A life of funny, serious, perplexing paradox

FAY WELDON has often found herself in situations not of her own choosing.

She was to have been born in New Zealand but emerged from the womb in England. She is one of the finest novelists of the last 40 years but she began her literary life as an advertising copywriter in order to earn enough to raise her child alone. Desperately seeking solace in marital bliss, it took her three husbands to achieve it.

For years a trenchant critic of religion, in 2000 she chose to be baptised into the Church of England because, as she put it, “it allows you to believe one thing one week and another the next”.

For decades she was the thinking woman’s feminist icon – and then she went and spoiled it all by declaring: “rape isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman if you’re safe, alive and unmarked after the event”.

A canny commentator who uses fiction to criticise fact, she also loves a good belly laugh while, at the same time, frets that too much humour in her writing will mean she is not taken seriously.

“I sometimes take funny lines out for that reason but if I take too much out it can become boring and, anyway, life is made up of alternating funny bits and serious bits.”

She lives with her husband Nick Fox in a chocolate box English country village in Dorset, but rarely ventures out. “I don’t like the outdoors and I don’t do much exercise as I have two bad knees.”

A cultural critic, she sees her mission as being “faithful to what I see around me, whether I like it or not. My role is to look at the world, get a true vision of it and hand it over to you in fictional form”.

In her fiction, Weldon portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of western, and in particular British, society.

On the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill she acknowledges its liberating effect on women but ponders the downside. “It has led to all kinds of complications,” she says. “Because it meant that sex was no longer connected with procreation, it took responsibility away from men and handed it over to women and this has had all kinds of psychotic effects.”

Some critics say 78-year-old Weldon is full of contradiction, but she isn’t. She is full of paradox, though, and that is part of her charm. When asked her views on Irish writers, she appears bemused at the notion. “I don’t think of a writer as being Irish or not, just as being a writer. There really isn’t much difference between nationalities.”

Then, she immediately turns that on its head. “Of course the Irish language has infused writing in English with great richness which makes Irish writers so very good. Their writing has a musicality about it. It is not as academic as English writing.”

Franklin Birkinshaw – the name she was saddled with at birth – was barely three months in the womb in 1931 when an earthquake razed the buildings in Napier, New Zealand, and sent her mother and sister fleeing to the hills above the town. Her father, a doctor, was nowhere to be found so her mother took the first boat out. That is how Weldon came to be born in England, and perhaps that is how she came to weather so many vicissitudes in her life.

At five weeks old she and her mother, a writer of commercial fiction under the pen name Pearl Bellairs, returned to Kiwi country. At the age of 14, some years after her parents’ divorce, she returned to England with her mother and her sister Jane – never to see her father again. She lived with her mother, sister and grandmother until she started college and, as a result, grew up believing “the world was peopled by females”.

She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She feels the name she was christened, Franklin, contributed to her being accepted at St Andrews and permitted to study economics: the school assumed, in what sounds much like a Fay Weldon novel, that she was a male applicant.

In her early 20s she was briefly married to a school headmaster more than 20 years her senior and had a son. They split soon afterwards and she raised her son alone, a time she remembers as fraught with “odd jobs and hard times”. For a while, she worked on the problem page of the Daily Mirror and then as a copywriter for the Foreign Office. Then she got lucky. During a stint as an advertising copywriter she became famous for her slogan “Go to work on an egg” for Britain’s Egg Marketing Board.

“Advertising was the only thing I could do in order to earn a decent enough living... I did it for about eight years.” She once coined the slogan “Vodka gets you drunker quicker”. She explained her reasoning in an interview with the Guardian: “It just seemed... to be obvious that people who wanted to get drunk fast, needed to know this.” Her bosses disagreed and suppressed it.

She married Ron Weldon in 1962 and had three more sons, but after that came meltdown. “I was 30, depressed and ignorant, and knew it.” She went through psychoanalysis, which gave her the courage to give up advertising and start serious writing. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967, but by then she had already written some 50 plays for radio, stage, or television, the most well-known being Upstairs, Downstairs.

She built a successful career, publishing more than 30 novels, collections of short stories, television movies, newspaper and magazine articles and becoming a well- known face and voice on the BBC. But it took its toll on her marriage and she and Ron continued to visit therapists regularly. They divorced in 1994, after he left her for his astrological therapist who had told him that the couple’s astrological signs were incompatible. She subsequently married Fox, a poet, who is also her manager.

There is something of the Jolly Hockeysticks about Weldon. She is inclined simply to get on with things and also to make no-nonsense pronouncements: “I have always been an outsider and that is a very useful thing for writers who often find society peculiar. We are right-brained people so we see things differently to others.”

In paradoxical parallel to this pragmatic streak runs a family obsession with the occult, which feeds the fictional wellspring. Weldon’s mother had an interest in numerology; her maternal grandfather was a member, along with W B Yeats, of the secret cabalistic Order of the Golden Dawn; and Weldon herself pronounced recently as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that she has the gift of “second sight” that gives her secret knowledge of what other people are thinking.

“I think I know what goes on in other people’s heads more than most people do. It can be quite uncomfortable actually because you know what they’re thinking. Writers on the whole tend to have a degree of empathy that not everybody has.”

Her psychic powers have their limits, though. “I cannot see the future or anything like that. I can’t tell you who is going to win the 3.30 at Chepstow – more’s the pity – but I have felt and seen ghosts. I suppose it comes from writing fiction. After all, if you are in the business of making up fictional characters, you might as well make up real ones as well.”

* Fay Weldon appears on Friday, July 9, in the Maritime Hotel in Bantry as part of the West Cork Literary Festival. The festival runs from Sunday, July 4, to Saturday, July 10. Booking on 027-55987 or go online to www.westcorkliterartyfestival.ie