Margaret Drabble

“Real conflict for me at least always turns out to be wordless, which is why I find drama and the theatre so unreal.” (Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

Back in June I was inspired by heavenali’s a year with Margaret Drabble to read the author’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963). I was really impressed by what she’d achieved when she was just 24, and so I was keen to pick up her second novel The Garrick Year (1964), which was written only a year later. Once again I found the sure style really striking.

“All that strange season, that Garrick year, as I should always think of it, which proved to me to be such a turning point, though from what to what I would hardly like to say.”

Emma is an ex-model and mother to toddler Flora and baby Joe. She’s a bit adrift as to what she wants to do with her life, but is keen when offered a newsreader’s job. Unfortunately her selfish, self-serving husband David also gets offered a job, which involves moving from London to Hereford for a year so he can act in the local theatre productions by acclaimed director Wyndham Farrar.

At first David seems an outright pig, telling Emma she has no choice and he’s already signed the contract. It turns out this isn’t true and Emma never thought it was. Still, they both know it might as well be. This is the early 1960s and while staying behind for a year might be theoretically possible for a married woman with small children, it’s not hugely likely even with a nanny.

“I could hardly believe that marriage was going to deprive me of this [job] too. It had already deprived me of so many things which I had childishly overvalued: my independence, my income, my twenty-two inch waist, my sleep, most of my friends who had deserted on account of David insults, a whole string of finite things, and many more indefinite attributes like hope and expectation.”

Drabble captures that compelling mid-twentieth century time where women are starting to have a sense of more possibilities and life choices opening up, but these options still don’t seem wholly obtainable.

So David isn’t quite as dreadful as he first appears, but neither is he particularly likable. And he’s about to get worse, as he brings his roles home with him:

“this time I was condemned to a whole season of Flamineo who happened to be a self-centred existentialist pimp.”

As in her first novel, The White Devil by John Webster is heavily referenced. I’d be interested to know why this slightly bonkers, bloody Jacobean play seems so significant for Margaret Drabble at the start of her career. (And I say that as someone whose MA was on ritualistic bloodshed on the early modern stage – bonkers and bloody theatre is right up my street 😀 )

But The Garrick Year isn’t a pity-fest for Emma in contrast to David. She’s young and self-centred too, an intellectual thinker but not personally reflective. She can be quite bitchy, describing ingenue Sophy “as stupid and as shiny as an apple”, but I don’t think we’re supposed to take pronouncements like: “The provinces have never appealed to me, except as curiosities.” entirely seriously. Emma knows she can be a snob, and contrary.

“I feel that I’m insulting something when I am bored… My tastes are shallow; My life is shallow; and I like anonymity, change and fame. In Hereford I could have none of these things: I was condemned to familiarity, which beyond anything I find hard to maintain with ease.”

Her insight is limited, so when she starts an affair with Wyndham, she doesn’t really understand why she would do such a thing. It’s not particularly passionate, and remains unconsummated for the majority of its frankly tedious duration (tedious in terms of events, not portrayal!)

Drabble balances really well the spiky, sharp observations of Emma with a degree of sympathy for her. I don’t think as readers we’re supposed to necessarily like her, but not despise her either. Rather we’re encouraged to recognise how incredibly thwarted and frustrated she is, at a time when she has agency and choices but not enough of either.

“I personally, I myself, the part of me that was not a function and a smile and a mother, had been curled up and rotten with grief and patience and pain.”

I’ve read somewhere that Drabble goes off the boil in later novels, but these early ones are really hitting the spot for me now. I find women’s lives in this period endlessly interesting, and she captures that time so well. She’s not afraid to make her characters recognisably real even when they are not particularly appealing, and she incorporates her intellectual considerations seamlessly so they never obscure characters or plot. I’m looking forward to exploring her further.

To end, I may be a fellow Londoner but I’m baffled as to Emma’s problem with lovely Hereford:

“A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – a special kind of double.” (Toni Morrison)

/ madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

Many of you will know that Ali who blogs at heavenali is doing a year with Margaret Drabble throughout 2024. Ali’s posts of her Drabble reading so far have been really enticing and so I was determined to pick up this author whom I had never read.

A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) was Drabble’s first novel and was published when she was just 24. It’s a really impressive achievement and has definitely encouraged me to read more by her. (Which is lucky as someone cleared out their Drabble collection into my local charity bookshop recently, so there were several Penguin paperbacks with appalling 1980s covers available. Yes, I know it was preposterous to buy them all, but there was something about them all coming from the same reader and staying together that I liked. Also I’ll justify my book-buying any which way 😀 I think the same reader also cleared out their Penelope Livelys and I’m trying to resist…)

(I am genuinely perverse because I honestly wish, if I am going to have these monstrosities, that they were all the same style and the worst one, which to my eyes are the ones with the faces and the dark backgrounds. I just have to reassure myself that they’re all pretty terrible 😀 )

A Summer Bird-Cage is the examination of the relationship between two sisters, from the point of view of the younger one, Sarah, recently graduated from Oxford. She feels directionless and is returning from tutoring in Paris to see her older sister married. Louise also went to Oxford and she is academically less successful than Sarah; she is also breathtakingly beautiful.

A Summer Bird-Cage is an interesting period piece in many ways, as it captures that time when women had more freedom and more choices, but not quite enough. The expectations and pressures towards domestic fulfilment are still significant.

“I thought about jobs, and seriousness, and about what a girl can do with herself if over-educated and lacking a sense of vocation. Louise had one answer, of course. She was getting married.”

The sisters are not close at all and A Summer Bird-Cage is written with a refreshing lack of sentimentality but also a lack of any real jealousy. (Drabble’s sister was AS Byatt and they were both quite open about the fact that while they had a reasonable relationship most of the time, they also weren’t close.) At times Sarah may envy Louise her beauty, and the choices brought by her husband’s wealth, but most of the time she has a bemused indifference.

“There is just this basic antipathy, this long rooted suspicion, that kept us so rigorously apart.”

Sarah is definitely not jealous of Louise’s cold, snobbish husband Stephen, and I really liked this scene from a conversation she has with him at the wedding reception as Stephen pontificates on Art with a capital A:

“ ‘No no, the well-observed norm, that is what art is about. The delicacy of the perception will compensate for any lack of violence.’

 I think he was quoting from one of his reviews.”

We don’t really get to know Louise because Sarah doesn’t know her, and Drabble resists the temptation for fully-drawn, psychologically rounded portraits which would compromise the first-person point of view. Instead the novel portrays the unknowingness of other human beings, even those who are consistently in our lives to a greater or lesser degree.

“I wondered why she was such a mystery, why she didn’t fit together, why she was so unpredictable.”

There isn’t a plot as such, rather we follow Sarah through her first year out of university while her boyfriend is at Harvard; the unhappy lives of her friends; and the unhappy marriage of Louise. Sarah is young, and she can be snarky and judgemental. But what stops her being unbearable is that she fully acknowledges her own shortcomings, and will direct her snarkiness towards herself as much as anyone else:

“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.”

It’s astonishing to me that Drabble wrote A Summer Bird-Cage at just 24. There is the occasional sentence that is a bit too clever-clever and clunky, and the denouement felt a little bit clumsy given the way the sisters’ relationship had been portrayed up to that point, but these are really minor quibbles. If this is what she achieved in her first novel I can’t wait to see what heights she climbs to later in her writing.

“I don’t know why, but it was only then that I began to realise she was vulnerable. It seemed at the time like a clever and perceptive discovery, but I suppose that in fact it was extremely belated.”

You can read Ali’s wonderful review of this novel here.

To end, a trailer from the RSC’s 2014 production of The White Devil by John Webster, which is where the title of the novel comes from. Of course Sarah would name her book through a literary reference: