Books
A life less ordinary. What is it to be a man in our post-feminist age? Robert Winder reads an amusing study that urges men to give up the day job and set off in search of wild adventure
Published 04 February 2002
Being a Man
Robert Twigger Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 190pp, £12.99
ISBN 0575070293
There are a hell of a lot of books on how to be a woman, most of which say more or less the same thing (though you wouldn't know it from the amount of irascible heat they generate). There are only a handful on how to be a man, which is a relief, as they tend to be shrill whinges about the emasculating effects of feminism, the welcome advance of which is seen as belittling and unfair to men. The present appetite for self-examination, however, is sponsoring plenty of male navel-gazing, so my eyes clouded over at the first sight of Robert Twigger's new book. Oh Christ, I thought. Not another one.
I needn't have worried, not on that score at least. The author of a couple of much-admired adventures in faraway lands, Twigger is acute and disarming, and his book on manliness has the refreshing virtue of declining to see women as the enemy. On the contrary, Twigger watches his wife give birth in hospital and is appalled (in a hippy sort of way) by the extent to which male-minded medical technology has encroached on female wisdom and dignity. He might have noticed, in lamenting medicine's contempt for "the knowledge that women have gained over the centuries", that this knowledge included the certainty that many babies would be born dead, and many mothers would expire in the process. But at least he concedes that the travails of masculinity are not women's fault.
On the contrary, they are only a function of "the lousy modern world", which offers too few possibilities for the kind of physical exertions that Twigger himself most enjoys and values: climbing, boating, trekking, martial arts, and so on. He casts envious eyes at the primitive tribes that impose ritual expressions of male identity, and regrets how the comforts of contemporary life have deprived him of the chance to prove himself by wrestling lions or surviving alone in the rainforest - skills that might well be more useful to an Indonesian tribesman than to a married writer living in Oxford.
This is awkward, then. Having successfully dodged one cow-pat, Twigger lands feet first in another. Noble savagery is old hat, and the objections to it are well known: it's a patronising construction of western thought that says more about the fantasy life of civilians in the industrialised world than it does about "savages". There's a comic moment when Twigger's wife gives birth and the author is holding the baby, and the baby is crying, and Twigger (excited, as he's read up on this) tries an old Yanomami Indian trick guaranteed to quell screaming. I leaned forward eagerly, having been in that position myself. But all he did was . . . walk the baby up and down. And guess what - the baby stopped crying. I'm not sure that Twigger really needed tribal anthropology for this insight, when he could just as fruitfully have asked any mum in a supermarket. Twigger has the grace to note that the doctor seems "bemused" when he lectures her on this matter - as clear an instance of male intrusion on female wisdom as any in the book.
I feel bad now, because all that sounds spiteful. But Twigger's rejection of "lousy" modern life seems both sentimental and conventional, and spoils what is, in all other respects, a sweet, alert and funny book. It has three threads. A neat description of Twigger's own big day - a family barbecue, followed by the artificially induced birth of his son - is mixed with a series of terrific episodes (remembrances of dangers passed) and sprinkled with reflections on what it is to be a man in such a safe, well-padded world. In the old days, he suggests, men could be men by escaping from POW camps, or commanding submarines; today, they can only wrangle impotently with parking meters, and try not to get in the way of the nurses. This makes for nice comedy, even if it isn't true. Twigger himself has led an adventurous life, and still feels that manliness is primarily a matter of proving yourself physically in tight spots. His descriptions of his own excursions - falling off a mountain, floating adrift in a capsized boat, and so on - are smart, stirring and funny. He even pokes fun at his own need for physical escapades, fingering them as the Hemingway Complex - "the nagging feeling that your life is too soft, not manly enough, hard enough, testing enough".
He is on good ground here. People who take physical risks are often said to be "flirting with danger" - a phrase meant to disparage their self-indulgent lack of responsibility, or some such. It's a bad, misleading cliche. You can be said to have "flirted" only in the afterglow, when the danger has receded. At the time, when trouble really presses in, it is nothing like a flirtation, not remotely playful or make-believe. These are moments of rare seriousness and concentration, when life is exposed as very fragile, and perhaps not quite as significant as you had imagined.
This must be the point of such moments. They are brief transcendences. Twigger is right to suggest that masculinity is struggling to find new proving grounds for itself, and his purple poem about the stars at the end shows that such moments can be inspired by ordinary life: by the birth of a child. But is this enough? Twigger insists that facing our fears is a necessary step on the path to male adulthood. But is there any point in pur- suing challenges that were relevant to another time, another place? For a hunter, wrestling lions is a confidence-builder and occupational hazard. Suburban man has other demons.
Twigger's own greatest fear, so far as I can tell, is to end up wearing a tie at some drab desk in some drab office, nine-to-fiving to pay off a mortgage and stash away a pension. He sneers, in the usual New Age way, at the dim wimps who perform such tasks, and a large part of his book is driven by the urge to let us know that he is not like the ghastly, average, shallow, boastful time-servers who do the world's boring jobs. He is especially rude about his own brother, a fast-driving, crude-talking barbecue whizz who is evidently everything that Twigger hopes not to be.
So how about it? A regular, average job. It's a terrifying prospect, to be sure. But perhaps he should dive in head first, think of it as a coming-of-age ritual, a test. Is he man enough? A job with the Inland Revenue, perhaps, or some accountancy exams - they might do for starters. It would take courage; it would be an ordeal. But perhaps, if he survived with his impressive wits intact, he would have a keener sense of what it takes, and what it costs, to live a life less interesting than his own.
Robert Winder writes monthly for the NS books pages
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