know whether to believe him. He always ended his stories with the question ‘What do you want?’ For him this was the key to life, and he believed it would always elude him. ‘You see,’ he’d say, ‘that’s my problem. I don’t know.’
Michael disappeared that winter. The garden was covered with snow. No one went into it, even in the summer, but that morning there were footprints leading from the house to the garden fence. Not shoe prints but bare feet. Outside our door the hallway was full of police. The man in the cupboard was on the run and had jumped out of his open window, half naked and shoeless. They caught him making his escape down the road.
At the time I wondered where Michael had intended to go. He had spent years wandering from one sleazy bedsit to another and had few friends. Though his mother lived only a few miles away, I doubted he was heading in her direction. He had simply run for his life and I don’t think he gave a thought to where he was going. He was compelled to keep moving. That is what men do, he once told me. They pursue life. In both a metaphorical and a literal sense, men take to the road in search of their identities. They are uneasy about home, with its intimations of femininity and its constricting relationships. Generally young men do not daydream about a settled, domestic existence; instead they choose stories of travel, action and adventure. In their youth they leave behind their mothers and embark on voyages of discovery in search of themselves. The boy leaving home to seek his fortune is one of the oldest of all stories. He changes. He finds wisdom, kills his enemy, finds a wife, becomes rich and gains status and authority. When he returns, he has become a man.
When I was a boy, adventure stories mapped the geography of my desire: the sands tramped by the foreign legion, the seas sailed by plucky young English midshipmen, the veld of southern Africa, the islands, shipwrecks and pirates of England’s maritime history. I escaped and travelled to every distant corner of the globe without leaving the confines of my bedroom. I had no fear of being lost or abandoned. I lived periodically in deserts, and as a castaway on tropical islands, my desire transmogrified into heroic feats of survival. I had created a dream world entirely my own, full of angels and demons and mythical beings. In later years I was captivated by the frontier spirit of the Beat generation – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassidy, who headed across America demonstrating their rejection of the Cold War and 1950s white suburbia. The road was their metaphor for masculine freedom and self-expression, exemplified by Robert Frank’s photograph US 285, New Mexico, an infinite road heading off into a limitless future. Kerouac, with his compulsion to travel without stopping, was the personification of mobility: ‘somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed me.’ It never was. Kerouac ended his life in his mother’s house, where he died a drunk, defeated by the impossibility of his longing.
Kerouac wanted the simple things in life – marriage, possibly children. He was old fashioned at heart. He craved love but never knew how to ask for it. He believed he’d find it over the next hill, in the next town, on the next journey. In my own youth I could see none of this hopelessness because I was seduced by his poetry and the romanticism of his adventurous life. I dreamed of pursuing my life in the way that Kerouac had his. It never occurred to me that if I did so, I might end up running away from it. Kerouac pursued life because he felt he did not have it. The stories men write and tell each other – in literature, poetry, films, television programmes – provide us with the words and images of masculinity, giving us the means to define ourselves. Like the adventure stories of my boyhood, Kerouac’s narrative offered me an opportunity to escape from the confinement of my upbringing. If I now return to the imaginary islands and deserts and roads of my boyhood and youth, it is to excavate these stories and undo them from the inside. I want to unpick the seam of their narratives and discover Kerouac’s pearl – the silence I think I may find at their heart.
In recent years a new narrative of masculinity has emerged, which contradicts the conventional stories of ambition and worldly success. It is about men’s feelings. Demand has increased for popular psychology books which focus on men’s problems in communicating their feelings to others. Claude Steiner confesses in Emotional Literacy: ‘I would say that many of the things I did were insensitive and hurtful to the people in my life … Looking back I see myself as someone who had infatuations but no real attachments, who had little respect, regret or guilt when it came to the way I treated others.’ Some scientists are claiming that men’s difficulties in empathizing with others is caused by their genetic makeup. Explanations are reduced to a crude form of Darwinism: men have spent thousands of years hunting and fighting in wars and gain some advantage by lacking the qualities of empathy and concern. It is an argument which assumes masculinity is a fixed and unchanging identity. I don’t believe that our biology is our destiny. For me the distinctive problems men have in their relationships and in expressing their feelings are the consequences of our history and culture. There is no better illustration of this than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It was one of the first books I was given as a child. The writing was difficult and reading it lacked pleasure – yet it is memorable because its narrative defined all the subsequent adventure stories I read in my boyhood. It is a story about the making of modern masculinity. It provides an explanation for men’s struggle with their feelings. It shows us what has made us into the men we are today.
Shipwrecked on a slaving expedition to Africa, Robinson Crusoe transforms the uninhabited island into his ‘little kingdom’. He orders time and space, builds his fortress home, domesticates animals, produces candles, clay pots and plates, and after three years cultivates his field of barley and rice and earthen vessels for baking bread. It is an idyll without the complicating presence of women. He suppresses his emotional response to events in favour of rational explanation. His scientific observations and careful dissection and classification of experience distance him from the compromising enigma of his feelings.
He decides to write a journal, but delays starting it. When he does begin, he chooses to describe events retrospectively. He explains that if he had begun his journal immediately on being shipwrecked, ‘I must have said thus: Sept. 30th. After I had escaped drowning … I ran about the shore, wringing my hands and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery, and crying out, I was undone, undone.’ With the trauma behind him, he can exert a greater control over his feelings and master his words. His command of his emotions is projected onto his command of the island’s resources. He is lord of the whole manor. There are no rivals, no competition, nobody to dispute his omnipotence. He is utterly alone, but he reflects on the benefits of his isolation. He has nothing to covet and nobody to lust after. Everything he enjoys he has made himself, for himself alone. It is a moment of personal triumph. But it also marks his downfall.
‘One day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.’ After fifteen years his self-made world is shattered. He cannot conceive of the existence of someone other than himself. He is haunted. He begins to imagine – hope against hope – that the footprint is a ‘mere chimera of my own’. To no avail. Crusoe, the king of all that he knows, is almost driven mad by his terror of this unknowable print in the sand. He sleeps fitfully, dreams of the pleasures of murder and suffers lurid nightmares. The only significant emotion in the book is Crusoe’s dread of being swallowed up by the unknown. War must be declared, both on himself for mastery of his emotions and against this nameless other who threatens his existence; either he devours or he will be devoured.
After twenty-four years alone on his island and nine years under the threatening shadow of this footprint, Crusoe finally confronts the source of his dread and saves Friday from being killed in a sacrificial ritual. His solitude is over. But he is incapable of forming a relationship with Friday. He fashions Friday into a simulacrum of himself – not a threatening unknown nor an independent-minded individual, but a mimicry. He teaches him English – ‘I … taught him to say Master’. And like Crusoe’s parrot, Friday’s language is a copy of Crusoe’s own imperial identity – ‘Yes, master’ to Crusoe’s ‘No, Friday.’ After all the threat and the terror, there is nobody to fear. Robinson Crusoe inaugurates the
