Britain's literary power couple Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd turn the lens on their own lives
The two discussed their family stories in a 2001 interview
This summer, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, Eleanor Wachtel presents 10 of her favourite episodes chosen from the show's archive.
This episode originally aired in May 2001.
For 60 years, Margaret Drabble has been writing fiction that reflects our times. Her husband, Michael Holroyd, is one of the most influential contemporary biographers. In different ways, both have also examined their own family stories.
Drabble was only 24 when her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. Prize-winning titles such as The Millstone, Jerusalem the Golden and The Needle's Eye established her as a chronicler of the changing lives of women and, more broadly, British society. Her 2000 novel, The Peppered Moth, was inspired by the life of her mother, a Yorkshire woman who could be difficult and unpredictable.
Holroyd is often credited for the revival of 20th century literary biography. He's perhaps best known for his mammoth three-volume life of George Bernard Shaw — for which he received an advance of more than a million dollars. He's also produced meticulous biographies of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John. His books Basil Street Blues, Mosaic and A Book of Secrets blend memoir and family history with biography.
In a rare joint conversation, Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd spoke to Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the 2001 Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal.
Why biography?
Margaret Drabble: "The frivolous answer is that my publisher at the time, George Weidenfeld, didn't believe in fiction at all. And he did say to me, 'isn't it time you wrote a proper book?' And I rose to the challenge.
"But I think the deeper reason is that I've been very interested in the connection between life and work. I've only ever written literary biography, and I just feel that when you study a life closely, you may see where [the literature] comes from. So I'm interested in the life and the transformation — how much is it transmuted? What in the life creates the work?"
Michael Holroyd: "I sometimes think that the lives of authors, of writers, lie invisibly between the lines of the text, and if you can in some way bring it to light, you enrich that text. And to be ignorant of that is like a psychiatrist not having any knowledge of the unconscious mind."
Importance of the past
Margaret Drabble: "I just find the origins of human life and of humanity perpetually interesting, and every time somebody digs up a yet older bone or skull and claims it is a hominid, I am just intrigued by the way we push back the barriers of time and humanity. What was it that made human consciousness? This is the big riddle that nobody knows the answer to.
"I'm just interested in the beginnings. When did the first human being see that the moon was the moon and that time was time and that death was death? I'm just intrigued by that. I want to go back and back. If we understood when humanity began, we might know what it was designed for, supposing it were designed for anything."
Michael Holroyd: "The most magical instrument to me is the Hubble telescope, the most modern piece of technology. Like a great eye up there which looks into the past. That ancient and modern combination is absolutely magical — and I'm entranced. I can't understand it, but I am absolutely hypnotized by it."
I want to go back and back. If we understood when humanity began, we might know what it was designed for, supposing it were designed for anything.- Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble: "The difference between Michael and myself is perhaps that Michael is interested in geological time and I am really interested in that human span, from the first human moment to the last. I am interested in the contemporary, but the contemporary embraces [the past]. We are all part of what we have been and we're part of where we're going and we won't see the end of the story — but maybe we will.
"I just find it so intriguing that we're suspended in our contemporary moment, but technology, as Michael has said about the Hubble telescope, is taking us further and further back into the past and also prolonging our lives at the other end of the human span. So we live historically at an interesting moment because it's extending in both directions."
Michael Holroyd: "It's as if we contain the answers somewhere in us, but we can't always bring them to the surface. We can't quite understand them."
Margaret Drabble: "It's going to be very, very annoying when we die without knowing."
On writing about family in The Peppered Moth
Margaret Drabble: "I think it's something that comes to everybody at a certain age, and it usually comes just too late when your parents have died and you can't ask them all the questions that you wanted to ask them.
"In my case, I wanted to write about my mother, a character who has perplexed me my entire life. She died in 1984, and it took me a very long time to approach her as a subject.
"I think it was the time lag. But also, as you reach a certain age, you do become more curious about family patterns because you see yourself — you thought you'd cut free — but you find yourself repeating certain patterns that you realize are deeply inbred. And you wonder how far back they go. So you start looking at your family history.
"While writing this novel, I did find out quite a lot that was new to me. But when I thought of writing it down factually, I realized that I wouldn't have the liberty to speculate, or if I did it would annoy a lot of people — quite legitimately.
I needed to put in the rest of the story, the next generation, things that were going better. So it turned into a novel.- Margaret Drabble
"I still feel that the integrity of my mother's life has to be addressed one day, and maybe one day I will [write a memoir]. But I needed, at this particular distance in time, to write something. And it did turn into fiction, because I needed the techniques of fiction to explore it. Also, to be quite honest, to write a simple memoir of my mother would have been just too sad. It would have made me too depressed and sad. I needed to put in the rest of the story, the next generation, things that were going better. So it turned into a novel."
Invisibility in Basil Street Blues
Michael Holroyd: "I am to be seen, to some extent, through my parents and my grandparents — what I inherited from them, their reactions to me. There are reflections of me, but part of the theme of the book, apart from how and why I became a biographer, is the seeking of invisibility and the use that is to a biographer.
"In a lot of the places where I ended up, such as the army or at school, to be looked at, to be pointed at, was trouble. But if you placed yourself in the middle rank and gradually lost your identity — became a number, not a name — you were free of them. It was like being invisible, and that freedom was wonderful and I intended to use it."
Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd's comments have been edited and condensed.
