on "male novelists," their plight, etc
on "male novelists," their plight, etc
it’s a steady job, but he wants to be a paperback writer
Some months ago on Substack there was a round of posts lamenting the difficulty male novelists1 face in getting published. Since I have never tried to get a novel published, and also, am not male, I do not really know how much this feeling is rooted in reality. I do know people, male and female, who have had a difficult time getting fiction published, so my inclination is more to believe that getting published as a fiction writer is difficult, in general.2
But then that’s what bigots generally say, isn’t it…? So.
But for the sake of argument, I’m happy to grant the premise that male novelists are in some way uniquely discriminated against, that lots of fiction editors evaluating manuscripts are biased against them, that they get less respect, that their novels are covered less, and so on. Premise granted. Let’s continue.…
For work-related reasons I’ve been pretty immersed in the work of writers who were active within an ecosystem often actively unfriendly them (and at best, simply not friendly to them)—that is, (American) women3 who wrote sci-fi in the sixties and the seventies.4 (Previous writing from me on this subject can be found here.) Women were in fact all over the place in science fiction, and always were, and I don’t mean by that to cite the existence of “Mary Shelley” and “Margaret Cavendish,” great though they be, I mean average workaday writers5 and editors and so on.6 In his book Partners in Wonder, Eric Leif Davin counts two hundred and three individual women contributors to science fiction magazines from 1926 to 1960.
Some of the women writers working before the sixties and seventies were very good (C.L. Moore)7 and some of them I find very hard to take (Zenna Henderson),8 because, well, that’s how it goes with writing.9 Some of them wrote under male names, but most of them did not. I bring them up to say that the shift in dynamics that takes place in the sixties and seventies was not only about the presence of women. There was other stuff going on—in the country itself, too, as you might perhaps have heard—and one way of understanding what happened was that it came down to the picking of fights that had been, until then, postponed.10
Even “male allies” were not exactly what you might want. You have your Samuel Delanys (well, really, just the one Samuel Delany) and your Jeff Smiths (organizer of the Khatru symposium on women in science fiction, friend to James Tiptree). But then you have Harlan Ellison, somebody who I think could be fairly characterized as a champion of (some) women writers—among other things, he was a very important mentor to Octavia Butler11 and a friend (somehow?) to Joanna Russ. He is also somebody you find, for instance, groping Connie Willis on stage in 2006 (!) and then grousing when she wasn’t a good sport about it.12
But that, too, is a familiar dynamic. One thing biography will teach you (if, somehow, life doesn’t) is that there’s almost no person who is an unmixed bag, who is not generous in some ways and cruel in others.13 As individuals we should try to unmix ourselves, of course, but we can’t force that purity of heart on others, we can only take them as they come. In any case, my only point really is that even for the women who hung in there and made a place for themselves, there was still a lot of contempt. Even people who were on their side were often only conditionally so. They kept going (when they kept going) because it mattered to them.
So, when I read all the posts about male novelists, these writers were what I was thinking about. If you aren’t allowed in somebody’s club, ultimately, you figure out how to kick down the door or you sneak in or you build your own club or you give up. Those are your options. You can’t make people respect you but you can make it in their best interest to cozy up to you. These are the ways in which people who are discriminated against counter-act it: they find proxies, they build alternatives.
What prevents the serious suggestion of a “Masculinist Press”—or… what is the male version of a “virago”…? well, whatever that would be—is (I would guess) the feeling it would be kind of cringe. For instance, somebody like Robert Bly is just sort of a joke, right? No guy wants to identify himself with Robert Bly. If it’s absolutely unavoidable for some reason he’ll make it into kind of a joke: what if we all went into the woods and screamed about our feelings… just kidding… unless…14
But like, most feminist presses and women’s presses are cringe too. Feminism is cringe. I mean this positively. Many, possibly all, things worth doing are cringe. And if you want to do anything crazy, if you want to buck a norm, one consistent lesson in publishing seems to be that you’ll have to be comfortable going through less lucrative and less respectable routes. You run your own press or you get your novel published by a pornographer or whatever else.15
So I kept reading things waiting for the moment it would lead to some sort of call for action but it always sort of stopped at—there are too many white women in publishing, dot dot dot…. The cumulative effect of reading all these posts was that they read more like a lament for a lack of respect than anything else, i.e., a wish to be respected not just as novelists, but as male novelists who write in some distinctively masculine way about distinctively masculine experiences, and who feel like they can’t get a fair hearing if the twenty two year old brunette evaluating the manuscript can’t relate.
But this specific problem, how to make your way in a publishing industry that finds your work unrelatable and insufficiently universal and so on, has been faced by writers before—it’s just that they were women (among others). See for instance that infamous letter by Michael Coney complaining about Russ’s “When It Changed”:
The hatred, the destructiveness that comes out in the story makes me sick for humanity and I have to remember, I have to tell myself that it isn’t humanity speaking — it’s just one bigot. Now I’ve just come from the West Indies, where I spent three years being hated merely because my skin was white — and for no other reason. Now I pick up A, DV [Again, Dangerous Visions] and find that I am hated for another reason — because Joanna Russ hasn’t got a prick.16
At this point, maybe one third of the people reading this are irritated at me for sounding dismissive of their situation and then two thirds are irritated at me for granting the premise. But (to that one third), I’m really not being dismissive, I promise—I’m just asking, why not learn from the people who had the same problem? You’ll never be pitied into gaining the position it is that you want.
Or, you know, Taylor Swift. Become so huge that even people who hate you have to defer to you! That one is difficult to do though.17 I have yet to accomplish it myself. We’re still at the “singing along to ‘Mean’” stage at BDM Industries.
Now you might be asking: why are you publishing this now, rather than at any time in the not so distant past when it would have been part of the conversation? This is a good question, and the actual answer is unfortunately that I was drafting a post about something even more annoying and this sort of grew out of it and it was very long and had nothing to do with the original, more annoying thing.
Specifically straight male novelists, but not—and this is perhaps important in the stuff that follows—white male novelists. (An earlier version of this discourse was as I recall started by Marlon James.)
Sometimes in moments of self-pity I do this about “not going to an Ivy league school,” like, I would have gotten that job interview if only I’d applied to Yale… and also, gotten in… and not just stayed in my room all the time like I probably would have….
Except for Octavia Butler, this scene is basically all white.
While I’m just dealing with “women” as a category here, maybe worth noting the most significant Black sci-fi writer of this time (Samuel Delany) was very much allied with Russ et al. (Octavia Butler starts publishing in the seventies but her “big” works come out later.)
There are lots of anthologies of classic women’s sci fi out there to consult, if you’re so inclined… off the top of my head, there’s Sisters of Tomorrow, The Future is Female!, Rediscovery: Science Fiction By Women (two volumes), Women of Futures Past… I’m sure there are others.
I was reading one of Mike Ashley’s books on the history of science fiction magazines and you can find women editors in it who are credited with developing important writers or sensibilities, but they were never on the top of the masthead and so you’ll only discover their presence if you are the sort of person who is interested in a multi-volume history of science fiction magazines.
I have a copy of Moore and Lovecraft’s correspondence, which I have yet to sit down and read, but I did open it at random to find Lovecraft enthusiastically praising the New Deal—what an open-minded fellow—what a champion—now never to look up another of his opinions—
Though I guess it’s more accurate to say that Henderson started before the sixties but kept working through them.
Does Zenna Henderson have shooters…? I guess I’ll find out.
But more on all this… on some future occasion.
From Gerry Canavan’s book on Octavia Butler:
In 1969 Butler took a class through a Screen Writers Guild of America “Open Door” Workshop—a program intended as outreach to black and Latino writers in L.A.—run by Harlan Ellison. It was an event that would prove pivotal in her career. Ellison, already a successful and well-known writer of SF, became both friend and mentor to Butler, supporting her entry to the first Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, held in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1971; alongside Ellison, the legendary Samuel R. Delany would be one of her teachers there. (Ellison even loaned her some money to go; she borrowed the rest from relatives.)
This is really only the tip of the iceberg as far as Harlan Ellison Bad Behavior goes, but we don’t need to get into it.
See Robert Lowell, a very supportive figure for woman poets like Elizabeth Bishop, and who would also screen girl applicants to his class to make sure they were pretty before he would let them in (and then, once they were in the class, bully and mock them). This is described in Kathleen Spivack’s book Robert Lowell and His Circle:
For the most part, as writers, women didn’t count much with Cal, except as decoration. He could be kind to the fragile female mental patient, and even gallant, but attractiveness in a woman was the essential quality; once that was established, intelligence and wit could shine. In fact — theoretically this would never be allowed to happen now — when selecting for his writing classes at Harvard, Lowell read the work of the male students when making his decisions, but invented a pretext for interviewing, and thereby looking at, the women who applied. He took very few women into the classes, and he told me quite openly that he selected primarily on looks.
This could, and did, boomerang on the young women selected, as the course progressed. Cal came down especially hard on the women he had chosen for their seductiveness. It was as if he let himself be tempted by them, then slapped them down. Having selected the most attractive of the young women, he was then perfectly capable of — and did — turn on them in class. “Don’t ever write again,” he told a lovely young woman, after he had decimated her poem in class. The woman burst into tears and left the room. Cal had been completely open about telling me his selection process, conveniently forgetting the fact that I was a woman also. He had looked shocked when I was not terribly supportive. Thereafter I became known as “the feminist,” and he liked to tease me, inventing ways to get a rise out of me, especially if we were in a group with mostly male poets.
Of course this embarrassment coexists with aggression, defensiveness, chauvinism, etc., and in some cases probably enables those feelings. And then women are often writing these pieces asking what’s wrong with men, what can we do about men, why don’t men read or eat vegetables or wash their hands, why are men watching Andrew Tate videos, why are men doing Y, why aren’t they doing X, where are their role models and can we clone Mr. Rogers, and so on, and so forth. Which would give me personally a bit of a complex, though the pieces (many written by people I like) are well-intentioned.
As any agent will tell you, the best way to sell a book to a publisher is to convince them the concept’s already been done successfully. Nobody wants to publish a genuinely new thing.
But then, Philip K. Dick’s defense of Russ, quoted in the blogpost I linked to, is hardly better: “Lady militants are always like Joanna, hitting you with their umbrella, smashing your bottle of whiskey.…” Anyway I always love quoting the “hasn’t got a prick” complaint with the lines directly preceding it because they make it funnier: having come back from being persecuted as a white guy.…
Joanna Russ would be a self-hating swiftie that is constantly posting in r/SwiftlyNeutral about how she is DONE WITH TAYLOR SWIFT for real this time one day and then scream-singing along to TTPD the next because she forgot that she was done with Taylor Swift. Ursula K. Le Guin would only like Taylor Swift and Fearless, but she would also write at least one snippy little blogpost about how much she disliked folklore. Vonda McIntyre would be mostly Swift-indifferent but she would like the snake imagery with reputation. James Tiptree would actually be a full blown cupcake swiftie who buys all the merch but who pretends, in letters, to be Cool About It. Tiptree’s favorite album is probably Lover but it might also be Midnights.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Believe me, our best men are dedicated to these questions here at BDM Industries. Also, H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite Taylor album is 1989.
Wonderful. Reminds me of this from Delaney’s Racism and Science Fiction:
I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous sf editor of Analog Magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility. . . .). No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset. . . .
It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it. . . .) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry. . . .
Today if something like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible. At the time, however, I swallowed it—a mark of both how the times, and I, have changed. I told myself I was too busy writing. The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that. That was the point I began to realize I probably was not going to be able to make the kind of living (modest enough!) that, only a few months before, at the Awards Banquet, I’d let myself envision. The things I saw myself writing in the future, I already knew, were going to be more rather than less controversial. The percentage of purple brocade was only going to go up.
I've come around to your way of thinking on this, although more regarding what I'm reading. I still think there is something to the plight, although I also think it's just one part of a larger problem. The respectability of the classic male novelist isn't coming back because literature is more of a niche thing at this point. Even if the male novelist reclaims his 'rightful throne' at the top of the literary world, he'll have become a king without a castle imo. With that in mind they should take your advice and just write what they want (although they may have to get a real job to actually pay the bills; sorry but them's the breaks).