Oh, on the stranger-than-fiction front…Actually nothing is stranger than fiction. You may well have ‘troubling dreams’, these days, but you’re not going to wake up ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. And such lines as no writer could invent a character more outlandish than our would-be president and our would-be president has made satire redundant are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature can do, and has always done and will always go on doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there was nothing to add?
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…In real life – in society, in civilisation – we bow to the old rule, No freedom without laws. Novels and stories aren’t like that: in fiction there are no laws and at the same time freedom is limitless. Fiction is freedom. Mm, I suppose that’s what some people find so terrifying, early on, about the blank sheet of white paper: write anything you want; no one’s stopping you.
Still, I’ve come to an awkward conclusion: there are certain things that fiction must broach with extreme caution, if at all, certain sizable and familiar zones of human existence that seem naturally immune to the novelist’s art. At the least, fictional successes, in these areas, are dismally rare. Just the three things, by my count (though there may be more) – and that’s not many things.
One. Dreams. This would be the least controversial…
‘Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that.
Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience. Oh, we’ve probably all had the one where you’re sitting a major exam in a crowded public space, and your pen doesn’t work and for some reason you’re in the nude. And there are a couple of others – the aeronautic dream, the dream where your legs turn to liquid as the demon draws near, and so on. Mainly, though, and fatally, dreams are plucked from the random world of the unconscious, the subterranean perverse, reducing the dreamer–author to an agglomeration of quirks – a trait it shares with our next customer.
Two. Sex. This would be the most controversial…
I used to say that Pride and Prejudice has only one serious flaw: the absence of a thirty-page scene involving Mr and Mrs Darcy on their wedding night (in which Lizzie is irresistible and Fitzwilliam, too, acquits himself uncommonly well). A futile notion: where would Jane Austen find the language or even the thought patterns of sex? Even so, there’s a startlingly worldly exchange, very close to the wedding day and the festive conclusion, when Elizabeth is called in to her father’s library, and the very intelligent but very cynical Mr Bennet identifies her as a young woman of forceful and perhaps transgressive erotic range…
It takes almost the length of the novel for Elizabeth’s dislike of Mr Darcy to evolve into love (and he has certainly earned it). Unaware of the recent sea change, Mr Bennet has rather woundingly decided that she’s about to stoop to the ‘disgrace’, as Jane Austen habitually calls it, of marrying for money. ‘I know your disposition, Lizzie,’ he tells his favourite daughter:
I know you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband…Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery.
In other words, Lizzie’s ‘disposition’ would cause her to take those ‘lively talents’ elsewhere – she would stray, she would fall. Just for a moment, listening to Mr Bennet, I miss the chapter-length sex scene even more…
Mr Bennet’s brief speech is probably the dirtiest thing in all Jane Austen. I am now going to quote what is probably the dirtiest thing in the entirety of mainstream Victorian fiction. It comes in Dickens – Hard Times (1854). Thomas Gradgrind, the pinched, the parched utilitarian schoolmaster (who thinks that the first thing you need to know about a horse is that it’s a ‘granivorous quadruped’), is urging his beloved child, Louisa, to marry his friend Josiah Bounderby, a bumptious minor industrialist who is three times her age.
‘I now leave you to judge for yourself,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘I have stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practical minds…The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.’
Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?’
‘There seems to be nothing there, but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire [note the superstitious capital] bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning quickly.
‘Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the implication of that remark.’ To do him justice he did not, at all.
And so saying, Charles Dickens, perhaps the most headstrong writer in English, shyly shuffles from the room.
In the West the mainstream novel got going around 1750.*1 And for a couple of centuries it was simply illegal to write about sex. Then something happened.
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1967)
D. H. Lawrence is unquestionably the bridging figure – indeed, the putative father of the sexual revolution. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was privately printed in Italy in
