20 Books of Summer: A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

I recently heard Margaret Drabble speak in an episode of the excellent Slightly Foxed podcast*. She's been writing since 1963; at 83 years old she's still as sharp as a knife, and it was so interesting to hear about her early days as a novelist. She says she started writing because she could fit that around young motherhood, and that she wrote a novel in between each of her three children

 'writing was such a convenient career to combine with having a family' (Margaret Drabble, The Art of Fiction No. 70 - The Paris Review. Fall-Winter 1978.)

(From this I conclude that she had help - her novels frequently feature au pairs - as I couldn't have written anything more than a haphazard shopping list when my three children were little.) 

Drabble's early novels deal with the lives of young, usually reasonably affluent, women in 1960/70s Britain. They are often set in London, although Stratford-On-Avon is another popular location; they frequently feature actors (Drabble joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1960). Drabble's themes, many of them autobiographical, are the conflicts between marriage, motherhood, and independence. These are women - of whom Drabble was one - who have been highly educated (Drabble read English at Newnham College, Cambridge) but are then expected to return to the domestic world. If they are rich, they lunch. If they are less well off, they work but are still expected to cover all of the housekeeping chores. Their main function, ultimately, is to have babies.

In A Summer Bird-Cage, the narrator, Sarah, returns from Paris (where she has been doing a variety of unexciting jobs since graduating from Oxford) to Warwickshire to be a bridesmaid at her elder sister's wedding. Beautiful, accomplished, glamorous and ice-cool Louise is marrying the author Stephen Halifax. Sarah loathes Stephen and has no idea why Louise has chosen him. Sarah can't really see the point in marriage at all, but she understands that;

It seemed to be one way of escaping the secretarial course-coffee bar degradation that had been creeping up on her ever since, two years ago, she had left the esoteric masonic paradise of Oxford.

Stephen Halifax may be rich but he is a horror; 

He never makes a joke....He behaves like his books...when I talk to him I always feel that I am badly dressed and have the wrong accent. I am sure this is what he does think, but as he thinks the same about everyone, his opinion is hardly objective. Nobody escapes. Everyone is either ridiculously rich or ridiculously poor, or ridiculously mediocre or ridiculously classy. He leaves no possibility of being in the right, unless he means to leave himself as a standard, which would be logical, as he is almost entirely negative. He looks grey...he looks very inconspicuous and distinguished and grey...

Sarah assumes that Louise is marrying for status and creature comforts;

Louise has a real old aristocratic predatory grandeur....perhaps Stephen was marrying her because she never looked ridiculous.

She is cold and distant with Sarah, who sees her as ruthless and attention-seeking, and is jealous of both her looks and her 'success'. 

Louise, teach me how to win, teach me how to be undefeated, teach me how to trample without wincing.

she muses to herself.

In the aftermath of the wedding, Sarah tries to understand the sister that she's not been close to since early childhood. In the process, she also evaluates her own life and thinks about what she really wants from it. 

There is much brilliant social observation in this novel. We are in the very middle-class world of sherry parties, houses with music rooms, melancholic Swedish au pairs, people who call their parents Mama and Papa....The wedding itself is full of contemporary detail;

I concentrated on eating stuffed prunes, prawns, smoked salmon and suchlike.

Sarah and Louise's frumpy cousin Daphne is expertly - if cruelly - drawn. Sarah (and presumably, by extension, Drabble) doesn't hold back in pointing out her fellow bridesmaid's hopeless appearance;

I was highly embarrassed by having to sit next to Daphne, who looked such a fright in her ultra-smart dress. It was a tarty dress, but at the same time it did suit me: it had a very short skirt and I have nice legs. whereas Daphne's are muscular and shapeless round the ankles and covered in hairs and blue pimples. Oh the agony.

And earlier;

Daphne peered and chatted at me and told me heart-breaking, pathetic stories about the Classics master at the Boys' Grammar School who apparently took her to the cinema from time to time.

One does get the feeling that Sarah's heart is not in fact 'broken' by Daphne's sad desperation.

At the wedding reception Sarah meets up with her old university friend Gill, and her husband Tony, a would-be artist, whom she has always seen as the perfect couple

She and Tony had got married the minute she left the Porters' Lodge...and had since then been living in a flat on the King's Road.

But to Sarah's surprise and shock, Gill informs her that she and Tony have separated, unable to cope with the (relative!) depredations of life outside the cocooned world of Oxford. 

'It got so bloody cold, posing (Tony sees Gill as a convenient life model) especially when they cut the electricity off and the fire wouldn't work.....You don't know what a difference it makes not to have meals provided. To know that if you don't start peeling potatoes there won't be any potatoes....It's too dismal.'

(Sarah later shares a flat with Gill, allowing Drabble to examine the predicament of a sad and disillusioned woman who can't let go of her philandering ex-husband.) 

Also present at the wedding is John Connell, a semi-famous actor and Stephen's best man;

John rather fancies himself in jeans, open-necked shirts and coal-heaver's jackets with leather patches on the back. It's all a big game because he went to Winchester: his histrionic tendencies only bloomed at Cambridge...where I gather he was the King of the ADC.

Louise and Stephen embark on a protracted honeymoon. Sarah picks up the odd snippet of news about them from friends, but hears nothing from Louise herself. In the meantime she gets a job, and through socialising in London begins to work out what is really going on with Louise, just why she married Stephen, and where John Connell fits into the story. When Louise and Stephen finally return to London, matters come to a head, Louise turns to Sarah for help, and Sarah realises that she needs to reevaluate some of the ideas she has long harboured about her sister.

I enjoyed A Summer Bird-Cage; it captures an era, although its characters do all come from a certain layer of society. The relationship between Sarah and Louise was interesting; Louise is caught in a 'bird-cage' of her own making, but given expectations at that time, she perhaps had little choice.  Sarah rejects that cage, but is sometimes equally trapped by her own assumptions and indecision. I did feel that by the end of the book each woman had grown in understanding, both of one other and of life. 

I think, however, that the fact that this is a first novel shows. There is far too much waffle about Sarah's feelings, some of which is wrapped up in such obtuse language that it didn't make much sense to me;

Satire won't do. Worldliness won't do. But until you can do them both you can't do anything. Immaturity is no good, and they make me feel immature, all those people....they caught undertones that I couldn't....The thing is I couldn't start to feel them in my terms because I couldn't really feel them in theirs, and one needs the double background.

What? 

A while ago I read The Garrick Year, Drabble's second novel, and I'd say that it's definitely better, with clearer writing and more nuanced characters. But A Summer Bird-Cage is worth reading, and at the end of it one can't help but ask whether anything has really changed for women. 

*you can hear the Slightly Foxed podcast featuring Margaret Drabble here: https://foxedquarterly.com/margaret-drabble-a-writers-life-slightly-foxed-podcast-episode-17/