Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  I’m davening as I write these words, and it’s always while I’m in the act of writing that the impulse to rock grows strongest, that the rocking feels the best, the most necessary and right. The more easily the words come, the more wildly I rock. When I consider the problem-solving nature of writing fiction—how whatever book I happen to be working on is always broken, stuck, incomplete, a Yale lock that won’t open, a subroutine that won’t execute, yet day after day I return to it knowing that if I just keep at it, I will pop the thing loose—it begins to seem to me that writing may be in part a disorder: sheer, unfettered XO9. Look at Borges with his knives and his tigers, or Nabokov with his butterflies, or Irving with his bears, or Plath with her camps and her ovens; look at every writer, writing the same damn story, the same poem, returning endlessly to the same themes, the same motifs, the same locales, the same lost summer or girl or father, book after book. Why do you keep writing about gay men who are friends with straight men? people want to know. Why are bad things always happening to dogs in your books? What’s with all the sky similes? Why did you use the word spavined, like, seventeen times in one novel? Sometimes I try to come up with sensible answers to these questions, logical explanations for these recurring tropes, motifs, and phrases, but in truth there’s only one honest answer that a writer in the grip of XO9 can give: I can’t help it.

  When my father was a young pediatrician, he took care of a patient named Ira. My father had his favorite patients, and at the dinner table sometimes we used to hear about them. They tended to be either black or Jewish; Ira was the latter. He used to talk to my father about the stars.

  “Ira was telling me today about Aldebaran,” my father might say while he carefully smashed each carrot, pea, and cube of chuck roast in his dish of my mother’s beef stew into a grayish paste. He is by nature a vegetarian but would never consider giving up meat. Hence he feels he needs to disguise it. “Apparently, it’s a binary system.”

  This Ira kid was six, seven: my exact contemporary. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Tau Ceti. He knew whether they were blue or red. He understood the Doppler effect as it pertained to starlight. He even knew the Greek myths that underpinned so many of the constellations.

  Now, I had strangely possessive feelings about mythology. Once I came upon a copy of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths lying on a table in the school media center, lying there where any shmo could come along and pick it up and discover for himself the dark and vivid world that lay inside the covers of that book. Quickly, I returned it to the safe anonymity of the 398s.

  Mythology was my territory. So I decided to horn in on Ira’s.

  I asked for a telescope. At Hannukah, one was duly provided, along with a small, dense, rather dry British volume entitled Astronomy in Colour. I have disappointed memories of that telescope. It was made of blue plastic and heavy gray cardboard, with a rickety metal tripod. It did not, as I had imagined, work by letting you put your eye up against the fiery flank of the universe itself. It had a small, bleary oculus that received a shimmery reflection from a tiny mirror that lived all alone at the bottom of the long cardboard tube. It had a focus knob that knowingly tormented you with seventeen different varieties of blur. It was not so much a telescope as a kind of antikaleidoscope, its interior vista endlessly static and dim. The book had a star chart and some interesting drawings of spacecraft and imaginary Saturnscapes. But its prose and its ideas were way over my head and of no real use, especially at night, in the dark, when I really needed the book. In the end, after some cursory study, I learned to find five or six of the most obvious constellations. Polaris, Betelgeuse. Venus and Mars.

  My astronomical knowledge has not advanced very far since then. I get the Doppler effect. I know now what a binary system is. But I never showed the gift for astrophysics that I hoped to discover in myself, any more than I would later turn out to be a genius at chemistry, electric guitar, or the free-throw line. I never presented any threat to Ira. The starry heavens became a lifelong locus of insufficiency, but so is everything you love most, and that bitter memory has never stopped me from taking an interest in the night sky and its behavior.

  Several years ago my wife bought me my second telescope. It is incredibly enormous. It is nuclear-powered, made of iron mined from an asteroid, and weighs seven metric tons. Its mirror is broad and brilliant and conveys an image of the moon so magnified that under a quarter of its visible surface more than fills the eyepiece. You can see the shadows of crater rims, the snaggled teeth of giant craters like Pythagoras and Herschel. The thing uses GPS and has a processor to allow it to know where it is and what you’re looking at. When you train it on what appears to the naked eye to be a blank, black patch of sky, you find the oculus aglitter with stars and realize that beyond them could be seen, if you had a more powerful scope, more glittering specks of light and still more beyond them. And you feel a shallow shiver of how deep space really is.

  Unfortunately, the thing requires a winch, a derrick, and a team of elephants to transport it. Also, I live in the city, in Berkeley, California, and when there’s no fog to obscure it, our night sky is polluted with light. After my initial burst of enthusiasm for the telescope, I began to question its usefulness. By the time you, Tantor, and Queenie got the thing out to the front yard (where you could see about forty-two degrees of heavenly arc among the housetops and trees), you had dented a wall, stubbed your toe, pulled a muscle in your shoulder, and suffered a heart attack on the front porch. I fantasized about building a little observatory on top of the house where I could use the telescope without having to move it, but soon I realized that even if I could afford to do such a thing, there would be nothing much to see between the fog and the flooded sky once I got up there. So in time, the telescope was returned to its tuba-capable case and humped up to the attic to reproach me with my inadequacy like the heavens themselves.

  This summer we shipped it to Maine. We’ve been coming here for the past few summers, and our good landlords let us store things in the basement of their house over the year, even enormous things like this telescope. The weather has been rotten, but tonight, as on four or five other fine nights, the sky just knocks you over. I used to share a house with a graduate student in astronomy who told me that when you first reach the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where Cal maintains the Keck Observatory, your eyes are so starved for oxygen that they see almost nothing distinctive in the sky, a sparkly gauze. He described bending over to take a few deep breaths and then throwing his head back to take in with new oxygen-rich eyes, the newly blazing archipelago of lights. That is how the Maine sky can look sometimes to a city dweller. It dizzies you.

  Jupiter has been working its nightly way across the sky all month. The word is debased, but when I first got Jupiter in the eyepiece, I thrilled at what I saw. Lined up to its left in a tidy row like ducklings swam four of its thirty-nine moons. The moons of Jupiter! Who would not thrill at the sight of them and the sound of their name? They were no bigger in the eyepiece than large stars to the naked eye, but they were there, unmistakably, and as I stood in the chill evening with crickets playing the summer offstage and mosquitoes grazing on my ankles, I felt as if I were there, too: out there, four hundred million miles away, orbiting that disappointed star.

  That is a shared promise of telescopes and literature: to create an illusion of interstellar or interhuman travel within the confines of your own skull. Though I have always been aware of the connection between stories and constellations, between the beauty of the stars and the perhaps even greater beauty of their names, I never truly felt it until I looked through a first-rate instrument at an unspoiled sky.

  “It kind of freaks me out to think about that, Dad,” my older son said after I had him look through the telescope at one of those endlessly deep and star-packed regions of space that look empty to the naked eye. “I mean, we’re so small.”

  “True,” I said.

  “We’re, like, nothing.”

  “Well, yeah. Except to each other.”


  And then I pointed the telescope at Jupiter and its brood of moons and had him take a look, and he did a little thrilling himself. It’s just so shocking somehow to see them there, plain as stars, when you can look at the same spot with no telescope and see a solitary speck of gold. “Think of Galileo,” I told my son. “You and I know those moons are going to be there, but Galileo had no idea when he first saw them that they were going to be there. He just had the weird inspiration to point a newfangled set of lenses at the king of planets and check it out. Think how surprised he must have been!”

  “Okay, that’s awesome,” my son agreed, backing away from the eyepiece. “What happens if we point it at the moon?”

  Maybe he or one of my other children will turn out like Ira, to have the gift of stars. He or she will be able to look up at the sky and see not myths and legends and a history of failure but information, gases and voids, cold, infernal, luminous and pure. Or maybe my children will just look up and remember the weight of my hand on their shoulders as they stood beside me on a warm summer night, the rasp of my beard against their cheek, my voice soft at their ear, telling them, Look.

  [ VIII ]

  My younger son asked me if I would teach him how to make a girl.

  It was a fat curve, hung right out over the plate. But the boy was not yet five, and I knew that whatever I came back with would sail right over his head. So I decided to tell him the truth.

  “I don’t really know how to make a girl,” I told him. “I’ve never been very good at it.”

  “You need to use more circles,” suggested my older son. At the time he was a sophisticate of ten, but if my reply had been something like Start by putting on a Barry White record, it would have sailed over his head, too. “And make the circles, like, skinnier.”

  The boys in our house spend a lot of time drawing men. Not the girls—the girls mostly draw girls, but if their theme requires it, they will draw a necessary boy, and they never seem to run into any difficulties, or rather, the problems they encounter have nothing to do with their gender or that of the figures they’re attempting to depict. The only trouble they have is the usual trouble with feet, noses, hands, poses, and proportions, the ones that dog anybody who tries to arrest and suggest the human form with a Flair pen or a No. 2 Ticonderoga. My older daughter is reasonably competent in drawing in the style of the Japanese comic books she loves, and apart from hairstyles and details of dress, there is not all that big a difference among the willowy and saucer-eyed youth who tend to populate those books, regardless of gender. My younger daughter is more into drawing hamsters, flowers, and disturbing hybrids thereof, so the question rarely arises. But for my sons and for me, it’s pretty much an unvarying repertoire of male superheroes, male cyborgs, and male costumed action heroes of one kind or another.

  “Is a girl superhero the same as a boy superhero?” the little one persisted, his tone betraying a certain forlornness. He was looking back and forth from me to the blank place on his piece of paper where he had been planning to put a drawing of Sue Storm, to round out his portrait of the Fantastic Four. Generally, he neglects or avoids the need to portray females in his artwork, but when it comes to the Fantastic Four, once you’ve done the rocks, the flames, and the rubbery arms, you basically have no choice in the matter. “Only she has some boobs?”

  “Kind of,” said the older brother, going a bit stony-eyed. His own inability to depict females, I imagined, was bitter knowledge that sometimes left him feeling forlorn, too. “Not exactly.”

  There was no doubt, I wanted to explain, that boobs were a big part—literally—of the female superhero package. Almost every superwoman apart from explicitly adolescent characters such as the original Supergirl or the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde came equipped, as if by the nature of the job, with a superheroic rack. Furthermore, the usual way of a female superhero costume was to advertise the breasts of its wearer by means of décolletage, a cleavage cutout, a pair of metal Valkyrie cones, a bustier. In their unitards and tights, all comic book superheroes, male or female, are fundamentally tinted naked people, and this convenient fact has often tempted the (overwhelmingly male) anatomists of costumed heroes to let themselves get a tad carried away in carving the figureheads, as it were, of their dreamboats. Back in the early pre–Comics Code days, there had been a popular subgenre known as headlight comics, complete with its own genius, the mysterious African-American artist Matt Baker, whose lyrical mappings of Phantom Lady’s planetary system continue to this day to haunt the fantasy life of some gray-haired old boys of the fifties. Today’s female costumed characters tend to sport breasts so enormous that their ability simply to get up and walk, let alone kick telekinetic ass, would appear to be their most marvelous and improbable talent.

  I remembered my childhood pencils-and-stapler comic book company with a couple of friends, one of whom, though not much of an artist, could do wonderful things with a bustier. His super-ladies never had faces (he couldn’t do faces), and sometimes they had no hands or feet (feet are crazy hard), but they always had a Fantastic Two. And, as far as we were concerned at the time, that was almost enough. Almost.

  “It’s not just the boobs,” I told my little son, sketching a quick Sue Storm on my own sheet of drawing paper. “A lot of other things are different, too. The shoulders are narrower. The legs are, uh, longer. The, uh, the waist … the waist…”

  We three looked at the snarl of lines I had made on the paper, at once tentative and overbold. We tried to see, with considerable charity on the boys’ part, how the lines might resemble a stirring and heroical woman.

  “What is a waist, anyway?” said the little one.

  I started to feel forlorn myself. Over the years I have worked very hard to create in my fiction living, fiery female characters to match the life and fire of various real women I have known. I have endowed them as carefully and thoughtfully as I could with fragments of the histories and memories, with physical mannerisms, with traits of hair and complexion and even, occasionally, the recollected breasts of those living women. With each story, I have convinced myself as I told it that I was managing to portray a woman as strong and as fragile, as complicated and simple, as real, as the women who have been part of the story of my own life. It has not always been easy. I have struggled and written myself into corners and clichés, and resolutely shuffled paragraphs and memories. I have rewritten entire sections of a novel from a female character’s point of view, just to see if I could do it, and in writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I spent months and months turning out some four hundred pages of close third-person narration about the sister of Sammy Clay, only to realize at some fatal point that (although quite flat-chested) she would never possess the marvelous, improbable power of getting up and walking around. This is a problem, I’m trying to say—I wanted to tell my boys—that I have been working on for a very long time. And yet each book that resulted has come under a certain amount of deserved criticism from female readers for being a boy’s book, guy lit, for never quite presenting a female character to match the novel’s men. A lot of this criticism tends to arise from the passionate female reader who is mother to the boys who were just then engaged in trying to learn something from my drawing of Sue Storm.

  I looked at their faces, patiently waiting for me to come through for them. I had no idea why it should be so hard for me to depict women, whether with a pencil or a word processor. I find that I resent the difficulty on feminist grounds, for accepting it would seem to endorse the view that there is some mystic membrane separating male and female consciousness, some nebulous difference between men’s and women’s minds, when people are people and minds are minds and, if you want to get down to it, I don’t really know or understand what goes on inside anybody’s head apart from (in moments of grace) my own. I can’t stand—I feel in all honesty that I was raised by a strong-willed, working mother in the heyday of feminism not to be able to stand—the retrograde pseudo-sensitive air of balderdash that seems to underlie the idea
of a woman’s heart being inaccessible to a man by virtue of their respective genders.

  And yet there I sat, huddled down at the boys’ end of the kitchen table with my sons, drawing big hypertrophied dudes in capes while, at the other end, the girls mutated their hamster flowers and posed their effete saucer-eyed teenage hermaphroninjas. I admired the girls’ work vocally. But I knew that I didn’t fully understand their reasons for wanting to draw what they were drawing and not what we boys all wanted to draw. The inescapable corollary of this knowledge has often seemed to be that while I also vocally admire my daughters themselves, I don’t fully understand them, either. When one of them is feeling sad, or crushed, or furious, or anxious about a social situation in the classroom, I find myself unable to jolly or cajole or, worst of all, sympathize her out of it the way I can almost always manage to do with one of the boys. There is apparently an inherent callousness in me that fails to see the gravity or the angles in their gravest and most angular emotional situations or to understand the ins and outs of their complicated friendships. There is a mystery in those heads that I will never stop trying to solve, even if the very act of seeking solution, of viewing women in terms of mystery, damns me forever to defeat and ineptitude.