Meeting Yourself in Someone Else's Story

I went to hear Margaret Drabble at the Words by the Water book festival a couple of weeks ago and, after listening to her talk about short fiction, bought her collection of short stories, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman. She talked about the struggle she'd had to persuade her publisher to put them into print, which gives an idea of the state of publishing these days.  It's an interesting selection, ranging from 'Hassan's Tower' written in 1966 to 'Stepping Westward' in 2000.

Many of the stories are classic Drabble, with the prose style that is so distinctive.  The circuitous sentences that wind round the sense, balanced by colons and commas, repetitions, clauses and sub-clauses.  Some people hate it, but I find it mesmerizing. In 'A Pyrric Victory' a young girl, dragged out of her comfort zone on holiday with a boyfriend and unsympathetic friends, deliberately defiles a rock pool as an act of defiance and provocation.  It's a victory of sorts, very quickly qualified. This is the last sentence - vintage Drabble:-

'But of the nature of that victory she was never sure: she had thought to destroy, in one last unnatural effort, her admiration for that gaudy picture postcard set, but even as she sat there amongst the debris, imprisoned, exiled, yet victorious, she wondered whether she had not perhaps left herself, more clearly than ever, but in less painful isolation, with that moment, poised beautifully before the ugliness of its own ruin, poised there before the destruction of sharing and articulation and definition, which was as necessary, as painfully necessary to its existence as water, rocks, and sea, and fish, and faces.'

Margaret Drabble as she looked around the time she wrote this story.

When I got to story No.7, 'A Success Story', I was intrigued to come face to face with a character called Kathie Jones.  Now, you may not know, but among family and friends I'm Kathie Jones (with an ie not a y).  More intriguingly Kathie Jones is a writer, from a working class background in a cultural wilderness. Worse and worse, 'she was quite a nice-looking woman', but 'she had rather a long, large-featured face, with a large nose: she had big hands and large bones'.  Which just about sums up my physical appearance.  Of course it isn't me.  Margaret Drabble had never met me when she wrote it (I hope) and if she had would have had more sense than to give her character my name. But it has eerie resonances.  I liked the bit where Kathie Jones meets a famous writer at a party and, although she is respectably married, she goes back to his hotel room where nothing much really happens.  Something like that once happened to me and I was similarly virtuous (regretted it later!). Apparently Saul Bellow thought Margaret had based Howard Jago on himself and sued.  So that settles it.  I have never met Saul Bellow (as far as I know) . . . .

Jane Davis is tackling the difficult question of basing your characters on real life people over at 'Pills and Pillow Talk' today.  Getting it wrong can be expensive for a writer, though we all do it from time to time.

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, by Margaret Drabble,  is a Penguin Modern Classic available in paperback and on Kindle.