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