DO WOMEN KNOW MEN ?

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 73, 27 March 1931, Page 13

DO WOMEN KNOW MEN ?

LITERARY SOCIETY DEBATE

Can women writers draw real men?] This subject was debated recently at a "highbrow" literary society, composed of both sexes (writes Celia Starflold in the "Sydney Morning Herald"). The most significant fact revealed during the discussion was the widely differing conceptions entertained as to what constituted a "real man," the women prosent endowing him with all the virtues and the men with most of the vices. Indeed, one of the latter put forward the quaint argument that no. woman could ever truly know any man, being debarred from following him into his native lair—otherwise known as the men's smoking room —where presumably he drops his conventional mask and discloses himself for the monster that he really is. Why a man should be any more real •whilst indulging in smoke-room tales than when playing with the children, taking part in sport, or in any of the multifarious activities of modern life, is a puzzle—also a libel on the sex in general. It is simply one side of his make-up, and should not be unduly stressed, cither by himself or his delineators. However, women arc beginning to have a shrewd suspicion (in the married one this amounts to definite knowledge) that their menfolk often hint darkly at a desperate past, because of the "gay dog" tradition which still persists, and which invests them with a certain glamour in the eyes of romantic spinsters. A EEAL MAN DEFINED. Two definitions come to mind, personally overheard. One was by a fellowboarder, who said of another: "What I admire about him is the way he gets what he wants and sees that he gets it pretty quickly. A real man, I call him." The other was delivered by a charwoman, who boasted that her husband, with all his faults, was a real man, because, though he might constantly use a poker, he never struck her with his bare fists. Thus the interpretation would appear to embiaco a pretty wide range in spite of our lady debaters. To return for a while to the first point: if absolute knowledgo wero an indispensable qualification in writing, then tho world's literary output would automatically cease. Wisdom does not of necessity tend towards expensiveness; on the contrary, it often acts as a check on the imagination, which prefers possibilities to facts. By the. same token men, the largest purveyors of fiction, have from timo immemorial protested their ignoraneo of the opposite sex and voiced their despair of ever understanding them; yet the shelves of our libraries an? filled with books written by men about women —presumably, then, about tho things they do not know about them. Admitting that these are mere sophistries, women have already proved that they can portryy real men. and when they do it is executed with a deadly precision seldom excelled by male authors. Tho first instance that comes to mind is that of George Eliot (Mrs. George Henry Lewes), whose male portrait gallery in "Scenes from Clerical Life" contains characters so devastatingly true that tho originals recognised themselves to their considerable discomfiture. In fact, for years her books wcro taken to be the work of a man. FOBERUNNER OF "THE CAVE ' '• . . MEN." Then there is Charlotte Bronte, perhaps' the first woman writer to break away from tho traditional handsome, gallant hero, with the creation of Rochester, who was ill-mannered to boot. Think of the courage needed to launch him upon an ill-prepared world, together with a plain heroine in Jane Eyre. Rochester was incidentally the forerunner of the "cavo men," since perpetuated in "The Sheik" and works of that ilk. The culmination of this type in the strong, silent man of lat-ter-day feminine fiction is tho reaction from the garrulous man-made licroes of a past generation; and, little as some of us may admire Charlotte Bronte's hero, he does not impress us as a possible male creature, which the Victorian hero, with his pompous periods, seldom did. Thackeray's Colonel Newcome, as an example, must have been an unconscionable bore in real life —did he ever exist. Amongst modern women writers who give us characters instinct with life Sheila K. Smith stands pre-eminent. Her work has boon compared with that of Thomas Hardy in its fidelity to tho soul that inspired it. Of her men two stand out—Bob and Clem. Fuller in "Green Apple Harvest," Clem, the fine young farmer, reminiscent of Adam Bede, and scapegrace brother Bob, who becomes converted at a revival meeting, and whose consequent struggles with tho unruly side of his nature help to make one of the most moving as well as convincing stories ever written. Tho' figure of Bob Fuller is weak, pathetic, tragic, and real, and is a complete auswer to those who deny woman's power to portray a. man.