Fay Weldon on Fay, wittily

AUTO DA FAY: A MEMOIR

By Fay Weldon

Grove, $25, 367 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

Fay Weldon has written two dozen novels, many of them highly diverting, but all too often madly — and maddeningly — over the top. Yet in her public life as an author, for example her staunch support for the hapless Salman Rushdie battling the murderous fatwa, she is a model of judiciousness and forthright common sense. And I have to say that on the two occasions in the late 1980s when I was able to spend some hours talking with her, she was not only charming but eminently sensible and markedly intelligent. So how to explain this puzzling dichotomy?

Among the many virtues of her delightful memoir, “Auto Da Fay,” (and the title itself tells you something of her mischievous pleasure in the apt bending of words), is the appearance of at least some answer to this conundrum. For this memoir leaves us in no doubt that if Mrs. Weldon is a clever and educated woman (she has a degree in Economics from St. Andrews University in Scotland), she has led a disorderly life which has contained more than her fair share of — not to mince words — foolishness.

But it has provided her with a great deal of rather sensational grist for her fictional mill and, as she says in the last sentence of the book, which concludes with her becoming Fay Weldon upon her second marriage at age 32: “What I do from now on, all that early stuff digested and out of the way, is write, and let living take a minor role.”

And what a life she has lived. Parents who split up when she was quite young. A much-admired older sister who sank into suicidal insanity. A penurious childhood in New Zealand followed by an equally parlous existence from age 15 in the austerity of postwar London. Generations of family who exemplify advanced ideas and leave in their wake the chaos that such ways produce in an overwhelmingly conventional world.

Her own single motherhood, followed by a mariage blanc to a creepy headmaster two decades her senior, who at times seems to act as a combination of pimp and voyeur to his attractive but foolish young wife. (At this point in her story, Mrs. Weldon is so appalled at the tawdry life led by her younger self that she is forced to lapse into the third person.) Employment as a waitress is followed by being a cake-shop proprietor, a factory worker, a nightclub hostess in London’s seedy Soho district, and finally, a highly successful advertising copywriter.

Those of us who lived in London in the early 1960s will remember such celebrated Weldonisms as “Unzip a Banana” and “Go to Work on an Egg,” but not one that (unsurprisingly) never saw the light of day, “Vodka Makes You Drunker Quicker!” London may have been gearing itself up to swing through the Sixties, but it wasn’t ready for that one. And Mrs. Weldon’s inability to see that it was far too outrageous to make it into the public domain gives the reader a foretaste of that lack of critical judgement regarding her own fiction which would finally prevent her from making a serious contribution to the postwar English novel.

But “Auto Da Fay” itself is consistently a pleasure to read. Witty, tart-tongued, even aphoristic at times, Mrs. Weldon can at her best sound almost like Rebecca West (of whom she wrote a most insightful short biography in the 1980s). When it comes to her cutting-edge forebears and their cavalier attitudes towards custom, she can be wise as well as funny:

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