Where are all the daunting classics written by women?
The Roman Empire, Robert Moses, and Monsters
One Page at a Time: The Roman Empire…
There is a question going around the internet: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? You can read more about the internet origins of this trend from the ever-helpful website Know Your Meme. The joke of this question is that it is one posed to men, and that their answer is often: quite a lot. The reason this has taken off and people find it funny is not all that surprising to a book person. Men as a reading population—to completely stereotype, and speak broadly, and in generalities—prefer only two things in books: nonfiction they feel they will be personally improved or enriched by and, relatedly, classic works of fiction. And no topic fits this mold more than the Roman empire. Functioning both as a classical subject and being generally held as the foundation of western civilization, it is a subject that men in particular, since grade school, feel more enlightened for having read about. The source of the humor—a way one should never start a sentence but here we are—is that men (a certain type of man, let’s say, to be delicate) are so predictably into a certain type of book that makes them feel and seem smart and powerful—e.g. as if knowing a lot about Caesar makes you a leader of men, too. In fact, Ryan Holiday, author and business self-help figure, created a whole industry out of simply combining the pillars of male readership, self-improvement and classics into primers on how to adapt the ancient Roman and Greek stoic philosophy into modern life. Holiday’s books with titles like The Daily Stoic, Ego is the Enemy, and The Obstacle is the Way are all massive bestsellers.
Then, a slight variation of the Roman Empire question cropped up that hit closer to home: how often do you think about Robert Moses? This is hitting the same nerve but for a slightly more intellectual and literary man. If the Roman Empire joke is to poke fun at jocks with business and marketing degrees, then the Robert Moses variation is to poke fun at snobs with economics and English degrees. The latter caught me right in its crosshairs. Robert Moses was an urban planner in New York City from the 20s to the 60s, and one of the most powerful people of the 20th century, commanding untold resources of the most powerful city on earth and shaping it into what it is today. The reason his story is common(ish) knowledge today, is because of Robert Caro’s famous, Pulitzer-Prize-winning, 1100-page biography of Moses, The Power Broker. Like how we read Moby-Dick a page at a time earlier this year at Dear Head of Mine, the rough plan was to start The Power Broker as our next daunting read in October. Do men actually think about Robert Moses or the Roman Empire that often? Of course not. But, remember it’s a joke, not a question being asked in earnest. What the question exposes makes it worth reconsidering this plan.
Monsters
At worst, a joke reinforces the negative ideas people already hold. But at best, a joke can be a way to tell the truth without hurting the intended recipient’s feelings. A way of pointing something out that’s so outrageous or morally bad but widely accepted that people who hear the joke stop to think and change their ways. Personally, I’ve been thinking about and making fun of men and their reading tastes recently—basically, that when a man tells you he reads fiction, prepare to hear that he includes no authors from the 21st century unless their book has won a Pulitzer (by the immutable principles of publishing, a prize-winning fiction book is consumed just like nonfiction, i.e. something to “have read” and keep spine-out on your shelf). As silly as it is, these Roman Empire and Robert Moses jabs have made me reconsider before embarking to read another daunting classic. I have also been influenced by my recent reading of a fabulous new work of criticism: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, which puts the idea of male genius, something the daunting male literary classic is mixed up with, into stark relief.
Monsters deals with perhaps the most complicated and pressing moral dilemma of reading, watching, and consuming art in this age: How do you engage with great works of art made by bad men? This question, unlike “How often do you think about Rome and Robert Moses?’, is too complicated to unpack entirely here, but I encourage readers to check out Dederer’s excellent book. A few of the best chapters are “The Genius” and “The Anti-Semite, The Racist, and Time”, and “Am I a Monster?” In these three chapters, Dederer tackles our idea of male genius and how its definition allows for monstrosity; the falsehood that many of these geniuses (Hemmingway, Wagner, Picasso) were unaware that their bigotry was wrong at the time they created their art; and finally, the conditions for making art. The final piece is the most pertinent as we discuss the question: why aren’t more daunting classics authored by women?
When making the list of literature for daunting, ambitious, challenging, classics, largely considered works of genius that stand the test of time, the list of women authors on the list is short indeed. Only two came to top of mind at first: Middlemarch by George Eliot (pointedly, in this conversation, a man’s pen name for Mary Anne Evans) and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Not that there aren’t hundreds of classics and genius works written by women, but because the nature of genius and genius in literature is so wrapped up in male ideas of achievement, scale, and Seriousness that it is, by definition, not, historically, a form that welcomes women. Dederer addresses this idea of male genius and the license they feel they have as the pre-condition of both making and proclaiming something as great directly:
“For years thereafter my artist friend Victoria and I tried in vain to copy the novelist when we talked about our own work: ‘It’s a very important book,’ I attempted. ‘It’s a very important painting,’ she tried. We couldn’t make ourselves do it, with a straight face, in public. We collapsed in laughter…Ambition is the thing that men have. In my usage here, ‘ambition’ is an entirely positive word. Ambition is the key that turns the lock of art. Ambition simply means this: I’m not trying to make something…I’m trying to make something great.” (168).
The underlying cultural understanding that Dederer and her friend are laughing about is the same one that’s the foundation of the Roman Empire jokes circling the internet: the thought that completely average men are walking around thinking the novel they’re writing is important, just like how average men are sitting around thinking about how important ancient civilizations are. While average men might find this normal, women—and increasingly more men—find this to be comically grandiose. However, in the context of creating ambition works of literature, this lack of widespread delusion presents a kind of mental and cultural barrier for women to create these kinds of works of literature. A group has to believe in their own potential for greatness and try en masse before the one-in-a-billion actual genius breaks through. Of course, there is also a real system of power that enforces this belief. Although there are likely many factors of economics in great works of literature—money equaling time, and men having control of most of both throughout history—Dederer focuses on the clean line of intimate relationships and labor that existed then as well as now. She uses her own personal, literal island as a clever metaphor for the role wives have historically played in walling off the lives of great and average artists alike throughout history so they could do their art:
“Sometimes I used my island as a wife. An artist requires healthy boundaries. Artists famously use their wives to set boundaries. My island had boundaries; they were made out of water. And so I used the island as a kind of stand-in wife. Its remove from the city took care of certain things for me. The island canceled plans for me. The island prevented my extended family from popping by. The island made sure I could duck out early when I went to parties—sorry, have to catch the ferry. I used the island to protect me from the world because I didn’t have a wife to do it for me. I had never written a book before I moved to the island; once there, I wrote three in a decade. The island was my Vera.” (171-172)
Inspired by Monsters, I did research and extended my list of daunting classics written by women. Works of genius by women simply tend to take on a different character, and they are shorter and thus far more accessible than the historically male-oriented way of demarcating genius. But still there are some: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Eleanor Catton’s Luminaries and Birnam Wood, The Book of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, and the 1000-page novel written in one sentence, Ducks, Newburyport. It’s not surprising after reading the entire exegesis that is Monsters that many of the examples cited in the last sentence come from the 21st century, and that every daunting classic pre-21st written by women are outnumbered by the novels of Russian men alone. It is proof that gender parity in literature, like in life, is getting better now that practical conditions and attitudes are changing, but that it was mind-bogglingly unfair forever and still has a far way to go. It will take lots of time—think of all of history and how relatively few works of literary genius there are by men considering that timeline—for women to produce these types of works. It will take even longer for these new works of literature to be evaluated, lifted up, and canonized into classics.
This is all to say, I am putting aside my Robert Moses for a little while longer. Instead, next month we will start one of the books that Claire Dederer mentions in Monsters that is both a novel about women in literature and is a work of genius itself, a stone cold classic. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. This novel is told through four fictional journals that the protagonist is trying to weave together into a fifth book (the golden one) and each journal has a color-coded system for each part of her life that the notebooks correspond to—now that’s ambitious. And at 688 pages worth of novel about a writer, it certainly fits our definition of daunting too.
Back Matter: Taylor, WGA, and Awards
“Taylor and Kelce” is now the biggest cultural moment going, here’s a summary from ESPN in a type of article—complete with bad Taylor Swift song puns—that once was reserved for pop culture media. Just when we thought the most popular person couldn’t get any bigger, she effectively takes over the most popular sport in America in a couple of weeks.
The WGA strike finally ends, and the striking pretty much worked.