Letters to Alice (16 page)

But the purpose of this piece is not self-pity, and I know there are few enough people out there in the world to pity me, as I ring for breakfast and it comes with smiles and pleasant looks — black coffee in small Danish cups, rolls and pastries, a boiled egg and their accompanying wafers of cheese, and I have my cake and eat it too.

I pass the time working out details of the Visiting Writer’s Handbook. There will be a section for Advance Preparation. Your agent, I will say, under the section
ABROAD,
will always ask for First Class Air Travel. This will never, of course, be conceded, but serves to make your host nervous enough if a publisher, to book a rather better hotel for you than originally anticipated (the writer comes out of the PR budget); or if a university, or theatre company, to put you up in moderately comfortable, moderately sophisticated households. People who admire your work tend to believe you share their likes and dislikes. Publishers on the whole live well and eat well, and their status and sales are best served if the writer does the same, but academics and feminists believe that if they do not like television, music, meat, soft pillows, central heating, food (even) on moral or practical grounds, then neither will you. I will tell the reader of my handbook of the many strange beds I have slept in abroad — the damp beds of absent grandmothers, the equally damp beds of three year olds; attic rooms and basement rooms: I will refer to the host who said I could have his bath water after him, and before his wife: I will warn the visiting writer that if told, ‘We thought you’d rather stay in a private home than in an impersonal hotel’ to gently indicate they are mistaken. After a day full of personalities — one’s own the most boring of all, I hasten to say — impersonality and peace is most attractive. I have, I will add, for fear of offending the many delightful people whose pleasant hospitality I have enjoyed, broken this rule often and been glad.

I will remark on how tactful and polite the visiting writer presently learns to be. A careless and frivolous remark made in Adelaide one evening, will be repeated in Sydney the next; to whom it most concerns and most hurts. I will advise the writer never, never to speak ill of another writer’s works; if forced into a corner, the worst you can say is ‘So and so’s work is not, I think, counted as great literature’. Never speak ill of the host country, I will say. That is only courtesy. Never speak ill of the host country before last, because that gets back too. Never speak ill, in fact. Hold your tongue and mind your manners.

Be courteous to journalists and considerate of photographers. Remember regional differences. Dutch photographers, for example, will want you to look bleak and grim and as old as possible; lit from above, they will stand you against a stark white wall. Danish photographers love you to laugh and twinkle: American photographers want you to be properly made up and beautiful: Australian photographers want you to look ordinary and like everyone else. Above all, remember this of photographs, those who know you know what you look like, and for those who don’t, can it matter? Try and believe it.

Danton D’Albier, the actor whom I married, long ago, the children’s father, left me on publication day of
Lot and his Daughter
two years’ back. He read the book, against my will, (a kind of rape) and said, ‘I never knew you thought like that’ and he looked at a photograph of me in
The Times
and said, ‘I never knew you looked like that’ and I think it was the photograph and not the book that did it. Nevertheless.

…There I stopped. As I say, £50 if you can tell me why I didn’t go on. Jane Austen wanted to charge brother Henry 100 guineas for the unfinished
Lesley Castle,
and here am I, actually giving money away.

You write complaining of the dreadful feeling of dry despair which your course in English Literature induces in you: you feel you are suffocating; as if your mouth was being stuffed with dry leaves; as if your brain was slowly dying of some mental poison. It makes you want to scream. How well you put it. I really have hopes for your novel: how is it going? Women in loveless marriages complain of the same feelings: they tremble on the verge of panic; there is something terribly wrong, but they can’t quite place it. Or unsupported mothers (well, unsupported except for Uncle State) trudging home up the hill in the rain from Sainsbury’s, with a small child on either side: ‘Where am I?’ they scream, soundlessly, for the wet wind forces protest back into the mouth, ‘This is not what I meant at all!’ And where are you, Alice,
Persuasion
in one hand and pen in the other, is this what you meant? Are these the joys of literature? — making your mind work where your feelings don’t, delving round in your brain for the responses you ought to have, which other people claim to have, and you just don’t. It is murder, mental murder, twisting your head to get it into someone else’s place (in your terminology) because that person has power over you, to pass you or fail you; accept you in the cultural world or throw you out of it. So you persist, and your mouth chokes up with dry leaves and you write that the character of the second to youngest Bennet sister is undeveloped (you’ve forgotten her name) because you have been told that is the case: it is universally acknowledged that writers
ought
to develop characters.

Not by me, of course. This kind of criticism, to the writer, is like saying to the mother of her newborn baby, ‘But why has your baby got red hair?’ implying that surely there was something she should have done about it! ‘But that
is
the baby,’ she’ll say, upset and confused. It is almost as easy to upset and confuse new mothers as it is writers.

Writers are not so rational about the writing of their books, you see, as students of English Literature like to think. They write what they write and if it was different, it would be a different book and have a different title, so fault-finding is self-defeating. And if you think your brain is dying slowly, that your head is held trapped by iron bonds of boredom, it is no more than you deserve. When you study a writer’s work in depth you are stealing from that writer: so much he or she offered to you gladly, but you are greedy: you are demanding more.

A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental — obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought. The teacher prises open the door so that everyone can rush in. They may well do, but it’s not
for
everyone, it was never meant to be.

I think I overstate my case. Only endure! Loveless marriages turn again to loving ones; unwanted children become wanted; the study that bores you today may enlighten you tomorrow. Do not change courses in midstream, Alice. Do not abandon Eng. Lit. for Social Studies. Simply write your own book to counteract the danger of too much analysis; synthesize as much as you analyse, and you will yet be saved. So much advice I owe your father. I suppose.

Incidentally, Jane Austen made only £700 during her lifetime, from her writing:

1803: £10 from Crosby, for
Northanger Abbey.

1811: £140 from the publisher Thomas Egerton, for
Sense
a
nd Sensibility.
It came out in 3 volumes, price 15s. £150 from the profits of same.

1812: £110 for
Pride and Prejudice
likewise, published at 18s. The print run was 1,500.

1814: £450 from the publisher John Murray for the copyrights of
Sense and Sensibility
and
Mansfield Park
(since Egerton seemed unable to move them from the booksellers’ shelves, produced very small editions and paid very little) and her new novel
Emma.
Egerton excused himself by saying, ‘People are more ready to borrow and praise than to buy’.

I make that £860, but it is usual for people to say that ‘she made only £700 from her writing during her lifetime’. So that is certainly what you should say in your end of term exams, should the subject come up. Truth is relative in any case, and I read in
New Scientist
that two and two do not make four, but approximately four, since the very action of adding alters the number, so I daresay £700
feeling
right, is right.

Love from Fay

P.S. Perhaps someone index-linked the sum and forgot to say? There was shocking inflation between 1800 and 1817. Napoleon and all that.

London, May

M
Y DEAR ALICE,

In
Mansfield Park
there is a young lady, a Miss Crawford, who behaves very badly. She speaks slightingly of the clergy. She is quite without respect for the Admiral uncle in whose household she was brought up, and to whom therefore she should be grateful. She says she has a large acquaintance of various Admirals; she knows too much about their bickerings and jealousies, and of Rears and Vices she has seen all too many. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’ But of course we do. Rears and Vices! Strong stuff! Miss Crawford mocks religious feeling. She remarks, on being shown round the Rushworth Elizabethan chapel, ‘Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Miss Eleanors and Miss Bridgets — starched up into seeming piety, but with their heads full of something very different — especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at — and, in those days, I fancy parsons were inferior even to what they are now.’

That makes Fanny angry. So angry she can hardly speak. It is the only time in the whole book that she is swayed by unholy passion. She is angry, you see, on Edmund’s behalf. Edmund is training to be a parson. Fanny is an unusual Austen heroine: she is good, almost unspeakably good. Edmund is more usual: he is of the Mr Knightley mould. He is kind, noble and instructive. He rather fancies Miss Crawford, in spite of her bad behaviour, perhaps even because of it, and she is certainly the one character in the book with whom one would gladly spend a week on an off-shore island: she is witty, lively, lovely and funny at other people’s expense. She is selfish — she unfeelingly makes use of Fanny’s horse, to Fanny’s detriment, since Fanny seems quite unable to take care of herself — and admits it. Miss Crawford, in fact, doesn’t mind being
bad.
Fanny simply can’t help being good.

Now Jane Austen started to write
Mansfield Park
in 1812. She had been living in Chawton, with her mother and sister, since 1809. It is tempting to suggest that the struggle between Miss Crawford and Fanny was the struggle going on in the writer between the bad and the good. The bad bit, which could write in a letter to Cassandra, ‘Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’ (Now that’s far, far worse than anything Miss Crawford ever said.) And the good bit, which struggles to live at peace in a modest home with her mother and sister, and to continue to believe that her father was ‘good and kind’, (and not, as I tend to believe, the callous and egocentric model for Mr Bennet), and takes in
Mansfield Park
the personification of Fanny. And even more tempting to go back to Jane Austen’s early childhood, and see in that powerful description in
Mansfield Park
of the arrival of a small, timid girl, into a strange family — on the whole kindly, but stupid — a portrait of herself, sent away to a school where she nearly died, among strangers, and to suggest that the split between good and bad never, in Jane Austen, quite reconciled and resulting in her early death, started there. The rebellious spirit, raging at being so cast out by mother and father, learning the defences of wit and style — Miss Crawford. The dutiful side, accepting authority, enduring everything with a sweet smile, finding her defence in wisdom
—
Fanny. So tempting, in fact, that I shan’t resist. I shall offer it to you as an explanation of Jane Austen’s determination to make the unctuous Fanny a heroine.

And also add that she must have missed her father very much, but in a rather, to us, unexpected way.
Mansfield Park
was the first new novel she wrote after his death — though she worked over
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice,
novels of which we know he approved. I think she was trying hard, especially hard, to be good: as if without his controlling spirit all morality and self-control might fly away, dissipate, unless everyone was very, very careful. When Sir Thomas, the patriarch, leaves his family to go to Antigua for a time, his fear is — and it seems to Jane Austen a reasonable fear — that if they are without his direction, without his watchful attention, they will behave without restraint and rapidly go to pieces. And so indeed they do — Good heavens! Amateur theatricals!

Mansfield Park
throbs with the notion that what women need is the moral care and protection of men. Fanny marries Edmund in the end (of course), ‘loving, guiding and protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than anyone else at Mansfield, that he should learn to prefer soft light eyes [Fanny’s] to sparkling dark ones [Miss Crawford’s].’

Oh, Miss Austen, what wishful thinking do we not have here! It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the worse women behave, the better they get on. (Discuss, with reference to your female friends, and their mothers.)

Well, perhaps we
should
look to fiction for moral instruction: we should not see it, as we have come to do, as a mirror to be held up to reality. Perhaps writing should not be seen as a profession, but as a sacred charge, and the writer of a bestseller not run gleefully to the bank, but bow his head beneath the weight of so much terrifying responsibility. To be able to influence, for good or bad, the minds of so many! In China they do not have ‘novels’ in our sense: they have fiction, it is true, but fiction that points the way to good behaviour, both at an individual and a social level. Such works are exhortations to hard work, honour, good cheer, and the power of positive thinking, and sell by the hundred millions. And in Russia any individual writer who flies, in the name of art, or truth, in the face of an accepted group morality, is seen as irresponsible, even to the point of insanity. It is a different way of looking at things. I have some sympathy with it. It is, oddly enough, readers and not writers who believe so passionately that writers should be free to write what they want. I do not think Jane Austen would have thought they should be: certainly not on the evidence of
Mansfield Park,
a book in which virtue is rewarded and bad behaviour punished, and the abominable Julia, disgraced, is obliged to go and live with the awful Mrs Norris. And serve both right.