Dear Edith Wharton: if authors were agony aunts

Throughout my life romantic and social dilemmas have often left me pondering, “What would Edith Wharton do?” The writer’s lively yet unsparing eye when describing America’s Gilded Age made her, in my eyes, the perfect agony aunt. Few other writers gauge so finely the tipping point between a faux pas and social ruin, or so clearly flag up the tripwires awaiting those with a weakness for witty company and amorous adventures.

But then, why do we read literature if not to better understand the human condition and our own folly? It’s quite natural that in times of trouble we feel like turning to the authors we trust most.

I wasn’t surprised to learn last week (via the research of the academic Judith Coffin) that feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir received tens of thousands of letters soliciting her advice following the publication of The Second Sex. You might expect that a woman who helped pioneer modern notions of female autonomy, enjoyed a lifelong “open relationship” with Jean-Paul Sartre, and pursued relationships with both sexes at a time when such flouting of convention was highly unusual, would elicit pleas for help.

One 36-year-old British woman wrote to her saying, “I am what is called a pervert, a lesbian. My friend and I have loved each other for years. Could you give me the name of a doctor who could perform a surgical operation on me to change me into a man?” Another wrote of “sobbing in despair” after undergoing an illegal abortion.

De Beauvoir wasn’t the only author besieged by anxious readers wanting guidance. The diarist, novelist and erotic short story writer Ana?s Nin received so many missives from fans soliciting her help that she spent most of the last decade of her life responding to them – once boasting of writing 45 handwritten replies on a single flight. Although you slightly wince to think of the advice Nin might have proffered. She was an enthusiastic proponent of “mensonges vital”, or “the lies which give life… the special lies which I tell for very specific reasons – to improve upon living”. She had affairs with Henry Miller and both her shrinks, then briefly set up as a psychoanalyst and slept with clients, too.

I suppose the lesson is: be careful who you seek advice from. But I suspect readers treat authors as they do good friends – often seeking those who’d steer them in the way they want to travel, rather than those who might check wilder impulses. Several women I know treat Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, as a literary mentor, despite, or more likely because of, her three ill-fated marriages, equally unhappy love affairs and brief period selling sex to survive, heavy drinking, a stint in jail and waspish nature. If she were still alive they’d be camped out on her doorstep with a case of wine in the desire to share their own tales of dependency and emotional abuse.

In fact, most famous authors would make terrible agony aunts. As Graham Greene rightly pointed out, good writers tend to have “a splinter of ice” in their hearts, which allows them to look dispassionately at unpleasant people and happenings and turn their observations into art. Greene himself would have been rubbish at proffering advice because of all that Catholic angst. Anyone who can make God the third person in a love affair, as he does in The End of the Affair, should be barred from counselling others.

Even a writer as wise and clear-sighted as Jane Austen might not be best suited to putting others on the couch. You sense from her novels and letters that she enjoys spying on the foolishness of others a bit too much to set people straight. Her private jokes in letters to her sister Cassandra could verge on cruel, as when she wrote: “Mrs Hall of Sherborne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” That’s not the tender-hearted soul you’d want consoling you in times of tragedy. Bharat Tandon, the academic and Austen scholar, concedes Austen might not have enjoyed giving advice to strangers, but points out she was solicitous in tending to younger relatives’ problems. Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight about one proposal of marriage, “I dare not say ‘determine to accept him.’ The risk is too great for you unless your own Sentiments prompt it.”

In fact, speculating which writers would make good agony aunts, and which would not, makes an excellent parlour game for book lovers. I ran into the academic and Scott Fitzgerald aficionada Sarah Churchwell in the course of writing this article and we spent a delicious half-hour running through various scenarios.

Churchwell’s top tip was Zelda Fitzgerald, on the grounds there was no experience she hadn’t lived through, including severe mental illness. We agreed you wouldn’t want to go near a man who’d taken advice from overly macho, wife-deserting Ernest Hemingway, nor one who modelled himself on Evelyn Waugh because of the repressed homosexuality and the snobbery (you’d feel you’d need to own a rather lovely country pile before he’d take any interest in your quandaries). Yet Henry James’s fine observation of errant behaviour, his ear for subtext – let alone his incredible insight into women – would put him right up there with his friend Wharton as a counsellor.

Susanna Forrest, the anthropologist and author of The Age of the Horse, nominated Angela Carter, because “she’s bracing, funny and made mistakes when young” and “because of the peaches”. She explained that in Carter’s short stories there’s a woman who describes how she was once in the Greyhound bus station in Houston, Texas “with a man I was then married to,” who hands over a coin for the vending machine.

The story’s narrator describes how there are two peaches amid the sandwiches and candy bars: “One peach was big. The other was small.” She then describes how she “conscientiously” chooses the smaller peach, feeling someone else’s need of the big one might be greater.

When her spouse asks her why she’d done such a thing, she realises how used she has become to suppressing her own desires in service to other people’s: “I date my moral deterioration from this time.”

We will all have a personal favourite. Although we should perhaps remove Shakespeare from the running, or everyone would pick him as their guru, since there’s no scenario he hasn’t dwelt on in his plays and sonnets.

Let me leave you with an alternative agony uncle – the novelist, journalist and essayist Arnold Bennett. His excellent polemic How to Live on 24 Hours a Day gives top advice on how to make the best use of your time on this planet. It’s a clarion call to follow your dreams: “A man may desire to go to Mecca… he may drown before he reaches Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrated… But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who… never leaves Brixton.”

Unlike de Beauvoir and the concept of free love, this advice works for pretty much everyone.