I had one of my children eight days before Christmas and that was bad enough. There were paper streamers in the bathroom and roaches in the bath.
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Children often don't come out too well in my novels. I stifle one in
Praxis,
mock them in
She-Devil,
give them away in
The Heart of the Country.
But I do love little Nell immoderately in
The Hearts and Lives of Men
. I see her as the hope of the heart, the whole future. Having come to the conclusion that really I must never write another novel with the words heart, or life, or loves ever again, I put my trust in
Joanna May
and a more clinical approach. I am not automatically against reproductive technology: I am not convinced that having babies by chance, or at any rate by sexual selection left in the hands of overemotional, rash, and unwise individuals, is the best possible way forward. Looking round the world, I am not convinced that nature is very good or very wise. Nature simply is.
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In
Puffball,
which I wrote after the birth of my fourth and final child, in 1977, hoping to capture some of the extraordinary feelings and emotions of pregnancy, which are, by a margin, even more extraordinary than the sensations engendered by writing a novel, I said this of nature:
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 | | What is nature, after all, for living creatures, but the sum of the chance genetic events which have led us down one evolutionary path or another. And although what seem to be its intentions may, in a bungled and muddled way, work well enough to keep this species or that propagating, they cannot be said always to be desirable for the individual.
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And men, sensibly, are discouraged by society from doing what is natural: e.g., fighting, raping, killing one's enemies, trampling the vanquished underfoot. Women are encouraged so to do: nurturing, comforting, having babies, dusting, cleaning. But I forget it's the nineties. I must try to soften out these difficulties, make them unbumpylike those new tar-softening machines which soften out the potholes in the road. They don't exactly mend the road, or fill in the holes: you just don't notice them so much because the edges are smooth. That's the nineties for you, I predict.
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| | Nature sets us in motion, Nature propels us. It is as well to acknowledge it.
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| | And by Nature we mean not God, nor anything which has intent, but the chance summation of evolutionary events which, over aeons, have made us what we are: and starfish what they are, and turtles what they are: and pumpkins too, and will make our children, and our children's children what they will be, and an infinitesimal improvementso long, that is, as natural selection can keep pace with a changing environmenton what we are. Looking back, we think we perceive a purpose. But the perspective is faulty.
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| | We no longer see Nature as blind, although she is. Her very nature is imbued with a sense of purpose, as the name of God used to be. God means us. God wills us. God wants for us. We cannot turn words back: they mean what we
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