The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  The thirty-odd years that are covered in this trilogy is kid’s stuff compared with the chronological leapfrogging Munro has done in the past—in, say, “A Wilderness Station,” where she straddled more than a century in the space of thirty pages. “I write the story I want to read,” she says, as straightforward a literary credo as has ever been expressed. “I do not feel responsible to my readers or my material. I know how hard it is to get anything to work right. Every story is a triumph, and then I think, ‘Now I can relax. I’ve done it; I’ve got it out.’” As for Munro’s playing fast and loose with the genre, it is an issue critics have raised from the start. “Whether Alice Munro’s ‘The Beggar Maid’ is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel, I’m not quite sure,” the critic John Gardner wrote, “but whatever it is, it’s wonderful.”

  “I’ve tried to write novels,” Munro says, sounding slightly annoyed with her own intractable methods. “They turn into strange, hybrid stories.” And then an almost imperceptible note of defiance enters the conversation, as though she were having an argument with the powers that be, whoever they be—with all those who would tell her how to behave or how to write: “I haven’t read a novel that I didn’t think couldn’t have been a better story,” she says. “I still go into bookstores and look at how few pages you can get away with in a novel. I actually stand there, deducting the white pages in between and adding up the number on my fingers. Do you think you can get away with 110?”

  * * *

  It is five on the same Saturday afternoon in Clinton. In search of more clues to the psychological whereabouts of this most autobiographical but personally elusive of writers, I stroll around to the back of the narrow white Carpenter Gothic house, with a blue roof and brown wood shutters, where Munro lives. I am snooping around at her express invitation. She and her husband, who arrived to pick her up at the end of our lunch, wanting to know immediately how much we had had to drink, are out shopping for groceries. Her offer of an unguided tour of her unoccupied premises struck me as a consolation prize of sorts for having come all this way and never getting past the front door, but I decide to take her up on it in my best investigative-reporter role. I cast a sweeping eye over the side porch, furnished with a round table and humble plastic chairs, and take in the jumble of small ceramic and wood animals on a windowsill. Then I concentrate on channeling my inner Miss Marple, trying to glean potentially vital information by studying the couple’s expansive five acres of garden, taking vague but assiduous notes. “Peaceful birdsong,” I note. All I lack is a microscope—and a working knowledge of flora and fauna. Munro has described a big row of walnut trees, but I wonder whether all the trees—there are quite a few—are walnut. Maybe some of them are birch or spruce? “Old trees,” I scribble.

  Otherwise, everything in the garden is just as she has described it to me: the large pond, the railroad track beyond the hedges, and the “visually witty” touches Fremlin has provided in the way of scattered homemade objets d’art. An old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub lies tilted on its side against a tree trunk; it has been painted to resemble a Holstein cow, then provided with a pair of rusting propeller-like ears. Elsewhere a weather vane has been erected on an old striped barber pole. Munro claims responsibility only for the flowers, characterizing them as the kind favored by casual gardeners like herself. “They plant things,” she explains, “and say, ‘You’re on your own.’”

  I wander around in the growing shadows, musing on why Munro seems to feel so strongly about her garden and why it seemed so important for me to see it, when suddenly it strikes me: These trees and rocks and flowers and pieces of sculpture compose a whimsical sanctuary, speaking the private language of insider jokes and family history. It is, if you will, a place that is both imaginary and concrete, bringing together the writer’s need to soar beyond reality with her down-to-earth upbringing. Here, tucked away on the corner of a quiet street of modest porch-lined houses in a universe far away from the red-hot literary center, lies an enchanted garden that is Alice Munro’s clandestine room of her own.

  THAT BRITISH DAME

  (MARGARET DRABBLE)

  2009

  Let us begin as Margaret Drabble might begin one of her novels, by setting the scene. (And, because this is in part a tale of literary influences, let us begin as well with apologies to Virginia Woolf, who mocked the Edwardian novelists for just such hopelessly materialist renderings. “They have given us a house,” she declared, “in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”) Picture, then, an overcast Saturday afternoon in England in mid-July, the sort of weather about which the British are constantly on the defensive. The writer, who has recently turned seventy, leads the visiting journalist into the living room of the country house that she shares with her husband, the eminent biographer Michael Holroyd, tucked away on its very own hillside in tiny Porlock Weir at the tail end of Somerset.

  The view looks northward across the Bristol Channel to Wales, and the air rings with the sound of cawing seagulls. The three of us have just come from an excellent lunch down the road at a little hotel that Drabble and Holroyd treat like a closely guarded secret. While her husband repairs to watch cricket in their cozy TV room with its striped curtains and tightly patterned wallpaper, Drabble shows me the room that Holroyd uses for writing; it is impressively large and light filled, with sloping glass ceilings, and stands in stark contrast to her own basement office, which is damp and dark but has the one advantage of looking out on the garden. It is in the garden that she seems most in her element—as anyone who has read a Drabble novel knows, she is a connoisseur of flowers and plants—and after a brief tour we settle ourselves down on comfortable couches in the living room. We proceed to talk for the next two hours about matters large and small, from Drabble’s views on housework (“It’s good exercise—you can run up and down stairs with the Hoover, it doesn’t do you any harm”) to feminism (“I don’t think women have a fair share yet, but I don’t see writing novels along that agenda”) to her famously vexed relationship with her older sister, the novelist A. S. Byatt (“The only book of mine that she said she liked was The Waterfall—it could’ve been because it was more experimental”).

  Drabble, who has been writing continuously for almost five decades, was made a dame of the British Empire in 2008 for her contributions to contemporary English literature—the year after her husband was knighted for similar service—and the couple’s house is everything you might imagine a residence of two formidable literary creatures to be. It is a kind of Bloomsburyian vision of whimsy and cultivation, with rooms painted different colors—mint green, rose, lilac, and Tuscan yellow—and faded rugs, books, and paintings everywhere you look. A Chinese-checkers board and copies of The Coleridge Bulletin and The Bookseller occupy a round coffee table; across the way is a pink recliner adorned with a handwritten sign reading, “Do Not Sit” (“so the grandchildren won’t destroy it”).

  As I assess the room, my eye is drawn to an elaborate, partly done jigsaw puzzle of van Gogh’s Irises that is laid out on a mahogany folding table. It was on this table that Drabble would do jigsaws with her “auntie Phyl,” a “stroppy” woman who, for the last fifteen years of her life, made annual summer visits to her niece at Porlock Weir. She is the heroine-of-sorts of Drabble’s memoir-of-sorts, due out September 16, called, with a nod to Henry James, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. Doing jigsaw puzzles with her aunt—she continues to do them to this day as “one of my strategies to defeat melancholy and avoid laments”—was also a part of Drabble’s childhood, which she here excavates selectively, in an effort to rescue its brighter aspects. “Many of the happier times of my childhood I owe to her,” Drabble writes, “and although I often tried to tell her this, she was not much of a one for compliments or emotional declarations. She did not know how to deal with them.”

  Out of memories of her aunt and of childhood visits to Bryn, her grandmother’s redbrick Georgian farmhouse where Auntie Phyl liv
ed as an unmarried daughter and taught her niece “to peg rugs, and to sew, and to do French knitting, and to make lavender bags, and to thread bead necklaces, and to bake rock cakes and coconut fingers, and to play patience,” Drabble has constructed an oblique but absorbing account of her early life—albeit one that by American standards is grievously lacking in self-disclosure. “I didn’t want to write a memoir,” she explains, “because it would annoy too many people. I thought I’d infiltrate bits of memoir into the jigsaw book.” Then again, as Drabble notes, “the English have a reputation for being very reticent. I was very conscious of what I left out. I don’t think any English person would be as confessional as Philip Roth.” Penelope Lively, the English novelist, who is a longtime admirer of Drabble’s and doesn’t approve of what she calls “the vogue for ‘misery memoirs,’” agrees with this assessment. “We’re less confessional,” she notes. “We create lacework.”

  What is certain is that in The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble bypasses both chronology and raw autobiographical revelation for a more meandering approach that touches briefly on family pathology and private pain as it crisscrosses the centuries and unfolds the microhistory of jigsaw puzzles, an English invention, circa 1767. This is not the first of Drabble’s books to allude to the writer’s difficult past—her 2001 novel, The Peppered Moth, was a fictionalized portrait of her unhappy mother, and there are autobiographical elements in many of her novels—but it is the first time she has written at length about herself “without,” as she puts it, “the veil of fiction.” On the other hand, although Drabble is a prolific fiction writer, having produced seventeen novels to date, she has never confined herself to one genre. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, as well as literary and social histories of modern Britain, and took on the massive task of editing the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.

  I’d been fascinated by Drabble ever since coming upon her deft early novels in my twenties and discovering that she not only had already published five novels in her twenties but had somehow also managed to be a wife, a mother, and, from the sound of it, a good cook as well. (“I’m a very agitated cook,” Drabble insists. “But I can provide a good meal, yes.”) By her mid-thirties she was divorced and raising three children on her own (she separated from her first husband, Clive Swift, in the early 1970s and married Holroyd a decade later), yet she continued to write novels, this time of a different and more ambitious order than her first efforts. In doing so, she stood for the writer not as a special case—a neurotic creature always on the verge of a nervous breakdown—but as a hyper-competent Everywoman adroitly running her life. There was something admirably plucky about her heroines; they had an efficient way about them even when they were at their most defeated, and the same, I gathered, could be said of Drabble herself. She struck me as someone who had hewed to the line of her own ambition without sacrificing crucial pieces of her feminine identity along the way.

  “We remind ourselves,” Carolyn Heilbrun, the critic and novelist, once observed, “that of the great women writers, most have been unmarried, and those who have written in the state of wedlock have done so in peaceful kingdoms guarded by devoted husbands. Few have had children.” So how did Drabble pull it off? How did she handle it all—marriage, divorce, children, a vocation dear to her heart, success, the envy of others, the specter of aging? She had always offered direction through her work, from the reader-friendly early books that made her reputation to the massively intelligent and almost bristlingly informed novels she produced from the 1970s on. Although she must have suffered from the anxiety and despair that she passed on to some of her characters, she seemed uniquely capable of rising to the next occasion on behalf of her fiction—whether it be shifting social priorities, as in The Ice Age, or the changing expectations of a woman no longer in the prime of her life, as in The Sea Lady—and becoming more expansive, more embracing of the larger world in the process.

  Like Doris Lessing (whom she counts among her good friends) and—to pick someone on this side of the Atlantic—Anne Tyler, Drabble has been writing steadily for years, and like them she is beyond trends, seemingly immune to the whole business of literary marketing. Perhaps this above-the-fray aspect could help to explain what, to me, is her puzzling lack of presence in America, at least these days, when she is no longer delivering the kind of renegade news about the domestic life that she did when her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, was picked out of a publishing-house slush pile in its brown paper parcel by a discerning reader (“I sent it to George Weidenfeld,” Drabble explains, “because he published Saul Bellow”) and appeared in 1963 to general acclaim.

  Drabble remained a well-known literary name throughout the next two decades, even as her novels became more complex and wide-ranging in their concerns. In 1980, after the publication of her ninth novel, The Middle Ground, People magazine profiled her glowingly, noting that she had been compared to Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf—and could just as well have noted that she had also been compared to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Evelyn Waugh. But somewhere along the way—between her dense and somewhat insular trilogy of a postimperial, postindustrial 1980s England, her seven-year interlude working on the Oxford Companion, and the 1990 publication of A. S. Byatt’s humdinger of a novel, Possession—Drabble appears to have been gently sidelined. No one’s denying that her books merit critical attention or that she isn’t in some way a figure to conjure with, but somehow the excitement that brews around certain writers, even when there are disappointments in their work (as there have been in Drabble’s), isn’t quite there. And yet, in her own quiet, get-it-done fashion, Drabble has been excitingly taking risks all her creative life, right up to her latest book, in which she audaciously both does and doesn’t deliver up a personal narrative, admitting in her foreword that she is “not sure what [this book] is.”

  What she is, I think, is nothing less than a British prodigy, dedicated to the delineation of the provisional, the tentative, the nontriumphant—what life is rather than what it might be. But she is hard to pin down precisely because of her many-faceted angles as a writer, her refusal to lend herself to packaging as either a feminist or a throwback to a more “old-fashioned,” exterior sort of storyteller. Although Drabble’s consistent attention to the passing sociopolitical scene has been essential to the landscape of her novels since The Needle’s Eye—her characters discuss multiculturalism, the economy, and global warming the way characters in less heady novels might discuss playdates or love affairs gone wrong—she is equally interested in exploring her protagonists’ interior lives. Her literary influences are hybrid; she is a confirmed admirer of F. R. Leavis, the conservative Cambridge professor who established the pristine “Great Tradition” of the English novel in the 1950s, with its focus on the novel as a moral mirror, while at the same time sharing Arnold Bennett’s “great respect for ordinary life and ordinary people.” (Leavis thought Bennett to be “beneath contempt.”) When you add to that her openness to brazen postmodernist techniques like bossily intruding into the story and resisting the “closure” of neat endings, it’s small wonder that she evades being categorized except as herself.

  * * *

  My first encounter with Drabble (who is known as Maggie to her friends and family) and Holroyd occurred several days before my visit to Somerset, at the annual Ways with Words literary festival at Dartington Hall in Devon, about a two-hour drive from their country house. (The couple also share a home in Notting Hill in London, after many years of maintaining separate residences.) Each of them was on the roster of speakers—she to talk about her memoir, which was published in England to mostly admiring reviews, and he to speak about his latest book, an account of the nineteenth-century theatrical careers of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. We arranged to meet in the reception area, and I immediately picked out Drabble from the back, although we had never crossed paths before. She was wearing a tan hooded anorak and a pair of trousers; her hair was cut in th
e guileless Dutch-boy style that was familiar to me from two decades of author photographs, and there was something compelling—a kind of not-quite-regal bearing—that singled her out. Holroyd, a tall, cerebral-looking man who dresses with a witty flair suggestive of a Ronald Firbank character, recently came through a two-year battle with cancer and appeared to depend on Drabble for navigation. “Do you want me to answer or should you?” he asked about a form they were supposed to fill out.

  Drabble and I arranged to have a quick drink before she was to help Holroyd “get ready for his ‘show.’” (Holroyd prepares his talks ahead of time, while Drabble prefers to speak off the cuff.) When we met later at a wood-paneled pub, she had changed into a bright yellow cardigan and gray flannels and was wearing a dab of rosy lipstick. With her slim build, clear blue eyes, and soft brown hair barely tinged with gray, it is still possible to glimpse in her the poised, chic young woman who captured the imagination of so many of her generation when she published her first clutch of novels, starting at the age of twenty-three. (“She was a terrific figure in those days, the ’60s,” Hilary Spurling, the biographer, recalls. “She became enormously famous very young. People read huge amounts of her stuff. She was both glamorous and ‘in.’ I remember her wearing those triangular dresses from Mary Quant.”)