Believe it or not, but it bowls along
Byron Rogers
AUTO DA FAY by Fay Weldon
Autobiography turns on trust: it is a long tale told in a darkened room, on which you cannot question, let alone crossexamine, the teller. But should you catch him or her out once on a point of detail, that is disastrous: the daylight streams in, and you start wondering just how much of the rest you can believe. In Fay Weldon's autobiography the daylight for me streamed in on page 104, where she writes about the writer Arthur Machen:
It was he who invented the famous Angel of Mons, the apparition which floated over Mons Cathedral one Christmas Day during a lull in the fighting in the first world war. He was battle correspondent for the Evening News at the time, his editor was harassing him for a report, there was nothing for him to say, so he invented the Angel and wired the story back. Or so he told Nona.
Nona was Fay Weldon's grandmother, so the story comes with the imprimatur of a witness.
It is hard to know where to start with this version. There was no Angel of Mons, there were angels, at least this is how it has passed into folklore, something which mystified the writer who had not mentioned angels once. It was September 1914, not Christmas Day, when Machen's The Bowmen appeared in the Evening News, and this was not a report, it was a short story, published as such. Nowhere does he mention Mons Cathedral, and certainly not a lull in the fighting. On the contrary, the British line is almost breaking when the ghostly archers of Agincourt (with a sort of shining about them') intervene, and the grey German hordes go down before their arrows. Machen was not a battle correspondent, he was a feature writer who was never in France, But he was a friend of Fay Weldon's family, and this is how she remembers the story. So how much else can you believe?
On page 351 she tells the tragic story of the two suicides in the life of the late Poet Laureate, whom again she knew. These, she says, came out of a refusal to peel potatoes. A young couple, David and Assia Weevil, the husband a colleague of Fay Weldon's, were staying with the Hugheses, when Mrs Hughes, the poet Sylvia Plath, asked Assia to help with the lunch, something which caused her to bridle Ca tendency an Israeli background always encourages', comments Mrs Weldon). To exact revenge, Mrs Weevil went down the garden and made a pass at Ted Hughes, to which he, over the bean rows, responded. The result, according to Fay Weldon, was two dead women and a dead unborn child. Only she hasn't done, Lacking a sense of the ridiculous, she uses what she calls 'these seminal events' to preach a hairraising little feminist sermon:
That such talented women should die for what — for love? Because that's what they died of, not depression, let alone 'born to suicide', as is so often said of Sylvia. How could it happen, today's young women ask, in bewilderment? How could women see their lives only in terms of being loved or not loved by a man? The times were against them, so the times had to change. And so they did.
Eh? Say things happened as she says they did: you are either dealing with mental illness, which makes it sad, or with people so self-obsessed and absurd they are part of the blackest of all black comedies, for it is horribly funny. You are left hoping, if only for the sake of tragedy, that her version is not correct. Reading this book is like watching a speeded-up silent film without captions. Little figures scurry around until they fall down, and in time they all fall down, or go mad, or commit suicide, or run away. You need a good head for geography to cope with all the running away, on one occasion by her father, a doctor, during an earthquake in New Zealand, when he abandoned his family for three months. Why he did so is never explained, as it never is in her novels. It is just that things happen, usually bad things, usually to women, usually because of men. This book is not a load of laughs, but it does bowl along.
On one occasion the second wife of her third husband turned up (you also need a good head for maths):
My second son Daniel was a few months old, and [she] told me I was crass, and insensitive, and had stopped Ron [the husband] painting, and took the baby from my arms and threw him across the room. Then she left. She was dark with flushed cheeks, and stunninglooking. She was wearing very shiny clompy black shoes. Dan landed on a sofa and didn't even cry, just looked surprised.
Quite a few people go mad in the book, but this second wife later went 'very mad', and cut her throat. But 'Then she left', and all those 'ands' ... Family life in Primrose Hill reads like that of a different species, Komodo dragons, say. She picked up my son and ate him under a jacaranda tree. Then she left. Her tail was very long. This is on page 361.
On page 360 there is an account of Mr Weldon's war service. 'He never got to the front line in Burma because his name began with a W...' Eh? `...and was over a page which no one ever bothered to turn: everyone else went off and was killed, but he was spared.' Had Mrs Weldon in her parallel universe been present at the battle of Hastings, which she may well have been, her account might have been something like this: King Harold loved comcrakes and, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, would stop and look up. Unfortunately...
Hers has been a remarkable life, full of ghosts and men, which as far as she is concerned may be the same thing in the end. Husbands appear and disappear, unlike socks which she hates and are always there, one of the husbands, having given up sex, inviting her to prostitute herself, which she does, for a pair of nylons, with a market trader who fails to turn up for their second appointment ('selling herself so cheap had made him angry'). She often writes about herself in the third person. Then there is advertising (she comes up with the slogan 'Go to Work on an Egg'), and, finally, novels.
On the cover is a portrait of her as a child, her face wide-eyed and expressionless, as though waiting for life to scribble all over it. This is now in the national art gallery of New Zealand, but the eerie thing is, though life did its best, that face in photographs never did change.
Previous page
