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.
The details of publication of the stories are as follows:
‘Hassan’s Tower’, Winter’s Tales 12, A. D. Maclean (ed.), London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s; Nova, June 1966; Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1980.
‘A Voyage to Cythera’, Mademoiselle, December 1967.
‘Faithful Lovers’ (published in an early version as ‘The Reunion’), Winter’s Tales 14, K. Crossley-Holland (ed.), London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1968; The Saturday Evening Post, 6 April 1968.
‘A Pyrrhic Victory’, Nova, July 1968.
‘Crossing the Alps’, Penguin Modern Stories, Volume 3, J. Burnley (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; Mademoiselle, February 1971.
‘The Gifts of War’, Winter’s Tales 16, A. D. Maclean (ed.), London: Macmillan, 1970; New York: St Martin’s, 1971; Women and Fiction: Short Stories By and About Women, S. Cahill (ed.), New York: New American Library, 1975.
‘A Success Story’, Spare Rib 2, 1972; Ms., December 1974; Fine Lines: The Best of Ms. Fiction, R. Sullivan (ed.), New York: Scribner’s, 1981.
‘A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman’, Cosmopolitan, October 1973; In the Looking Glass:
Twenty-One Modern Short Stories by Women, N. Dean and M. Stark (eds.), New York: Putnam, 1977.
‘Homework’, Cosmopolitan, November 1975; The Ontario Review 7, Fall–Winter 1977–8.
‘The Merry Widow’, Woman’s Journal, September 1989.
‘The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance’, Persuasions 15, 1993.
‘The Caves of God’, Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing, Volume 2, N. Royle (ed.), London: Quartet, 1999.
‘Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale’, The Long Story 18, 2000.
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman
1
Hassan’s Tower
‘If,’ she said, ‘I could be sure they were free, then I would eat them.’ ‘They must be free,’ he said, ‘when you look at the price of the drink.’ ‘But supposing, just supposing,’ she said, ‘they turned out to be as ludicrously expensive as the drink? If you can pay twelve shillings for one gin and tonic, just think what you might have to pay for those.’ He was silenced, for he too had been thinking this thought, though unwilling to admit it to her, unwilling to display before her the full extent of his mercenary fear; and he was annoyed with her for voicing it, for in her such thoughts were merely niceties, whereas to him they were daily bread. He stared glumly at the little squares of toast, with their sadly appetizing decorations of sardine, shrimp and olive, and wondered how much, in the fantastic and unreal financial system which he had entered, they could possibly cost. What, he wondered, was the absolute ceiling for each of those squares? Five shillings? Ludicrous, ludicrous, but alas surely not impossible? Seven and six? Now seven and six was truly impossible. By no stretch even of the Moroccan five-star imagination could they possibly cost seven and six each. So if she were to eat them all (and be assured that she would eat them all, if any, her appetites being as it now appeared insatiable), that would cost him over three pounds. But what was three pounds, after all, amongst friends? Or between bride and bridegroom, rather? Nothing, it would appear. To his continuing amazement, even he thought that it was nothing. Although, of course, so much too much for the article. And then, of course, there was the chance, the probability, that they might be free, thrown in, as it were, with the shocking price of the gins. It would be a shame to leave them, if they were free. But then again, if they weren’t free, and she ate them, and then set off towards the lift and the hotel bedroom on the assumption of non-payment, what would happen then? Would the barman in his foolish fez nip deftly out from behind his bar and pursue him? Or would the cost be added, discreetly, within the price of sundries on their anyway colossal hotel bill? Really, he was caught by inexperience between two brands of meanness: he hated to leave them if they were free, and he hated equally to eat them if they cost more than they ought. And he was moreover irritated by her luxurious, gratuitous hesitations: what had he married her for, but to decide about such things?
He reached out and took one, then pushed the little plate over to her. She took one, to his annoyance, independently, almost absent-mindedly, showing no gratitude for his decisive action, her face blank as though her mind had left his trifling crisis far behind. As indeed, when she spoke, he found that she had.
‘I do so wish,’ she said, in her quietly strident, heavily over-inflected tones, ‘that you wouldn’t get in such a panic when people try to sell you things. I mean, that man in that souk place this afternoon. There was no need to get so worked up about it, surely?’
‘What do you mean, worked up?’
‘Well, there was no need to shout at him, was there?’
‘I didn’t shout,’ he said. ‘I hardly raised my voice. And anyway, if you don’t shout, they go on pestering.’
‘You should ignore them,’ she said.
‘How can I ignore them, when they’re hanging on to my coat sleeve?’
‘Well then,’ she said, changing her tack, ‘why don’t you just laugh? That’s what other people do, they just laugh.’
‘How do you know they laugh?’
‘Because I see them. That French couple we saw in Marrakesh, with all those children pestering them, they were just laughing.’
‘I don’t find it funny,’ he said. ‘I wish they’d just leave me alone, so I could look at things in peace.’
‘They don’t mean any harm,’ she said. ‘They’re just trying it on.’
‘Well, I wish they wouldn’t try it on me.’
‘What you would like,’ she said, ‘is a country without any people in it. With just places. And hotels.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind people, I just wish they’d stop trying to sell me things I don’t want. I just want to be left alone.’
‘I find them all quite amusing,’ she said, with a determined little lift of her chin: and he hated her for saying it, because he knew they didn’t amuse her at all. On the contrary, they scared the life out of her, all these foreign jugglers and mountebanks, these silent hooded robed men, and the only reason she did not like him to shout at them was that she was afraid he would provoke some reciprocal violence or offence. She wanted him to laugh in order to placate them: she was so nervous that if he left her to herself she would buy their horrible objects, their ill-stitched toy camels, their horrid little woolly caps, their rings set with fake, crude-faceted stones. And yet, if he were to buy them, she would despise him for it, as she would have despised him had he left, through fear or ignorance, the shrimps and the olives. It was just like her, to accuse him of her own fears; yet there had been a time, surely, when they might have in some way shared their alarms, and a time not so far distant at that. Even during their long and grinding engagement there had been moments of unison, moments when he could sneer at her family and she could mock at his with some forgiveness, but in the last two weeks, since their wedding, their antagonism, so basic, so predictable, had found time to flower and blossom, and their honeymoon had been little more than a deliberate cultivation of its ominous growth. He had hoped that in leaving England they would have left behind some of their more evident differences, differences that should be of no importance in a foreign setting, but instead they had found themselves steadily isolated in a world of true British conflict, where his ways and hers had become monstrously exaggerated, as though they were on show, a true British couple, for all of Morocco to observe. Things which he had been able to tolerate in her at home, and which he had seen merely as part of her background, now seemed part of the girl herself: and similarly, in himself, he could feel his own defects magnified beyond all proportion, his behaviour distorted by foreign pressures into a mockery of itself. He began to see some reason for leaving sex until the honeymoon, for at least its problems would have diverted him from other more gloomy forebodings. It was a mistake to come to Morocco, but where else could they have gone, in their position, with so much money, and in so cold a month?
It was the money, truly, that created the worst of their problems, and it was Morocco that cast so nasty a shade upon the money. He knew quite well that were he not earning what he himself daily considered to be a truly astonishingly high salary, he would never have dared to marry a girl with so much money of her own, because of what people might say: and thus between them, she with a small inherited fortune, and he with money earned by the sweat of his brow writing idle articles for a paper, they were really rather well off. And the subject of their finances was an endless source of bitterness. Both suffered from guilt, but hers was inherited, his acquired: when he attacked her for hers, he could not but see how much more guilty he himself was, for he had had a choice. It was no defence to say that he had not sought the money but the job itself, for there were certainly less lucrative branches of journalism than the one into which he had, however respectably and innocently, drifted. He must have wanted it, just as he had wanted her, although, like the money, she had so many connotations which he despised. But in England the money had at least seemed necessary as well as wickedly desirable: all her friends had it, all his friends, being clever, were beginning to acquire
it, and in fact he sometimes found himself wondering how his own parents had so dismally failed to have it. Here in Morocco, however, things were very different. To begin with, every penny they spent was pure unnecessity (although he had hopes of recovering a little on the tax by writing a judicious article). Nobody saw them spending it, and the conditions of expense he found sickening in the extreme. He had not bargained for such poverty and squalor, and the rift between rich and poor, between hotel and medina, made his head split in efforts of comprehension. As a student, years ago, he had travelled in a different style, and almost as far afield as this: he had been to Tangier, with a few pounds in his pocket, suffering from appalling stomach disorders, hunger, filth and painful blisters, and he had sat in dirty cafés with seedy expatriates, staring at the glamour of more elegant tourists, and desiring their beds and their meals, and yet at the same time confident that he was happy, and that they were not capable of seeing, as he had seen, the city rising white in the morning out of the sea, in the odourless distance, and all the more beautiful for the cramped and stinking night. In those days, he had been permitted to see, and because he now could not see, was it not logical to suppose that the money had ruined his vision?
The truth was that perhaps in those old days he had been able to pretend that he too was poor, as these Arabs were poor, and he had seen that their life was possible. He had not winced at the sight of their homes, and nobody had thought it worthwhile to pester him with toy camels and fake rubies. But now, on this painful honeymoon, every time he went out of the hotel a boy at the door would leap jabbering at him, jabbering about his shoes, and could he clean the gentleman’s shoes, and please could he clean the gentleman’s shoes, and he could speak English, for listen, he could sing the songs of the Beatles. He lay there in wait, this boy, and every time Kenneth ventured through the great revolving doors – and they even swung the doors for him, they wouldn’t allow him the pleasure of revolving his own exit – this wretched, grinning, monkey-faced, hardly human creature would pounce on him. He was unbelievably servile, and yet at the same time increasingly brazen: when Kenneth had declined for the tenth time to have his shoes cleaned, the boy had pointed out the fact that his shoes needed cleaning, and that they were a disgrace to any respectable, hotel-dwelling tourist. And Kenneth, gazing at his own feet, could not but admit that his shoes were dirty, as they usually were, for he disliked cleaning them, he disliked the smell of polish, he disliked getting his hands dirty. And yet he could not let this hatefully leering, intimately derisive child do them, for it was not in him to stand while another pair of hands dirtied themselves for money on his behalf. So that each time he entered or departed from the hotel, the boy at the door would chant some little jingle in French about the English miser with muddy shoes, and Chloe would stiffen coldly by his side.
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