Mantrapped by Fay Weldon Page B

purpose, profundity. They are not constructed like this. This is just and then, and then, and then, as if a child were writing it. Worse, it is written in the present tense, as if it were some film script.'
    I had to admit that the book was indeed a TV play of mine I had novelised. Its roots were showing, like Mrs Kovac's on a bad day. It was true that all I had done was move from scene to scene after the fashion of a TV script.
    I had been writing TV dramas in my spare time but had become discontented, fed up with having less than total control of what happened on screen. The director had fallen out of love with me, and broken my heart, and the actors would put the wrong expressions on their faces; the designers would unreasonably up-grade the sets, the producer had impertinently taken out a line or two 'because of length'.
    It came to me in a flash of light the way not to be interfered with was to rework the play in novel form. I could elaborate as I went along. The characters would now be mine, not what the casting director, on the grounds of cost and practicality, had decided they would be. Their problems were mine, not what the director had inferred that they were.
    But the chief reason for my defiance was the simple exhilaration of writing a novel: I had done the play, the skeleton of the plot was sound, from now on what I wrote became almost automatic writing. The muse descended from the skies. The sum added up to more than the sum of the parts, so long as I followed my instinct and tried not to let reason get between me and what I wrote. This conclusion, however wrong-headed, gave me confidence.
    I remember writing 'The End' on an A4 pad, wide lined, with a Pentel pen, on the top of a bus going down Regent Street. I was on my way to my office in Brettenham House on Waterloo Bridge. I remember the feeling of exaltation as I wrote those two satisfactory words, 'The End'. This was my metier . This was what I was meant to do. This was what I had been born for. This I would do to the end of my days, and there was so much unsaid in the world I could go on saying it for ever.
    But looking through The Fat Woman's Joke , now so proudly published, Louis Simpson merely groaned. He said this was simply not how novel writing was done. I had a terrible feeling he was right. That the original play had been produced by Granada TV only because the director hoped, not without reason, to get into my knickers. (The euphemism of the time.) He did. The publishers, MacGibbon and Kee, had published the novel version only because they were hoping to amalgamate with Granada and it suited their contract to deliver me up to their new owners. George Melly, musician and art critic, had given the book a rave review in the Observer , only because he was friend of Ron's - and hoped to buy antiques from him at a favourable price. Or so Ron told me was the case. The public, I could see, had been thoroughly misled and that was why they were buying the book. It had all been a terrible, humiliating mistake. I had better stick to advertising.
    But the next novel, Down Among the Women , had already been written, and was at the printers. How was I to avoid the disgrace of fresh exposure? I had been presumptuous. I had stuck my head over a parapet only for it to be shot at. I retreated next door, grateful to still have my domestic life, glad that it was my habit to underplay such small successes I had had so far in the literary world. Grateful that I had children to sing lullabies to, and things I should better spend my time on, such as writing ads and cleaning the burnt copper pans without scratching them yet more, so they didn't leak heavy metal into our food and poison us.
    When the proofs of Down Among the Women came through the post I almost didn't show them to Louis, though he had relented enough to ask me to, and when I did I was sorry. They seemed to make him even angrier.
    'This is just a rip-off of Mary McCarthy's The Group,' he complained - a novel