Fay Weldon's Candid Autobiography - Reviews - Auto Da Fay - Book Review

Contemporary Review, July, 2003 by Stephen Wade

Auto Da Fay. Fay Weldon. Flamingo-HarperCollins. [pounds]15.99. 366 pages. ISBN 0-00-710992-X.

Fay Weldon has never flinched from controversy and dissent: in fact she quite enjoys it. Not only has she written markedly direct and challenging fiction, she has also enjoyed such sidelines as producing a 'Counterblast' booklet and even television or radio debate. In some ways, this memoir is a counterblast to the usual plethora of writers' memoirs in which the sole alm appears to be to chronicle meetings with remarkable people, and tell anecdotes about artists and poets moving in particular circles. The only real circles here are those full of workers, travellers, entertainers and over-worked mothers.

This memoir has plenty of that side of Fay Weldan's life, but it also shows another. It is a testament to her novelist's skill in giving us people, warts and all, complex in their humanity, even when overflowing with eccentricity or offensiveness. In this respect there are many memorable figures, but few to equal Nona, a pianist and former wife of a literary man who moved in all the poweful Edwardian artistic circles. Nona came from America to the author's New Zealand and played the piano for most of the day, but her bon mots on several famous people encapsulates the Weldonian humour. For instance, she recalled Joseph Conrad as 'very bad tempered' and that 'it was his children who had driven him mad'.

We have the story of a life here, from girlhood in New Zealand (and the cultural delights of Christchurch) to the passage to Britain after her mother received an unexpectedly large legacy. For much of the book, however, the literary and creative insights are few, purposely relegated to second place behind such things as penises, lesbianism, sanitary towels and even thoughts of suicide. Fay Weldon is never less than candid, and her style is almost always so forthright and self-regarding that any hint of explanatory notes in a quasi-Freudian manner are out of the question.

Instead we have a series of social or cultural panoramas, in which the author shifts the foregrounded matter in a well controlled rhythmic prose, flexible and sure. In this way, when she does reach the really fundamental things about belief or creativity, we take them as all the more convincing. The author has the knack of allowing the mundane and the visionary to live together, shifting from accounts of children or food to the inner imagination of the reader.

Fay Weldon quotes Cyril Connolly's remark that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than a pram in the hail, and this explains the kind of memoir intended here. In a sense, it is purposefully anti-intellectual and very much concerned with the raw life-data we all have to live in, sometimes sinking and sometimes swimming. As Conrad said, we should 'in the destructive element immerse' but only for the unreckoned outcomes of life, vigour and challenge. These are certainly here, and Weldon might not help any scholars who wish to write a thesis on her work, but she will entertain, and in doing so, offering plenty of the stuff of life -- marriage, babies, ghosts and amateur dramatics along the way.

If one is looking for insights into writing, then the sections on Fay Weldon' s career in advertising do throw up some resonant phrases, such as 'realize that the words on the page are always embattled'. It could be a sub-heading for Auto da Fay: a woman embattled by life, never short of 'copy' for the next story, and never, ever, bland. Fay Weldon has produced what Priestley might have called 'an entertainment' and a thoroughly enjoyable read it is, too. The wonderful Nona (who lived to be ninety-nine) would have approved: she had no time for literary types and wanted simply to play Chopin until the troublesome world disappeared.