The Presence of Theater in the Life of the Novelist

JOSÉ FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ

In the middle of The Radiant Way (1987), Margaret Drabble’s great novel of Britain in the 1980s, the narrator makes a cursory comment on one of the book’s minor characters, a teacher at a secondary school in Northam: “Miss Grigson is no feminist; she lives too far north for that” (Drabble [1987] 1988, 196–97). The assessment is so robust and definitive in its phrasing that no elaboration is required, characterizing a narrative voice that speaks as if it were conveying an unquestionable truth. As an otherwise insignificant remark, it also points to a kind of indissoluble bond between ideology and environment in Drabble’s work, one that can aptly be used to introduce the topic of the writer’s own origins.

Margaret Drabble was born in the North of England, in Sheffield, on June 5, 1939. The second of four children (three girls and a boy), she grew up in a family of middle-class parents who had risen up the social ladder from humble origins thanks to hard work and determination. Her mother, Marie Bloor, had studied at Cambridge University at a time when few women from a working-class background were able to study beyond primary education. Her father, John F. Drabble, also studied at Cambridge and became a barrister and then later a judge. Both parents had liberal views on religion and did not impose strict religious observance on their children, but Drabble nonetheless was aware of and influenced by the Methodist and Puritan beliefs that had once prevailed in the social and geographical environment of both her paternal and maternal grandparents. None of them had been religious, but Methodism had made its mark on the northern and Midland landscape, as Drabble (1974) describes in her biography of novelist and playwright Arnold Bennett (a writer who decisively rejected the Methodist legacy).

1. Margaret Drabble rehearsing on stage at Cambridge University in 1959. © John Bulmer. Reproduced with permission from the photographer.

Naturally, the fact that Drabble grew up in the postwar era, “when the expectations were low and simple luxuries were highly appreciated” (Leeming 2006, 1), contributed to the development of her social conscience. As will be seen later, the general feeling after the war, when measures were taken toward achieving the goal of a fairer society, greatly determined Drabble’s commitment to equality: “I feel very strongly that we’ve lost this phrase ‘social hope’ that comes back to me because I know we used to have it, we used to think things would get better” (in Fernández 1995, 245).

In the Drabble family, education was of the greatest importance: “We were all expected to work very hard which we all did” (in Creighton 1982, 26). Owing to the experience of coming from a lower social stratum, John and Marie were keenly aware that one could only progress in life by means of personal effort, and education was the vehicle to achieve this goal. As Drabble said to Valerie Grosvenor Myer, “They [her parents] couldn’t afford not to spend money on our education” (Grosvenor Myer 1991, 15). At the same time, Drabble’s elders viewed typical children’s activities with impatience: “Both my parents often made me feel silly. They wanted us to grow up. They didn’t really like children. . . . We were praised for high marks and passing exams, but nothing else we did seemed to be of value” (Drabble 2009, 155).

What Drabble remembers most acutely about her childhood was the strains caused by her mother’s difficult personality and depression. Marie Bloor had abandoned teaching after she got married, and her frustration seemed to permeate family life. Her mother, for her part, remembered Drabble as “a fiery child with a hyperactive mind” (quoted in Hauptfuhrer 1980). According to Drabble’s elder sister, the novelist A. S. Byatt, with whom Drabble for many years had a complex relationship, Margaret and her mother would “fight and scream” (quoted in Stout 1991), both feeling relieved afterward. Drabble confessed that “from an early age—the age of three, I am told,—I suffered from a stammer, at times severe, though now very episodic and temperamental” (Drabble 2001). Drabble overcame her stammer when she was a teenager and developed a more active social life. Prior to this period, she said, she was not a sociable child, did not play with other children, and was at times ill: “I used to spend a lot of time alone, writing and reading and just being secretive” (in Milton 1978, 54). For the future novelist, the habit of reading voraciously from a very young age became a cornerstone of her cultural training, but, curiously enough, the writing of plays also appears at this early stage. With her two sisters, she would write plays for the family (Milton 1978, 53), and they would make their own Christmas pantomimes in which she would appear as the witch (Hauptfuhrer 1980).

With her siblings, Drabble was sent to a Quaker boarding school, The Mount, in York, where her mother had briefly taught before getting married. There she spent five years and received not only a sound education but also a foundation in strong moral values: “They [Drabble and her siblings] were also taught to live their lives not to their own satisfaction, but in contribution to the general good” (Creighton 1985, 19). Margaret was a brilliant student, and following school she won a scholarship to read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1957. Her memories of the university years are among the fondest for her: “I was so happy there. It was wonderful. There were so many marvelous people. Most of my good friends I made there, I suppose. It was physically such a beautiful place to work and a marvelous combination of reading and living in an institution which I adore” (in Creighton 1982, 28). Drabble excelled in her studies and obtained a starred first-class degree. In addition, while at university “she did a great deal of very successful acting with her future husband” (Sadler 1986, 4). At the time, it would not have been difficult for her to embark on an academic career, but she married soon after graduation and directed her efforts toward a different professional activity, one related to her passion for the theater: “Drabble, who had acted in student productions, was anxious to become an actress, and joined her husband in Stratford, where she eventually got small parts and understudying” (Leeming 2006, 2). Her marriage to the actor Clive Swift and their removal to Stratford-on-Avon clearly indicated that she was playing for high stakes in this aspect of her life: “I had wanted to be an actress, but my stage career hadn’t worked out as I’d hoped. Being a writer was a second choice for me” (Drabble 2009, 321). She got small parts in theater productions, understudied people who in time would become famous, such as Vanessa Redgrave, and was asked to audition for roles in movies. However, she soon became pregnant, and although she found motherhood fulfilling in one sense, it did not meet her artistic and intellectual needs and did not occupy all of her time, so she devoted herself to writing: “At the time I very much wanted to be an actress and in fact I did act for a year, but by then I had my first novel accepted. I was still very keen on the stage but I was losing interest in it because of the children—I had one and was expecting another—and writing was such a convenient career to combine with having a family” (in Milton 1978, 45). For Drabble, at this early stage and for the rest of her life, being a mother was the most enriching experience she would ever have, and she would never renounce her active role in bringing up her children. Her devotion to her offspring became part and parcel of her personality, even in her dealings with the literary world, as her agent in the 1960s, Robin Dalton, remembers: “Maggy, pregnant and prone to fainting spells, became my client through childbirth. I felt an instant affinity because of our shared, obsessively protective concern for our children. Maggy is the only other woman I have ever met who would blanch at the sound of an ambulance and instinctively rush to follow it before realising that her children were in another city” (Dalton 1998, 218).

Thus, Drabble became a novelist almost by accident, through boredom and because her husband spent long hours away from home. She soon discovered that she was good at writing and that she could control the entire process, and so the prospect of following a career on the stage gradually faded. The publication of her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), launched a literary career that would, with the passing of time, take her to great prominence in the British literary world of the second half of the twentieth century.

Somehow, considering Drabble’s background, it might be imagined that after an initial period Drabble would not feel at ease among actors and actresses. True, the theater world might have meant a glamorous escape from the drab existence of a middle-class life, but she might also have found that the realm of acting was nothing but an empty, amoral territory where vanity was rife. Drabble, who has always written in connection to episodes of her own life, describes in her second novel, The Garrick Year (1964), an atmosphere that she got to know quite well. In the book, a young, educated, and sophisticated woman, Emma, follows her husband to an English provincial town, where he works on the opening season of a theater; she, meanwhile, is forced to stay at home and take care of the children. Thus, The Garrick Year follows the pattern of Drabble’s novels in the first part of her career, in which she explores the plight of brilliant women who have to adjust their expectations when entering adult life: “In many novels Drabble offers portraits of young women who have made the choice of marriage and suffer bitterly for the ensuing constriction of their horizons” (Moran 1982, 37). What is striking in Drabble’s second novel is the harshness with which the author’s alter ego treats the theater and those who work in it, although it has to be said that Emma is an unreliable narrator—she does feel excluded by and left out of all the theater life and is jealous of the camaraderie shared by the other characters. In any case, though, the novel is populated by egocentric actors whom the protagonist sees through and treats satirically: “What a pair of conceited pathetic self-deluding fools, what folie de grandeur, they don’t seem to realize that the theatre is a dead end, a minority art, that nobody ever goes to it but actors and actors’ wives, they think they’ve done something clever now, those two, they think they’re famous, just because they’ve got a few columns in the daily press” (Drabble [1964] 1966, 110).

There is certainly a high degree of narcissism in those who spend their lives in front of an audience, but the narrator in Drabble’s novel seems to be angry at everything that surrounds their professional activity: “For those who have never heard actors discuss their trade, I may say that there is nothing more painfully boring on earth. I think it is their lack of accuracy, their frightful passion for generality that rob their discussions of interest” (Drabble [1964] 1966, 56). The impression one gets from reading the novel in the context of Drabble’s own life is that she tapped into a genuine feeling of impatience with actors that she had experienced firsthand. According to Ian McKellen, some readers of The Garrick Year “identified her [Drabble’s] RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] colleagues in the fiction” (2006).

The truth is that Drabble conscientiously pursued the task of being a published author, in the process setting aside her aspirations of becoming an actress. Her first novels, dealing with the situation of young women who have just finished their degrees and have to deal with a series of obstacles in their careers in a male-dominated world, while facing tough decisions in their personal lives, won for her a large audience. She became, in fact, “the representative voice of educated women of her generation” (Massie 1990, 19). As she admitted when looking back at her early books, there were personal reasons behind her resolve to write novels: “I know that partly I was writing these books in order to assert myself against the environment which I felt was hostile and unbelievably boring” (in Millard 1983, 259).

With the passing of time, Drabble established for herself a solid name in the literary world, gradually expanding the range of topics in her novels, becoming a sharp analyst of social mores and a keen observer of the changing ideological climate of Britain during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. She found herself comfortable in the profession of writing; she could combine it with her role as a mother of three children, and there did not seem to be any obstacles to her success: “But as far as the tradition goes, I think I was conscious from a very early age that writing novels was a thing that women did do and had always managed to do best. At least they reached the top rather than next to the top, so it was an open-ended profession, and not being a pioneer, that seemed to me a good place to be” (in Preussner 1979–80, 570).

It is in this context that Margaret Drabble, a promising novelist in her twenties in the 1960s, happened to write two pieces of drama, one play for television, Laura (1964), and a one-act play for the theater, Bird of Paradise (1969), which are published in this volume for the first time. It must be noted that when Drabble was commissioned to write these pieces, she already had a successful career as a novelist and had no intention of abandoning her chosen literary path. Writing plays was more of a temporary deviation: she relied on her talent, on the stamina of youth, and on the lively cultural atmosphere of London, where writers were expected to fully participate in the intellectual life of the time. Appearing on television, writing opinion articles for newspapers, and trying their hand at other artistic forms seemed natural: “This was the beginning of the 1960s, and the end of the dull postwar, rationed, sober, claustrophobic, insular ’50s. Writers, buttoned up through the war, and harnessed to patriotic causes, were sniffing the air for new freedoms—the end of censorship, sexual freedom, homosexual law reform, flower power, cheap air travel, and invitations to literary festivals all over the world” (Drabble 2001). When she was approached to write a play for Granada Television, it seemed quite natural to accept the invitation. Television was an exciting new medium in the 1960s, and groundbreaking playwrights such as Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, and Christopher Hampton were expanding their talents in an environment of creativity and freedom.

Laura was broadcast on September 11, 1964; it was directed by Claude Whatham, and the main character was played by Patricia England. Drabble wrote the play at Stratford, where her husband still worked at the RSC, and, as noted earlier, she did not take on the task as if it were a new path in her career but rather as one more episode in her development as a writer. After all, television plays have many affinities with novels in terms of plot, structure, and other elements (Bradbury [1982] 1984, 10). Apart from certain technical aspects, as Malcolm Bradbury has observed, any novelist should be able to produce a reasonably good television play. Nevertheless, Drabble surely had to face the complications derived from the different nature of both media: “The step is enormous and the change of situation profound. And it is not just that television has a different grammar, and means learning a radically different set of codes. It is also that television is a radically different kind of institution, and takes a very different view of the writer and the work” (Bradbury [1982] 1984, 10). Just like Bradbury, a writer who in fact wrote very successfully for television, Drabble found that the constraints imposed by the external conditions of production were not much to her taste: “I found the experience of writing TV drama slightly discouraging. I didn’t like the lack of total control, even with a sympathetic director and cast, and really would rather have been acting the roles myself than writing them. Being so close to the theatre made me very aware of all the problems, but didn’t teach me how to solve them. The novel was a more natural medium for me, with its scope for interior monologue, descriptions of landscape, thought processes.”¹

Five years later Drabble would make another attempt at writing for the stage. Joan Plowright was part of a project that involved commissioning plays by women writers for the National Theatre. The idea was to encourage the writing and production of plays in which women would have a more notable presence. Plowright asked each of four women novelists to produce a one-act play: Margaret Drabble, Shena Mackay, Gillian Freeman, and Maureen Duffy. This is how Duffy recalls the whole experience:

Joan Plowright, intensely aware from her position within the National Theatre company of the shortage of good contemporary roles for actresses, and of women writers and directors in the theatre, had decided to exercise some positive discrimination. The assembled writers, known chiefly for their work as novelists[,] were all to try their hands at writing a one act play and the National would stage such of the results as were stageable in an evening that came to be known as Ladies’ Night. (Duffy 2003)

Plowright, for her part, remembers meeting Drabble and Mackay, both young mothers at the time, in their homes and discussing their ideas for the plays: “Both writers had to conduct a conversation about the project in pauses between the feeding or restraining of energetic small children who whooped and shrieked and clambered over us on the sofas. I suppose they somehow found time to write at night and I was full of admiration for their acceptance of the limits imposed on the nurturing of their talent” (Plowright [2001] 2002, 158).

This is how Drabble came to write Bird of Paradise, one of the four plays of a season of experimental theater, starting on February 11, 1969, which was the result of Plowright’s scheme. Drabble does not think that the whole project triggered many more plays by women writers. She admits that she was very busy at the time, that she was not available to attend rehearsals, and that, in any case, she “had a feeling that nobody really knew what the play was about.”² Indeed, in a short paragraph devoted to An Evasion of Women, the general title for the four plays performed by the National Theatre, in an article on theater news published in The Spectator at the end of the season, Drabble’s piece was not even mentioned (only Maureen Duffy’s play Rites was mildly praised). For the highly prejudiced reviewer, the whole experiment was an oddity devoid of any foundation:

An Evasion of Women, at the Jeannetta Cochrane, is a case in point: an odd idea—four lady novelists were each invited to contribute a one-act play for ladies—with even odder results, since all four playwrights seem to have construed their instructions as relating strictly to gynaecological topics, with an occasional glance at geriatrics. So much so that, for long stretches of the evening, we seem to be watching dramatised excerpts from the Guardian’s women’s page, giving off that note of faint, plangent dismay, and that rather touching solemnity, with which women tend to contemplate their sex. (Spurling 1969)

Drabble clearly decided to focus on her career as a novelist and did not write for the theater again. In the following years, she turned down many offers to write for the screen, and she only yielded to the pressure on one further occasion, when she wrote the script for the film version of her novel The Millstone (1965), which was released with the title A Touch of Love (1969). She also wrote some dialogue for Karel Reisz’s film Isadora (1968) and for John Schlesinger’s film Yanks (1979). Questioned in interviews about her limited involvement in theater and film, Drabble acknowledged her attempts at writing plays but disassociated herself from a serious commitment to the theater or to scriptwriting: “I have tried writing plays; I just haven’t got much interest in writing plays. It could well be that the novelist’s role is easier. You don’t have to struggle and fight; you just do the job and get on with it” (in Preussner 1979–80, 571). In a conversation with Joanne V. Creighton, she expanded on her involvement in this kind of literary activity, saying that the plays she had written had been done in a half-hearted way:

I can’t remember what plays I’ve written, but they have all been terrible, so we’ll talk no more about them. I only write them when people suggest I ought to. Every time I agree to do something like that, I think well perhaps it won’t be so bad this time, but it’s always worse. I warn people that I don’t like doing it and can’t do it. In another five years I suppose I’ll agree to write some script or other and regret it. (in Creighton 1982, 26)

Precisely because Laura and Bird of Paradise were not written by a professional playwright, they openly expose the motives of the committed intellectual that Margaret Drabble was in the 1960s in their themes of social advancement and critical examination of the situation of women at that time. In addition, the working of an imaginative mind can be perceived in Bird of Paradise, trying to escape well-worn paths and to move away from the conventional urban drama of the time. Despite her negative comments to the contrary, Drabble produced an original and unconventional play for the theater, one that showed an unusual interest in exploring a freer, alternative sexuality for the female protagonist. After these experiments, Drabble went back to writing novels, but these pieces stand as proof of her versatile and sharp talent.

The presence of actors and actresses as characters in her novels has been very limited over the years. As her fiction expanded toward wider social horizons in the 1970s and 1980s, representatives of the world of theater are mentioned only casually as part of the social fabric in that fiction. Drabble specializes in the plights and dilemmas of individuals belonging to the professional middle classes, consisting mainly of journalists, media experts, analysts, political commentators, columnists, archaeologists, lecturers, art historians, academics, doctors, politicians, entrepreneurs, and high-ranked civil servants. In the new millennium, her fiction has tended to reflect a growing interest in science and with it has come a new breed of characters—lichenologists, epidemiologists, genealogists, and researchers—allowing her to ponder the future of humankind and the path that led us to this stage in history. Within this assortment of people, an actor or theater director is occasionally mentioned, such as Alison Peacock in The Radiant Way, “anxious about her Arts Council subsidy” (Drabble [1987] 1988, 32), but is without any particular significance or importance.

One exception is “A Success Story,” a short story published in 1972 in which Drabble gave the main role to a playwright. Here she created the character of Kathie Jones by drawing partly on elements from her own life, recounting an episode that she had experienced when American writer Saul Bellow (thinly disguised in the story as another playwright) tried to seduce her. In the narrative, Drabble imagines the protagonist as a hard-working and talented young woman who has made progress in the world of theater, having started from inauspicious beginnings (assistant stagehand at a provincial theater) until she has her own plays performed in the West End to critical acclaim. In her assessment of Kathie Jones’s strengths, Drabble tapped into her inside knowledge of the backstage atmosphere of theater production to expose the difficulties for a writer there: “She was good at the job, and that was why she succeeded. She was also good, somewhat to her own surprise, at all the things that went along with the job, and which had kept women out of the job for so long: she was good at explaining herself, at arguing with megalomaniac directors, at coolly sticking to her own ideas, at adapting when things really couldn’t be made to work” (Drabble 2011, 1998).

With the portrait of Kathie Jones, Drabble makes some sort of rapprochement with the world of the stage that she had definitively left behind, recognizing the efforts of committed individuals who work honestly in the production of plays. In the story, nevertheless, actors are depicted as egocentric and frivolous individuals, symbolized by film actress Georgina, who glamorously attracts the attention of the American writer: “‘Howard, Howard, there you are, I lost you,’ she wailed, throwing her arm around his neck, possessively, her bosom heaving, her necklace sparkling: she started to stroke his graying hair, passionately, as she turned to greet Kathie” (Drabble 2011, 103).

The final reconciliation with the acting profession in Drabble’s work can be found in her novel The Dark Flood Rises (2016), with the sensitive and dignified description of actress Maroussia Darling, a minor but significant character in the narrative. Maroussia had already made a brief cameo appearance in Drabble’s previous book, The Pure Gold Baby (2013). At the end of that novel, it is revealed that Darling, in her old age, is about to retire in order to undergo a serious operation (Drabble 2013, 290). In The Dark Flood Rises, the protagonist, Fran, also on the verge of retirement, watches with dismay as Maroussia makes her last heroic performance in the theater, playing the role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s drama Happy Days. Despite not really having the strength needed for this very demanding role, Maroussia bravely plays her part until the end, then makes the decision to commit suicide: “She is thinking that at the end of the run, which is imminent, she will give her last performance as Winnie, hear one more round of applause, and then she will come back to her home and take her dose of Nembutal. . . . It will serve Beckett right. She has served him well and loyally, and she deserves a grand finale, at his expense” (Drabble 2016, 273).

This great theatrical personality’s exit from the world can perhaps be interpreted as Drabble’s return to her beginnings and as an act of homage to those actresses she grew up with as a young aspiring actress, to those divas whom she admired, and to those female performers who started out with her and who with the passing of time made brilliant careers on the stage. Having come full circle, the author seems finally to admit the worthiness of her first ambition of working in the theater and to join the audience in their applause for the vanishing actress.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Malcolm. [1982] 1984. The After Dinner Game. London: Arena.

Creighton, Joanne V. 1982. “An Interview with Margaret Drabble.” In Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms, edited by Dorey Schmidt, 18–31. Edinburg, TX: Pan American Univ. Press.

————. 1985. Margaret Drabble. London: Methuen.

Dalton, Robin. 1998. An Incidental Memoir. Ringwood, Australia: Viking.

Drabble, Margaret. 1963. A Summer Bird-Cage. London: Penguin.

————. 1965. The Millstone. London: Penguin.

————. [1964] 1966. The Garrick Year. London: Penguin

————. 1974. Arnold Bennet: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

————. [1987] 1988. The Radiant Way. London: Penguin.

————. 2001. “Thankyou and Goodnight.” Guardian, Oct. 20. At http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/20/fiction.books.

————. 2009. The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. London: Atlantic Books.

————. 2011. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories. Edited by José Francisco Fernández. London: Penguin.

————. 2013. The Pure Gold Baby. Edinburgh: Canongate.

————. 2016. The Dark Flood Rises. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Duffy, Maureen. 2003. “Rites: About the Play.” At http://www.anglo-iren.de/rites/rites_p.htm.

Fernández, José Francisco. 1995. “Reinterpreting Britain: An Interview with Margaret Drabble.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 30–31:243–48.

Grosvenor Myer, Valerie. 1991. Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide. London: Vision Press.

Hauptfuhrer, Fred. 1980. “England’s New Virginia Woolf? Some Say It’s Maggie Drabble.” People, Oct. 13. At http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20077626,00.html.

Leeming, Glenda. 2006. Margaret Drabble. Tavistock: Northcote/British Council.

Massie, Alan. 1990. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970–1989. London: Longman.

McKellen, Ian. 2006. “Comments on ‘The Three Sisters.’” At http://www.mckellen.com/stage/00503.htm.

Millard, Barbara C. 1983. “Margaret Drabble.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 14, no. 1, edited by Jay L. Halio, 256–73. Detroit: Gale.

Milton, Barbara. 1978. “Margaret Drabble: The Art of Fiction LXX.” Paris Review 20, no. 74 (Fall–Winter): 40–65.

Moran, Mary H. 1982. “Spots of Joy in the Midst of Darkness: The Universe of Margaret Drabble.” In Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms, edited by Dorey Schmidt, 32–47. Edinburg, TX: Pan American Univ. Press.

Plowright, Joan. [2001] 2002. And That’s Not All: The Memoirs of Joan Plowright. London: Orion.

Preussner, Dee. 1979–80. “Talking with Margaret Drabble.” Modern Fiction Studies 25:563–77.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. 1986. Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twaine.

Spurling, Hilary. 1969. “Proved Most Royal.” The Spectator, Feb. 28.

Stout, Mira. 1991. “What Possessed A. S. Byatt?” New York Times Books Supplement, May 26. At https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/06/13/specials/byatt-possessed.html.

1. Margaret Drabble, unpublished comments on her plays, 2012, document sent by Drabble to José Francisco Fernández.

2. Drabble, unpublished comments, 2012.