"There are certain ways of becoming attentive," British novelist Margaret Drabble said in a Paris Review interview in 1978. "Like walking. If I go for a long walk, I can think better because I don't have to worry about what I'm doing."
Thirty years later in "The Missing Piece," an essay written for The Guardian newspaper, Drabble again brought up the subject of walking--this time describing it as one of her antidotes to depression. In the opening paragraph of the essay, she includes references to various literary figures alongside examples from her own life.
from The Missing Piece*
by Margaret Drabble
Virginia Woolf's father went in for mountaineering and public groaning, mine for gardening and a kind of tuneless humming; he also liked to walk with his dog Anna by the river Deben in Suffolk. My mother sought relief in pre-Prozac pills called Tofranil, and in novels. I take long walks and do jigsaws. (Reading doesn't do the trick so well any more, although I still read obsessively.) These are all attempts to alleviate depression. We claim we talk much more openly now about depression than we used to, and it is true that many confessional memoirs dealing with it have been published in recent years, some good (William Styron's Darkness Visible, Gwyneth Lewis's Sunbathing in the Rain), some bad, and some exploitative, but it's hardly a new topic. Melancholia has been with us for centuries, and Hamlet was not the first to have suffered from it. Tennyson feared what he called "the black blood of the Tennysons," an inheritance of mental and physical disability and drug addiction, and exorcised his demons in the intense, hypnotic and enervating melancholia of his verse. Some can harness it to their own purposes, and ride the waves. Sylvia Plath rode bravely and fearlessly for a while, yet in the end went under.
Selected Works by Margaret Drabble
- A Summer Bird Cage, novel (1963)
- The Millstone, novel (1965)
- The Waterfall, novel (1969)
- The Needle's Eye, novel (1972)
- The Realms of Gold, novel (1975)
- For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age, criticism (1978)
- A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature, criticism (1979)
- The Middle Ground, novel (1980)
- The Radiant Way, novel (1987)
- Angus Wilson: A Biography (1997)
- The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th ed., criticism (2000)
- The Red Queen, novel (2004)
- The Sea Lady, novel (2006)
- The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, nonfiction (2009)
* "The Missing Piece" by Margaret Drabble was published in The Guardian, April 4, 2009.
