Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

  …We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she had produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss that excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners and sentiments, greatly above our own.

  You see, they were all obsessed by it. The novel must be used to set before the reader examples of good behaviour. I am frequently asked why I write about anti-heroines and anti-heroes, and not role models, and all I can say in my defence is that what I write is what I write and there is not much I can do about it.

  …Upon the whole, the turn of this author’s novels bears that same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other, but it affords to those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the experience of their own social habits; and what is of some importance, the youthful wanderer may return from his promenade to the ordinary business of life, without any chance of having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has been wandering.

  One word, however, we must say on behalf of that once powerful divinity, Cupid, king of gods and men, who in these times of revolution, has been assailed, even in his own kingdom of romance, by the authors who were formerly his devoted priests. We are quite aware that there are few instances of first attachment being brought to a happy conclusion, and that it seldom can be so in a state of society so highly advanced as to render early marriages among the better class, acts, generally speaking, of imprudence.

  But the youth of this realm need not at present be taught the doctrine of selfishness. It is by no means their error to give up the world or the good things of the world all for love; and before the authors of moral fiction couple Cupid indivisibly with calculating prudence, we would have them reflect, that they may sometimes lend their aid to substitute more mean, more sordid, and more selfish motives of conduct, for the romantic feelings which their predecessors perhaps fanned into too powerful a flame.

  Who is it, that in his youth has felt a virtuous attachment, however romantic or however unfortunate, but can trace back to its influence much that his character may possess of what is honourable, dignified, and disinterested? If he recollects hours wasted in unavailing hope, or saddened by doubt and disappointment; he may also dwell on many which have been snatched from folly or libertinism, and dedicated to studies which might render him worthy of the object of his affection, or pave the way perhaps to that distinction necessary to raise him to an equality with her.

  In other words, better to pine, better to suffer the pangs of unrequited love, than to be flippant, frivolous and drunk. Remember that, Alice!

  Even the habitual indulgence of feelings totally unconnected with ourself and our own immediate interest, softens, graces, and amends the human mind; and after the pain of disappointment is past, those who survive (and by good fortune those are the greater number) are neither less wise nor less worthy members of society for having felt, for a time, the influence of a passion which has been well qualified as the ‘tenderest, noblest and best’.

  Oh, Alice, has your relationship with your professor, however unfortunate, not given to your character much of what it now possesses that is honourable, dignified and disinterested? Has not your recent indulgence of feeling softened, graced and amended your mind? I hope so. And if only, had you not wasted hours in unavailing hope, had you rather dedicated the time to studies which would render you worthy of his affection, raised you to an equality with him — how different things might have been! Or, again, might not.

  Or, as your father would say, ‘for God’s sake, Alice, stop mooning around and get on with your work.’

  I know Fanny Price is a masochistic idiot, standing round there in the Park letting others walk all over her. I agree with Mrs Austen that she’s insipid — but she got her man in the end! Perhaps you should practise a meek, self-righteous virtue, and see where that gets you. That is, of course, if you still want your man. It is always amazing, to those not concerned, to observe the stern passions which quite ordinary young men arouse in the hearts of young women.

  With much love,

  Fay

  P.S. You do not win your £50 bet, which makes a change. ‘Return to the Hotel Atlantic’ was an agreeable title, little more. It had no shape, no inbuilt tensions. I had no real idea what was going to happen next, or worse, what was the point of the story. Not only did I have no peg to put the coat on, I had no coat. Grace D’Albier was rather a nice idea; but incest is not a rather nice idea. What were they both doing in the same story? Having said that, the fact that they were might well have been the point, and had I ended with silver boots full of blood, we might have been getting somewhere. But I doubt it: it was all too uneasy a grafting of fiction onto fact to work. It veered out of invention into description and back again: they never fused. You don’t win your £50. You just said you found it boring. You and your twin Miss Augusta Braunstone, as aforesaid. Nothing changes.

  LETTER FOURTEEN

  A gently lingering illness

  London, June

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  I shall write a little about the manner of Jane Austen’s death. I want to get it over. I find it upsetting. I suppose as pleasure spills over through the centuries, so grief does too. She is presumed to have died from what is now called Addison’s disease — an insufficiency of the adrenal glands. The adrenal cortex fails to work properly for one reason or another — it can be TB, or a fungal infection, or a tumour, or by virtue of the body turning against itself, deciding that what is benign is harmful and setting out to destroy it and succeeding — that is, as a consequence of the auto-immune process. The condition these days affects one in every hundred thousand people. (John F. Kennedy is rumoured to have had Addison’s disease — it is nowadays contained by synthetic steroids: and it was liberal doses of cortisone, they say, which gave him a jowly look and sent him racing down the White House corridors after totally inappropriate secretaries. But as I say, they’ll say anything.)

  In Jane Austen’s day there was no cure, and indeed the disease was not even identified, let alone named, until the 1840s. Dr Addison — who else? — then discovered it, in the proper sense of the word. To Jane Austen, her friends and doctors, it must have been a completely mysterious event: a gently creeping illness, of an undefined nature, particular to her and her alone, which might end in death, but might not. Their hope, as time went on, must have failed.

  The early symptoms of the disease are langour, lack of appetite, exhaustion, irritability, and a disinclination to physical or mental effort. (I, for one, find alterations in the mental state, as a symptom of illness, more distressing than mere physical disability, or even pain. Is the personality, really, no more than the sum of the body? I find it hard to accept.) The skin looks dirty, the mouth blotches. ‘The body wastes,’ wrote Addison, ‘the pulse becomes smaller and weaker, and the patient at length gradually sinks and expires.’ And so she did.

  In our terms death comes by hypoglycemia, shock and cardiac arrest. If only we could have their language and our drugs.

  That is enough. The dying should be accorded some privacy.

  I think she probably just gave up. I find it hard to believe that when death occurs by the auto-immune system, by the body turning against itself, that the unconscious will is not involved. As with cancer, when normally harmless cells proliferate and by so doing cause their agreeable host such damage. Death, in Addison’s disease, comes eventually as a result of upset — ‘the inability to withstand severe or even minor stresses without going into shock’.

  Enough, enough! Surely, that’s enough…

  When Jane Austen was so ill, they say, she rested in the living ro
om on an arrangement of three chairs. Her mother kept the sofa. Enough!

  I think writers can kill themselves off early enough, as they can the extensions, the different versions of themselves that go into their books. They flesh them into existence, and wipe them out again. In the end, I am sure, they could altogether fictionalize the original body, from which the shadows spring to take up their habitation in the City of Invention. One could leave this world easily enough and take up one’s existence over there, in That Other Place.

  I tell you this to comfort you. It isn’t pleasant to think of her dying of a lingering illness which modern medicine would diagnose and cure. But death is only a part of life; one cannot see it, when recently bereaved; one sees only pain, waste, anger and humiliation, the worst and not the best. Only with time does the end sink back into proportion, become part of the whole and not the definition of the whole. And that’s another reason why the death of children is so particularly dreadful, and early deaths worse than later ones — there is less lived time available into which dying time can be swallowed up and incorporated. Alice, we will, as they say, be a long time dead. You must carve your living self as sharply into the Rock of Eternity as you can. Please send your novel off; don’t do as you threaten and forget it. Of course it’s more than likely to be rejected and come back, and of course you will then feel rejected and discovered in your presumption. But if you embark on these things, you can’t draw back. Or you’ll be just a snail-trail on the Rock…

  No? Well, I stick by it. You did it, I warned you not to, now take the consequences. You made your bed, as your mother’s mother would say to my sister and me, now you must lie upon it. I remember making her extremely angry by replying, ‘I don’t see why. One can always lie on someone else’s’.

  How did your exams go? Did you know I am to have tea at a tea parlour in Covent Garden with your mother and father? I worry rather about this. I feel the chairs will be made for narrow modern hips and the sandwiches will be tough, bran-enforced rolls filled with ground sesame, and the tea will be herbal and the sugar brown, and your father somehow not be in his proper ambience. But you never know.

  With best wishes,

  Aunt Fay

  London, July

  My dear Alice,

  I am extremely sorry about your exams. Is it my fault? I suppose so. Your mother has cancelled tea at Covent Garden. Why don’t you try an American university? I’ll pay.

  Much love,

  Aunt Fay

  LETTER FIFTEEN

  A publisher’s offer

  London, July

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  This is wonderful, astonishing and gratifying news. Publishers mean what they say. If they say they will publish a novel, that is what they mean to do. If they say they are delighted by The Wife’s Revenge that means they think they will make a profit out of it. (If they say ‘impressed’, they mean the critics will like it, if not necessarily the public.) If they say they will pay you £700 for it, consult an agent, and one who is not an outrunner for the Publishers’ Association but one who sees his duty to his client clearly: that is, to fight publishers. I will send you names. But do remember that more money now means less later. You only start getting royalties when the advance has been paid back. If you have any faith in your book — go for greater royalties and a smaller advance. On the other hand, of course, the greater the advance, the greater the PR budget is likely to be…

  Publishers grade books into what they judge to be 1. good/good books; 2. bad/good books; 3. good/bad books; and 4. bad/bad books. Categories 2 and 4 they reject; 2 with many apologies and explanations, 4 with mere rejection slips. Their judgment, of course, may be wrong. From their response I imagine they are placing you in 3, where most of the bestsellers dwell. Since they have accepted your book, I should not worry too much about their view of it. At least they’re not suggesting you change the setting from a university to a Fish Factory, on the grounds of a revival in plebeian settings.

  What do your parents say? Aren’t you excited? I am! Will you settle down to ‘be a writer’ or will you go to UCLA as planned? It would save me money if you did the former, but I very much hope you won’t. I am sure I have written to you, in earlier letters, about the dangers of being a writer. Why not go to UCLA and write? It is possible to do both: you have proved it is possible to do what so many of your colleagues claim is impossible: to study English Literature and write: to analyse with one part of your brain; synthesize with the other. Perhaps the hot sun and the blue sea will stop you writing: I still argue in favour of postponement while wishing you a world bestseller.

  Mind you, you never read Persuasion, did you! Tricky days.

  You are probably wise to join the new celibacy movement, in the company of your professor’s wife. I am glad you two got together. It was on the cards. Leave your professor to his new junior lecturer, and your boyfriend to your professor’s sister, and read Persuasion.

  Let me give you the first paragraph:

  Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century — and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed — this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened…

  The rest is up to you.

  With love,

  Aunt Fay

  LETTER SIXTEEN

  The marvel of creation

  London, August

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  It is time I started another novel — there is one waiting in the far recesses of my mind, like an octopus beneath a coral reef, occasionally putting out a feeler or two, prodding quite painfully into my conscious mind. I will have to respond, I can see: dive down and haul it out, and up into shallower, brighter waters, where I can get a good look at it, and then catch it and kill it and chop it up and fry it in batter and serve it up in some Quick Food Café. The book you mean to write is never the book you do write. A piece of fried octopus on the end of a fork, compared to the mysterious hidden majesty of the living thing. Never mind.

  No? Too ridiculous a metaphor? You may be grateful that I mean to stop diverting myself by writing letters to you and get on with Amygdala. The word means the part of the brain where rage is centred. The novel is set two hundred years in the future. Publishers and agents warn me against it — not in so many words, of course, but with a faint look of pained bafflement in the face. They are good at that.

  I shall send you a reading list. I hope you don’t think this is patronizing of me. You have sold more copies of The Wife’s Revenge in three months than I have of all my novels put together (well, in this country at least. Let me not go too far). I am glad to be wrong about so much; I still maintain that it is better to read than not to read, and I still deplore what you refer to as your ‘general amiable illiteracy’. Can you be developing some kind of house style?

  Sometimes, I think, the exhilaration of all this being so great — of ideas, notions, fantasies, speculations, claims false and valid, advice good or bad, the pattern made by altering truth as day melts into day, is great enough to make us immortal. These things have been, and so in a sense always will be: they are not finite in time. Only our bodies are that. Let them blow us all up if they want, reduce the planet to ashes (as they say) — the leap between nothing and something, once made, is always made. It is the marvel at creation that can’t be destroyed: not the creation itself. Emma’s pages here in the real world, may in the end yellow and curl and go unread. Emma’s voice may falter and fade into a final silence: ‘But, Miss Bates, we have a difficulty here…’ And yet, I do believe, though all else f
alls, the City of Invention will stand.

  It doesn’t matter, Alice, little Alice. Here and now. Think here and now. Your mother tells me you have your own hair back again. (What you call greasy mouse, and she calls healthy, clean and natural.) Is that progress, or a talisman against success, a surfeit of attention? I hope you bear them both well. And I have been asked to tea at your house by your mother, and your father has consented to be there too, so long as I don’t talk about novels, writing, feminism, or allied subjects. I shall try to keep the conversation to pets and food, and be very happy.

  With all my love, your Aunt Fay

  About the Author

  Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

  Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe—winning role.