Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021
MARY EAGLETON
July
The title above sets the tone for Fay Weldon’s long and highly productive 1 1 The title refers, career. Her play, A Catching Complaint, appeared as ITV’s Play of the Week respectively, to one of on 5 September 1966. Over fifty years later, she is still writing.2 Her latest Weldon’s short story collections, Barreca’s essay novel, Death of a She Devil, a sequel to The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), collection, and Hebert’s was published in 2017. Weldon’s website lists thirty-six novels and novellas, essay title. 2 For further information eight collections of short stories, eight works of non-fiction, three books for about the play, please see children, twenty-two plays, and fifty-one film and television credits.3 There
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017. doi:10.1093/cwwrit/vpx012 259 © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] the film and video panel of Greater London Arts in the 1970s, and of the Arts Council literary panel in the 1980s; she was Chair of the judging panel for the Booker Prize (1983) and on the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival (1996); she continues to be Honorary Patron of the Bridport Prize. In addition, Weldon appears at literary festivals, gives lectures and interviews, and writes magazine and newspaper articles. Since 2012, she has been a professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. Across her career and across different media and forms, Weldon has gathered awards and honors. Her script for the first episode of the television drama
Upstairs Downstairs (1971) won a Writers Guild of America Award; Polaris won the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 1978 Giles Cooper Award for the best radio play; in 1979, she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Praxis (1978); in 1989, she won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Heart of the Country (1987); in 1996, she was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award for Worst Fears (1996) and won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for her short story collection Wicked Women (1995). Weldon has been awarded several honorary degrees, including from her own university, St. Andrews, Scotland, where she studied Economics and Psychology. In 2001, she was made CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to literature. The critical assessment, however, is more difficult to make. Though Weldon is widely reviewed, features in nearly every survey of contemporary writing and, particularly, contemporary women’s writing, and continues to be the subject of academic articles, there have been only three monographs or edited collections devoted to her work, all in the 1990s: Regina Barreca’s Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions (1994), including five short contributions by Weldon herself; Finuala Dowling’s Fay Weldon’s Fiction (1998); and Lana Faulks’s Fay Weldon (1998). Beate Neumeier’s 2001 collection on contemporary British women’s writing contains three essays on Weldon, and Michael Meyer’s 2006 survey of Weldon’s short fiction provides a useful introduction to this under- researched area of her writing, but, generally, her work of the last twenty years is still waiting a critical overview. Katy Emck has described Weldon as “a moralist with a delinquent streak” (656). Certainly Weldon raises many issues of contention that demand an ethical response: for example, militarism (The Shrapnel Academy [1986]); reproductive technologies (The Cloning of Joanna May [1989]); psychoanalysis and the therapy culture (Affliction [1993] and The Stepmother’s Diary [2008]); the pharmaceutical industry (The Ted Dreams [2015]); and transgender (Death of a She Devil). The delinquency comes, firstly, in Weldon’s refusal to moralize or to adhere to any overarching philosophical or political position, any “ism.” Mara Reisman sees in Weldon’s work an “ethical ambiguity,” which will always “keep the moral ground in flux” (“Shifting” 647). And this is as true of Weldon’s exploration of her major ethical theme, that of sexual politics. Virtue is never unconditionally on the side of women. As Lorna Sage comments, Weldon’s plots are “invariably partisan and have female characters centre-stage,” but she “refuses to see women as experts
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 260 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon in continuity or communion” (154). What Sage terms “matriarchal realism,” a form of realism that speaks to a sisterhood of women, constitutes, Sage believes, “an episode, or one kind of destiny, rather than a governing paradigm” (156). Secondly, Weldon’s characters repeatedly turn to “delinquency” to escape the position patriarchy has established for them. The women who are used, abused, or drably invisible become avenging, deviant, veritable “she-devils.” However, these are not stories of heroic achievement or resolution; ongoing struggles are everywhere. Weldon’s women fight with men but also among themselves. Mistresses will scheme to supplant wives; rejected wives will
retreat and plot; female friends might help or hinder; mothers and daughters, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 or stepmothers and stepdaughters, battle it out. The tensions around divorce and remarriage, disputed property, “blended” families that are anything but harmonious drive the plots of many Weldon novels. In some cases, Remember Me (1976) and The President’s Child (1982) for instance, the child acts out the lies or distress of the parental generation. At the same time, the intimate familial and interpersonal clashes signify larger problems of politics and values. For Reisman, that most domestic arena – food, cooking, and the kitchen – is the location for power struggles and “food becomes an important symbol of gender and class tensions and an indicator of civility and survival” (“Food Fight” 4). For Imelda Whelehan, discussing Big Women (1997), Saffron’s loss of her mother and her revenge on her mother’s friends tell us about generations of feminism, Second Wave and after, and about tussles between political commitment and economic survival or advantage. Whelehan points out the ambiguities in Weldon’s work between changing the self and changing the world. Alongside Weldon’s material and social worlds, and her representation of physical bodies – fat, thin, pregnant, surgically transformed, ageing – lies another level of understanding. She mentions in her memoir, Auto da Fay (2002), the family interest in the occult. In her fiction, the present is disturbed by the ancient magic of Glastonbury Tor (Puffball [1980]), or the spirits of Maori culture (Kehua! [2010]), or he-devils as often as she-devils (Growing Rich [1992]). Characters can have psychic, seer-like qualities, and sometimes they inhabit the border between life and death. Elisabeth Bronfen indicates how, by disappearing, Ruth in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil can be certified as neither dead nor alive, while Madeleine in Remember Me refuses to stay quietly dead and becomes the revenant who haunts the text, having more power in death than life. The very title is saying, on the one hand, “don’t forget me now I’m gone,” and, on the other, “here I am again.” Bronfen explores the rhetorical strategies at work in these moves between the social death that is so often the misfortune of Weldon’s protagonists, literal death, and rebirth. As many writers do, Weldon also makes the connection, in The Stepmother’s Diary but particularly in Kehua!, between haunting and writing. The writer is possessed by stories, sounds, and voices; she is driven to write. Literary criticism has read Weldon’s rebellious characters chiefly in the context of feminism and deconstructive critiques. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the dialogic
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 261 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon and the carnivalesque – a carnival actually occurs in The Heart of the Country – and Freud’s work on jokes are particularly prominent. Ann Marie Hebert looks to Bakhtin but also draws on theories of the performative to explore the feminine script of women’s subordination to love and romance. Alongside Bakhtin and Freud, Susan Sellers includes the essays of Hélène Cixous in noting the importance of the comic mode as a disruptive force, a way of both undermining internal prohibitions and mocking the voice of authority. Like Dowling and Hebert, Sellers sees Weldon’s women as caught in old stories, their energies confined, but enabled by the power of the comic to break out. Hidden stories can then be
explored, and the old stories told in new ways. Weldon’s involvement throughout Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 her career with myth and fairy tale is evidence of this. In addition, she transforms canonical texts and has written play adaptations of Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and A Doll’s House, while her short story “Lily Bart’s Hat Shop” (1992) is crowded with nineteenth-century literary characters. Others have extended the Bakhtinian approach into discussion of the female grotesque; The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967) and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil are the texts most frequently considered. Sellers remarks on how “women’s monstrosity is often the insurgent force of their energies which patriarchy has sought to contain” (40); Sara Martin sees contemporary women writers as “taking female monstrosity away from the hands of patriarchy” (195); Zeynep Z. Atayurt points to “an articulation of excess as a transgressive and celebratory strategy” (126). But, equally, critiques of the carnivalesque and the grotesque query the extent of its disruption, the ease with which the carnivalesque might be reabsorbed, for instance, or, in Martin’s words, how “seeing ourselves as triumphant monsters . . . is still too bound to patriarchal man’s view of woman as an eminently physical object” (195). We wonder, therefore, who is the most “monstrous” in Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil – the she-devil Ruth, or the surgically reconstructed Ruth, or the patriarchal fantasy of Mary Fisher. Indeed, these positions might not be distinct. As Stéphanie Genz argues, “[i]t is only by ‘inhabiting’ femininity that the postfeminist Gothic heroine can go about her monstrous business and achieve a position of power and subjectivity” (69–70). Equally, critics have found subversion and slipperiness in Weldon’s stylistic, formal, and generic diversity. David Lodge in The Art of Fiction (1992), also referring to Bakhtin, applies his concepts of polyphony and dialogism to Weldon’s flexibility of style and voice. In an analysis of just two paragraphs from Female Friends (1975), Lodge perceives “cinematic montage,” irony, shifting forms of précis, the use of cliché, parody, and summary, and forms of “special pleading” (126–28). Patricia Waugh claims that women writers, including Weldon, have been “the great innovators in the use of free indirect discourse,” an ideal mode for parody, satire, “contested authority,” and she links this mode to feminist theory’s interest in the strategic, mimicry, and the masquerade (205). At any moment within a narrative, a letter, a section of script, an autobiographical account, a list, an interview, a résumé of the plot, or any one of a myriad number of forms might intrude. In so
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 262 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon doing, suggests Faulks, Weldon “unhinges the narrative from voices altogether” (6). Moreover, narratives often tread a wavering line between different genres. Hence, although social satire and black comedy are the dominant genres, Weldon also explores, among others, the ghost story (Remember Me and Kehua!), utopian fiction Darcy’s( Utopia [1990]), dystopian fiction Chalcot( Crescent [2009] and The Ted Dreams), the political thriller (The President’s Child), historical fiction Love( and Inheritance Trilogy: Habits of the House (2012); Long Live the King (2013); The New Countess [2013]), and autobiography (Mantrapped [2004]). Interesting interrelations are generated. Thus, Gina Wisker, discussing The Cloning of Joanna May and The
Life and Loves of a She-Devil, indicates how tropes from the horror genre – body Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 transformations, for example – are set alongside the domestic and the conventions of romantic love. Sage discusses how polemic might break into narratives or how the narrative might become a form of picaresque: “the characters’ lives are seen as episodic, opportunist, short-sighted; they live on their wits, and often at each others’ expense” (156). Comparing Weldon to Angela Carter, Sage sees in both a leaning toward the picaresque, which she interprets as an “imaginative mobility, the literary equivalent of being street-wise” (174). This interview took place in November 2016 at the Literary Leicester festival and was subsequently developed by e-mail. It begins with discussion of Before the War (2016), at that stage Weldon’s latest novel, and her renewed concern with the historical. It then moves into Weldon’s earlier work and changes in the literary field during her long career. Weldon has remarked that she would have liked Before the War to have been entitled Anyway, a word repeated at key moments throughout the text. One could look upon anyway as the leitmotif for Weldon’s work, her defining sensibility. Whatever the predicament or moral dilemma, there is always a turn of events, an opportunity, reversal, or consequence. Whether that “anyway” is a shrug, or a raised eyebrow, or a confidential aside, the narrative will go on. ME: In 1971 you wrote for television the first episode ofUpstairs Downstairs, which was situated in the Edwardian big house. Then in the Love and Inheritance trilogy, you move from the Victorian period to the cusp of the Edwardian. Now, in Before the War, you’re somewhat later; the book starts in 1922 and ends in 1939. What has brought you back to historical writing? FW: It’s not so much out of my own experience, but my grandfather was a writer. He was a best-seller in Edwardian times, indeed in Victorian times. He wrote two autobiographies, Memoirs of an Edwardian and Memoirs of a Victorian. So from there, and knowing him and knowing the family I had, it seemed a natural period to explore. Also with the advent of Google, historical novels became so easy. I did try to write one pre-Google novel, about twenty years ago, but couldn’t because it was so difficult. You had to do so much looking up. Now research is a pleasure. If you want to know the vehicle that seven people use to travel across London you can just look it up and visualize it. You know that if there’s space for
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 263 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon only six people, it’s no use trying to take seven. It’s these little practical details that I find absolutely fascinating and how people managed so brilliantly well in spite of the difficulties of everyday living. It was a pleasure to write Before the War. And in the early days, with Upstairs Downstairs, I had a research team from the BBC who would tell you everything you needed to know. And anything that is historical is actually just stories about people in different circumstances, and those circumstances are practical. How do you get from place to place, and how do you blow your nose when you have to use a handkerchief, and then you have to launder it yourself or not yourself, if you have a maid. Now we have tissues, and a
cold in the nose is nothing. Then it was a real, major horror. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 ME: With the move toward World War II we get a strong sense in Before the War of times changing and one fascinating area of change you explore is the publishing industry. We’re still in the world of clubbable, gentleman publishers, but they are having to think much more about things like advertising and book promotion. Both authors and publishers are becoming commodities. FW: Yes, the writer as personality was beginning to come in, and this has made so much difference to publishing today. Up to almost the last war, you didn’t have a personality as a writer; you didn’t have your picture on the cover; nobody talked about you; very few newspapers were interested. You were the name on the book beneath the title and you built up your back-list and your reputation simply by what you had so far written. So in the end people would look on the shelves for a book by whoever it was and read that. But as soon as you had your picture on the cover you became a personality. Everybody assumed the writer was the same as the picture on the cover, and you were probably the person the book was about. I started writing from scratch, in anonymity, learning how to deal with words in an advertising agency and how to be very conscious of a reader or a listener or a viewer or whoever was receiving the advertising message. But then, once one was a picture on the back of the book, it seemed reasonable to acknowledge that I was the writer if only because with your photo, you go public. Just talk to your reader, which is happening in Before the War, acknowledging that you’re the person writing it, telling the story. Why deny it? Once the writer was seen as a person publishing, and writing changed. ME: And has this attention to metanarrative developed in your work? FW: I think I went through a phase of metanarrative, which I would describe as “Dear Reader” books. It gives you great liberty because you can chatter on as the writer and I quite like that, and you can fictionalize the writer so it’s not really you. You’re one removed again so you’re a personality who is, as it were, another character in the book. It’s just an invented technique. I did it for a bit but people don’t like it so much. ME: Well, I very much like it. I was thinking as you spoke of moments in Chalcot Crescent or Kehua!, for example, where you directly address the reader in ways that are certainly funny but also highly effective in involving the reader.
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 264 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon FW: You’re with your reader and you share this experience. You have to go ahead. You have the power of invention and of putting it into words, which, probably, the reader doesn’t, but, as a simple act of generosity, you take them with you. I do think writing is about generosity, passing on to other people what you’ve had the misfortune of having to find out for yourself. In the Love and Inheritance trilogy, I’m taking the reader into the past and building up a past for them, ignoring what has happened between then and now. Whereas in Before the War, I acknowledge it and kill off my heroine, which I tell the reader I’m going to do, but I’ll give her a very easy death because she doesn’t deserve it. When she dies
in childbirth, it is the year 1935. If only it had been 1936, a drug would have been Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 available, and she would have lived. So it is a kind of acknowledgment, as you write, of the passage of time and the development between then and now, and there seems no reason at all not to put it in the book. You can’t do it too much but just to make us realize as we write it or read it how much the world has changed. ME: At the start of Before the War, there’s one of these direct addresses to the reader where you say, “I’m not asking you, reader, to step back in time. I’m asking you to stay happily where you are in the twenty-first century, looking back” (3). This suggests two characteristic reading positions for historical fiction. The reader might feel the distance and strangeness of the past or experience connections with the past as if one is living out its legacy. Is it the same for the author? FW: Yes, the previous three novels, the trilogy, were escapism, in a way, and so it is entertainment and quite simple entertainment and it’s quite fun to write. This next novel, Before the War, was slightly more difficult to write. You’re involving the reader more, and the more readers are involved, the easier it is to remember. If you go to a stage play, for example, you usually remember it because, as a member of the audience, you have been involved. You’ve had the freedom to look at this part of the stage, that part of the stage. If this character interests you, this is the one you single out. You are involved. If you go to a film, the director does all that for you. You sit passively and, if you’re not involved, you forget the whole thing very quickly. It is the fact of the involvement, of bribing the audience almost by giving them a laugh or two to get them involved. ME: On your website, you mention that you’re writing a sequel to Before the War. Will we learn more about those sparky twins, Mallory and Stella? FW: I’ve only written two lines. But it’s now after the war, and my twins have grown up and are in their early twenties. I think Mallory will go into politics and Stella will sleep her way to the top. ME: If we can turn to the start of your career and your first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke. Esther, the woman in question, gives up all wifely, maternal, and domestic responsibilities, moves to a grotty basement, and eats. Looking back now, can we see her as the prototype for a whole sisterhood of disruptive women that was to follow?
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 265 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon FW: That was feminism; that was the beginning. I wrote The Fat Woman’s Joke when I was working in an advertising agency, advertising eggs and, almost, advertising motherhood. I was working to support a baby – I was an unmarried mother – and you could see that life was hard and you had to work hard. If you got offered promotion a man would come up to you and say, “You shouldn’t take that,” and you would say, “Why?” and he would say, “Because it’s taking the bread out of a working-man’s mouth.” The myth was so great that men were earners and women weren’t. Now women have to go out to work because no male wage will support a family. The whole structure of society altered when women did go
out to work, but not going out to work for women like me was terrible anyway. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 Work was equally awful, and women are still doing the same thing although the myth has gone. Women are expected to go out to work, and the same juggling of home and family doesn’t change. The Fat Woman’s Joke still sells, and people read it now and say that nothing’s changed. Underneath all this work is still the female necessity of running the home, if she wants to have babies. There was a whole faulty expectation about how women lived and their prime duty being toward the housework, to keep the house clean. Esther was quite wittily protesting against this and finding the only solace she could find, which was eating. ME: You mention that The Fat Woman’s Joke came out of feminism. Is feminism still shaping your work, or did it shape your work at particular stages of your career? FW: I think that from the beginning I was describing the world around me as I saw it. As it changed, I changed. ME: There’s a point in The Fat Woman’s Joke where Phyllis, Esther’s friend, complains about how unsettling are Esther’s comments on life. I wonder if that’s another characteristic marker of your work, a desire to puncture the façade. Wherever there is a happy marriage, or a comfortable home or a supportive friendship, in the course of the novel, something darker will be revealed. FW: Yes, I think that is true. Perhaps I’m just a horrid person. Things are very complicated and people do like to put a good face on things, and so they should, but what is really going on? Somebody in any group of people will be making some sort of sacrifice, which is not being acknowledged. And the art of telling the story is to explain this, to explain to readers what is really going on. In a way, I’m quite a didactic writer and think I know best, which is not very nice. ME: The critic Paulina Palmer has commented in conversation on how you were one of the first fiction writers to represent women as frightened of success. They’re not consciously frightened but, if they get success, they then try to destroy it. How did you come to that realization? FW: When I began writing it was a time when women writers had to please men because they couldn’t support themselves. They didn’t want to be thrown out of the home. You didn’t write anything that was going to upset your husband, your lover, your father, or whoever. You behaved well. You didn’t want to be successful
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 266 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon because it was dangerous. Really it was only after women began to be able to earn, and were earning, and could write, and didn’t depend upon men to look after them and their children but could do it themselves, that they began to write honestly in any way at all. Before then, on the whole, women wrote about – when they did write which was not often because they were meant to be doing the housework and bringing up the children – but if they did write, they wrote nice emotional stuff about love and never about sex, because how could they know about that. One man all their lives? In theory at least. ME: Given those very real constraints, what has enabled you to write
so prolifically and so incisively about what we might call, roughly, the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 female condition? FW: I was brought up by a divorced mother who thought that relying on a man for support was dishonorable, and then I had a baby “out of wedlock,” as they called it, in my early twenties. There was just me and no benefit system. The State would put your baby in an orphanage if you failed to look after it, but that was its only concern. There was a great deal to write about, I suppose. ME: In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge uses a passage from your Female Friends as an example of the flexibility of narrative, how open it is to different voices, and styles, and forms (125). One aspect that I notice particularly about the flexibility of your work is how you range across different genres. Do you deliberately explore that narrative flexibility? FW: Well, I don’t really know. You do what you do. If you’re going to tell a story, you have a point you want to make or a hypothesis you want to prove. You have a story and you work out the best way of telling it, and there are all kinds of ways of doing that. I find with my students that someone can have a massive historical draft, and it’s not working, and it’s too big to get it all together. But if you change the style, or if you turn it into the first person, or into the present tense, it might just work. It sets other trains of thought running, or other ways of doing it. So, knowing what you’re going to do, you then work out the best way of doing it, but it can take quite a long time. It might be just a thriller like The President’s Child, or something like Darcy’s Utopia, in which I have to start a whole new religion to get it to make sense. Publishers really want one to write the same book over and over, but one can’t. I had one agent say to me, “Please write a consistent book, and we’ll sell it,” but if the next one is different, it makes their life more difficult. ME: So is your writing process one of false starts? You try it one way and, if that isn’t working, you try it another. FW: Yes, it is. The way that writes most easily is the way you should do it. There’s no reason to make it more difficult than it is. If you know what you’re doing, writing a novel is quite easy. Finding out how to know what you’re doing is the problem. ME: Of course, you can only say it’s “quite easy” after years of experience.
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 267 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon FW: Yes, that’s true. ME: This conversation is taking place under the auspices of the Literary Leicester festival, the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, and the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing. Just saying that tells us a lot about changes in recent years in the literary field – the increasing number of festivals and ways readers can meet the author and the emergence of contemporary women’s writing as a category that can be studied, written about, and awarded prizes such as the Bailey Prize. As a writer, do these developments help, or hinder, or are
they, basically, background noise? Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 FW: Just background noise. In a way even genre is background noise. What you’re trying to do will fall into this genre or that genre, but you don’t write it because it falls into a genre. It’s sort of chicken and egg really. ME: So these things are happening around you but not necessarily influencing how you work? FW: No, what you write about is the real world, the real changing world, the world as we see it now, not the world as we saw it yesterday. One keeps up-to- date because everything changes, your own view of the world changes, one’s principles even, one’s politics change. Because you are the writer, you write about now, always very conscious of the now. If I write about the past, it’s only to show how it relates to now. Therefore, Before the War. A lot of what one writes is a sort of psychological thriller, but you don’t write what you write because it can be interpreted as a psychological thriller. There are so many ways of interpreting what happened then, what happens now. ME: Writers can respond both positively and negatively to that category, “contemporary women’s writing” that I just mentioned. I’m thinking of Andrea Levy, for instance, who speaks enthusiastically about the feminist publishing houses Virago and the Women’s Press, calling them “my books; they were my people” (122). Maggie Gee, on the other hand, says that being described as a feminist writer or a woman writer makes her “shudder” (174). How do you feel about being named in that way? FW: I don’t mind one way or another. ME: By the end of Big Women, the feminist publishing house, Medusa, has moved from being a politically conscious women’s collective to being a commercial enterprise in a male-dominated, multimedia company. We’ve talked about the cult of personality in publishing. What kind of role do you think gender plays in publishing? FW: Nearly everyone I come across in publishing these days is female. There are more female novelists than male novelists, more female readers than male readers, so why not more female publishers too? The really top boss, though, often turns out to be male.
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 268 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon ME: Indeed. And, as the annual VIDA Count indicates, the situation with respect to who reviews and what is reviewed is also effected by 4 4 See:
FW: Pretty good! Very clever, and I think it’s true. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 ME: Did the move to word-processing impact what you were writing, or how you were writing or how you were feeling about your writing? FW: I used to write by hand all the time, and then have it typed up, and then edit it from the typescript. You’d try to get it right because typists were so expensive so you had to get it right first time round or certainly as well as you could. You got into the habit of that. And then, about that time, I was reading a collection of stories about sisters, Forever Sisters (1999), written by people who had quite obviously been to creative writing classes, and they were terribly nice – nice sisters, and nice writing, and nice language, and everything was under control. And I came to a story called “Pyroclastlic Flow” that was all sort of wormy and gnarled, and the people weren’t particularly nice, and then I realized the story was by me. ME: What did I say about always getting below the surface? FW: Then some reviewer picked it up and said they’d read this story in an anthology of my work where it hadn’t seemed strange at all, but, putting it in this context, it had seemed very odd. I thought the world is changing, and people are writing differently, and people are reading differently because of the advent of the computer. They’re now reading fiction in which the editing has been so easy, fast, and simple that every sentence they read makes total sense, not almost sense, as it did in the old brain-to-hand-to-pen days, when the actual writing took longer. It’s become quite an effort to read precomputer texts; you’re not, as it were, being spoon-fed. The writing we used to do was very different, typing being a halfway house between then and now. I’m trying to get a bit of research going into the difference in result between handwriting, typewriting, and word-processing. I think it is different. My husband tends to respond only to books from the precomputer age: he denies this, but I think it’s true enough. What holds his attention is the “old” writing. But if everyone is reading in a new and different way, there’s not much point in writing as one used to write. One’s aim is to communicate. So I went over to the computer around 2000, (and my handwriting, once so bold and strong, is now almost illegible.) But one hopes one has enough memory of writing by hand (thirty years’ worth) that the fractional delay before committing words to paper still lingers. I find actually – again compared to my students – that I have to do much less rewriting than they. At the back of my mind is still the fear of the typist’s bill.
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11:2 July 2017 269 Mary Eagleton • Wicked Women, Wicked Fictions, Wicked Laughter: An Interview with Fay Weldon ME: Hilary Mantel in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost (2003) asks the question: “Is my writing clear: or is it deceptively clear?” (5). A lot of reviewers and commentators talk about your writing as “warm,” but I wonder: is it warm or is it deceptively warm? FW: It’s deceptively warm. Yes, I think she’s right. You have to expose the self because that’s what readers want of you. But you don’t want them to have you completely, so there is a bit that is left over. So it is “deceptively.” ME: And quite rightly. It reminds me of Letters to Alice (1984), where the author voice speaks of writers needing to have “the Martian’s eye”
(47). They have to look at their characters as strange, alien people. Not Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/11/2/259/4080713 by guest on 23 September 2021 warm at all. FW: I think that often happens to writers if they change cultures in their teens. I was brought up in New Zealand. I accepted that, and accepted its society, and everything seemed perfectly normal. But when I was fifteen, I came to England, and everything was completely different. Morals were different, behavior was different, and you learned that nothing is stable or nothing was settled; everything had to be looked at again. I think the habit of re-looking is very useful to writers: strangers in a strange land take nothing for granted. ME: Is it possible, finally, to look back across your long and continuing career and see how it has evolved or to see a pattern in its development? FW: I don’t have time or leisure to do this kind of thing. Others are welcome to try, (using such internal evidence as they can find). ME: Fay Weldon, thank you.
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