Letters to Alice (7 page)

She
is neurotic.

You
are nervy.

I
am perfectly normal, thank you.

Writing is an odd activity — other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch
ET
‘the extraterrestrial’, the unconscious (collective
à la
Jung or personal
à la
Freud) ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go you take yourself; and no pure experience either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer’s habit of standing back and observing what is going on — which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless, and calculated, but is not. They must observe with the Martian’s eye, that of a stranger in a strange land, and marvel at this and be horrified at that, while yet knowing they are part of it, and as prone to human error as anyone. They must develop the link between the mind that thinks, and the hand that writes, until words are contemporary with thought, and even precede it: until the language, as they say, has a life of its own. Language you can allow to have this life but of the other contents of a book — characters, story, purpose — the writer must remain in control. Fear the work of a writer who says, it is my characters who lead me, they take off! They well may, but who will want to follow? It is the writer’s
mind
the reader wants: a controlled fantasy, very, very, rarely, the meanderings of an idle author.

The instinct to develop the craft, given the gift, is strong. Jane Austen wrote her first book when she was fourteen. It is entitled
Love and Freindship,
wrongly spelt, and is very funny. She has clearly read many novels: (well, we know she had. Burney, Richardson, Sterne, Fielding — no mean novelists — and no doubt a host of lesser ones too). She mocks the convention. Her characters swoon and run mad:

What first struck our eyes — we approached — they were Edward and Augustus — Yes, dearest Marianne, they were our husbands. Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground. I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation — Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often…

Love and Freindship
is written in the form of letters, as was
Lady Susan
later. It was a popular form of fiction at the time, presently to fall into disrepute, for no really good reason. Such a novel has the power of one written in the first person, and the limitations thereof divided by the number of letter-writers the author chooses to involve. A direct authorial voice has to be done without, but the point of view can be from more than a single character. It is not so bad a way of telling a story. To accomplish a letter-novel successfully requires a special skill, the skill of a born dramatist — the knack of moving a plot along through the mouths of the protagonists, and laying down plot detail, as it’s called, without apparently doing so: the body has to be fleshed, but the bones not allowed to show. Jane Austen, even at the age of fourteen, could do these things wonderfully well. The pattern of her storytelling is the same as TV dramatists use today; each letter a new scene, to move the action on, each taking a different viewpoint. Her own animation, her own pleasure in her own skill, shines through the text. She must have found great pleasure in writing
Love and Freindship,
and greater satisfaction in finishing it. The inner excitement, when a writer realizes for the first time that this whole new world of invention and meaning lies waiting to be explored, is intense and overwhelming and exhilarating. It is like falling in love. The feeling of being singled out, of suddenly discovering that you are different from other people, and in some way special, is powerful. What to some non-writers is seen as easy (‘I’d write a book too myself if only I had the time’) and to others as hard (‘I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t’), to the newly fledged writer is neither easy, nor hard, but simply miraculous. Perhaps it just is that books, novels, loom larger in the lives of writers than they do in the lives of ordinary people, so that to actually
be able to write a book
seems far, far superior an achievement to the novice writer than, say, making a million pounds or inventing a cure for cancer, or marrying the Prince Regent.

Be that as it may, I don’t suppose her family allowed her to become conceited about
Love and Freindship.
They will have cut her down to size with gentle mockery — of the same kind that Jane Austen likewise used, and sometimes not so gentle: safe enough on the page, but devastating in real life.

Alice, that is enough for today. I am going to the Qantas office here in Cairns to see about my ticket home. Cairns is a pretty place, but it isn’t where I belong. Many of the houses here are built on stilts, incidentally, for reasons as varied as the people who tell me why. Some say it’s because of the crocodiles, or the white ants, or because they’ve always been like that, or for ventilation, or because of the floods, or to raise them above the swamp, or all the better to see the abos from, and some are joking and some are not: hard to tell, so laid back, handsome, sunburned and droll are these Queenslanders. The town itself has wide streets and low wooden buildings, and a branch of David Jones, the department store, made of plywood, with a restaurant where they serve seamen (it’s a port, did you know, do you care, do you have a map?), enormous meals of sausages, beans and steak and fried bread and hot sweet tea. The tribal Aboriginals outside in the desert live on wichetty grubs and a nut or berry or so, and blend better into the background, as thin as the white men in the towns are fleshy. Here rich landowners import Asian girls as wives. The girls are glad enough, they say, to escape the hunger and poverty of their own lands; and I have seen them come into town, on occasion, seeming happy and grateful enough, gliding along just behind their striding, paunchy, well-satisfied husbands. Are we to disapprove? I suppose so. But think back to
Pride and Prejudice.
Charlotte Lucas found happiness with Mr Collins, in spite of marrying him for all the wrong reasons. It did for her: it would not do for Elizabeth, who was shocked at first, and heartily disapproved, and then re-thought the whole matter.

I suppose what has happened is that there in Georgian England we had the microcosm of what was to explode into the wide, wild world. Then it was the village girl, whose face was her fortune, obliged to marry the old, rich man from fifty miles away, in order to survive. Now it is the pretty girl from Java who marries the rancher from North Australia.

The population of the British Isles today is some 60 million. In 1800 it was estimated at 11 million. Would you like a break-down of the population, as a parting educational shot? I daresay you dread my return, you are afraid you will actually have to
meet
me, but I assure you, you don’t.

The whole country, you must understand, and using the language of the times, depended for subsistence, and all the conveniences of life, on the labour of less than one half of the total number. Nowadays the whole depend upon the labour of a third of their number.

Your aunt, Fay

*An American term, I’m sorry. But it has a precise and valuable meaning.

Cairns, January (getting hotter)

D
EAR ALICE,

Well, you can’t trust anyone. In an encyclopedia published in 1813 I find in Volume VII, under ‘Midwifery’, that the age of menstruation in the human female is sixteen, and that to start any earlier is a disorder and should be treated by bleeding: leeches, that is. The symptoms of the disorder are a full face, full breasts, sighing and a warm imagination. Rather like Lydia in
Pride and Prejudice.
I daresay Lydia might have done better with leeches to quieten her down, than to end up with the shifty Mr Wickham. But in Volume XIV, under ‘Physiology’, I see the age of menstruation given as fifteen. Both are rather different from the figures I gave you in my earlier letter. Between sixteen and eighteen, I said then, firmly, using other people’s figures to prove a point I wanted to make. Fiction is much safer than non-fiction. You can be accused of being boring, but seldom of being
wrong.
I mention my error out of conscience and as a general warning that we all (especially me) tend to remember what it is convenient to remember, and forget what we want to forget, and manage to deduce from given facts what we want to propose.

The encyclopedia is delightfully written by wise and intelligent people. The section on ‘Midwifery’ is a little alarming, it is true. There was a feeling that placentas should be delivered by hand if nature didn’t do it at once, but a rather good notion of using the gentle pressure of the midwife’s hand to stop the perineum tearing. If any of your friends are into obsessive natural childbirth I will give them full details, but I imagine, and certainly hope, that most of you will be finding life so exhilarating and full you will have decided to have no babies at all, ever, and be queuing up at the sterilization clinics, where fortunately the wait is long, and natural childbirth, the Leboyer method, and other male plots against the labouring female the last matter on your mind.

But let me quote further from the section on ‘Midwifery’, here in my encyclopedia. We are dealing with puerperal convulsions — still a major reason for death in childbirth today. The cause is high blood-pressure, and the main work of our ante-natal clinics is to detect it, and cure it before labour starts. Otherwise, now as then, the mother goes into convulsions more severe than in epilepsy, ‘in regard to deformity suppressing anything the imagination of the most extravagant painter ever furnished’, and dies. But the Georgians had their own view of it.

It is most frequent in large towns, and in those women who lead the most indolent life: hence it is to be found in the first circles of fashion, in preference to others, and there is one grand circumstance which has great influence on its production, that is, a woman’s being with child when she should not. Being obliged to live in a state of seclusion from society for some months, perhaps, she reflects and broods over everything which relates to her situation, and which gives her pain: she recollects she is not to enjoy the society of the babe she has borne, but on the contrary will be obliged perhaps to part with it for ever. She is afraid of her situation being known, and that she shall be considered an outcast to society. In this way she will brood in solitude, ’til at last the mere initiation of labour may be sufficient to excite puerperal convulsions.

They could bleed, give opium, pour cold water over the head when the fit came on, break the waters, or dilate the birth canal by hand (another common practice) to speed delivery, but that was all. If the baby came quickly enough the mother might live otherwise not.

I tell you all this so you don’t forget to be thankful that you live now. Doctors then were faced, often enough, with the problem of which to save, the mother or the child. The Church said the baby: the newborn soul must go on, to achieve its chance of redemption: the mother, the older soul, could be left to die and fly, with any luck, to God. But for the most part, it seems, doctors decided where the likelihood of survival lay, and either performed a Caesarean — which inevitably meant the death of the mother, within a day or so — or opened the head of the baby, within the womb, and removed it piecemeal. They were not brutal: they merely did what they could. But it is not surprising that the taste of the female novel-reader, at the time, so often lay in extravagant romance: that they loved wild gothic tales. Every child would be brought up with a knowledge of the closed bedroom door, the hurrying of midwives and doctors, the black bags in which the instruments were carried — the vectis, or the new, safer forceps. ‘There is still a query,’ says my encyclopedia, which seems to be intended to serve as the only text-book a surgeon would have, ‘that if forceps be so much better than the vectis, how is it that the vectis is still in use by some? For no other reason but because it is easier to use: the instrument requires less skill, and for that reason is it preferred by those who have no more skill than they know what to do with.’