London, June
MY DEAR ALICE,
I shall write a little about the manner of Jane Austen’s death. I want to get it over. I find it upsetting. I suppose as pleasure spills over through the centuries, so grief does too. She is presumed to have died from what is now called Addison’s disease — an insufficiency of the adrenal glands. The adrenal cortex fails to work properly for one reason or another — it can be TB, or a fungal infection, or a tumour, or by virtue of the body turning against itself, deciding that what is benign is harmful and setting out to destroy it and succeeding — that is, as a consequence of the auto-immune process. The condition these days affects one in every hundred thousand people. (John F. Kennedy is rumoured to have had Addison’s disease — it is nowadays contained by synthetic steroids: and it was liberal doses of cortisone, they say, which gave him a jowly look and sent him racing down the White House corridors after totally inappropriate secretaries. But as I say, they’ll say anything.)
In Jane Austen’s day there was no cure, and indeed the disease was not even identified, let alone named, until the 1840s. Dr Addison — who else? — then discovered it, in the proper sense of the word. To Jane Austen, her friends and doctors, it must have been a completely mysterious event: a gently creeping illness, of an undefined nature, particular to her and her alone, which might end in death, but might not. Their hope, as time went on, must have failed.
The early symptoms of the disease are langour, lack of appetite, exhaustion, irritability, and a disinclination to physical or mental effort. (I, for one, find alterations in the mental state, as a symptom of illness, more distressing than mere physical disability, or even pain. Is the personality, really, no more than the sum of the body? I find it hard to accept.) The skin looks dirty, the mouth blotches. ‘The body wastes,’ wrote Addison, ‘the pulse becomes smaller and weaker, and the patient at length gradually sinks and expires.’ And so she did.
In our terms death comes by hypoglycemia, shock and cardiac arrest. If only we could have their language and our drugs.
That is enough. The dying should be accorded some privacy.
I think she probably just gave up. I find it hard to believe that when death occurs by the auto-immune system, by the body turning against itself, that the unconscious will is not involved. As with cancer, when normally harmless cells proliferate and by so doing cause their agreeable host such damage. Death, in Addison’s disease, comes eventually as a result of upset — ‘the inability to withstand severe or even minor stresses without going into shock’.
Enough, enough! Surely, that’s enough…
When Jane Austen was so ill, they say, she rested in the living room on an arrangement of three chairs. Her mother kept the sofa. Enough!
I think writers can kill themselves off early enough, as they can the extensions, the different versions of themselves that go into their books. They flesh them into existence, and wipe them out again. In the end, I am sure, they could altogether fictionalize the original body, from which the shadows spring to take up their habitation in the City of Invention. One could leave this world easily enough and take up one’s existence over there, in That Other Place.
I tell you this to comfort you. It isn’t pleasant to think of her dying of a lingering illness which modern medicine would diagnose and cure. But death is only a part of life; one cannot see it, when recently bereaved; one sees only pain, waste, anger and humiliation, the worst and not the best. Only with time does the end sink back into proportion, become part of the whole and not the definition of the whole. And that’s another reason why the death of children is so particularly dreadful, and early deaths worse than later ones — there is less lived time available into which dying time can be swallowed up and incorporated. Alice, we will, as they say, be a long time dead. You must carve your living self as sharply into the Rock of Eternity as you can. Please send your novel off; don’t do as you threaten and forget it. Of course it’s more than likely to be rejected and come back, and of course you will then feel rejected and discovered in your presumption. But if you embark on these things, you can’t draw back. Or you’ll be just a snail-trail on the Rock…
No? Well, I stick by it. You did it, I warned you not to, now take the consequences. You made your bed, as your mother’s mother would say to my sister and me, now you must lie upon it. I remember making her extremely angry by replying, ‘I don’t see why. One can always lie on someone else’s’.
How did your exams go? Did you know I am to have tea at a tea parlour in Covent Garden with your mother and father? I worry rather about this. I feel the chairs will be made for narrow modern hips and the sandwiches will be tough, bran-enforced rolls filled with ground sesame, and the tea will be herbal and the sugar brown, and your father somehow not be in his proper ambience. But you never know.
With best wishes,
Aunt Fay