Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (69 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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The trouble is, reason alone is too hard a couch on which to bring to birth babies, or novels, or the future. We need a softer, kinder, altogether muzzier
 
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and more emotional approach. Or we might as well, like Carl May, be dead of soul: like Joanna May, wonder how, if she can be cloned, how she can ever die: how night will ever fall.
This, as I say, is the penalty of thinking one day, when I read in my Sunday paper a report from a Canadian laboratory which said that the cloning of human beings was possible but there was no call for it, "but that's absurdI'd like to be cloned: while one of me was out talking, the other one could be at home writing." And then trying to turn that simple thought into a novel and discovering that, far from being simple, it was probably the most complex subject I had ever tackled; the sum, as it were, of all the novels that had gone before. The next one sets off on an entirely different tack, but that's another story.
 
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When the Writer Visits the Reader
Fay Weldon
January 15, 1990
I told my family I was leaving home at the weekend to go to Amsterdam. "Why?" they said. "Because I'm going to deliver a lecture," I said. They saw that as no good reason for leaving home. I am a writer. A writer, they believe, sits at home at a desk, like Hardy or Jane Austen, and sends a manuscript off by post, has a short argument about money with the publishers, and by magic a book appears, to general acclamation. "Why are you delivering this lecture?" they asked. "What's it about?'' "It is about why I am delivering the lecture," I was obliged to reply. I assured them that by talking to an audience I might be able to define and refine my views on the subject, and give a better answer on my return. I suspect, as they do, that I try too hard to justify my actions; that the truth of the matter is that I just like to stand on platforms and hear the sound of my own voice. Time wasand they preferred that timewhen I was too nervous to open my mouth in public. Now, they say, I can scarcely be stopped. There is some truth in this, too.
I wonder whether here in the Netherlands you have the same tradition of the Sunday sermon in church as we do in Britain? This begins to sound remarkably like a sermon. The kind of thing the vicar would sayrelating the greater to the lesser, the universal to the personal. Perhaps, now so few of us go to church, we just all miss sermons. Perhaps, in the absence of vicars, it's left to writers to stand up in public and speak, while others gather together to listen? Perhaps that's why I'm here. I will try this one on my family. But experience has made them shrewd. I don't think it will work.
Now there are, of course there are, a host of perfectly understandable
 
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reasons why writers should make speeches on literary and even political matters. It is good for sales if a writer has what the publishers call a high profileor so their publishers tell them. What's good for sales is good for publishers, for booksellers, and so must be good for writers. Yet the royalty on every paperback is so small, it is hardly an adequate motive for traveling abroad, addressing groups of readers, academics, fellow writers: writers would be more profitably engaged if they were actually writing, I suspect, than talking about themselves. But profit is simply not the point. We have to face it. I am continually persuaded that those connected with the world of ideas, of fiction, of the imaginationpublishers, booksellers, writersare not primarily motivated by money. Readers, certainly, are not. Where is the profit, I ask you, in financial terms, in reading a novel? I think we also often hide, abashed, almost embarrassed by our own idealism, our own romanticism, behind the familiar shelter "I only do it for the money."
Even when I worked in advertising, that most cynical and, allegedly, greedily cold-hearted of professions, I never quite believed the copywriter's plea, "I do this terrible thing for the money." Most people did it, so far as I can see, because they loved every minute of it. I certainly did.
I do not stand here, believe me, because I want or need the fee. I do it because the time has come to discover why I do it, and so perhaps even to decide finally to stop doing it, and I think if I talk it out with you, I might find out. Stay home, say my family, and make supper: I long to do so. Go out, say the publishers, and some instinct in me, raise your profile high, talk to your readers. Why you might even find out what they want. Not, of course, they add hastily, being nervous of the high literary moral stance of the writer, that you should ever give the reader what the reader wants: heaven forfend that you should ever alter what you write for the sake of the market; it's just, well, helpful to remind yourself that the reader is real, not a figment of the writer's imagination. It is certainly easy for a writer to forget the reader, believe he or she writes for publishers, editors, critics
Perhaps I just want to get out, to have a decent conversation. But this is a fairly one-sided conversation, isn't it? I talk. You listen, though later you will be required to ask questions. Certainly you will be given no opportunity to interrupt me. Perhaps that is what I wantto talk and not be interrupted. That certainly never happens at home. But I can do that on the page, with less trouble. On and on, using a literary skill to keep your attention: forbidding you to leave the page: using the device of a story to keep you reading while I impose my view, my vision of the world upon you. The world's like this, I say, and that: you'd better believe it. And I prove my point by instructing my invented characters to behave this way
 
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and that, by way of demonstration. Unfair tactics. No documentary producer would be allowed to do it. Yet I get away with it. Why? What is a novel but a pattern composed of lies, exaggeration, polemics, and false instances? Yet how I love to write them and to read them. I would pay for the privilege of doing it: it still rather astonishes me that I am not required to pay for the luxury. I suspect people ought only to get paid for doing what they do not want to do: then money would have a purpose and a meaning. It is this feeling in writers, a kind of gratitude to fate for having given them this gift, that makes them so easily exploitable; why we have to have agents to protect our rights; why we are so ready to regard our publishers, who are our business partners, as our friends, believe our editors must know better than we do; why I belong to the Writers Union, the Society of Authors, why I struggle for better contracts for writers, which I also do for no payment, and frequently suggest to writers, women writers in particular, that they should take courses in nongratitude, in the same way as, in their own self-interest, they will take courses in karate. Because you feel grateful to fate is no reason to say to a publisher, give me a rotten deal.
I look at my list of activities over the previous year and discover I have done many, many things apart from actually writing. I've judged a whole succession of literary prizes: the Whitbread Fiction Prize, the GPA Irish Prize, the Peninsula Prize, the Mail on Sunday first-paragraph-of-a-novel award. This is a kind of subprofession. It means you get to read and discuss novels with other people who are also easily tempted to read and discuss them: it means you find out how the minds of your fellow judgesusually lucid, frequently ingenious, often willful peoplework; you learn a lot from those who have actually studied literature, as I have not: my own qualifications are in Economics, not much help, one might think. I find out from this group analysis of a text all kinds of things about what makes a novel "good," what makes a novel "best." It shows you the kind of novel you don't want ever to write: the kind of novel you wish you had written: it obliges you to be not merely reader, but judge; to be persuasive in your enthusiasms. How can you tell which is the best book? people ask: how dare you sit in judgment? to which all you can reply isthe book that wins, say the Booker Prize, is not the "best" book, only time will tell you that, but the book best fitted to win this year's Booker Prize, and someone has to be prepared to say so. Someone, somewhere, has to make what is called a ''value judgment" or we will all drift into a sea of polite and easy acceptance of the pretentious and the dull. I understand well enough why I accept invitations to act as a literary judge. It is flattering to be asked. I like to read contemporary novels. I like not to have to pay for them. I like to meet my fellow judges. I love talking about novels. I love to dress up for
 
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award dinners; I love the buzz and excitement of the occasion, the sense of literary scandal brewing: I am prepared, for the sake of these things, to be reviled and derided by those who think I've done it hopelessly wrong. Besides which, I believe I am usually rightand time tends to prove me soand I have become quite good at it with practice, and it is always very pleasurable to practice a skill, especially one not many have the opportunity or privilege to develop. I am always much reassured by the degree of unanimity of choice in any panel of judges, the first five or six on the short list are usually a matter of consensusthe winner and runner-up hotly contestedand the next down, the third favorite, very often gets the prize because the supporters of numbers 1 and 2 won't give way. It is this compromise choice, the book that upsets nobody, that the experienced judge tries to keep in its proper place. The "Mail on Sunday" pays in bottles of wine. Is that a good idea? My family quite likes that one.
I see from my list I've done three residential writing workshopstwo in New Zealand, one a four-day general fictional course, one a screen-writing course; and, a week after I came back from there, a five-day course in novel writing at the Arvon foundation in Devon, which I tutored with a certain Penelope Fitzgerald: an excellent novelist. Now I don't believe you can teach the ungifted to write: I think you can save the gifted a year or so practice time, and that this is worth doing. In any such group of apprentices you will find one or two potentially professional writers: the rest you can help, as it were, find themselves through writing. Writing as therapy is not such a bad idea. The writing of fiction is a training in empathy, even more acutely than is the reading of fiction. It does no one any harm. When I say reading does no one any harm, I sometimes wonder. I am surprised by the number of people who say that though they read Stephen King, they won't keep a Stephen King novel in the house. It seems to them altogether too powerful as an object, to carry with it dark and elemental powers. It is what Stephen King aims for, and what he succeeds in only too well, excellent writer that he is. Whether he "should" or not is another matter. "Should" applies to writers as much as to doctors, or politicians, anyone who interferes with the lives of others, let us not suppose it doesn't.
It has become customary for novelists, screenwriters, poets of standing, to tutoror facilitate: the NZ wordthese classes. Again, why we do it is unclear to me. It takes up valuable time and energy, and pays very little money. We do it because funding in the Arts, in Britain as elsewhere, is starved of money: if you do it, you must do it for the love of it, and so many of us go out and try and teach others, from the desire to pass on a craft from generation to generation, to impart enthusiasm, to share common
 
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ground, to try to detect, perhaps, where craft stops and art begins. As I say, it is exhausting. You must, in reading the work of beginners, cherish the good, expunge the bad, while hoping to heaven you can tell what is good and what is bad. You must resist the temptation to make other people write as you do; you must realize that what you see as a weakness may in fact be a strengthI don't like to see more than two adjectives in a row: I will say, well, if a noun needs an adjective, that adjective had better take its time in a phrase, or a sentence, all to itselfonly to have brought to me an Iris Murdoch novel in which she uses eighteen adjectives in a row. You learn not to teach rules. You hate the other teachers of creative writing who've had a go at your pupils, distorting their vision and wrenching their style out of shape. No doubt they think the same of me. Penelope Fitzgerald and I came to the conclusion we had a maternal view of language, we want to nurture the potential of someone else's novel, almost as much as our own. Because you can't bear to see a sloppy sentence without wanting to clean it up: as if it had some kind of existence outside its writer: carried in itself the potential for perfection; it is your simple duty to do what you can to help it on its way, in the same way as if you see a drowning man, you feel it is your duty to jump in and save him. You may not do it but you know you should.
When last in New Zealand, the country where I was brought up, though not born, I conceived it as my duty to bring NZ writing to the attention of the world. I chided my pupils there, many of them already published in NZ, for their insularity; I pointed out that they could no longer hide behind their geographical remoteness: the fax, I said, made the whole English-speaking world one land, and that included all those nations who now have English as a second language. You are not writing for three million, I told them, but for a thousand, thousand million, and you should behave accordingly, write accordingly, and change your publishers accordingly. I was, I think, outrageous in my presumption. They were very good about it, but probably quite glad when I flew off.
I noticed there that the young writers, brought up on visual narrative, in film and TV, were much more at ease writing screenplays than prose: took to it, if encouraged, like ducks to water. I came to the conclusion that the peculiar and distinctive character of the NZ short story, in which no person or place is ever described, but simply somehow occursso that the reader, being denied any helpful detail, can only assume the middle: middle class, middle age, middlish temperament: how boring writing can becomeis because the young writer, film reared, sees his story rather than hears it: all too easily loses the art of transferring the train of his, her thoughts from his own head into another by way of pen and paper: he, she,

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