by Fay Weldon
Anyway, last night at Canberra the readers and the would-be writers came to hear me speak, and to ask questions. It was a particularly good evening. Speaker and audience animated one another: these occasions, when all goes well, are like nothing else. They are half-way, for the audience, between going to a theatrical performance and reading a book; and for the writer, half-way between the former and writing one. A new art form:
The phenomenon is not new. Readers and listeners made tracks to Snorri Sturluson, twelfth-century writer of Icelandic sagas, poet, politician and historian. They came, over snow and tundra, by horse and cart and reindeer and sleigh. The questions would have been the same then as they are now. ‘Mr Sturluson, do you work regular hours or do you wait for inspiration to strike? Do you take notice of what the critics say? Of what the King says?’ (He had better have paid more attention to the latter: he came to a sorry end by the King’s hand.) ‘What were the early influences on your work?’
Human nature does not change over the centuries. If one writer is born to every five hundred non-writers, so are five critics and ten sceptics, twenty questioners and, thank God, one hundred simple readers: the proportion was the same in the twelfth century as it is today: only the scale is different, and (in the West) there are lighter penalties for writing what displeases, and thinking what is inconvenient. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have quite upset a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilization.
Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.
I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.
Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.) So the work is covered. It isn’t shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.
I would have thought the small, round table, half-way between fire and window, sitting with a warm back and life going on the other side of the pane, when you chose to look up from the page, and the occasional knock at the door, and a putting away of the work, was an ideal place and way for any writer to work, It’s how I choose to do it, I know that. I won’t have her pitied for it.
I do pity contemporary male writers, who have wives to bring them coffee and answer the phone to the bank manager, and no excuse not to undertake, not to complete, not to get published, and who find themselves with nothing to say. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting. We were not born with typewriter keys for fingers; we were born to pick up sticks and scratch away in mud and make our ochre marks on the walls of caves. Now, given that we must make a living, we join the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors and fight for our rights and our royalties and have to do so — but we should not be misled as to the true nature of our occupation. We do not need offices and a muted typewriter and no disturbance — we need a table half-way between the fire and the window, and the muted sound of the world around: to be of that world, and not apart from it. It is easier for women than it is for men, the world being what it is, and women writers, to their great advantage, are not allowed wives.
Alice, how is your novel? I do quite like your title. The Well of Loneliness: but I think someone has already used it. Do check with your tutor. You ask me how to write a ‘good novel’. Well, the writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending I do not mean mere fortunate events — a marriage, or a last-minute rescue from death — but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.
‘This is a far, far better thing,’ said Dickens at the end of Tale of Two Cities, ‘than I have ever done.’ And look how that sold!
Readers need and seek for moral guidance. I mean this in the best and even unconventional sense. They need an example, in the light of which they can examine themselves, understand themselves.
If you are good, Jane Austen promised, you will be happy. Emma learns to control her foolish impulses, and marries Mr Knightley. Anne in Persuasion holds fast to her ideals of unchanging love, and brings her lover back to her. Elizabeth comes to distinguish unthinking prejudice from impartial judgment, and so can love and be loved by Mr Darcy. Jane Austen defines our faults for us, analyses our virtues, and tells us that if we will only control the one with the other, all will yet be well.
That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true. Of course we read and re-read Jane Austen.
It is in this sense that the City of Invention is so valuable to us. In this other City, virtue is rewarded, and the bad are punished; and all events are interconnected, and what is more, they rise out of characters and action, not chance. Had you noticed how rarely coincidence occurs in the City of Invention? It is frowned upon here: it upsets the visitors. Coincidence happens in real life all the time. Not here. Cause and effect must rule, or else the readers will prefer reality, with its chaos and coincidence. They will leave the City, in droves.
We want and need to be told how to live. Let me quote from What is to be Done?, written by Nicolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. People have been reading it for more than a hundred years. Virago have just re-issued it. What is to be Done? is what’s called a World Bestseller as is Emma. It is a study in self-control and moral development as is Pride and Prejudice. It is the story of a girl from a brutal background who grows into a fine young woman, runs a dress factory cooperative in Czarist Russia and becomes a doctor. She marries twice: the first marriage is sexless, since the sexual act is seen as something rather animal and undignified and standing in the way of true companionship and true love: in the second marriage sex is allowable as an expression of love. Chernyshevsky almost seems to be saying, like St Paul, ‘Well, better to marry, I suppose, than to burn.’ He offers us an agreeable and stirring and achievable Utopia, if only we would learn to control ourselves and our passions. He does not invoke God, as the Church does, as the interventionary power required to bring general self-control and Heaven here on earth: he sees the strength latent there in both man and woman, if only they will use it.
It is stirring stuff: we should have more of it. He addresses his reader boldly, thus:
I wager that up to the concluding paragraph
s Vera, Kirsanov and Lopukhov (his protagonists) have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not every person’s impossible aim in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high. It is you who are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth: and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in the clouds, it is because you are in the infernal depths. The light where they stand all men should and can reach…Come up from your caves, my friends, ascend! It is not so difficult. Come to the surface of this earth, where one is so well situated and the road is easy and attractive. Try it: development! development! Observe, think, read those who tell you of the pure enjoyment of life, of the possible goodness and happiness of men.
Chernyshevsky was, if you want a rapid résumé of nineteenth-century Russian thought, a ‘man of the ‘eighties’, who replaced the men of the ‘sixties, with more visionary Utopians — Kropotkin the anarchist, Bakunin the philosopher. (They couldn’t stand each other.) Chernyshevsky ran off with Bakunin’s daughter and was mad, quite mad. He frightened everyone with his glittering eyes. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities when he was thirty-four, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped, they say, by converting the entire prison staff to his ideas, to the kind of ecstatic pre-Marxist communism we find in What is to be Done?, which he wrote in prison. The staff unlocked the prison gates and set him free. The authorities found him, and sent him to Siberia where the warders were less impressionable and too stupid and vile to be converted to anything, and where he died in 1889. What is to be Done? lives on.
Jane Austen’s lifestyle (as they call it now) was very different, and her call to moral arms more muted; but it was there. And her books too live on.
Well, of course readers are envious of writers.
With best wishes,
Aunt Fay
LETTER SIX
Letter to a sister
Canberra, January
MY DEAR ENID,
Thank you for writing to me. Your letter followed me from Cairns, and has caught me here the day before I leave for Heathrow. Of course I am not encouraging your daughter Alice to write a novel. Of course she should concentrate on her studies. I am only trying to help her understand Jane Austen: see my letters as seed flung upon ground badly in need of literary fertilizer.
Do you remember our mother discovering a copy of The Well of Loneliness under my pillow and ceremoniously burning it, as indecent and likely to corrupt? Did you ever report that incident to Alice? I doubt it, yet the title is lurking there somewhere in her subconscious: it would almost lead one to become a Lamarckian, and believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
I am glad you wrote. It is time we patched up this quarrel. I understand your nervousness that Alice might set fictional pen to paper — you are particularly sensitive on this point and no doubt believe she will start writing about your and Edward’s intimate marital relationship for all the world to see, and then Edward will ban her from the house. She won’t — any more than I ever did. You are not the model for Chloe in Female Friends. Too many of my friends claim that role, in any case, for you to be able to do so sensibly. Any woman who waits upon her husband as a servant upon a master — and they are legion — all too easily sees herself as Chloe. But I made her up. I promise. It is true that you must set the dough to rise before going to bed so that Edward can have fresh home-baked bread rolls for breakfast, as Chloe did for her Oliver, but because you do that, must no writer ever write about it? Can you own it, because you do it? The incident is yours, I admit, but the character of Chloe simply is not. You would never have a garden full of other people’s children, come to live with you because you were the only mother in sight. You choose your friends more carefully. You will never leave Edward, crying ‘I can, I can, and I will!’ and good for you, because you live the way you live, however strange that may appear to others. You are not Chloe.
Let me try and explain; let me try and give you proof. There is, to me, even as reader, a detectable difference between invented and described characters. Take Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma — a book I know you have read and loved, though somehow failed to pass the enthusiasm on to little punk-head Alice. I am sure Miss Bates is based upon a real person, a woman that one may, that one must laugh at, says Emma — because it is a slightly spiteful portrait and goes on too long: Jane Austen’s revenge perhaps for hours of local boredom. Truly, properly invented characters, born out of the imagination, sprung from the head fully formed, as Venus was from Zeus, may appear as wicked, or good, or bizarre or foolish, but the writer takes the attitude of God — he forgives and understands, even while condemning. This is, after all, his own creation. He is in a way responsible.
But when the writer describes and does not invent, he suffers the limitations of his own humanity, and appears spiteful, or bigoted, or not really entitled to comment at all. Miss Bates, I confess, makes me uneasy. I think she lived in the village of Chawton, and I am sure the villagers read Emma and nudged each other and said, ‘That’s her, that’s Miss Bates,’ and laughed the more at her, and I hope Jane Austen was slightly ashamed, just as Emma eventually was. Except, of course, literacy in the village would have been running at a rate of only some fifteen per cent. Perhaps Jane Austen thought she was safe.
Authors writhe and chafe at the notion that they are parasitical upon spouses, family, friends, colleagues. The charge is so nearly true, yet never quite. People in fiction are conglomerates or abstractions: in personality and in appearance. Fictional characters are simple and understandable — real people are infinitely complex, incomprehensible and even in appearance look one way one day and another the next.
Of course I am worried that you think you are Chloe, and I feel guilty about it, even while loudly declaring my innocence.
But these kind of literary-social personal remarks are better directed at Alice, who has essays to write and needs a phrase here and a thought there, not you, Enid. My love to Edward. If he will forgive me for upsetting you by putting before the general novel-reading public (a very small proportion of the population, I do assure him — and Mrs Thatcher never reads them) the details of husband/wife bread roll relationships, and accept that my whole purpose in the world is not to upset marriages, and will understand that my sending Alice £500 was not in order to denigrate him, or imply that he kept his own daughter in poverty, but simply a matter of paying off my gambling debts in an honourable way, I would love to come to stay. I do miss you, Enid.
Your loving sister,
Fay
LETTER SEVEN
Emma lives!
Singapore, February
MY DEAR ALICE,
I am in correspondence with your mother: your father may forgive me: we may even be reunited. Why any of us read novels, life being so novelettish, I cannot today imagine. Next week, jet-lagged and with the prospect of an earnest, hard-working future unalleviated by foreign travel before me, I shall no doubt be knocking pitifully once again on the doors of the City, in flight from boredom, in search of ideas.
In the meantime, I am on the 18th floor of the Marco Polo Stopover hotel, too terrified of the East to leave my room. My terror is not for my body but for my mind. To come to terms with the concept of the group soul, and forget our Western notion of individual life, death and salvation, takes more time than is available to me on this trip. I shall look out of the window and pretend that what I see is a backcloth, and write to you, and have hamburgers for supper, and shut my senses to the ripe, Imperial, murderous efficiency of this new/old place, on the Qantas coach back to beautiful Changi airport, where the fountains play and policemen with machine guns keep them trained upon the crowd, no doubt for the benefit of the likes of me. I carry Currency.
I think you should make yourself acquainted with the writers Jane Austen read: Addison, Johnson, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, St
erne and Fanny Burney.
Too much?
Stick to Fielding. Read Tom Jones (if that’s too much, at least see the film). Jane Austen is said to have censured Fielding as being morally lax. One of the difficulties of being a writer of note is that people believe that you mean what you say, and believe that you go on believing what you say. A change of mind or mood requires a flag or a trumpet. Had Jane Austen known that a light remark of hers about Fielding — possibly uttered to suit the occasion and keep the social wheels running smoothly — was to stand as her one, true, lasting opinion of Fielding through the centuries, she might well have phrased it differently — or, had she wanted to get on with her work, simply given the existing statement marks out of ten for conviction, durability and passionate utterance, and marked all rather low.
I think you should probably read Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which I believe was one of Jane Austen’s favourites. I have not read it. If you will read it, Alice, and let me know what it is like, I will pay you £50. I believe that reading books you do not really want to read, like looking after children you do not really want to look after, should be a very highly-paid occupation indeed. It is an assault to the human spirit. I studied English Literature for a short (a very short) time at university, and was so distressed at having to read a novel by Walter Scott that I paid someone else to do it, in much the same way as I now pay you for reading Richardson. It was not an admirable or ethical act, in the circumstances, and feeling it to be so, I gave up English Literature altogether, and took to Economics and Psychology, departments in which I flourished. I deduce nothing from this, either as to the nature of the reader or the embryo writer, merely that I was a bored and idle student. I hope you never do any such thing.