Letters to Alice (11 page)

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

Canberra, January

M
Y DEAR ENID,

Thank you for writing to me. Your letter followed me from Cairns, and has caught me here the day before I leave for Heathrow. Of course I am not encouraging your daughter Alice to write a novel. Of course she should concentrate on her studies. I am only trying to help her understand Jane Austen: see my letters as seed flung upon ground badly in need of literary fertilizer.

Do you remember our mother discovering a copy of
The Well of Loneliness
under my pillow and ceremoniously burning it, as indecent and likely to corrupt? Did you ever report that incident to Alice? I doubt it, yet the title is lurking there somewhere in her subconscious: it would almost lead one to become a Lamarckian, and believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

I
am
glad you wrote. It is time we patched up this quarrel. I understand your nervousness that Alice might set fictional pen to paper — you are particularly sensitive on this point and no doubt believe she will start writing about your and Edward’s intimate marital relationship for all the world to see, and then Edward will ban her from the house. She won’t — any more than I ever did. You are
not
the model for Chloe in
Female Friends.
Too many of my friends claim that role, in any case, for you to be able to do so sensibly. Any woman who waits upon her husband as a servant upon a master — and they are legion — all too easily sees herself as Chloe. But I
made her up.
I promise. It is true that you must set the dough to rise before going to bed so that Edward can have fresh home-baked bread rolls for breakfast, as Chloe did for her Oliver, but because you do that, must no writer ever write about it? Can you
own
it, because you
do
it? The incident is yours, I admit, but the character of Chloe simply is not.
You
would never have a garden full of other people’s children, come to live with you because you were the only mother in sight. You choose your friends more carefully. You will never leave Edward, crying ‘I can, I can, and I will!’ and good for you, because you live the way you live, however strange that may appear to others. You are not Chloe.

Let me try and explain; let me try and give you proof. There is, to me, even as reader, a detectable difference between invented and described characters. Take Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s
Emma
— a book I know you have read and loved, though somehow failed to pass the enthusiasm on to little punk-head Alice. I am sure Miss Bates is based upon a real person, a woman that one may, that one
must
laugh at, says Emma — because it is a slightly spiteful portrait and goes on too long: Jane Austen’s revenge perhaps for hours of local boredom. Truly, properly invented characters, born out of the imagination, sprung from the head fully formed, as Venus was from Zeus, may appear as wicked, or good, or bizarre or foolish, but the writer takes the attitude of God — he forgives and understands, even while condemning. This is, after all, his own creation. He is in a way responsible.

But when the writer describes and does not invent, he suffers the limitations of his own humanity, and appears spiteful, or bigoted, or not really entitled to comment at all. Miss Bates, I confess, makes me uneasy. I think she lived in the village of Chawton, and I am sure the villagers read
Emma
and nudged each other and said, ‘That’s her, that’s Miss Bates,’ and laughed the more at her, and I hope Jane Austen was slightly ashamed, just as Emma eventually was. Except, of course, literacy in the village would have been running at a rate of only some fifteen per cent. Perhaps Jane Austen thought she was safe.

Authors writhe and chafe at the notion that they are parasitical upon spouses, family, friends, colleagues. The charge is so nearly true, yet never quite. People in fiction are conglomerates or abstractions: in personality and in appearance. Fictional characters are simple and understandable — real people are infinitely complex, incomprehensible and even in appearance look one way one day and another the next.

Of course I am worried that you think you are Chloe, and I feel guilty about it, even while loudly declaring my innocence.

But these kind of literary-social personal remarks are better directed at Alice, who has essays to write and needs a phrase here and a thought there, not you, Enid. My love to Edward. If he will forgive me for upsetting you by putting before the general novel-reading public (a
very
small proportion of the population, I do assure him — and Mrs Thatcher
never
reads them) the details of husband/wife bread roll relationships, and accept that my whole purpose in the world is
not
to upset marriages, and will understand that my sending Alice £500 was not in order to denigrate him, or imply that he kept his own daughter in poverty, but simply a matter of paying off my gambling debts in an honourable way, I would love to come to stay. I do miss you, Enid.

Your loving sister,

Fay

Singapore, February

M
Y DEAR ALICE,

I am in correspondence with your mother: your father may forgive me: we may even be reunited. Why any of us read novels, life being so novelettish, I cannot today imagine. Next week, jet-lagged and with the prospect of an earnest, hard-working future unalleviated by foreign travel before me, I shall no doubt be knocking pitifully once again on the doors of the City, in flight from boredom, in search of ideas.

In the meantime, I am on the 18th floor of the Marco Polo Stopover hotel, too terrified of the East to leave my room. My terror is not for my body but for my mind. To come to terms with the concept of the group soul, and forget our Western notion of individual life, death and salvation, takes more time than is available to me on this trip. I shall look out of the window and pretend that what I see is a backcloth, and write to you, and have hamburgers for supper, and shut my senses to the ripe, Imperial, murderous efficiency of this new/old place, on the Qantas coach back to beautiful Changi airport, where the fountains play and policemen with machine guns keep them trained upon the crowd, no doubt for the benefit of the likes of me. I carry Currency.

I think you should make yourself acquainted with the writers Jane Austen read: Addison, Johnson, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne and Fanny Burney.

Too much?

Stick to Fielding. Read
Tom Jones
(if
that’s
too much, at least see the film). Jane Austen is said to have censured Fielding as being morally lax. One of the difficulties of being a writer of note is that people believe that you mean what you say, and believe that you go on believing what you say. A change of mind or mood requires a flag or a trumpet. Had Jane Austen known that a light remark of hers about Fielding — possibly uttered to suit the occasion and keep the social wheels running smoothly — was to stand as her one, true, lasting opinion of Fielding through the centuries, she might well have phrased it differently — or, had she wanted to get on with her work, simply given the existing statement marks out of ten for conviction, durability and passionate utterance, and marked all rather low.

I think you should probably read Richardson’s Sir
Charles Grandison,
which I believe was one of Jane Austen’s favourites. I have not read it. If you will read it, Alice, and let me know what it is like, I will pay you £50. I believe that reading books you do not really want to read, like looking after children you do not really want to look after, should be a very highly-paid occupation indeed. It is an assault to the human spirit. I studied English Literature for a short (a very short) time at university, and was so distressed at having to read a novel by Walter Scott that I paid someone else to do it, in much the same way as I now pay you for reading Richardson. It was not an admirable or ethical act, in the circumstances, and feeling it to be so, I gave up English Literature altogether, and took to Economics and Psychology, departments in which I flourished. I deduce nothing from this, either as to the nature of the reader or the embryo writer, merely that I was a bored and idle student. I hope you never do any such thing.

I wonder if you are a politicized young woman? I wonder if you notice that your examinations become more and more difficult to pass as there are fewer and fewer places available in our universities? Or, if you know, perhaps you do not care? You are, I suspect, too privileged, too bright, too pretty, too secure in your opinions to care much what goes on in your society. And, above all, too unread, too little practised in empathy.

Jane Austen wrote her first version of
Pride and Prejudice
(then called
First Impressions)
in 1796. It was a year of famine and shortages. The price of wheat was rocketing. There was large-scale rural unemployment — most workers on the land were temporary employees, and in hard times were left without work. Nearly everyone worked at harvest time — almost nobody at Christmas. If there was no work there were no wages, and if there were no wages there was no food. More children died, inside or outside the womb. The villagers still doffed their caps to the gentry, and especially to the vicar who, leaving his relationship to God out of it, was usually the magistrate, and had almost total power in the community; to sentence for offences, to grant relief, to evict, and so forth. No doubt the vicar’s children were well and truly doffed to. What should they notice? They took soup to the poor, and did not wonder at the causes of their poverty. They took comfort, if they did, in the existence of the Speenhamland system — which came into being in the mid-1770s, and which subsidized low wages out of the local rates in cases where the labourer’s family income fell below the subsistence level, either because the price of bread was too high or because he had too many children. It was never law, but it was certainly common, and it never worked. The distinction between worker and pauper vanished. Farmers continued to pay below-subsistence rates. The subsistence level itself was whittled away. In 1795 a three-and-a-half gallon loaf did for an adult male, a one-and-a-half for every other member of his family: twenty years later a one gallon loaf per adult male was considered appropriate. That’s the way it goes.

The rural population saw its common land vanishing as farmers and landowners claimed it for their own, and enclosed it with hedges, and was powerless to prevent it, and grew hungrier and hungrier.

And Mr Bingley rode by the Bennets’ window on his way to Netherfield Park, and Elizabeth was slighted by Darcy, and sister Jane was slighted by Mr Bingley, and then Darcy fell in love with Elizabeth, who rejected his offer of marriage, and Lydia ran off and lived in sin for at least a week with Mr Wickham, and Elizabeth fell in love with Darcy, and Bingley was reunited with Jane, and everyone lived happily ever after, even Mrs Bennet, the only one with the slightest notion of the sheer desperation of the world, whom everyone laughed at throughout.

Nonsense, isn’t it!

Millions starving, then and now, I hear you protesting. And Jane Austen! What
are
you going on about? All I can answer is, plaintively, man, and especially woman, does not live by bread alone: he has to have books.

Not that
Pride and Prejudice
would have cheered the lives of the rural poor, for so few of them could read. The Rev. Austen was busy teaching the sons of the gentry Latin; not the sons of the poor to read and write. That way revolution lay — or at any rate uncomfortable demands for higher wages.

Emma Woodhouse befriended Harriet in
Emma
and Harriet was born in rather sorry circumstances and Emma tried to teach her, but I’m afraid in eighteenth-century terms breeding will out — Harriet was a disappointment to Emma. Mr Knightley knew it would be so. The argument then was all from nature, not nurture. In the genes v. environment debate, genes won hands down, even in Jane Austen. Harriet found her natural level with honest Robert Martin, tenant farmer. The gentry, if misbegotten, went down a fairly sharpish peg or so.

So what
are
you going on about? I hear you repeat. Why this reverence for Jane Austen, who was blind (in our terms) to so much? I will tell you. The gentry, then as now,
has
to read in order to comprehend both the wretchedness and ire of the multitude. It is not only ignorance in the illiterate we need to combat, it is insensitivity in the well-to-do. Fiction stretches our sensibilities and our understanding, as mere information never can. Well, you will know this for yourself. A play on television makes ten times the impact as a documentary on the same subject. (I am talking about plays — not series episodes. The play is the controlled fantasy of a single person, and the technology follows where he or she — usually he — leads. The series episode is the product of group thinking, and will hold the mind of the viewer but not his or her — usually her — imagination.)

If society is to advance then those that hath must empathize with those that hath not. I am not offering quite so severe a doctrine as Auden’s — ‘we must love one another or die’ — rather that we must learn to stand in other people’s shoes and look out at the world with their eyes, or die. (It is at least a little more attainable to most people, love being in such scarce supply and depending — or so they say — on love of self, which is scarcely within our control.) If the Minister of Education and the Prime Minister read more novels, your exams would not be so difficult to pass, university places having been cut. They would know what it
felt
like to be an unsuccessful student, and they would have mercy.

You can practise the art of empathy very well in
Pride and Prejudice,
and in all the novels of Jane Austen, and it is this daily practice that we all need, or we will never be good at living, as without practice we will never be good at playing the piano.