Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (2 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page xiii
NANCY A. WALKER
is a Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of
Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women
(1990), and
A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture
. She is also the editor of
Redressing the Balance
(1989).
 
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Introduction
Regina Barreca
Reader, I know it isn't easy. But if I can write it, you can read it.
Fay Weldon,
The Shrapnel Academy
I picked up a copy of
Remember Me
at the Kings Cross railway station bookstall on my first trip to Paris when I was twenty-two. Going to Paris should have in itself been interesting enough to fully occupy my time, but the journey paled in comparison to discovering Fay Weldon. I didn't look up until we reached the Gare du Nord, and by then I was hooked. I was speaking in short sentences, punctuated by satiric aphorisms which were almost always softened by brief bits of wisdom; reading Fay Weldon made me talk with her inflection the way that you might pick up a foreign accent when traveling. As soon as I returned to my studies in England, I bought every book she'd written and began doing my academic work on her prose.
After several years, I was back in New York and teaching at Queens College, home to the prestigious Queens College Evening Readings Series. Encouraged by Joe Cuomo, director of the series, I gathered all my nerve and invited Weldon to give a reading. I spent more time revising the letter I sent than I'd spent on many a graduate paper. Finally, I quite simply began, ''I've been told that you can never meet your heroes," and asked her if she would consider making the trip over. I told her that part of my dissertation on hate and humor in contemporary women writers was based on her novels. I didn't want to seem presumptuous so I reassured her that my writing my thesis on her work didn't mean I'd be digging up her garden to look for unfinished manuscripts or anything, but that I hoped for her benediction. I mailed the letter feeling like I was entering the Irish Sweepstakes; I hoped against hope that she would reply. Weldon wrote
 
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back the following week, saying "By all means dig up the garden. You can keep the manuscripts. We shall plant bulbs."
Weldon came to do her first American reading to a room packed with eager listeners who made the pilgrimage to Flushing driven by the shared belief that Fay Weldon is one of the most significant writers of today. Perhaps some of the audience were drawn by a blurb that announced that the writer of the initial episodes of "Upstairs, Downstairs" was appearing, but most of those who showed up on that May evening were there with Weldon's books under their arms. She did not disappoint. Reading from
The President's Child,
which had just been published in the States, she seduced her already converted audience to a new level of devotion. Her voice, which continues to be a combination of Grace Kelly and Mother Goose, is the perfect vehicle for her prose because it allows both the humor and the power of her work to come through. Described by one of her sons as "very quiet and terribly English," she nevertheless galvanized her audience. She did not so much read
with
emotion as she read in such a way that her listeners were themselves filled with feeling. She remained dignified and commanding, but also enormously accessible and delighted by the audience response.
Like a conductor before an unrehearsed orchestra, she brought us all into the same key. For example, Weldon would read, in an appropriately resonant voice, a passage from
The President's Child
as follows: "And the valleys shall ring to Thy Praise, O Lord." There would be a momentary pause, during which she might look up over the rim of her glasses before addressing the audience directly and explaining, in more confidential tones, that the cries of passion during lovemaking are the joyful noises we make unto the Lord because "What else could the psalmist have meant? The bleating of sheep on the yellowy Mesopotamian hills? No. I think he too heard the
cries de joie,
which almost, but not quite, blot out the tears of misery and fear which follow them." Dismissing the idea that bleating sheep are the subject of the Lord's attention, Weldon effectively undercut any diversion away from her intended effect. Mixing the profane and the sacred, the familiar and the divine, Weldon was mapping out her usual transgressive territory.
The audience changed from a crowd into a community. We were nodding and laughing and seeing ourselves in what she read. After her reading, dozens and dozens of women and men lined up with their multiple volumes of her work, and I have no doubt that every one of them left feeling as if they had formed a permanent relationship with the author. They told her stories of their marriages and divorces, children and parents, and she listened carefully enough to comment on everyone's remarks. It is a re-
 
Page 3
markable gift Weldon continues to possess: readings to crowds of several hundred will result in half that number lining up to speak to her, and she never flags in her ability to respond directly to everyone. Perhaps her novels, filled as they are with direct references to the reader and demanding a high level of response, have actually created a sense of dialogue.
I have had the pleasure of hearing Fay Weldon read from many more novels during the last ten years, and I have been able to appreciate, as I did on my receipt of that first letter, her generosity and her ability to fascinate her readers. Weldon's work is worth digging into and, like a healthy garden, yields rich rewards for the efforts made to cultivate its every corner.
Her nineteen full-length works of fiction have been translated into more than a dozen languages; several of these best-selling books have won her critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. In England she is a familiar figure on television and a much-heard voice on radio. Her nonfiction has appeared everywhere, it seems, from
Allure
to the
New York Times
"Op Ed" page; three works of nonfiction range from discussions of Austen to Rushdie. Most telling, perhaps, is that her wit, erudition, and signature style have already brought the term "Weldonesque" into wide circulation whenever the uncanny, unnerving, wily, or wise comes into view.
A classic "Weldonesque" moment is one in which all the forces in the universe seem to converge in the most unlikely of ways: the day that the cat dies, a new kitten appears stuck in a high branch of the backyard tree; the night that a husband leaves, an old lover telephones for no particular reason, just to say hello; a mother dies young, but her daughter's daughter has the same way of sipping her coffee, or of preferring wool rather than cotton next to the skin; a child fails an exam, but is offered a good job that very afternoon. These moments as often as not tread on one another's heels because, as Weldon writes in the epigram to
Life Force,
"Nothing happens. And nothing happens. And then everything happens." When everything happens, Weldon is there to capture the event. Or we can see it in terms of linkages, unnoticed but nevertheless irrevocable, as she points out in
Remember Me
. "Everything has meaning," cautions the narrator. ''Nothing is wasted. Only the young believe that they can stand alone in the world, for good or bad, their own master, independent of the past." As if to convince her readers by offering scientific detail, she goes on to explain that
As we grow older we sense more and more that human beings make connections in much the same manner as the basic materials of matter: that we cluster, in fact, as do those complex molecular structures which we see as models in physical laboratories. The linkages are unexpected; they can be of objects, plants, places, events, anything. It is perhaps why we should take good care
 
Page 4
to polish furniture, water plants, telephone friends with whom we apparently have nothing in common, pay attention to coincidence, and in general help the linkages along instead of opposing themas sometimes, in our panic at our very un-aloneness, we are moved to do. [P. 61]
The linkages that Weldon invokes do more than provide a quasi-scientific terminology; the links forged between apparently random people are at once defining a territory and creating a net, thereby keeping safe everything within their protective boundary.
With all these affirming qualities, why choose the word "wicked" for the title? Blame it on alliteration, but "wicked" has been applied to Weldon by critics since reviews of her work began appearing in the late sixties. "Gleefully wreaking havoc,'' headlined a review in
Vogue,
"She talks ... about her wicked, wicked ways." One reviewer dubbed her "a sniper. A sniper for good," implying that Weldon uses her position as an outsider to her advantage. Another declared that "there are demons in the Weldon refrigerator," and endless reviewers wonder if Weldon considers herself the model for female Lucifer Ruth in
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
. This linking of Weldon's work to wickedness is not without her approval, it must be said, given that she herself announces that "My moral fiction is slightly amoral because it doesn't toe the party line of moral. It is not ideologically sound, or indeed moral, for an intelligent and competent woman to turn herself into her husband's fancy, pushy, idiotic mistressnow is it? But that is what Ruth does in
She-Devil
. My idea of morality isn't about women becoming strong and forceful, competent or whatever; it's about having a good time."
1
So it is obvious that Fay Weldon is not wicked, not really. True, her fiction and her nonfiction alike are filled with images of transgression, subversion, heresy, and hysteria, but her writings are, in the end, humane, compassionate, sympathetic, and merciful. It is equally important to offer a caveat to the second part of the book's title: this collection also deals with Weldon's nonfiction. Clearly, Weldon's nonfiction work is as central to an understanding of her textual territories as is her fiction. The same essential issues are explored: imbalances of power, traced along lines of gender, country, and class, are in the forefront of her essays, articles, and lectures. Robert Sullivan explores Weldon's essays in detail and shows us precisely how her signature narrative voice is as fully present in her nonfiction as in her fiction. Weldon refuses to make distinctions between truth and fiction: "the novel you read and the life you live are not distinguishable," explains a character in
Life Force
(p. 15).
If you come to any of Weldon's works, fiction or nonfiction, angry, you will be calmed; if you come to them complacent, you will leave outraged.

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