Read Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions Online

Authors: Regina Barreca

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Women (and men alike) are encouraged to have a good time, it's true, but they also learn to be strongor, more accurately, to recognize the strengths they have always possessedand they acquire competence far more easily than they ever imagined possible. Like a good mother or a full-time fairy godmotherboth, perhaps, equally fictitious creatures of the imaginationWeldon offers her readers the possibility of recognition and realization in place of a desire for revenge or retribution.

She treats her readers roughly on occasion, expecting a great deal from them and assuming an intimacy that some neophytes find daunting. In
The Shrapnel Academy,
for example, Weldon confronts what can be called "the readerly/writerly battle for responsible literature" by addressing her reader directly and dissecting the relationship: "Now, gentle reader, shall we return ... Gentle reader! What have I said! You are no more gentle than I am! I apologize for insulting you. You are as ferocious as anyone else. The notion that the reader is gentle is very bad for both readers and writersand the latter do tend to encourage the former in this belief. We all believe ourselves to be, more or less, well intentioned, nice goodies in fact, whether we're the greengrocer or the Shah of Shahs. But we can't possibly be, or how would the world have got into the state it's in? Who else but ourselves are doing this to ourselves? We simply don't know our own natures" [p. 52].

Accepting responsibility is part of Weldon's regime, for her characters and for herself. Being a woman who lives by her wits, Weldon is the embodiment of the working writer who learned early how to earn her keep by the keen and quick use of her pen. (In an introduction to Louisa May Alcott's thrillers, Weldon presumes that Alcott wrote the gothic tales for three reasons: "She was good at them, they were obviously fun to write (as they are to read) and she needed the money." Much the same can be said of Weldon herself, who always argues that she writes better when she has outstanding bills to pay.) Weldon makes unashamedly declarative judgments, pronouncements on all sorts of topics, and does this verbally as well as on the page. A serious writer, Weldon has no difficulty in staking out an intellectual or conceptual claim and sticking by it. Whether writing about the Anita Hill hearings or why most people are slightly repulsed by scientists, Weldon unhesitatingly takes a position and writes her way into the argument. The daughter of a mother whose fiction was published under the pen name "Pearl Bellairs" and the granddaughter of Edgar Jepson, whose work can often still be found in the less-busy parts of large libraries, Weldon did not glamorize the process of putting one word after the other. Writing is a respectable profession, according to Weldon, nothing to be ashamed of, but one should be careful to avoid the temptation of regarding

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oneself as too much of an artiste. Writing everything from advertising copy to working for the Foreign Service "writing lies," Weldon continues to be mercurial as a writer. She seems to move effortlessly from dramatist to short-story writer to radio-play author to television scriptwriter, and then back to novelist.

It is more than difficult to document Fay Weldon's life story because she reinvents herself biographically nearly as often as any set of questions can be posed. We would do well to keep in mind remarks concerning the construction of a past that are sprinkled through Weldon's novels, summed up neatly by one paragraph in
Praxis
:

How much is fiction and how much is true? There can be no objective truth about our memories, so perhaps it is idle to even attempt the distinction. We are the sum of our pasts, it is true: we are altogether composed of memories: but a memory is a chancy thing, experience experienced, filtered coarse or fine according to the mood of the day, the pattern of the times, the company we happen to be keeping: the way we shrink from certain events or open our arms to embrace them. [P. 81]

On some matters, the sources of information seem to agree. Born in 1931, Fay Weldon was actually christened Franklin Birkinshaw, a name her mother invented for more or less magical reasons having to do with numerologythis, at least according to Fay-folklorists, has had a number of significant effects. Weldon argues that she was admitted to St. Andrew's University in Scotland because they believed she was a male student, and with a name like Franklin, this is really no surprise. "Otherwise they never would have permitted me to study economics," Weldon offers by way of further proof. The scenario of the female student admitted because of an administrative error appears in various guises in several works, most specifically in
Female Friends
. Growing up "in a house full of women," as she often defines her childhoodwhich took place first in New Zealand, later in Englandshe learned to expect a great deal of herself and of women generally.

Her parents divorced when she was five. Weldon lived with her mother, sister, and grandmother until she started college. "I believed the world was essentially feminine," she explains. "It was quite a shock to discover that the world, as other people saw it, was dominated by men. Luckily I had already formed my own opinion."

In her early twenties Weldon was briefly married to a man more than twenty years her senior, from whom she was soon divorced. Raising her eldest son as a single mother, Weldon looks back on her twenties as times fraught with "odd jobs and hard times," and recalls peeling linoleum, cold food straight from the can, defiance, and, finally, success. Eventually she

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moved from writing for the intelligence service and advertising companies (along the way marrying Ron Weldon, with whom she had three more sons) to writing for television, and then to writing fiction and nonfiction for what would soon become her avid readership. But, thinking of
Letters to Alice,
Weldon's book about Jane Austen, I remember her warning her fictional, novel-writing niece about the needs and desires of literary types, declaring that "I speak as one studied by Literature Departments (a few) and in Women's Studies Courses (more) and I say 'one' advisedly, because it is not just my novels (legitimate prey, as works of what they care to call the creative imagination) but
me
they end up wanting to investigate, and it is not a profitable study" (p. 10).

Unlike many other contemporary writers, Weldon has no problem with her work appearing in women's weekly magazines as well as the
New York Times
or literary journals. The readers of Cosmopolitan and the readers of
The New Yorker
finally have something in common. Weldon writes books you can give to your mother, your brother, your students, and your colleagues without risking their wrath or their wariness: students may wonder why readable books are being assigned as course work, perhaps, but that is the worst that will happen.

Giving Weldon's books to colleagues has another advantage; you can telephone and ask them to write essays based on those books they already know by heart. Scholars such as Nancy Walker, Elisabeth Bronfen, John Glavin, and Siân Mile have been addressing Weldon's work in their own writings and lectures for some time; scholars such as Margaret Doody, Rachel Brownstein, Rose Queillo, Lee Jacobus, and Julie Nash are only recently turning their considerable talents toward Weldon's fiction; and working writers such as Bob Sullivan and Pam Katz bring their insight and expertise to Weldon's work in a wholly new way.

Finally, Fay Weldon herself, always and ever generous, has here printed or reprinted some of her most significant, previously uncollected work. This is the first complete book focusing on Fay Weldon's wickedand kindlywork, but it is surely not the last because, as Weldon observes, "By such discussion and such shared experience, do we understand ourselves and one another, and our pasts and our futures."

Note

1. Interview, "The Life and Loves of Fay Weldon," Eden Ross Lipson,
Lear's
(January 1990): 11315.

Page 8

Works Cited

Weldon, Fay.
Letters to Alice: On first reading Jane Austen
. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977.

.
Life Force
. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

.
Praxis
. New York: Summit Books, 1978.

.
The President's Child
. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

.
Remember Me
. New York: Random House, 1976.

.
The Shrapnel Academy
. New York: Viking, 1987.

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions

4.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub