A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (2 page)

Liz Headleand was unable to find Stephen Cox, the man who could have been her lover, in the jungle of Cambodia in
The Gates of Ivory
(1991), but the interested reader has an opportunity to imagine how such a meeting would have fared in ‘The Caves of God’, when Hannah Elsevir finally finds her ex-husband, Peter, or rather the reincarnation of her husband in Turkey (Drabble had been impressed by the dream-like landscape of Cappadocia during a British Council visit). The similarities between the two men (humane, compassionate, calm) are remarkable. It would be interesting to analyse, incidentally, why her mature and intelligent women fall for elusive, ambiguous, evanescent men, such as Stephen Cox, or Bill Elliot in ‘The Dower House at Kellynch’. Perhaps they need a respite after disentangling themselves from the turmoil of a life with the likes of Nick Gaulden (
The Peppered Moth
, 2000), that attractive and remorseless rolling stone who leaves behind a trail of families and children.

When one reads the stories in this collection, certain motives and places acquire special relevance, as if one were seeing the hidden threads that make the writer’s oeuvre, like the reverse of a tapestry. The rock pool that Anne spoils with her sacrilegious deed in Drabble’s early story, ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’, finds its final significance in her most recent novel,
The Sea Lady
(2007). By swimming in a rock pool on the North Sea coast at the end of the novel, Ailsa Kelman is almost gaining redemption
for young Anne’s sin on that distant Mediterranean shore so long ago. The author herself stressed the importance of these connections in a 1991 lecture, aptly named ‘In Search of a Future’: ‘For the past is not fixed: it changes as we change, and we look back and perceive in it different messages, different patterns. Our past selves speak to our future selves. We are part of a continuing process.’ Just as is common in her novels, so too in her stories fate and chance exert a pull that impels or diverts human efforts towards happiness. It is because of luck, therefore, that Viola meets her former lover in that particular restaurant in ‘Faithful Lovers’, although perhaps she was destined to go there because of their past affair. Giles Reader meets by chance his old friend Peter Elsevir in Turkey in ‘The Caves of God’, thus procuring the encounter that Hannah so badly needs with her ex-husband, a reunion that was meant to take place.

The stories in this collection are, of course, worth reading on their own, even if one is not acquainted with Drabble’s longer fiction, and details concerning their publication are themselves truly enthralling narratives. It is now known, for instance, that Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow wrote a prickly letter of complaint to Drabble, rightly suspecting that he was the model for womanizer and woman-hater Howard Jago in ‘A Success Story’. By reading this story one also has privileged access to the sort of parties that publisher George Weidenfeld used to give. And, on one occasion, the Woodcraft Folk even took legal action against the author when she had some children in ‘Homework’ make the naïvely funny remark that their organisation was ‘a kind of guerrilla warfare training for Marxist boy scouts’. The Mill House, which appears so prominently in ‘The Merry Widow’, was rented by Drabble herself in the mid-eighties. Just like the protagonist of the story, the author went to Dorset to recover from a period of distress.
Unlike Elsa Palmer, however, Drabble had recently experienced her mother’s, not her husband’s, death.

Although imbued with Drabble’s characteristic themes – her cautious feminism, class conflicts, a fascination for those chosen by grace, metafictional devices (‘You must not imagine me as speaking to you in my own person,’ writes the authorial voice in ‘Stepping Westward’) – in Drabble’s short stories the social concerns are more subdued, the tone is more relaxed than in her longer works. Drabble the social anthropologist is less obviously at work here. Occasionally, though, she still lets it be known that she is aware of the class abyss that separates people in modern Britain: old and new money, property … These are issues that she does not abandon completely: ‘The Elliots of old would not have acknowledged the existence of my category of person’, reflects Emma Watson in ‘The Dower House at Kellynch’ on her unexpected rapport with a member of the landed gentry. There is an authorial tut of displeasure for those who forget their origins, those who pretend that they have been affluent all their lives and that round the corner does not lurk a lower-middle-class past, as with the Palmer offspring in
The Witch of Exmoor
(1996) (‘They have turned themselves into members of the English middle class by sleight of hand’), an attitude also represented in Drabble’s short fiction by Kenneth in ‘Hassan’s Tower’, who believes that being rich is something natural: ‘he sometimes found himself wondering how his own parents had so dismally failed to have it [money].’ Drabble may despise the network of contacts between the upper classes and make passing remarks on the falseness of committees which give an appearance of democratic procedures to a system of nepotism in stories such as ‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’ – she occasionally expands on the merchandising of the past in England, now labelled as ‘Heritage’, as in ‘Stepping Westward’ – but, generally
speaking, as perhaps befits a genre such as the short story, in Drabble’s short pieces there are fewer global concerns and many more intimate portraits. Less political strain and more tranquil pleasures.

Much of the sensuousness in these stories comes from the contemplation of the English landscape, in particular Drabble’s adopted territory of the West Country: ‘It is the most beautiful place in England’, as Esther Breuer says about Somerset in
The Radiant Way
(1987). In short stories such as ‘The Merry Widow’, ‘The Dower House at Kellynch’ or ‘Stepping Westward’ the author shows, as she puts it in
A Writer’s Britain
(1979), an almost mystic devotion to the land itself, a pure affection that eases her painful love for England. Most readers will probably share Elsa Palmer’s grief in ‘The Merry Widow’ when the old man from the village destroys her private Eden in Dorset, her little paddock at the back of the Mill House, which had been her source of healing peace. There is certainly moral strife in the story, a personal betterment achieved through suffering, but the watercolour of wild flowers growing in profusion makes up for the misery Elsa endures.

A luxurious and lustful delight in the overpowering landscape can also be found in ‘Stepping Westward’, as seen by the twenty-year-old who had once been the schoolteacher Mary Mogg:

Ferns sprouted like orchids from the trunks of vast oaks overhanging the rapid rivers, ivy with berries like grapes rampaged up ash and beech in tropical splendour, and hollies soared towards the sky. Primeval lichens of grey and sage green and dazzling orange encrusted bark and twig and stone, and the red earth broke into bubbles of scarlet and purple and bright spongy yellow.

This is an interesting angle from which to consider someone labelled as the moral conscience of her generation. Drabble does indeed surprise the prejudiced mind in these stories: a woman rekindles an adulterous old flame in a public bar; an intelligent female writer relishes the sexual longing that she provokes in a man of worldly fame; a famous TV presenter heroically speaks about the future to a school audience of children and parents while bleeding profusely, due to a gynaecological examination. There is certainly a dialogue with the tradition the author hails from – Wordsworth’s voice, for instance, can be heard in ‘Stepping Westward’ – but Drabble has always been able to supersede that same tradition (‘How I dislike Jane Austen’, Jane Gray had said in
The Waterfall
) by an exploration of different kinds of consciousness, revising from the inside old forms of writing.

After the trilogy of the late eighties and early nineties (
The Radiant Way
,
A Natural Curiosity
,
The Gates of Ivory
) her novels have, in their own quiet way, endeavoured to open new paths for fiction, entering the realm of the supernatural and flirting with uncertain areas of the occult in
The Witch of Exmoor
, or courting the underworld and revisiting myths of a dark nature in
The Seven Sisters
(2002). Similarly, the unexpected comes up in her short stories, where she convincingly portrays a mentally unstable character in ‘Homework’ or when she chooses a geneticist as the protagonist of ‘The Caves of God’, anticipating her interest in genealogy, DNA research and matrilineal descent in
The Peppered Moth
. The lack of closure in ‘The Dower House at Kellynch’ is intriguing too, as is the intersection of this narrative with ‘Stepping Westward’, when the protagonist of the first story appears in the background of the second one as an old acquaintance of the reader, thus adding elements of playful intertextuality to conventional storytelling.

It has to be said that Margaret Drabble has never disowned the tradition of the social realist novel and has always admitted the powerful influence on her work of the great English novelists of the nineteenth century, George Eliot among them. She has often stated that in her writing she is arguing back, continuing
their
story. But as her novels of the nineties and the new millennium show, only a short-sighted and uninformed critic could maintain old clichés, as that of Drabble being a ‘typical’ woman novelist of the 1960s and 1970s or that she is a writer clinging to the past. Even a cursory reading of Drabble’s 2004 novel
The Red Queen
will show that her work has followed a steady pace of innovation. Following the British tradition of long rambling books (she is a great admirer of that rambling constructor J. C. Powys and his
A Glastonbury Romance
, 1932), she takes the story of the Red Queen of Korea of two centuries ago, whose ghost tells the tale of her past to readers across continents and cultures. Current global issues are discussed as well and an intricate plot is developed, with the very English character of Dr Barbara Halliwell, ‘an archetypal middle-class grammar-school girl from Orpington’, as its protagonist. In this novel Margaret Drabble appears as a character, too, and is able to tell Dr Halliwell with postmodern irony that novelists ‘are not to be trusted. They steal; they borrow; they appropriate. You should never tell them anything, if you want to keep it a secret.’

One, of course, should not underestimate the power of a perfectly balanced syntactic structure: ‘I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.’ This statement, casually expressed by Drabble in a radio programme when she was starting out as a writer, and later reproduced in Bernard Bergonzi’s
The Situation of the Novel
(1970), has done much to pigeonhole her as a writer out of touch with the fresh winds of change
buffeting the English novel, and this stamp has been difficult to rub away. Take for instance her authorial interventions, a common feature in her novels since
The Realms of Gold
. Reviewers of her books have frequently viewed these asides as manipulative and irritating ticks in her style, suffocating intrusions by the author, and not as attempts by the writer to bridge the gap that separates her from her readers. It is time for a re-evaluation of Drabble’s work as a whole and for taking into consideration its multifaceted nature. Perhaps the publication of her short stories will stimulate new approaches to her writing.

No one should really expect contemporary literature to make positive declarations of intention or to have an unquenchable faith in humankind. And Margaret Drabble’s stories do not offer such things either. Many stories in this collection, however, contain their own epiphanic moments, taking bold steps into the future and searching for inner light, and that makes them appropriate for any attempt to find meaningful narratives for our time. Furthermore, and perhaps at the most intimate level, there is a pure and simple pleasure to be found in reading these survivalist, questioning, belligerently intense short stories.

José Francisco Fernández University of Almería, Spain

Note on the Texts

The stories collected here are arranged chronologically according to their dates of publication. Some of them, however, may offer a variation as to their dates of composition. ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’ was probably the first story that Margaret Drabble wrote, when she was a student at Cambridge University in the late 1950s, but it was not until she was an established writer that it was finally published, in the magazine
Nova
in 1968. ‘Stepping Westward’ was written on commission for the Wordsworth Society in 1994. In actual fact, however, Drabble read it aloud at the annual meeting of this association in the Lake District at Grasmere, but it was not published until the year 2000 in the Massachusetts literary magazine
The Long Story
. In this volume, therefore, it appears as the last of the stories Margaret Drabble has published so far.

Other stories were kept for a time in a drawer for different reasons. ‘The Caves of God’, for example, was not destined for the
Time Out
anthology; Drabble wrote it for a book about ‘secrets’ which was never published. She rescued it when Nicholas Royle asked her for a story for his collection.

Two fragments from two of her novels, not included here, were published as short fiction in magazines: ‘The Dying Year’, an excerpt from
The Radiant Way
, was published in
Harper’s
magazine in July 1987, and ‘The Dinner Party’, taken from
A Natural Curiosity
, appeared in
Harper’s
in September 1989. ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses
’
, Drabble’s first published short text, appeared in
Punch
in October 1964.