This Weekend, Experience The Enduring Power Of 'The Millstone'

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

With a case of what's old is new again, it is time for our weekend reads segment. And today, we're talking about a book that was first published back in 1965. It's called "The Millstone," and it was written by Margaret Drabble. It's set in 1960s London and centers on a young lady called Rosamund Stacey. Following a one-night stand, Rosamund soon discovers she's pregnant. Remember, pregnancy out of wedlock, 1965, not something that went over well with a lot of people. To talk more about the book and its significance, we're joined by Tessa Hadley. Tessa, thanks so much for joining us again.

TESSA HADLEY: Hello, lovely to be with you.

MARTIN: So as we just mentioned, Margaret Drabble's "The Millstone" is 50 years old. But you only read this book recently. What made you want to pick this up?

HADLEY: Well, first of all, what made me not want to pick it up for all that time? I don't know how that happens sometimes. You feel as if you have read a book because you've known about it for so long. And you forget that actually, you've never opened it up. And I think I thought it was going to be a bit stodgy and dull and earnest. And then, what nudged me into reading it was actually that lovely thing, when you pick it out one day in a secondhand bookshop in an old, tatty Penguin copy. And you suddenly think, oh, it's the day. It's the day for reading this.

MARTIN: I mean, this is a crazy thing to be writing about in 1965, an unmarried girl - an educated girl - having a kid out of wedlock and raising it on her own.

HADLEY: It is. It is provocative. But it was being written about 1965. There are quite a few British novels - I mean, there's Stan Barstow, "A Kind Of Loving," where, you know, it's all unhappy and disaster. And it's all sad and earnest. And then there's Lynne Banks, "The L-Shaped Room." So it was a - it was kind of a testing moment, obviously, where illegitimacy was no longer an absolutely unspeakable secret. Though, you know, it was still socially deeply problematic. What's really radical to me about this novel is that somehow, she manages to simply, calmly insist, this happens, and I am going to do it. And I'm not going to make a great, orchestrated fuss about it or weep huge tears. It's an adventure. And let's just stare it in the face, you know. That - it's the calm of the book, I think, and the absolute insistence that you can be an intelligent woman with a rich life of the mind and have a baby and that those two things are not going to be set in some kind of tragic opposition. They are just going to run along together.

MARTIN: She falls in love with her baby, too. It's - she embraces parenthood.

HADLEY: Yeah. It's wonderful. She has no idea what it's going to be like. She's very funny and dry on the subject of her sister's babies and, you know, any experience she has, which is actually rather little, of babies. She has no idea what it's going to be like. And then I think the passage where she writes, looking at that baby for the first time - it's an interesting passage. She doesn't - she doesn't give way to poetic raptures. She says something very simple, I can't remember exactly what... It was love. And then, she talks about how she talked to a man friend afterwards. And he said, that's not interesting, that love. That's boring. Every woman on the planet experiences it. There's nothing to say about it. But Rosamund holds to her experience. And it - right at the center of this novel, displacing the love for a man, which is usually at the center of the novel - right at the center of this novel is the love affair between this mother and her little girl.

MARTIN: This is a book, as we've mentioned, it was written generations ago, 1965. Do you think it still resonates in the same way today? Does it have the same power?

HADLEY: Yes because I do think that if books have power - really have power - they hold that power. They don't lose it. We are not - "Anna Karenina" doesn't cease to be tragic because we no longer think that adulterous women, you know, they don't need to throw themselves under trains. And equally, the impact of this pregnancy in the face of all expectation, doesn't lose its power just because now it would really - nobody would turn a hair. The crucial thing in this book is not that. I mean, she - Rosamund's very careful to say it herself. She says, it's because I'm privileged and I live in my parent's flat - her parents are away - I live in my parent's flat in a very nice part of London, and everybody treats me as a privileged person I'm getting away with this. If I were factory girl, it would not be so easy and so on. So she says that herself. It isn't society's opposition to what she's done that is the radical element in the book. Actually, it's the book itself and the narration insisting on making that women's bodily experience, pregnancy, birth, motherhood as interesting to literature, as thought-provoking, as richly poetic, as the things we're more used to reading about in literature.

MARTIN: The book is called "The Millstone," by Margaret Drabble. Tessa Hadley joined us from the studios of the BBC in London to talk about it. Her latest novel is called, "Clever Girl." Tessa, thank you so much for talking with us.

HADLEY: Thank you, Rachel. It's a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.