The lakeside, Canberra, January
MY DEAR ALICE,
I have shipped out of North Queensland and come down to Canberra, before leaving for home. I know it adds a few thousand miles to an already outrageous distance — the world, so small a place to the telephone user (fifteen digits and variations thereupon will these days get you anywhere in a couple of seconds), is truly horrendously large to the person who has to physically move themselves from one part of it to another — but I find I need time before launching myself from the Southern Hemisphere back into the Northern. Therefore Canberra. I create the same distractions for myself — visits to friends, consultations with publishers, TV producers and so on — as I create before embarking on a new novel or play. Some writers classify the delaying process as research, and get advances from publishers and grants from Arts Councils to do it but I (I like to think) know it for what it is, an uneasy mixture of terror, idleness and a paralysing reverence for the Muse which, descending, prevents the writer from putting pen to paper for an intolerable time; till something happens — a change in the weather, an alteration to the pattern of dreams — which makes it possible to begin.
North Queensland lives by its wits and its physique — it gives no credence to writers, especially women; what use imagination when a crocodile advances or the locusts get the sugar-cane? You need a flame thrower and a helicopter, not a novel. Down in Canberra things are very different. It is a city of astonishing artifice and astonishing beauty. Once it was a barren plain, an indentation in the dusty desert: now it is striped by tree-lined avenues — the trees imported by the hundred thousand from Europe, over the years — in pretty, idiosyncratic suburbs where house prices define the status of the occupants, and when you change houses you change your friends, willy-nilly — and dotted by swimming pools, and graced by tranquil man-made lakes. It is a place of final and ultimate compromise: it exists only because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree where the seat of Australia’s government was to be, and so invented this place, somewhere in between — but rather nearer Sydney. It has handsome new buildings; a High Court where the courts are like theatres and judges and criminals play to an audience; the prettiest, leafiest, and most savagely, suicidally conspiratorial university in the world, the ANU — and it has readers.
I talked to them last night. I read to them. I read from Puffball — or rather I read all Puffball, leaving out the bits difficult to précis. A potted novel: a Reader’s Digest version. Once I was too terrified to open my mouth in public — my heart raced and my voice came out in a pitiful mouse-squeak — but now I enjoy haranguing hundreds.
It is practice, only practice, and learning to despise and put up with your own fear that works the transformation — which I tell you, Alice, just in case you suffer yourself from that terror of public speaking which renders so many women dumb at times when they would do better to be noisy. And if you are in a Committee meeting or at a Board meeting or a protest meeting, speak first. It doesn’t matter what you say, you will learn that soon enough, simply speak. Ask for the windows to be opened, or closed, or cigarette smokers to leave, or no-smoking notices to be taken down — anything. The second thing you say, later, will be sensible: your voice will have the proper pitch, and you will be listened to. And eventually, even, enjoy your captive audience.
Here in Canberra, this fictitious place, this practical, physical, busy, restless monument to invention, they love books and they love writers. Different cities call out different audiences. In Melbourne the audience is middle-aged and serious; in Sydney middle-aged and frivolous; here in Canberra they are young, excitable, impressionable and love to laugh. They want to know: they ask questions. They nourish you, the writer, with their inquiries, and you fill them with answers; right or wrong, it hardly matters. It’s always wonderful to find out that there is a view of the world, not just the world: a pattern to experience, not just experience — and whether you agree with the view offered, or like the pattern, is neither here nor there. Views are possible, patterns discernible — it is exciting and exhilarating and enriching to know it. You need not agree with the person on the platform, but you discover that neither do you have to agree with friends and neighbours: that’s the point. You can have your own view on everything — and this, particularly in a place such as Canberra, is liberty indeed. And it is why, I think, increasingly, any seminar on Women and Writing, or Women Writers, or the New Female Culture, or whatever, is instantly booked up — by men as well as by women — and readings by writers, and in particular women writers — are so popular. At last, it seems, there is some connection between Life and Art, the parts do add up to more than the whole: we always thought it! We discover — lo! — we are not alone in the oddity of our beliefs. Our neighbour, whom we never thought would laugh when we laughed, actually does.
It puts, of course, quite a burden on the writer, who is expected to direct all this mental theatre, to be seen as an Agony Aunt as well as the translator of the Infinite, and the handmaiden to the Muse, and may not have realized, on first putting pen to paper, where it would all end. But we have our royalties to give us some worldly recompense: our foreign sales, our TV rights, and so on. Like the real Royalty, it does not become us to complain.
Jane Austen and her contemporaries, of course, did none of this. They saved their public and their private energies for writing. They were not sent in to bat by their publishers in the interest of increased sales, nor did they feel obliged to present themselves upon public platforms as living vindication of their right to make up stories which others are expected to read. Imagine Jane Austen talking at the Assembly Hall, Alton, on ‘Why I wrote Emma’. But times, you see, have changed, and writers have had to change with them. When the modern reader takes up a ‘good’ novel, he does more than just turn the pages, read and enjoy. He gratifies his teachers and the tax payer, who these days subsidizes culture to such a large extent, in every country in the world; he gives reason and meaning — not to mention salary — to all those who work in Arts Administration and libraries and Literature Foundations, and Adult Education and the publishing, printing and book distribution trades — nothing is simple, you see, nothing: nothing is pure — and by virtue of the pressure put upon the reader to read, the burden of the writer is that much the greater. If your writing has any pretensions to literary merit, you must appear, you cannot shelter behind the cloak of anonymity: you have to be answerable, although you would rather stay home knitting, or dipping a horrified toe into the dangerous coral seas of the uncultured North. It won’t do: you have to come down to Canberra: you want to come down to Canberra. Somehow, it is registered as duty. You’re lucky, moreover, if they pay your fare.
All this you will discover when you finish your novel and it is acclaimed. It is very rare for writers to be acclaimed at an early age, of course, but you will quote Keats and Shelley at me, and I will predictably say, ‘poets are different, poets are expected to have a view of their response to the world, and can do that from adolescence onwards; novelists are expected to have a view of the world itself,’ and you will say, ‘not so, why?’: and neither of us will believe the other, so I shan’t continue on this theme. All I want to say is that a writer’s life is not a piece of cake, though better, I swear, than a waitress’s. (I was one of those once, too.) And that, if you want to be a writer — don’t; if you want to write, which is a different matter, nothing will stop you, not lack of time, nor the existence of husband, home or children; these things will merely sharpen your determination, not deter you. And that it is useless looking for things to say; if you have nothing to say, as my mother, your grandmother, used to remark to us girls, shut up. ‘Stay silent,’ she phrased it, being a lady to her bones. That may have been why our father, your grandfather, left her. A few plain words condemning his drunken fornicating habits might well have stopped them, and him in his tracks. Men — I use the term generically to include the female, as I so often in my letters to you use the male pronoun to include the female — are like children; they tend to misconstrue lack of reproof as lack of interest, as indifference.
I do wonder what it was that led Jane Austen into believing that her novels were publishable: were acceptable to a readership other than that of her immediate family and friends? She wrote the early books, initially, to be read aloud. Her tiny, fine handwriting, lacing the page this way and that — paper was expensive and it was customary to cover every available patch of it with writing — was hardly conducive to actual reading. The sense of the books, the delicacy of the language, the phrasing, the dialogue — all was written to be absorbed by the ear, not the eye. This is one of the reasons, of course, why a Jane Austen novel can be so wonderfully read aloud, and pleasurably listened to, on the radio. It is their true, their proper form. And if you have formed a writing style through your early work, it is likely to continue into your later. Persuasion was no doubt written with publication in mind — that is, to be absorbed by the eye, through the turning of pages, and a multitudinous eye at that, including all ranks and types of owners — but the early conception of a family audience, gathered round a vicarage fire, or sitting in the sun of a late afternoon, listening, smiling, responding, with evident pleasure, would not easily be forgotten.
And this — the mental presence of an actual audience — is another reason for the peculiarly dramatic scene-setting of which Jane Austen is so fond. She knows how to end a scene, an episode, a chapter, before beginning the next: when to allow the audience to rest, when to and how to underline a statement, when to mark time with idle paragraphs, allowing what went before to settle, before requiring it to inform what comes next.
It is a very modern technique. It requires, bluntly, and in modern terminology, consciousness of audience, and audience reaction. Jane Austen, I surmise, learned hers by reading aloud; listening to the stirrings, sighings and coughings of her audience. Today many writers learn by cutting their teeth on screen or TV or radio plays, before settling down to write novels; and though many who eschew the other forms of writing, and only write novels and are proud of it, will deny a sense of audience, saying, ‘But I don’t think of the readers at all. I only think of me,’ when what they usually mean is, ‘I am my own reader; I am both writer and reader. I must be the one, to gratify the other.’ For without this sense, there can be no pleasure by the writer in the sense of manipulating, through the written and the spoken word, the mind of the reader: and none of the mildly masochistic glory the reader has in being so manipulated and controlled as to actually have feelings he would not otherwise have had, and thoughts likewise, and discover in himself opinions he never knew he held. Truly, Alice, books are wonderful things: to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! To be able to visit the City of Invention at will, depart at will — that is all, really, education is about, should be about.
But that’s enough of that for now. You may observe, that like so many of my generation, brought up on one side of the great cultural arts/science divide, I tend to believe that Science Faculties do not exist.
There is another very boring side to this reader/writer interconnection. It happens to writers who offer, or seem to offer, a solution to moral complexities of life, who do more than just offer plots and characters. ‘There is some mystery here,’ the reader thinks. ‘Let us find out what it is.’ They send questionnaires. One arrived this morning, forwarded from England. It comes from a post-graduate student, doing a thesis on feminist literature. It goes like this:
1. In adolescence, were your favourite or formative writers female?
2. Of these early influences, which do you think have been important to your development as a writer?
3. Who was the first writer or writers you thought of as having a specifically female point of view?
4. Would you consider them so today?
5. Who would you consider to be the major figures in feminist fiction?
6. Does the writing of women from other cultures interest you as a writer?
7. Do you think that there are male writers writing from a point of view that is sympathetic to feminism?
8. Do you consider that a male writer can write convincingly about female experience, and if so, who would you give as an example?
9. Which area of female experience do you think has been most neglected by writers to date?
10. Do you think that certain female experiences have actually been suppressed in literature?
11. Are you happy with the teaching of literature in schools?
12. A. Rich has referred to our language as ‘…man-made, inadequate, and lying…’ Do you think that a feminist vocabulary (a clumsy phrase, but can’t think of a better one) is desirable or necessary?
13. Why do you think that historically we know much more about women in literature than in the visual arts?
I will answer the questionnaire, of course, as best I can, and out of a general courtesy, but I do not think my answering will help the inquirer understand literature, men, women, or me. I can only reply as a reader, not a writer. I would have to write a whole play, or novel, based on the theme of every single question, and she would have to watch that, or read it, and absorb it, and understand it, before she would be one jot further on; and then she would have another questionnaire to send out, based on that, and we would never, ever finish. Of course we wouldn’t! The whole way in which fiction differs from journalism — a journalist would have no trouble answering the questionnaire — is that it attempts to reduce the enormous complexities of the whole to something comprehensible by an imaginative leap — we are humble sheep in a field of infinity: behold, a little ditch. Over goes the writer first: the readers follow after. But it was only such a little ditch…The journalist knows nothing of this: he has no concept of scale. He will answer question No. 1 briskly and informatively. He will say, ‘my favourite writers were female but my formative writers male, in adolescence. In my childhood the position was reversed, and in my adult life I have had no favourite or formative writers’ or something of that kind, and she will ponder this and, with any luck, will decide it means something. I will be still on Act 1, scene 3, detailing the nature of adolescence and the sexual desires of an androgynous English teacher.
These inquiries — mostly from women doing theses on some aspect of literature and/or feminism today — seem to believe that, if only they understood the writer, they would then understand the book. Recognizing that there is something inexplicable about the work, their ambition is instantly to nail it, and then explain it. Or perhaps, for some, it is that they are baffled by the writer’s ability to do what they themselves would like to do, but can’t. That is, write a novel that others want to read. They can write essays, memos, letters — why is it then that they can’t write novels: that the words lie dead and flat upon the page? There is some secret here, they feel, that the writer knows and unfairly withholds. If only the inquirer digs deep and uncomfortably enough — then the writer will be obliged to divulge the secret, every man can be his own novelist, and never spend a penny on a book again.
I worked in an advertising agency once. We were taken over by rational Americans, who could not bear the risky and expensive waywardness of the way we worked, and pinned us down by research, and tried to nail the creative process, so that successful campaigns could be produced in a rational way — so many positive adjectives here, so many exclamation marks there, a set ratio of copy to picture — but it never quite worked. The success rate was as high if we were guided by instinct as it was if we went by computer and research. Management retired, baffled, and let us get on with it in our own way, losing millions here, gaining millions there, for all the wrong reasons. It is for this same reason, the desire to control the creator and to calculate audience response, that once ‘great’ TV series decline and fall away; the initial creativity runs out; is drawn off like water from a well, by script editors who rationally apply a formula that ‘works’; only the well must presently run dry. Viewers notice it long before script editors: viewing figures fall, and only writers understand why. There is construction here, and description, but no invention. Dallas palls, Upstairs Downstairs brings a yawn.
Anyway, last night at Canberra the readers and the would-be writers came to hear me speak, and to ask questions. It was a particularly good evening. Speaker and audience animated one another: these occasions, when all goes well, are like nothing else. They are half-way, for the audience, between going to a theatrical performance and reading a book; and for the writer, half-way between the former and writing one. A new art form:
The phenomenon is not new. Readers and listeners made tracks to Snorri Sturluson, twelfth-century writer of Icelandic sagas, poet, politician and historian. They came, over snow and tundra, by horse and cart and reindeer and sleigh. The questions would have been the same then as they are now. ‘Mr Sturluson, do you work regular hours or do you wait for inspiration to strike? Do you take notice of what the critics say? Of what the King says?’ (He had better have paid more attention to the latter: he came to a sorry end by the King’s hand.) ‘What were the early influences on your work?’
Human nature does not change over the centuries. If one writer is born to every five hundred non-writers, so are five critics and ten sceptics, twenty questioners and, thank God, one hundred simple readers: the proportion was the same in the twelfth century as it is today: only the scale is different, and (in the West) there are lighter penalties for writing what displeases, and thinking what is inconvenient. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society. Elizabeth Bennet, that wayward, capricious girl, listening to the beat of feeling, rather than the pulsing urge for survival, paying attention to the subtle demands of human dignity rather than the cruder ones of established convention, must have quite upset a number of her readers, changed their minds, and with their minds, their lives, and with their lives, the society they lived in: prodding it quicker and faster along the slow, difficult road that has led us out of barbarity into civilization.
Now, the questions asked last night by the readers of Canberra, those same questions asked of Sturluson and Tolstoy and George Eliot and any writer who even once ventures a public opinion on the way the world is run, and their relation to it, are sensible enough. They are what I ask other writers. They are what I would ask Jane Austen if I were her contemporary. They are the questions that her biographers try to answer for her.
I think they sometimes get it wrong. I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way.
Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‘And who is this Mr Knightley I see on the third line down? Is he going to marry Emma?’ (I daresay two chapters into the work she simply didn’t know, but no reader/visitor is going to believe a thing like that.) So the work is covered. It isn’t shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.
I would have thought the small, round table, half-way between fire and window, sitting with a warm back and life going on the other side of the pane, when you chose to look up from the page, and the occasional knock at the door, and a putting away of the work, was an ideal place and way for any writer to work, It’s how I choose to do it, I know that. I won’t have her pitied for it.
I do pity contemporary male writers, who have wives to bring them coffee and answer the phone to the bank manager, and no excuse not to undertake, not to complete, not to get published, and who find themselves with nothing to say. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living. It is something you do with your hands, like knitting. We were not born with typewriter keys for fingers; we were born to pick up sticks and scratch away in mud and make our ochre marks on the walls of caves. Now, given that we must make a living, we join the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors and fight for our rights and our royalties and have to do so — but we should not be misled as to the true nature of our occupation. We do not need offices and a muted typewriter and no disturbance — we need a table half-way between the fire and the window, and the muted sound of the world around: to be of that world, and not apart from it. It is easier for women than it is for men, the world being what it is, and women writers, to their great advantage, are not allowed wives.
Alice, how is your novel? I do quite like your title. The Well of Loneliness: but I think someone has already used it. Do check with your tutor. You ask me how to write a ‘good novel’. Well, the writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending I do not mean mere fortunate events — a marriage, or a last-minute rescue from death — but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.
‘This is a far, far better thing,’ said Dickens at the end of Tale of Two Cities, ‘than I have ever done.’ And look how that sold!
Readers need and seek for moral guidance. I mean this in the best and even unconventional sense. They need an example, in the light of which they can examine themselves, understand themselves.
If you are good, Jane Austen promised, you will be happy. Emma learns to control her foolish impulses, and marries Mr Knightley. Anne in Persuasion holds fast to her ideals of unchanging love, and brings her lover back to her. Elizabeth comes to distinguish unthinking prejudice from impartial judgment, and so can love and be loved by Mr Darcy. Jane Austen defines our faults for us, analyses our virtues, and tells us that if we will only control the one with the other, all will yet be well.
That to be good is to be happy is not something particularly evident in any of our experiences of real life, yet how badly we want it, and need it, to be true. Of course we read and re-read Jane Austen.
It is in this sense that the City of Invention is so valuable to us. In this other City, virtue is rewarded, and the bad are punished; and all events are interconnected, and what is more, they rise out of characters and action, not chance. Had you noticed how rarely coincidence occurs in the City of Invention? It is frowned upon here: it upsets the visitors. Coincidence happens in real life all the time. Not here. Cause and effect must rule, or else the readers will prefer reality, with its chaos and coincidence. They will leave the City, in droves.
We want and need to be told how to live. Let me quote from What is to be Done?, written by Nicolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. People have been reading it for more than a hundred years. Virago have just re-issued it. What is to be Done? is what’s called a World Bestseller as is Emma. It is a study in self-control and moral development as is Pride and Prejudice. It is the story of a girl from a brutal background who grows into a fine young woman, runs a dress factory cooperative in Czarist Russia and becomes a doctor. She marries twice: the first marriage is sexless, since the sexual act is seen as something rather animal and undignified and standing in the way of true companionship and true love: in the second marriage sex is allowable as an expression of love. Chernyshevsky almost seems to be saying, like St Paul, ‘Well, better to marry, I suppose, than to burn.’ He offers us an agreeable and stirring and achievable Utopia, if only we would learn to control ourselves and our passions. He does not invoke God, as the Church does, as the interventionary power required to bring general self-control and Heaven here on earth: he sees the strength latent there in both man and woman, if only they will use it.
It is stirring stuff: we should have more of it. He addresses his reader boldly, thus:
I wager that up to the concluding paragraphs Vera, Kirsanov and Lopukhov (his protagonists) have seemed to the majority of the public to be heroes, individuals of a superior nature, if not ideal persons, if not every person’s impossible aim in real life by reason of their very noble conduct. No, my poor friends, you have been wrong in this thought: they are not too high. It is you who are too low. You see now that they simply stand on the surface of the earth: and, if they have seemed to you to be soaring in the clouds, it is because you are in the infernal depths. The light where they stand all men should and can reach…Come up from your caves, my friends, ascend! It is not so difficult. Come to the surface of this earth, where one is so well situated and the road is easy and attractive. Try it: development! development! Observe, think, read those who tell you of the pure enjoyment of life, of the possible goodness and happiness of men.
Chernyshevsky was, if you want a rapid résumé of nineteenth-century Russian thought, a ‘man of the ‘eighties’, who replaced the men of the ‘sixties, with more visionary Utopians — Kropotkin the anarchist, Bakunin the philosopher. (They couldn’t stand each other.) Chernyshevsky ran off with Bakunin’s daughter and was mad, quite mad. He frightened everyone with his glittering eyes. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities when he was thirty-four, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped, they say, by converting the entire prison staff to his ideas, to the kind of ecstatic pre-Marxist communism we find in What is to be Done?, which he wrote in prison. The staff unlocked the prison gates and set him free. The authorities found him, and sent him to Siberia where the warders were less impressionable and too stupid and vile to be converted to anything, and where he died in 1889. What is to be Done? lives on.
Jane Austen’s lifestyle (as they call it now) was very different, and her call to moral arms more muted; but it was there. And her books too live on.
Well, of course readers are envious of writers.
With best wishes,
Aunt Fay