Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  4. The Culture-Heroine

  I borrow this term from the American folklorist Richard Chase’s classic essay, ‘The Brontës, or Myth Domesticated’ first published in the Kenyon Review in 1947, and often reprinted:

  Rochester and Heathcliff are portrayed as being at once godlike and satanic. In them the universal enemies may be set at war by a culture-heroine. Then if the Devil is overcome, a higher state of society will have been achieved. The tyrannical Father-God will have been displaced.

  Chase argued that the Brontë sisters, or their fictional heroines, ultimately backed away from the achievement of this mission, settling for domesticity, bourgeois marriage and Christian orthodoxy; but he gave them credit for challenging their patriarchal society in such ambitious terms, anticipating later feminist interpretation of their work.

  Feminist writers have been ambivalent about Diana, especially Diana the star and Diana the icon, for obvious reasons; but many women in Britain today, and in other countries, have seen her struggle for personal fulfilment against the restrictions imposed on her by a monarchy whose values are essentially patriarchal (even though the present monarch is a queen), and her experience of emotional neglect, marital breakdown, depression, eating disorders and single parenthood, as an epic version of their own trials and tribulations. The key to the astonishing reaction to Diana’s death, according to the psychologist Oliver James, writing in the Independent, ‘was the way that the agonies of her particular plotline mirrored the real suffering of the populace, particularly women and young people . . . above all, the scale of the reaction is caused by a massive undercurrent of misery that afflicts women throughout the developed world today and for which Diana’s death is a conduit’. It is crucial to this interpretation that Diana was killed at the very moment when she seemed to have eluded the repressive patriarchal forces ranged against her. If she had married Dodi and spent the rest of her life swanning happily about the world in luxury yachts and private planes from one exclusive fleshpot to another, she would have failed as a culture-heroine even more spectacularly than Chase thought the Brontë heroines failed.

  This is not merely a feminist issue. Much has been read by political commentators into the mass identification with Diana in her death by people of all races, creeds and classes in British society, and their success in forcing a full-scale ceremony of public mourning upon a reluctant Royal Family. It has been dubbed the ‘Floral Revolution’ by Martin Jacques, former editor of Marxism Today. Jacques was one of the first British Marxist intellectuals to recognise that the Thatcher era had banished old-fashioned socialism from British political life for good, and that New Labour’s version of a market economy humanised by a corporate state was the left’s best hope for the future. Connections have been drawn between Tony Blair’s landslide victory last May and the surge of popular feeling over the death of Diana, reinforced by the Prime Minister’s faultless handling of the latter event, publicly and behind the scenes.

  The general election result and the popular reaction to Diana’s death were both unprecedented and totally unexpected in scale; and both were motivated by sentiment rather than ideology. The occurrence of two such massive convulsions in such a short space of time has prompted speculation that British society really has changed; that the old patriarchal code of the stiff upper lip, emotional reticence, respect for authority, tradition and social precedence, which used to characterise us as a nation, has gone for ever, along with the cynicism, individualism and greed which flourished in the Thatcher years, to be replaced by a much more open, flexible and compassionate and feminised ethos. Well, we shall see.

  5. The Victim

  The first instinctive reaction to Diana’s death was to see her as the victim of a degenerate press, and this remains an important element in the more complex web of emotion and interpretation that now surrounds the event. It would have been deeply satisfying to the general public if early reports that the paparazzi directly caused the fatal accident by buzzing her car on their motorcycles had been confirmed. It now seems clear that the main cause was that the driver Henri Paul was drunk (and using pharmaceutical drugs prescribed for depression and alcoholism) and driving the vehicle at reckless speed. Indirectly, however, the paparazzi were responsible for the tragedy. Their relentless pursuit of Diana and Dodi, which had been going on for weeks, had reached a pitch of hysteria on both sides by the day of the fatal crash. An article in the London Sunday Times for 7 September which reconstructed the last day of Diana and Dodi in meticulous detail, revealed that the couple changed their plans several times in a vain effort to throw the photographers off their trail. And the well-attested reports of the paparazzi clustered round the crushed Mercedes like carrion crows, shooting photos of the dead and dying occupants through the windows instead of giving assistance, aroused widespread anger and disgust. Here, at the scene of her death, the various images of Diana – the divinity, the icon, the culture-heroine, the victim – were violently forced together. The Earl Spencer noted in his tribute the irony that his sister, named after the goddess of hunting, was herself the most hunted of human beings. But another legend associated with the goddess Diana – the story of Actaeon surprising her bathing – portrays her as the object of male voyeurism. The paparazzi, toting their gross telescopic lenses like swollen phalluses, are the very embodiment of commercialised voyeurism. There have been calls for new laws and codes of practice to restrict their activities, and promises by contrite editors not to use their services in future. But I fear this will be the most transitory effect of Diana’s death.

  6. The Departed Soul

  If Richard Dawkins has publicly commented on the death of Diana and its aftermath, I missed it. I would dearly like to know what he, or Daniel Dennett, or any other of our fashionable neo-Darwinian scientists and philosophers, made of it. They must be exasperated. For years they have been telling us in well-written, well-argued, well-researched books and articles and lectures and TV documentaries that there is no such thing as the immortal soul, no ghost in the machine; that individual self-consciousness is a product of the brain capacity we happen to have surplus to our evolutionary requirements, and ceases when our brain activity ceases; that human beings are disposable vehicles for the transmission of genes, the only true immortals. Then a beautiful young woman dies in a car crash and all over the world people are consumed with grief, and seek consolation in behaviour that, however vulgar and improvised, has its roots in religious ritual and language and assumes the immortality of the individual soul. Anyone who had stood up in Hyde Park on Saturday 6 September and declared that the person called Diana, Princess of Wales, was extinguished utterly and for ever would have been seriously endangering their health. ‘DIANA WE LOVE YOU’ was inscribed on a banner held up during the minute’s silence at an international football match between England and Moldova ten days after her death. Not ‘loved’ but ‘love’. Diana lives.

  But is this a manifestation of unsuspected reservoirs of faith, or a release of suppressed anxiety and dread? Britain today is a largely secular country, with a small and diminishing number of regular churchgoers. And among the latter many, like myself, unwilling to sever their links with that long and rich tradition of scripture, liturgy and ethical discourse which has contributed so much to human civilisation, will readily admit that for them it only makes a kind of metaphorical sense, expressing a yearning for, rather than a belief in, transcendence. The scientific materialists are much more confident, and more plausible. We fear they may be right. Science has not deprived us of awe and wonder at the nature of the universe – quite the contrary; but it has made the idea of a personal God who intervenes in human history, and numbers every hair of our individual heads, desperately difficult to believe for all except fundamentalists. Immortality seems impossible; but extinction seems unbearable. That is the existential double-bind in which we find ourselves.

  The man, or woman, in the street does not perhaps reflect on these matters in such abstract terms, but the same unresolved
contradiction gnaws away at their peace of mind, as they pursue the materialistic good life which capitalism and modern technology have made increasingly accessible. We all live in secret fear of the positive biopsy, the unsurvivable air-crash, the fatal road accident, that interrupts and renders irrelevant our quotidian desires, anxieties and satisfactions. When we hear about such things happening to strangers, or read about them in the newspapers, or see them on the TV news, our compassion is mingled with relief that the tragedy didn’t happen to us, or anyone near and dear to us, and with the dread knowledge that one day it will, in one form or another. We quickly suppress these intimations of mortality, and get on with our lives. But when the tragedy happens to a star, a goddess, an icon, a culture-heroine, a figure uniquely loaded with meanings for a vast number of people, who seemed to move on a different plane from ordinary mortals, but succumbed to the most banal and unnecessary of violent deaths, then it is not surprising if all that repressed emotion should erupt in an explosion of collective grief and quasi-religious feeling. The man who wept more for Diana than for his wife was perhaps only weeping deferred tears for his spouse, and proleptic tears for his own inevitable end.

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  Thus begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, ‘Spring and Fall’, addressed to a young child moved to tears by the sad beauty of the autumn leaves. It ends:

  It is the blight man was born for,

  It is Margaret you mourn for.

  In the last analysis it was not Diana, but ourselves, that we mourned for.

  September 1997

  TROLLOPE’S FIXED PERIOD

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE PUBLISHED his first novel in 1847 when he was thirty-one, and went on to write forty-five more, and some twenty-five other books, including five collections of short stories, before his death in 1882, an average of two books a year over thirty-five years. For the first twenty years of this prolific literary career he had a responsible full-time position in the Post Office, supervising and improving the postal service in various regions of Ireland and England. He was also a keen horseman, and seized every opportunity to hunt until age restricted him to merely riding. After he moved back from Ireland to England he was an active member of several London clubs, including the Athenaeum and the Garrick. When he finally resigned from the Post Office he immediately took on the editorship of a magazine, and later he stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Beverley in a general election. If he had become a Member of Parliament, we can be sure he would have continued to write novels. How he achieved his astonishing output of books while leading such a full life was revealed in his posthumously published Autobiography. ‘According to the circumstances of the time,’ he wrote, ‘I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words.’ For many years he made a practice of rising at 5.30 in the morning, spent half an hour reading over the previous day’s work, and then wrote till 8.30, with his watch in front of him, aiming to produce 250 words every quarter of an hour, or 10,000 words per week, before going off to his day-job. The totals he actually achieved were meticulously recorded in a ledger. His work for the Post Office entailed a good deal of travelling by train, and instead of reading a book he would continue writing one of his own, using a pencil and a home-made writing board, to be transcribed later by his wife. When he made long journeys by sea, privately or on official business, sometimes as far as the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand, he always had the ship’s carpenter construct a writing desk in his cabin and made good use of it.

  What began as a self-imposed discipline became a habit, and eventually an addiction. Trollope simply couldn’t stop writing. On 21 December 1880, when both his health and his popularity with the reading public were declining, he wrote to his elder son Harry, ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they be not published, I think I can be happy.’ The novel Trollope started that week was entitled The Fixed Period and it was published in March 1882, the last year of his life. It received mixed, somewhat baffled reviews, and sold only 877 copies, making a loss for its publisher. It has not been any more popular with readers since then. The story is set in the future, in 1980, on an imaginary antipodean island called Britannula, and therefore lacks the subtle observation of a recognisable social world for which Trollope’s fiction is cherished. It has a first-person narrator, a method he had used before only in a few short stories, and then in a style very like that of the urbane, sympathetic authorial persona of the novels. The narrator of The Fixed Period, in stark contrast, is earnest and humourless. Most disconcerting of all to Trollope aficionados is the novel’s subject: the effects of a law passed by the youthful Britannula Assembly making euthanasia compulsory for everybody between the age of sixty-seven and sixty-eight.

  The Fixed Period has been largely ignored by those who go to Trollope for a superior kind of comfort reading, and dismissed as an aberrant minor work by most critics and biographers. The article on him in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes it as ‘worthy of mention only as being so much out of Trollope’s normal line’. Richard Mullen refers to ‘this unpleasant novel’ as ‘an oddity among his fiction’ in his biography of the novelist. John Sutherland also describes it as ‘the oddest item in all Trollope’s fiction’, in The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. It is certainly unique in Trollope’s oeuvre, but also oddly relevant to some of our own current social, economic and ethical concerns. Due to advances in medicine and public health Britain, like many other developed countries, has experienced a rapid rise in life expectancy in recent decades, which means that more and more old and retired people must be supported for longer and longer by the working population, a situation that has been exacerbated by the global credit crisis, with a consequent rise in unemployment and a fall in the value of pension funds. At the same time there is increasing public controversy and private uncertainty about the legitimacy of assisted dying in certain circumstances. It is fascinating to see an astute Victorian mind exploring these issues through fiction.

  In an introductory chapter, the narrator summarises the history of Britannula, an uninhabited island that was settled by a group of young emigrants from New Zealand, a country Trollope knew well. (He visited it in 1872 after spending a year in Australia where his younger son Fred was a sheep farmer, and wrote a book about his travels in both countries.) The colony of Britannula prospered and was granted independence by the British government. The narrator was the first Speaker of its Assembly, and at the time of writing is the country’s President. He is a fervent advocate of the Fixed Period for rectifying ‘two mistakes . . . made by mankind; first in allowing the world to be burdened with the continued maintenance of those whose cares should have been made to cease . . . and the second, in requiring those who remain to live a useless and painful life’. The aim of compulsory euthanasia is to convert death into a civic duty carried out with honour and dignity. For one year before their demise the old ‘would be prepared for their departure, for the benefit of their country, surrounded by all the comforts to which, at their time of life, they would be susceptible, in a college maintained at the public expense; and each, as he drew nearer to the happy day, would be treated with still increasing honour’. It is a kind of utopian (or dystopian) version of the almshouses in The Warden (1855), Trollope’s first successful novel. As to the expense of such a system, the narrator calculates that the savings which would accrue to the community by the elimination of its non-productive members would more than compensate. ‘It would keep us out of debt, make for us our railways, render all our rivers navigable, construct our bridges, and leave us shortly the richest people on God’s earth!’ To the narrator’s regret, however, this bold social experiment was thwarted before it c
ould be put to the test, as he proceeds to relate.

  He is called John Neverbend. Trollope liked to give some of his characters obtrusively symbolic names, wilfully violating the conventions of realism which he otherwise observed. (Henry James, who deplored the habit, said of Mr Quiverful, the father of fourteen children in Barchester Towers, ‘We can believe in the name and we can believe in the children. But we cannot manage the combination.’) A name like Neverbend is, however, appropriate in a fable of this kind. He is obsessed with his vision of benign euthanasia, and unable to empathise with the growing repugnance of the population to the idea as the time draws near to put it into practice. He is deeply offended when people refer to the method to be used (‘certain veins should be opened while the departing one should, under the influence of morphine, be gently entranced within a warm bath’) as ‘murder’ or ‘execution’. He is shocked when his friend Gabriel Crasweller, who voted for the law when it was framed, shows signs of reluctance to be ‘deposited’ in the college, and vainly attempts to lie about his age. Neverbend regards voluntary euthanasia as a more effective way to banish the fear of death than religion can offer, and says to Crasweller: ‘How best can we prepare ourselves for the day which we know cannot be avoided? That is the question which I have ever been asking myself, and which I thought we had answered. Let us turn the inevitable into that which shall in itself be esteemed a glory to us . . . and you, oh my friend, have ever been he whom it has been my greatest joy to have had with me as the sharer of my aspirations.’ To which Crasweller replies flatly: ‘But I am nine years older than you.’