Letters to Alice (12 page)

The writer, oddly enough, holding master classes in empathy, is excused from his or her obligation to observe the distress of society, to record the wider sweeps of social change. More than enough to observe and pass on the minutiae of the dealings between one human being and another: it is up to others to extrapolate from the small to the great, from the microcosm to the greater world. I have heard it offered as a reason (or excuse, I suppose) for the fact that a whole band of writers appears to espouse fascist causes, is because — dealing so intently with the fictional world, needing all their energy for the building of their splendid houses in the City of Invention — they like to be able to relax in the real world, and leave its conduct to the strong and powerful; those who cannot, in fact, be argued with. Discuss, on one side of the paper only.

I have had my Sunset Daiquiri brought to me by Room Service, and also a club sandwich filled with curry. Thus East and West must meet. Room Service — as often happens when ladies of a certain age travel alone — also offered more intimate services, which I refused. Your mother would be proud of me — your father merely conclude that women who travel alone deserve whatever they get. I know a young woman who travelled the world fomenting revolution and when she got home to her parents’ house in leafy Muswell Hill complained tearfully of having been raped by five policemen on the Afghanistan border, and was met by ‘well, what do you expect?’ She took great exception to this, but I think I am on her parents’ side. Nothing is for nothing. The world is very real, and not made up of an insubstantial web of rights and wrongs, and ins and outs, as we like to think in our leafy, decent suburbs, and it is no use being astonished — as journalists often are — if you join a war and are shot by real and not theoretical bullets, often by your own side. Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good. It is a hard lesson, lately learned.

I have put the chain on my door and re-read your letter. You complain about
Emma.
You say you have read the first third. I will admit there is a middle section of
Emma
which drags, rather.

Let me give you a quick run-down of the plot — the peg upon which Jane Austen hangs her novels. Plots, I assure you, are nothing but pegs. They stand in a row in the writer’s mind. You can use one or another for your purposes, it makes some difference, but not much, which one it is. The plot of
Emma
is not quite so flimsy as that of
Pride and Prejudice:
it can support altogether more character, and more observation, and more meaning: and more boredom on the part of the grudging and hasty reader — in whose ranks I still include you.

If you want
real
enthusiasm, read Ronald Blythe’s introduction to the novels in the Penguin series.
‘Emma
is the climax of Jane Austen’s genius and the Parthenon of fiction’, it begins. They won’t allow
you
to be so dramatic and positive in your essays on the book: they will feel you are throwing words around like weapons, to parry attack: but that is because they, like me, are suspicious of your youth, and how easily ignorance and enthusiasm blend, like eggs into choux pastry, making the whole, when baked, rise and puff and grow light: empty, mere shells, requiring to be filled.

Emma
opens with a paragraph which sends shivers of pleasure down my spine: it glitters with sheer competence: with the animation of the writer who has discovered power: who is at ease in the pathways of the City of Invention. Here is Emma, exciting envy in the heart of the reader and also, one suspects, the writer — and now, she declares, Emma will be undone; and I, the writer, and you, the reader, will share in this experience:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence: and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her…

It’s the word ‘seemed’, fourteen in, which sets the whole book up. It will take four hundred pages to resolve. You have five variations there — handsome, clever, rich, comfortable home, happy disposition — five to the power of five, which you can relate in various combinations of the ‘blessings of existence’.

It is so simple, you see, and so wonderfully full of promise, which bypasses the conscious mind of the reader, gets us instantly into the City of Invention, and off we go.

I frequently find myself saying to unpublished and resentful writers who do not understand the reason for their rejection, ‘but you must think of your
readers’,
and they think I am telling them to write for a market, but I am not. I am trying to explain that writing must be in some way a shared experience between reader and writer: the House of Imagination built with doors for guests to enter in, and pegs for their coats, and windows for them to look out of: it is no use being a recluse. You will die of hypothermia and malnutrition if you live alone in your house, however beautifully constructed it is. It must be a welcoming place, or exciting, if dangerous, or educative, if unpleasant, or intensely pleasurable.

Emma lives with her (to me, but not Emma) irritating, difficult, hypochondriacal father, Mr Woodhouse, in the village of Hartfield. Her mother died in her infancy: she has a married sister, Isabella. She has £30,000 of her own. She was brought up by a governess, who presently marries, thanks to Emma’s matchmaking, and leaves Emma lonely. She is conceited. There is a fairly obvious suitor in the village, a Mr Knightley; but Emma sees him in the role of friend, not lover. (Lover in the old sense of suitor, Alice. Fornication was simply not in the minds of decent and self-controlled people, for reasons I have already gone into.) Another possible lover is approaching over the horizon — a Frank Churchill — brought up, like her own brother, Edward, in rather grander circumstances than the ones into which he was born. Emma has befriended Harriet Smith; Harriet Smith is a beautiful but misbegotten girl. ‘The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful of your associates,’ Emma warns her. Illegitimate! Harriet is on the verge of marrying Robert Martin, farmer, but Emma, believing Harriet could do better in the marriage stakes, turns the foolish girl against poor Mr Martin. Mr Knightley reproaches her for this. Emma means Harriet to marry Mr Elton, the handsome curate, and mistakes his courtesy to Harriet for passion. Mr Knightley reproaches her. Jane Fairfax appears as a foil to Emma — more talented, more clever, and more serious than her, and doomed to be misunderstood, and ever so slightly disliked. (I wonder sometimes if Jane Fairfax is not more of a self-portrait of Jane Austen than Elizabeth Bennet — the bright, lovable, wayward heroine of
Pride and Prejudice,
as is so often supposed.) Emma is unkind to Miss Bates. Mr Knightley reproaches her. Mr Elton takes a detestable wife. In and out the relationships intertwine.

Ronald Blythe, in his loyalty, describes the ins and outs as a ‘detective story’, and you would do better to believe him than me if you want to pass your exams. But it was written in 1814—15. I believe that Jane Austen, from the internal evidence of
Emma,
was at that time driven to distraction by her mother and Cassandra, and to boredom by the manner of her life, and not quite having the courage to go to the kind of parties where Madame de Staël would appear, and developing a fatal illness, and humiliated by living in a corner house in the village by courtesy of her brother, who lived up in the big house, when the Prince Regent had a set of her books in each of his houses. I think she wrote on, gritting her teeth, wrapping her misery into herself, taking refuge in the world of invention, instead of going there with a clear mind and heart, travelling freely in and out, unable quite to get the coat properly off the peg. She kept tugging and it wouldn’t come; and that is why you have no trouble with the first third of the book and then stopped reading. She was having trouble too.

She did get it off the hook. Harriet develops aspirations to Mr Knightley which shocks Emma into realizing her own love for him. Harriet’s origins are discovered to be even lower than at first thought, so she can be safely married to Robert Martin. The odious Mr Woodhouse is talked into liking the idea of Mr Knightley and Emma marrying. The intimacy between Emma and Harriet changes into a calmer sort of goodwill. Well, it would have to, wouldn’t it, if Emma is going to be Mrs Knightley. Some have doubted that the marriage of Emma to Mr Knightley is indeed a happy ending, but I am content to let Jane Austen know her own characters best.

We return, very much, in all this, to the ‘breeding must out’ preoccupation of the times. Emma befriends Harriet, who was born in such sorry circumstances, and tries to teach and improve her, whilst taking pleasure in her simple gaiety (even then, it seems, the gentry looked a little askance at their own refinement, envying the common herd their general energy and lack of inhibition — as our modern-day cultural spokesman will love to go to football matches, and middle-class young ape the language of the streets, and music critics attempt to take the Beatles seriously, and in general invent art forms which require an untutored imagination rather than a dangerously desiccated expertise) — but Harriet was in the end a disappointment to Emma. Mr Knightley, who knew everything, knew it would be so.

Harriet may have been well born (there were funds for her education, so presumably at least one of her parents had money) but she was not virtuously born; she had better make do with a yeoman farmer for a husband. Seven out of ten for genes, take away three for unfortunate beginnings, add one for a good sound education, another two for prettiness and charm, and take away two for a general lack of soundness and you end up with five out of ten — the same marks as Robert Martin, yeoman farmer, began and ended with; it was therefore a good match. The delight of
Emma
— which I trust by now you have taken up again — is in the violent seesawing of marks out of ten, especially in Harriet’s case, which the author awards. Emma herself hovers between seven and eight, losing marks for folly and wilfulness, gaining them for being good to her dreadful father, Mr Woodhouse, losing them (and quite right too) for being so obnoxious to Miss Bates, gaining them again for putting up with grief without making a fuss (unlike Harriet) — and finally making it through to nine out of ten, and thus being allowed to marry Mr Knightley — a steady nine out of ten throughout. And he would have had a ten out of ten, like Mr Darcy, had he been nobly born and about to be a Marquis any minute.

(It is observable in Jane Austen’s novels that it is the women who have moral struggles, rather than the men. This may, of course, be a reflection of life. It is because I make this sort of remark that your father will not have me in the house — that and the matter of the bread rolls, of course.)

Jane Austen likes to see the division between nobility and gentry broken down — or perhaps she merely wishes to ennoble the rather dreadful habit the nobility had, of using the gentry as their breeding ground — choosing suitable mothers for their children as they chose mates for their farm animals — liking to ‘breed out’ in order to achieve healthy stock. They weren’t daft. Later, the English nobility were to use the
nouveau riche
American girls for similar purpose — and they, of course, often brought money with them. Elizabeth Bennet brought neither land nor money to Darcy — but she brought intelligence, vigour and honesty. Her vulgar mother, her dreadful sister Lydia, just had, in the end, to be put up with.

(Or, as Winston Churchill would say — himself the son of a love-and-money match between an English Lord and an American heiress — ‘up with which in the end everyone would have to put’. It is a truism — at least to my generation — that Churchill sent back for re-writing memoranda containing sentences which ended with prepositions. Even with Hitler battering at the gates, it seemed important. Civilization v. barbarity.)

In general, in the novels of the times, if working girls — governesses, dairy maids and so forth — won the love of gentlemen, some switching at birth is bound to have occurred. Until very recently, the switching of babies, the sending away of rightful heirs and so forth, has been the stock-in-trade of fiction — and not only an attractive idea in the personal sense — which of us, when young, did not stare at our parents and think ‘surely,
surely
this can’t be them!’ — but in the political sense, as a phenomenon, both echoing and leading the groping forward of society, through the fog of custom and prejudice, through to the light at the end of the tunnel, when all men could be reckoned to be born equal. It is out of fashion, now that we are all (more or less) socially mobile.

It is time for me to leave this hotel and return to the care of Quant — Qua — Qantas. (I have had to write that three times before I can manage a ‘Q’ without a following ‘u’.)

I think I have been too scathing about your attempts to write a novel. By all means, try.

Your loving aunt,

Fay

London, February

M
Y DEAR ALICE,

It is alarming to be back in this real city, having stayed for so long in what seems, in retrospect, a picture postcard. Australians live on the surface of their vast land, and round its rim: the centre, unimaginably beautiful, is left empty. I am reminded of a human brain, excited activity around its periphery, the slow, blank, powerful unconscious within. Inner space. It is the country of the future, I swear. Little by little that centre will be drawn into consciousness: memories will surface, and something new and immensely wise will be born. In the meantime the land is like some powerful zonked-out god, lying splayed on its back, zapped by the past, stirring the Pacific with an idle toe, suffering from a temporary amnesia. Just you wait till it wakes: be there if you possibly can, citizen of no mean city. Do you know that reference? ‘I am a citizen of no mean city’? St Paul?

In 1797 the Reverend Austen wrote to the London publisher Cadell, saying he was in possession of a novel about the length of Burney’s
Evelina,
which he would forward if Cadell was interested. Cadell wrote back declining the offer, thus calling down upon himself hoots of derision from an unfeeling future. The novel was
Pride and Prejudice.
Now I don’t blame Cadell at all. The novel must have sounded singularly ordinary. Poor girl gets rich man in unbelievable circumstances: the setting rather mundane. The nearest thing to High Life, a guided tour by a housekeeper around a stately home…Popular novels of the time fell easily into one of two categories — novels of Sentiment and novels of Terror.
Pride and Prejudice
was clearly one of the former, but lacked the death scenes which were so popular. Nobody even swooned. Jane caught a bad cold, but that hardly counted.