A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
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A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
The Collected Stories
MARGARET DRABBLE
Edited and with an Introduction by
JOSÉ FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ
PENGUIN CLASSICS
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1989, 1993, 1999, 2000
Introduction © José Francisco Fernández, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and the author of the introduction have been asserted
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96711-0
For Pat Kavanagh
Contents
Introduction
Note on the Texts
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
1 Hassan’s Tower
2 A Voyage to Cythera
3 Faithful Lovers
4 A Pyrrhic Victory
5 Crossing the Alps
6 The Gifts of War
7 A Success Story
8 A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
9 Homework
10 The Merry Widow
11 The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance
12 The Caves of God
13 Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale
Introduction
When Margaret Drabble’s short story ‘The Caves of God’ was published in Nicholas Royle’s Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing, Volume 2 (1999), Michael Moorcock, in his introduction, termed her contribution ‘a rarity’. The sense of having found an anomaly was reinforced by the editor’s comments in the foreword: they were just as excited, Royle wrote, about publishing some promising writers’ first short stories ‘as we are about featuring a rare excursion into the short form by Margaret Drabble’.
The truth of the matter, however, is that, before ‘The Caves of God’, Drabble had published a dozen stories in a number of journals, magazines and anthologies. Moorcock and Royle’s comments are mentioned here merely to demonstrate the general lack of awareness surrounding the author’s short fiction, despite her having written such small gems as ‘Hassan’s Tower’ and ‘The Gifts of War’, which have been reprinted and anthologized several times. These two and her other pieces are fine examples of well-made stories: neatly constructed, carefully contextualized, focused, unified in tone, elegantly climactic, and at times tinged with the seriousness of a moral dilemma. At the same time they are so very English; they encapsulate values and ideas that, for better or for worse, have been associated with England, or with a kind of England Drabble admires: restraint, moderation, common sense, intolerance of snobbishness (which was the main topic in Drabble’s first published short text, the sketch ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’, 1964), wit and seriousness.
Perhaps it was the Englishness of her stories that impelled a lecturer at an English university in the mid-eighties to distribute ‘The Gifts of War’ to a group of foreign students, myself included, who were engaged in an informally arranged exchange programme in those pioneering days before the extension of the celebrated Erasmus scheme. What did we see in that story? What did we learn from that exposure to Englishness? The silent dignity of Kevin’s working-class mother, for example, watching her son going to school along the narrow back alleys of terraced houses; the self-deceit of Frances Janet Ashton Hall, ready to move to a southern university, accosting distressed passers-by, trying to convince them on the banning of all armaments; the mazy introspection of female conscience that Drabble developed in novels such as The Waterfall (1969), a reasoning, self-assured, if slightly severe narrative voice, which would in time step out of the printed page and address the reader directly, reaching high levels of intimacy in A Natural Curiosity (1989) with such well-known remarks as ‘What do you think will happen to her?’
None of the stories in this collection are autobiographical in the strictest sense, although many are based on Drabble’s own experiences, on places she has been to and people she has met. Some of her friends are taken as characters, like the lichenologist in ‘Stepping Westward’, while the coastal village in Somerset where she keeps a house appears in one of the stories. Drabble did visit the island of Elba when she was seventeen, while studying Italian in Perugia, and she took material from that experience to write ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’. She certainly made a journey to Morocco with her husband in the mid-sixties, crossing the length of Spain by car to reach their destination, and this provided details for the story ‘Hassan’s Tower’. Drabble was pregnant with her second son at the time, and this may account for the willingness on the part of the protagonist to consider the common bonds of humanity at the end of the story. In these and other journeys Drabble surely took precise notes on the English abroad, a persistent topic in the early stories. The English are shown to be an interesting subject of study, afflicted with a mixture of fear and admiration, halfway between neurosis caused by the threat of foreigners and fascination with new experiences. ‘What you would like,’ says newly wed Chloe to her groom, Kenneth, in Marrakesh, ‘is a country without any people in it. With just places. And hotels.’ Kenneth and Chloe, the protagonists of ‘Hassan’s Tower’, are too polite to ask if the food that has been offered them along with their drinks is for free, and yet at the same time they feel outraged in case the price turns out to be exorbitant.
In these early stories there is a longing for an exotic life – as with Helen in ‘A Voyage to Cythera’, who ‘could get excited by the prospect of any journey longer than thirty miles’ – a life of travelling on the continent and beyond, a desire to apprehend a more dazzling life elsewhere. Helen maintains the illusion that she can change just by travelling. No matter how far they go, however, the protagonists of these initial pieces cannot truly escape England. They are haunted by their English upbringing in a time of drabness. Their handling of space outside their homes is problematic: that is why they compare their new surroundings with their homeland as the only way to appropriate the foreign landscape. In ‘A Pyrrhic Victory’ Anne remembers childhood excursions to the beaches on the Yorkshire coast while contemplating a sunny rock pool on the island of Elba
. In ‘Hassan’s Tower’, what first comes to Kenneth’s mind when he looks at the people at the top of the monument is the image of grandmothers on a beach in England. When he reconciles with mankind and accepts them as human beings, with their little lives of worries and joys, he sees ‘all of them, alive and separate as people on a London street’.
If the characters of the stories written in the sixties cannot escape the constraints imposed by England – either the reality or illusion of England – they also inhabit a different time-frame, where the effects of the war are still present in the geography of cities. These pieces refer to a past time, when people still kept fourpenny stamps in their wallets, used pens to write letters and boxes of matches to light cigarettes on trains.
The short stories written in the seventies, however, suggest a change of attitude. No more longing for distant places or deep states of contemplation caused by the struggles of love. Brisk, busy, highly efficient professional women enter the stage: Kathie Jones in ‘A Success Story’, Jenny Jamieson in ‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’ and the unnamed TV presenter and mother of four in ‘Homework’ are representatives of the woman who has to divide her time between her duties at home and the demands of a job, usually, in Drabble’s stories, one related to the media. There is usually a husband and children too, and the stories of this period encapsulate Drabble’s attempt to draw a picture of the modern woman trying to reconcile all the pressures put upon her and, at the same time, maintain an independent voice. The influence of Doris Lessing, whose work Drabble had discovered during the previous decade, can be clearly seen here.
In the last group of stories, from ‘The Merry Widow’ onwards, a period that roughly covers the late eighties and most of the nineties, the female protagonists, usually middle-aged, having paid their dues to society, escape the burden of mundane obligations and retire to a corner of England, seeking peace and solitude, and gaining time for themselves, becoming more interested in the wonders of nature than in the paradoxical workings of love. They let their hair go undyed, abandon diets and happily put on weight, driving their cars themselves to places of their own choosing. A kind of circle has been completed from the solipsistic young women of the first period: forgiveness has been granted, a serene conscience has been achieved.
My contention is that Margaret Drabble’s short stories constitute an essential complement to understanding her work: not only do they establish a fruitful dialogue with her major novels, but they also contain clues that point to lesser-known aspects of her art. This makes all the more surprising the fact that a substantial part of the literary imagination of one of the most important writers of postwar Britain has not been studied in depth. With the exception of the odd article, there is no thorough study of Drabble’s short fiction. Perhaps her work as a novelist has eclipsed her production of short stories, here collected for the first time in book form. Perhaps the dispersion in time and space of her short stories, mostly published in Britain and America over a period of more than thirty years, has not allowed a proper assessment. Research on the interwoven lines, preoccupations and topics shared between her stories and novels remains a task yet to be completed. The fascination that Helen, for example, the protagonist of ‘A Voyage to Cythera’, feels for the perfect, harmonious family picture she glimpses through the window from the street corresponds with the sophisticated world that Clara experiences in the Denham household in Jerusalem the Golden (1967). While, in order to achieve the final version of the protagonist in The Realms of Gold (1975) – independent, self-confident and respected archaeologist Frances Wingate – Drabble probably needed to gain the necessary practice drawing the profile of the main characters in ‘A Success Story’ and ‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’. In this last story, TV presenter Jenny Jamieson’s savoir-faire marks a relevant precedent for future heroines: ‘she never offended and yet never made people dull. She was intelligent and quick, she had sympathy for everyone she talked to, and all the time she looked so splendid [. . .]’
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’, ref
lects 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.