During the four decades over which these stories were written the relationship between men and women in the West has changed out of all recognition. In the seventies women still endured the domestic tyranny of men, in the eighties we found our self-esteem, in the nineties we lifted our heads and looked about, and in the noughties – well, we went out to work. We had to.
The stories from the seventies, I notice, tend to be long and serious, those from the busy two thousands, shorter. Everyone’s busy. By the 2014 novella, various chickens from these last decades have come home to roost, while social media and big pharma wreak their own special havoc. Some things don’t change, of course. Like mother-love; and children learning to put up with second best. The wife may become the partner, but she goes on making, mending, patching broken lives the same as ever.
Reading through my hundred-odd stories was a disturbing experience. Delving into one’s past writing is like delving into memories of one’s own life for an autobiography – there is so much concentrated, even painful experience here. Fiction these stories may be, but the feeling-tones of yesterdays are bound to come surging back. Women’s bodies go on betraying them, desire goes on trumping common sense. The sadistic male artist seems perennial, his poor masochistic moll up to her arms in soapsuds, admiring him.
Most of the tales in this book have been collected before; a few have appeared only in newspapers, magazines or on the radio. A couple are unpublished: the novella had an initial outing as an e-book but is paper published here for the first time. Most of them were written as interruptions of whatever novel I was writing at the time (Alopecia, for example, must have been a kind of interjection into the comparative frivolity of Little Sisters). It seems wiser to get new ideas out of my head and onto the page than keep them seething away inside it. These stories often read, I can see, more like concentrated mini novels than classic short stories.
It was only when I wrote my first short stories unasked for and uncommissioned that I could persuade myself that I was any kind of proper writer. Since I began writing fiction in 1966 I’d found myself writing non-stop in response to requests for television and radio dramas, stage plays, novels, fulfilling contracts and meeting deadlines. But perhaps the fact that I could do that was more to do with my training in advertising than from any genuine talent? Perhaps all I’d been doing was responding to requests in order to pay the rent and keep a family? Not initiating my own ideas like a proper writer? I trusted the incomparable Giles Gordon, my literary agent from 1966 until he died in 2003, to market what I produced. Which he unfailingly did. So I gained confidence.
Then the short began to creep surreptitiously into the long fiction. In Leader of the Band (1988) I added three only obliquely relevant short stories. And fiction crept into ‘non-fiction’: in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) I had to warn readers the ‘I’ in the book was not me, albeit she bore my name. In Mantrapped (2004) I stirred fiction into autobiography to work out whether one can truly separate the writer’s personal life from what she makes up. I decided that you couldn’t.
But I have always had a try-try-try-again approach to writing: nothing ends up quite as you meant it to, which is why one sighs and starts again, in the hope that this time you will get it right. Of course you never will. But this way you get an awful lot of different kinds of books written – to the despair of one marketing executive who shook her finger at me at a meeting and said, ‘You write consistent product, we’ll sell it.’
So many changes have come to pass in the last four decades to disturb the equanimity of the writer. By the nineties most of us were writing with computers – it was so fast, so easy, and the mouse outran the brain. Unconsidered first, not second, thoughts reached the page. Writing by hand went out of fashion. I held out until about 1995. I am not at all sure that the change to the digital text has been a blessing. The computer depends for its very existence on disambiguity; it deals with yes-no certainties. ‘Perhaps’ doesn’t get a look in. Every sentence means what it says and only what it says, and the ease of change for the writer is so swift and unlaborious that any hint of paradox, any sense of the opaque, is removed.
And then the e-book came along, the naked text without the frills of publisher’s advocacy, jacket, blurb, writer’s photo: Look at me! Read this book! The text must now stand alone, without defences. Readers, who once liked to settle down with a good book when they had peace and time to think now increasingly read e-books when they are on the move. It’s no surprise that plot-rich, contemplation-light genre novels leave literary novels lagging behind. ‘Good’ writing is so much to do with an aesthetic, with a resonance of language which is more apparent on paper than on a screen.
The Other Side always seems to hover over my work – alternative realities always threatening to break through, scaring us out of our wits and sometimes into them. In The Ted Dreams it finally steps into ours.
Fay Weldon
December 2014