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Margaret Drabble with Piers Plowright at Burgh House in Hampstead |
Why I don’t want to be in America
Stop the publicity circus I want to get off, pleads novelist Margaret Drabble. Matthew Lewin reports
AUTHORS are being poorly served by their publishers and being required to do too much to publicise their own books, says novelist Margaret Drabble who has also pledged never again to do a book tour in the United States.
Ms Drabble, the multi-award winning author of 17 novels, two biographies, short stories and a television play, told an audience at Burgh House in Hampstead on Thursday that she occasionally enjoyed making appearances in connection with her books, but added: “Book tours can be really, really unpleasant.
“I love doing things like this tonight because I feel I’m among friends. I like coming to Hampstead, I know where I am. What I don’t like is walking into a room in an unknown city, sometimes in an unknown country, with a lot of people who have no idea of who I am of why I am there or why they are there, and having to entertain them.
“I feel strongly that authors are now asked to do things in the name of publicity that the publicists and the publishers should be doing. The publishers don’t do anything now – they just send the authors out and keep their fingers crossed for the Booker Prize. I exaggerate, but there is a lot of that going on.”
Answering questions from BBC radio producer Piers Plowright, Ms Drabble, who lived for many years in Heath Hurst Road in South End Green, Hampstead, said: “I’m never going to the United States again. It’s too unpleasant and completely exhausting.
“The last time I was there was on the eve of the last presidential election and the feeling in the country was appalling, going through the airports was extraordinarily disagreeable – and they tried to take back the St Louis Literary Prize I had been awarded because I had written something about Guantanamo that they didn’t like.
“And I don’t want to go to the Hay-on-Wye Festival again, although I know it’s sometimes great fun, because I always get lost in a big festival, and also I didn’t like it that they paid President Clinton £100,000 and they don’t pay their authors anything. Some authors will happily go for the price of their supper, but I don’t think they should be asked to do so.”
Ms Drabble spoke about her childhood in a very literary family in Sheffield (“We read a lot and we talked about books – that was what we did”) and the paradoxes of being educated at a Quaker boarding school in York.
“They taught us not to be self-promoting or to push ourselves forward,” she said. “But there is also a strong work ethic in the Quaker approach, which leads people to be successful. So even while you’re pretending not to be successful or pretending that you’re not really trying to make money, you actually become the Rowntrees and the Cadburys and you make a lot of money – by mistake.
“The result is that I always found advertising myself very difficult, and after having been taught not to push yourself forward, having to talk about myself as an author was to me a paradox.”
She read English literature at Cambridge under the controversial critic and teacher F R Leavis but in that period her real love was for the theatre, and after university she joined the RSC.
“I understudied Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, and even got on the stage once as Imogen in Cymbeline. But the other two were never ill – both were amazingly robust and strong women. But in a way I was glad, because it was lovely being in the theatre every night, and I did have a line or two here and there.
“And it was having such small parts at the RSC that helped tip me into writing novels. I had a lot of time on my hands and I used to sit in the dressing room with my typewriter writing away at my first novel. That book had a very good reception and I said, well, okay, I’ll be a novelist. And it was a very much easier career to combine with being married and having small children. I’m very glad I made that decision – although I do sometimes still miss the theatre.”
Asked to give an example of how one of her novels came about, Ms Drabble described how the structure of her book The Sea Lady was arrived at.
It followed a period in which she had read more than 100 science books when she chaired the jury for the Aventis Science Book Prize and had become fascinated by modern scientific ideas and particularly with marine biology. So she made her main character a marine biologist and matched him up with “a loudmouth feminist”.
She then borrowed an idea from an Ingmar Bergman film, Wild Strawberries, which is about a man travelling to an honorary degree ceremony and reviewing past events in his life.
“I thought: that’s what I want to do. I want to write about seaside holidays and a little boy who became a marine biologist and I wanted him to travel back in time while he sits on a train on his way to a degree ceremony. I stole all that from Ingmar Bergman, but I do mention that in the book, and there is a tribute to Bergman, so I won’t get sued for plagiarism.”
She also spoke about her two biographies, of Arnold Bennet and Angus Wilson, explaining that publisher George Wiedenfeld had said to her: “It’s all very well writing novels, but isn’t it time you wrote a proper book? Wouldn’t you like to write a biography?
“And like a fool I said okay. I didn’t know anything about biography in those days. I know a lot more about it now, and what I have learned is that it is difficult, a very demanding medium and terribly hard work.
“Writing novels is difficult, but in writing biography you have to respect the person as well. If you write a novel badly you’ve only let yourself down, whereas in a biography you have this sense of obligation to your subject.”
Mr Plowright read a line from her latest novel, The Red Queen: “One day, one day soon, all patterns will be revealed.”
“Do you think all patterns will be revealed?” he asked.
“I think we are coming nearer to it. I never used to be interested in cosmology because I thought it was completely fantastical, but now I realise that we are getting very close to understanding how it all began and where it’s going.”
“To God?”
“If it were God we would be getting nearer to God. We are on the way to finding out, but we are a lot nearer than we were. The speed of discovery is so extraordinary, both on the micro level and on the cosmological level, that our understanding about where we are in the universe is growing.
“I think our grandchildren may know a great deal about the creation of the universe than was previously imaginable.” |
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