Gender and Writing
Copyright ©
Carmel
Bird
August 1999.
All rights reserved.
The following essay celebrates the 1999 republication of my comic novel CRISIS
So I have decided to come out as a woman, after all. It’s a short but moving story. For a time, I was a man.
I stole the name of my great-grandfather Jack Power and used it as a pen-name. I ‘ve never done a thing like that before. The book was Crisis , a comic novel narrated by a man, and it was first published in 1997, under Jack’s name. In 1999 it comes out with a spanking new jacket, under my own name. It’s funny, when I could pick any name I liked, that I chose to borrow from my own family. I think I felt a kind of authenticity about it, and I know I regret having stupidly ditched the surname Power when I got married, before modern feminism brought women to their senses about these things.
In a faded photograph on the piano old Jack stands in front of the house he built in the Tasmanian bush, a house I used to visit when I was a child. Jack and I were born exactly one hundred years apart. He has a long beard and two sons on a horse, and what appear to be two wives in high-necked long black dresses. I won’t say I was taken over by the spirit of this ancestor when I was writing Crisis , but I will look you in the eye and say I was taken over by something. I felt, as I was writing, as if I were a man. No worries.
No male secondary sexual characteristics appeared on the outside, but I seemed to have access to some kind of masculine area of my imagination. Well, I’m over it now, and I have decided to come out and admit to being the woman behind the man who wrote the novel. I know it isn’t a new book, but it feels like one because it looks so different, and it’s got my name on it instead of his.
Why did I do it in the first place? What did I think I was playing at?
It must have been in 1996, and I was getting on a plane to do interviews in Sydney forThe White Garden , your serious literary novel. I remember chewing on airline fruit cake and staring out into the clouds and thinking: God, this is weird and terrible stuff, this White Garden; why don’t I write a different kind of novel? Something fun? Then I mentally ran through some of the kinds of short stories I’d written, and arrived at a comic one where the man is having a mid-life crisis. It had been fun writing that. I swallowed the last bit of fruit cake, closed my eyes and into my imagination floated one of the last images I had seen before leaving the ground.
The traffic was held up at the lights, just before the entrance to the airport freeway. And standing at a tramstop in the middle of the road I saw a most beautiful Indian woman in red. She became the guiding light of Crisis : “She was a young Indian woman of heart-stopping beauty and grace, draped in a scarlet silken sari edged with patterns of delicate gold. She was utterly still, and one of her slender hands rested lightly on the bright red leaves of an artificial tree that stood in a pot beside her. She was a creature from another world - around her a radiant halo. Mysterious, tantalising, alluring.” The main character, in his mid-life crisis, chases the fantasy of the Indian girl.
I had begun the novel. And I knew that the writing felt different, that the voice in my head was different, that the narrative was entirely spoken by a man, and that I was no longer myself. Throughout the writing I felt I was a man writing. I don’t know how else to explain this. The sensibility expressing itself in the prose, in the plot, the dialogue, was male.
Don’t get this wrong. All my novels have male characters who speak for themselves, and who sometimes take over the narration of the text. I have always liked writing those parts very much. But this time the entire thing was gushing out in a male voice, and I wanted it to appear as a man’s story told by a man, with nothing of the female me getting in the way. Yet I wasn’t trying to pretend that Jack Power was real either; I was prepared to own the book, ultimately. Men who read the manuscript said they thought it was written by a bloke.
I wondered where I was going to send it, this strange new creation. Then I saw an article about Jane Palfreyman, the spunky new publisher at Random House, and I thought she’d like it. And she did. (Sometimes you can believe what you read in the paper.)
Random House ran a competition with bookshops, offering a case of champagne to anyone who could guess who was the woman who had written the book. A bookshop in Darwin won.
Then there was media. I borrowed some men’s clothes and along came the makeup artist. As he worked on my face, I could feel myself, slipping away, and a new self coming into being, a bit like an image appearing in photographic fluid. I got new hair and eyebrows and a bit of a beard. I was given props - spectacles, a cigarette and a glass of whisky. They said did I want to look in the mirror, and suddenly I was frightened; I was unable to look in the mirror. I felt weirdly tearful; it wasn’t funny any more. I didn’t want to know what I looked like. The photographer took my picture from behind a window, with smoke from my cigarette curling across the image.
When I saw the photo, I didn’t mind so much. The image on paper didn’t bother me the way the mirror image would have done. I don’t think it looked like me at all. Actually, I thought it looked like somebody I used to know a long time ago (no relation).
This year Random House decided to republish Crisis under my name. They sent me a new cover design which I thought was so awful it brought on the tears - maybe they were the tears I didn’t shed when I was dolled up as Jack. I resisted commenting on the design until, at three in the morning I could stand it no longer and I sent my editor a wild and childish e-mail: “I’d rather die than have that cover on my book”. I had turned into a woman overnight. So they changed the design, and the cover is now really terrific.
People ask me, and I ask myself: why did you do all this; why not just write the novel and publish it in the normal straightforward way? I don’t really know the answer. I can only say that I truly felt different when I was writing Crisis , and that difference is reflected in the manner of the publication. Will I write another book by Jack Power? Maybe.
From time to time I return to the photo of Jack Power and his sons and his two wives. Behind them is the picket fence, behind that the wooden house with the verandah and the high, high shingle roof. From a window beside the front door, I fancy I can see a small white face, the face of a child, peering out. It is probably a jug or something, but I like to imagine that it is me. The ghost of myself some sixty-odd years before I was born.
The backdrop to the scene is the mysterious Tasmanian bush, reminding me that the house is isolated, in the middle of nowhere. It was still in the middle of nowhere when I was a child. I couldn’t find it when I went back to look for it last year, and there were other newer houses round about. There was a road named after my great-grandfather, running past the houses, running back up into the bush, into the middle of nowhere.
Writing fiction is an activity which draws on many parts of a person; perhaps even the whole person. But the biggest part is the imagination. This is the most mysterious quality we possess, and it is endless, affected in endless ways by endless influences of ancestry, upbringing and experience. I have stared often enough at the figure of my great-grandfather before his house, have wondered and puzzled about him, wished I could have met him, heard his voice, looked into his eyes which I am told were blue. The beard, I believe, was red. What imp was it that urged me to borrow his name for my comic project? I don’t know. But I love that imp.