Brett Gundlock/National Post

Barbara Kay: David Gilmour has a point

In an interview posted on the Random House website, best-selling author and University of Toronto Literary Studies professor David Gilmour stated that he is “not interested” in teaching female novelists, because he prefers to teach the writers who “I truly, truly love.” And the writers he truly loves happen to be “serious heterosexual guys.”

Love of the writers one teaches is a good basis for a syllabus. But since Gilmour also claims that he teaches “only the best,” the obvious conclusion to draw is that he thinks female writers are inferior to male writers. His grudging acceptance of Virginia Woolf as the sole female writer he considers worthy to join his personal pantheon, ironically, only adds fuel to the fire his remarks have stirred up.

For if he repudiated all women writers, one could brush him off as a crank or a misogynist, who doesn’t read or appreciate women writers for ideological or psychologically twisted reason. By including just a single woman, he seems to wish to emphasize the brutal message that he has tested many women writers and found them all wanting … apart from the freakishly good Woolf.

One supposes that Gilmour was simply trying to be mischievous with these provocative statements, and he knew very well what kind of hysterical blowback his naughty and extremely politically incorrect views would generate. Or perhaps he underestimated it, since he has spent the time since the interview backtracking. Gilmour watered his wine a bit when he told the National Post he had used a “careless choice of words,” and nuanced his rejection with the defence that he prefers to teach “people whose lives are a lot like my own, because that’s what I understand best, and that’s what I teach best.”

David Gilmour once sent me an e-mail, after I had written some literature-themed column, whose gist was that I didn’t have the credentials to comment on literature, and whose tone was truly, madly, insufferably patronizing. I remember writing back that it was by far “the most pretentious” communication I had ever received from an academic (and believe me, if you could see some of the nonsense I get from so-called intellectuals, you would know that is really saying something).

So I am probably the most unlikely person one can think of to spring to Gilmour’s defence. And yet, having indulged in a little justified schadenfreude, I am going to.

Gilmour deliberately overstated his case, but I think that buried beneath the foolish extremism and outright absurdity — George Eliot? Jane Austen? Emily Brontë? All chopped liver? — he has the makings of an actual point.

The publishing business once was mostly male, but by the 1970s that situation had begun to reverse itself, at least in regards to fiction. The Canadian literary scene, in particular, is dominated by women. Women readers buy and read more novels than men.

And what most women readers want is women’s-issues and women’s sensibilities-dominated books. I can easily see how a serious lover of literature, even a pretentious one, would find most Canadian literature by women that is gushed and Giller-ed over, however finely workshopped the prose, pretty slow-paced, broody and dull against the best male writers. As I myself once wrote about Canadian novels: “They’re all jumbled together in memory as feminized paeans to a sepulchral past, mired in poetically lyrical, but navel-gazing narrative stasis.”

Gilmour is not teaching literature as recreational pastime, he is teaching literature as great art

Even our finest women writers — Munro, Atwood — see the world almost exclusively through women’s eyes. That isn’t a bad thing. But if a writer’s male characters are not memorable — and in my Canadian reading experience, they mostly aren’t (not true of many British female writers, by the way) — one can understand why the books aren’t loved by deeply serious male readers.

I will risk some blowback myself in asserting that the great male writers seem to be able to manage to get into both men’s and women’s skins. But I will also name-drop at least one female writer who shares this ability: Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant. If you didn’t know who the writer was, it could be a man or a woman, something that can’t be said for other Canadian women writers.

The fact is, many women writers write extremely well. Probably half the writers I read for pleasure are outstanding female writers. But Gilmour is not teaching literature as recreational pastime, he is teaching literature as great art. And, as I say, he has a point. Too bad it was superseded by his childish need to épater la bourgeoisie.