The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Unlike many celebrated types, Drabble seems genuinely modest—very much a person who “backs into the limelight,” as Holroyd describes it to me. “She’s shy of publicity,” he explains. “She’s afraid that it will stimulate envy or competition: ‘Who is the overrated writer getting all this attention?’” Drabble also evinces a curiosity about whomever she happens to find herself with, and for the first few minutes of our conversation I find I am the one being graciously interviewed rather than vice versa. It is a way of avoiding the spotlight, to be sure, of maintaining her reserve while not seeming to be impolite, but it is also a way of establishing parity and thus putting the other person at ease. When I turned the conversation back to her and noted how patient she was with a woman she didn’t know who had just approached her to expound her theory of jigsaw puzzles (or possibly life), Drabble explained that she likes jigsaw puzzles because “they’re a neutral subject, like the weather.” It is easy to mistake a comment like this for a lack of passion, but it struck me as an extension of inbred English discretion around the presumption of intimacy.

  We touched on her relationship with her sister—Drabble has never read Byatt’s Babel Tower but confided that when Possession was up for the Booker, she bet some money on it and won—and then we moved on to the topic of money itself, which is never far from the surface in Drabble’s novels as an irritant or, more rarely, a facilitator. “So few people think they have enough,” she said. “I think as long as I don’t have to worry about the taxi meter, I’m fine.” Drabble is an echt, old-line Social Democrat, but she went on to sound like the champagne socialist she sometimes can be taken for, adding, “I’m interested in what it’s like not to have money.” It is a theme she explored in what is, to my mind, her most powerful novel, The Needle’s Eye, where money or the lack of it fuels the plot and a main character ventures to give away her inheritance.

  * * *

  Drabble’s family was first-generation bourgeois, one foothold removed from working class. She grew up in Sheffield, Yorkshire, the second of four gifted and driven siblings, in an atmosphere shaped by Quaker values, with their emphasis on probity and the common good. Her mother and father were the first in their families to attend university—both at Cambridge, both on scholarship. Her father, John Drabble, who went on to become a barrister and a county-court judge, was, according to his daughter, a remote but loving figure. Her mother, Marie Bloor, was a different matter altogether—a source of conflict and strife as well as the prime mover behind her children’s wish to excel. Bloor attended Newnham College, from which all three of her daughters would eventually graduate. (Aside from Byatt, Drabble has a younger sister, Helen, who is an art historian, and a much younger brother, Richard, who is a barrister.) “She really wanted to be an English teacher,” Drabble explained. “She enjoyed grammar and could explain a poem, but in those days that was not what people did. She would have been happier with a career, but it didn’t happen that way.”

  Bloor’s sense of thwarted ambition and acute class anxiety led her to move further and further inside herself, clinging to the house and projecting her feelings of frustration and disappointment outward. In the process she stoked the keen competitive spirit that would ripen over the years into a sense of rivalry between her two older daughters. (In Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide, Marie Bloor is quoted as saying that “Susan”—the name by which A. S. Byatt was known—“resented the birth of a second child, and Margaret was quite old before she realized that Susan didn’t like her.”) At the same time, Drabble seems to have been acutely aware that her mother envied her children’s success. “She got jealous when we went out and did things,” Drabble said. “Something in her didn’t like us to have a fuller life than she did.” Drabble, who was her mother’s acknowledged favorite, also crossed swords with her. “Mum could fight back better,” observes Becky Swift, Drabble’s forty-five-year-old daughter, who runs a literary consulting firm in London. “She was always feisty.”

  Curiously enough, for such a committed scribbler, Drabble didn’t always want to be a writer. Her original ambition, formed at Cambridge, where she shone academically and took part in dramatic productions, was to be an actress. This idea was scuttled not long after she married Clive Swift, an aspiring actor, in June 1960 at the age of twenty-one. Swift was Jewish and grew up in mercantile Liverpool (his father sold furniture)—a far cry from Drabble’s dour Yorkshire roots. (“There was a certain kind of coldness about the Drabbles,” Swift observed.) He was bar mitzvahed, and the family went to an Orthodox synagogue on Yom Kippur, but, as he hastened to assure me in a phone call, “We were very liberal—we weren’t Zionists or anything.” Drabble seems to have fallen in love as much with Swift’s generous and warmhearted family—whom she refers to as “adorable” to this day—as with the man himself. The couple divorced for what Drabble calls “the usual reasons—career divergence, stupid rows, both of us having affairs.” Drabble grows starry-eyed when recounting her exposure to the hothouse tribalism of the Swifts, different as it was from the undemonstrative style she had been used to at home: “I did think this was the great escape. I loved the gefilte fish, the chicken soup, the way they hugged you.”

  The couple spent the first years of their marriage in Stratford-on-Avon as members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Drabble understudied actresses like Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. When she became pregnant with their first child, however, she gave up on her acting career and turned to writing. As Drabble tells it, the shift to writing sounds suspiciously easy. She didn’t know anyone in Stratford, and she was alone most evenings while her husband was out socializing, so, presto, she “sat down and wrote a book.” It is, I suspect, a tribute to the dauntingly strong will that thrums beneath the overtly uncompetitive image she projects. “I don’t like to be beaten by things,” Drabble admitted, almost uneasily. “It’s another go, another day.” (Drabble’s conflict about her own ambition is such that in recent years she has refused to be put up for a Booker Prize. Her sister, meanwhile, has been nominated for her second Booker for The Children’s Book, due out in the United States in October.)

  In becoming a writer, Drabble was, consciously or not, trespassing on the literary turf that had appeared to be her sister’s domain. “The original setup,” says Becky Swift, alluding to the decades-long tension between her mother and her aunt, “was that the pretty sister was going to act—and then she turns to the things Antonia always wanted to do and becomes a bestseller.” Tellingly enough, Drabble’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, revolved around the differing destinies of two sisters, the elder one of whom is beautiful and mercenary and the younger of whom is more vulnerable but ultimately more fulfilled. Byatt would have her own back with her second novel, The Game, published in 1967, in which one sister drives the other one to suicide. Drabble openly admits to not liking it, “especially since the murderer was me,” and still sounds stung, all these years later, despite the fact that her sister called her up after it came out and apologized. (Byatt declined to be interviewed for this article.)

  Narrated in a casually perceptive, nervy first-person voice, A Summer Bird-Cage laid out what would become recognizable Drabble territory in its taking for granted a certain level of intelligence and education in its female characters; it also demonstrated an unexpected candor about sex, abortion, career-versus-motherhood conflicts, and the glaring insufficiencies of married life. Drabble recalls that she was very much influenced early on by The Group, by Mary McCarthy. “It meant a lot to me,” she said. “It was about growing up as a woman. I began making it up for myself in the beginning, then I looked around and saw Fay Weldon, Nell Dunn, Edna O’Brien, and Sylvia Plath. We were all living the same kind of lives, on our own, with children.”

  Her aura of self-sufficiency in the literary realm, as in others, is inescapable. (She told me that she “quite enjoyed” being by herself after her divorce, adding, “I didn’t think I’d remarry.”) All the same, it is almost impossible from our current vantage
point to understand just how freeing Drabble’s tone in those first novels actually was. Drabble’s early works were nothing less than “startling,” says Carmen Callil, who founded Virago Press and ran the publishing company Chatto & Windus from 1982 to 1994. “They were about clever women having children and love affairs but straining at the leash. Those first women were spiky women, good mothers who loved being in love and loved men but were sort of fed up much of the time.”

  Drabble’s talent for evoking the mixed reality of women’s lives, for capturing the practical drudgery of child care while also tuning in to the unfettered aspirations that a higher education and a more developed sense of autonomy had created, brought her a loyal readership as well as a high profile. “It’s a gift she has,” Hilary Spurling says. “She embodies, expresses, and pins down something everybody feels, but she is often the first person to say it. Those early novels were about how to live a life that was not purely domestic—feminism before the letter.” Victoria Glendinning, a novelist and biographer who remembers seeing Drabble at “fantastic, lavish parties” in the 1970s before becoming friends with her, concurs: “She was writing for people like me—people in modern society who also had brains. I don’t think anybody wrote like that before, not with that sort of intelligence and empathy. Her books accompanied our lives.”

  When I asked Drabble whether she kept up with the women writers who tackle such topics today in novels and memoirs, she seemed slightly weary of the question and its implicit suggestion that she’s old hat, when the reality is that she got there first. “‘My mother loved your books’ is a line I get a lot,” she said, flashing a wry smile. “There’s a younger generation that I don’t read so much. I feel I know about that character—I’ve got colicky children, I’m divorced, juggling mothering and a career. There’s a movement about women hating their children. They don’t know anyone wrote about it before … Doris Lessing would say that’s how it should be: you put an idea out there, and other people pick it up.”

  One theme that has absorbed Drabble since the beginning is the extent to which choice can affect your destiny. Can we, that is, unmake our beginnings, or are we always acting willy-nilly on the promptings of the past? Are our individual stories foretold, or do we create them as we go along? You sense that, willed into shape as her own life is—she went from being a timid, unhappy girl with a stutter to someone who can disarm a crowd of four hundred—she is always cognizant of those, like her mother, who don’t make it out, who are felled by circumstance. “I married at twenty-one,” she said, “which was very wise. I left home. I knew I had to get away.”

  In The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble writes about her fear of inheriting a legacy of misery: “My mother was seriously depressed for much of her later life, and her depression oppressed and infected me, or so I have come to believe.” Although Drabble uses a SAD lamp in the winter to mimic natural sunlight, which cheers her up, and was briefly in therapy, she nonetheless is convinced that depression can have a positive as well as a negative effect. “My mother used it as a weapon to manipulate others,” she said, as the afternoon wore on and the sky grew darker outside the living room windows in Porlock Weir. “It took the form of anger.” Her own bouts seem to feed her art—“happy and buoyant don’t force you into action on the page; you go shopping when you’re up”—and also force her to reassess things. “It’s useful,” she pointed out, “for stripping off ways of getting through life that prevent you from having to think.”

  * * *

  These days Drabble writes best in the mornings, on her own in Porlock Weir. She suggested in an interview last spring that she was done with novels, but she insisted to me that she didn’t really mean it. “I only said that to see what it sounded like,” she said. “I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t in a frame of mind to write fiction—it was connected with Michael’s illness, which absorbed all my energy. I couldn’t get away from it in a way that he could. He could concentrate, but I couldn’t. A man is much more able to make work a priority. Women have a tendency to allow other considerations weight. Doing jigsaws was a refuge and writing the jigsaw book an escape.” So maybe Drabble isn’t quite the expert juggler in her own mind that I have envisioned her as being after all.

  “As I get older,” Drabble confided, moments before Holroyd came in to collect me for the drive to Taunton, where I would catch the train to London, “I do fear my physical world is getting thinner. When I was younger, I led multiple lives. When I’m here in Porlock, everything flows in again. It doesn’t matter if I’m thinning out … The trees are full, the sea is full, and I am getting more ghostly. The physical world is taking over and absorbing me, and eventually my ashes will be scattered in the churchyard.” And then, taking her aptitude for seeing beyond the glare of self-interest—beyond the moment’s buzz—to its natural extension, she muses unblinkingly on the inevitable void that awaits even those who fill the world with words: “My being the center has ceased to be of importance.”

  SISTER ACT

  (BETTY FRIEDAN)

  1999

  In our ever-mutating cultural landscape, it’s almost impossible to keep track of the way movements (women’s lib) yield to countermovements (“power” feminism without special pleading), which yield to savvy coeds with book contracts for reactionary theses (the new modesty), which yield to fashion trends (geisha chic). Betty Friedan? Her name comes at us like a far-off echo—as though she were a suffragette fighting for the right to wear bloomers instead of the woman who, not all that long ago, presided over the birth of modern feminism. Before there was Wendy Shalit or Katie Roiphe or Naomi Wolf or Susan Faludi, before Germaine Greer propounded her theater-of-ideas version of female virility or Gloria Steinem flashed her come-fly-with-me smile on magazine covers, Friedan cast her eye over a nation of suburban housewives and determined that inside their well-kept but under-occupied lives they were going bonkers.

  It was in 1963, the tail end of the quiescent 1950s, that Friedan burst forth with The Feminine Mystique—the same year that Steinem, then an un-politicized girl around town, published The Beach Book, which sought to impart frilly wisdom about suntans and rich men. (“A landing party from Aristotle Onassis’s yacht has just come ashore to ask you to join them. You say no.”) Friedan’s book had begun as a questionnaire circulated at her fifteenth Smith College reunion (she was class of 1942), and after five years of work it metamorphosed into an expansive, sometimes overwrought argument with what she viewed as the Donna Reed culture of her time. Half sociological tract and half impassioned manifesto, The Feminine Mystique took on “the problem that has no name”—an amorphous malaise that afflicted college-educated American women, who smothered their children with attention, had unrealistic expectations of their husbands, and then sought to assuage their sense of quiet desperation by downing pills or having joyless extramarital affairs. That, she charged, was what came of being indoctrinated into society’s rigid and largely unconscious notions of femininity.

  After pages and pages of deconstructing the fluffy content of women’s magazines (where the malaise “is solved either by dyeing one’s hair blonde or by having another baby”), citing gloomy statistics and psychological surveys, Friedan moved to define the problem in the largest possible terms, as “simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities.” The book, which had a first printing of three thousand copies, went on to become the No. 1 bestselling nonfiction paperback of 1964. Its author, in turn, became a celebrity, appearing on the then–newly born television talk shows, and an effective crusader, giving speeches around the country. In the summer of 1966, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women—known by its acronym, NOW—and provided her supporters with a serious platform from which to shake up the status quo.

  These days, it is hard to remember that Friedan was the one who got a revolution going—that it was she who fought for equal pay, equal rights, day care, and legal abortion, so that other women could go on to examine their
cervixes in consciousness-raising groups and muse wishfully on prehistoric matriarchies in the pages of Ms. For women under forty—the “I’m not a feminist, but…” generation—who are aware that Friedan was important but are vague about her exact contribution, she is a shadowy presence, an icon-without-portfolio. Given her age (she is seventy-eight) and our short collective memory, this isn’t so remarkable.

  What is surprising, though, is how quickly she was pushed to the sidelines of the very movement she had founded. In 1972, when the fledgling National Women’s Political Caucus gathered at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Friedan lost her bid to be the official spokeswoman for the cause. Somewhere along the way, between the first stirrings of liberal activism and the increasingly radical, anti-male, and pro-lesbian tone that came to mark the women’s movement as it gained momentum in the early 1970s, Friedan was edged out of the spotlight in favor of other leaders—notably, Steinem and, briefly, Bella Abzug. “The cameras are clicking at Gloria,” Nora Ephron observed in a gimlet-eyed account of the Miami Beach gathering that she wrote for Esquire, “and Bella has swept in, trailed by a vortex of television crews, and there is Betty, off to the side, just slightly out of frame.”

  * * *

  How and why did this happen? And what does it suggest about the internecine conflict that seemed to fracture the women’s movement at the very moment of its ascent? The enigma of Friedan’s rapid eclipse is at the heart of Judith Hennessee’s new biography, Betty Friedan: Her Life. It is a tale that hangs on a visibly unfixed nose, a tendency to yell, a commitment to broad-based social change rather than identity politics, and a refusal to demonize family and the male sex. (For the record, right after finishing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan considered getting a nose job, but she was concerned that the operation would change her signature gravelly voice.)