Backlisted - The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Novelist Linda Grant and critic and editor Lucy Scholes return to Backlisted for a discussion of Margaret Drabble's third novel The Millstone, a book which has remained in print ever since it was first published in 1965, when Drabble was 26 years old; it was adapted for the screen by the author herself in 1969 as A Touch of Love, starring Sandy Dennis, Eleanor Bron and, making his film debut, Sir Ian McKellen. This story of a shy but determined young woman's decision to keep her baby and raise the child alone remains as relevant as ever. But The Millstone also speaks volumes of the era in which it was written, during which Margaret Drabble was a rising star in the literary firmament; and Andy, John, Linda and Lucy were delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate both novel and author, who is now 84. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today, you find us on Marylebone High Street in London, sometime in the mid-1960s. A tall, somewhat worried-looking woman emerges from unwinds, clutching a large bottle wrapped in tissue paper. She stares idly into shop windows as she passes, her steps quickening as the evening darkens. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher on Bound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read.

And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by two returning guests. Welcome back, Linda Grant and Lucy Scholes. Thank you for having us. Linda, say hello. Oh, hi. It's like you're watching telly, Linda. It totally is.

Anyway, welcome back now linda grant first joined us on batlisted on our second ever episode which was about gene reese's good morning midnight and so we owe you a huge debt of thanks linda for starting this enterprise so stylishly that's still one of the most popular episodes of Batlisted, which is wonderful for us and wonderful for dear Miss Reese. And we can only apologize profusely that it's taken eight years for us to bring you back. So thank you so much for being here. Linda is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction. She's won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the South Bank Show Award, the Wingate Prize, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and this year's George Orwell Prize. Her latest novel, The Story of the Forest, was published in

May and moved Nigella Lawson to write, I'm in awe, I'm charmed, and I want to press a copy on everyone I know. Linda, were you expecting Nigella to say that or was that a delightful surprise? She's a good woman, let's put it that way. I'm very grateful to her. She asked for a signed copy as well. That's amazing. After she'd read it.

Oh, well, listen, thank you so much for coming back. We're so pleased to have you back. And also, we're also delighted to welcome back for what is apparently her fifth appearance on Backlist, is friend of the show, Lucy Scholes. Hello, Lucy. Hi. It's very nice to be back again.

She previously joined us on episodes dedicated to Barbara Cummings, Anita Bruckner. Let's say it again. You were on the Anita Bruckner episode, the Anita Bruckner let's say it again, you were on the Anita Bruckner episode the legendary Bruckner episode I mean, that's my claim to fame above all else in my life I made it onto the backlist Bruckner episode

You did, on the Bruckner episode, I know Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Mortimer all the Penelopes and what we like to think of as the core backlisted backlist she is Senior Editor at Minnelli Editions and what we like to think of as the core backlisted backlist. She is senior editor at McNally Editions, a series of paperbacks devoted to hidden gems, including the Penelope Morsma title you talked about on this, right?

Yes, and I owe you both a debt of gratitude because I hadn't read that book for quite a while and then I just started working for McNally when I came on the show to do the Mortimer episode and it was rereading it, listening to you guys talk about it, you know, enjoying it again. I thought this needs to be back in print. So, yeah, we brought it back in America, which is great. Is that the first time it had actually been published in America? No, it was originally published with the title Cave of Ice. Very different to Daddy's Gone Hunting.

As opposed to Daddy's Gone Hunting, which was the original UK title, right? Exactly. So we brought it back with Daddy's Gone Hunting. As opposed to Daddy's Gone Hunting, which was the original UK title, right? Exactly. So we bought it back with Daddy's Gone Hunting, but it was the first time it had been reprinted. Yeah, so thank you very much, both of you, all of you. Our pleasure. Lucy hosts Our Shelves, a podcast from the legendary feminist publishing house Virago,

and wrote Recovered, a column for the Paris Review about out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn't be. And one thing we should say about today's choice of book is it has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1965. John, what is the book we are discussing today? The book we're discussing is The Millstone, which is the third novel by Margaret Drabble. The Millstone, which is the third novel by Margaret Drabble. As you say, first published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1965 and as a Penguin paperback in 1968, adapted for the screen by Warris Hussain in 1969 with the screenplay by Margaret Drabble as A Touch of Love, starring Sandy Dennis and a young Ian McKellen. We'll be talking about that later. So the story of the

novel is a first-person narrative of that of Rosamund Stacey, Cambridge graduate in her mid-20s, who's writing a thesis on Elizabethan poetry and living rent-free in her parents' large Marylebone flat. She's in half-hearted relationships with two very different men, novelist Joe Hurt and accountant Roger Anderson. She becomes pregnant by a third, George Matthews, an apparently gay BBC radio announcer, after a rather awkward one-night stand. But she decides to have the baby, breaks it off with her two boyfriends and forges her own path forwards. At the heart of the novel is an exploration of Rosamund's complex emotional reaction to pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal illness of her child. Drabble said herself the novel aimed to show how maternity

changes you into something fiercer than you were before. Often hailed as a feminist classic, the writer Tessa Hadley goes further, claiming on the 50th anniversary of its publication that The Millstone was the seminal 1960s feminist novel that Doris Lessing's golden notebook is always supposed to be. Anyway, in its sensitive and original treatment of status anxiety, sexual mores, attitudes to raising children, and what we now call work-life balance, The Millstone certainly feels both absolutely of its time, but also oddly prophetic. Also, before we get on to the main discussion i'm going to throw a question out to the panel the millstone is a historic novel the publication of millstone by

mark drab is a historic novel for a specific technical reason do any of you know what it is no do you speak for everyone linda I think it would be fair to say. You mean the history of printing or technical? Yes, yes. And that's my clue. In the history of printing, the millstone by Margaret Drabble is a historic publication. What is it?

Is it to do with it being in paperback? No good guess, but that's not correct. Right, okay. Some kind of new lithographic printing process that had never been done. You're getting close. I didn't know I was supposed to come on here with a history of printing as well at my fingertips. Well, you've been on before, Lucy.

You've been on before. Go on, Andy. Put us out of our misery. It's the first novel in the history of British publishing to be set on a computer. In 1965. Yep, in 1965. And I discovered that fact when I was searching the Times archive.

And there's a Times story from 1965, which says, in the future, it is believed there will be such a thing as an electronic book. And within that story, it says already a new novel published by Weidenfeld, Margaret Drabble's The Millstone, is the first novel ever to have been set on a computer. Amazing. There you go. And you're surprised that none of us got that.

Yeah. That is surprising given that it was mid-60s, but it's obviously George Weidenfeld was always a man at the cutting edge of innovation and publishing. Quite so, quite so. So let's kick off our discussion in the usual place. Linda, when did you first encounter The Millstone? When did you first read this novel? linda when did you first encounter the millstone when did you first read this novel i i would have encountered it as soon as it came out in paperback uh you said it came out in paperback in 68 did you say yeah in that case i was 17 um i wouldn't have read it in hardback i would have read it in paperback i couldn't afford hardbacks as a school girl at the time a school girl in liverpool and it was the book that everybody was talking about and everybody was reading as a schoolgirl at the time, a schoolgirl in Liverpool.

And it was the book that everybody was talking about and everybody was reading. It was being sold in a way as a story of the sexual revolution and being a very racy book and being quite shocking. The thing about Rosamund is that in the entire sequence of the novel, she only has sex once. She's a virgin. She has sex once, gets pregnant and doesn't see the guy again for several years. And she doesn't have sex before or afterwards. So it's not really so much about sex. But it was very shocking that an educated, intelligent woman chooses to have a baby on her own.

She doesn't choose to keep it because abortion was illegal. She chooses not to have it adopted. But for me, in provincial Liverpool, there we are in the West End of London, Marylebone High Street, a department in which a woman has gone out to buy a bottle of gin so she could try the old bottle of gin in the bathtub routine, try and have an abortion that way. So what happens is there's a knock on her door and a bunch of her friends, who all seem to be novelists and poets,

arrive and ask her if she wants to go and see the new Fabini film. She says no. They hang around. They drink the gin. By the time she goes to pull the bath, the water's cold. And to me, as a 17-year-old, it was like, this is miraculous. This is the world I want to live in. I want to be with these people. I want to know

people who are writing their first novel, been published as novelists. It was absolutely incredible. So that was the sort of the opening thrust of it for me reading it at that time. Lucy, now when did you first read Margaret Drabble? I'm rather embarrassed to say I came to her quite late. I think the first Margaret Drabble novel I ever read was one of her much more recent books, The Dark Flood Rises, I think which was published in 2016 and I reviewed it at the time.

Is that her most recent novel? I think it might be, yes. It is. And I liked it. Yeah, that's right, Canongate. I liked it, but I didn't love it, let's put it might be. Yes, it is. And I liked it. Yeah, that's right. Canongate. I liked it, but I didn't love it. Let's put it that way.

And it's about people of her age. It's about older people, you know, coming towards the end of their life. And I think maybe it didn't ring too many bells with me. And then really randomly, because this is such an odd book for her to have recommended, but it was actually the novelist Nell Zink who first recommended Farid Rappel to me. And I was trying to find the email that I thought she'd written me about it and I couldn't find it today.

So I think it might've been in person. We were chatting about it and she had read The Waterfall, one of the early novels and said it was really wonderful and I should look at it. And I hadn't looked and I knew of the millstone. I knew there was something there that I probably should read at some point. So I picked up The Waterfall, read it, loved it. And in that way that I tend to do,

because I do like to sort of binge authors and binge books, I then just start at the beginning and I read through all her early novels. I think this was in summer 2019 and ended up writing about the Ice Age for my Paris Review column, because at that point, it was actually out to print in America. And there were a kind of collection of them. Obviously, the Millstone wasn't. But I was really surprised at these brilliant, absolutely brilliant novels.

I mean, they're very off their period in so many ways, but also they're not. They totally spoke to me as a, you know, still. And I couldn't believe that people weren't talking about them and sort of reading them. And there weren't these editions that were always available. Well, we should say two things. You know, first of all, happily,

Margaret Drabble is still with us in her early 80s. And also, she was very famous for a while in the 1960s and 1970s. And we have a clip here of the beginning of a film that was made in collaboration with her by the film director Richard Marcon from 1968, who made this in 1968 and 15 years later directed Return of the Jedi. There's another tiny fact for you.

And you can see where it all began in this film. Yeah, when you hear this clip, you'll see if only Ewoks ran onto the set at this point. Anyway, this is how they kick off this documentary about the young writer, Margaret Drabble. She is being interviewed and this will place, Linda, I would like you to comment on this once we hear it, about what it meant to be a female, young female novelist in the late 1960s. Margaret Drabble is a novelist. She's also married and the mother of three children. None of this is particularly extraordinary, but Margaret Drabble is 28. She's written four novels and a book about Wordsworth and is now completing her fifth novel. Isn't it hard, in fact, for you to live a life like that? I imagine

most married women make a choice between a career of some sort and their home. Why have you done both? Why are you both the mother of three children, a wife, and a very busy professional novelist? I don't know, because in a sense I can't do without any of them. I didn't think when I was younger that I would want to have children, but having had one, I knew that I wanted them very much, and this was a very important and sort of unavoidable experience, significant in a way that nothing else had been. And yet I couldn't, because I'd got children, spend my life wheeling pushchairs around the park.

I had to do something else as well. So in a sense, I've always felt that there was no choice for me, that I simply had to do both. And I've never decided between them. My life is a continual and absolutely exhausting compromise. I'm always rushing from one to the other and never knowing where I ought to be and feeling totally guilty about every part of my life. And yet there's none of it that you can't give up children. They exist. You can't possibly say I'm not going to be a mother to

these children. And so really, it's a question of me worrying about what hours I spend doing what. In other words, you try and do both exceedingly well. I try and do everything well and I'm always failing. There's nothing I dislike more than failing for sort of silly practical reasons like being unpunctual because a child was crying or leaving a child crying because I've got to get to a place on time. And this kind of thing is always happening to me. I feel terrible about it, but there's nothing I can do about it.

I ought to be able to give up one, give up, I suppose, my professional life, but I can't do it, and I know I'm not going to. I mean, goodness me, right? That speaks to the dilemma at the heart of the millstone, but also reminds us what a challenge it was to, in theory, have it all. You can't possibly do both, right? I'm stuck by the fact that she got married, I think, not long after leaving university,

and she had three children before she was 30, I think. So she had a very conventional trajectory, which she was always in the process of trying to undermine. And I think there's a tremendous level of self-awareness and determination there that you see in her characters as well. And she says, I can't give it up. I know myself too well. But it's obvious that, you know, it's laughable to think that anybody would have those expectations of a female novelist today um but i wonder in the past how many young women writers there were

who had three children so i think it was an incredible achievement on her part to have business so fast so far in a few years when it's incredibly intense period of time which accomplished an enormous amount four novels and a book on wordsworth um and three children by the age of 28 i mean as he says at the beginning not terribly not something not terribly remarkable you say it's unbelievably remarkable you fool you try it it. Yeah. Lucy, when you started reading Margaret Drabble then, as you were talking about, did you appreciate her achievement as a young writer? Oh, yes, I think very much.

As much as a young woman in that era. I think so, because the more I found out about, obviously I knew a little bit about her, but the more I looked into it and realised that she was writing these novels when she was incredibly young. And I think that wonderful, weird documentary, I remember watching that, I think, around about that time when I was discovering her work and being struck by the fact that she was clearly this incredibly intelligent woman who obviously, like she said, on apologetically, she can't give up working, but she also wants to have children and why shouldn't she and why can't she make it work?

And I think the early novels in particular are all very, I don't necessarily want to say autobiographical, but she clearly drew on her own life and her own experiences. But they are, right? I mean, this is one of the things I wanted to ask all of you. Is she an autobiographical writer or not? I think she's writing about the experiences of educated women. And educated sounds a bit snobbish, but it was by no means obvious

that intelligent young women would go to university in the 50s or 60s. Right. So she's educated. She's hyper-intelligent. she has this incredible powers of concentration i think she's erudite um and she came and talked to my university english department when i was it must have been in the early 70s and she was incredibly glamorous and beautiful as well i think she had started out in acting university and gravitated into writing so she she sort of had it all really um in that's a

horrible expression but she she was very very famous in the 60s and 70s. And she stayed with me. I've traveled along the whole of my life up to that last book. She's about 10 years older than me. That last book, which is writing about a number of people who've reached the terminus all day, I think that is her last and final book. So she's always been there exploring the next big thing. There's a novel that I think is still out of print called The Middle Way or The Middle Years, which I haven't read for a very long time because I haven't been able to find a copy about women who are divorced and living on their own with children who have grown up taking in lodges and trying to kind of navigate the world of middle age. So she's gone from exciting me as a teenager into thinking

I could be this fabulous woman who is so talented and so beautiful and so brave to being the real chronicler of women's lives across the decades. Yes, yes, yes, sure. You also used the phrase, the next big thing there, the title of a wonderful novel by Anita Brookman about that very thing, the next big thing, yes. I think the other thing about her, she came from the North.

I mean, that's not kind of apparent from that speech. She was educated at the Mount School in Yorkork although she was from sheffield but she was northern and that's very important to her writing um my favorite novel of hers well semi-favorite is jerusalem the golden about a young northern working class student who comes down to l, falls in with some very, very glamorous older people who are, I believe, the Maltimers, John and Penelope Maltimer, and falls into their world. The interconnectedness of all things, Lucy Scholes. Look at that. I know. That is a wonderful note. I think that's one of my favourites of her early ones, for sure. So she was an interloper. She was not somebody who grew up in the home counties and fell into this.

She fought for it. John, of Margaret Drabble's, it's just been mentioned, so this is easy. Of Margaret Drabble's 20 novels, which is the only one, the title of which does not begin with either the definite or indefinite article? Well, Jerusalem the Golden is the obvious one. It's the right answer, yes, Jerusalem the Golden. All the rest of her novels begin with the or a. I was going to say, I can't think of,

very few of them begin with that. I remember, I think her first one is called A Summer Birdcage, isn't it? It is, yeah. And then The Garrick Year. Yes, A Natural Curiosity, which I noticed I have on my shelf at home as well, when I was thinking about.

It really interested Linda in how this book, The Millstone, felt like it, to you, that it was a kind of glamorous world. The thing that really struck me reading it, and I hadn't read it before, so it was really interesting going back to it, that there is almost a kind of, that Rosamund has this as a narrative voice. It's much more interesting than I was expecting, much more kind of slightly kind of Bartleby the Scrivener kind

of, you know, she's weirdly resistant and original in the way that she navigates her way through all of this life. You know, there's a sort of almost a kind of 50s existentialist. She doesn't know why she worries so much. She's continually assailed by feelings of not fitting in. But at the same time, I love the way she kind of hates her friends, but loves her friends. When you about margaret drabbell you think about her as being a chronicler of of women's experience through the last 40 50 years but this seems to be much more interesting in its in its first person narrative than i was expecting to be to when i really really responded to it i found it and maybe that's one of the reasons we'll come on to when we talk about the film the film perhaps didn't succeed quite as well because you don't have that remarkable voice in your head. Well, John, you were just talking about the characters being shy. It's not just

sort of diffident and shy. And here's a clip of Margaret Drabble from about 2015, I think this is, talking to the World Book Club on the World Service about the millstone. And she's just been asked about the character of George. Did George have some kind of a secret that he wasn't letting on to the reader? I think he was just very shy. I think that in this novel you have a not impossible situation where two very shy people meet one another and would like to get further together but don't manage it. I mean, I think that's not impossible as a situation. I mean, I look back on my life

where I know people have been making an overture to me or wanted to be friends and I just haven't responded. And I think George is just one of those. He feels that he's a bit of a loner. And I never really knew what George was up to. I mean, he remained a mysterious figure to me as a novelist. It's obviously out clubbing, isn't it? There weren't clubs like that in those days. I don't think he was clubbing.

Do you think he was? It was so nice if he had been, but I really don't think he was. So that idea, Lucy, this appears to be one of the things I think about The Millstone is so interesting. It appears to be a very decorous, polite novel, right, because it has a kind of elegance and formalism to it. It's not stylistically experimental. And yet it's talking about issues which in 1965 are illegal. You know, abortion and George, who it is strongly

implied is bisexual. How does she get away with that? Is she being terribly daring or is she protected by a kind of Cambridge bubble? God, I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, I think maybe because it's just the way she deals with it, for me at least, it feels like it feels so true to life. It's just real life. She's kind of getting on with these things might have been illegal or not done, but that doesn't mean people weren't getting abortions or being gay, right? So it's just part and parcel of life. And I think the thing that I maybe take away from what she was saying there,

and a little bit even in that from the documentary we played the clip from earlier, is I'm really fascinated in this idea that she articulates that Rosamund can't be anything that she isn't. I think it's in the book and it's sort of, and she talks about it herself, Drabble talks about herself, their own life. She's very interested in people who are sort of constrained by their own fate. And she's makes a kind of comment in that documentary, I think, uh, about her characters. When somebody asks her, do you kind of, do you think you, can you do certain things your characters and she says well no

because they are confined by the way their nature they're confined by what they do and I just sort of have to go along with it to a certain extent and I think that to me that's what I see in the novel this is maybe a very roundabout way of answering that question but what I see are these characters George can't be what he isn't you know Rosamund can't be who she isn't. So they can't bridge that divide between them. They can't be anything but these quite shy characters with each other. You've had the sexual encounter, which, you know, neither of them is even quite sure what that sexual encounter, I mean, Rosamund isn't quite sure what that sexual encounter means. She doesn't necessarily want George to come back and ask her to marry him.

There's that wonderful bit at the end where he makes a comment about she didn't really want a husband anyway you know she wouldn't do it like that and i think these these characters are they're trapped in their sort of their own identities in the way that we all are in real life right yes the scenes with george are generally rendered in dialogue and the dialogue is absolutely brilliant because it's full of sort of subtle silences and nuances and things that are not quite expressed. I was very interested to hear her say she doesn't know what George is up to because the reader doesn't know either. We know what Rosalind's up to.

After they have sex this one time, he says, well, I ought to go. And she says, I wanted to say don't go, but I couldn't. It's a fear of being impolite or not wanted or being rejected. So she can't say anything. And you've no idea whether he is just trying to get out of there after this one incident, or if he would like to stay. You've no idea. And there's a remarkable bit when her parents write to say

they're not coming back from Africa, they're going on to India. And there is this very, very strong implication that they know that she has had a baby and they're staying out of the way to give her some space. But it's not stated because they don't say what they mean either. So it's full of people not saying what they mean, which I think is very English and very kind of 50s, 60s as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yes, I strongly agree with you.

But that's also to do with class, don't you think, as well? Like there's a sense of, you know, and that's talked about a lot in the book, that she is of a different class to a lot of the other mothers-to-be that she meets. There's that brilliant passage near the beginning of the novel, in the conversation she has with George, where she talks about her parents and says, they have to punish themselves, you see. They can't just let things get comfortable. All this going to Africa and so on, other people don't do it. Other people just say they ought to do it. But my parents, they really go.

It was the same with the way they brought us up. They were quite absurd, the way they stuck to their principles, never asking us where we'd been when we got back at three in the morning, sending us to state schools, having everything done on the national health, letting us pick up horrible Cockney accents, making the charlady sit down and dine with us, introducing her to visitors, all that kind of nonsense. My God, they made themselves suffer. And yet at the same time, they were so nice, so kind, so gentle. And people aren't nice and kind and gentle. They just aren't. The charlady went off with all the silver cutlery in the end,

and she despised them. I could see her despising them, and she knew they wouldn't take any steps. And the awful thing is, they weren't even shocked when she did it. They had seen it coming, they said. And my brother went and married a ghastly girl whose father was a colonel, and now he lives in Dorking and spends all his time having absolutely worthless people to dinner and playing bridge. My sister still tries, but she married a scientist, and they live on the top of a hill in the middle of the country on a housing estate near an atomic station. And last time I went, she was stopping the kids from playing with the kids next door because they taught them to say silly bugger. It's been a disastrous experiment in education. That's all one can call it.

I just think that sense of even in the middle of the 60s, she's incredibly clear-sighted about stuff that isn't being resolved. And I know, I mean, I think it was Tessa Hadley who said people don't behave like their parents anymore. But I think a lot of that sort of middle class confusion about how to deal with people from other backgrounds feels absolutely contemporary. One of the things about the parents in this novel is they're Fabians. As their daughter complains, they stick to their principles. And yet at the same time, she can afford to live in a flat in Marylebone that they pay for. There's also an incredible scene where she's separated from her baby in an NHS hospital. She screams in order to get the baby back.

And no one will let her see the baby until the specialist arrived, who it turns out is a friend of her father's. So this idea that it's a class study, which is simultaneously able to accommodate the principle of the thing and the reality of the thing. You know, she's in a privileged position and her mistrust of the National Health Service at the same time, right? We're used to thinking of the NHS as being this service for the people of which we refer to as our NHS, of which we're terribly proud. And it's a very live debate at the moment. But you can see if you go back 60 years, it's perceived as a, I don't know, an imposition. Do you think it is mistrust though? I think it's to do with women's experience in the

NHS, because women's experience of hospitals is far greater than it's, it takes up more women's lives. And there's no question that the NHS used to be organised in such a way that it made life very, very difficult and it treated women as sort of objects, really. I mean, it's very shocking. It's really, really shocking when her baby has gone into hospital for a heart operation and she's told she can't see her for at least two weeks

because it's inconvenient it's inconvenient for the staff and you know that that idea now is is grotesque i mean nobody nobody will believe it but yeah that's where rosamund comes into her own by just screaming she screams the place down and doesn't stop until they let her see her baby and that's where rosamund fires up and becomes more than her nature but she's part it is i suppose it is part of her nature but just the thing about class rereading it this week i was really struck by how uncomfortable her descriptions of the women that she is in the hospital with, in the waiting room with, is.

And the class sort of snobbery really kind of tells because she feels herself to be very different. But at the same time, she understands she is now down amongst the women. It's also reinforced in the film adaptation of Touch of Love with the script by Drabble where she can't go to a waiting room without sitting next to an overweight woman or an immigrant. Those are all framed as this, and yet knowingly I think,

this poor middle-class girl is having to slum it to some extent um and yet at the same time the care that she receives within that system is an education to her right Lucy she's like this is a a fascinating example of a type of education a character undergoing an education yeah i don't know i feel like i maybe read it slightly differently to something i mean i i think second time around reading it for this podcast i was really struck about how much to me this book was about the nhs which i think i hadn't thought so much first time around i've been much more focused on rosamund and her experience and i was this time around, I kept thinking this is a portrait of the NHS

and it's kind of, it's good sides, it's bad sides, everything. I mean, I think, I don't know. I feel like she is, I don't know if it's necessarily the fact that she's using the NHS, but the fact that she has been having the, she makes a lot of points. Doesn't she mention the fact that she hasn't been ill? She's not someone who's ever ill.

And I think that's really interesting because, so she's saying that when she has to find a doctor she needs to find a doctor because now she's pregnant she doesn't even know where to start looking because she hasn't been ill since she was a child and i think that is it i don't i i mean you might disagree with me but i don't get the sense that she's particularly concerned about using the nhs i think she's happy it's there and she'll use it. But she feels very at sea in that world because it's not somewhere she's had to be before. And suddenly she is this very, and also, I mean, this is an obvious thing to say,

but this is a young girl whose entire life is the life of the mind, right? And now she's pregnant for the first time. She has to really get to grips with herself as a body and as a female body in the world that's going to be prodded and poked by all these male doctors. You know, she's never going to see women.

Well, we have a clip here from the film, just a very short clip from The Touch of Love, which if anybody's listened to the previous episode of Backlisted on the Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trott, they will hear a continuity here between that episode and this episode. So, Nikki, could we hear that clip, please? Where is Ward D? Come on, get a move on. There'll be trouble if they catch you in here. And bloody hell, can you blame me if one of your colleagues was incompetent enough to put me in the wrong room?

No, no. All right, just how do I get there? Talk. How do you think? No. No. Now, admittedly, it's going to be more challenging when we do our episode on Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

to find a clip with Penelope Keith in it. But there she was again, as she was in the last episode. There she was again. That was Sandy Dennis and the young Penelope Keith in a scene from A Touch of Love with Penelope Keith playing a nurse in the NHS. So this seems like a very good moment for us to take a break and hear this word from our sponsors.

Linda, this book is also a novel about abortion, an issue which continues to be an important and divisive one. How does it stand up now, do you think, 60 years later on that topic? It tells you how difficult it was to get an abortion, even if you were middle class. It tells you that a woman as intelligent as Rosamund still believes the old wives' tale about the hot bath and the bottle of gin, which is, you know, ridiculous.

Her friend Lydia, the novelist who comes and lives with her to look after the baby while she's out at the library, explains that she tried to get an abortion and she went to a Harley Street man. And there was this kind of catch-22. She said, I'm too crazy to have a baby. And he said, well, I think you're too crazy to have an abortion. So it's a sort of catch-22. Everybody expects that she's going to have the baby adopted. And there's this excruciating scene in the hospital after she's given birth. And they're saying, don't you think it's a little selfish of you to want to keep this baby when there's you know nice

couple childless couple who could give it a better life than you can i mean by the time it was published in 65 the abortion was still completely illegal the act wasn't passed till 67 and abortion wasn't legalized until the following year, 68. But also it was still very difficult for unmarried women to get contraception. She's not on any form of contraception because she's not expecting that sex. It's a world in which women have no control over their fertility. They just don't. And it's, you know, even with the best one in the world, she can't find a way to end her, to terminate her pregnancy.

Although she realizes she wants to have a baby, she never quite explains why. She never spells out why she wants it. But then she just thinks, she does she does and she's a wonderful mother and has a wonderful baby yeah until this heart problem develops and then she realizes that her whole life has to be taken up with protecting her child is that novel really about the relationship between the mother and the baby i was thinking that i was thinking when i read it this time around as well it struck me that it is a love

story but it's about yeah it's a love it's a love affair between a mother and a child and about her and about rosamund i think falling in love with her child there are points at which i i didn't actually double check this before the show, but there are bits early on where she talks about the baby as an it, and then by the end she talks entirely, if I'm remembering correctly, my baby, my baby. Yes, my baby, yeah. I mean, and that's what really struck me, I think, this time round about how much it is a love story between them.

Amazingly moving bit towards the end where she says that when she prays, you know, not having a clear sense really of God, despite her kind of Fabian socialist background, she prays, and it's very moving in quotes, sort of Ben Johnson about the death of his child. And I think I kind of love that way. She says something wonderful at one point where she says about, I have a vague sense, she said, of, I had a vague and complicated sense that this pregnancy had been sent to me in order to reveal to me a scheme of things totally different

than the scheme in which I inhabited, totally removed from academic enthusiasm, social consciousness, a tier-related, undefined emotional connections, and the exercise of free will. It's kind of baby as reality principle, and also connecting to her ability to love. Yeah, yeah. Well, going back to that documentary, One Pair of Eyes, can you imagine this happening now?

Here is Margaret Drabble being quizzed on the subject of the millstone by a group of schoolchildren in Sheffield. The mind boggles that this would be broadcast now, but here we go. What do you think about abortion then? Because in the millstone, the girl doesn't really want an abortion, does she? I myself think that the abortion law reform the abortion laws were archaic and wicked and so on and so forth and should have been changed and um and indeed kind of you know did what i could to do something about it but um this doesn't

mean that i myself i i have a very strong religious feeling about unborn children. I mean, and yet I don't feel that one can impose one's own religious, this is really what I mean, one can't impose one's own mystical sense about how marvellous it is to have a child on the mother of nine who's about to, you know, risk her life with the tens. You know, I think it's wicked to impose one's own rather hazy mystical notions about the virtues of life

on somebody in a position like that. Therefore, if you'd been in her position, would you have done as she had done? I would have done what she did. Yes, certainly I would have done. But, I mean, I wouldn't in any way condemn anybody who didn't. It's just that I think that she did the right thing. I think that I admire her for feeling as she did about it, for feeling that she had to have the baby because it was hers.

Just what it's worth. The next child asks if she believes in God, and if not, where her moral framework comes from. But isn't that fascinating? I think we've heard clips from the beginning of her career and nearer the end of her career, she seems to me someone who is willing to listen and engage totally with her readers. She's fascinating. Her view is the book is about one thing, but she's terribly interested in hearing what her readers believe the book to be about.

I did a literary festival event with her in Bath a few years ago. I believe two of you were there. Yeah, we were. We had dinner with her in Bath a few years ago. I believe two of you were there. Yeah, we were. We had dinner with her afterwards. We did. And, yeah, I mean, she is in a dialogue with people about her book, about her work. For an intellectual writer who is perhaps typecast

as a kind of Hampstead intellectual, I find her tremendously generous towards her readers the pluralist reading of her work is very very generous from um someone perceived as such a kind of high table author um on a personal level i feel very angry that she has been pigeonholed as the novelist of Hampstead's adultery because I've read most of her novels. I can't actually think of any that are set in Hampstead. She doesn't write novels about adultery.

I think she's been maligned, very, very badly maligned over the years. And I'm not sure why that's happened. I mean, it happens to other women. Joni Mitchell, for example, was typecast as a folky, and that kind of really sort of boils my piss.

If I'm allowed to say that on Blacklist. Indeed. I think she's a remarkable novelist who's had a remarkable career, and I think she's written a run of extraordinary books. I mean, I don't love them all equally. I don't love anyone's work equally in that sense. But I think she's just so far more than what she has been typecast as being. And I think she always has been.

Well, you're an enthusiast for Margaret Drabble's work. Here is a clip from World Book Club in 2015, where another enthusiast for Margaret's work gets to quiz her. We've got a caller on the line now, Peter Donnelly, who's calling from York in the north of England. Peter, hi. Am I right that you're an administrator of the Margaret Drabble Appreciation Society on Facebook? That's correct, yes. And you an administrator of the Margaret Drabble Appreciation Society on Facebook? That's correct, yes. And you have a question for Ms. Drabble. Yes. It was about the millstone.

I heard it dramatised on the radio a few years ago, and I believe it's been televised as well in the past, adapted by IESL. As far as I know, it is the only one that's ever been adapted for television or radio. And it seems to be one that's reread quite a bit and used as a choice for book clubs.

And I just wondered what it was about this particular novel which made it perhaps a more popular choice to be reread or revisited when some of the others, which I may prefer, they haven't been used in that way.

Thank you. Yes, I think some of the others are better. But there is something about the simplicity of the millstone, the universality of the theme, which is easily approached from anywhere, that has made it adaptable. And some of the other novels are more complex. I also recommend it to people who haven't read any of my work because it's short and you don't want to send them off

to read The Needle's Eye, which I think is my best novel, because it's very long. So The Millstone, if you don't like it, you haven't lost much time on it. And there's that to be said for it. There's something very British about a man from an appreciation society popping up to say he doesn't really like the book he's asking her about. That's perfect. Anyway, Linda, I'm aware we haven't really heard much

of Margaret Drabble's prose. Have you got a section that you would care to read us? This is the beginning of the book when she's trying to have her bathtub abulsion and her friends turn up. And they're all kind of literary types. And she has a great friend called Lydia, who is a wannabe Debbie novelist. Lydia was the only one who had really made it. She had published a couple of novels, but had now for some time been mooching around London, moaning that she had nothing else to say.

Nobody sympathised with her at all, understandably. She was only 26, so what did she have to worry about? In view of her state, she seized with delight upon any stories of the atrocities of other people's latest books, of which we managed to offer a kindly few. It's no good anyway, said Dick, after dismissing Joe Hurt's latest with a derisive sneer, churning them out like that one a year. Mechanical, that's what it is. A bit more mechanism wouldn't hurt you, I said gaily. I was on my second large gin. Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wade of despondency.

I don't care what you say, she said. It's better to write bad books than no books. It really is. Writing nothing is nothing, just nothing. It's wonderful to turn out one a year. I think Joe Hurt is wonderful. I admire it. I admire that kind of thing.

You haven't read it, said Dick. That's not the point, said Lydia. It's the effort that's the point. Why don't you write a bad book then, I asked. I bet you could write a bad book if you wanted to, couldn't you? Not if I knew it was bad when I was writing it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't get it done. What a romantic view of literary creation, said Dick. Speak for yourself, said Lydia Crossley. Get yours published and then start calling me romantic. Pass the gin, Rosie, there's a darling.

Wonderful. I mean, it's great prose. It really is. As you say, Linda, so of its time as well, right? The idea that, you know, what you did in the evening, if you were in London, you went to see a Fellini film. Fellini film.

A new Fellini film. Talked about books. On Regent Street, on the Cameo Polly. Cameo Polly. I wouldn't say it wasn't true that writers don't sit around dissing each other's books, which they haven't read. My favourite comic scene in this novel, other than those early scenes, is the discovery that Lydia has been writing a novel,

and it turns out that Lydia's novel is about Rosamund. And Rosamund finds it and reads it with a mounting... At first, she thinks she comes out quite well from it. And then she starts... Lydia obviously is sort of very dismissive about the scholarship that she's doing, which Rosamund is extremely proud of and remains proud of all the way through the book. So she gets cross with it, and then it disappears like a kind of, you know, in MacGuffin-like way into the book. And then it reappears brilliantly when Octavia, who's now a toddler, sneaks into Lydia's bedroom and eats half the novel. She finds it in a kind of, you know,

kind of masticated mess over the floor. It's just a very, very, very funny it in a kind of you know kind of masticated mess over the floor it's just a very very very funny scene and a kind of brilliant symbolic scene about life's revenge on art well speaking of life's revenge on art i've got the review here from the times newspaper um when the millstone was first published um i have to say um i'd love to get your reaction to this um that it's an anonymous review as was the tradition in that time and um it's also worth saying that many of the other reviews of the millstone were very very good but this perhaps not so much and i'm sharing this with you um because in a sense I think it's indicative of what Margaret Drabble and writers like Margaret Drabble were up against. So this is reviewed, the millstone is reviewed alongside

other novels including John Wayne's The Young Visitors and P.H. Newby's One of the Founders. And this is what the Times reviewer says. As a constant which always seems variable, the immorality of the young is a good subject for a novel, and three of the five novels under review deal with it. Miss Drabble, in her admirably written third novel, The Millstone, has created a self-righteous, unmarried mother called Rosamund. This heroine tells her own story in a disciplined stream of consciousness style of how she conceives from her first and only sexual experience, determines to have the baby and goes

through the machinery of the welfare state to do so. The character of this young feminist is plausible enough. She is the daughter of academic socialist parents whose luxurious Marylebone flat she shamefacedly lives in. Her language has the traces of pedantry which would be typical of a thesis writing girl just down from university. Her judgments and descriptions are suffused with the class consciousness of the would-be classless socialist middle class. There are several excellent scenes of middle class life. However there is a disappointing lack of thought behind the theme. Miss Drabble's concern is really only for what the neighbours will think, and her moral stand is how fine it is to defy them.

She never goes beyond the limits of careful realism. There is no consideration of what life will be like for the fatherless child, no ethical evaluation of Rosamund's purposeful avoidance of marriage, no explanation for the inadequacy of all the male characters. avoidance of marriage, no explanation for the inadequacy of all the male characters. Therefore, though well-written, the millstone is no more than a special kind of woman's novel. That's so harsh.

Yeah. I'll tell you what that reminded me of, how contemporary critics of Sally Rooney treat her work. So, Lucy, would it be accurate to describe Margaret Drabble as the Sally Rooney of her work. So Lucy, would it be accurate to describe Margaret Drabble as the Sally Rooney of her day? I think what's so strange about that, though, is that the, to me anyway, the idea that Rosamund, to me, is a very moral.

She's a character who's incredibly worried about the sort of morality of what she's doing. I guess just her morals are not the same as the reviewers' morals in that sense. And I suppose that's what she's up against throughout the whole book, isn't it? That other people think she's doing this terrible thing and bringing a baby into the world and they won't have a father. And she says, well, that doesn't matter. You know, if I love this baby, the baby's mine. And that's all that counts.

I don't know. it's a very dated and it reminds me so much of that clip you played at the beginning the way that even you know Drabble's being talked about right that how dare you think that you can have a career alongside having a baby it's such a you know and she and I love I don't think we maybe mentioned this specifically but I love in that first clip from Drabble how unapologetic she is I love that about it that she doesn't she says yes of course i'm you know i'm not i'm always going to feel bad but she doesn't make any apologies she doesn't try and kind of say i should be ashamed for doing this there's no she's she's brilliantly ingenuous in how she answers questions all through her career right

you've heard different points different people children, men, people on Facebook asking her questions, and she just takes them straight on. She deals with them straightforwardly. Linda, a special kind of woman's novel? It's a style of literary criticism or reviewing that we don't really have anymore, which is making moral comments on the content. And he says, I think, and see me, it's a man. They say twice, it's very well written, which is what I would have underlined and taken away from that.

And inserted on the paperback jacket. Yeah. I think reviews of Great Gatsby were like that. It's the 60s equivalent of I didn't find the characters likeable. Relatable, but not relatable because I am not a young woman. Yes. Absolutely, yeah. Lucy, would you take us out with a reading from The Millstone, please? Yes, of course. I'm going to read a section from when she's in the hospital

for one of her antenatal appointments. Is that getting it right? Yeah. Okay. I wonder if I had the right word. Has the baby been born? No. Then antenatal is correct.

It's antenatal, isn't it? Yeah. My lack of understanding of this. So as you might have guessed, I haven't had a baby in my life. No idea. She's in the hospital. She hasn't had the baby. She's having an appointment to check the baby's okay.

Okay. They all had one thing in common, of course. Their conditions varied from the invisible to the grossly inflated. As at the doctor's, I was reduced almost to tears by the variety of human misery that presented itself. Perhaps I was in no mood for finding people cheering, attractive, or encouraging, but the truth is they looked to me an unbelievably depressed, miserable lot. One hears much, though mostly from the interested male, about the beauty of a woman with child, ships in full sail and all that kind of

metaphorical euphemism. And I suppose that from time to time on the faces of the well-fed, well-bred young ladies that I had seen a certain peaceful glow, but the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the other side. Anemia and exhaustion were written on most of the countenances. The clothes were dreadful, the legs swollen, the bodies heavy and unbalanced. There were a few cases of striking wear. A huge middle-aged woman who could walk only with a stick, a pale, thin creature with varicose veins and a two-year-old child in tow, and a black woman who sat there not with the peasant acceptance of physical life of which one hears, but with a look of wide-eyed, dilating terror. wide-eyed dilating terror. She was moaning to herself softly and muttering, almost as though she were already in labour. Perhaps like me, she was more frightened of the hospital than of anything else. Even those who had no evident complaints and who might well have been expected to be full of conventional joy were looking cross and tired, possibly at the prospect of having such a tedious afternoon. There were a couple of young girls in the row in front of me, the kind of girls who chatter and giggle on buses and in cafes, but they were not giggling. They were complaining at

great lengths about how their backs ached and how they felt sick and how they felt they'd never get their figures back. It seemed a shame and there we all were and it struck me that I felt nothing in common with any of these people, though I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them. I was like that too. I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it. Fabulous. Thank you so much. And I'm afraid that is where we have to leave the not so mean streets of 60s london huge thanks to linda and lucy for leading us through the drabble lands and to nikki for making the sounds of our remote quartet feel bedsick close if you would like show notes with

clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 189 that we've already recorded please visit our website at thatlisted.fm and if you'd like to know what we've been reading this week you can hear that on lock listed which is available via our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted if you would like to buy the books discussed visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. And we're always keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Yes, your Patreon subscription. Mentioning that, picking that up again from Andy brings you other benefits. Indeed, if you subscribe at the LotListener level for about the same amount as a bottle of gin from Rosamund's local Unwinds,

you get two extra exclusive podcasts every month. We call it LotL listed because it began in the wenlock tavern just before lockdown and it features the three of us talking and recommending the books we've been reading and films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight people who have subscribed at this level also get their names read out on the podcast accompanied by lashings of genuine thanks and gratitude so here we go go. Thank you to Andy Sharman, a marvellous writer. Thank you, Andy. Thank you to Cohen Cuggle.

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so much. Now, before we go, Lucy, is there anything you wish to add on the topic of Margaret Drabble and or the millstone that we have not covered? Where do I begin? No, only joking. I think the only thing I would say that we didn't have a chance to discuss is just how interesting a career she had when she starts out writing these um these early novels are very interested in sort of individual female experience and then as she goes and becomes clearly kind of more established and and uh i think aware of her own voice she branches out and by the sort of late 70s and into the 80s she's writing these kind of very very kind of big uh condition of England novels which are hugely

important and I think that's something that you know people like to maybe dismiss her earlier work as sort of that whatever the quote was from the review about a particular kind of woman's story but she's really not doing that throughout her career and I think that in itself is a fascinating transition as well. Yes I feel like there's a whole um oeuvre to explore with with Margaret Drabble and um Linda as you were saying you know she's sort of been rather typecast over the last however many years but in fact her the range of her work is is pretty incredible i think it's also interesting that um all her novels as far as far as i can remember all contemporary they're all set in the present she doesn't write historical novels she doesn't run out of things to say she always has something to say and done like lucy i really liked her final novel

because you know she's 10 years ahead of me in terms of ageing. And she deals with debt. And I think it's an extraordinary book. I can understand why somebody of your age wouldn't relate to it, perhaps. But I really did. I'm ordering it now. Well, listen, thanks so much, both of you. Thank you.

I'd read The Millstone before, but going back to it, what I found so interesting is, as you were both saying, this seemingly quite slim novel manages to contain so many readings within it. I had a very different experience on second reading than I had on the first reading. And I also we haven't talked very much but I thoroughly

enjoyed the film adaptation A Touch of Love if you want a bit of late 60s post Cathy come home kitchen sink it fulfills that brief tremendously eloquently also has some lovely shots of the old reading room at the British

Library too. Johnny? I really really loved this book in a way that I wasn't quite expecting to I just wanted this one sentence that sums up to me it's sort of strange kind of intelligence that review couldn't have been wrong I think there's a really really interesting moral intelligence at work in this book but she says very early on rosamund the character says i did not realize the dreadful facts of life i did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us it's just it's good good. That's one for the notebook. Amazing book. Well, thanks for giving us the feel-good ending.

I could do one that's funny. Sorry, thanks, man. I could do one that's funny. No, go on. Give us another one. Go on. This is for backlisted fans. They'll love this.

She says, I do not care very much for plots myself, but I do like to have a sequence of events. Oh, no. No, no, no. I'm not. I have a sequence of events. Oh, no. No, no, no, I'm not. I don't approve of that. No, no, no. Well, listen, thanks, Linda. Thanks, Lucy, and thanks, everybody.

Thank you. We'll see you next time. We'll be back in a fortnight. Thank you. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. © BF-WATCH TV 2021