Читать книгу Mantrapped - Fay Weldon - Страница 14

My suspicion is this – that just as one day Peter and Trisha cross on the stairs, so one day there is bound to be an actual crossover between the novelist’s actual life and the alternative reality as presented by that novelist. That the times have finally and sadly come to this, that a novel simply no longer feels meaty enough without the input of the writer’s life and sorrows. All my writing life I have argued that fiction and autobiography are separate. ‘Good Lord,’ I have been in the habit of saying at literary festivals and in interviews, where writers are so frequently these days required to bare their souls, ‘if any of what I wrote was true I would be in prison or dead.’ Now I can see that I ought to have been in prison or dead, if I were to get my just desserts, that is to say if to lust in your heart is as sinful as the act itself, as St Matthew reports. All these monstrous acts I have written, all the murders, crimes I have conceived, are as good as done. I who was accustomed to saying earnestly to my audience, ‘If you want to write a novel you must lose your good opinion of yourself’, should repent. It is a terrible thing to say. I have been urging others to be as bad as their characters. Late-Victorian novelists felt obliged to present noble characters capable of good deeds, Soviet writers would only be published if they provided worthy role-models for their readers, the Chinese to find excitement in the fulfilling of the factory quota. Our writers fostered discontent and rebellion. Those women who read my novels in the Seventies and come up to me at literary gatherings still and say, ‘But your novels changed our lives. It was you who gave me the courage to leave my husband, ’in fact bear witness against me. But what I wrote was all true, true, true. I never slept with my father, as Praxis does in the novel of that name, written in 1977, but I daresay that if like her I met him in a bar and he picked me up, and I didn’t know who he was, I would not hesitate. Like would surely call to like. Think it and it’s done.

It has not been the habit of writers to show their hand too clearly. Flaubert writes about his own father when in Madame Bovary he describes the good Doctor Bovary’s disastrous attempt to cure a club foot by breaking all the bones in it and stretching it until the foot gets gangrene and all but drops off. Flaubert couldn’t bear to keep the incident out, though it meant Dr Bovary had to behave out of character for a whole chapter. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ Flaubert famously says, giving the game away. I daresay Chaucer had an affair with the Wife of Bath, gat teeth and all. But Chaucer’s not going to declare that, either.

Just as the world of screen and airwaves blends and melds into real life, so too, today, must the creations of the printed page. There are elements of me in Trisha, and parts of Rollo and Peter in every man I have ever known. Mind you, men of the Newer Age have to be learned: they are not the ones I grew up with. Men of the Former Age tended to be without emotional conscience, like George Barker, or Ted Hughes or my husband of many years Ron, but at least they produced art.

If Rollo, the ex-stuntman now born-again Christian and conscientious father, or Peter, the bottled drinking water (still, please) newspaper man were to write a poem, you’d know in advance it would be fairly terrible – mealy-mouthed, sentimental and commonplace. When it comes to the reformation of the world, Rollo believes in the efficacy of the new overarching social-worker-Jesus, Peter in the Power of Purchasing. Both are victims of the Pelagian Heresy: that we are all nice people at heart, really, so it’s only others who come along and muck things up. George Barker and the Dane, of an earlier generation, knew only too well about Original Sin: they revelled in it, and were loved the more because of it.

Charlotte Brontë, dealing with men of the Former Age, did not attempt Mr Rochester from the inside out: she observed him from the outside in, and very erotic the result is. That was when men and women were differently reared. Far easier these days to write about men from the inside out. Now they are just more people, it is rather disappointing. So they were like us all the time.

Mind you, some things don’t change. Good behaviour never gets a woman anywhere: bad behaviour gets a man everywhere. I say this from long experience of husbands, lovers, sons, both of the Former and the Newer Ages. But then I would, wouldn’t I. If I were a man I would no doubt reverse the genders.