The Man Behind The Woman Behind The Man

Bird On The Wire
an online column by Carmel Bird

No. 5
3 June 1998

Previous columns
The future of the book
Time Slices
Outside In
The Tried and Tested

I won the prize for the best dressed boy. (So I was six years old. SO?) Was I dressed as a Red Indian chief? I was. Nobody turned a hair. It was the right thing to do, be a girl and dress up as a boy. If my brother had won a prize as a ballerina, it would have been a different story. For one thing, he would have been very unconvincing. A little later on I wrote plays with parts in them for myself, parts such as Tom the chimney sweep and Huckleberry Finn. I played Shylock in one school play and Alfred Dolittle in another. I had long hair which I used to fix around my chin. At university I played a virtual man in the character of Lady Macbeth.
With travesty and credentials like this it is no wonder I found myself writing fiction in a male voice. It is hard to explain, but it comes naturally to me. One of my first novels, which I destroyed in my twenties, was in the voice of an Australian boy early this century. My first published story using a number of male narrators is 'Woodpecker Point', and I recall the enjoyment of the writing -- as Arthur, Father, the Gardener, the Vicar, the Doctor and so on. I spoke them aloud as I wrote them, taking on different tones. I had a great time.
Writers do this kind of stuff all the time, but on one occasion I took it all a step further and not only wrote as the man, but imagined myself, the author, as a male writer. I published the book Crisis under the pen name of Jack Power. It's about the mid-life crisis of a man with a bit of a lingerie fetish. And one time I was made-up and dressed and photographed as a man. The dress-up thing again. Sitting behind the window with a beard, a cigarette and a glass of scotch.
While I was writing I really felt as if I was a man -- how to explain this -- the imagined world of the novel was so vivid to me and I knew I was seeing it through male eyes, with a male sensibility. Because I am not versed in gender theory I don't really have the vocabulary to analyse this very much. I was writing a man's story in a man's voice and I felt like a man. I can't really explain why or how. I could hear my own voice in my head and it was the voice of SimonTyler, the main character, a lecturer on the motif of the animal in poetry and prose. His friend and colleague is Ross. The novel, by the way, is of the comic/satiric type.
'Ross sets the same essays, more or less, year after year. I like to give them something different each time. Get real, Ross says to me, who gives a shit? The students, he says, are different every time, you don't have to rack the old brain for different topics for christsake. I 've told him that actually, it sometimes seems to me the students are the same. Year in, year out, the same old student. Hello Student, I say, so here you are again. How about a nice new essay topic for you then? How about the lark in literature. Or the frog or the bloody snail for all I care.
'I give the same lectures to the (same?) students but I vary the routine with different essays. Ross looked at me through his beer glass and said I was a comedian or a philosopher, and either way I was a dickhead. Why make it hard for yourself, Tyler old son. Sling 'em the same old hash. They love it. Then they can buy their answers from the year before.
'As in many things, he's right, but I go on doggedly setting new animals and birds. The elephant was good, one time, and the Major Mitchell cockatoo, but this semester it's the lark.'
I had not realised how I would react during the photographic session for Jack Power. I had grown accustomed to transforming at will, imaginatively, into the man, but as I felt my appearance changing under the make-up artist's hand, it became impossible for me to look in the mirror. I was OK as long as I didn't look. It all felt right, but I didn't want to see. Afterwards when I saw the proofs I was really pleased because they looked as I had wanted to them look, but there was no way I would look at myself at the time. Myself and not myself. It was all too much.
My most recent novel, Red Shoes , takes the male voice a step further. The narrator of this one is male - and an angel. Being an angel he is interested only in his work which is to be the guardian of a woman of whose morals he disapproves. He can't influence her morality, all he can do is save her life when she is in danger. Some angels get too lazy even to do that, which explains how people get killed in accidents and so on. Writing in this male/angel voice was particularly enjoyable.
'I often see things from above, like a cameraman with an aerial long shot. If you open the newspaper or news magazine you will nearly always find an aerial long shot of a mansion or a farm house where something terrible has happened, such as a multiple death of some kind. You get the house of tragedy down on the earth, and up above are journalists hanging from hovering helicpoters, getting their pictures. The angle of vision is one which is entirely normal to me. No big deal.'
Both the angel and Simon Tyler are what you might call good characters. it bothers me sometimes that the men in my books are not so good. Dr Goddard, the psychiatrist who narrates parts of The White Garden is one of he worst. I confess I enjoyed writing him too. The novel opens with him saying:
'I have always, for as long as I can recall, identified myself with the elephant. This is not something I readily admit because in my profession friedns and colleagues are only too ready to leap in with an analysis, to place a facile interpretation on this most intimate, personal and colourful of facts.'
Throughout my fiction there is a shadowy male presence by the name of Carrillo Mean. He is even more of a shape-changer than the angel; he is subtly here, there and everywhere, thinking, writing, publishing, pronouncing. And then there is the voice of the automatic teller machine in Automatic Teller. It's a male voice.
A male voice whispering in your ear in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. Can this mean that I have a male voice whispering in my head? I think it can. Hearing voices are we now? Writing fiction is such a pleasurable way of letting the fellow have his say.

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Copyright © Carmel Bird 1998. All rights reserved.


	Bird On The Wire an online column by Carmel Bird No. 5 3 June 1998
Previous columns The future of the book Time Slices Outside In The Tried and Tested	I won the prize for the best dressed boy. (So I was six years old. SO?) Was I dressed as a Red Indian chief? I was. Nobody turned a hair. It was the right thing to do, be a girl and dress up as a boy. If my brother had won a prize as a ballerina, it would have been a different story. For one thing, he would have been very unconvincing. A little later on I wrote plays with parts in them for myself, parts such as Tom the chimney sweep and Huckleberry Finn. I played Shylock in one school play and Alfred Dolittle in another. I had long hair which I used to fix around my chin. At university I played a virtual man in the character of Lady Macbeth. With travesty and credentials like this it is no wonder I found myself writing fiction in a male voice. It is hard to explain, but it comes naturally to me. One of my first novels, which I destroyed in my twenties, was in the voice of an Australian boy early this century. My first published story using a number of male narrators is 'Woodpecker Point', and I recall the enjoyment of the writing -- as Arthur, Father, the Gardener, the Vicar, the Doctor and so on. I spoke them aloud as I wrote them, taking on different tones. I had a great time. Writers do this kind of stuff all the time, but on one occasion I took it all a step further and not only wrote as the man, but imagined myself, the author, as a male writer. I published the book Crisis under the pen name of Jack Power. It's about the mid-life crisis of a man with a bit of a lingerie fetish. And one time I was made-up and dressed and photographed as a man. The dress-up thing again. Sitting behind the window with a beard, a cigarette and a glass of scotch. While I was writing I really felt as if I was a man -- how to explain this -- the imagined world of the novel was so vivid to me and I knew I was seeing it through male eyes, with a male sensibility. Because I am not versed in gender theory I don't really have the vocabulary to analyse this very much. I was writing a man's story in a man's voice and I felt like a man. I can't really explain why or how. I could hear my own voice in my head and it was the voice of SimonTyler, the main character, a lecturer on the motif of the animal in poetry and prose. His friend and colleague is Ross. The novel, by the way, is of the comic/satiric type. 'Ross sets the same essays, more or less, year after year. I like to give them something different each time. Get real, Ross says to me, who gives a shit? The students, he says, are different every time, you don't have to rack the old brain for different topics for christsake. I 've told him that actually, it sometimes seems to me the students are the same. Year in, year out, the same old student. Hello Student, I say, so here you are again. How about a nice new essay topic for you then? How about the lark in literature. Or the frog or the bloody snail for all I care. 'I give the same lectures to the (same?) students but I vary the routine with different essays. Ross looked at me through his beer glass and said I was a comedian or a philosopher, and either way I was a dickhead. Why make it hard for yourself, Tyler old son. Sling 'em the same old hash. They love it. Then they can buy their answers from the year before. 'As in many things, he's right, but I go on doggedly setting new animals and birds. The elephant was good, one time, and the Major Mitchell cockatoo, but this semester it's the lark.' I had not realised how I would react during the photographic session for Jack Power. I had grown accustomed to transforming at will, imaginatively, into the man, but as I felt my appearance changing under the make-up artist's hand, it became impossible for me to look in the mirror. I was OK as long as I didn't look. It all felt right, but I didn't want to see. Afterwards when I saw the proofs I was really pleased because they looked as I had wanted to them look, but there was no way I would look at myself at the time. Myself and not myself. It was all too much. My most recent novel, Red Shoes , takes the male voice a step further. The narrator of this one is male - and an angel. Being an angel he is interested only in his work which is to be the guardian of a woman of whose morals he disapproves. He can't influence her morality, all he can do is save her life when she is in danger. Some angels get too lazy even to do that, which explains how people get killed in accidents and so on. Writing in this male/angel voice was particularly enjoyable. 'I often see things from above, like a cameraman with an aerial long shot. If you open the newspaper or news magazine you will nearly always find an aerial long shot of a mansion or a farm house where something terrible has happened, such as a multiple death of some kind. You get the house of tragedy down on the earth, and up above are journalists hanging from hovering helicpoters, getting their pictures. The angle of vision is one which is entirely normal to me. No big deal.' Both the angel and Simon Tyler are what you might call good characters. it bothers me sometimes that the men in my books are not so good. Dr Goddard, the psychiatrist who narrates parts of The White Garden is one of he worst. I confess I enjoyed writing him too. The novel opens with him saying: 'I have always, for as long as I can recall, identified myself with the elephant. This is not something I readily admit because in my profession friedns and colleagues are only too ready to leap in with an analysis, to place a facile interpretation on this most intimate, personal and colourful of facts.' Throughout my fiction there is a shadowy male presence by the name of Carrillo Mean. He is even more of a shape-changer than the angel; he is subtly here, there and everywhere, thinking, writing, publishing, pronouncing. And then there is the voice of the automatic teller machine in Automatic Teller. It's a male voice. A male voice whispering in your ear in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. Can this mean that I have a male voice whispering in my head? I think it can. Hearing voices are we now? Writing fiction is such a pleasurable way of letting the fellow have his say.
HOME	Copyright © Carmel Bird 1998. All rights reserved.