Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

Emma could not resist. Emma: ‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to number — only three at once!’

  Alice, Emma lives!

  Or let me put it another way, if that makes you shuffle and feel uneasy. (There are more ways of killing a cat, and making a Jane Austen convert, than you would suppose.) All over the country irons were held in suspension, and car exhaust bandages held motionless and lady gardeners stayed their gardening gloves, and cars slowed, as Emma spoke, as that other world intruded into this. It does more and more, you know. We join each other in shared fantasies, it is our way of crossing barriers, when our rulers won’t let us. ET and his like is our real communication. Hand in hand the human race abandons the shoddy, imperfect structures of reality, and surges over to the City of Invention.

  (I suppose to you it appears quite ordinary: for you the world has always trembled on the verge of the fictional supra-reality: Dr Who flows in your bloodstream. It still, as a phenomenon, leaves me feeling breathless.)

  O.K. Back to Northanger Abbey. In my edition (Oxford World’s Classics) I observe that the editor (John Davie) has, according to his publishers, researched on authors as diverse as Jane Austen and Browning. It is this kind of remark that makes me feel really inadequate as aunt, semi-literary tutor, and moral adviser. Is not Browning a poet? Is not Jane Austen a novelist? Are they then both to be grouped as authors? Can comparison then be made, or as in this case, anti-comparisons? To say ‘as diverse as Jane Austen and Jorge-Luis Borges’ would make more sense. Jane Austen and Browning simply doesn’t. Unless there is something I don’t know, and Browning wrote novels as well as poetry. (Did he? Did he? At moments like these I wish I had persisted with Eng. Lit. I am sure it is the kind of thing everyone else knows, but me.) And who am I to find fault with the editors of the Oxford University Press?

  I raise this point, Alice, in the hope that you will not begin the suspension of your disbelief until you have actually got to the text of whatever you are reading; the phrase ‘as diverse as Jane Austen and Browning’, if you allow it to penetrate your young and all too penetrable mind, will muddle and confuse your mental filing system. You will forever be pulling things out of the wrong places. You must always be more on your guard, when reading non-fiction, as I like to rather affectedly and disparagingly call it, than fiction.

  And do remember, a letter counts as non-fiction. Careful, Alice. Use what I say as a sack of rather dusty brown rice, from which you will take cupfuls, at intervals, and concoct delicious and nourishing dishes. (You mention in your letter that you are a vegetarian. Your Marxist Professor (married) of Economics is a vegetarian too. That surprises me. Marxists are usually meat-eaters. It is the softer, more liberal left which feels tender about lately living things.) What I say, remember, is not the dish itself, merely a rather lulling ingredient, to be used at your discretion. Use your judgment, Alice, not mine.

  Personally, I don’t like brown rice at all. I find it difficult to swallow. Sticks in the gullet. Go by instinct, Alice, too. Rely on what you feel about books, while remembering it is disgraceful to toss your head and say, ‘I know what I like’, if only because by the time you’ve aligned these two rather different activities, knowing and liking, both may somehow have slipped away. You’ve confined each within the bounds of the other: Siamese twins, back to back, trapped, lashing out at the world, most destructively.

  Travel hopefully, as a reader. Retain your trust, as long as you possibly can. My bathroom contains seven half-finished thrillers. I push myself beyond endurance, in the face of bad writing (by this I mean, I think, imprecision in writing, combined with a paucity of thought and feeling, but more of this later), hoping to be held and entranced. And what pleasure there is when, rarely, a good, intelligent, well-worked thriller turns up — I tell you, there shall be more rejoicing in the bathroom over one writer that is lost, and found again…

  Alice, I do have to stop now. Northanger Abbey will have to wait ‘til the next letter. I shall be serious and responsible, I promise. The novel was written in 1798, or thereabouts, when Jane Austen was in her early twenties, was sent to a publisher who bought it but kept it for ten years and didn’t publish it. I have some sympathy with him. It isn’t nice to be mocked.

  In 1798 Napoleon invaded Europe and Jane’s wild cousin (well, she married a foreigner, a Frenchman and a royalist, and wore flashy gowns) had fled to England, home and safety with her baby son, and Jane’s aunt (her mother’s brother’s wife) was accused of shoplifting — the penalty if she was found guilty was hanging at worst and transportation at best — and God knows what dreadful things were happening in Ireland, and Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey, in which the worst thing that happened was that Catherine was sent home in sudden disgrace by her boyfriend’s father, General Tilney.

  All love,

  Aunt Fay

  P.S. Mrs Leigh Perrot was acquitted, but only after she had spent many months in jail awaiting trial. She could have bought the shopkeeper off, as he expected, but Mr Leigh Perrot said, ‘No, I will never submit to blackmail of this kind!’ This story is usually told as demonstrating how noble, likable and admirable a man Mr Leigh Perrot was. But I see it as just more proof of the general premise, that when a man has a principle, a woman pays for it. He believes in honour: she stays in prison.

  LETTER TEN

  ‘Are you sure they are all horrid?’

  London, April

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  I am going to tell you a story you won’t believe. A couple of years ago I was being taken home from a party in an art dealer’s car, and there beside me on the seat was a packet wrapped in brown paper. I put my hand on it and found that it was warm. Books and papers, similarly placed, were cool enough. I remarked upon it to the art dealer, and he said, ‘Well, of course. It’s a Lowry. It’s a hot property.’ I took my hand away rather rapidly. He unwrapped it later and showed it to me. I am not a profound admirer of Lowry’s work. I think it is pleasant enough, and leave reverence for those who know more than me. Your mother, for example. (When the qualities were shared out between her and me — as qualities are, among siblings; between them they add up to quite a decent person — she got a visual sense, I got a response to language.) So it was not me endowing the parcel — however telepathically — with a warm importance. I could only imagine it was the intensity of other people’s regard, hotting up a mere painting into an actual art object. Lowry had just died; his was the name on many lips, his work a vision in the forefront of many minds, in the strange cultural shadow world where we dwell.

  Now, inasmuch as those engaged in particle physics will assure us that a particle alters by virtue of being observed, so we can never really know what anything is like, because the knowledge interferes with what we wish to know, it doesn’t surprise me that a painting, so imbued with the force of attention, changes its nature. Heats up. Hot property!

  I told you you wouldn’t believe me.

  But I have had more than one literary critic, adjudicator, panel member, and not all that drunk either, raise his bowed head and say, ‘Don’t tell anyone. I know it’s mad. But you begin to know, when you pick up a MS, before you open it, whether it’s any good or not. Just something about the feel.’

  And then, having confided this absurdity, they fall back into their stupor, the paralysis of the over-literate. Enforced judgment thins the blood, in the end. They’re the first to agree: they are the slaves to the Muse, not honest yeomen. She uses them and abuses them, sends them chasing off on thankless errands, yet they love her. And it is a noble calling; it is their judgment, after all, that sends the writer or painter off on the strange leaping, bounding, crag-to-crag journey to the summit of their discipline. Hot property!

  Desperate would-be writers sometimes send off to those theatrical managements who have rejected their work obscure plays by famous people. When these too are rejected they turn round and say, ‘See. We are at the mercy of incompetent and prejudiced judgment! We always kne
w it. That was a Chekhov play (or whatever) that was!’

  But it seems to me that the renown of the writer rubs off on the work itself. That a play written by Ibsen and claimed by Ibsen, is a different and better play than one written by Ibsen and claimed by Anon. The former contains the concentrated magic of the attention of millions; a consensus that here is something, really something; you don’t have to join in (like me with Lowry, or rather, not with Lowry), but you will know it’s there. The latter is merely words upon the page, interpreted by the theatrical profession; it will gain a nod and a snore and an absence, if Anon is lucky, of protest. No more.

  How difficult, then, you may say, for the writer to begin. Ah yes. We all know that. At which the critics suddenly snap their heads aloft and fix you with a beady and really quite energetic stare and say, ‘But that’s what we’re for. If it wasn’t for us, properties would never be hot’.

  Northanger Abbey, 1798. A hot property eventually.

  Northanger Abbey is a lovely romp. It mocks the kind of novel the publisher Crosby published — the gothic romance, and I am not surprised, having bought it —because how could you not buy so spirited, wilful and charming a tale — he felt no need to publish it. He just hung on to it, baffled.

  Catherine:

  had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no — not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door — not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

  But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero her way.

  It is interesting, is it not, that in her later novels Jane Austen took seriously what in her youth she could not. The stuff of her own later fiction — love at first sight (Jane and Bingley), lords in the neighbourhood (Darcy), wards (Fanny Price and Emma in The Watsons), young persons of unknown origin (Harriet Smith) she here derides —well, not quite derides, that is too strong a word, but pokes and prods with a delightedly aware finger. I think it is this ripple of merriment, this underground hilarity, which she has lost by the time she gets to the more plaintive Mansfield Park and the more sombre Persuasion, that so endeared her to future generations. It may not have shown in her own character; it is, as I like to say to audiences — and I’ve had my share of them lately, Alice — a literary truth and not a home truth.

  How, audiences say to me, can you be married and have sons and still be so horrible about men? And I reply, (a) ‘I am not horrible to and about men, I merely report them as I see them. I neither condone nor reproach, I merely report. It’s just that men are so accustomed to being flattered in books by women that simple honesty comes as a shock and they register it as biased and unfair’ — and if they don’t let me get away with that I retreat to, (b) ‘This is a literary truth, not a home truth. The writer is not the person, yet both natures are true.’

  I think it is perfectly possible that Jane Austen the writer was very different from Jane Austen the person.

  I also think, concurrently, that the reason no one married her was the same reason Crosby didn’t publish Northanger Abbey. It was all just too much. Something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth: something capable of taking the world by its heels, and shaking it — as a mother takes a choking baby — shaking out great muddy gobbets of barbarity and incomprehension and cruelty, and setting it on its feet again, altogether better and improved.

  She knew too much, you see, for her own good.

  The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author — and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too informed themselves to desire any thing more in women than ignorance.

  Can you imagine it?

  ‘And will you dance, Miss Austen, will you dance? You pretty, giddy little thing, with your trim small body and your clear complexion, and your pretty face, perhaps rather too full in the cheeks for perfect beauty — will you dance?’ No!

  Catherine and Isabella (her friend) shut themselves up, in defiance of wet and dirt, to read novels together:

  Yes, novels; — for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. ‘I am no novel reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.’ — Such is the common cant — ‘And what are you reading, Miss —?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. — ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

  ‘Improbable circumstances, unnatural characters’! It is they who inhabit the real world: the City of Invention is peopled by altogether more reasonable folk, with natural and consistent characters. In that City if there is an effect there is a cause; there is relevance, purpose and meaning; it is a wonderful place. She knew it.

  I don’t think you will have much difficulty in actually reading Northanger Abbey, but since you tell me you are now five chapters into your novel — now entitled The Wife’s Revenge — you may not have a great deal of time at your disposal, so I will give you a quick run-down of the plot.

  I do, you see, feel just a little guilty in encouragi
ng you in your literary interest, in the face of your father’s disapproval. Only if you manage to pass your exams as well, will I be vindicated; will this family ever be reunited. If you fail, I will get the blame, not you, so don’t feel unduly pressurized.

  Northanger Abbey, 1798. The novel starts as a literary burlesque and ends as a serious story, in which the heroine — or anti-heroine — has actual, real, recognizable feelings, brought about by social disgrace and public humiliation. Catherine Morland, up to Bath for the season, is asked to stay by her suitor Henry Tilney at his ancestral home, Northanger Abbey. The Abbey fails to live up to her expectations of Gothic horror:

  The furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste. The fire-place, where she had expected the ample width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest English china. The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the General talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the pointed arch was preserved — the form of them was Gothic — they might be even casements — but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.

  Henry’s father, General Tilney, does arouse her suspicions, however. There is a certain room which no one enters, and the General’s wife died in what could be construed as mysterious circumstances. Henry, discovering her suspicions — by now quite obsessive — disillusions her with wit, kindness and concern. He’s as fine a lover as any you’re likely to find in the Collected Works. They seem on the verge of marriage. But Catherine is then suddenly and rudely dismissed by the General, peremptorily sent home by carriage. A long, uncomfortable and lonely journey.