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literature tends towards a condition of anonymity, and that, so far as words are creative, a signature merely distracts from their true significance.
    I do not say that literature “ought” not to be signed…because literature is alive, and consequently “ought” is the wrong word. It wants not to be signed. That is my point. It is always tugging in that direction…saying, in effect, “I, not the author, really exist.”
    The poet wrote the poem, no doubt. But he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read….We forget, for ten minutes, his name and our own, and I contend that this temporary forgetfulness, this momentary and mutual anonymity, is sure evidence of good stuff.
    Modern education promotes the unmitigated study of literature, and concentrates our attention on the relation between a writer’s life—his surface life—and his work. That is the reason it is such a curse.
    Literature wants not to be signed.
    And yet I know whom I am quoting, for Forster signed his work.
    W. H. Auden writes:
Our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.
    We cannot seem to escape paradox; I do not think I want to.
    —
    Forster refers to “
his
surface life and
his
work”; Auden says, “
He
is not only a poet or a novelist;
he
is also a character in our biography.” That
his
and that
he
refer as much to Jane Austen and George Sand as to Flaubert and Hemingway. They are generic
his
and
he,
and not exclusively masculine.
    I am a female of the species man. Genesis is very explicit that it takes both male and female to make the image of God, and that the generic word
man
includes both.
    God created man in his own image, male and female.
    That is Scripture, therefore I refuse to be timid about being part of
man
kind. We of the female sex are half of mankind, and it is pusillanimous to resort to he/she, him/her, or even worse, android words. I have a hunch that those who would do so have forgotten their rightful heritage.
    I know that I am fortunate in having grown up in a household where no sexist roles were imposed on me. I lived in an atmosphere which assumed equality with all its differences. When mankind was referred to it never occurred to me that I was not part of it or that I was in some way being excluded. My great-great-grandmother, growing up on the St. John’s River in times of violence and hardship, had seven homes burned down; nevertheless she spoke casually in seven languages. Her daughter-in-law ran a military hospital, having been brought up at the court of Spain, where she was her ambassador father’s hostess; her closest friend was the princess Eugenie, soon to be empress, and the two young women rode and competed with the princess’s brothers in all sports; to prove their bravery, each drove a sharp knife into the flesh of the forearm without whimper. Others of my female forebears crossed the country in covered wagons and knew how to handle a gun as well as any man.
    Perhaps it is this background which has made me assume casually that of course I am not excluded when anyone refers to a novelist—or anyone else—as
he
or
him.
My closest woman friend is a physician, and so is my daughter-in-law. Not all women have been as fortunate as I have been. When my books were being rejected during the fifties it was not because of my sex, it was because the editors did not like what I was writing. My words were being rejected, not my femaleness.
    Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.
    But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that