by Fay Weldon
I will fill you in on the rest of her life, in a sentence or two, if not a nutshell, and return to it in later letters. I don’t think I will go to pack: I think I will simply lie in the shade by the pool. (The bus driver will take this letter to the post box for me. There is something about this place that reminds me of Georgian England. It is not just the alarming fact that they sentence criminals — those whom they define as criminal: that is, mostly Aboriginals — to prison sentences with hard labour, but that, more positively, simple human needs are recognized and met, with an easy, natural helpfulness, and with the sense that everyone is working together towards the best of all possible worlds.)
Jane Austen did not marry. She had no children. Nor did Cassandra. Jane Austen lived at Steventon until she was twenty-five, when her father retired. The family then went to Bath, where her father presently died. Her mother, Cassandra and she, left unprovided for, then lived by the courtesy of relatives for two years in Southampton, and then in the village of Chawton, in a house which had once been an inn, in the shadow (more or less. It’s half a mile away) of the great house where her brother Edward lived in style. In this house she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion. You can still visit the house, and see the small round table where she worked. I went there once and it seemed to me her spirit was still there: the part of her that was the writer, at any rate. You may dismiss this as silly if you like.
In 1817 she died, of, it is now said, Addison’s Disease. Then it was described as a lingering illness. She was forty-one.
She was born on 16 December (Sagittarius, and the birthday of my third son). She died on 18 July (the date on which my second son was born). Her books, as they vulgarly but truly say, live on. If writers build well and soundly, and in the service of Truth, who is the God they worship there in the City of Invention, their houses live after them, as a good house in this world remains, long after its occupants have turned to mould. It always seems strange to me, how different families serve shifts in the same house; as if the house owned them, sucked them dry, spat them out and tried again — and not the family that controlled the house at all.
I digress. ’Til the next letter, Alice,
Your aunt, Fay
LETTER FIVE
Pity the poor writer
The lakeside, Canberra, January
MY DEAR ALICE,
I have shipped out of North Queensland and come down to Canberra, before leaving for home. I know it adds a few thousand miles to an already outrageous distance — the world, so small a place to the telephone user (fifteen digits and variations thereupon will these days get you anywhere in a couple of seconds), is truly horrendously large to the person who has to physically move themselves from one part of it to another — but I find I need time before launching myself from the Southern Hemisphere back into the Northern. Therefore Canberra. I create the same distractions for myself — visits to friends, consultations with publishers, TV producers and so on — as I create before embarking on a new novel or play. Some writers classify the delaying process as research, and get advances from publishers and grants from Arts Councils to do it but I (I like to think) know it for what it is, an uneasy mixture of terror, idleness and a paralysing reverence for the Muse which, descending, prevents the writer from putting pen to paper for an intolerable time; till something happens — a change in the weather, an alteration to the pattern of dreams — which makes it possible to begin.
North Queensland lives by its wits and its physique — it gives no credence to writers, especially women; what use imagination when a crocodile advances or the locusts get the sugar-cane? You need a flame thrower and a helicopter, not a novel. Down in Canberra things are very different. It is a city of astonishing artifice and astonishing beauty. Once it was a barren plain, an indentation in the dusty desert: now it is striped by tree-lined avenues — the trees imported by the hundred thousand from Europe, over the years — in pretty, idiosyncratic suburbs where house prices define the status of the occupants, and when you change houses you change your friends, willy-nilly — and dotted by swimming pools, and graced by tranquil man-made lakes. It is a place of final and ultimate compromise: it exists only because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree where the seat of Australia’s government was to be, and so invented this place, somewhere in between — but rather nearer Sydney. It has handsome new buildings; a High Court where the courts are like theatres and judges and criminals play to an audience; the prettiest, leafiest, and most savagely, suicidally conspiratorial university in the world, the ANU — and it has readers.
I talked to them last night. I read to them. I read from Puffball — or rather I read all Puffball, leaving out the bits difficult to précis. A potted novel: a Reader’s Digest version. Once I was too terrified to open my mouth in public — my heart raced and my voice came out in a pitiful mouse-squeak — but now I enjoy haranguing hundreds.
It is practice, only practice, and learning to despise and put up with your own fear that works the transformation — which I tell you, Alice, just in case you suffer yourself from that terror of public speaking which renders so many women dumb at times when they would do better to be noisy. And if you are in a Committee meeting or at a Board meeting or a protest meeting, speak first. It doesn’t matter what you say, you will learn that soon enough, simply speak. Ask for the windows to be opened, or closed, or cigarette smokers to leave, or no-smoking notices to be taken down — anything. The second thing you say, later, will be sensible: your voice will have the proper pitch, and you will be listened to. And eventually, even, enjoy your captive audience.
Here in Canberra, this fictitious place, this practical, physical, busy, restless monument to invention, they love books and they love writers. Different cities call out different audiences. In Melbourne the audience is middle-aged and serious; in Sydney middle-aged and frivolous; here in Canberra they are young, excitable, impressionable and love to laugh. They want to know: they ask questions. They nourish you, the writer, with their inquiries, and you fill them with answers; right or wrong, it hardly matters. It’s always wonderful to find out that there is a view of the world, not just the world: a pattern to experience, not just experience — and whether you agree with the view offered, or like the pattern, is neither here nor there. Views are possible, patterns discernible — it is exciting and exhilarating and enriching to know it. You need not agree with the person on the platform, but you discover that neither do you have to agree with friends and neighbours: that’s the point. You can have your own view on everything — and this, particularly in a place such as Canberra, is liberty indeed. And it is why, I think, increasingly, any seminar on Women and Writing, or Women Writers, or the New Female Culture, or whatever, is instantly booked up — by men as well as by women — and readings by writers, and in particular women writers — are so popular. At last, it seems, there is some connection between Life and Art, the parts do add up to more than the whole: we always thought it! We discover — lo! — we are not alone in the oddity of our beliefs. Our neighbour, whom we never thought would laugh when we laughed, actually does.
It puts, of course, quite a burden on the writer, who is expected to direct all this mental theatre, to be seen as an Agony Aunt as well as the translator of the Infinite, and the handmaiden to the Muse, and may not have realized, on first putting pen to paper, where it would all end. But we have our royalties to give us some worldly recompense: our foreign sales, our TV rights, and so on. Like the real Royalty, it does not become us to complain.
Jane Austen and her contemporaries, of course, did none of this. They saved their public and their private energies for writing. They were not sent in to bat by their publishers in the interest of increased sales, nor did they feel obliged to present themselves upon public platforms as living vindication of their right to make up stories which others are expected to read. Imagine Jane Austen talking at the Assembly Hall, Alton, on ‘Why I wrote Emma’. But times, you see, have changed, and writers have had to change with them. Whe
n the modern reader takes up a ‘good’ novel, he does more than just turn the pages, read and enjoy. He gratifies his teachers and the tax payer, who these days subsidizes culture to such a large extent, in every country in the world; he gives reason and meaning — not to mention salary — to all those who work in Arts Administration and libraries and Literature Foundations, and Adult Education and the publishing, printing and book distribution trades — nothing is simple, you see, nothing: nothing is pure — and by virtue of the pressure put upon the reader to read, the burden of the writer is that much the greater. If your writing has any pretensions to literary merit, you must appear, you cannot shelter behind the cloak of anonymity: you have to be answerable, although you would rather stay home knitting, or dipping a horrified toe into the dangerous coral seas of the uncultured North. It won’t do: you have to come down to Canberra: you want to come down to Canberra. Somehow, it is registered as duty. You’re lucky, moreover, if they pay your fare.
All this you will discover when you finish your novel and it is acclaimed. It is very rare for writers to be acclaimed at an early age, of course, but you will quote Keats and Shelley at me, and I will predictably say, ‘poets are different, poets are expected to have a view of their response to the world, and can do that from adolescence onwards; novelists are expected to have a view of the world itself,’ and you will say, ‘not so, why?’: and neither of us will believe the other, so I shan’t continue on this theme. All I want to say is that a writer’s life is not a piece of cake, though better, I swear, than a waitress’s. (I was one of those once, too.) And that, if you want to be a writer — don’t; if you want to write, which is a different matter, nothing will stop you, not lack of time, nor the existence of husband, home or children; these things will merely sharpen your determination, not deter you. And that it is useless looking for things to say; if you have nothing to say, as my mother, your grandmother, used to remark to us girls, shut up. ‘Stay silent,’ she phrased it, being a lady to her bones. That may have been why our father, your grandfather, left her. A few plain words condemning his drunken fornicating habits might well have stopped them, and him in his tracks. Men — I use the term generically to include the female, as I so often in my letters to you use the male pronoun to include the female — are like children; they tend to misconstrue lack of reproof as lack of interest, as indifference.
I do wonder what it was that led Jane Austen into believing that her novels were publishable: were acceptable to a readership other than that of her immediate family and friends? She wrote the early books, initially, to be read aloud. Her tiny, fine handwriting, lacing the page this way and that — paper was expensive and it was customary to cover every available patch of it with writing — was hardly conducive to actual reading. The sense of the books, the delicacy of the language, the phrasing, the dialogue — all was written to be absorbed by the ear, not the eye. This is one of the reasons, of course, why a Jane Austen novel can be so wonderfully read aloud, and pleasurably listened to, on the radio. It is their true, their proper form. And if you have formed a writing style through your early work, it is likely to continue into your later. Persuasion was no doubt written with publication in mind — that is, to be absorbed by the eye, through the turning of pages, and a multitudinous eye at that, including all ranks and types of owners — but the early conception of a family audience, gathered round a vicarage fire, or sitting in the sun of a late afternoon, listening, smiling, responding, with evident pleasure, would not easily be forgotten.
And this — the mental presence of an actual audience — is another reason for the peculiarly dramatic scene-setting of which Jane Austen is so fond. She knows how to end a scene, an episode, a chapter, before beginning the next: when to allow the audience to rest, when to and how to underline a statement, when to mark time with idle paragraphs, allowing what went before to settle, before requiring it to inform what comes next.
It is a very modern technique. It requires, bluntly, and in modern terminology, consciousness of audience, and audience reaction. Jane Austen, I surmise, learned hers by reading aloud; listening to the stirrings, sighings and coughings of her audience. Today many writers learn by cutting their teeth on screen or TV or radio plays, before settling down to write novels; and though many who eschew the other forms of writing, and only write novels and are proud of it, will deny a sense of audience, saying, ‘But I don’t think of the readers at all. I only think of me,’ when what they usually mean is, ‘I am my own reader; I am both writer and reader. I must be the one, to gratify the other.’ For without this sense, there can be no pleasure by the writer in the sense of manipulating, through the written and the spoken word, the mind of the reader: and none of the mildly masochistic glory the reader has in being so manipulated and controlled as to actually have feelings he would not otherwise have had, and thoughts likewise, and discover in himself opinions he never knew he held. Truly, Alice, books are wonderful things: to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will — that is all, really, education is about, should be about.
But that’s enough of that for now. You may observe, that like so many of my generation, brought up on one side of the great cultural arts/science divide, I tend to believe that Science Faculties do not exist.
There is another very boring side to this reader/writer interconnection. It happens to writers who offer, or seem to offer, a solution to moral complexities of life, who do more than just offer plots and characters. ‘There is some mystery here,’ the reader thinks. ‘Let us find out what it is.’ They send questionnaires. One arrived this morning, forwarded from England. It comes from a post-graduate student, doing a thesis on feminist literature. It goes like this:
1. In adolescence, were your favourite or formative writers female?
2. Of these early influences, which do you think have been important to your development as a writer?
3. Who was the first writer or writers you thought of as having a specifically female point of view?
4. Would you consider them so today?
5. Who would you consider to be the major figures in feminist fiction?
6. Does the writing of women from other cultures interest you as a writer?
7. Do you think that there are male writers writing from a point of view that is sympathetic to feminism?
8. Do you consider that a male writer can write convincingly about female experience, and if so, who would you give as an example?
9. Which area of female experience do you think has been most neglected by writers to date?
10. Do you think that certain female experiences have actually been suppressed in literature?
11. Are you happy with the teaching of literature in schools?
12. A. Rich has referred to our language as ‘…man-made, inadequate, and lying…’ Do you think that a feminist vocabulary (a clumsy phrase, but can’t think of a better one) is desirable or necessary?
13. Why do you think that historically we know much more about women in literature than in the visual arts?
I will answer the questionnaire, of course, as best I can, and out of a general courtesy, but I do not think my answering will help the inquirer understand literature, men, women, or me. I can only reply as a reader, not a writer. I would have to write a whole play, or novel, based on the theme of every single question, and she would have to watch that, or read it, and absorb it, and understand it, before she would be one jot further on; and then she would have another questionnaire to send out, based on that, and we would never, ever finish. Of course we wouldn’t! The whole way in which fiction differs from journalism — a journalist would have no trouble answering the questionnaire — is that it attempts to reduce the enormous complexities of the whole to something comprehensible by an imaginative leap — we are humble sheep in a field of infinity: behold, a li
ttle ditch. Over goes the writer first: the readers follow after. But it was only such a little ditch…The journalist knows nothing of this: he has no concept of scale. He will answer question No. 1 briskly and informatively. He will say, ‘my favourite writers were female but my formative writers male, in adolescence. In my childhood the position was reversed, and in my adult life I have had no favourite or formative writers’ or something of that kind, and she will ponder this and, with any luck, will decide it means something. I will be still on Act 1, scene 3, detailing the nature of adolescence and the sexual desires of an androgynous English teacher.
These inquiries — mostly from women doing theses on some aspect of literature and/or feminism today — seem to believe that, if only they understood the writer, they would then understand the book. Recognizing that there is something inexplicable about the work, their ambition is instantly to nail it, and then explain it. Or perhaps, for some, it is that they are baffled by the writer’s ability to do what they themselves would like to do, but can’t. That is, write a novel that others want to read. They can write essays, memos, letters — why is it then that they can’t write novels: that the words lie dead and flat upon the page? There is some secret here, they feel, that the writer knows and unfairly withholds. If only the inquirer digs deep and uncomfortably enough — then the writer will be obliged to divulge the secret, every man can be his own novelist, and never spend a penny on a book again.
I worked in an advertising agency once. We were taken over by rational Americans, who could not bear the risky and expensive waywardness of the way we worked, and pinned us down by research, and tried to nail the creative process, so that successful campaigns could be produced in a rational way — so many positive adjectives here, so many exclamation marks there, a set ratio of copy to picture — but it never quite worked. The success rate was as high if we were guided by instinct as it was if we went by computer and research. Management retired, baffled, and let us get on with it in our own way, losing millions here, gaining millions there, for all the wrong reasons. It is for this same reason, the desire to control the creator and to calculate audience response, that once ‘great’ TV series decline and fall away; the initial creativity runs out; is drawn off like water from a well, by script editors who rationally apply a formula that ‘works’; only the well must presently run dry. Viewers notice it long before script editors: viewing figures fall, and only writers understand why. There is construction here, and description, but no invention. Dallas palls, Upstairs Downstairs brings a yawn.