Letters to Alice (10 page)

I will answer the questionnaire, of course, as best I can, and out of a general courtesy, but I do not think my answering will help the inquirer understand literature, men, women, or me. I can only reply as a reader, not a writer. I would have to write a whole play, or novel, based on the theme of every single question, and she would have to watch that, or read it, and absorb it, and understand it, before she would be one jot further on; and then she would have another questionnaire to send out, based on that, and we would never, ever finish. Of course we wouldn’t! The whole way in which fiction differs from journalism — a journalist would have no trouble answering the questionnaire — is that it attempts to reduce the enormous complexities of the whole to something comprehensible by an imaginative leap — we are humble sheep in a field of infinity: behold, a little ditch. Over goes the writer first: the readers follow after. But it was only such a little ditch…The journalist knows nothing of this: he has no concept of scale. He will answer question No. 1 briskly and informatively. He will say, ‘my favourite writers were female but my formative writers male, in adolescence. In my childhood the position was reversed, and in my adult life I have had no favourite or formative writers’ or something of that kind, and she will ponder this and, with any luck, will decide it means something. I will be still on Act 1, scene 3, detailing the nature of adolescence and the sexual desires of an androgynous English teacher.

These inquiries — mostly from women doing theses on some aspect of literature and/or feminism today — seem to believe that, if only they understood the writer, they would then understand the book. Recognizing that there is something inexplicable about the work, their ambition is instantly to nail it, and then explain it. Or perhaps, for some, it is that they are baffled by the writer’s ability to do what they themselves would like to do, but can’t. That is, write a novel that others want to read. They can write essays, memos, letters — why is it then that they can’t write novels: that the words lie dead and flat upon the page? There is some secret here, they feel, that the writer knows and unfairly withholds. If only the inquirer digs deep and uncomfortably enough — then the writer will be obliged to divulge the secret, every man can be his own novelist, and never spend a penny on a book again.

I worked in an advertising agency once. We were taken over by rational Americans, who could not bear the risky and expensive waywardness of the way we worked, and pinned us down by research, and tried to nail the creative process, so that successful campaigns could be produced in a rational way — so many positive adjectives here, so many exclamation marks there, a set ratio of copy to picture — but it never quite worked. The success rate was as high if we were guided by instinct as it was if we went by computer and research. Management retired, baffled, and let us get on with it in our own way, losing millions here, gaining millions there, for all the wrong reasons. It is for this same reason, the desire to control the creator and to calculate audience response, that once ‘great’ TV series decline and fall away; the initial creativity runs out; is drawn off like water from a well, by script editors who rationally apply a formula that ‘works’; only the well must presently run dry. Viewers notice it long before script editors: viewing figures fall, and only writers understand why. There is construction here, and description, but no invention.
Dallas
palls,
Upstairs Downstairs
brings a yawn.

Anyway, last night at Canberra the readers and the would-be writers came to hear me speak, and to ask questions. It was a particularly good evening. Speaker and audience animated one another: these occasions, when all goes well, are like nothing else. They are half-way, for the audience, between going to a theatrical performance and reading a book; and for the writer, half-way between the former and writing one. A new art form:

The phenomenon is not new. Readers and listeners made tracks to Snorri Sturluson, twelfth-century writer of Icelandic sagas, poet, politician and historian. They came, over snow and tundra, by horse and cart and reindeer and sleigh. The questions would have been the same then as they are now. ‘Mr Sturluson, do you work regular hours or do you wait for inspiration to strike? Do you take notice of what the critics say? Of what the King says?’ (He had better have paid more attention to the latter: he came to a sorry end by the King’s hand.) ‘What were the early influences on your work?’

Human nature does not change over the centuries. If one writer is born to every five hundred non-writers, so are five critics and ten sceptics, twenty questioners and, thank God, one hundred simple readers: the proportion was the same in the twelfth century as it is today: only the scale is different, and (in the West) there are lighter penalties for writing what displeases, and thinking what is inconvenient. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have quite upset a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilization.

Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.

I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote
Emma, Mansfield Park,
and
Persuasion
and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.

Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.) So the work is covered. It isn’t shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.

I would have thought the small, round table, half-way between fire and window, sitting with a warm back and life going on the other side of the pane, when you chose to look up from the page, and the occasional knock at the door, and a putting away of the work, was an ideal place and way for any writer to work, It’s how I choose to do it, I know that. I won’t have her pitied for it.

I do pity contemporary male writers, who have wives to bring them coffee and answer the phone to the bank manager, and no excuse not to undertake, not to complete, not to get published, and who find themselves with nothing to say. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting. We were not born with typewriter keys for fingers; we were born to pick up sticks and scratch away in mud and make our ochre marks on the walls of caves. Now, given that we must make a living, we join the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors and fight for our rights and our royalties and have to do so — but we should not be misled as to the true nature of our occupation. We do not need offices and a muted typewriter and no disturbance — we need a table half-way between the fire and the window, and the muted sound of the world around: to be of that world, and not apart from it. It is easier for women than it is for men, the world being what it is, and women writers, to their great advantage, are not allowed wives.

Alice, how is your novel? I do quite like your title.
The Well of Loneliness:
but I think someone has already used it. Do check with your tutor. You ask me how to write a ‘good novel’. Well, the writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending I do not mean mere fortunate events — a marriage, or a last-minute rescue from death — but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.

‘This is a far, far better thing,’ said Dickens at the end of
Tale of Two Cities,
‘than I have ever done.’ And look how that sold!

Readers need and seek for moral guidance. I mean this in the best and even unconventional sense. They need an example, in the light of which they can examine themselves, understand themselves.

If you are good, Jane Austen promised, you will be happy. Emma learns to control her foolish impulses, and marries Mr Knightley. Anne in
Persuasion
holds fast to her ideals of unchanging love, and brings her lover back to her. Elizabeth comes to distinguish unthinking prejudice from impartial judgment, and so can love and be loved by Mr Darcy. Jane Austen defines our faults for us, analyses our virtues, and tells us that if we will only control the one with the other, all will yet be well.

That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true. Of course we read and re-read Jane Austen.

It is in this sense that the City of Invention is so valuable to us. In this other City, virtue is rewarded, and the bad are punished; and all events are interconnected, and what is more, they rise out of characters and action, not chance. Had you noticed how rarely coincidence occurs in the City of Invention? It is frowned upon here: it upsets the visitors. Coincidence happens in real life all the time. Not here. Cause and effect must rule, or else the readers will prefer reality, with its chaos and coincidence. They will leave the City, in droves.

We want and need to be told how to live. Let me quote from
What is to be Done?,
written by Nicolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. People have been reading it for more than a hundred years. Virago have just re-issued it.
What is to be Done?
is what’s called a World Bestseller as is
Emma.
It is a study in self-control and moral development as is
Pride and Prejudice.
It is the story of a girl from a brutal background who grows into a fine young woman, runs a dress factory cooperative in Czarist Russia and becomes a doctor. She marries twice: the first marriage is sexless, since the sexual act is seen as something rather animal and undignified and standing in the way of true companionship and true love: in the second marriage sex is allowable as an expression of love. Chernyshevsky almost seems to be saying, like St Paul, ‘Well, better to marry, I suppose, than to burn.’ He offers us an agreeable and stirring and achievable Utopia, if only we would learn to control ourselves and our passions. He does not invoke God, as the Church does, as the interventionary power required to bring general self-control and Heaven here on earth: he sees the strength latent there in both man and woman, if only they will use it.

It is stirring stuff: we should have more of it. He addresses his reader boldly, thus:

I wager that up to the concluding paragraphs Vera, Kirsanov and Lopukhov (his protagonists) have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not every person’s impossible aim in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high. It is you who are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth: and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in the clouds, it is because you are in the infernal depths. The light where they stand all men should and can reach…Come up from your caves, my friends, ascend! It is not so difficult. Come to the surface of this earth, where one is so well situated and the road is easy and attractive. Try it: development! development! Observe, think, read those who tell you of the pure enjoyment of life, of the possible goodness and happiness of men.

Chernyshevsky was, if you want a rapid résumé of nineteenth-century Russian thought, a ‘man of the ‘eighties’, who replaced the men of the ‘sixties, with more visionary Utopians — Kropotkin the anarchist, Bakunin the philosopher. (They couldn’t stand each other.) Chernyshevsky ran off with Bakunin’s daughter and was mad, quite mad. He frightened everyone with his glittering eyes. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities when he was thirty-four, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped, they say, by converting the entire prison staff to his ideas, to the kind of ecstatic pre-Marxist communism we find in
What is to be Done?,
which he wrote in prison. The staff unlocked the prison gates and set him free. The authorities found him, and sent him to Siberia where the warders were less impressionable and too stupid and vile to be converted to anything, and where he died in 1889.
What is to be Done?
lives on.