Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (49 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 153
Sorry: That's a tangential theory and I apologize for ... well, for trotting it out. It has little to do with the subject at hand.
Which is: Fay Weldon, Journalist.
I mulled this for a while
Fay Weldon, Journalist
and came up empty. I hadn't had a clue that Ms. Weldon journalized ... journaled ... journayed ... reported on stuff.
Now, I tried to envision it. I conjured the elegant Ms. Weldon in fur-felt fedora, press card in place, taking notes. Didn't work. I saw her sleuthing
à la
Woodward, meeting shadowy figures with deep throats in parking garages and eventually bringing down Thatcher (whom I assumed any liberal London cultural-elitist detested). Nope: History told me this hadn't happened. I tried to fit Ms. Weldon into the Rosalind Russell role: batting out the murder story on deadline on her rickety Royal, then dashing off with editor-in-chief Cary Grant in the film's final frames. I figured Ms. Weldon might seek me out and shoot me for that one, and erased it from memory.
So I was having trouble with this "Fay Weldon, Journalist" thing. Then the pile of FW Journalism arrived from Gina. Journalism it was, and a good substantial hunk of it. But it wasn't
that kind
of journalism.
It was, I realized pretty quickly, Fay Weldon's nonfiction: essays and sketches and musings and arguments and polemics and proddings about things that are true. (Not that Weldon's fiction isn't about true things. It
is,
of course. HeyYou know what I mean.)
So then: Fay Weldon's Nonfiction. That was the real assignment.
Fine. My task was now clear: Discuss Fay Weldon's nonfictions for a volume entitled
Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
. That I am the black sheep among Gina's contributors is evident, a point I'll raise with Gina later, and privately.
Well then: Weldon's Nonfictions. Are they, too, wicked? If soAre they too wicked? Wicked enough? And more: What's wicked? Which wicked will we whack around? A teenage boy thinks Motley Crue is wicked, as in
wicked,
while his parents think the Crue is wicked, as in they-should-burn-in-hell!
Weldon's nonfiction is
wicked
and wicked bothby turns and even, sometimes, simultaneously. It is, for the most part, every bit as sharp, provocative, and fun to read as her fiction is. Every bit as pointed, too. As with the novelist Weldon, the journalist Weldon clearly feels there are those who shouldor at least willburn in hell.
As an operative theory for our examination, I would offer that the burn-in-hell essays, as opposed to the burn-in-hell novels, are less effective. When you're dealing with true folk you run the risk of sinking to their
 
Page 154
level by shouting at them, even if you're shouting perfectly sensible stuff. When you're dealing with fake folk, you control the explication of their vile behavior and thus, if you deal deftly, you maintain a firm upper hand. You manipulate events to make your point elegantly. When you get outraged with the real world, it is usually because you
can't
manipulate events. Your frustration is sometimes unseemly on the page.
But this will come through. Let's dive into the pile.
Its topics are several and varied. "On Censorship" resides hard by "Ladies Who Don't Lunch," which follows closely on the stomp, stomp, stomping heels of "Twenty Years Older and Deeper in Debt" (about Britain's failure to treat women equally in the workforce), which shares the covers with "God and the Creative Imagination." And then there's a commentary on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas dustup.
My goodness.
But think about it. Every one of these essays concerns either (a) women today, (b) literature today, or (c) both. And thus are they all material fit to be commented upon by the author of
Female Friends, The Hearts and Lives of Men
and the other aforementioned books. Weldon, when she chooses well, chooses topics she knows of, and Weldon's concerns in her novels are reflected in her essays.
Essays these are, mostly. A few are speeches, and they read somewhat less well, as speeches usually do. The speeches are more strident in argument and broaderless eloquentin humor. But most items in this collection are essays, and good sound ones. Well worth reading.
Take Weldon's take on the Hill-Thomas affair ("Sex and Paradox Across the Atlantic"). It helps us Americans, I think, to get a view from afar: "The Affair settled down, or so it seemed to us here in Britain, into a dispute as to whether racism was worse than sexism: racism won by a hair. A sign of relief, I fear, ran through the male intelligentsia of the international community: and a sigh of sorrow through the female." Some would argue, perhaps, that the situation was a bit more complex than that, but the good essayist focuses on one point before traipsing off to the next one, and this is what Weldon does, always. Don't ever think she won't get to the next one. After she has examined Thomas-Hill from the sexist angle, she finishes with this provocative thought: "It is tempting to find a parallel in the Rushdie Affair, in which the sacrificial victim to a different paradoxthat freedom of thought and freedom of religious belief are mutually exclusiveis still two years later dodging the assassination squads. The centuries are littered with such victims, from Socrates onwardas we creep miserably towards self-knowledge and the civilization that, with
 
Page 155
any luck, comes in its train." Make it
four
years later and let the lament stand.
The essay, with this last allusion, becomes rounded and worthy. It has added not just a lucid appraisal but an original thought to the heap of opinion built during Thomas-Hill. This is what E. B. White used to do: come up with a new way of looking at a thing, but a way that always, once digested, seemed no less valid or obvious than the standard way of looking at a thing. If an essayist's argument is forced, it's invalid. If an argument's usual, it's pointless.
I found the short Thomas-Hill essay the best of Weldon's no-jokes, Political-with-a-cap-P pieces. I found, by way of contrast, her essay on the feminists Susan Faludi, author of
Backlash,
and Marilyn French, author of
The War Against Women,
much less fine.
In this piece Weldon doesn't forward a single thought that is incorrect. She starts by pointing out how much harder it has become to openly proclaim oneself a feminist. She goes on to applaud Faludi and French for delineating the recent backlash against women. She continues by condemning job bias. She finishes this way: "These are books for men as well as women: but let men answer the charges. They're pretty telling."
Well, sure they are. Weldon at one point calls
The War Against Women
an "unfunny, impassioned, angry and powerful book." Hers is an unfunny, impassioned, and angry essay that lacks the power usually inherent in a work by Fay Weldon, who is an impassioned, sometimes angry, and very funny writer. She would say (I would guess): "Some things just aren't funny." I'm not arguing that point. What I'm saying is: Weldon has such an acuity for seeing the funnythe quirky, the odd, the bizarre evenin a subject, or for skewering through humor, that when she does not do so, she is not at her very best. The Thomas-Hill essay had a Long Dong Silver joke, for goodness' sake
and profited by it
. We were in Weldon country. In the Faludi-French piece, Weldon is a home-run hitter bunting. She's a serve-and-volley tennis player forced to the baseline. She has sheathed a part of her weaponry, and maybe the best part of it, for it is a part she wields as well as anyone in the trade. Imagine Navratilova forced to serve underhand.
And, again: In this essay, there isn't much that's new. There's nothing that's wrong, but not much that's new.
In her best essays, original thought after original thought comes marching.
I would argue that Weldon is as astute a categorizera labeleras Mencken or Wolfe, who are justly famous for their dubbing of society. To be such a be-knighter, a writer must have a keen eye (the writer has to spot
 
Page 156
a type before labeling it). In "On the Reading of Frivolous Fiction" Weldon comes up with classifications for literature: good good books (tried and true classics like
Vanity Fair
and
Madame Bovary
that astound you anew with their quality), bad good books (those that aspire to be great through various devices and poses, and that are therefore "unendurable"), good bad books (these "can be terrific.
Hollywood Wives,
Mills and Boon, the thriller, the horror, the scifi romp: it is true they can take you out of the real world, but what's the matter with that? The real world isn't so hot. Read the good bad books while you gather strength for the good good books: the illumination of the vision, the shift of focus in the psyche that the good good book provides is strong stuff. You can't be open to it all the time."), and finally, bad bad books which are, basically, bad books. I finished the essay and said to my self, "She's right!" Now I will go forth and plagiarize Weldon's very original good good books theory, and I hope she takes this as a sincere form of flattery.
Another essay with labels: "Ladies Who Don't Lunch" would, I figured, be a lark. And it was, sort of. But as Weldon explained about midday women, it dawned on this reader that there really
are
differences of substance between ladies who lunch ("elegant, wealthy, fastidious, never drop food on their silk or cashmere clothes; empires crumble for them. They are timeless. Queen Nefertiti, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy were, I imagine, ladies who lunched.") and ladies who "do" lunch ("always busy. They plot, plan, conspire, radiate confidence, pick and choose lovers and organise empires. Elizabeth I and Florence Nightingale would have 'done' lunch.") and ladies who ''meet for" lunch ("really nice and often covered with crumbs. They do good works and people are sorry when they die. They improve the lot of empires. Eleanor Roosevelt and Marie Stopes were the kind to meet other ladies for lunch.") Weldon enjoys, as you might expect, some high hilarity with her premises. (Overheard in "the Great Celestial Restaurant in the Sky [were] Nefertiti on Eleanor: My dear, for all the good she did in the world, did you see that
hat
? Marie on Elizabeth I: Such an unrestful, noisy person! No wonder she isn't married. Florence on Helen: Well, you can't deny her looks, but she's no better than a call girl. Everyone on Cleopatra: But Anthony was
married
!")
Weldon has her fun, but all the while she is going someplace. She is heading toward a discussion of how personal substance and style, sometimes seemingly at odds, can coexist. Weldon is an intellectually brilliant woman and yet she is one, she concedes, who suffers from "shopping disturbance." She explains: "I was born to shop. Some are, some aren't. I am totally at home, indeed almost at my happiest, in a department store. If this is a sin, I am a self-confessed sinner: if it is a vice, I am vicious: if it
 
Page 157
is an illness, I am ill." What she's getting at here is this: "Yes, yes, the personal is the political, all that, but the trivial must also be the immortal." In a way, it certainly must. The smaller a thingthe more interior it isthen the larger. It's a joke, but it isn't. It is, in fact, Weldon's defense for her status as a contributing editor of
Allure,
in which the essay appeared. She answers criticism "that it ill befits a 'serious writer' (me) to write for the readers of
Allure
(you)'' with a paraphrase of Flaubert: "Allure, c'est moi."
C'est elle, indeed.
She-Devil est elle,
but
Allure est elle aussi
! People are of many parts. And the Alluring aspects of Weldon are, I think, more central to her
being
than the angry-polemicist aspects. She's
not
Rush Limbaugh, and she needn't mud wrestle with him.
I found the "Lunch" essay immensely appealing and thought-provoking. I felt the same way about another piece for
Allure,
"Infidelity." This is a primer for the soon-to-be adulterous. "There's what ought to happen, and what does happen, and they're different," Weldon begins. "There's love eternal, couples walking hand in hand into the sunset of old age, and you and I know how seldom that happens, and how we go on hoping against hope that it will.
"There are theories of life and there's real life, and a great black tearful pit in between which it's all too easy to fall into. So be careful about theories...." That's the lesson to be taught today: Be careful about theories, don't hang your hat on them. That life isn't always what it seems is a very ordinary dictum. Weldon, essayist, puts a spin on it. It's not an earthmoving spin, but it's a spin sufficient to propel the essay, to make this lesson her own: a Professor Weldon lesson in life.
'[I]f anyone tells you it's okay to have an affair, that it will enrich your marriage, don't listen. Or at any rate, if you do, if you're meeting this man out of hours, be careful, be secret, tell no one. And if you want to cry to the world I'm happy, it's so wonderful, I'm in lovedon't do it." Weldon depicts, in this piece, the consequences of not heeding this advice. There's a hilarious sketch about an idealized husband, Dean, chancing upon a loverly phone message to his wife from one "Bob," who is, more unfortunately, her sister Frieda's husband. Dean takes this new circumstance of interfamilial intercourse absolutely in stride, and the sketch ends with him and his wife declaring in unison: "Hand in hand into the sunset!" Then Weldon depicts what really happens: Bob ripping apart his wayward wife's office; two families wrecked; Bob running off with the sister, etc.all the stuff you might read in a Weldon novel. "The penalty for discovering your erotic self may be extreme," says Weldon. "So watch it." She is the bravest and most helpful of feminist journalists: One who reports not

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