Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

  What had she done, or what had she omitted to do, to merit such a change?

  The only offence against him of which she could accuse herself, had been such as was scarcely possible to reach his knowledge. Henry and her own heart only were privy to the shocking suspicions which she had so idly entertained; and equally safe did she believe her secret with each. Designedly, at least, Henry could not have betrayed her. If, indeed, by any strange mischance his father should have gained intelligence of what she had dared to think and look for, of her causeless fancies and injurious examinations, she could not wonder at any degree of his indignation. If aware of her having viewed him as a murderer, she could not wonder at his even turning her from his house. But a justification so full of torture to herself, she trusted would not be in his power.

  Anxious as were all her conjectures on this point, it was not, however, the one on which she dwelt most. There was a thought yet nearer, a more prevailing, more impetuous concern. How Henry would think, and feel, and look, when he returned on the morrow to Northanger and heard of her being gone.

  What’s happened is that the General has discovered she isn’t an heiress as he had unreasonably concluded — his paranoia (to use a word totally, thank God, unknown at the time. We have too many axe words like this, I believe: cutting through sensibility with a sharp single blow), equalling hers, and in a way serving her right. Henry defies his father and marries Catherine in spite of his disapproval. The novel ends thus:

  To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced, that the General’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

  What do you think, Alice, since it does concern you? She is still talking to you, and she knows you are there. You, the reader, are involved in this literary truth, as much as the writer.

  When I say to would-be writers, but you must think of your readers, this is what I mean. Not that you must consider markets, and write to fill them, but that, in generosity, forgetting your individual self, you must use your craft to pass on energy and animation and involvement; and if you do it properly, then the craft is understood to be art. You must aspire, in order that your readers can do the same.

  love from,

  Aunt Fay

  LETTER ELEVEN

  ‘An annuity is a serious business’

  London, May

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  I am back from a publishing tour of Denmark. Contemporary writers are required, from time to time, to undertake visits to other countries for the purpose of publicizing their work. They will be given an itinerary on arrival and someone from the publishing house delegated to look after them. They will sit in their hotel room and give press interviews at hourly intervals; they will make TV appearances, and radio interviews; they will sign books in bookshops and give lectures at the local university; they will lunch with publishers and book club officials, and breakfast, if they are sensible, alone. There will be no time to think, only to perform. With any luck there will be television in the room (not in Holland, where TV is considered down-market) for late nights, and bath oil and shower caps in the bathroom for early mornings. If there is an hour or two to spare, they will be taken on a sightseeing tour before it is time for their flight. (The word has understandably taken on a double meaning.)

  Now an etiquette has grown up around these visits: there is a way to behave and a way not to behave but no one to tell you what it is. There are things to beware, but you must find them out for yourself. To this end, I started a short story which I know I will never finish, it being faultily constructed. £50 if you can tell me why it is unfinishable. (As a clue, I’ve already told you why Lesley Castle never got published.) Herewith:

  RETURN TO THE HOTEL ATLANTIC, AARHUS

  or

  The visiting writer’s handbook

  Well now listen, sisters! As more and more of us take up our pens and write, so do more and more of us get asked abroad, by publishers, universities, festival organizers and so forth, and we have no rule book to go by, and no handbook to consult, any more in this respect than we do in real life. In real life we have friends to guide us, and magazines to explain ourselves to ourselves, and parents who hold up a mirror (often unflattering) in which we can gaze, but who does the visitor abroad have, in Wellington, New Zealand, or Aarhus, Denmark?

  All places of course get nearer home as the cultures of the world become more and more similar, except for the air fare that separates them, and that’s a comfort. A woman’s group in Madrid is pretty much like a woman’s group in Johannesburg. A Women’s Studies Department in Oslo is much like one in Melbourne: English is everyone’s second language: the divisions in the world are increasingly those of occupation and political opinion, not of nationality. Even so, jaunting abroad, I have nearly jumped from a window of the Lakeside Hotel, Canberra, nearly stepped deliberately in a lorry’s path in Stockholm, so great is the overwhelming depression, the sense of isolation that can afflict the visiting writer abroad, in the midst of admiring, even enthusiastic crowds, and all for the lack of a handbook, a little advice, a little forewarning as to what to expect.

  Therefore I, Grace D’Albier, aged thirty-five, author of a novel about incest, pass on a little information to you. Lot and his Daughter was my first novel, the first one to go into translation, to take the world by storm (publisher’s language) and to send me hurtling by Pan-Am around the world, explaining as I go that the novel is not autobiographical; that I made it up. No one believes this, of course. Journalists, in particular, who work so cleverly from the real world, understand description, but not invention. It is not surprising. They lose their jobs if they do invent — novelists get sued if they don’t invent. So I, Grace D’Albier, must go round the world, stared at as a victim of paternal and maternal incest: and though my parents still speak to me, they do so in a rather stiff way. They can comprehend that I made it up, but their friends can’t.

  On the other hand, all over the world women come up to me and thank me, and say my book has helped them; not that the thing, the deed, actually happened to them, but the feeling was always there, and now they need no longer be ashamed that it was. They are part of the new community of the literate; they are released and absolved from guilt, and I have done it.

  But there is no comfort at home. My own children look at me askance, especially my oldest son, for Susan in the book had her first child by her father, when she was fifteen, and Susan’s mother conceived a child by the son, when the boy was fifteen. Of course I made it up. I am not old enough not to have made it up. But people everywhere believe what they want to believe, not what is true, let alone credible. God knows what the children’s friends say. I daren’t ask, and they don’t say.

  Sometimes I think I cannot go on. Here at the Hotel Atlantic, Aarhus, looking out over the cold bright sea and the car-ferry loading bay, and the busy bleak industriousness of normal early morning people, I wonder what I have done to be so separated out from them. And how did it happen that I, who started out as a writer, have turned willy-nilly into a performer? Yesterday afternoon I spoke to five hundred students at the university here: they listened with attention and I felt useful, but a flea — perhaps I picked it up on the plane? — was jumping about inside my new silver Kurt Geiger boots, biting me, and how can you scratch and scream while facing an audience of five hundred? Last night I scratched my feet and ankles while I slept and this morning I find my nails have raked raw weals into my flesh.

  But the purpose of this piece is not self-pity, and I know there are few enough people out there in the world to pity me, as I ring for breakfast and it comes with smiles and pleasant looks — black coffee in small
Danish cups, rolls and pastries, a boiled egg and their accompanying wafers of cheese, and I have my cake and eat it too.

  I pass the time working out details of the Visiting Writer’s Handbook. There will be a section for Advance Preparation. Your agent, I will say, under the section ABROAD, will always ask for First Class Air Travel. This will never, of course, be conceded, but serves to make your host nervous enough if a publisher, to book a rather better hotel for you than originally anticipated (the writer comes out of the PR budget); or if a university, or theatre company, to put you up in moderately comfortable, moderately sophisticated households. People who admire your work tend to believe you share their likes and dislikes. Publishers on the whole live well and eat well, and their status and sales are best served if the writer does the same, but academics and feminists believe that if they do not like television, music, meat, soft pillows, central heating, food (even) on moral or practical grounds, then neither will you. I will tell the reader of my handbook of the many strange beds I have slept in abroad — the damp beds of absent grandmothers, the equally damp beds of three year olds; attic rooms and basement rooms: I will refer to the host who said I could have his bath water after him, and before his wife: I will warn the visiting writer that if told, ‘We thought you’d rather stay in a private home than in an impersonal hotel’ to gently indicate they are mistaken. After a day full of personalities — one’s own the most boring of all, I hasten to say — impersonality and peace is most attractive. I have, I will add, for fear of offending the many delightful people whose pleasant hospitality I have enjoyed, broken this rule often and been glad.

  I will remark on how tactful and polite the visiting writer presently learns to be. A careless and frivolous remark made in Adelaide one evening, will be repeated in Sydney the next; to whom it most concerns and most hurts. I will advise the writer never, never to speak ill of another writer’s works; if forced into a corner, the worst you can say is ‘So and so’s work is not, I think, counted as great literature’. Never speak ill of the host country, I will say. That is only courtesy. Never speak ill of the host country before last, because that gets back too. Never speak ill, in fact. Hold your tongue and mind your manners.

  Be courteous to journalists and considerate of photographers. Remember regional differences. Dutch photographers, for example, will want you to look bleak and grim and as old as possible; lit from above, they will stand you against a stark white wall. Danish photographers love you to laugh and twinkle: American photographers want you to be properly made up and beautiful: Australian photographers want you to look ordinary and like everyone else. Above all, remember this of photographs, those who know you know what you look like, and for those who don’t, can it matter? Try and believe it.

  Danton D’Albier, the actor whom I married, long ago, the children’s father, left me on publication day of Lot and his Daughter two years’ back. He read the book, against my will, (a kind of rape) and said, ‘I never knew you thought like that’ and he looked at a photograph of me in The Times and said, ‘I never knew you looked like that’ and I think it was the photograph and not the book that did it. Nevertheless.

  …There I stopped. As I say, £50 if you can tell me why I didn’t go on. Jane Austen wanted to charge brother Henry 100 guineas for the unfinished Lesley Castle, and here am I, actually giving money away.

  You write complaining of the dreadful feeling of dry despair which your course in English Literature induces in you: you feel you are suffocating; as if your mouth was being stuffed with dry leaves; as if your brain was slowly dying of some mental poison. It makes you want to scream. How well you put it. I really have hopes for your novel: how is it going? Women in loveless marriages complain of the same feelings: they tremble on the verge of panic; there is something terribly wrong, but they can’t quite place it. Or unsupported mothers (well, unsupported except for Uncle State) trudging home up the hill in the rain from Sainsbury’s, with a small child on either side: ‘Where am I?’ they scream, soundlessly, for the wet wind forces protest back into the mouth, ‘This is not what I meant at all!’ And where are you, Alice, Persuasion in one hand and pen in the other, is this what you meant? Are these the joys of literature? — making your mind work where your feelings don’t, delving round in your brain for the responses you ought to have, which other people claim to have, and you just don’t. It is murder, mental murder, twisting your head to get it into someone else’s place (in your terminology) because that person has power over you, to pass you or fail you; accept you in the cultural world or throw you out of it. So you persist, and your mouth chokes up with dry leaves and you write that the character of the second to youngest Bennet sister is undeveloped (you’ve forgotten her name) because you have been told that is the case: it is universally acknowledged that writers ought to develop characters.

  Not by me, of course. This kind of criticism, to the writer, is like saying to the mother of her newborn baby, ‘But why has your baby got red hair?’ implying that surely there was something she should have done about it! ‘But that is the baby,’ she’ll say, upset and confused. It is almost as easy to upset and confuse new mothers as it is writers.

  Writers are not so rational about the writing of their books, you see, as students of English Literature like to think. They write what they write and if it was different, it would be a different book and have a different title, so fault-finding is self-defeating. And if you think your brain is dying slowly, that your head is held trapped by iron bonds of boredom, it is no more than you deserve. When you study a writer’s work in depth you are stealing from that writer: so much he or she offered to you gladly, but you are greedy: you are demanding more.

  A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental — obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought. The teacher prises open the door so that everyone can rush in. They may well do, but it’s not for everyone, it was never meant to be.

  I think I overstate my case. Only endure! Loveless marriages turn again to loving ones; unwanted children become wanted; the study that bores you today may enlighten you tomorrow. Do not change courses in midstream, Alice. Do not abandon Eng. Lit. for Social Studies. Simply write your own book to counteract the danger of too much analysis; synthesize as much as you analyse, and you will yet be saved. So much advice I owe your father. I suppose.

  Incidentally, Jane Austen made only £700 during her lifetime, from her writing:

  1803: £10 from Crosby, for Northanger Abbey.

  1811: £140 from the publisher Thomas Egerton, for Sense and Sensibility. It came out in 3 volumes, price 15s. £150 from the profits of same.

  1812: £110 for Pride and Prejudice likewise, published at 18s. The print run was 1,500.

  1814: £450 from the publisher John Murray for the copyrights of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park (since Egerton seemed unable to move them from the booksellers’ shelves, produced very small editions and paid very little) and her new novel Emma. Egerton excused himself by saying, ‘People are more ready to borrow and praise than to buy’.

  I make that £860, but it is usual for people to say that ‘she made only £700 from her writing during her lifetime’. So that is certainly what you should say in your end of term exams, should the subject come up. Truth is relative in any case, and I read in New Scientist that two and two do not make four, but approximately four, since the very action of adding alters the number, so I daresay £700 feeling right, is right.

  Love from Fay

  P.S. Perhaps someone index-linked the sum and forgot to say? There was shocking inflation between 1800 and 1817. Napoleon and all that.

  LETTER TWELVE

  Let others deal with misery

  London, May

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  In Mansfield Park there is a young lady, a Miss Crawford, who behaves very badly. She speaks slightingly of the clergy. She is quite without respect for the Admiral uncle in whose household she was brought
up, and to whom therefore she should be grateful. She says she has a large acquaintance of various Admirals; she knows too much about their bickerings and jealousies, and of Rears and Vices she has seen all too many. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’ But of course we do. Rears and Vices! Strong stuff! Miss Crawford mocks religious feeling. She remarks, on being shown round the Rushworth Elizabethan chapel, ‘Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Miss Eleanors and Miss Bridgets — starched up into seeming piety, but with their heads full of something very different — especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at — and, in those days, I fancy parsons were inferior even to what they are now.’

  That makes Fanny angry. So angry she can hardly speak. It is the only time in the whole book that she is swayed by unholy passion. She is angry, you see, on Edmund’s behalf. Edmund is training to be a parson. Fanny is an unusual Austen heroine: she is good, almost unspeakably good. Edmund is more usual: he is of the Mr Knightley mould. He is kind, noble and instructive. He rather fancies Miss Crawford, in spite of her bad behaviour, perhaps even because of it, and she is certainly the one character in the book with whom one would gladly spend a week on an off-shore island: she is witty, lively, lovely and funny at other people’s expense. She is selfish — she unfeelingly makes use of Fanny’s horse, to Fanny’s detriment, since Fanny seems quite unable to take care of herself — and admits it. Miss Crawford, in fact, doesn’t mind being bad. Fanny simply can’t help being good.

  Now Jane Austen started to write Mansfield Park in 1812. She had been living in Chawton, with her mother and sister, since 1809. It is tempting to suggest that the struggle between Miss Crawford and Fanny was the struggle going on in the writer between the bad and the good. The bad bit, which could write in a letter to Cassandra, ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’ (Now that’s far, far worse than anything Miss Crawford ever said.) And the good bit, which struggles to live at peace in a modest home with her mother and sister, and to continue to believe that her father was ‘good and kind’, (and not, as I tend to believe, the callous and egocentric model for Mr Bennet), and takes in Mansfield Park the personification of Fanny. And even more tempting to go back to Jane Austen’s early childhood, and see in that powerful description in Mansfield Park of the arrival of a small, timid girl, into a strange family — on the whole kindly, but stupid — a portrait of herself, sent away to a school where she nearly died, among strangers, and to suggest that the split between good and bad never, in Jane Austen, quite reconciled and resulting in her early death, started there. The rebellious spirit, raging at being so cast out by mother and father, learning the defences of wit and style — Miss Crawford. The dutiful side, accepting authority, enduring everything with a sweet smile, finding her defence in wisdom — Fanny. So tempting, in fact, that I shan’t resist. I shall offer it to you as an explanation of Jane Austen’s determination to make the unctuous Fanny a heroine.