The Little Man-Cave on the Prairie by Andrew O’Hagan
Our home life was a breach of the peace in nightly instalments. By the age of six, I wanted a moon of my own. I would’ve settled for a space-pad across the road from Luke Skywalker at the edge of the Tatooine Desert, or a lifetime in orbit on the Soyuz spacecraft, but I realised I might have to compromise and live in a chalet at the Chateau Marmont instead. You can’t always get what you want, as the man says, but wanting my own place was an early-onset depravity with me, and I had elaborate real-estate fantasies
at a time when your average teenager was only thinking about sex.
None of the places I imagined contained other people. It wasn’t a six-bedroom house in Hampstead. It was a little man-cave on the prairie, where your actual, long-suffering correspondent would live a very wholesome life, one completely devoid of responsibility, in the company of beer and Maltesers.
“What happened to the dream?” my imaginary friend asked me not long ago. (People think it’s only children that have imaginary friends: they know nothing about middle age.) “Oh, did it get lost in the post?”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
Then I did it. I bought a tin house by the sea. I filled it with foreign ashtrays and the complete works of Martin Scorsese. And now I am happy. I go from time to time when the breeze of everyday life begins to sting my eyes. I eat all the sausages. I smoke all the fags. I do press-ups on the beach and then eat three custard tarts. At night, I watch the sun go down, the pink sky making me think nothing matters anyhow.
My wife knows more about men than I do. She smiles at my man-cave needs, sending me off with a kiss and a smile, and welcomes me back to London when my life as Grizzly McAndrew comes to seem less necessary. This is a developing story, however, and the truth is I find myself becoming increasingly house-proud at my mancave. I brought up one of those new Dysons the other day. I’m always hunting for surface-scouring materials. I festooned the place with bunting and put out cushions designed by Cressida Bell. The bedspread is pink. There are many scented candles and Chinese lanterns. I’ve been thinking of running up a few curtains in red gingham.
And so, I begin to see that my initial fulfilment of all the male clichés flows ever so fluidly with my inner hausfrau. I am as proud of my little caravan as Mrs Hinch is of her Essex semi. What began with me wanting to escape the urban haze of masculine responsibility, ends with me in a flowery pinny, dusting my caravan with joy and extolling the virtues of lavender wipes.
This is not what it said on the tin. The first known use of the phrase “man-cave” came in 1992 in the Toronto Star (Hemingway’s old paper, by the way), when the writer Joanne Lovering surveyed the typical male need for a dungeon: “With his cave of solitude secured against wifeintrusion by cold floors, musty smells and a few strategic cobwebs,” she wrote, “he will stay down there for hours nestled in very manly magazines and open boxes of tools. Let’s call the basement, man-cave.”
Well, Ms Lovering, things had come to a pretty pass, and I have to report the man-cave of today is a bijou confection, a home-away-fromhome where the modern male may retreat for a spot of macramé. He may be found, of an evening, avoiding the rough and tumble of male sports, and tending, instead, to a warm bowl of Elizabeth David’s potage du père tranquille, that he made himself.
The problem with clichés is their remedies become clichés, too, which is why most self-help books go out of fashion so quickly. I’ve been looking at a heap of them — from Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: the Emotional Costs of Everyday Life to The Nordic Theory of Everything: in Search of a Better Life — and I’m afraid they are, like those of us who read them, warped with ideals nobody can live up to. Beyond a certain age, time spent alone is just good preparation for time spent with others, and I enjoy the comedy of it all, running away from the charms of domestic life in order to replicate the charms of domestic life.
What I really do when I go to the man-cave is work. The Scorseses remain in their sleeves. And that vintage bottle of rum, the one you can only get in one shop in Havana, remains undrunk. So, as well as a place in which to exercise one’s rage for order, it’s also another office, and that was never on the list of expectations either when the man-cave ideal first sprung into being.
Maybe it’s Wi-Fi that has changed it all. When I dreamed as a child of being in my own house in a galaxy far, far way — well, the whole notion of “away” really meant something. You could be in a place without a phone, never mind Deliveroo. But such places become increasingly unimaginable, and my man-cave, blissful as it is, has perfect connectivity and I can surf to anywhere from that lonesome beach. Instead of lying in my boxer shorts under a huge pile of pizza boxes, I find I am sitting at a well-polished table, learning a foreign language by internet correspondence, swapping seaside gardening hints with the male hausfraus of California, and writing several stories at once.
Maybe the real realisation for the middle-aged monster, is that one no longer has the same appetites. Face it, cave-dweller: life socialised you. And when you’re supposed to be cutting all ties, you’re actually busy forging stronger ones. The alienation effect was just childhood, really, though I’d still take that pad on Tatooine, if only for the pleasure of advertising my aloneness on social media.
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