Letters to Alice (14 page)

All our lives, on whatever scale they are lived, however studded with events, sexual obsession, divorce, cancer, the making and breaking of fortunes, public recognition or approbation, reduce themselves at times, like some rich sauce over a low flame, to these little, powerful, painful simmerings, where small events loom impassively large. A picnic on Box Hill on a summer’s day, when everything goes wrong; to be remembered, in real life in the future, after a fashion, but never quite, as it were, head-on. The mind slips away, hastily gets round, somehow, like a car going into rapid reverse, grating its gears, when it encounters these small, scraping memories, which do not count as Major Life Events (to use the terminology of the times), do not merit Working Through, but are simply there, and one wishes they weren’t. Social lapses; most embarrassing moments; carcinogenic rubbings in the mind. Long years with a psychoanalyst will smooth them over, listening to
Emma
on the radio will do pretty well, sharing this fictional understanding, not just with
Emma’s
writer, but with all her readers as well. A package tour to the City of Invention!

Alice, does it not seem to you most extraordinary: the amazing phenomenon of shared fantasy. I can never get used to it. I suppose half a million people listened to
Emma
this afternoon; of those a few hundred thousand would already know the book; a few thousand, with me, would be willing and wishing Emma
not
to say what she did say, while knowing that indeed she would say it:

Miss Bates: ‘I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?’ (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on everybody’s assent). ‘Do not you all think I shall?’

Emma could not resist. Emma: ‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to number — only three at once!’

Alice, Emma lives!

Or let me put it another way, if that makes you shuffle and feel uneasy. (There are more ways of killing a cat, and making a Jane Austen convert, than you would suppose.) All over the country irons were held in suspension, and car exhaust bandages held motionless and lady gardeners stayed their gardening gloves, and cars slowed, as Emma spoke, as that other world intruded into this. It does more and more, you know. We join each other in shared fantasies, it is our way of crossing barriers, when our rulers won’t let us. ET and his like is our real communication. Hand in hand the human race abandons the shoddy, imperfect structures of reality, and surges over to the City of Invention.

(I suppose to you it appears quite ordinary: for you the world has always trembled on the verge of the fictional supra-reality:
Dr Who
flows in your bloodstream. It still, as a phenomenon, leaves me feeling breathless.)

O.K. Back to
Northanger Abbey.
In my edition (Oxford World’s Classics) I observe that the editor (John Davie) has, according to his publishers, researched on authors as diverse as Jane Austen and Browning. It is this kind of remark that makes me feel really inadequate as aunt, semi-literary tutor, and moral adviser. Is not Browning a poet? Is not Jane Austen a novelist? Are they then both to be grouped as authors? Can comparison then be made, or as in this case, anti-comparisons? To say ‘as diverse as Jane Austen and Jorge-Luis Borges’ would make more sense. Jane Austen and Browning simply doesn’t. Unless there is something I
don’t know,
and Browning wrote novels as well as poetry. (Did he? Did he? At moments like these I wish I had persisted with Eng. Lit. I am sure it is the kind of thing everyone else knows, but me.) And who am I to find fault with the editors of the Oxford University Press?

I raise this point, Alice, in the hope that you will not begin the suspension of your disbelief until you have actually got to the text of whatever you are reading; the phrase ‘as diverse as Jane Austen and Browning’, if you allow it to penetrate your young and all too penetrable mind, will muddle and confuse your mental filing system. You will forever be pulling things out of the wrong places. You must always be more on your guard, when reading non-fiction, as I like to rather affectedly and disparagingly call it, than fiction.

And do remember, a letter counts as non-fiction. Careful, Alice. Use what I say as a sack of rather dusty brown rice, from which you will take cupfuls, at intervals, and concoct delicious and nourishing dishes. (You mention in your letter that you are a vegetarian. Your Marxist Professor (married) of Economics is a vegetarian too. That surprises me. Marxists are usually meat-eaters. It is the softer, more liberal left which feels tender about lately living things.) What I say, remember, is not the dish itself, merely a rather lulling ingredient, to be used at your discretion. Use
your
judgment, Alice, not mine.

Personally, I don’t like brown rice at all. I find it difficult to swallow. Sticks in the gullet. Go by instinct, Alice, too. Rely on what you
feel
about books, while remembering it is disgraceful to toss your head and say, ‘I know what I like’, if only because by the time you’ve aligned these two rather different activities, knowing and liking, both may somehow have slipped away. You’ve confined each within the bounds of the other: Siamese twins, back to back, trapped, lashing out at the world, most destructively.

Travel hopefully, as a reader. Retain your trust, as long as you possibly can. My bathroom contains seven half-finished thrillers. I push myself beyond endurance, in the face of bad writing (by this I mean, I think, imprecision in writing, combined with a paucity of thought and feeling, but more of this later), hoping to be held and entranced. And what pleasure there is when, rarely, a good, intelligent, well-worked thriller turns up — I tell you, there shall be more rejoicing in the bathroom over one writer that is lost, and found again…

Alice, I do have to stop now.
Northanger Abbey
will have to wait ‘til the next letter. I shall be serious and responsible, I promise. The novel was written in 1798, or thereabouts, when Jane Austen was in her early twenties, was sent to a publisher who bought it but kept it for ten years and didn’t publish it. I have some sympathy with him. It isn’t nice to be mocked.

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Europe and Jane’s wild cousin (well, she married a foreigner, a Frenchman and a royalist, and wore flashy gowns) had fled to England, home and safety with her baby son, and Jane’s aunt (her mother’s brother’s wife) was accused of shoplifting — the penalty if she was found guilty was hanging at worst and transportation at best — and God knows what dreadful things were happening in Ireland, and Jane Austen wrote
Northanger Abbey,
in which the worst thing that happened was that Catherine was sent home in sudden disgrace by her boyfriend’s father, General Tilney.

All love,

Aunt Fay

P.S. Mrs Leigh Perrot was acquitted, but only after she had spent many months in jail awaiting trial. She could have bought the shopkeeper off, as he expected, but Mr Leigh Perrot said, ‘No, I will never submit to blackmail of this kind!’ This story is usually told as demonstrating how noble, likable and admirable a man Mr Leigh Perrot was. But I see it as just more proof of the general premise, that when a man has a principle, a woman pays for it.
He
believes in honour:
she
stays in prison.

London, April

M
Y DEAR ALICE,

I am going to tell you a story you won’t believe. A couple of years ago I was being taken home from a party in an art dealer’s car, and there beside me on the seat was a packet wrapped in brown paper. I put my hand on it and found that it was warm. Books and papers, similarly placed, were cool enough. I remarked upon it to the art dealer, and he said, ‘Well, of course. It’s a Lowry. It’s a hot property.’ I took my hand away rather rapidly. He unwrapped it later and showed it to me. I am not a profound admirer of Lowry’s work. I think it is pleasant enough, and leave reverence for those who know more than me. Your mother, for example. (When the qualities were shared out between her and me — as qualities are, among siblings; between them they add up to quite a decent person — she got a visual sense, I got a response to language.) So it was not me endowing the parcel — however telepathically — with a warm importance. I could only imagine it was the intensity of other people’s regard, hotting up a mere painting into an actual art object. Lowry had just died; his was the name on many lips, his work a vision in the forefront of many minds, in the strange cultural shadow world where we dwell.

Now, inasmuch as those engaged in particle physics will assure us that a particle alters by virtue of being observed, so we can never really know what anything is like, because the knowledge interferes with what we wish to know, it doesn’t surprise me that a painting, so imbued with the force of attention, changes its nature. Heats up. Hot property!

I told you you wouldn’t believe me.

But I have had more than one literary critic, adjudicator, panel member, and not all that drunk either, raise his bowed head and say, ‘Don’t tell anyone. I know it’s
mad.
But you begin to know, when you pick up a MS, before you open it, whether it’s any good or not. Just something about the
feel.’

And then, having confided this absurdity, they fall back into their stupor, the paralysis of the over-literate. Enforced judgment thins the blood, in the end. They’re the first to agree: they are the slaves to the Muse, not honest yeomen. She uses them and abuses them, sends them chasing off on thankless errands, yet they love her. And it is a noble calling; it is their judgment, after all, that sends the writer or painter off on the strange leaping, bounding, crag-to-crag journey to the summit of their discipline. Hot property!

Desperate would-be writers sometimes send off to those theatrical managements who have rejected their work obscure plays by famous people. When these too are rejected they turn round and say, ‘See. We are at the mercy of incompetent and prejudiced judgment! We always knew it. That was a Chekhov play (or whatever) that was!’

But it seems to me that the renown of the writer rubs off on the work itself. That a play written by Ibsen and claimed by Ibsen, is a different and better play than one written by Ibsen and claimed by Anon. The former contains the concentrated magic of the attention of millions; a consensus that here is something, really something; you don’t have to join in (like me with Lowry, or rather,
not
with Lowry), but you will know it’s there. The latter is merely words upon the page, interpreted by the theatrical profession; it will gain a nod and a snore and an absence, if Anon is lucky, of protest. No more.

How difficult, then, you may say, for the writer to
begin.
Ah yes. We all know that. At which the critics suddenly snap their heads aloft and fix you with a beady and really quite energetic stare and say, ‘But that’s what we’re for. If it wasn’t for us, properties would never be hot’.

Northanger Abbey,
1798. A hot property eventually.

Northanger Abbey
is a lovely romp. It mocks the kind of novel the publisher Crosby published — the gothic romance, and I am not surprised, having bought it —because how could you
not
buy so spirited, wilful and charming a tale — he felt no need to publish it. He just hung on to it, baffled.

Catherine:

had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration but what was very moderate and very transient. This was strange indeed! But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out. There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no — not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door — not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero her way.

It is interesting, is it not, that in her later novels Jane Austen took seriously what in her youth she could not. The stuff of her own later fiction — love at first sight (Jane and Bingley), lords in the neighbourhood (Darcy), wards (Fanny Price and Emma in
The Watsons),
young persons of unknown origin (Harriet Smith) she here derides —well, not quite derides, that is too strong a word, but pokes and prods with a delightedly aware finger. I think it is this ripple of merriment, this underground hilarity, which she has lost by the time she gets to the more plaintive
Mansfield Park
and the more sombre
Persuasion,
that so endeared her to future generations. It may not have shown in her own character; it is, as I like to say to audiences — and I’ve had my share of them lately, Alice — a literary truth and not a home truth.

How, audiences say to me, can you be married and have sons and still be so horrible about men? And I reply, (a) ‘I am not horrible to and about men, I merely report them as I see them. I neither condone nor reproach, I merely report. It’s just that men are so accustomed to being flattered in books by women that simple honesty comes as a shock and they register it as biased and unfair’ — and if they don’t let me get away with that I retreat to, (b) ‘This is a literary truth, not a home truth. The writer is not the person, yet both natures are true.’

I think it is perfectly possible that Jane Austen the writer was very different from Jane Austen the person.

I also think, concurrently, that the reason no one married her was the same reason Crosby didn’t publish
Northanger Abbey.
It was all just too much. Something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth: something capable of taking the world by its heels, and shaking it — as a mother takes a choking baby — shaking out great muddy gobbets of barbarity and incomprehension and cruelty, and setting it on its feet again, altogether better and improved.