A Dream About Dandys and Beanos

John’s post below reminds me that I haven’t yet noted Margaret Drabble’s well-deserved elevation to Dame of the British Empire. I read The Waterfall in my late teens, just because it was on my parents’ bookshelves, and didn’t like it at all, presumably because I didn’t understand a word of it (my parents’ bookshelves provided a lot of my teen reading, including every single on of Shaw’s plays, and the very weighty Auld report on the William Tyndale affair – I was not very discriminating and even read The Concrete Boot which is, if I remember correctly, truly dreadful). I started reading Drabble’s novels as an adult only after hearing her talk about The Witch of Exmoor on Radio 4 and heard her talk about its foray into political philosophy (I assign chapter 1 in my upper division political philosophy class to be read after we play the original position game). But I liked them so much that I stopped about half way into her ouevre, on the principle that I want to have more available to read for the first time later in my life (the same reason that I stopped reading Trollope and Dostoevsky, and stopped watching the new series of Doctor Who half way through the second season; from which you can tell that have an iron will). Anyway, John’s post reminded me of Lady Drabble’s elevation because she is the author of one of my favourite passages from the whole of literature. It brilliantly the evokes the personality of a middle-aged man whom life has (so far) defeated. It’s on page 11 of The Needle’s Eye which is, I think, my favourite of her books so far. Dour and depressed Simon Camish, enduring an unsuccessful marriage, is about to go to a dinner party hosted by his friends Nick and Diana:

He wondered what they would try on him this time, remembering the last occasion when he had been invited out to dinner without his wife and had found there, like a risen ghost, a woman whom he had once admired for two whole years, hopelessly mildly and unrequited, and produced for him so much too late, laid on his plate like a peach or a slice of pineapple, yet still, even served up, with a ghost-like and sullen aspect, as unwilling and hopeless a prospect as ever, with the added disadvantage (unlike the comparable peach) of being no longer loved and no longer desired. What more useless than an image of a past goal, never attained and no longer wanted? It was an indictment of both past and present, like a dreadful dream he had once had, in which he had found himself in a room full of unread Dandys and Beanos—hundreds and hundreds of them, piles and piles of them, all virgin, all untouched, and had woken finding himself thirty, and the Beanos not even there. Surely she would not arise again, this ghostly creature, expecting to be wooed across such a muddy ditch….

Marvelous. Right down to the hint that it was the Beanos, not the Dandys, that really mattered.