Letters to Alice (2 page)

The poem is about God pursuing an escaping soul, lurching after him, hound-like. He gets him in the end, as a Mountie gets his man. (Another dusty image, no doubt; and one scarcely worth the taking out and dusting down.) When I refer to ‘the arches of the years’ I hope to convey the whole feeling-tone (as Freudians say of dreams) of the poem, both the power and the slight absurdity;
all
the poem in fact, in the five words of his that I choose, for the benefit of my sentence. Call it plagiarism, call it fellowship between writers, or resonance (since you’re in a Dept. of Eng. Lit.). I don’t suppose it matters much. It is the kind of thing writers used to depend upon in their attempts to get taken seriously, and now no longer can. We talk to an audience (and I say talk advisedly, rather than write: for contemporary authors are left largely with the writing down on paper of what they could as well speak, if only their listeners would stand still for long enough) and a generation which has read so little it understands only the vernacular. I don’t think this matters much. I think that writers have to change and adapt. It is no use lamenting a past: people
now
are as valuable as people
then.
You will just have to take my word for it, that the words a writer uses, even now, go back and back into a written history. Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning: they did so then, they do so now.

I bet £500 you have not read ‘The Hound of Heaven’.

But back to our City of Invention. Let me put it like this — writers create Houses of the Imagination, from whose doors the generations greet each other. You will always hear a great deal of enlivening dissension and discussion. Should Madame Bovary have munched the arsenic? Would Anna Karenina have gone under the train had Tolstoy been a woman, would Darcy have married Elizabeth anywhere else but in the City of Invention, and so on and so forth, in and out of the centuries.

And thus, by such discussion and such shared experience, do we understand ourselves and one another, and our pasts and our futures. It is in the literature, the novels, the fantasy, the fiction of the past, that you find
real
history, and not in text books. Thomas More’s
Utopia
tells us as much about his own century, his own world, as the one he invented for the delectation of his peers.

Writers are privileged visitors here. They have a house or two of their own in the City, after all. Perhaps even well-thought of, and nicely maintained: or perhaps never much reckoned and falling into disrepair. But to have a house of any kind, even to have brought it only to planning stage, and have given up in despair, is to realize more fully the wonder of the City, and to know how its houses are built: to know also that though one brick may look much like another, and all builders go about their work in much the same way, some buildings will be good, some bad. And a very few, sometimes the least suspected, will last, and not crumble with the decades.

Writers, builders, good or bad, recognizing these things, are usually polite to one another, and a great deal kinder than the people who visit, as outsiders. Builders vary in intellect, aspiration, talent and efficiency; they build well or badly in different suburbs of the City. Some build because they need to, have to, live to, or believe they are appointed to, others to prove a point or to change the world. But to build at all requires courage, persistence, faith and a surplus of animation. A writer’s
all,
Alice, is not taken up by the real world. There is something left over: enough for them to build these alternative, finite realities.

Jane Austen had a great deal left over. You could say that was because she didn’t wear herself out physically running round the world, pleasing a husband or looking after children. (But that didn’t save her from an early and unpleasant death.) And though this meant that she chose, perhaps, a safer, rather inward-looking site to build her houses (though what a pleasant, grassy, well-regarded mound it turned out to be), than she would otherwise have done, she gave herself, through her writing, another life that out-ran her own; a literary life. It was not, I am sure, what she set out to do. But it happened. She breathed in, as it were, into the source of her own energy, her own life, and breathed out a hundred different lives. She had energy enough to build. Some, of course — and I tend to be one of them — maintain that the constant energizing friction of wifehood, motherhood and domesticity, provides its own surging energy, and creates as powerful an inner life as does the prudent, contemplative, my-art-my-art-alone existence. Others deny it.

You get all kinds of writers, Alice. You get Dickens and St Theresa of Avila, you get wicked George Sand, surrounded by lovers and children, and you get Jane Austen. Writers deal with their lives as best they can, and their personalities, and the family and century into which they were born: they do what they must with their day-to-day existences, and build in the City of Invention.

It’s getting crowded, these days, here as anywhere else. Look around. Almost nowhere that’s not been built on! Unless they think of somewhere new, which they probably will: discover a new slope, or hillside, hitherto considered barren, which with a little ingenuity turns out to be fertile. The City as it is today, stretches far and wide, through dreary new suburbs to a misty horizon. All kinds of people choose to build here now, and not just those born to it. Non-vocational writers can put up a pretty fair representation of a proper house, and even get a number of enthusiastic visitors. The structure will crumble within the year, and then someone else will quickly use the site, fill the space on the Station Bookstall. But the result is that bus journeys into the centre of the city can seem to last for ever — so many books, just
so many,
on the way! — before you get to those wonderful places where the visitors flock and the tourists gasp with gratification, and that’s where I want you to go, Alice. I know no one’s ever set you a proper example. (Your mother reads books on tennis, I know: I doubt she’s read a novel since an overdose of Georgette Heyer made her marry your father. Books can be dangerous.) I do not want you to be deprived of the pleasures of literature. You are, in spite of everything, my flesh and blood.

I can give you a physical location for the City. It lies at a mid-way point between the Road to Heaven and the Road to Hell; these two were depicted in the lithograph that used to hang on your mother’s and my bedroom wall when we were children: before I took the broad and primrose Road to Hell, by going with our father when he left, and she stayed on the narrow, uphill path of righteousness that leads to Heaven, by remaining with our mother. What dramas there were then, little Alice, with your green and black hair! You have no idea how the world has changed in forty years.

Before you can properly appreciate Jane Austen, you do need to be, just a little, acquainted with the City: at any rate with its more important districts. Master builders work up on the heights, in the shadow of some great castle or other. They build whole streets, worthy and respectable. Mannstrasse, Melville Ave, Galsworthy Close. You need at least to know
where
they are. More fun, perhaps, to ferret out the places where an innocent has erected some glittering edifice almost by mistake — Tressell’s
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,
or Flora Thompson’s
Lark Rise to Candleford
or James Stevens’s
The Caretaker’s Daughter
— or a child achieved what an adult can’t. The path up to Daisy Ashford’s
Young Visitors
is always thronged with delighted visitors. But it’s pleasant going about anywhere, especially with company. You can wander up and down the more cosmopolitan areas, dip into Sartre, or Sagan, or through the humbler districts, saying: that’s a good house for round here, or this one really lets the neighbourhood down! Sometimes you’ll find quite a shoddy building so well placed and painted that it quite takes the visitor in, and the critics as well — and all cluster round, crying, ‘Lo, a masterpiece!’ and award it prizes. But the passage of time, the peeling of paint, the very lack of concerned visitors, reveals it in the end for what it is: a house of no interest or significance.

You will find that buildings rise and fall in the estimation of visitors, for no apparent reason. Who reads Arnold Bennett now, or Sinclair Lewis? But perhaps soon, with any luck, they’ll be rediscovered. ‘How interesting,’ people will say, pushing open the creaking doors. ‘How remarkable! Don’t you feel the atmosphere here? So familiar, so true: the amazing masquerading as the ordinary? Why haven’t we been here for so long?’ And Bennett, Lewis, or whoever, will be rediscovered, and the houses of his imagination be renovated, restored, and hinges oiled so that doors open easily, and the builder, the writer, takes his rightful place again in the great alternative hierarchy.

Visitors, builders feel (even while asking them in and feeling insulted if they don’t look around), are demanding and difficult people; the visitors seem to have no idea at all how tricky the building of Houses is. They think if only they had the time, they’d do it themselves. They say, such a life I’ve had! I really ought to put it all down some day; turn it into a book! And so indeed what a life they’ve had, but the mere recording of event does not make a book. Experience does not add up to Idea. It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

Some builders build their houses and refuse to open the door, so terrified of visitors are they. In drawers and cupboards all over the land, I’ll swear, are the hidden manuscripts of perfectly publishable novels which, for lack of a brown envelope and a stamp and a little nerve, never see the light of day. Genius lasts, but I’m not so sure that it will necessarily
out.

Sometimes when a builder opens the door of a newly finished house, and the crowds and critics rush in, he must wish he’d never opened the door. Hardy never wrote another novel after
Jude the Obscure
was published, so upsetting did the critics find it, and so upsetting did he find the critics.

Mind you, I see their point.
Jude the Obscure
stopped me reading for quite some time. I kept postponing my visits to the City for fear of what I might find there; the Giant Despair, for example, wandering the hitherto serene streets, zapping the unwary visitor on the head. Hardy, claimed the critics, was the one who had unlocked the cage and let the Giant loose: and then, worse, had opened the gates of the City and positively invited him in: had made it a dangerous place.

It’s safer, you’ll find, down among the Pre-Fabs, if it’s safety you’re after. Here the verges are neatly swept and Despair wears a muzzle, albeit the houses themselves lack all grandeur and aspiration. Surprising to see such flimsy structures built with such care and skill. Novels-from-films — film first, novel after —
Jaws, Alien, ET
— are so efficiently written as to all but pass for real creation, real invention, and not the calculated flights of reason that they are. There is no vision here, but an acute observation of what a mass audience wants to see and hear. Heart-strings twang, but don’t vibrate. The windows in these Pre-Fabs have the blinds pulled down, and on the blinds are painted what you might reasonably see (reasonably for the City of Invention, that is) if they were raised — a beach scene, or a space ship, or an extra-terrestrial plodding about outside — but they are still only painted, albeit with wonderful conviction. And if you do raise the blinds, send them whirring up to the ceiling, where clean brisk straight edge meets clean brisk straight edge (nothing here of the softness of age, no mellow patina of the past) you will see out of the windows grey nothingness, and when the thrumming shark-fear music has died away, and the wistful songs of outer space, you may even hear the footfall of Despair outside and wonder just how fast his claws do grow, and if he gets even this far, and if he’s snapped his muzzle free.

Quick, next door, to the rather solider hyped twin houses of
Scruples
and
Lace.
The blinds are frilly and expensive and very firmly pulled down. You’re not supposed to look around too closely, once inside. You may not want to, much (and in any case, your comments aren’t called for. You’re supposed to pay your money at the door, and leave at once). These houses and others like them, are well enough made. They are calculated to divert and impress and often do — but do not take them seriously, Alice, and know them for what they are.

The good builders, the really good builders, carry a vision out of the real world and transpose it into the City of Invention, and refresh and enlighten the reader, so that on his, or her, return to reality, that reality itself is changed, however minutely. A book that has no base in an initial reality, written out of reason and not conviction, is a house built of — what shall we say? — bricks and no mortar? Walk into it, brush against a door frame, and the whole edifice falls down about your ears. Like the first little pig’s house of straw, when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed.

Round the corner from the money-makers, the edges of the two suburbs running together, is the vast red-light district of Porno. Step into houses here at your peril: what you find inside is exciting enough, but the windows have no blinds at all, and there is real pain, torture, degradation and death out there. There are not even any curtains, just a nasty red flicker round the edges of the window frames, because this is where the city borders on Hell. Well, somewhere has to, just as someone has to be bottom of the class. But the suburb’s grown too fast, it’s unstoppable. Police forever roam the streets, to the mirth of the nudging, knowing, winking inhabitants, and occasionally manage to demolish a monstrosity, only to find a worse one springing up in its place. There’s a good building or so, of course, round here, and visitors bus in from everywhere, sometimes on very respectable tours. They come in by the bus-load for
The Story of O —
it’s so well constructed, they say: so elegantly made; look how graceful the lintels are, how delicately placed the beams — never mind where the whole thing’s placed! And the French lady, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller’s friend, never built better than when she was down here, and well paid. You will find, if you insist, other light-fingered and enchanting structures up and down the streets, but they have the air of the witch’s house in
Hansel and Gretel.
All smarties and gingerbread and delicious; but beware, the witch with her oven waits inside, and she’s luring you in, to eat you up! Wait until you’re older, Alice, and the pleasures of your own flesh desert you.