Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  Throughout the novel all the real feeling is Emily's and all the insincerity belongs to the humans. After reading a letter Amy has written to Alfred, Emily understands the bogus nature of Amy's sentiment—but Alfred remains blind to it. Soon we cease to expect any subtlety or surprise from the humans in the book; they are stick-figures, being held up to ridicule, and they come out very badly in comparison with the chimp.

  It is not only the subtlety of Emily's understanding that is impressive, but also her ability to express it. It is Emily's bookishness that fills this novel with literary allusions. (One of the great games His Monkey Wife inspires is guessing the sources of the numerous quotations.) I have mentioned Tennyson and F. C. Cornford; but there are also Vaughan, Donne, Dowson, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake. Emily is romantically inclined and eager to give Alfred the benefit of the doubt. Love has made her literary, and so has contempt, for when Amy treats her like a slave Emily feels "like something out of Uncle Tom's Cabin." Collier made her presence especially effective by giving her thoughts but no voice. What might have sounded pompous or improbable in direct speech is persuasive and vigorous rendered as ruminant thought. One of the funniest scenes in the novel also depends on a literary classic for its effect. This occurs when Emily brandishes a knife and a copy of Murders in the Rue Morgue in Amy's face, just before the wedding ceremony. It is unexpectedly fierce of Emily to threaten anyone (love is her excuse), but even so it is the Poe that makes the point.

  His Monkey Wife has been described by Osbert Sitwell (in his Foreword to Collier's Green Thoughts, 1932) as an allegory about "the growth of the soul, from beast to man," and other critics have suggested that it is a satire against the New Woman. Anthony Burgess describes the book as a "wayward masterpiece" and a "sport" and said that thematically "anything will do." It is a highly adaptable fable, but will anything do? The book is so funny and bright it does not need critical explanation. Sitwell's thesis about its illustrating a kind of moral evolution is not very interesting, and mentions of Virginia Woolf and Mrs Pankhurst, and gibes at George Moore, hardly create enough wind to fill the sails of a feminist argument.

  But not anything will do. The book is a laugh, yet it is also a great satire about human weakness. The chimp is weakest at her most human, and strongest and most resourceful at her monkeyest. There is not a human being in the book who is not deficient and deeply silly in a fatal way. Collier's writing is in the tradition of English satire in being cheerfully misanthropic, and not long after writing the novel he declared, "I cannot see much good in the world or much likelihood of good. There seems to me a definite bias in human nature towards ill, towards the immediate convenience, the ugly, the cheap ... I rub my hands and say 'Hurry up, you foulers of a good world, and destroy yourselves faster'."

  Fatigay is perfectly named—he is limp and clapped out, always the solemn fool, and not a patch on "his sensitive pet." It is one of the ironies of the novel that none of the characters has any idea of how wonderful Emily really is, or what a fine mind she has. This is particularly true of Alfred. He never discovers how perceptive and high-minded she is. The chimp is civilized, an omnivorous reader and a woman of the world, but it is for her pet-like qualities that Alfred admires her. He comes to love her at last for her being a good pet, for her constancy and devotion. Human love is shown to be no more than selfish condescension. Emily is the worthiest character in the book. If this were not so, the satire would be quite different. The last irony is that a novel that delights in being unphysical ends on a note of triumphant carnality.

  Among other things, the novel is a chronicle of Emily's success. In the course of four years, Emily rises to such a highly paid position as a star dancer in London that she is able to transform Alfred, who has been brought to a pitiful condition—gnawing cauliflower stems for sustenance and chattering in Piccadilly.

  It is when he becomes most monkey-like that Emily shimmers out of the Ritz and offers him a new life. Redemption is the proper word but it is out of place in a discussion of this glancing novel. In important points in the narrative Emily takes the initiative saving Alfred from Loblulya, learning to read, managing the marriage ceremony, and carrying Alfred away from the brink of oblivion. At last it is she who suggests that they return to Africa together. One of my favourite asides in the book is Collier's mention that Alfred is the only person ever to have returned to Boboma after having once left it.

  From the first sentence of the novel the reader is aware that he is in the presence of a magician. This is Collier's strength as a writer. He casts a spell and he does so always with a smile. His style is effortless, always enjoying itself as it weaves its magic. The book is full of asides, parodies, half-quotes, and Collier's literary rope tricks, in which before our eyes he levitates a number of clauses and then he disappears leaving a long sentence dancing in the air. The second sentence in Chapter XII contains 354 words.

  If His Monkey Wife is a disturbing book it is because the chimp is so innocent, so winsome, so undemanding, relying on the power of romantic love in an atmosphere of human failure. She is civilized in the way man ought to be; she is man before the Fall, before Satan and God hatched the idea of sin. She is also a terrific vaudeville act. The ending—one of the greatest last paragraphs of any novel—is a good shock; it is perfect, in fact. It gives order to the disturbance, and it reminds me of Collier's remark about his script for The African Queen, in which he chose to deal with Allnut and Rose in his own way. "A happy end?" he said. "Bet your life it was."

  Being a Man

  [1983]

  There is a pathetic sentence in the chapter "Fetishism" in Dr Norman Cameron's book Personality Development and Psychopatbology. It goes, "Fetishists are nearly always men; and their commonest fetish is a woman's shoe." I cannot read that sentence without thinking that it is just one more awful thing about being a man—and perhaps it is an important thing to know about us.

  I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness). Even the expression "Be a man!" strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient, soldierly and stop thinking. Man means "manly"—how can one think about men without considering the terrible ambition of manliness? And yet it is part of every man's life. It is a hideous and crippling lie; it not only insists on difference and connives at superiority, it is also by its very nature destructive—emotionally damaging and socially harmful.

  The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is effectively separated from women and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a nuisance. Of course, there is a female version of this male affliction. It begins with mothers encouraging little girls to say (to other adults) "Do you like my new dress?" In a sense, little girls are traditionally urged to please adults with a kind of coquettishness, while boys are enjoined to behave like monkeys towards each other. The nine-year-old coquette proceeds to become womanish in a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially decorative and always alert to a man's sense of inadequacy.

  Femininity—being lady-like—implies needing a man as witness and seducer; but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so grotesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy—because it denies men the natural friendship of women.

  It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women, and it begins very early. At an age when I wanted to meet girls—let's say the treacherous years of thirteen to sixteen—I was told to take up a sport, get more fresh air, join the Boy Scouts, and I was urged not to read so much. It was the 1950s and if you asked too many questions about sex you were sent to camp—boys' camp, of course: the nightmare. Nothing is more unnatural or prison-like than a boy's camp, but if it were not for them we w
ould have no Elks' Lodges, no pool rooms, no boxing matches, no Marines.

  And perhaps no sports as we know them. Everyone is aware of how few in number are the athletes who behave like gentlemen. Just as high school basketball teaches you how to be a poor loser, the manly attitude towards sports seems to be little more than a recipe for creating bad marriages, social misfits, moral degenerates, sadists, latent rapists and just plain louts. I regard high school sports as a drug far worse than marijuana, and it is the reason that the average tennis champion, say, is a pathetic oaf.

  Any objective study would find the quest for manliness essentially right-wing, puritanical, cowardly, neurotic and fueled largely by a fear of women. It is also certainly philistine. There is no book-hater like a Little League coach. But indeed all the creative arts are obnoxious to the manly ideal, because at their best the arts are pursued by uncompetitive and essentially solitary people. It makes it very hard for a creative youngster, for any boy who expresses the desire to be alone seems to be saying that there is something wrong with him.

  It ought to be clear by now that I have something of an objection to the way we turn boys into men. It does not surprise me that when the President of the United States has his customary weekend off he dresses like a cowboy—it is both a measure of his insecurity and his willingness to please. In many ways, American culture does little more for a man than prepare him for modeling clothes in the L. L. Bean catalogue. I take this as a personal insult because for many years I found it impossible to admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer. It was my guilty secret, because being a writer was incompatible with being a man.

  There are people who might deny this, but that is because the American writer, typically, has been so at pains to prove his manliness that we have come to see literariness and manliness as mingled qualities. But first there was a fear that writing was not a manly profession—indeed, not a profession at all. (The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.) Growing up, I had thought of sports as wasteful and humiliating, and the idea of manliness was a bore. My wanting to become a writer was not a flight from that oppressive role-playing; but I quickly saw that it was at odds with it. Everything in stereotyped manliness goes against the life of the mind. The Hemingway personality is too tedious to go into here, and in any case his exertions are well-known, but certainly it was not until this aberrant behavior was examined by feminists in the 1960s that any male writer dared question the pugnacity in Hemingway's fiction. All the bullfighting and arm wrestling and elephant shooting diminished Hemingway as a writer, but it is consistent with a prevailing attitude in American writing: one cannot be a male writer without first proving that one is a man.

  It is normal in America for a man to be dismissive or even somewhat apologetic about being a writer. Various factors make it easier. There is a heartiness about journalism that makes it acceptable—journalism is the manliest form of American writing and, therefore, the profession the most independent-minded women seek (yes, it is an illusion, but that is my point). Fiction-writing is equated with a kind of dispirited failure and is only manly when it produces wealth—money is masculinity. So is drinking. Being a drunkard is another assertion, if misplaced, of manliness. The American male writer is traditionally proud of his heavy drinking. But we are also a very literal-minded people. A man proves his manhood in America in old-fashioned ways. He kills lions, like Hemingway; or he hunts ducks, like Nathanael West; or he makes pronouncements like, "A man should carry enough knife to defend himself with," as James Jones once said to a Life interviewer. Or he says he can drink you under the table. But even tiny drunken William Faulkner loved to mount a horse and go fox hunting, and Jack Kerouac roistered up and down Manhattan in a lumberjack shirt (and spent every night of The Subterraneans with his mother in Queens). And we are familiar with the lengths to which Norman Mailer is prepared, in his endearing way, to prove that he is just as much a monster as the next man.

  When the novelist John Irving was revealed as a wrestler, people took him to be a very serious writer; and even a bubble reputation like Erich (Love Story) Segal's was enhanced by the news that he ran the marathon in a respectable time. How surprised we would be if Joyce Carol Oates were revealed as a sumo wrestler or Joan Didion active in pumping iron. "Lives in New York City with her three children" is the typical woman writer's biographical note, for just as the male writer must prove he has achieved a sort of muscular manhood, the woman writer—or rather her publicists—must prove her motherhood.

  There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted that to be a man is somehow—even now in feminist-influenced America—a privilege. It is on the contrary an unmerciful and punishing burden. Being a man is bad enough; being manly is appalling (in this sense, women's lib has done much more for men than for women). It is the sinister silliness of men's fashions, and a clubby attitude in the arts. It is the subversion of good students. It is the so-called "Dress Code" of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and it is the institutionalized cheating in college sports. It is the most primitive insecurity.

  And this is also why men often object to feminism but are afraid to explain why: of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe—and with reason—that their lives are just as bad.

  Making Tracks to Chittagong

  [1983]

  India, one of the greatest railway nations in the world, is peculiarly visible from its railway trains. I have the idea that much of Indian life is lived within sight of the tracks or the station, and often next to the tracks, or inside the station. The railway is part of Indian culture. It was one of the greatest imperial achievements, and now—a larger system than ever—it still has the powerful atmosphere of empire about it.

  People sometimes wonder how the vast overpopulated subcontinent manages to run, and even to prosper. The chief reason is the railway. Trains have been running for a hundred and thirty years, but—dusty and monumental—they often seem as ancient as India itself. In Pakistan they look like part of the landscape. An old reliable network of track brings hope to beleaguered Bangladesh.

  I had happy memories of these trains, and after a ten-year absence I wanted to return and to trace a line from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, and through India, to Chittagong in Bangladesh. I wanted to take as many trains as possible. It was to be neither a vacation nor an ordeal, but rather a kind of sedentary adventuring—an imperial progress on the railways of the old Raj.

  From the corner seat in a railway car it was possible to see an enormous amount of this land; moving east from the stony cliffs of the Northwest Frontier in Pakistan, then cutting into India on an express across the Punjab and traveling up and down, linking the hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling with the long straight journeys of the plains—via Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and the holy city of Benares. After Calcutta I could nip into Bangladesh and go south to the end of the line, in Chittagong. I imagined my itinerary on a map as resembling my own elongated signature written in railway lines across the top of India.

  I started from Jamrud, a deserted station, a short distance from Jamrud Fort which, having been built in 1823, is just a hundred years older than The Khyber Railway. It was an early morning in July, and very hot—the monsoon was weeks overdue.

  Once a week, this train descends the 3,500 feet from the highest point of the Khyber Pass, carrying the refugees and travelers who can afford the seven rupee train fare. The train is required to climb such steep inclines that it is powered by two steam engines—one at the front and one at the rear of the five coaches—both belching smoke and whistling as it makes the journey to and from Landi Kotal.

  "Once there was no trouble here," a man told me as we clattered across the plain. "There was no water, no trees. Only small villages. Then a dam was built and water came to the valley in a stream, and since then there has been constant fighting."

  Tempers were very bad: the months of drought had scorched the fa
ce of the land and made it so hot that people had moved out of their houses and set up their string beds under trees—I counted fourteen beds under the dusty leaves of one large tree. To cool themselves, men sat on the banks of the stream trickling beside the railway tracks and they chatted, keeping their feet in the water.

  There were over thirty-five thousand people in the Kacha Garhi Refugee Camp, and nearly as many in the one at Nasserbad not far away. Driven from their homes in Afghanistan by the war, they lay in hammocks, they cooked under trees, they waited for the daily shipment of food; they watched the train go by.

  Across the ten miles of gravel are the high grey-brown mountains which mark the border of Afghanistan, and the black smoking train makes its way across the dead land.

  This was always a tribal area, the people were always dressed like this, and always armed, the train was always pulled by smoking screeching steam engines, and the night-time noises were always human voices and the clopping hooves of the tonga ponies, and when—hours late—the train pulls into Peshawar Cantonment Station, the passengers hurry in various directions—to "Lower Class Exit" or "First Class Exit," to "Woman's Waiting Room" or "Waiting Room for Gents." It is pitch dark and a hundred and ten degrees. As in the old days most people make straight for the bazaar.

  "This is the Qissa Khawani Bazaar," said Ziarat Gul in Peshawar. Mr Gul was a powerfully-built and kindly soul who was known locally as "Gujjar"—"Buffalo Man." He was pointing at a labyrinth of alleys too narrow for anything but pony carts.

  "This means 'The Storytellers' Bazaar'. In the old times all the kafilas (caravans) came from Persia and Russia and Afghanistan, here to Peshawar. They told stories of their journeys."

  But Peshawar is once again a great destination. Now the travelers are Afghan refugees and the stories in the bazaar concern the heroism of Pathans ambushing Soviet convoys. There are said to be more than a million of them, and many of them bring goods and food to sell at the bazaar—carpets and jewelry, embroidery, leatherwork, cartridge belts, pistol holders, rifle slings, almonds, dates, prunes, and fresh fruit. The bazaar has never been busier or more full of hawkers, and everywhere are the beaky craggy faces of the travelers, the turbaned men and shrouded women, the rifles and pistols, and the tea-drinkers huddled around samovars—storytellers again.