30/7/2020 0 Comments On revision and its limitsI like sequels to stories, even if they are written by someone else, and I like reading different perspectives on the same story, like Joan Aiken’s brilliant and startling Jane Fairfax which gives us the reverse image of Jane Austen’s Emma, but I like these sequels and new perspectives only so long as nothing in the original story is contradicted, even if it might have been, we discover, only partially understood. I first wrote a story about two sisters, Hillary and Bridgid, about twenty years ago, mainly to use the spelling of the name Bridgid that, when I came across it, reminded me of my childhood fascination with the name Hillary. When I used the names again for a later story with sisters in it, this did some of the work all by itself of fictionalising what started out as a little bit semi-autobiographical. Hillary and Bridgid were becoming real characters, with a life beyond the stories they were in. This made the facts of any stories they were in unalterable truths, for me as the writer of them, and the writer of any potential sequels. But now I have revised the last chapter of The Bedmaking Competition, the novella that tells five of the stories from Hillary and Bridgid’s lives, for a second edition, and what I had written about Molly and Fred in the first edition is completely contradicted by the second edition. Two versions of the same scenes are now in print, one no longer true, one a new truth, overwriting the first version. This breaks my own rules so completely that I can’t even think of it as cheating. I think it only felt possible, and even necessary, because I’d sort of cheated when I’d made up the adolescent Molly and Fred in the first version, a version in which they were never really quite real characters. I needed Bridgid not to be winning as a sibling by having children, I explained to my own children, when I found myself having to account for Molly’s coldness and Fred’s dishevelment. I must have been reading too much Virginia Woolf, the diaries, not the novels, in which she is always measuring herself against Vanessa and in her own mathematics always coming out with Vanessa as the winner because Vanessa has children. But I was right to feel embarrassed by the characters of Molly and Fred, not because they were too fictional, but because they weren’t fictional enough, they were nothing but convention, a cartoon of adolescence lifted from parenting guides that never did anything to improve my own parenting, or my writing. So I made up a new Molly and Fred for a second edition of the novella, taking the starting points of their characters as they had been written into the early stories when they were small children and following Molly’s word-play as a toddler through to an adolescence in which she speaks only in Latin, an ambition not completely unrelated to my own adolescent intention to grow up and raise children speaking only Latin. Fred’s early insistence on wearing dresses is followed through to his adolescent sense of style, though it is a silk jumpsuit, rather than a dress, he is wearing in the revised version of the hospital scene. There were still limits, though, to what I could invent, including the constraint the revision still shared with the first version of the scene, that the dialogue had to match up with the dialogue in a story that has never been published, which tells the story from the point of view of the woman Bridgid and Hillary’s mother had run off with all those years ago. This is who comes into the hospital room, very briefly, when Fred and Molly have just arrived, and when she first sees Fred, she thinks he must be the son she believed Bridgid and Hillary’s mother was pregnant with, all those years ago when their father came after their mother and broke up this affair. So she still has to say, “he’s the boy,” and then, later, “you’re his mother” in this version of the scene, just as she does in the other version of the scene, and just as she does in a story that will probably never be written, but tells what are, for me, still unalterable facts in the fictional world of Bridgid and Hillary.
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