The Wild Girls (8 page)

Envoi: to Lot’s Wife

Salty lady dry your tears

nothing worth your sorrow

Salty lady don’t look back

don’t look back tomorrow

O
UR WORD
MODESTY
COMES FROM
Latin
modestia
, which is the opposite of
superbia
, pride: the moderate as opposed to the overreaching, the overweening. To the Romans modesty wasn’t a negative, passive avoidance of pride, but an active virtue requiring self-control and an intelligent realism.

But it had a secondary, narrower, gendered sense. For a woman, modesty meant quiet deference to one’s male superior/father/husband, plus a retiring manner designed specifically not to attract the attention of other men.

This gendered connotation continued to encroach on and weaken the larger meaning of the word. Most men, and many women, don’t consider a virtue supposed to be proper to women to be praiseworthy in men. And when Christianity came along, though Christian moralists called pride a cardinal sin, its opposite wasn’t modesty, but humility. Humbling oneself is quite a different matter from avoiding arrogance. Humility is drastic, and often highly visible. Modesty is nothing like so sexy as humility; inherently non-extreme, it consists largely in realistic assessment of one’s gifts and prospects, respect for probability, and distaste for swagger and boasting. You can show off your humility in quite dramatic ways, but modesty, by definition, doesn’t and can’t show off.

In the last century, the word went right out of fashion. It’s seldom used now in a positive sense except as an adjective meaning unpretentious, mostly turning up as a euphemism for small or poor—a modest house, modest means.

Its direct opposite, immodesty, came to be applied mostly to female behavior and dress. I’ve never heard the word “immodest” applied to male costume, not even to something as preposterously boastful as a codpiece or as uncomfortably bulgeful as a ballet dancer’s tights.

When women began to rebel against the gender hierarchy, the womanly virtues assigned by the hierarchs—silence, deference, obedience, passivity, timidity, modesty—of course came into question, and women began to disown them all with scorn. This process was well under way in the late nineteenth century, went on all through the twentieth, and continues now. Again a gendered interpretation overwhelmed the idea of modesty as a general attribute. As an admirable quality, as a human virtue, modesty is, at this point, pretty well dead.

This seems a pity.

So long as modesty was an unreasonable or humiliating demand for female self-suppression and asexual behavior, women might well scoff at and refuse it. But where is it now so enforced? In Islam, and in some conservative Christian sects and other religions, I suppose. Certainly not in Western society at large.

In the area of women’s clothing, the notion of modesty as a kind of limit to sexual flaunting and deliberate provocation exists mostly as an imaginary barrier which clothing designers keep lowering to titillate and raising a little again to tease. The appearance of physical modesty in fact has little to do with clothing, everything to do with convention. A naked woman can be completely modest in her demeanor, if nakedness is a norm in her society, while a fully dressed woman can appear as a flaunting, taunting sexual self-advertisement, if she wants to, or is expected to, or if the fashion in clothing forces it on her.

In the political arena, modesty has usually been rather a pose than a position. For most politicians, exhibitionism is the norm, sometimes with an effort to ground self-praise on an ethical basis, often showing only a shameless disregard for realistic self-judgment.

Advertising—boastfulness in the service of greed—is the great enemy of realistic assessment and respect for probability. Where profit is supposed to be unlimited, realistic assessment is unwanted. Advertising now sets the tone and style not only of politics but a great deal of what we say and do, read and hear. Thus strength of character is judged not by reliably competent behavior, but as a show of assertiveness, a display of aggressiveness. In order to prove that he’s strong and confident, the president of the United States is required to talk about “kicking ass.” The self-consciously vulgar, preening hostility of the term is the essence of its significance.

(I find the bumper-sticker slogan “Girls kick ass” particularly sad. What the slogan protests is the old notion of modest man-serving maidenhood, or the vicious demand that young Black women be humble and subservient. But such a vapid threat of indiscriminate violence fails as a protest: it doesn’t evoke pride, it isn’t a call to action, it’s nothing but an advertising slogan.)

For an artist, insofar as modesty implies diffidence, an unwillingness to exhibit oneself or one’s work, it’s a virtue so dubious as to be a handicap. Art is a show, an exhibition. Self-doubt can smother a true gift, just as a canny self-confidence can parlay a minor talent into artistic fame. But if modesty is interpreted not as diffidence or self-effacingness, but as non-overweening, a realistic assessment of the job to be done and one’s ability to do it, then you might say a chief virtue of excellent artists is their modesty. We may mistake it for arrogance because the ability they knew they had was so immense that they were unafraid to do what nobody else dared. But knowing your limits and going to them isn’t arrogance. It’s greatness of spirit. It leads to the immense, unboastful sureness of a Shakespeare or Rembrandt or Beethoven. Next to them the swagger artists, the great egos, the Wagners and Picassos, look a little smaller than life.

Self-advertisement by announcing the subversiveness of one’s work, making a show of boldly overthrowing conventions long since overthrown, adopting a style for mere novelty, or in cynical mockery of an older style, or to shock—these are ploys artists first began using in the nineteenth century. They’re common now, and particularly successful in architecture, painting, and sculpture. Writers and composers who attempt similar immodesties don’t always meet with the complacent acceptance offered the visual artists.

Their prices are lower and their critics less collusive. The greatest work of art concerning modesty as a major character trait is the Jane Austen novel that people who adore
Emma
usually don’t adore at all. The morality of the tale of an uppity girl getting brought down to size is simple, familiar, and welcome to everybody. The morality of
Mansfield Park
is not simple, is not familiar, and is unwelcome to those who consider extraversion a desirable norm and self-confidence an illimitable virtue. That a girl could really, truly, actually be modest—that is, assess her situation realistically, choose the behavior appropriate to it, and stick to it through immensely powerful opposition—to many readers seems so strange, even unnatural, that they can only dismiss her as a hypocrite. Fanny’s fault is not falsity, but an undue lack of self-confidence, hardly surprising given her upbringing. Her realism fails; she misjudges herself. All the same, she sticks to reality as best she can, with a stubborn transparency of purpose that is the exact opposite of hypocrisy. I find her a fascinating, endearing, and true heroine.

It’s my impression that people respond positively to modesty, and resent arrogance and overweening, though they’ll endure a good deal of it without complaint, and are even impressed by it—probably because a great many people are, in fact, modest. They accept themselves as ordinary. They estimate their own worth without inflating it (or underestimating it, which leads to weakness and servility). They don’t assume they have nothing to learn, so they’re willing to listen. They lack the fatal conviction of innate superiority.

Therefore all too often they’re willing to listen to people who pretend to superiority—the news commentators, the talk show shouters, the popes and priests and ayatollahs, the advertisers, the know-it-alls. Modesty’s weak point is that it may permit arrogance in others. Its strong point is that in the long run arrogance doesn’t fool it.

I think a great many people still hold modesty to be a virtue and practice it, even if they don’t use the word. I’m thinking of everyday conversations—carpenters working together on a job, secretaries chatting during a break, people having a beer or dinner together and talking about whatever they’re interested in and know about. It appears to me that in these situations, modesty of demeanor is the norm. Overbearing garrulity about my sweet deal on the Honda, my trip to Oaxaca, my incredible sex life, my special relationship to Jesus, etc., is borne with, heard out more or less politely, especially by women listening to men. But at length the true conversation continues around it, reconnecting unbroken, as water flows around a boulder. The conversation of the modest is what holds ordinary people together. It is the opposite of advertisement. It is communion.

What have you got against Amazon?

Nothing, really, except profound moral disapproval of their aims and methods, and a simple loathing of corporate greed.

Even though you occupy a pretty high perch in American Letters, you have never hesitated to describe yourself as a science fiction and fantasy author. Are you just being nice, or is there a plot behind this?

I am nice.

Also, the only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn’t SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well.

Your first Earthsea novel (1968) features a school for wizards. Some critics claim that you used your SF powers improperly to travel thirty years into the future and swipe the idea from J. K. Rowling. Do you deny this?

I plead the Fifth.

You once described yourself as a “fast and careless reader.” I loved that! It reminded me of Dr. Johnson telling Boswell he rarely
finished
a book. Do you still regard this as an advantage?

Of course. It means I can get through shoddy books in no time, and can reread good books over and over …

One of the things I love about
The Wild Girls
is its economy. You create a complex and strange world with a few swift strokes. William Gibson does this with art direction. How would you describe your technique?

As improved by age and practice.

Should girls learn to sword fight?

I got in on my big brothers’ fencing lessons when I was ten or twelve. It is a lovely art. I never planned to go out in the streets of Berkeley with my button foil looking for Bad Guys, however.

Your newest novel,
Lavinia,
retells Virgil’s
Aeneid
from a woman’s point of view. Aeneas still plays the major role, though, and you seem rather fond of the dude. Do you like him better than Ulysses? Or Achilles?

Ulysses is way too complicated to just like or dislike, but Achilles really turns me off. Sulky little egocentric squit. As if a lot of other guys on both sides didn’t have to die young. I bet he went around with beard-stubble all over his face like all the sulky sullen half-baked heart-throb actors do.

Robert Louis Stevenson once said that our chronological age is like a scout, sent ahead of our “real” age which runs ten or fifteen years behind. What would you report back from your eightieth birthday?

I would like to be all cheer and bounce and lifewas-neverbetter as old people—excuse me for bad language: older people—are expected to be. Unfortunately I find that at eighty I don’t feel seventy let alone sixty-five. I feel eighty.

It isn’t easy, but it’s interesting.

You say you are not a “plotter.” Do you start with an idea, or a character, or a situation? Or are they all the same thing?

Erm. Things come. People, landscapes, relationships among the people/landscapes. Situations begin to arise. I follow, watching and listening.

One criticism of the movie
Avatar
was that there is no explanation for the convergent evolution. Is there one in your Ekumen books (I may have missed it)? Why not?

Why not did you miss it? Why did you miss it not? Sir, I know not.

I provided a specious explanation of why everybody is more or less human: because everywhere local was settled by the Hainish. But that leaves out the indissoluble network of genetic relationship of
all
life on a planet. Such is the sleight of hand SF often has to play in order to get a story going. All we ask is the willing suspension of disbelief, which can and should return in full force when the novel is over.

You have generously mentored and promoted many emerging writers. Did anyone do the same for you?

I know everybody else remembers the early days of SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] as huge ego-competitions between X and Y and Z; but (maybe it was my practice at being a younger sister, or something?) I remember my early days in the SF world as being full of encouraging editors and fellow writers. Hey, what a neat bunch of people!

Seems to me it’s easier to get published these days but harder to get noticed. How do you think you would fare starting out today?

If I hadn’t connected with [literary agent] Virginia Kidd when I did, I might very well have had a much more constricted career and less visibility as a writer. Virginia was ready and able to sell anything I wrote—any length, any genre, to any editor.

I don’t think it’s easy to get published these days, though. Not published so as it matters. Put stuff up on the Net, sure. Then what?

Have you ever been attacked by lions?

Three separate dogs have bitten me, many separate cats have bitten me, and recently my ankles underwent a terrifying siege by a bantam rooster at whom I had to kick dirt until he backed off and stood there all puffed up and shouting bad language like a Republican on Fox TV.