The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [290]
He spoke at the Cambridge Young Fabians on the subject of “The Conventions of the Novel.” This looked innocent enough as a title to pass the critical gaze of censors and critics. He spoke in a Literary Lecture Room in Trinity Street. Julian Cain went along to hear him, with some other Apostles, including the beautiful Rupert Brooke from King’s, who was an enthusiastic Fabian. There he found his sister, Florence, in a smart blue dress, and Griselda Wellwood in silver-grey, as well as the other Newnham regulars. Charles/Karl was also there, having come to visit, and chaperone, Griselda, which he could do, as an elder brother who had graduated. They were all invited to dinner in Brooke’s rooms, afterwards, where a more informal discussion was to take place. Methley’s books had been censored: he needed to be circumspect in public.
He spoke very cleverly about how the conventions of the novel mirrored the conventional attitudes of society. Everything in a novel must end with a marriage—this was still so, although great novelists had already revealed that life, and love, particularly love, continued after marriage and were not confined by it. He said that intelligent young people who read novels came to see—as they lived their lives—that the world did not quite correspond to the world described either by novels, or by conventional social beliefs. On the one hand, the young ladies present surely did not really believe that their very existence and presence would be an intolerable provocation to the young gentlemen present, unless they were accompanied by chaperones? On the other hand, the young gentleman were not all ready to turn the young ladies into idols, or goddesses, or visions of perfection? They had come to talk to them as was right and proper. They were grown-up people, in charge of their lives.
And then, subtly and disconcertingly, he changed tack. As they grew older, he said—“I have the advantage over you of some years of experience and observation, no other”—they must realise that they knew, and felt, and observed, all sorts of things—nuances of delicate feeling, strange little social observations, seeds of attitudes, and problems—which did not appear in novels. He must mention the sexual feelings, because not to do so would be dishonest. The character in a novel must put into a reverential, chaste kiss feelings that surged up from underground and—in a novel, perhaps in life—had to be repressed. You came, as a reader, to recognise coded descriptions—taking off a glove, let alone a stocking, conveyed so much more than those simple acts. He was always surprised at the description of scholarly, or intelligent, ladies, as bluestockings. For the word—in itself a lovely, mysterious word—caused people to think of precisely what they were being defied to think of—the human body, in all its energy and beauty.
He had said he must mention the sexual feelings. But to give the impression that they were the only, or most powerful, feelings would also be wrong. Women in novels were saints, sinners, wives, mothers. Sometimes they were actresses. They were not politicians, financial managers, doctors or lawyers, though they might be artists of what George Eliot called “the hand-screen sort.” And yet modern women felt inside them the struggling towards the light of the repressed doctors and lawyers, bankers and professors, politicians and philosophers. There was more subterranean life, nearer the surface, feeling its way blindly through veins and tunnels, like roots, which move like animals. And if these energies broke the surface, or the skin, there were dowagers like the Duchess and the Red Queen, waiting