A Day in the Life of a Snarling Woman

There was once this woman. She was in her thirties. She was quite famous, in a way. She hadn't really meant to be famous; it had just happened to her, without very much effort on her part.

So begins Margaret Drabble's story, 'A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman', in the story collection of the same name (2011). The stories were written between 1967 and 2000, and are a representation of her short fiction written over the years (I, like many people assumed she was only a novelist).

You probably know women like Jenny Jamieson, the protagonist of 'Smiling Woman'. Perhaps you are one. A woman with an interesting job, who sits on committees, looks after her family, and has no time to look after herself. She does too much. She's efficient at multi-tasking. A list-maker.

...she read the lists of things to be done that lay on her bedside table. There were several lists, old and new, and it was never safe to read the newest one only. Some of the words on the lists were about shopping: haricot beans, it said at one point; Polish sausage, at another; then vitamin pills; shoelaces for Mark; raw carrots(?); Clive Jenkins; look up octroi. It would be hard to tell whether these notes were a sign of extreme organisation or of panic. She could not tell herself.

She is woman who spends too much energy smiling and being pleasant to people.

Then one night she snaps, and the next morning things do not seem the same. She sees people differently.

There used to be, till yesterday, a little knob that one twisted until these people came into focus as nice, harmless, well meaning people. And it's broken, it won't twist any more.

An 'exceptionally healthy woman', she's been having unexplained bleeds, and that day she finds herself at her hospital appointment. She faces the prospect of death ( but we are told that she didn't, after all,  die from this), and fears for her children's lives without her. But despite this  spiritual crisis she carries on regardless, taking herself dutifully to a school where she is an honoured guest speaker. She gets up and makes a confident, optimistic speech as her boots gradually fill with blood.

For twenty minutes, she spoke and bled.

What Drabble is particularly good at is in observing the ambiguity in people's lives; the accommodations they make in order to make life bearable. And how appropriate is it that Jenny's body is making known its discomfort in a way only a woman's body can, by a disruption of the hormonal system.

This story was written in 1973, in the early days of the women's movement. Even now in my opinion women smile too much, make themselves amenable. It is expected of us. We expect it of ourselves. Would it hurt you just to be nice?

Sometimes instead of being a smiling woman I become a snarling woman - that's a trap as well. Smiling too much or snarling too much - you're letting other people set your agenda.

You need to be a thoughtful woman; an aware woman, a woman who won't be pushed around.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams


I love William Carlos Williams. I think his adage 'no ideas but in things' taught me the most I know about writing. Be specific. Observe. Notice the small things.

I also like plums.

Yesterday I cooked some plums, and had them cold with home-made yoghurt and custard.

They were quite sour, but very delicious.

The best plum jam I've ever made wasn't very pretty, as the pale, mottled skins didn't colour the mix, so the jam was a muddy yellow. But it tasted delicious - which shows that you can't just go by appearances alone.
I've been looking for plums like those ever since, and failed to find them.

Why I like men

I have trouble concentrating on reading novels lately - too much going on in my life and head.

And even music I don't sit down and listen to much any more. But listening in the car is good.

Yesterday when coming back from the coast we put on The National's High Violet, and it was exactly what I needed to listen to. Melodic, unemphatic, almost diffident music at times, very thoughtful and reflective and full of emotion. It's kind of muted, yet strong. And I thought, as the car went up the hill at St Helena, just past Byron Bay, how nice it is that men make music like this. And how much I like (some) men.

Which led me to think of Edith Speers' poem, 'Why I Like Men'.



Why I Like Men

mainly i like men because they're different
they're the opposite sex
no matter how much you pretend they're ordinary
human beings you don't really believe it

they have a whole different language and geography
so they're almost as good
as a trip overseas when life gets dull
and you start looking for a thrill

next i like men because they're all so different
one from the other
and unpredictable so you can never really know
what will happen from
looks alone

like anyone else i have my own taste with regard
to size and shape and colour
but the kind of style that has nothing to do
with money can make you bet
on an outsider

lastly i guess i like men because they are the other
half of the human race
and you've got to start somewhere
learning to live and let live
with strangers

maybe it's because if you can leave your options open
ready to consider love
with such an out and out foreigner
it makes other people seem
so much easier

Edith Speers (b 1949)

From The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, ed Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Elizabeth Bishop

Thinking about underwear

"I didn't get much sleep last night

thinking about underwear

Have you ever stopped to consider

underwear in the abstract ..."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'Underwear', in Penguin Modern Poets 5 (1963)

This was one of my favourite poems when I was in my late teens in the late 60s. My original copy is falling apart (has fallen, actually, with very little glue holding this slim volume together.)

I have another, less-falling-apart copy. I had a bit of a thing about this book, and used to buy up copies I saw, so that I'd always have one. My third copy, bought guiltily after the second-hand bookshop owner told me that the beats were very popular with young people, was eventually given away to a Young Person.

So: Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg are the poets in this book. I'm not so keen on the Ferlinghetti now. Ginsberg remains my favourite, and I have a book of his poems as well.

What the beats did was write frankly, colloquially and personally about things that people didn't think were fit subjects for poems.  Rimbaud did this more than a hundred years earlier, and Walt Whitman was a forerunner of the beats as well ...  hence Ginsberg's  'A Supermarket in California':

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon

and later:

I saw you Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

 And underwear? I frequently think about it as well. I think I should go through my underwear drawers and throw out all the exhausted bras I never wear, and the knickers the elastic has gone in. I think how I like my purple knickers with small pink spots so much that I should have bought more than two pairs of them. I think nostalgically of the ones with purple moons and stars of more than 15 years ago and wish I could find more like them. I wonder if there are many women like me who like their underwear and yet keep it all tangled up and untidy in drawers for years and years, hardly ever throwing any out, so there is virtually a history of their underwear there.

The book I carry around in my head

This is my favourite book from my early childhood.

Growing up in a post WW2 world, most of my books were hand-me-downs, and some of them weren't great literature (but I loved them at the time anyway). But this one, which was in the Little Golden Book imprint (I'm sure it was, though it didn't remain with that publisher) was brought home for me by my teenage sister along with a LGB version of the Twelve Dancing Princesses when I was sick in bed. (In those days mothers believed in keeping children in bed when they were sick, and I was sick a fair bit. The Robert Louis Stevenson syndrome of sick children becoming writers?)

Somehow, it got lost, or at least, didn't survive my childhood. But after I left school I bought myself another copy. By that time, in the early-mid 1970s, Madeline was one of the books approved by the women's liberation movement, and it was available at a radical bookshop, in a cheaply-produced paper covered copy that didn't age well. I still have it somewhere.

But I don't need it, because I carry this book around in my head:

In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines

Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines

In two straight lines they broke their bread

And brushed their teeth, and went to bed.

The youngest one was Madeline...

I certainly found Madeline herself an intriguing character, because of her bravery ( 'She was not afraid of mice, She loved winter, snow, and ice, And to the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, Pooh! Pooh!.')

and her individuality. ('And nobody knew quite so well/How to frighten Miss Clavell.')

which shows Madeline walking along the parapet of a bridge over the Seine.

To a child in 1950s Australia, who had never before heard of Paris, much of it was mystifying. The teachers (Miss Clavell) looked like nuns. And the idea of living in what was obviously a boarding school seemed strange.

Which just goes to show how much mystery and exoticism children can accommodate and accept in the books they read. And perhaps Madeline was one of the reasons I grew up to become a feminist.

Women get madder as they get older

Nothing much happens to me now, nor ever will again. But that should not prevent me from trying to write about it. I cannot help but feel that there is something important about this nothingness. It should represent lack of hope, and yet I think that, somewhere, hope may yet be with me. This nothingness is significant. If I immerse myself in it, perhaps it will turn itself into something else. Into something terrible, into something transformed. I cast myself upon its waste of waters. It is not for myself alone that I write this. I hope I may find some general purpose as I write. I will have faith that something or someone is waiting for me on the far shore.

Margaret Drabble, The Seven Sisters




So writes Candida Wilton on the first page of Drabble's novel, writing on her 'modern laptop machine'.

(Candida: I love it that her name is also that of that scourge of womanhood, thrush, whose cure was almost an obsession with me and my friends in our student days).

Candida's awful marriage is over and she buys a small flat in London, where she ekes out her days in little bits of shopping, going to her health club, and in meetings of her Virgil reading group.

I find this book almost unbearably delicious, and read bits of it (which is the way I often re-read, going over just the parts I like, which incidentally, I've heard, is the way a lot of children read) quite often.

There's a bit where Candida asks to lunch a woman she knew in her old life and whom she doesn't particularly like. The first time I read this I thought, 'No man could have written this' (a thought I often have when reading women writers) - and probably no man would find this incident interesting. Reading it is like hearing a piece of gossip from a friend - the gorgeous sense of anticipation, the appalling delight in bitchiness.

And then there are sentences like this these:

Julia arrived at the dot of our appointed hour. For a wicked woman she is always surprisingly punctual.

In an interview I read years ago Margaret Drabble said, 'Women get madder as they get older.' Perhaps she was talking about this book, or perhaps she was talking about The Witch of Exmoor, in which Frieda Haxby retires to a crumbling house on the coast to write her memoirs, to the horror of her children.

In any case, I can only second her opinion. I've been thinking about what she said a bit lately, which is probably why I've dragged her book up to put in the attic on this hot summer night.