Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

  Jane and Cassandra went to a boarding school at Reading where, to all accounts, they were happy enough, and the lady in charge had an artificial leg made of cork. At the end of a year Mrs Austen took her daughters back (perhaps she thought they were enjoying themselves too much). Now I know that is unnecessarily unkind, but most Austen biographers go to such lengths to interpret all family events as benignly intended, by saintly people, that I was tempted and I succumbed. The Austen family, like any family, then or now, but especially then, wished to present a good face to the world, and did, and should be allowed to preserve it, and I will not prod further. Mrs Austen had her daughters back.

  Except, Alice, I am distressed for the child Jane, and for the young woman she became, and the old woman she never was to be: and I am conscious of the little back bedroom next to her mother’s large front-facing one, in the ale-house-turned-residence at Chawton where she, in her early middle age, ended her days, and I wonder. I think indeed she bowed her will and humbled her soul, and bravely kept her composure, as a good nun in a good convent might, and escaped into the alternative worlds of her novels: and simply because she was so good, or did become so, and her self-discipline was so secure, she brought into that inventive world sufficient of the reality of the one we know and think we love, but which I think she hated, to make those novels outrun the generations.

  But we are meant to be being factual: not too fanciful. Not whimsical, as the young Jane Austen was accused of being. Francis went off into the navy and the girls came home. Mrs Austen taught them the domestic arts. Don’t despise these, Alice. A time in your life will surely come when circumstances confine you to your home, and that time can be usefully, and pleasantly, and creatively spent looking after it, and making up for the years in which you have left furniture unwaxed, and copper unpolished, and put hot, wet cups of coffee down on delicate surfaces. (If we should ever meet, and you should ever do such a thing, expect to be asked to leave. You must learn to respect anything, even if only furniture, in which human care, effort and affection has been invested.) The domestic arts did not mean merely flower arrangements and watercolour painting: they were useful as well as decorative. (Our forbears, of course, did not make the distinction between the two that we do.) The servants might do the work, but the women of the family would know in detail how it should be done: how a room should be turned out, how a floor scrubbed, how silver cleaned, bed-clothes aired and dried, clothes cared for, and the winter curtains stored when summer arrived. There was a romance, a reverence and a dignity about housework then: I look forward to the day it is revived. It is too easy to believe that because something is traditionally women’s work, that it is worth nothing. On the contrary.

  The daughters of the house would be taught to regard waste with alarm — to make a patchwork quilt out of scraps of fabric, a summer pudding out of stale bread and blackberries from the hedgerows. When there were so many shivering, starving wretches around, waste must have seemed not just immoral, but unlucky: an insult to the Gods.

  The girls would learn how to sew: they would start with samplers, perfecting different embroidery stitches, on coarse linen. (Your mother and I had one in our bedroom at home when we were children, framed and hanging on the wall: ‘The days of man are but as dust — Sara Price, her work. 1799: In God we Trust.’ It used to worry me. What use was it, her trusting God? Poor little Sara Price, dead and gone, for all her prayers, all her pious thoughts and all her endeavours. I used to annoy your unfortunate mother by weeping for Sara Price, and being discovered doing so, thus laying unfair claim to a greater sensibility than she.)

  The domestic arts included cookery. The girls would not have cooked themselves, but could have instructed and supervised the cook. They would know how a goose should be plucked and dripping clarified, and when the carrots were ready for the gardener to pull. They would know how to clear coffee, by pouring off a little from the jug into a saucer, letting it cool, and then pouring it back into the jug, so the cooler liquid sinks to the bottom, taking the grounds with it. They would know how to make hens lay in the winter time, by removing the rooster from the flock and giving the birds a little chopped meat daily. Their knowledge of the way things grow, and prosper, and work, and are best looked after would be, I imagine, very much superior to yours, Alice. The ‘domestic crafts’ nowadays taught in schools (and taught to the dullest girls, at that, so I don’t suppose you ever learned any) are just a sorry hand-me-down from the days when these skills were sharp, necessary and highly regarded.

  They do say that the reason for the decline in English cooking, so that for a period of about a hundred years, from the middle of the last century to the middle of this, English cooking was the worst, the wateriest, and the dullest in the world, was due to the social aspirations of the new socially mobile working class; no household could be without its maid-of-all-work, if only living in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The new-style mistress not only felt cooking to be beneath her, but did not have the knowledge or the will to instruct the wretched slattern she employed to do it. The traditions of good cooking, the understanding of food, died out. In the rest of Europe, which remained predominantly rural, and where the population growth was not so sudden and severe as it was in Britain, the traditions were retained.

  Well, we learned. We read books. In the last twenty years cookery books have headed the bestseller lists. We got our skills back. They say that in the English private household today the food is better, not just than it used to be, but than almost anywhere else in the world. (Mind you, they’ll say anything.) And not so long since my mother, and your mother’s mother, took a job in a restaurant and her first task when she got there at eight in the morning was to put the cabbage on for lunch.

  I have no doubt that in the Austen household the gardener would bring in a good cabbage during the morning: the vegetable would be soaked briefly in salt water to bring out the slugs, it would be finely chopped immediately before cooking, put into boiling milk (which removes the sulphur and makes it more digestible) until tender, then well drained and served at once. Delicious! as I would have said, in my advertising days.

  So much for the domestic arts. Meanwhile, Cassandra and Jane’s minds were being elegantly and gracefully developed. Their father taught them the classics, as he, being a clergyman, was well qualified to do. Not so long, after all, since Latin was the written language of all Europe, and its native tongues merely the vernacular. Now there was true internationalism! You will have been taught to reject Latin as irrelevant, elitist, and old-fashioned, but it makes the student alert to the structure of language itself, and more sensitive to the patterns of his own thought. Subject, object, genitive, passive, active — I expect it sounds boring to you, but to me, and to many people of my generation who later became writers, the study of Latin is remembered with pleasure, almost affection. There is no reason to think it was otherwise with Cassandra and Jane Austen — two bright girls.

  I am sure that they behaved well. Village girls romped with boys, tumbled in haystacks, laughed aloud, wept freely, argued hugely — but not the clergyman’s daughters. Mr Austen wrote to Francis, away at the Royal Naval Academy, when he had finished his training as an officer and was about to go to sea, at the age of fourteen, in these terms:

  I think it necessary, therefore, before your departure, to give my sentiments on such general subjects as I conceive of the greatest importance to you…You may either by a contemptuous, unkind and selfish manner create disgust and dislike: or by affability, good humour and compliance, become the object of esteem and affection: which of these very opposite paths ‘tis your interest to pursue I need not say.

  A modern father, I daresay, knowing his son was setting off to sea at a time when England was at war with France, when the ships were hell-holes, sailors had to be forcibly enlisted into the navy, and disease and harsh treatment carried off more good men than the French ever did, would have written differently. Never mind. The Rev. Austen preached survival by good manne
rs, and it was not such a bad path to be required to follow. Francis became an Admiral.

  The Austen family were very English. They did not make a fuss: nor did Jane, in particular, in her novels. The Reverend Austen knew well enough the dangers his son was facing: Jane knew well enough the disease, hunger, and distress that afflicted the village. But the human spirit was supposed to rise above these things, above the dreadfulness of the life of the flesh, outside Heaven but not quite in Hell, and did. It is a mistake, I do believe, to regard their attitude as callous indifference. It was policy. It was the best that could be done, given the general dreadfulness of the world. English middle-class women, still, make less noise in childbirth than anyone else, anywhere in the world. They apologize, saying, ‘I’m sorry to make such a fuss, doctor. I’m sure there are others far worse off than me.’ What a tradition — wonderful, absurd and dangerous!

  And Francis, as midshipman (did you ever see the original Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton? You’ll have got a good picture of a midshipman’s life from that), would have eaten well, or at any rate better than the men. Hard-tack and brackish water were flung at those unfortunates; up in the officers’ mess the same food might, in the end, after a couple of weeks becalmed, be served to their masters, but on porcelain plates, with white napery and polished silver, and perhaps it was the more nourishing for it. There is the spirit, you know, Alice, as well as the flesh. Next time you’re in McDonald’s, remember it.

  So here is the Austen household in the last years of the eighteenth century, busy, cheerful, and self-disciplined, practising compliance and the filial arts. If Jane Austen, in her letters, is occasionally quite remarkably disagreeable, it is hardly surprising. More of this later. She was very bright, very perceptive, lived for ever under her mother’s thumb, loving and admiring a father who in the event did her no favours — like Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice he left his wife and children unprovided for — and lived chastely, though having a sensuous, responsive and romantic nature.

  In your language, I imagine, one would describe her as ‘repressed’ but that would be an over-simplification; and perhaps imply too strongly that her writing was a reaction to her life, her talent a form of neurosis, and so forth. The initial ability to ‘write’ is a gift, a talent, a golden present from a fairy godmother: the development of the craft of writing to such a high pitch that the world sits up and takes notice, if sufficiently obsessive, may I suppose be called neurotic, but I say so grudgingly.

  She is neurotic.

  You are nervy.

  I am perfectly normal, thank you.

  Writing is an odd activity — other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch ET ‘the extraterrestrial’, the unconscious (collective à la Jung or personal à la Freud) ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go you take yourself; and no pure experience either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer’s habit of standing back and observing what is going on — which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless, and calculated, but is not. They must observe with the Martian’s eye, that of a stranger in a strange land, and marvel at this and be horrified at that, while yet knowing they are part of it, and as prone to human error as anyone. They must develop the link between the mind that thinks, and the hand that writes, until words are contemporary with thought, and even precede it: until the language, as they say, has a life of its own. Language you can allow to have this life but of the other contents of a book — characters, story, purpose — the writer must remain in control. Fear the work of a writer who says, it is my characters who lead me, they take off! They well may, but who will want to follow? It is the writer’s mind the reader wants: a controlled fantasy, very, very, rarely, the meanderings of an idle author.

  The instinct to develop the craft, given the gift, is strong. Jane Austen wrote her first book when she was fourteen. It is entitled Love and Freindship, wrongly spelt, and is very funny. She has clearly read many novels: (well, we know she had. Burney, Richardson, Sterne, Fielding — no mean novelists — and no doubt a host of lesser ones too). She mocks the convention. Her characters swoon and run mad:

  What first struck our eyes — we approached — they were Edward and Augustus — Yes, dearest Marianne, they were our husbands. Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground. I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation — Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often…

  Love and Freindship is written in the form of letters, as was Lady Susan later. It was a popular form of fiction at the time, presently to fall into disrepute, for no really good reason. Such a novel has the power of one written in the first person, and the limitations thereof divided by the number of letter-writers the author chooses to involve. A direct authorial voice has to be done without, but the point of view can be from more than a single character. It is not so bad a way of telling a story. To accomplish a letter-novel successfully requires a special skill, the skill of a born dramatist — the knack of moving a plot along through the mouths of the protagonists, and laying down plot detail, as it’s called, without apparently doing so: the body has to be fleshed, but the bones not allowed to show. Jane Austen, even at the age of fourteen, could do these things wonderfully well. The pattern of her storytelling is the same as TV dramatists use today; each letter a new scene, to move the action on, each taking a different viewpoint. Her own animation, her own pleasure in her own skill, shines through the text. She must have found great pleasure in writing Love and Freindship, and greater satisfaction in finishing it. The inner excitement, when a writer realizes for the first time that this whole new world of invention and meaning lies waiting to be explored, is intense and overwhelming and exhilarating. It is like falling in love. The feeling of being singled out, of suddenly discovering that you are different from other people, and in some way special, is powerful. What to some non-writers is seen as easy (‘I’d write a book too myself if only I had the time’) and to others as hard (‘I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t’), to the newly fledged writer is neither easy, nor hard, but simply miraculous. Perhaps it just is that books, novels, loom larger in the lives of writers than they do in the lives of ordinary people, so that to actually be able to write a book seems far, far superior an achievement to the novice writer than, say, making a million pounds or inventing a cure for cancer, or marrying the Prince Regent.

  Be that as it may, I don’t suppose her family allowed her to become conceited about Love and Freindship. They will have cut her down to size with gentle mockery — of the same kind that Jane Austen likewise used, and sometimes not so gentle: safe enough on the page, but devastating in real life.

  Alice, that is enough for today. I am going to the Qantas office here in Cairns to see about my ticket home. Cairns is a pretty place, but it isn’t where I belong. Many of the houses here are built on stilts, incidentally, for reasons as varied as the people who tell me why. Some say it’s because of the crocodiles, or the white ants, or because they’ve always been like that, or for ventilation, or because of the floods, or to raise them above the swamp, or all the better to see the abos from, and some are joking and some are not: hard to tell, so laid back, handsome, sunburned and droll are these Queenslanders. The town itself has wide streets and low wooden buildings, and a branch of David Jones, the department store, made of plywood, with a restaurant where they serve seamen (it’s a port, did you know, do you care, do you have a map?), enormous meals of sausages, beans and steak and fried bread and hot sweet tea. The tribal Aboriginals outside in the desert live on wichetty grubs and a nut or berry or so, and blend better
into the background, as thin as the white men in the towns are fleshy. Here rich landowners import Asian girls as wives. The girls are glad enough, they say, to escape the hunger and poverty of their own lands; and I have seen them come into town, on occasion, seeming happy and grateful enough, gliding along just behind their striding, paunchy, well-satisfied husbands. Are we to disapprove? I suppose so. But think back to Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte Lucas found happiness with Mr Collins, in spite of marrying him for all the wrong reasons. It did for her: it would not do for Elizabeth, who was shocked at first, and heartily disapproved, and then re-thought the whole matter.

  I suppose what has happened is that there in Georgian England we had the microcosm of what was to explode into the wide, wild world. Then it was the village girl, whose face was her fortune, obliged to marry the old, rich man from fifty miles away, in order to survive. Now it is the pretty girl from Java who marries the rancher from North Australia.

  The population of the British Isles today is some 60 million. In 1800 it was estimated at 11 million. Would you like a break-down of the population, as a parting educational shot? I daresay you dread my return, you are afraid you will actually have to meet me, but I assure you, you don’t.

  Nobility and gentry 5,000

  Clergy of the churches of England and Scotland 18,000

  Ditto dissenters of every

  description 14,000

  Army and militia, including half-pay, etc. 240,000

  Navy and marines 130,000

  Seamen in the merchant service 155,000

  Lightermen, watermen, etc. 3,000

  Persons employed in collecting the public revenue 6,000