I’m reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Rebecca West at the moment. During her thirties i.e. not in her dotage, R.West wrote to a friend about
’a theory I have long held that to authors … events present themselves according to their own style. They begin by inventing certain incidents …and then life says, “Oh, that is how he likes things to happen, is it? Well, then, they shall happen to him like that!”
This could be a flippant aside to amuse the receiver of the letter, but R. West was surprisingly superstitious. She was an extremely intelligent woman and an absolutely first-rate writer of criticism and political journalism but she seems, from the two biographies I’ve have read so far, to lack self-knowledge to an unusual degree. She felt that there was ’something in myself to invite tragedy’ and she wasn’t talking about repeated patterns of behaviour that had unfortunate effects. She meant something more like a hex. That’s one way of ducking responsibility for what happens to you. And she was frightened by the ’something in myself’ that made the men she desired reject her so she had psychoanalysis. Nothing so glamorous, I suspect, as some mysterious doom-laden aspect of her personality but something more banal. Men found her clever and intense, which for most damps the fuse.
Anyway, I started to wonder if there could be a scintilla of truth in her suggestion about some supernatural factotum turning fiction into fact for writers just for a jape. Some self-interest here as I’d jolly well like to inhabit a world more like the ones in my novels. That’s a spur for writers obviously …to make a more acceptable world for themselves than the real one. I thought of Thomas Hardy who WAS rather depressed, of Dickens for whom things turned out well after many vicissitudes and much drama, of Fielding who was handsome, witty and mischievous, always getting in scrapes like Tom Jones … well, the sad inescapable fact is that writers write about themselves, an idealised self, naturally, over and over again. They may disguise it by setting the book in Tibet or giving the hero red hair, ten lovers and a gammy leg but scrape off the surface and there is the demon Ego grinning up at you. Life and books. Fiction follows fact. Still, it was an attractive idea.
