by Fay Weldon
It is time for me to leave this hotel and return to the care of Quant — Qua — Qantas. (I have had to write that three times before I can manage a ‘Q’ without a following ‘u’.)
I think I have been too scathing about your attempts to write a novel. By all means, try.
Your loving aunt,
Fay
LETTER EIGHT
‘Oh! It’s only a novel!’
London, February
MY DEAR ALICE,
It is alarming to be back in this real city, having stayed for so long in what seems, in retrospect, a picture postcard. Australians live on the surface of their vast land, and round its rim: the centre, unimaginably beautiful, is left empty. I am reminded of a human brain, excited activity around its periphery, the slow, blank, powerful unconscious within. Inner space. It is the country of the future, I swear. Little by little that centre will be drawn into consciousness: memories will surface, and something new and immensely wise will be born. In the meantime the land is like some powerful zonked-out god, lying splayed on its back, zapped by the past, stirring the Pacific with an idle toe, suffering from a temporary amnesia. Just you wait till it wakes: be there if you possibly can, citizen of no mean city. Do you know that reference? ‘I am a citizen of no mean city’? St Paul?
In 1797 the Reverend Austen wrote to the London publisher Cadell, saying he was in possession of a novel about the length of Burney’s Evelina, which he would forward if Cadell was interested. Cadell wrote back declining the offer, thus calling down upon himself hoots of derision from an unfeeling future. The novel was Pride and Prejudice. Now I don’t blame Cadell at all. The novel must have sounded singularly ordinary. Poor girl gets rich man in unbelievable circumstances: the setting rather mundane. The nearest thing to High Life, a guided tour by a housekeeper around a stately home…Popular novels of the time fell easily into one of two categories — novels of Sentiment and novels of Terror. Pride and Prejudice was clearly one of the former, but lacked the death scenes which were so popular. Nobody even swooned. Jane caught a bad cold, but that hardly counted.
And in any case, novels of Terror, the same gothic novels that we have, early versions of our bodice-rippers, sold better.
Now, you must remember, Alice, that at the time to read novels was a highly suspect activity. The human appetite for fiction, not unlike the human appetite for sex, though in a milder degree, was seen as somehow sleazy. (How much more disconcerting to have someone in the family who actually wrote them.) It had become quite the fashionable thing for women of good education, lively mind and no occupation to turn their hand to the task, but they were expected to take great care not to offend, to set a good moral tone, in general to encourage the reader towards virtue and good behaviour. Most certainly the Reverend Austen would not have sent Lady Susan to Mr Cadell — the tale of a wicked woman, who although punished by being obliged to marry the horrible suitor she had planned as her daughter’s husband, seemed, in the meantime, to enjoy her wicked ways, and who had a Good Time. Had Jane Austen been born to a different, wilder, freer background, had she kept company with Shelley and his wife Mary of Frankenstein fame, Byron and his sister Augusta, of incest fame, and Leigh Hunt, of grasshopper fame — but such suppositions are as much nonsense as wishing one had been born to different parents. If one had, one would not exist.
Anyway, Pride and Prejudice, under its original title First Impressions was not accepted by Mr Cadell.
If you persist with your novel, Alice, you will find it difficult to finish. Because if you finish it you will then have the problem of whether or not you actually want it published. The worry may be conscious, or unconscious, but it will be there. You will go on holiday, break an arm, finish with a boyfriend; or start another affair; quarrel with your parents, burn down your flat — anything, to put off the actual finishing of the work. You may very well not even understand what you are doing.
‘But I couldn’t have wanted to break my arm,’ you’ll say.
‘Your right arm,’ I’ll say, ‘your writing arm. Funny it wasn’t your left.’
And it will be unfair but there’ll be a truth in it. You are building your house in the City of Invention: the responsibility terrifies you. Presently you will have to throw open the doors — and supposing no one wants to come in? Or even worse, supposing they do? Won’t life change? Won’t you have to put aside the griefs and complaints that sustain you, and embark on a whole new set? Oh yes, indeed. Success is a dreadful thing.
Especially, I will add, pace your father, especially for a woman. For if you can look after yourself, who will look after you? ‘Success kicks away the stool of masochism, on which female existence so often depends, and leaves you hanging, gasping.’ Discuss.
And there’s another factor, too. Sir Thomas More put it rather elegantly in 1515, in his Utopia, translated with equal elegance in 1965 by Paul Turner:
To tell you the truth, though, I still haven’t made up my mind whether I shall publish it at all. Tastes differ so widely, and some people are so humourless, so uncharitable, and so absurdly wrong-headed, that one would probably do far better to relax and enjoy life than worry oneself to death trying to instruct or entertain a public which will only despise one’s efforts, or at least feel no gratitude for them. Most readers know nothing about literature — many regard it with contempt. Lowbrows find everything heavy going that isn’t completely low-brow. Highbrows reject everything as vulgar that isn’t a mass of archaisms. Some only like the classics, others only their own works. Some are so grimly serious that they disapprove of all humour, others so half-witted that they can’t stand wit. Some are so literal-minded that the slightest hint of irony affects them as water affects a sufferer from hydrophobia. Others come to different conclusions every time they stand up or sit down. Then there’s the alcoholic school of critics, who sit in public houses, pronouncing ex cathedra verdicts of condemnation, just as they think fit. They seize upon your publications, as a wrestler seizes upon his opponent’s hair, and use them to drag you down, while they themselves remain quite invulnerable, because their barren pates are completely bald — so there’s nothing for you to get hold of.
Besides, some readers are so ungrateful that, even if they enjoy a book immensely, they don’t feel any affection for the author. They’re like rude guests who after a splendid dinner-party go home stuffed with food, without saying a word of thanks to their host. So much for the wisdom of preparing a feast of reason at one’s own expense for a public with such fastidious and unpredictable tastes, and with such a profound sense of gratitude!
Nothing changes for the writer. The centuries revolve around him-her with their changing mores, their ever-improving methods of communication — but the activity is timeless, as is the reception of that activity.
And how, if you write novels, are you going to live with your friends and neighbours, who are bound to see themselves therein? They will devour your books simply to do so. They will still confide in you, but they will draw back, saying, ‘I suppose you’re going to put all this into your next’, and that’s hurtful. The writer is not parasitical in the way that they suppose. Everything is fed in, it is true, to that unstoppable inner computer: there is no helping that, but it is the stuff, not the substance, of what is regurgitated; there is something besides, so oddly impersonal about it all. As if the computer merely used the writer as its eyes and ears: as if it were that fate took a hand, made this particular person act in a certain way, only for the recording. Fiction first, life after. It is an intolerable thought.
As if it were decreed that your mother Enid should put bread rolls to rise every night for your father Edward’s breakfast, in order that a certain paragraph in a certain novel should be written.
As if the City of Invention, little by little, using a chapter here, a paragraph there, is waking from its slumber and will eventually be more real than life itself, and we its servants, its outrunners.
By the time you have finished your novel you will know wh
at I mean.
With love,
Fay
LETTER NINE
‘I never read much’
Somerset, March
MY DEAR ALICE,
How can I possibly tell you how to run your life? I am a novelist and your aunt, not a seer. I suppose I could offer a few general rules. For example:
1. Love your mother if you possibly can, since she is the source of your life.
2. Love men if you possibly can, since they are the source of your gratification.
3. Reform yourself, as well as the world.
4. Agree with your accusers, loudly and clearly. They will shut up sooner.
5. Worry less about what other people think of you, and more about what you think of them.
I shall leave 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 blank, for you to fill in yourself. Revise them every New Year’s Day. The real Secret of Life lies in Constant Rule Revision.
I can offer, more sensibly, a few general rules about writing:
(a) Show your work to no one, not to friend, nor spouse, nor anyone. They know no better than you, but will have to say something. The publisher or producer, eventually, will say yes or no, which are the only words you need to hear.
You won’t observe this rule, so:
(b) What others say are your faults, your weaknesses, may if carried to extremes be your virtues, your strengths. I don’t like too many adjectives or adverbs — I say if a noun or a verb is worth describing, do it properly, take a sentence to do it. There’s no hurry. Don’t say ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’. Say, ‘it was at this moment that the fox jumped over the dog. The fox was brown as the hazelnuts in the tree hedgerows, and quick as the small stream that ran beside, and the dog too lazy to so much as turn his head.’ Or something. Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.
Having thus discouraged the apprentice writer from over-use of adjectives, I turn at once to Iris Murdoch and find she will use eighteen of them in a row. It works. What is weakness in small quantities, is style in overdose. So be wary of anyone who tries to teach you to write. Do it yourself. Stand alone. You will never be better than your own judgment, and you will never be satisfied with what you do. Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.
(c), (d), (e) and (f) you can fill in for yourself.
You tell me the plot of your novel in a nutshell. It sounds perfectly dreadful. But then so does Pride and Prejudice in a nutshell. (I know! Witches used to go to sea in nutshells? Wrong again! Eggshells, a friend says. That’s why children turn their eaten boiled eggs over and smash the shells. To thwart the witches. And I’d thought it was just their general tendency to leave me to clear up the detail of their self-expression. But I broke my eggshells as a child: so did your mother: I expect you do too. It is the kind of thing that gets handed on like life expectancy, rolling acres, and cold sores.)
I will tell you that the main fault of young writers is their habit of writing about the love lives of themselves and their friends, since this is so boring to the truly adult reader — inasmuch as what strikes the young as exciting and amazing is to the more experienced observer trite beyond belief, and boring too, and I will suggest that you wait until you have met an actual trouble or two, and know yourself a little better, and lose your good opinion of yourself, and get on with your studies, as your mother and father are so anxious that you should and then events will prove me wrong and you right. It is the kind of thing that happens.
I am wrong about things two times out of five. My general impression about other people is that they are wrong two-and-a-half times out of five. Can this be success? I know a brain surgeon. She plunges about with lasers in the brains of people who will die if she does nothing. Sometimes she cures them totally, sometimes she kills them quickly, sometimes she reduces them to long-lasting vegetables. But someone has to do something. And her vegetation rate, as it’s called, is two out of ten and not three out of ten, as it is with her colleagues, and her death rate the same, so she is considered The Best. And is. And people queue up — if people in comas can be said to queue up — for her services.
Your novel is about a young girl studying English Literature who falls in love with her professor, who is married to someone unlovable, and how her boyfriend reacts, which is not as expected. (It’s how I expect, who have some knowledge of human depravity.) He has an affair with Unlovable. It is all, obviously, autobiographical. My advice to you is, consider the nature of Unlovable. You may be wrong about her.
May I also suggest that your falling in love is an example of those diversionary tactics which afflict the writer — (I have already described them) — because in your earlier account of this novel it concerned a young girl studying English Literature who falls in love with a fellow student (male) and so escapes incipient lesbianism. By changing your allegiance to the professor you have altered the course of your novel — or should, unless you want it to be merely episodic — and delayed its finishing.
Why not fall out of love with the professor and go back to your first draft? But I’m afraid you won’t. I’m afraid you’ll then need a third draft about a young girl falling out of love with a married professor — and so on and so on. And will boyfriend then come back to you? He may not, you see. You know he’s part of your fiction, but he, rightly or wrongly, believes he’s living in a real world.
There’s no end to it if you go on like this, nor, I fear, of the novel. Novels are not meant to be diaries, you know.
Let me now speak to you seriously about Northanger Abbey.
Let me take you into my confidence. Having written the previous sentence I stretched out my hand for Northanger Abbey and found it wasn’t there. I had left my copy somewhere, in Abu Dhabi, or New York or Colchester, how am I to know? Whereupon I wept, reproached, and disrupted the entire household and became obsessed with the notion that I had not enough bookcases. Writing is all sacrifice, you see, especially on the part of the writer’s nearest and dearest. Do not think issuing advice and offering instruction is easy. It makes the body tremble with the notion of one’s audacity. I would rather write a short story than a letter to you any day, Alice. People could only complain I was boring: they couldn’t say I was wrong, or (at least so much as they did) that I was guilty of presumption, as you can. You ask, but you do not really want me to answer, I suspect, and on present evidence I am certainly not qualified to do so. Me? Offer advice?
I am much calmer now. I feel guilty, as Frank Churchill was in Emma’s eyes, for ‘having let myself get altogether away’, and when I had finished blaming everyone else, blamed you. Then I drove seven miles to the Bayley Hill Bookshop in Castle Carey, and bought a new copy of Northanger Abbey, and seven miles back, and on the car radio listened to John Tydeman’s admirable dramatization of Emma, wonderfully produced (in radio they call directors producers) by Richard Imeson, and almost changed my mind about the tediousness of several of its chapters, and rejoiced again at the picnic at Box Hill, where everyone went to be happy and no one was: it was far too hot; and Mrs Elton bullied Jane Fairfax, and Emma was so dreadfully unkind to Miss Bates. Emma let her tongue run away from her; she preferred for an instance the satisfaction of an irritated, witty remark to the satisfaction of being good and kind; allowed a brusque pattern of words to interrupt the delicate intertwining of human response, and thus earned Mr Knightley’s reproaches and her own remorse. And such a little thing! Frank Churchill says everyone must say three boring things. Miss Bates, desirous of compliment, offers to do it. Emma says, in effect, but we have a difficulty here. What, only three! Miss Bates, when do you ever stop?, and Miss Bates, stricken and publicly humiliated says, I must learn to hold my tongue.
All our lives, on whatever scale they are lived, however studded with events, sexual obsession, divorce, cancer, the making and breaking of for
tunes, public recognition or approbation, reduce themselves at times, like some rich sauce over a low flame, to these little, powerful, painful simmerings, where small events loom impassively large. A picnic on Box Hill on a summer’s day, when everything goes wrong; to be remembered, in real life in the future, after a fashion, but never quite, as it were, head-on. The mind slips away, hastily gets round, somehow, like a car going into rapid reverse, grating its gears, when it encounters these small, scraping memories, which do not count as Major Life Events (to use the terminology of the times), do not merit Working Through, but are simply there, and one wishes they weren’t. Social lapses; most embarrassing moments; carcinogenic rubbings in the mind. Long years with a psychoanalyst will smooth them over, listening to Emma on the radio will do pretty well, sharing this fictional understanding, not just with Emma’s writer, but with all her readers as well. A package tour to the City of Invention!
Alice, does it not seem to you most extraordinary: the amazing phenomenon of shared fantasy. I can never get used to it. I suppose half a million people listened to Emma this afternoon; of those a few hundred thousand would already know the book; a few thousand, with me, would be willing and wishing Emma not to say what she did say, while knowing that indeed she would say it:
Miss Bates: ‘I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?’ (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on everybody’s assent). ‘Do not you all think I shall?’