“Writers are often and rightly accused of self-absorption and egoism,” observed Margaret Drabble in The Pattern in the Carpet, “but many have a very fragile hold on the self”.
She revealed her own fragile hold in the same book, which mixes personal history and reflections on jigsaw puzzles. “At times I feel some pride in my continuing capacity for feeling really, really bad,” she reveals. In fact, the details she gives of her struggles are often tragic and moving – but there are also lighter moments.
One of the more curious relates to Jerusalem the Golden. Once the book was written, she says she took the manuscript in person to the offices of Weidenfeld and Nicolson at Bond Street in London. Except that when she got there, she found a dress shop. Her first reaction to this surprise was “shocking”:
Instead of assuming that I had made the mistake in the address, I knew suddenly, in a thunderbolt of awareness, that I had been deluding myself for years, and had madly fancied myself a writer, when I was nothing of the sort. I had been living in a fantasy and had better get on the bus, go home to Highbury and adjust to reality …
Fortunately, she soon realised that she should have gone to New Bond Street, delivered the manuscript and the moment passed – but was left wondering about the life she might have had if she had turned for home. “I didn’t see myself as a contender,” she writes.
Had Drabble failed to hand in her manuscript and given up, late 20th-century English fiction would have looked very different – and literary criticism along with it. Most particularly, we might never have heard of the “Hampstead novel”.
Hampstead novels were once much discussed, even if it was debatable whether anyone was actually writing them. They were supposed to be books about clever people in north London having tempestuous affairs and talking about themselves in exhausting detail. John Sutherland describes the term as “an easy sneer”, a shorthand for “middle-class orgasms, delicatessen food and high thought”. Drabble herself has pointed out that she never set a novel in Hampstead and suggested that this idea about her books was the invention of rightwing papers in an all too familiar attempt to brand leftwing intellectuals as a privileged elite. Even so, there are elements of Jerusalem the Golden that fit the stereotype: yes, it’s set in Highgate, across the heath from Hampstead, but it has the big house, the welcoming kitchen, the drinking, the adultery, the ease with money, the middle-class characters and the fervent conversations about poetry.
There’s a cruel irony that the very book that made Drabble feel such insecurity and question her place as a writer should create the template that would allow others to deride her as an establishment figurehead. Just to add to the sting, when the book came out it in 1967 was criticised for diametrically opposed reasons. Rather than representing middle-class comfort and complacency, Drabble was castigated for trotting out another novel about northern folk escaping their drab homes. In a Guardian review (quoted last week), Martin Green compared Drabble’s book unfavourably to The Lost Girl, DH Lawrence’s story of a girl fleeing an industrial town and finding sexual freedom.
That year, Drabble told the BBC: “I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition that I deplore.” She was actually talking about following in the footsteps of Arnold Bennett and eschewing a new form of modernism, but the quote is irresistible in relation to Jerusalem the Golden, since this book managed both to be at the end of one tradition, and the start of an oft-deplored other.
But these insults can be quickly turned around. For a start, there’s surely something to be said for both being the last and first word, a latecomer to one genre and a pioneer of another. But the more important point is that neither of those categorisations actually reflected my experience of reading the novel. I didn’t notice cliches; I focused on the singular and difficult character Clara. Nor do I remember reading any comments during this month’s discussions about DH Lawrence or Hampstead. Instead, the book has been discussed as it should be: a strange story about a determined individual. In the closing pages, Clara begs her lover to forget her mother’s dour house, to stop him associating it with her. “I can’t be free,” she says, “but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be thought to be free, is there?”
The novel she appears in is stuck in the same bind – we should take it on its own terms.
