Letters to Alice Read online

  I can give you a physical location for the City. It lies at a mid-way point between the Road to Heaven and the Road to Hell; these two were depicted in the lithograph that used to hang on your mother’s and my bedroom wall when we were children: before I took the broad and primrose Road to Hell, by going with our father when he left, and she stayed on the narrow, uphill path of righteousness that leads to Heaven, by remaining with our mother. What dramas there were then, little Alice, with your green and black hair! You have no idea how the world has changed in forty years.

  Before you can properly appreciate Jane Austen, you do need to be, just a little, acquainted with the City: at any rate with its more important districts. Master builders work up on the heights, in the shadow of some great castle or other. They build whole streets, worthy and respectable. Mannstrasse, Melville Ave, Galsworthy Close. You need at least to know where they are. More fun, perhaps, to ferret out the places where an innocent has erected some glittering edifice almost by mistake — Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford or James Stevens’s The Caretaker’s Daughter — or a child achieved what an adult can’t. The path up to Daisy Ashford’s Young Visitors is always thronged with delighted visitors. But it’s pleasant going about anywhere, especially with company. You can wander up and down the more cosmopolitan areas, dip into Sartre, or Sagan, or through the humbler districts, saying: that’s a good house for round here, or this one really lets the neighbourhood down! Sometimes you’ll find quite a shoddy building so well placed and painted that it quite takes the visitor in, and the critics as well — and all cluster round, crying, ‘Lo, a masterpiece!’ and award it prizes. But the passage of time, the peeling of paint, the very lack of concerned visitors, reveals it in the end for what it is: a house of no interest or significance.

  You will find that buildings rise and fall in the estimation of visitors, for no apparent reason. Who reads Arnold Bennett now, or Sinclair Lewis? But perhaps soon, with any luck, they’ll be rediscovered. ‘How interesting,’ people will say, pushing open the creaking doors. ‘How remarkable! Don’t you feel the atmosphere here? So familiar, so true: the amazing masquerading as the ordinary? Why haven’t we been here for so long?’ And Bennett, Lewis, or whoever, will be rediscovered, and the houses of his imagination be renovated, restored, and hinges oiled so that doors open easily, and the builder, the writer, takes his rightful place again in the great alternative hierarchy.

  Visitors, builders feel (even while asking them in and feeling insulted if they don’t look around), are demanding and difficult people; the visitors seem to have no idea at all how tricky the building of Houses is. They think if only they had the time, they’d do it themselves. They say, such a life I’ve had! I really ought to put it all down some day; turn it into a book! And so indeed what a life they’ve had, but the mere recording of event does not make a book. Experience does not add up to Idea. It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.

  Some builders build their houses and refuse to open the door, so terrified of visitors are they. In drawers and cupboards all over the land, I’ll swear, are the hidden manuscripts of perfectly publishable novels which, for lack of a brown envelope and a stamp and a little nerve, never see the light of day. Genius lasts, but I’m not so sure that it will necessarily out.

  Sometimes when a builder opens the door of a newly finished house, and the crowds and critics rush in, he must wish he’d never opened the door. Hardy never wrote another novel after Jude the Obscure was published, so upsetting did the critics find it, and so upsetting did he find the critics.

  Mind you, I see their point. Jude the Obscure stopped me reading for quite some time. I kept postponing my visits to the City for fear of what I might find there; the Giant Despair, for example, wandering the hitherto serene streets, zapping the unwary visitor on the head. Hardy, claimed the critics, was the one who had unlocked the cage and let the Giant loose: and then, worse, had opened the gates of the City and positively invited him in: had made it a dangerous place.

  It’s safer, you’ll find, down among the Pre-Fabs, if it’s safety you’re after. Here the verges are neatly swept and Despair wears a muzzle, albeit the houses themselves lack all grandeur and aspiration. Surprising to see such flimsy structures built with such care and skill. Novels-from-films — film first, novel after — Jaws, Alien, ET — are so efficiently written as to all but pass for real creation, real invention, and not the calculated flights of reason that they are. There is no vision here, but an acute observation of what a mass audience wants to see and hear. Heart-strings twang, but don’t vibrate. The windows in these Pre-Fabs have the blinds pulled down, and on the blinds are painted what you might reasonably see (reasonably for the City of Invention, that is) if they were raised — a beach scene, or a space ship, or an extra-terrestrial plodding about outside — but they are still only painted, albeit with wonderful conviction. And if you do raise the blinds, send them whirring up to the ceiling, where clean brisk straight edge meets clean brisk straight edge (nothing here of the softness of age, no mellow patina of the past) you will see out of the windows grey nothingness, and when the thrumming shark-fear music has died away, and the wistful songs of outer space, you may even hear the footfall of Despair outside and wonder just how fast his claws do grow, and if he gets even this far, and if he’s snapped his muzzle free.

  Quick, next door, to the rather solider hyped twin houses of Scruples and Lace. The blinds are frilly and expensive and very firmly pulled down. You’re not supposed to look around too closely, once inside. You may not want to, much (and in any case, your comments aren’t called for. You’re supposed to pay your money at the door, and leave at once). These houses and others like them, are well enough made. They are calculated to divert and impress and often do — but do not take them seriously, Alice, and know them for what they are.

  The good builders, the really good builders, carry a vision out of the real world and transpose it into the City of Invention, and refresh and enlighten the reader, so that on his, or her, return to reality, that reality itself is changed, however minutely. A book that has no base in an initial reality, written out of reason and not conviction, is a house built of — what shall we say? — bricks and no mortar? Walk into it, brush against a door frame, and the whole edifice falls down about your ears. Like the first little pig’s house of straw, when the big bad wolf huffed and puffed.

  Round the corner from the money-makers, the edges of the two suburbs running together, is the vast red-light district of Porno. Step into houses here at your peril: what you find inside is exciting enough, but the windows have no blinds at all, and there is real pain, torture, degradation and death out there. There are not even any curtains, just a nasty red flicker round the edges of the window frames, because this is where the city borders on Hell. Well, somewhere has to, just as someone has to be bottom of the class. But the suburb’s grown too fast, it’s unstoppable. Police forever roam the streets, to the mirth of the nudging, knowing, winking inhabitants, and occasionally manage to demolish a monstrosity, only to find a worse one springing up in its place. There’s a good building or so, of course, round here, and visitors bus in from everywhere, sometimes on very respectable tours. They come in by the bus-load for The Story of O — it’s so well constructed, they say: so elegantly made; look how graceful the lintels are, how delicately placed the beams — never mind where the whole thing’s placed! And the French lady, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller’s friend, never built better than when she was down here, and well paid. You will find, if you insist, other light-fingered and enchanting structures up and down the streets, but they have the air of the witch’s house i
n Hansel and Gretel. All smarties and gingerbread and delicious; but beware, the witch with her oven waits inside, and she’s luring you in, to eat you up! Wait until you’re older, Alice, and the pleasures of your own flesh desert you.

  (You may not know, of course, who Henry Miller was. He was an American. He wrote Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn back in the thirties, books explicitly sexual and much banned, and, with hindsight, exploitative of women. At the time he seemed the prophet of freedom, liberation, and imagination. His houses still stand.)

  I used to spend a lot of time myself in the all-male suburb of Sci-Fi, in the days when it was formal and reliable and informed and only a few knew of its pleasures. Sci-Fi Town borders on the red-light district: the two areas blend easily, being all mind and no heart. The houses here are mostly new, though a few proud old structures still stand. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were amongst the first to build. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 are showpieces in that nowadays slightly shoddy main street, Utopia. (Utopia comes from the Greek, Alice, and means a Nowhere Place, not a Good Place, as many people think.) Thomas More’s Utopia and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (‘Nowhere’ spelt backwards — well, more or less) were perhaps the finest and best buildings constructed here. But it’s the same here as anywhere: districts become too quickly fashionable, groundspace over-priced, jerry-building is tempting: good buildings are torn down and replaced by inferior constructions and then the heart of the place is gone. No one writes about Utopias any more.

  Science Fantasy, where these days the builders are for the most part women, is an area newly and brightly developed. But I for one still prefer to look out of windows and see futuristic nuts and bolts and the occasional bug-eyed monster rather than the strange shifting phantasms which you see up and down the new Fantasy Alley. (I am composing a reading list for you, incidentally. I shall send it under separate cover. An informed visitor to the City of Invention has a better time there than the naive and hopeful.)

  Romance Alley is of course a charming place, as your mother, I am sure, will tell you. It’s a boom town, too. The suburbs are increasingly popular for visitors who need time off from their own lives. (You don’t need to know anything about the rest of the City to visit here. Enough to be naive and hopeful.) And it really is a pretty place. Everything is lavender-tinted, and the cottages have roses round the door, and knights ride by in shining armour, and amazingly beautiful young couples stroll by under the blossoming trees, though he perhaps has a slightly cruel mouth, and she a tendency to swoon.

  Jane Austen is reputed to have fainted away when she came home from a walk with her sister, Cassandra, and was told by her mother, ‘It’s all settled. We’re moving to Bath.’ It was the first, they say, she’d heard of it. (Mind you, as I am fond of saying, they’ll say anything!) She was twenty-five; she had lived all her life in the Vicarage at Steventon: her father, without notifying anyone, had decided to retire, and thought that Bath was as pleasant a place as any to go. None of us fainted the day my father came home and told my mother, my sister and myself that he was leaving us that day to live for ever with his sweetheart, whose existence he’d never hinted at before. What are we to make of that? That swooning has gone out of fashion? Or that a later female generation has become inured, by reason of a literature increasingly related to the realities of life, to male surprises? Jane Austen’s books are studded with fathers indifferent to their families’ (in particular their daughters’) welfare, male whims taking priority, then as now, over female happiness. She observes it: she does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their idleness, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts. This may be another of the reasons her books are so socially acceptable in those sections of society least open to change. Women are accustomed to criticism; to being berated, in fiction, for their faults. Men are, quite simply, not. They like to be heroes.

  That is quite enough of this letter. If I write too much at any one time the personal keeps intruding, and I am writing a letter of literary advice to a young lady, albeit a niece, on first reading Jane Austen, not a diatribe on the world’s insensitivity to her aunt’s various misfortunes, or the hard time women have at the hands of men: a fact liberally attested to up and down the streets of the City of Invention.

  Alice, I see in your postscript, to my alarm, that you plan to write a novel as soon as you have the time. I sincerely hope you do not find the time, for some years to come, for reasons I will go into if and when you reply to this letter, but to do with your age and your apparent unacquaintance with the City of Invention. If you plan to build here, you must know the city. I comfort myself that to do a course in English Literature and to accomplish any serious writing of your own are commonly held to be mutually exclusive. We know you are doing the one, so the other seems (thank God) unlikely, at least for the time being.

  With best wishes,

  Aunt Fay

  LETTER TWO

  A terrible time to be alive

  Cairns, November

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  Just the very fact of existence is amazing: let alone grasping it and weaving it into patterns, as the novelist does. Fashioning nets, as I see it at the moment, to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence — like some wretched passenger flung from a disintegrating plane. You must forgive a certain overexcitement, Alice, in my prose — I have just finished writing a novel, and the sensation is wonderful; as wonderful as when guests, however much loved and welcomed, actually Go Away. Real life, dimly remembered, returns, for good or bad, and it is wonderful.

  I look around the hot, dangerous beaches, and into the slow, warm seas where the brilliant fish dart and hover, and the stone fish wait to kill you with a touch, and wonder what I am doing here; and I long for the mists and grey-green grass of England and a landscape altered by human regard, not indifferent and impartial, as are these vast Australian wastes. You may see me soon.

  Thank you for your letter. I hope you have already received the £500. I wired it at once. I think it was my bad luck, rather than my wrong judgment, to discover that you had actually read ‘The Hound of Heaven’. I suppose I can trust you to tell the truth? Your mother, as I remember, never told a lie: she did not have sufficient memory or consistency of vision to enable her to get away with untruths, as I always could. You will, you say, use the money to buy a word-processor. But, Alice, the machine will not write your book. You will still have to do it. You have the fantasy, held by many script editors the world over, that if only you could feed in characters and plots and a variety of adjectives, out would come a book. You might well get a book, but who would read it? Perhaps if you left a key or so out for the Muse (descending, as she tends to, at dawn or dusk) to strike, all would yet be well?

  How else but by invoking the Muse, to understand the writing of a novel? I can’t imagine, myself, how it’s done. Sometimes, it’s true, I see the novelist as someone who drops a plumb-line down into the well of the collective unconscious and fishes up God knows what, cleans it up and guts it and serves it up for the reader’s dinner. But mostly, I can see only the Muse, leaning over the writer’s shoulder, prodding with a bony finger, and bidding him or her write, damn you, write. The Angel of the House is there, too, if you’re a woman. Virginia Woolf described her in Professions for Women which she wrote in 1931:

  You may not know what I mean by the Angel of the House…She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily…she never had a mind or a wish of her own…And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words…She slipped behind me and whispered, ‘My dear, you are a young woman…Be sympathetic: be tender: flatter: deceive: use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.

  The Angel of the House stood at J
ane Austen’s elbow, that is my guess, and she never quite learned how to ignore her — except perhaps in the early Lady Susan, for the writing of which, I imagine, she was gently chided by her family, and drew back quickly as at the touch of a cold, cold hand, and never tried that again. But she learned how to get round the Angel, how to soothe her into slumber and write while she slept. Virginia Woolf never quite managed it, in her fiction at least. She abandoned herself to the subtleties of language, and the nuances of response; full of female art and wile; yet died by her own hand one morning, because the world was so dreadful and cruel a place. She knew it, but perhaps saw, as an earlier generation did, art as a retreat from life and not a response to it. I am not condemning, merely observing.

  Be that as it may, the air behind the writer is crowded, as the pen moves on. (Don’t type, Alice, if you persist in your insane literary plan: use a pen. Develop the manual techniques of writing, so that as the mind works the hand moves. If God had meant us to type, we’d have had a keyboard instead of fingers, etc.)

  There’s the Muse and this Jungian fisherman (both of whom I invoke, of course, to take charge), but there are also the personifications of every abstract concept there ever was, all shuffling and nudging for the writer’s attention, never quite focused, but always there, looking over the shoulder. Truth, Beauty, Love, Justice, Drama — all requiring attention, each trying to claim characters and sentences for their own, filling the air with phantasmagoric howls and moans of complaint and dissatisfaction.