Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

  And also add that she must have missed her father very much, but in a rather, to us, unexpected way. Mansfield Park was the first new novel she wrote after his death — though she worked over Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, novels of which we know he approved. I think she was trying hard, especially hard, to be good: as if without his controlling spirit all morality and self-control might fly away, dissipate, unless everyone was very, very careful. When Sir Thomas, the patriarch, leaves his family to go to Antigua for a time, his fear is — and it seems to Jane Austen a reasonable fear — that if they are without his direction, without his watchful attention, they will behave without restraint and rapidly go to pieces. And so indeed they do — Good heavens! Amateur theatricals!

  Mansfield Park throbs with the notion that what women need is the moral care and protection of men. Fanny marries Edmund in the end (of course), ‘loving, guiding and protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than anyone else at Mansfield, that he should learn to prefer soft light eyes [Fanny’s] to sparkling dark ones [Miss Crawford’s].’

  Oh, Miss Austen, what wishful thinking do we not have here! It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the worse women behave, the better they get on. (Discuss, with reference to your female friends, and their mothers.)

  Well, perhaps we should look to fiction for moral instruction: we should not see it, as we have come to do, as a mirror to be held up to reality. Perhaps writing should not be seen as a profession, but as a sacred charge, and the writer of a bestseller not run gleefully to the bank, but bow his head beneath the weight of so much terrifying responsibility. To be able to influence, for good or bad, the minds of so many! In China they do not have ‘novels’ in our sense: they have fiction, it is true, but fiction that points the way to good behaviour, both at an individual and a social level. Such works are exhortations to hard work, honour, good cheer, and the power of positive thinking, and sell by the hundred millions. And in Russia any individual writer who flies, in the name of art, or truth, in the face of an accepted group morality, is seen as irresponsible, even to the point of insanity. It is a different way of looking at things. I have some sympathy with it. It is, oddly enough, readers and not writers who believe so passionately that writers should be free to write what they want. I do not think Jane Austen would have thought they should be: certainly not on the evidence of Mansfield Park, a book in which virtue is rewarded and bad behaviour punished, and the abominable Julia, disgraced, is obliged to go and live with the awful Mrs Norris. And serve both right.

  Your loving Aunt,

  Fay

  LETTER THIRTEEN

  ‘You have delighted us long enough’

  London, June

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  Personally, I see critics as bus drivers. They ferry the visitors round the City of Invention and stop the bus here or there, at whim, and act as guides, and feel that if it were not for them, there would be no City. But of course there would be — people would walk, and save the fares, and make up their own mind where to pause and what to enjoy — but it wouldn’t be so convenient, and quite honestly rather tiring, as life can prove to be for the individualist on a packet tour who is glad in the end for a clean mattress in a foreign land, among people who understand.

  Quite often people just stay on the bus, and listen to the driver. They can’t be bothered getting off, and looking for themselves. They read the reviews, but never the books. I do that, sometimes. Except of course when I’m driving the bus myself, writing the reviews. I tend to stop at every house which comes along, for fear of upsetting the builder. Amazing, I feel, and wonderful that anyone can build a house at all, let alone a good one! Therefore stop and admire — forgo your criticism! Books are not rationed; neither is your enjoyment. The passengers groan, when I drive.

  As for the builder, the writer, he listens to what the bus driver is saying, with half an ear, but likes rather more, lurking in the edifice of his own conceit, to hear what the actual visitors have to say. From them, you learn. If everyone hits his head on the lintel in one house, the next time you build, you’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. You get tired of saying ‘careful’ and fetching plaster when people aren’t. You build the lintel higher.

  A wise writer is not controlled by his readers’ response, but is sensitive to it. Jane Austen, certainly, was the latter. In 1814 she collected and transcribed other people’s opinions of Mansfield Park. By ‘other people’ read family and friends. She did not bother to quote the newspaper reviews. Perhaps they simply did not matter to her? I select a few collected opinions. Thus:

  Mr James Austen: very much pleased. Enjoyed Mrs Norris particularly, and the scene at Portsmouth.

  Miss Lloyd: preferred it altogether to either of the others. Delighted with Fanny. Hated Mrs Norris.

  My mother: not liked it so well as Pride and Prejudice. Thought Fanny insipid. Enjoyed Mrs Norris.

  Miss Burdett: did not like it so well as Pride and Prejudice.

  Mr James Tilson: liked it better than Pride and Prejudice.

  Miss Augusta Braunstone: owned that she thought Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice downright nonsense, but expected to like Mansfield Park better and having finished the first volume flattered herself she had got through the worst.

  Admiral Foote: surprised that I had the power of drawing the Portsmouth scenes so well.

  Mrs Pole: ‘everything is natural, and the situations and incidents are told in a manner which clearly evinces the writer to belong to the Society whose manners she so ably delineates.’

  Everyone, when asked, has something to say, and everyone says something different. There is little consensus. How could there be? My advice to you, Alice, is — if Jane Austen got this response from an already published novel, how much more unhelpful will be the responses of friends and family to your unpublished one? You say your boyfriend has read it and said it is juvenile. What did you think he would say? If your boyfriend wrote a novel about you having an affair with your married professor, would you be inclined to admire it? If he wrote about his passion for your professor’s wife, would you enjoy it? You must remember that non-writers do not see fiction as sacrosanct, in the way that writers do. They think it’s personal, directly autobiographical and not a gracious suffusing of fantasy, invention, real event and real-er emotion recollected in tranquillity. If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen: lay down your pen. If you want to publish, send it off to a publisher. Don’t hang around waiting for approval. If it’s approval you want, don’t be a writer. There’ll always be someone like Mrs Lefroy to say, ‘I liked it, but think it a mere novel’.

  I think what Jane Austen was looking for was ‘permission to invent’. She didn’t get it — not since she tried Lady Susan and was chided for it. Women were warned — as school children still are — to write about what they know, not to imagine. To write about the football field or the school cloakroom, not the polo field or the House of Commons Dining Room. To describe, not to invent.

  But novelists don’t have to get things right. They are under no obligation to describe a real world: they can have the Battle of Waterloo take place in 1820 if they want; so long, that is, as they continue to enable their readers to suspend their disbelief; though in that particular circumstance they would, I can see, be making things difficult for themselves. Writers of fiction can’t be wrong: they can, I suppose, display so much ignorance, that the reader remembers the writer’s existence just at the wrong moment and throws down the book in disgust. Readers like writers to be cleverer than they are. But the strings attaching the real world to the invented world can be knotted and twisted and loosened and tightened and plaited as the writer wishes. He is, you see, in charge.

  You will, I do believe, when you have stopped we
eping over your boyfriend’s cruelty, and when you have read Mansfield Park, find the scene when Fanny goes to visit her natural mother at Portsmouth one of the most telling, memorable, real and vivid in the book. It is also the one most likely to be invented. Admiral Foote, if you remember, was surprised she had the power of drawing the Portsmouth scenes so well, assuming she had never been in such a household. And a reviewer of Northanger Abbey, in the Critical Review, complains that General Tilney seems to have been drawn from imagination —— ‘for it is not a very probable character, and is not portrayed with our authoress’s usual taste and judgement’. To my mind, of course, General Tilney is the most memorable of all the characters in the book, and one of the most probable. More probable, certainly, than his heroic, fault-free son, Henry.

  But there you are, you see. Ask one, get one reply: ask another, get another. Get the same reply from everyone, as Jane Austen did, that to invent is bad, to describe is good, and you end up believing the lintel is too low, and not the visitors altogether too long-necked: and next time, you raise it. You do not venture down to Portsmouth again, where you have never been, nor into houses you have never known. You fail to persist, and the visitors never learn to look after themselves, or bend their stubborn necks.

  This is most certainly the power of the critics, of the bus drivers. They tell you where it’s proper to build and how to build, and not merely what’s wrong with the house you’ve just completed. They know something, but not everything: don’t forget it. But listen carefully to the visitors, the readers: listen as you would to a lover. You have the same one-to-one relationship, after all; the same powerful intimacy; the particular connection made through the general emotion. It is like the lamp in the series, glowing fitfully, steadily, or briefly incandescent, depending on how it’s placed in relation to the battery and how the current flows. So it’s only polite to listen. As to acting on the visitors’ suggestions — the same rule holds as acting on a lover’s suggestion. You want to oblige, but if you make yourself too much what he wants, or what he says he wants — concepts very often diametrically opposed, alas — you will lose him. You cannot, you see, pretend to be what you are not, without falling into apathy and depression, and becoming boring. The answer, while listening politely to what is being suggested, is very often to do the opposite. To magnify your faults (as seen by the lover, the visitor, the reader) and subdue your virtues. A vulgar aside: ‘In real life, as opposed to novels, it’s the worst women get the best men.’ Discuss.

  ‘The novels of Jane Austen,’ wrote an unnamed reviewer in the British Critic, 1818, ‘display a degree of excellence that has not often been surpassed…This is the forte of our authoress: as soon as ever she leaves the shore of her own experience, and attempts to delineate fancy characters, such as she may perhaps have often heard of, but possibly never seen, she falls at once to the level of mere ordinary novelists. Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation.’ This critic complains of her want of imagination, and describes it as the principal defect of her writing, but the minute she tries, stamps on her!

  Jane Austen stamped on others in her turn. She wrote to her niece, Anna, then engaged on a first novel: ‘Do not set your story in Ireland if you have not been there. You will be in danger of making false representations.’ When Jane Austen died, Anna threw her MS into the fire, saying it reminded her too painfully of her dead aunt. Any excuse, Alice, any excuse! I shall try not to oblige you similarly.

  A great deal of what I have been trying to say to you in the course of these letters was said, rather more gracefully, though in longer sentences, by Walter Scott in 1816.

  Walter Scott was a novelist of considerable renown and more than considerable output. He had a family to keep. He wrote thus in the Quarterly Review, in 1816, on the subject of Jane Austen’s Emma. I abridge considerably. Men of letters then clearly had time at their disposal. But try not to skip. He writes beautifully:

  There are some vices in civilised society so common that they are hardly acknowledged as stains upon the moral character, the propensity to which is nevertheless carefully concealed, even by those who most frequently give way to them; since no man of pleasure would willingly assume the gross epithet of a debauchee or a drunkard. One would almost think that novel-reading fell under this class of frailties, since among the crowds who read little else, it is not common to find an individual of hardihood sufficient to avow his taste for these frivolous studies. A novel, therefore, is frequently ‘bread eaten in secret’; and it is not upon Lydia Languish’s toilet alone that Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle are to be found ambushed behind works of a more grave and instructive character. And hence it has happened, that in no branch of composition, not even in poetry itself, have so many writers, and of such varied talents, exerted their powers. It may perhaps be added, that although the composition of these works admits of being exalted and decorated by the higher exertions of genius; yet such is the universal charm of narrative, that the worst novel ever written will find some gentle reader content to yawn over it, rather than to open the page of the historian, moralist or poet…

  The judicious reader will see at once that we have been pleading our own cause while stating the universal practice, and preparing him for a display of more general acquaintance with this fascinating department of literature, than at first sight may seem consistent with the graver studies to which we are compelled by duty: but in truth, when we consider how many hours of languor and anxiety, of deserted age and solitary celibacy, of pain even and poverty, are beguiled by the perusal of these light volumes, we cannot justly condemn the source from which is drawn the alleviation of such a portion of human misery, or consider the regulation of this department as beneath the sober consideration of the critic.

  You will see, Alice (if you have not skipped), that Mr Scott regards novel reading as diversionary tactics against the regimen of reality. Litérature engagée, the socially useful novel, was yet to appear. Read on. I have trimmed and cut for your benefit.

  …The author of novels was, in former times, expected to tread pretty much in the limits between the concentric circles of probability and possibility; and as he was not permitted to transgress the latter, his narrative, to make amends, almost always went beyond the bounds of the former. Now, although it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human life have occasionally led an individual through as many scenes of singular fortune as are represented in the most extravagant of these fictions, still the causes and personages acting on these changes have varied with the progress of the adventurer’s fortune, and do not present that combined plot (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe. Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel.

  In other words, in real life we can have effects without causes, causes without effects. Not so in fiction.

  …A style of novel has arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years, differing from the former in the points upon which the interest hinges; neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident, or by those pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die. The substitute for these excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.

  In adventuring upon this task, the author makes obvious sacrifices, and encounters peculiar difficulty. He who paints from le beau idéal, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordina
ry probabilities of life: but he who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader.

  In other words, Alice, the new novelist (i.e. Jane Austen) risks more, because her readers know more. But these two lines of mine are a very crude representation of what Walter Scott had to say. I speak hurriedly, for a hurried world: you don’t have much time: your telephone will go and everything will suddenly change: Scott’s readers had time to finish sentences, however long, and patience to fillet out niceties of meaning which I do not even attempt to convey. To continue: