Letters to Alice (3 page)

(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

Cairns, November

M
Y 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 Jane 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.

Those are only the ones who stand behind. More real and yet more alarming figures stand in front. (‘And those behind cry “Forward”, and those in front cry “Back!”’) Critics, colleagues, friends whispering insults and exhortations, bearing tales of loss and envy, and a bank manager or so, too, rubbing his hands; and if you’re me, children, breaking through the thin walls between idea and experience, the concentrated world of invention and the more diffuse one of reality, saying when is supper ready? Who’s going to take me to school? And if all else fails, why then the cat will come and sit on the manuscript. (The cat, I do believe, is the Familiar of the Angel of the House.) Out of all this busy-ness in an empty room — where the writer sits allegedly alone with pen and paper (and not, Alice, a word-processor) comes the energy of creation, comes the House of the Imagination, with its charming rooms, its exciting corridors; its locked doors, with the keys hanging where least expected, waiting to be opened by the visitor.

I do believe it is the battle the writer wages with the real world which provides the energy for invention. I think Jane Austen waged a particularly fearful battle, and that the world won in the end and killed her: and we are left with the seven great novels. I know you’ve been told six. But she did write another,
Lady Susan,
a diverting, energetic and excellent novel, when she was very young, at about the same time as she wrote the comparatively tedious and conventional
Sense and Sensibility
(please don’t read it first). She put
Lady Susan
in a drawer. She did not attempt to have it published; nor, later, did her family. My own feeling is that they simply did not like it. They thought it unedifying and foolish, and that wicked adventuresses should not be heroines, and women writers should not invent, but only describe what they know. They had, in fact, a quite ordinary and perfectly understandable desire to keep Jane Austen respectable, ladylike and unalarming, and
Lady Susan
was none of these things.

I will write more of this later. You must understand, I think, the world into which Jane Austen was born. I do not think the life or personality of writers to be particularly pertinent to their work. I know many writers (especially poets) who are boring and conventional as people, yet who produce the most lively and un-ordinary work, and some very intelligent and entertaining writers (as people) who produce work that is singularly dreary.

But I do think
the times
in which writers live are important. The writer must write out of a tradition — if only to break away from it. You must know how to read a novel, for example, before setting out to write one; you must comprehend that they have stories and characters and plots and conversations, and that all these must work to a given end. You must understand that they are meant to be
read,
and that meaning must be absorbed through the eye, and that the ear cannot help. You could, I suppose, work these things out from first principles: but the novel form has developed through centuries and requires a reader more or less as cultivated as the writer. He, or she, writes out of a society: links the past of that society with its future; he or she can demonstrate to the reader the limitations of convention, as Jane Austen did in
Northanger Abbey,
or Thackeray in
Vanity Fair.
The reader may well have mistaken the fictional convention for life itself, so severe is the social indoctrination to which we are all subjected, whenever and wherever we live, and needs to be reminded from time to time that novels are illusion, not reality. Writers seem more conscious of what is going on than those many readers who will quarrel with the content of a novel, but not doubt the whole concept of
the novel.

I have no doubt, Alice, that you have a set of unquestioned beliefs. I could even give you a brief run-down of your opinions, without ever having met you. You believe, for example:

1. It is better to be good than bad.

2. It is better to be nice than nasty.

3. It is better to be sexually experienced than innocent.

4. Knowledge is good and ignorance bad.

5. White sugar is bad for you, brown isn’t.

6. Babies should be picked up when they cry.

7. The strong have a duty to the weak.