London, August
MY DEAR ALICE,
It is time I started another novel — there is one waiting in the far recesses of my mind, like an octopus beneath a coral reef, occasionally putting out a feeler or two, prodding quite painfully into my conscious mind. I will have to respond, I can see: dive down and haul it out, and up into shallower, brighter waters, where I can get a good look at it, and then catch it and kill it and chop it up and fry it in batter and serve it up in some Quick Food Café. The book you mean to write is never the book you do write. A piece of fried octopus on the end of a fork, compared to the mysterious hidden majesty of the living thing. Never mind.
No? Too ridiculous a metaphor? You may be grateful that I mean to stop diverting myself by writing letters to you and get on with Amygdala. The word means the part of the brain where rage is centred. The novel is set two hundred years in the future. Publishers and agents warn me against it — not in so many words, of course, but with a faint look of pained bafflement in the face. They are good at that.
I shall send you a reading list. I hope you don’t think this is patronizing of me. You have sold more copies of The Wife’s Revenge in three months than I have of all my novels put together (well, in this country at least. Let me not go too far). I am glad to be wrong about so much; I still maintain that it is better to read than not to read, and I still deplore what you refer to as your ‘general amiable illiteracy’. Can you be developing some kind of house style?
Sometimes, I think, the exhilaration of all this being so great — of ideas, notions, fantasies, speculations, claims false and valid, advice good or bad, the pattern made by altering truth as day melts into day, is great enough to make us immortal. These things have been, and so in a sense always will be: they are not finite in time. Only our bodies are that. Let them blow us all up if they want, reduce the planet to ashes (as they say) — the leap between nothing and something, once made, is always made. It is the marvel at creation that can’t be destroyed: not the creation itself. Emma’s pages here in the real world, may in the end yellow and curl and go unread. Emma’s voice may falter and fade into a final silence: ‘But, Miss Bates, we have a difficulty here…’ And yet, I do believe, though all else falls, the City of Invention will stand.
It doesn’t matter, Alice, little Alice. Here and now. Think here and now. Your mother tells me you have your own hair back again. (What you call greasy mouse, and she calls healthy, clean and natural.) Is that progress, or a talisman against success, a surfeit of attention? I hope you bear them both well. And I have been asked to tea at your house by your mother, and your father has consented to be there too, so long as I don’t talk about novels, writing, feminism, or allied subjects. I shall try to keep the conversation to pets and food, and be very happy.
With all my love, your Aunt Fay