…is you don’t talk about acting like a man. The second rule of acting like a man is, well, you know.

Forgive me if this post descends into an exercise in free association but this is a truth of traditional masculinity so self-evident that it’s hard to understate, or to quickly get a big-picture handle on. You’ve got your strong silent type. Your actions speak louder than words. Your walk softly and carry a big stick. It permeates the archetypes of Hollywood heroes: the gunslinger may be wounded inside—he almost certainly is—but he ain’t talking about it, and while he can certainly draw down on you if you force his hand, he isn’t going to waste a lot of breath telling you about it. The veteran cop sees himself as the thin line between civilization and predatory evil, and he’s going to keep his mouth shut about the deep scars the trouble he’s seen have left on his psyche. Taciturnity is always there in Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood. Forced to talk about what he does by sportswriters who lionize his exploits in poetic daily dispatches, the professional athlete resorts to a series of barely communicative clichés — I just go out there and give 100 per cent and hope the bounces go our way and, you know, we have great bunch of guys on this team, we’re all just working to get the little things right and, well, by the grace of God…

Tom Wolfe wrote a lot about men jockeying for social status, and imagined—some would say captured—their unspoken codes. In The Right Stuff, about Navy fighter pilots and, later, NASA astronauts:

No, herein the world was divided into into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way.

As to just what this ineffable quality was … well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite —and ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. […]

None of this was to be mentioned, and yet it was acted out in a way that a young man could not fail to understand….

Sherman McCoy, the bond trader in The Bonfire of the Vanities:

On Wall Street, he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe. There was … no limit whatsoever! Naturally he had never so much as whispered this phrase to a living soul. He was no fool.

And then naturally, the rule extends to the white-suited New Journalism lion himself, as I wrote of my conversation with him in 2004:

I mean when Tom Wolfe looks at himself in the mirror with “a second set of eyes,” as one of the characters in his new novel does, and sees himself as others do, he sees a man who has changed the way journalism is practised all over the world, a man who wrote definitive accounts of three different decades of American civilization, a man who has coined or popularized dozens of now commonplace expressions (good old boy, the Me decade, radical chic, flak-catcher), a man so iconic that Harper’s Magazine selected him to appear alongside Mark Twain on the cover of its 150th anniversary issue, a man who can inspire a first run of 1.5 million copies of a novel everyone fully expects to be terrible because he sold 1.2 million hardcover copies of the last novel, the one the giants of American letters ran into the ground. Here’s a man who can look into the mirror and say, “I Am Tom Wolfe, an American Icon, a Master of the Universe, A Man in Full, the very definition of The Write Stuff” — right Tom?… Tom?

There’s a long pause over the phone from New York […]

“You know, I wish that every morning I looked in the mirror and felt like an icon—I’ve, I’m really—I love the question because it raises the possibility that it might be true—I just cannot possibly think that way,” Wolfe says. “I mean, bless you for even toting it out as a question to which the answer might be ‘yes’… but you know, I grew up in the South, and we’re always raised to be essentially modest, and I… well, to answer the question, I’ve never really entertained the thought.

In Fight Club, whence the title of this post comes, the narrator first sets up the value of the club, saying “You weren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club.” Men enter as gormless blobs of insecurity and indecision and “You see this same guy here six months later, he looks like he’s carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything.”

Then, he says, “Outside, the sun is coming up. You don’t talk about fight club because except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn’t exist.” In other words, maybe, its mystery is its life, we must not let in daylight upon magic.

Is this why, perhaps, men have always devised other things to discuss—politics, art and (especially) sports? As proxies for the feelings and concepts that must remain unspoken? When we talk about why this first baseman is a bum or why that stay-at-home defenceman is the bedrock of his team, are we talking about acting like a m-n (as the chosen people refuse to spell out or pronounce that which is sacred to them)? I dunno. Worth some thought.

But this is clearly one of those giant Mars-Venus divides. As any Venusian magazine will tell you, the women have more ways to say “how do you feel about our relationship?” than the aboriginals of the North have words for snow. On Mars, however, there are a million ways to talk about who is the best pure goal scorer of all time, and very few words that function as a response to a request for emotional back-and-forth. (And famously, if you’ll forgive me the obvious, not a single word that translates properly as an expression of how jeans relate to the relative fatness of a woman’s ass.)

It’s a piece of conventional wisdom that men are taught to suppress their feelings, which I’ve always kind of thought was a load of B.S. At least partly. Men are very good at expressing irritation verbally, and have generally been good at expressing anger and excitement and pride. But when it comes to the really important questions of identity and love and everything else that is of real, fundamental importance—talk is cheap. It’s not always a question of avoiding vulnerability. Maybe sometimes it’s that language is an imperfect vehicle that is not up to carrying the most important sentiments to their destination. A lifetime of devotion, a series of sacrifices, a look, a touch—how many of these add up to the equivalent of a single spoken “I love you”? To return to the obvious, you say, “yes, those jeans make your ass look fat” in an effort to be honest, especially since you don’t think the ass is especially fat to begin with, and a shitstorm of wounded feelings and misdirected rage rains down on you. What would happen if you somehow similarly chose the wrong words to express your feelings about something important?

In relationships with each other, men don’t have to say “I love you.” They talk about Star Wars or the Yankees or politics or whatever the hell else is interesting, they help each other move and buy each other drinks and generally, the love is understood, unspoken but unquestioned. When you do, in some drunken moment of welled-up emotion—maybe after some punches are exchanged, say—do that man-hug thing and say “I love you man,” it gets all awkward. The words fuck it up a bit.

Back out in the realm of non-relationship talkiness, even questions about the essentials are often unwelcome. Ask Satchmo what jazz is and he says, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” The answer is right there in the horn playing, and every syllable of yakety-yakety dissection is unjazzifying it. A poem is the perfect number of words in the perfect order, while the experience of reading poetry criticism is often insufferable and often irreparably ruins your experience of the original, perfect work of art. Stand in front of a Rothko canvas and feel moved or angered or indifferent to it, but read postmodern art theory and you’ll just see the actual work receding into the distance.

But—but!—isn’t the minute dissection of art how true fans appreciate it? It’s how some of them claim to, and it’s certainly how such people stake their own claim to a sophisticated relationship with something they admire. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but it does mark a clear distinction between those who live something and those who admire it. An athlete is monosyllabic about his form of physical genius while the dedicated fans are statistics crunching monologists. Rock ‘n’ rollers are often too drugged and/or oversexed to say anything intelligent about their music—they’re much better telling road stories—while music geeks parse out which fraction of a second after the kick drum is struck that the high-hat comes in to create the precise rhythm that leads to musical catharsis.

Early in his book American Nerd: The Story of My People (which will be released next week and which I just started reading this afternoon) Benjamin Nugent points this out as a brand of nerd-dom:

Even music nerds, who sometimes pretend to be cool, seem to hope that a familiarity with defunct record labels and one-hit wonders creates kinship between musicians and themselves.

This is at least part of why Norman Mailer carried a clownish quality that his hero, Ernest Hemingway, didn’t have. That macho prize-fighting is a lot more effective—a lot more manly—without the running commentary of self-deconstruction. Some do, the rest talk about it. If you have it, if you understand it, you express it through your very being. It’s only those who don’t have it who need to break down its fine points and dissect it like a frog in biology class to see how the blood gets from the heart to the brain to the groin.

And so: for a blogger yak-yak-yakking about that which shall not be spoken, what does it all mean? That’s where I shut up and live to post another day.

photo credit: rochelle, et. al.

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Posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 12:09 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.