I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn’t been [so narrowly] elected, we wouldn’t be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.
With the exception of a skillfully wrought little antiwar story titled “The Gifts of War” that manages to be (gently) anti-pacifist as well, there is little that is overtly political in Drabble’s first collection of short fiction, ironically titled A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, but much that suggests an understated and oblique moral vehemence. These fourteen stories, the earliest published in 1974 and the most recent in 2000, focus upon the experiences of women primarily: women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, and finally as older women free of domestic and erotic entanglements. Read chronologically, the stories move from youthful, romantic yearnings (“Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” “A Voyage to Cythera”) and adulterous nostalgia (“Faithful Lovers”) to middle-aged disillusion with marriage (“A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman”) and finally to the freedom of the older, independent woman with a relish for life of an impersonal, Wordsworthian nature (“The Merry Widow,” “The Caves of God,” “Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale”). What is characteristic of Drabble in her short fiction as in the novels that have made her famous is her sympathetic clear-mindedness: Drabble isn’t judgmental of even her most naïve characters, particularly her young, romantic-minded women, whose delusions are so seductively presented they scarcely seem delusions:
She was already in her heart on her way to Mrs. Smithson’s, already surrendering to the lure of that fraught, romantic, painful world, which seemed to call her continually from the sorrows of daily existence to some possible other country where she felt she would recognize though strange to it, the scenery and the landmarks. She thought often of this place, as of some place perpetually existing, and yet concealed; and she could describe it to herself only in terms of myth or allegory. . . . A place other than the real world, and it was both more beautiful and more valid.
In the crueler and less forgiving worlds of Murdoch, Spark, and Lessing, such a fanciful “feminine” imagination would be likely devastated by a crushing counter-vision, but in Drabble’s variant of a “voyage to Cythera” the naïve young woman is granted a vision commensurate with her romantic yearnings, a (literal) look into the privacy of a happy domestic life in an elegant but homey terrace house in Victoria Place, London, with lovely children—“a vision of something so beautiful that its relevance could not be measured.” (Through Drabble’s fiction, from the tenderhearted if exhausted young mothers of the early novels to the doting grandmother Frieda of The Witch of Exmoor, children, at least young children and infants, are unassailable symbols of The Good.) The more satiric “Hassan’s Tower,” set in a seemingly inhospitable Morocco where an affluent, ill-matched English couple are honeymooning, ends with a similar vision of our common humanity, realized atop the local landmark Hassan’s Tower:
[The English tourist] saw all these foreign people keenly lit with a visionary gleam of meaning, as startling and as breathtaking in its own way as Tangiers had once been. He saw these people, quite suddenly, for what they were, for people, for nothing but or other than people . . . their relations became dazzlingly clear, as though the details of common humanity . . . had become facts before his eyes.
Yet Drabble’s most elaborated ecstatic visions arise from spontaneous experiences in the English countryside, or, in the case of the reclusive actress of “The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance,” an infatuation with an old ruin of an English country house that brings with it, as in the most sentimental of women’s romance fiction, the handsome heir Burgo Bridgewater Elliot. He was “in his way translucent. He was worn thin with a lonely pain.” Will she marry Burgo, who has proposed to her, or will she merely live with Burgo in his gorgeous ruin of a country estate: “Love of person, love of property.” The reclusive actress sounds very like the Drabble of A Writer’s Britain: “I trod in the footsteps of the Wordsworths and Coleridge and Lorna Doone, I made my way through a thousand pages of [John Cowper Powys’s] A Glastonbury Romance.” One would expect Drabble to end with Charlotte Brontë’s triumphant Reader, I married him.
In “Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale,” a schoolteacher unmelodiously named Mary Mogg—“You must not imagine me speaking to you in my own person. I speak to you as Mary Mogg, and it is her story I tell”—falls in love, perhaps not entirely consciously, with a woman naturalist whom she meets in the remote countryside of the Lake District on what was to have been a solitary excursion into both nature and her deprived emotional past: “She was about my age, with thick streaked black and grey hair, and a handsome, ruddy, veined, wind-weathered face. . . . ‘I read,’ she said, ‘the messages of the forest. I decode the text of the trees. I read the lichen through my little lens.’ And she passed me a small round hand lens.” Drabble concludes her story with a forthright declaration:
I am back in urban Northam now. . . . I am back at work and my excursion seems like a dream, but I am changed, I am fortified. . . . I stepped westward to test my destiny. And I found there Anne Elliot, with a wild gleam in her eyes at sixty. . . . I brought some magic back with me, and it will keep me through the winter.
There’s an ironic cast to Drabble’s calculatedly “happy” endings that suggests a perspective not unlike that of, for instance, Jane Austen: the narrator of “The Dower House” notes, “It is widely held that Elizabeth [Bennet] was joking when she declared that she fell in love with Darcy when she first saw Pemberly”—but the narrator isn’t joking, really; nor does Drabble suggest that Elizabeth, or Jane Austen, were joking, for the point of Elizabeth’s “love” for Darcy is that it isn’t an easy, melting female sentiment but one that must be wrested from her. Austen knew the not-very-romantic truth that it wasn’t individuals who married in the Britain of her time but family fortunes, or their absence; to resist, as Elizabeth Bennet might fantasize, is not, finally, possible.
Nor is Drabble joking in the glibly narrated “A Success Story” when her female protagonist, a famous English playwright, is most thrilled by the aggressive sexual attentions of an American novelist-womanizer, rather than the man’s alleged admiration for her work:
She thought of his face, looking at her, heavy, drunk, sexy, battered, knowing, and wanting her, however idly: and it gave her a permanent satisfaction, that she’d been able to do that to him, that she’d been able to make a man like that look at her in that way. It was better than words, better than friendship.
Kathie Jones isn’t so naïve as to succumb to Howard Jago, however: she knows that, as soon as she does, Jago will lose interest in her. Only a woman writer secure in her feminist principles and reputation could write such a story in celebration of female attraction to male chauvinist desire, with the casual disclaimer: “It’s an awful thing to say, but some women are like that. Even nice, sensible, fulfilled, happy women like Kathie Jones. . . . Whatever can one do about it?” “A Success Story” reads like a rejoinder to grimmer, humorless stories by Doris Lessing of women who find themselves used and discarded by men resembling Drabble’s sexually rapacious Howard Jago (identified, in the chatty introduction to the collection by a Spanish academician, José Francisco Fernandez, with startling abruptness and perhaps not altogether fairly as Saul Bellow). Lessing’s stories of the sexual exploitation of women—(see “One Off the Short List,” for example)—are more powerful and memorable than Drabble’s story, as they are more subtly wrought, and tragic, but Drabble’s story glows with an anecdotal authority that lingers, too, in the reader’s mind, as a corrective—playful? satirical?—of an older, condemnatory feminism.
The most gripping and suspenseful story in A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is the title story, an intimate account of a beautiful, accomplished wife and mother whose husband ceases to love her in proportion to her success in broadcast television, and whose vision of the world surrounding her is sud
denly recast, after an argument with her husband:
And now . . . looking around the polished table at their faces—at thin, grey, beaky Maurice, at tiny old James Hanney, at brisk young smoothy Chris Bailey, at two-faced Tom (son of one of the powers), at all the rest of them—she found that she disliked them fairly intensely. This is odd, she said to herself. . . . This is very odd.
And she thought, What has happened to me is that some little bit of mechanism in me has broken. There used to be . . . a little knob that one twisted until these people came into focus as nice, harmless, well-meaning people. And it’s broken, it won’t twist any more.
It’s a gem of a vision that might have been embedded in any of Drabble’s dystopian-Britain novels, an entire life’s-story writ small.
Only Margaret Drabble could make of this demoralizing anti-epiphany a means of liberating self-realization for the “smiling” woman who perceives it, thereby changing her life from this day onward. Drabble’s heroine has even the courage to confront the possibility of uterine cancer, the symptoms of which she’d been trying desperately to ignore for weeks: “Looking back, she was to think of this day as both a joke and a victory, but at whose expense, and over whom, she could not have said.”
THE INVENTIONS OF JEROME CHARYN
Of literary sleights of hand none is more exhilarating for the writer, as none is likely to be riskier, than the appropriation of another—classic—writer’s voice. In recent years there has emerged a company of remarkably imaginative, sympathetic, and diverse fictional portraits of classic predecessors: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Virginia Woolf); Colm Tóibín’s The Master (Henry James); Jay Parini’s The Last Station (Tolstoy); Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream (Stephen Crane, with writer-friends Henry James and Joseph Conrad); Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, with sisters Emily and Anne). In these exemplary works of biographically fueled fiction it’s as if the postmodernist impulse to rewrite and revise the past has been balanced by a more Romantic wish to re-enter, renew, revitalize the past: not to suggest an ironic distance from its inhabitants but to honor them by granting them again life, including always the stumbling hesitations, misfires, and despair of actual life—in contrast with the very notion of “classic.” As each generation would seem to require new translations of great texts, so new visions of our great predecessors would seem to exert a powerful attraction for fellow/sister writers.
No conventional biography of Henry James, for instance, could present the Master as tenderly yet unsparingly as Colm Tóibín’s’ Jamesian portrait, for the novelist is in possession of information about which his subject is in “denial”; no conventional biography of Stephen Crane can bring us so intimately, terribly, and funnily into the hectic private lives of the tuberculosis-stricken Crane, his (former brothel-owner) wife, and their writer-friends, as Edmund White’s lyric novel; no conventional biography of the Brontë sisters is likely to present their highly charged family drama—in which Charlotte emerges, as if by chance, as the triumphant survivor among her gifted siblings—more convincingly than Sheila Kohler’s impressionistically rendered group portrait.
In this company, Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is something of an anomaly. With an epigraph from Dickinson—“To shut our eyes is Travel”—the novel is best described as a fever-dream picaresque in a slightly less febrile mode than Charyn’s previous faux-historical novel Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution (2008). Clearly, these are bold postmodernist appropriations of the past—playful, subversive, phantasmagoric. Charyn’s Emily Dickinson speaks with the appealingly wistful naïveté of Charyn’s young hero, or anti-hero, Johnny One-Eye; like this keen-witted observer of vividly rendered eighteenth-century colonial American life, who describes himself as “unremarkable” amid a querulous crew of quasi-historical figures like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Benedict Arnold, Charyn’s Dickinson is essentially a marginal figure in her own life, a succession of “wild masks” in thrall to the ever-elusive (male) objects of her desire.
Far from being a faithful or even a plausible portrait of the historical Dickinson, for whom poetry was a kind of sustained guerrilla warfare against the confines of her daughterly life amid a conventional Protestant-Christian small town society, Charyn’s portrait makes of Dickinson a defiant adventuress more enamored of prowling “rum resorts” (Amherst College drinking clubs), back alleys, and circuses in search of male companionship than of such bookish pursuits as reading the classics and “scribbling” poetry. In one of her guises as “the ghost of Currer Bell” (Charlotte Brontë) Dickinson is discovered by her older, disapproving brother Austin in a “dark dead-end of Roominghouse-Row” on the wrong side of the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts:
“Emily, what are you doing in this godforsaken corner?” “The same as you, I imagine. Looking for adventure.” “And what sort of adventure could you possibly find in Roominghouse-Row?” asks, his enormous ears suddenly materializing in front of my eyes.
“I am not much traveled, Mr. Gould, being a member of the female sex who is not permitted to venture far without a male. But I had an irresistible urge to see where the maids and house keepers of our finest families live.”
At her most audacious this Emily exchanges kisses with shadowy suitors in taverns, risks being treated very roughly—“scalped”—by mobs of surly Union army deserters, and pursues the phantom of a handsome handyman-lover through decades from Mount Holyoke Female Academy (1848) to her bedridden life as Queen Recluse in her father’s house the Homestead (1880s). Repeatedly, her delusions of romantic love are rebuffed or vaporize into thin air; yet she persists in imagining herself as having “no more morals than a harem girl.” Poor Emily, a poet by default! Her quixotic yearnings persist to her final delirium: “I am wearing a bridal gown with my slippers and yellow gloves, though I’m not certain whose bride I am.”
In short, Charyn has invented for Emily Dickinson an active, at times frantic counter-life the poet never had: a “secret” life of unrepressed erotic desire. There is serio-comic pathos here—as well as a brashly subjective vision of our greatest American woman poet. Through years of amorous adventures and misadventures Dickinson flirts with men, maneuvers herself into compromising situations with men, yet seems never to actually lose her virginity—or does she? (“Lord, I did not know who I am or ever was.”) Near the end of her life—Dickinson died at the age of fifty-five, in May 1885, of Bright’s disease—she was courted by an elderly widower, a friend of her father’s, Judge Otis Phillips Lord of the Commonwealth Supreme Court, who did not live long enough to marry her, though he seems truly to have loved her, as Dickinson seems to have loved him; this poignant late-life romance is rendered delicately by Charyn, if ironically:
Suddenly I was Cleopatra with a plain simple face. . . . I could feel Phil’s longing as we lay together, and it emboldened me to think that I could arouse the want of a man. I did not scheme like Cleopatra in my Salem’s arms. If I held back, did not allow him into the Moss of my own little garden, it was not to punish or declare my modesty. I had none. It was just that my Salem was not a male witch. Whatever magic he had wasn’t enough to slay me into submission.
But our ecstasy did build with all the slow craft of a snail.
Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is his seemingly unstoppable energy—a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain, blurring author (Charyn) and subject (the “masks” of Emily) in a collage of short, often poignant scenes that generally end with the poet returned to her home deflated, rebuffed, dazed yet still enthralled:
But I ain’t comforted much . . . I could have slept on Zilpah’s porch and waited for the sun to rise. I would have learned something about that robber’s roost of hers. But what if the robbers had swept me inside and I never saw Pa-pa and Carlo [her dog] again? They wouldn’t have bothered ransoming an old maid. And suppose their leader, Richard Midnight, tried to peck at me with his filthy mouth
while Zilpah guffawed with delight and savored her own triumph? She’d have Pa-pa all to herself. She’d inherit my pencils and writing paper, and Pa-pa would consider it a miracle to have a housekeeper who could scratch an occasional Verse. Lord, it was too much to bear.
And again, following a particularly hallucinatory episode:
The mosquitoes were . . . tormenting me. I couldn’t move without marching into a whole skirt of them. I must have been near the river. The rot of marshland burned in my nose. And then the first signal of moon blindness struck—the feel of a terrifying stitch at the back of my head. And I plunged into total darkness, as if I’d fallen into Father’s well, but it was like a hollow without an end. I spun within its walls, faster and faster, and woke with a stifled scream on the front steps of 86 Austin, wrapped inside the shelter of an old horse blanket.
The “secret life” is narrated by Emily in brief, breathless chapters bracketed by passages of italicized prose in which the subject is viewed from the perspective of family observers. Here, where we might expect to see a different Emily, the portrait is more or less identical to the girlish self-portrait, even when the poet has become middle-aged:
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