by Susan Hill
It is an altogether touching picture of a younger novelist respectful in the presence of an older and very eminent one, of a man softened and shrunken by age, and above all, one who had come almost to disregard his own genius and what it had produced. Woolf reports that he seemed quite uninterested in his novels. He is never a cold or distant figure, never less than human, but somehow he comes closer to us in this account, and Woolf writes the visit up with great perspicacity and kindness.
Hardy taught me that landscape (and weather) can be as important as character in a novel. He also revealed much about the link between paintings and the novel, and not only in the sense that painters have taken narrative subjects. Scene after scene is illuminated from outside, or from within. When Damon Wildeve and Clym Yeobright play dice by the light of thousands of glow worms on Egdon Heath, the image seems to come straight from one of the Old Masters. Once I noticed the connection, I began to see how often Hardy works like a painter and how, although his narrative line is always direct and clear, he seems to present his story in a series of vivid tableaux. I went to look at some pictures and the pictures led me back to the books. It was probably our excellent English teacher who pointed out the link between Hardy and paintings. I cannot have found it for myself. She was a vague-seeming, nervous woman with a mass of fluffy hair forever escaping from its pins and for a time, until I got the measure of her, I thought she was equally fluffy. But gradually I realised that she taught by releasing tiny droplets of gold from a vial, which you were expected to notice and to catch. The rest was everyday stuff, the plain drinking water of teaching texts clearly and concisely. But it was the golden drops that were stored away, to enrich a lifetime.
After I had left school and was in my final year at university I met her again by chance. She asked what I had been studying, what I liked and did not, what I felt most valuable but when I mentioned my passion for Hardy, she made a wry face. ‘I never did much care for Hardy, you know,’ she said. It takes a great teacher to teach an author well and to inspire a lasting love for their books, while entirely concealing the fact that they do not much care for them.
Down among the Women
THIS BOOKCASE CONTAINS 743 books of which 445 are by men. Up a flight of stairs. This bookcase contains 66 books of which 51 are by women. I could go on like this all day and prove nothing except that both men and women write books. But if I pick out only novels, and sub-divide into novels by women, an impressive pile builds up on the floor.
Willa Cather
Carson McCullers
Fay Weldon
Jane Austen
George Eliot
Elizabeth Bowen
Edith Wharton
Margaret Drabble
Olivia Manning
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Isabel Colegate
Emily Brontë
Eudora Welty
Elizabeth Taylor
Charlotte Mendelson
Jeanette Winterson
Anne Brontë
Mary McCarthy
Penelope Mortimer
Penelope Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf
I might reach 100 women novelists. There are women historians and biographers and other non-fiction authors here too, not to mention the very many women writers of children’s books. But again, what does it all prove? What we already know, that writing has always been a strongly female art, whereas women composers and painters are few and far between and that proves – what? That writing can be fitted in most easily between other traditionally female work? Hmm. Jane Austen could hide her novel-in-progress under the blotter if anyone entered the drawing room. The Bronte sisters wrote novels but had to hide their sex behind masculine pen-names. Margaret Drabble could write when her babies were asleep. Most women novelists have had husbands, and therefore another family income. But Vanessa Bell was a painter of great talent and formidable output, who had several children and a busy domestic life, albeit one with servants, whereas Virginia Woolf, her sister, was married but childless. Anita Brookner is single but had a full-time university career. No, whichever way you look at this none of the answers stack up. Perhaps there is no equation at all. A lot of women have written novels. So have a lot of men. Some of them have been good, some bad, some successful, some failures; some women and some men have become rich by writing, others remain poor. If I read a novel which is new to me, without knowing the name of the author, can I tell if it is by a man or a woman? I have never actually tried it. Look at it another way. Here is a copy of Northanger Abbey. Could it have been written by a man? Here is War and Peace. Could it be by a woman? I think the answer to both is yes, but if I gave you this novel by Trollope how would you guess that it was Joanna and not Anthony – historical context aside? I have written several novels with a male narrator or from a male point of view but a (male) friend who read two of them said he could tell immediately that they were by a woman because they were not obsessed with sex.
For a month I have read only books by women writers, beginning with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda which I came to last of all her novels, having begun with Silas Marner for O level, and found it dull, though, mercifully, short.
A friend was teaching a first-year undergraduate class on the Victorian novel some years ago, and rather than begin George Eliot with Middlemarch, a book she assumed they would all know, she thought she would make life more interesting for them, and asked them to read Deronda. None of them had ever heard of it (and indeed, as became clear, none had heard of Middlemarch either) so she took a copy down from her shelves. They looked at it in horror. ‘What,’ asked one, ‘you mean read the whole of it?’ But the whole of it is the whole of a wonderful Victorian novel, an exciting, challenging story full of strong characters – and especially the women, though the villain, Grandcourt, is one of the best depictions of evil I know in fiction. It is the perfect book to discuss, too, full of moral arguments and differing points of view. Middlemarch is a flawless book. Deronda is not. Some of it is sentimental, some of it tendentious. But it is never less than gripping, and it teems with life and fervour. But might it be by a man? Yes. I think all of George Eliot might be. Might Dickens be by a woman, then? No. But am I saying that because I know and have always known the sex of the authors?
The more I think about it, the more I am sure that that is precisely the case, at least with novels before my own time, except, perhaps, for Jane Austen. Perhaps. Daniel Deronda is a book that takes care of a number of cold evenings by the fire. But having finished it, I have glutted on the Victorians. I like reading to be about contrast and change, I like having a jag on crime before turning to essays, being challenged by the sharp angry satire of Swift before relaxing into The Forsyte Saga.
But we are still in women-only territory and it is an unusually long time since I re-read Anita Brookner, whose cool, simply written, intelligent novels carry such an emotional charge, a charge well concealed beneath the surface, that always comes as a shock.
Lazy comment often says that Brookner’s novels are ‘all alike’ or ‘variations on one theme’ in the same way as lazy comment says Jane Austen’s novels are narrow and small of focus. Well, Monet painted a series of pictures of haystacks, each one very similar to the last, each adding a dimension to the set, each complementing the other. Bach composed many variations on a single theme. That the argument is a poor one may easily be proved by simply reading every single Brookner novel one after the other, as I have just done. There is a leitmotif running through many of them. The narrator or the principal character is usually a woman, though sometimes a middle-aged man, lonely in some essential sense, usually living in London, sharply self-aware and growing more so, intelligent, perspicacious, often parentally dominated, often without siblings, always middle class, always well educated. The men are interesting though fatally flawed, and their weaknesses are laid bare with a great clarity and understanding, with accuracy but without unkindness. It may seem that the heroines are all alike, all the same woman,
but they are not, there are innumerable subtle differences between them, even though they have aspects of a lifestyle in common, and the more you sink into the entire Brookner world, the more you understand what makes for these differences and how subtle but significant they are.
How we repeat our mistakes and why, how we fail to notice vital signs in human behaviour in time to save ourselves from disaster, how we make the best of the bad hand we have been dealt – or how we do not, how we relate to our past and try to make up for it with courage, or give in and blame it for our cowardice, how we betray ourselves more than we betray others, how we make errors of judgement in friendships, in love, how we grow old with or without grace, how we cope with isolation or with poor company – Brookner’s novels are about all of these things and more. She is a past mistress at recreating the faded, the sepia, the gloomy, the empty atmosphere, of a hotel, a London mansion flat where daylight barely penetrates the high-ceilinged rooms, a dismal seaside bungalow. She is wonderful on the detail of furniture, clothes, makeup, shopping bought, things cooked and eaten, and she has an uncanny ear for the lame conversations between people who have nothing to say to one another but are yet obliged to talk. She is wonderful on plump, greedy, spiteful, silly, over-made-up women who must pretend still to be young, to flirt and be spoiled as if they were girls, and she knows everything about possessive, selfish mothers, and well-meaning but weak fathers. She is an expert on stoicism, on making the best of it, on bleak self-knowledge and the loss of hope. It is not true that there are no happy endings in her novels but as so often is the case, the happy endings are less convincing, less moving, than the other kind.
The satisfaction and illumination that come from reading more or less nothing but Anita Brookner for three weeks are immense, and have alerted me all over again to how disgraceful it is that so many of her books are no longer in print, how much better she is than talents bruited more loudly abroad, how she ranks among the very best novelists of the late twentieth century.
Could a man have written Brookner’s novels? If I had no author’s name to guide me, would I be absolutely certain of her sex? In this instance, yes. The insight into the female mind is so acute, so truthful, so sure, that it can only be by one who knows, has experienced, who is not guessing, however cleverly, not playing ‘let’s pretend’. A man can write with absolute conviction about a woman but not, somehow, do it over and over again without giving the game away.
But as I finish the last Brookner novel and sit by the window looking at the stars prickle in the night sky, turning this question over and over, I know that all I have to go on is instinct, that I could not argue a case convincingly, and that someone somewhere could prove to me that a man might indeed have written these books. In the last resort, does it matter either way?
No. I turn away from the stars and the sliver of bright moon, sure that that is not true either, that it does matter, in some profound sense that is far more than literary. The trouble is that I have not yet worked out what.
I put the Brookner novels tidily back on their shelf – she is a novelist who requires tidiness of her reader, tidiness and attention to detail, application and careful thought. I go to bed, and read the Book of Job, long a favourite. But I am still thinking about why it is that I know a man could not have written the novels of Anita Brookner, whereas one could certainly have written those of, say, Carson McCullers.
Might a woman have written the Book of Job?
Reading for the Soul
I WAS BROUGHT UP as a Christian, my life has been steeped in Anglicanism, and so I find it unimaginable not to have spiritual reading. There is always something to learn, some wisdom, some new light on eternity, though sometimes what once seemed rich and full of insight and strength does not stay the course.
I remember a conversation with a fellow judge of the then Whitbread Awards some years ago, when the poetry winner was a volume about the death from cancer of the poet’s wife, and about his anguish and depth of bereavement in the weeks and months that followed. But within a remarkably short time, he had found a new wife – she even had the same name as the first – and he had brought her with him to the awards ceremony. As a result, my fellow judge said that the book had been completely spoiled for him, and that he could never look on it, or on the author, in the same way again. Was it just a case of the speed of the new love affair and marriage? Would he have felt the same if five or ten years had passed? No, he confessed that he would not. The time lapse made all the difference. He was not being judgemental, simply stating a truth – that the book which had meant so much to him had been fatally diminished for him when he discovered what had happened.
Did I feel the same? Yes, to some extent, though I argued that the poems must stand alone, regardless of the autobiography. But it is something that has gnawed away at me for years. Should it have made a difference? Was our uneasiness justified?
A related question has troubled me about the books by H.A. Williams, which clarified so much, illuminated so many aspects of Christianity, deepened my understanding and supported me through some dark times. Harry Williams knew several close friends of mine, he was a man everyone seemed to love and whose company entertained as well as inspired many. He was Chaplain of Trinity College Cambridge, a gin-drinking, party-loving, socialising sort of priest, as well as one of deep faith. Then he had a severe nervous breakdown which he records in his painfully honest autobiography, Someday I’ll Find You. After several years of psychoanalysis he retained his equilibrium and out of his turmoil came two remarkable books, True Wilderness and True Resurrection, which spoke to a great many people at a profound level. Harry took great risks in what he said, he always told the truth as he saw it, he never followed the party line and as a result his sometimes shocking, always brave, sermons and writings drove an arrow straight to the heart of belief and spirituality. As a result of his treatment he not only changed in himself, but changed direction. This affable friend of princes, the aristocracy, the rich and the smart, became a monk in the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, in Yorkshire, a move which shocked many, who counselled him that he would be utterly miserable, cut off from the fun-loving life he had been at the heart of, from the theatres, the dinners, the holidays courtesy of well-heeled friends. He knew better. Life in the plain monastic community was his salvation and he recognised it as such. He lived there for many years in a prayerful, supportive community. Illness eventually confined him to his room and he was looked after faithfully, much valued, much loved. But somewhere along the line he lost his faith. He no longer believed in everything he had taught, stood for, fought for, hoped and longed for, and been supported by, all his life. Whether this loss of faith, terrible deprivation, which was akin to losing his life, lasted until his death, I do not know. Once, he would have said that he lost his life to find it. Did he discover the truth of that in the end? I do not know that, either.
But as a result of what I do know, which is simply that he lost his Christian faith, I feel as differently about the books he wrote as a believer as my fellow judge did about the poet who lost his first wife and found another shortly afterwards. It troubles me that I should feel like this and I cannot decide whether I am right. After all, the books have not changed, Harry’s beliefs at the time he wrote them were firm and clear. I have not lost my faith. Why should it matter what happened later? Why should it have mattered about the poet and his wives?
More than ever, as I think these things through, I come to the same and only possible conclusion – that the text has to stand alone and the author, their life, and personality before, during and after, are and must remain irrelevant to us, the readers, though, of course, they may be profoundly relevant to the writer. But that is another matter.
My shelf of spiritual reading is not very long because these books need to be read slowly, a few pages, or even just a few paragraphs, at a time. I rely upon these books and come back to them time and again. Michael Mayne’s books are so rich on so many fronts that they nee
d to be treated like fruit cake, taken a small, dense slice at a time. He and I first met when he was working for the BBC Religious Affairs department, a job which did not seem the perfect fit. While he was Vicar of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, then Dean of Westminster Abbey, we were not in touch, but after he retired we were briefly on the same committee and our friendship began again – and I started to read his books. We shared a private bond relating to someone who had been important in both our lives, and though we did not share a political viewpoint, and disagreed on one or two other things, it never seemed very important – or not to me.
He was one of the most well and widely read people I have ever known and his deep love and knowledge of literature, poetry, the novel and drama, informed everything he wrote. He took as much spiritual sustenance from art as from the Bible, the Prayer Book and the Anglican liturgy, and reading any of his books opens innumerable magic casements – and is best done with a pen and notebook to hand. Michael’s books have always led me to others.
He became famous in a particular way with one book, A Year Lost and Found, written after he was seriously ill with a particularly acute and crippling form of ME, while at Great St Mary’s. As a result, he became everybody’s counsellor and port of call on the subject, which must have been a considerable burden, and I know at least two people who wrote to him in despair during their own bouts of ME and received immediate, generous, thoughtful counsel and advice. You do not have to have the condition to appreciate the book because in a sense it is about any sudden, serious illness which strikes in the middle of a busy life, causing a reassessment of priorities and a change of attitude to many things, not least one’s own self. But until his moving final book, he turned away from writing about himself in that directly autobiographical sense – though everything Michael wrote was, to some extent, about himself and his own faith and experience and responses. This Sunrise of Wonder is a series of letters to his grandchildren, a kind of bequest of what Ronald Blythe called Michael’s ‘inventory of joy’ – the things in art and nature which, for him, made life supremely worth living and always pointed beyond themselves to God. Learning to Dance takes a motif the Elizabethans would have recognised, that life is a dance, or a series of dances, discusses it, plays with it, even, through a series of penetrating readings of books and paintings, music and drama. (He was a passionate theatregoer and for a brief period in early life had thought of becoming an actor.)
