style="font-size:15px;"> Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is arguably the first novel of modern England. Crusoe represents the exemplary man of an increasingly confident middle-class society whose principle of freedom lies in the unfettered pursuit of profit. In such a culture the ideal man is the man who is alone, unconstrained by his emotional need of women, or by concern for the lives of others. For Robinson Crusoe reason is the font of truth and freedom. Defoe turns Crusoe’s island into an allegorical setting where his hero must confront his irrational fears about his body, his feelings, his sexuality, women and ‘savages’. Crusoe imposes his rational order and language on the island and turns it into a solipsistic world in which other people are reduced to things, and relationships become instrumental. But he is left with the anxiety that the fear he has repressed lies beneath the surface of things, ready to erupt into life and consume him. To keep order, he must cultivate a manliness and master himself through strenuous activity.
The story of Robinson Crusoe became an ideal vehicle for the imperial spirit of late Victorian England. Its story of manly self-sufficiency and survival provided a model for countless boys’ adventure stories, eulogizing the exploits of Britain’s empire-builders. Their boy heroes treated the empire like a vast playground, glorying in violence, and championing the team spirit and chauvinism of the public schools. ‘The Englishman’s idea is that the world is ruled by character, by will,’ wrote the Hungarian anglophile Emil Reich in Success Among Nations in 1904. ‘From the very earliest childhood,’ he continued, ‘the English boy is subjected to methodical will-culture; he is soon trained to suppress to the uttermost all external signs of emotion.’ Out of this culture of asceticism emerged a form of imperial manliness which gained renown for its stiff upper lip, its masterly control over world affairs and its incomprehension of women and personal feeling. This is the manliness that we have inherited – a product not simply of our genetic makeup but of our history of empire, our relationships to women, and our functions within the newly emerging economic order of capitalism. This is the history of masculinity I inherited and it was a vital ingredient in shaping my language and identity. It determined the words I would use to describe who I was, and it gave form to the idiom of my life and relationships.
At the age of eight I was returning home from school one afternoon when, walking past the newsagents, I saw the Victor comic for boys slotted into a rack next to the door. On the cover was a wounded, bedraggled British Tommy, heroically struggling to fire his field gun at a group of advancing German Panzers. Around him were sprawled his dead companions. I recall being intensely attracted to this image and at that moment Victor became a part of my boyhood. The stories were pared down to the essentials of manly action. Characters like Captain Hurricane were cardboard cut-outs whose function was to carry the action and violence to its inevitable conclusion – a bloody pasting for ‘Jerry’. Exclamations, grunts and inexplicable noises indicated the brute appeal of the male body. Victor depicted a manliness besotted with self-sacrifice and athleticism. But the enduring images in action and adventure stories of the wounded male body, shot up, filled with arrows, starved, beaten and tortured, gives another, contradictory account of the troubled relationship men have with their bodies. The renowned understatement and personal reserve of the hero as he is faced with danger – chin up, don’t let the side down – cultivates an imperviousness to fear. His self-denial of his feelings transforms his wounds. He is a spectacle of righteous suffering, a martyr to his own pain. His emotional need is sublimated into his willingness to sacrifice his life for his country. Meaningless, catastrophic death is transformed into an eternal heroism, his short life into immortality. This celebration of death and suffering, the refusal to contemplate or be still, suggest that these stories of manliness involve a compulsion in men to elude their feelings and escape their own bodies.
Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1911 was one of the last great examples of this kind of English adventure. Pitched against the unendurable, Scott played the part of the imperial hero in the vast white solitude of ice. Eleven miles from One Ton camp Scott and his four companions were caught in a storm which lasted for four days. Knowing they were about to die he composed a series of final letters. In one, addressed to his friend, the playwright Sir James Barrie, he wrote: ‘we are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our cheery songs.’ In another letter, addressed to the British public, he apologized for his failure. ‘Had we lived,’ he wrote, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of Englishmen. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’ This was how an Englishman should die, a willing accomplice to the rules of the game: his death should be free from the rictus and terror of personal annihilation, or the desperate pleading for a mother. And yet there is a frisson of anxiety. For Scott, the approach of death in the Antarctic brought with it a contemplation of his manliness. He wrote to his wife about his concern for his son: ‘Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know – had always an inclination to be idle.’ He ends his letter: ‘What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has it been than lounging in too great a comfort at home.’ The loneliness of his frozen, emaciated death thousands of miles away from home confirmed him in his manhood. Yet the icy wastes of the Antarctic proved easier to confront than a deeper fear, closer to home – a life of domesticity with his wife and son. What the hero fears more than his enemy and the hostile terrain he must journey across are those close to him who want his love.
The stories of my boyhood transported me into an imaginary world of manly solitude. They taught me a language of self-possession which, I imagined, would galvanize me into independence. As a man I would step out into the world, alone, with nothing to fear or be mindful of. I had grown up in a middle-class society where emotions were coded in order that they could be denied, or taken back at a later date. The untempered expression of feelings – tantamount to making a scene – was not good manners. Neatly trimmed privet hedges and angled flower borders were like totems warding off the outside world and sanctifying the proper order within. Any emotional outburst – antagonism, conflict, despair – was to be contained behind closed doors. Nothing was to pass the obstinately patrolled border between feelings and words. They were kept apart, and in the silence which existed between people emotions remained nebulous, confined to the kitchens and the bedrooms of children. In my youth I turned away from my family. I had wanted my parents on their knees. I sought release from the grip of their own fear of the world. For their part they could make no reply to my intransigence. I wanted to put my family behind me and make my own way in life. My adventures would not take place in Africa, or the Antarctic. The boundaries I wanted to cross were not national or geographical but class and cultural. It was the mid 1970s and there was still a strong and vibrant counter culture. When I was nineteen, I spent the summer working on a small community newspaper in north Lambeth, London, before going to university. It was run by a group squatting in an old shop in Blackfriars, where local communities were hard pressed by property speculation and commercial redevelopment. I wanted to live what appeared to be a carefree existence. In the squat’s messy kitchen, which looked out onto a high brick wall, they would hold collective meetings at eleven o’clock in the morning, smoking and drinking tea. Involuntarily, I was always discomfited by the casual, nonchalant way in which they eased themselves into daily activity.
I began university in the autumn. The clear delineation of its red-brick buildings and the neat squares of campus life echoed the suburban geography of my childhood from which I had longed to escape. In the summer of my first year I left. I had met a women called C who lived on a large estate on the edge of the city. She, along with a group of other tenants, was building an adventure playground on a piece of waste ground. Local firms were cajoled into making donations and the post office persuaded to part with a dozen telegraph poles. The local industrial estate was scoured for old timber, and materials were salvaged from skips. A complex structure of wooden poles and beams grew from the ground, a matrix of walkways, swings and tunnels. Adults and children hammered and roped the warren, arguing about the course of its development and the merit of one design over another. I lived close by and began working there.
C
