the clouds, it is because you are in the infernal depths. The light where they stand all men should and can reach…Come up from your caves, my friends, ascend! It is not so difficult. Come to the surface of this earth, where one is so well situated and the road is easy and attractive. Try it: development! development! Observe, think, read those who tell you of the pure enjoyment of life, of the possible goodness and happiness of men.
Chernyshevsky was, if you want a rapid résumé of nineteenth-century Russian thought, a ‘man of the ‘eighties’, who replaced the men of the ‘sixties, with more visionary Utopians — Kropotkin the anarchist, Bakunin the philosopher. (They couldn’t stand each other.) Chernyshevsky ran off with Bakunin’s daughter and was mad, quite mad. He frightened everyone with his glittering eyes. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities when he was thirty-four, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped, they say, by converting the entire prison staff to his ideas, to the kind of ecstatic pre-Marxist communism we find in What is to be Done?, which he wrote in prison. The staff unlocked the prison gates and set him free. The authorities found him, and sent him to Siberia where the warders were less impressionable and too stupid and vile to be converted to anything, and where he died in 1889. What is to be Done? lives on.
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
LETTER SIX
Letter to a sister
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
Chernyshevsky was, if you want a rapid résumé of nineteenth-century Russian thought, a ‘man of the ‘eighties’, who replaced the men of the ‘sixties, with more visionary Utopians — Kropotkin the anarchist, Bakunin the philosopher. (They couldn’t stand each other.) Chernyshevsky ran off with Bakunin’s daughter and was mad, quite mad. He frightened everyone with his glittering eyes. He was arrested for his revolutionary activities when he was thirty-four, tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped, they say, by converting the entire prison staff to his ideas, to the kind of ecstatic pre-Marxist communism we find in What is to be Done?, which he wrote in prison. The staff unlocked the prison gates and set him free. The authorities found him, and sent him to Siberia where the warders were less impressionable and too stupid and vile to be converted to anything, and where he died in 1889. What is to be Done? lives on.
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
LETTER SIX
Letter to a sister
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
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