Though I set my first novel in the fashion world, my interest in couture is largely metaphorical.  I would be hard pressed to distinguish a Christian Lacroix from a Christian Dior and have not bought a fashion magazine in years.  What appeals to me is fashion’s appetite for outlandish excess and for marrying the absurd with the sublime.  I had the pleasure of practicing my fashionese when I wrote Remedy and this experience was not unlike reading Alice in Wonderland where one enters of world of queer pairings and alliteration, where the associative and the excessive poke their tongue at reason.

Despite the conformity of mass produced ready-wear, fashion craves and inspires fancy much as fairy stories do.  Karen Blixen, the great writer of gothic tales, gave a name to each of her dresses and I suspect this whimsy of the wardrobe served to remedy the doldrums and repetition of getting dressed in the morning.  Inside her closet hung a cast of friends who came to life once pulled over her head and zipped up her back; they flattered her until their threads wore thin.  Following Blixen’s example, I once tried to christen a dress. It had kimono-style sleeves and touches of African wax.   The sacrament was swift and easy to administer:  I called it –rather appropriately I thought – Akiko Wemba and wore her to a fête the very evening of her baptism.  Though cleansed of original sin, by nine p.m. after a debouched sojourn at the buffet table, she was ruined by indelible, oily splotches on the bodice.  Deviled eggs were the culprit.  Akiko Wemba died an early death but I find comfort in my believe that she now occupies a hanger in purgatory’s closet.

As the risk of sounding reactionary, I confess a longing for the uniform if only to simplify the daily what-to-wear problem.  I have in mind a self-appointed, self-fashioned uniform, along the lines of what my character Remedy cooks up.  Hers involved doing something wonderful to a Led Zepplin belt buckle but yours can be whatever you want it to be.  What’s important is to be creative and to stick to it.  Uniforms are easy – no thought is required once they are conceived – but relentless; they gain meaning through constancy and therefore must be worn every day, with the exception of weekends and holy days. 

I keep my own uniforms in a kitchen drawer: five aprons, one for each day of the work week.  Understandably, I do not wear them outside of the house. What may appear less understandable is that I don’t wear them in the kitchen either.  These aprons are reserved for writing.  I fell into the habit of wearing them at the desk by chance: one morning I arrived at my work post in apron because I had forgotten to remove it after washing the breakfast dishes.  This kept happening and I didn’t fight it. The aprons felt right and reassuring as I faced the angst of creating something from nothing; they kept me on the straight and narrow, made me mindful of the demands of the art, which, after all, are not so different from those of cooking without a recipe.  I store my quintet in a special drawer apart from their food-splattered homologues I wear when at the burner.  My favorite of the writing aprons glows pinkly with rose-wreathed Virgin Marys; this Mary-Of-The-Apron looks about thirteen and unprepared for the primiparous undertaking that would bring her fame.  It would be the perfect item to wear on a pilgrimage to Lourdes; it’s good at the writing desk too.

To many of us, aprons connote female servitude and the domestic drudgery to which they have bound their lady wearers over the ages.  They alternately signify the stolid keeper of the hearth and the sexy newlywed wife or the proverbial French maid.  But whether dumpy or kittenish, the apron’s associations set anchor in feminine seabed and there is a part of me that wants to redeem it from the archaic abyss and put it to work in service of the imagination. Certain high-minded feminists will cringe at this recycling of such an emblematic vestment, yet I hold that we can more readily advance our cause by reinvesting aprons with a higher purpose than by wearing pantsuits.  Like many things that have been both denigrated and celebrated because of their intimate association with women (think motherhood, makeup, miniskirts, cold cream, curlers, hairspray, ballet, floral scented cleaning and hygiene products etc.) and hence lie at the crossroads of contradiction, aprons engage the kind of ambiguities on which literature thrives. 

I once spotted a literary celebrity at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris wearing a tee-shirt which read “Fuck fashion.”  I sighed when I saw it.  I knew what she meant.  I thought of that tense and fraught moment before leaving the house when I untied my apron and sifted through the closet for something better to wear than the pedestrian jean, something that wouldn’t prejudice me in the eyes of Latin Quarter Parisians.  Yes, the whole pitiful business of trying to keep pace with the fashion stallions was maddening and in the final analysis, a burden to the ponies among us.  Yet I can’t help thinking there might be a soft-spoken form of resistance, some other way of flipping the bird as it were.  What if I took to the streets in an apron?  There’s no reason to believe this would reap anything but ridicule, and yet…perhaps if I slipped on my shower bonnet on too?  

As things now stand I can no more dissociate aprons from writing than I can wine from the dinner table: the match fits; a solidarity of substance has taken hold in my mind and the apron will be forever wedded to the narrative burners.  When I tie the strings behind my back and head to the office my husband and son know I mean business.  They also know that dinner will be Picard  (France’s foremost frozen food store) and not the home-made blanquette de veau we’d much rather eat and which requires the other kind of apron.  I’m thinking of revamping and enlarging my quintet and to this effect have put a request for aprons on my Christmas list.  A nice addition would be a stars-and-stripes number to contrast the florals, 18^th century love scenes and religious iconography stamped on my current collection.  But Santa might have something else in mind.  And I’m always game for surprises.

It took me a minute or two to realize the woman who had just entered Sue Dumond’s gracious living room in Melun was Fay Weldon.  In any case, it hardly shows on the face, this writer thing.  Authors are ordinary people with a perhaps less than ordinary compulsion to flex their imaginations and create, mind to pen, worlds with the unbridled fabrics and loose threads of this one; apart from this imperative, which is internal and obeyed in solitude, they might resemble anyone else.    Though it is not quite true to say this of Fay Weldon.   It is when she begins speaking in a her soft, cooing voice that one can make sense of her strikingly loricate body, of the downy carapace that seems to envelop her in a casing of feathers rather than the bones and scales of armatures.  The body, over time, will come to mirror not only our sufferings and bad habits, but also our means of surviving them.  Small wonder there is so much birdness about her, then.  Here is a woman who has lived by wits of her quill.  

Sue and Judy, who run Reel Books, a charming English bookstore in Fontainebleau, organize the town’s annual Anglo-Saxon Salon in late November, inviting a writer to present her work before a mixed audience of native English speakers and French anglophiles.   Fay Weldon was this year’s distinguished guest and I was given the honour of playing interviewer beside her.  As Fay puts it, she is  “from a family of women,” — no mention of the Pater who we are left to assume quit the primal picture early on—and a sorority of writers.  Weldon gives the impression that writing has always been as prosy to her as driving a tractor is to the daughter of farmers; her approach to it is that of a craftswoman: practical and unpretentious.  Perhaps the operative word here is “craft”; Weldon’s detractors might fairly claim that her work does not quite meet the standards of literary art, that her novels do not speak the language of literature, by referring to the idea of literature.   Where are her winks to the rich tradition of writers who preceded her?   Indeed, it would be hard to justify the claim that she descended from the  Austin-Brontë-Elliot branch.  I would argue, however, that Weldon’s antecedents are situated elsewhere, in narratives as ancient as fairy tales and myths which she infuses with the contemporary story-telling of television and feminist fiction.  Reading her latest novel The Stepmother’s Diary, one suspects Weldon is keenly aware that her uninhibited combination of practicality and success doesn’t necessarily earn points with her more highbrow homologues and readers: her character Sappho, an immensely successful author, is told by an erudite, playwright (and very jealous) husband, that the success of her work is proportionate to its worthlessness, with the tragic result that she begins believing him.  It is hard to imagine Fay Weldon tolerating a husband who might tell her such rubbish; certainly she is unstoppable, one only need glimpse at the impressive number of books to her name, and yet it is fair to assume she has intimate knowledge of how jealousy of this sort undermines the artist-couple, often to the detriment of the woman.  But redemption is in the Word, and Weldon returns to It again and again with undaunted integrity and grit.

The women in Fay Weldon’s family wrote to bring home the bacon; naturally, without worrying whether her prose might be pigeonholed in the high or low rungs of the literati’s ladder, Weldon has pursued the family métier, penning in all directions: commercials, television series, plays, essays, novels and non fiction narratives.  No aspirations to Proustian prose complicate her relationship with a medium she means to be efficient in exposing the cankers of women’s lives, in telling female-centered stories with a relentless, obsessive energy which would perhaps be dimmed by any attempt to fatten the slim descriptions or explore the more subtle sensations and sentiments of her characters.  Weldon’s novels are not meditations but actions, dramas that one easily imagines as television serials, which, of course, she also writes to much acclaim.

I do not open a Weldon novel to satiate a hankering for exciting, inventive prose – Jeanette Winterson is there for that - but I admire her verve, the very gutsiness of her novels and the uncompromising way in which she shows us women who are victims not only of the men they love, but of their own blindness.   Her novels can upset and make us cringe at the Manichean manipulations that uproot the heroines. When the drama reaches its highest pitch, we feel an almost priestly hand at work, conjuring an exorcism to round up our demons from the woodwork.  The experience disturbs and the unsettling questions Weldon raises about women are far from being resolved.  Though many of us wish they were.

Paris, December 4, 2008

It happens in the depths of night, in bed; it is a private thing. When daylight bulges behind the curtains and wakes you, your head aches, your thoughts are desperate, but at least you will not be alone fighting your dragon for the next fifteen hours. It is odd, perhaps even presumptuous to be so burdened with St Michael’s battles while everyone is sleeping away the worries of the former day. Let me be clear: I do not want to wake up at three in the morning and stay awake until five or six, but this has been happening regularly for almost fifteen years now, despite trying nearly every remedy imaginable from sleeping pills (dreadful stuff – they jimmy the soul from the body) to acupuncture, to naturopathy, yoga, qi qong etc., all of which has led me to the conclusion that there is a recalcitrant someone in me who craves these intimate encounters with the dark: the reader.

Understandably the reader needs to read and when the duties of the day separate her from her defining task, she is obliged to burn the midnight oil. She has no qualms about waking you up and has the single-mindedness of a hungry newborn; she is all determination in the dark when your guards have gone off duty. And so I read, from three to five am, indulging her you might think, though this is not exactly the case. I use the reader as much as she uses me. For once I’m stunned awake, I am like a warrior of the most primitive kind, striking down the worries of the world and the smaller tracasseries of my own orbit with a crude planson; it is an endless, no-win battle, not at all like St. Michael’s noble and efficient slaying in fact, and only the reader shows me the route to a truce.

She steers my mind to a story. My bedside table is stacked and lined with books, which I read horizontally, simultaneously; I choose very carefully with Reader, for if the book is too exciting and fun, which recently was the case with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), I can forget to fall back asleep entirely. Usually we must compromise to find just that right fit: a book with a pleasing enough story line to reel us in, but one whose syntax or plot twists require steady, rapt attention. It is precisely this salutary mental effort which will tire my mind enough to release its grasp on the rim of the Here and Now and slip down to the land of Nod.

Last night we were ensconced in just the perfect book: Du CÙtÈ de Chez Swan (Proust of course) and read the remarkable opening passage on sleeping and waking, on the sensations of waking in a room and not knowing where you are, or even of knowing who you are. How apropos to read this reflection on the limitrophe state between consciousness and the unconscious! There is a great deal more to say about Proust obviously, and insomnia as well, but I must return to work. I’ve included some photos of the room where I’ve been waking of late; a boudoir chair with a pin cushion back and a rose I picked in the garden.

I’m quite pleased but also surprised they didn’t take issue with Miss Patsy who lives off the fat of mutual funds!

The Village Voice Bookstore - Located at 6 rue Princess in the 6th arrondissement, this excellent, upscale bookstore is run by the dedicated Odile Hellier and hosts lively readings upstairs.  Volumes of serious literature and philosophy line the shelves ( just found a superb book of interviews with Stockhuasen here) and Odile will always kindly order books she does not have in stock. Click here to visit their site.

Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia Whitman, daughter of the legendary George Whitman, now runs this left bank gem facing Notre Dame.   The place retains its funky mien and still offers shelter to aspiring writers low on the dime.  More recently Sylvia has been organizing a summer literary festival in conjunction with the Mairie de Paris and other high profile sponsors, bringing in big name authors. Check their website for more information.

 The Red Wheelbarrow - This charming, intimate bookstore at 22 rue St. Paul in the Marais should not be missed, and if you’re lucky you might also get treated to an impromptu concert by owner Penelope’s jazz musician husband. You’ll find an excellent selection of contemporary literature and children’s books, selected with care. Penelope keeps books about Paris or written by Paris-based authors up by the cash register. Click here to visit their website.

© Anne Marsella, 2007