Fay Weldon – Woman of, mixed, Faith

In April 2010 Fay Weldon agreed to me interviewing her for Christianity magazine. In 2000, She had become a notable Christian, baptised in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. She died yesterday, 4 January 2023, aged 91.

Approaching her house, my expectation was to see a cross between Joan Bakewell, glamourous TV intellectual, and Cruella de Vil, from 1001 Dalmatians. She was known as a sharp, pioneering feminist, author of The Life and Loves of a She Devil.’ She would be thin, taller than me, dressed in a green trouser suit, looking down on me.

Fay opened the large off-white wooden door. She was short and not at all thin, with blond, wavy, girly, hair, a broad smile, a quiet demeanour and a steady, penetrating, gaze. A cross between Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher.

Despite still recovering from a nasty bug, Fay had, that morning, welcomed her hairdresser for the interview photographs. At nearly 80 years old, she was a determined professional writer, presenting her work, and herself, as best she could.

For photos of the interview and brief footage of me rounding off, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Fh3Zpd6qY

Fay explained that she was born to humanists, ignored the prayers at her Catholic school and, much later, was drawn to St John’s Church in Hampstead.

I just like going to church! Being baptised seemed a sensible thing to do. It wasn’t a great moment of enlightenment or sudden conversion. Partly, I think, I wanted to belong.

Then I was always very worried about saying the Creed, because it’s very literal, isn’t it? And they won’t let you take it metaphorically. And one day I said it, and found that I hadn’t been struck by lightning or anything. Now I am used to it, and don’t query it at all.

Another thing that got me going as a Christian, so to speak, is that I was asked to write an introduction to 1 Corinthians. I was sort of converted by St Paul. It seemed such an extraordinary tale, so new at the time, and I thought ‘What an amazing person.

Faith became a strong part of Fay’s life.

We go to church every Sunday at 8 o’clock and once a month we go to another church at 11 o’clock and sing hymns, which I like doing, and meet people. And every now and then, not always, you feel the presence of God. And I like the whole sense of history, that people have walked up this particular path for the last five hundred years, at least, that you are part of something extremely valuable. If I don’t go, I feel as though I’ve missed something.

Fay learnt to cope with adverse reactions to her new faith:

My daughter-in-law was absolutely terrified of letting my grandchildren near me in case I converted them! People are, oddly, quite shocked because they think it means that you have no intellect. Many are really quite polite, and so many are Christians but you didn’t know. People are almost nervous of saying that they go to church and all the rest of it because it’s somehow, socially, not the thing to do. But you discover all kinds of people who are Christian, and who talk to you about it.

Now there’s a sort of scientist backlash which is trying actually to erase Christianity from the social structure. They say we’re superstitious and old-fashioned. But I find it equally difficult to comprehend what they think’s going on in the cosmos.

Fay wrote as a woman of faith:

You can’t proselytise you know. But everything I write, to me, has a kind of moral base to it. And, on the whole, virtue is rewarded.

When I talk at literary festivals, I explain to people that, if they take an hour, or an hour and a half, out of their lives every Sunday it is rather better than going to the shopping mall, and certainly cheaper. And to gather together and to pray for the sick does nobody any harm at all and might even do them a great deal of good.

Once you’ve seen it and once you’ve seen society as it is in its irreligious state, you think that the sooner it gets back to religion the better. If people don’t believe in God, they’ll believe in anything as Dostoevsky said. If you go to Glastonbury, you’ll see them believing in anything – a ruddy waste of time! My mother lived there for a time with the terrible things going on and she used to say ‘Where there are angels there are always devils as well.

Fay only commended her, traditional, type of church: She decried ‘bongo jingle church in pre-fab buildings.’ She relished ‘… a sense of respect, of God as an impersonal force. This is what I respond to. God is greater than you can conceive. Jesus was in your image but God is not in your image.’

Fay’s understanding of the Holy Spirit was ‘I think we’re born with it and if you allow it to develop, it develops. By an act of will that either denies it or includes it in your general behaviour towards other people.’ It seems that no-one, including myself, helped Fay to know that the Holy Spirit has to be received, as Jesus received at his Baptism and as Paul taught.

Fay’s first serious encounter with faith had been in 1989. After the fatwa of death against her fellow novelist Salman Rushdie, she read the Koran. She wrote the pamphlet Sacred Cows expressing her critical view:

The Koran is food for no thought. It is not a poem on which a society can be safely or sensibly based. It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, or even art, for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes.

The Koran fails in that, being so abusive of non-belief, it insists upon a concrete interpretation of its text. Thus, it gives weapons and strength to the thought police – and the thought police are easily set marching, and they frighten.’

Fay was herself then threatened:

Ten years later they declared me an Islamophobe, which was rather nasty. They turned up at literary readings and things. It took them ten years to get round to it – and that was written before I was a Christian.

Fay did not change her views for our 2010 interview:

I just think it’s very funny to believe that the Koran came from anything other than Mohammed, (perhaps you’d better not print this or I might get into trouble) who was rather like L J Hubbard, in creating a religion… From St Paul onwards Christianity was an inclusive religion. Islam, by its nature is exclusive.

Fay’s view of feminism did change, not to everyone’s approval:

The women are now, on the whole, happier than they were. Women now can speak up without having the little squeaky voices which they used to have because they were so nervous and so unused to speaking in public.

It’s just the children. If we could just have a 25 hour week. Any child can be without its mother for 25 hours a week. I think it’s the full-time work that’s the problem. Let them spend less time producing the stuff that nobody needs and more time in the home or taking care of the children.

Society has changed. Women now have absolute choice about how they live. What goes wrong is not men’s fault. But some women continue, out of habit, to find fault with men.

The published interview is here: https://www.premierchristianity.com/interviews/fay-weldon-i-go-to-church-every-sunday-and-every-now-and-then-i-feel-the-presence-of-god/3612.article

Fay’s appreciation of gathering together to pray was shown in her welcome of me praying with her that day. Before the interview, I thought Jesus had nudged me to offer to pray for her finances. To me, this seemed an unlikely need for a famous novelist. I offered anyway. Fay, happily amazed, called her husband and we prayed accordingly. This turned a professional meeting into an ongoing friendship.

At Fay’s birthday party a couple of years later, Fay welcomed me praying for her painful leg. When her son died, she welcomed me praying the Book of Common Prayer Funeral Service with her over the phone. At another birthday party, she welcomed prayer from myself and my fiancée for her painful back.

Fay encouraged me about my first novel, the whodunit A British Crash: https://www.laddermedia.co.uk/a-british-crash . She wrote ‘The writing is professional and what the book has to say is really interesting.’

Fay also continued to welcome Kehua, Maori familial spirits, from her upbringing in New Zealand. She wrote about these in a novel of the same name. ‘Kehua are the spirits of the dead, who are not nasty, but just trying to bring you home. The book is about the difficulty of distinguishing a character in a book from a ghost. It’s more or less in this house that it takes place.’ The book was largely autobiographical. Maybe she should have taken more heed of her mother’s warning of devils and angels.

We are all a mixture. Fay, and Fay’s strong Christian faith, was no exception. May she see even more clearly in the light of Paradise. May all the saints and angels enjoy her sharp, sympathetic, impish wit, for ever.

Roger Harper

Tags: Christian Faith, Fay Weldon, Feminism