I shall never finish what would have been my twentieth novel. When I started it, it was to be called Iridescence, but after I had been working on it for a while I changed the working title to Butterfly. The opening image was of bubbles floating over a hedge into a neighboring garden, bubbles blown by two fair- haired Polish girls. This in time linked itself in my mind to the image in Thomas Gainsborough’s celebrated painting of his two daughters chasing a butterfly (c. 1756), a work which remained, like many of his family portraits, unfinished. The grandfather of the narrator in my novel was to have been an Oxford entomologist, and for a while I interested myself in insects, attending a short course on diptera at the Natural History Museum in Oxford, and buying myself a microscope. The bubbles, the butterflies, and Gainsborough remained interwoven in my memory, long after I had abandoned my novel, and when I saw in the newspaper a preview of a Gains-borough exhibition of family portraits that was to be held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in Novem-ber 2018, I knew I would need to see it.
I had been struggling with the novel for some time before my daughter Rebecca fell ill, and as her illness progressed I knew I would not even want to try to finish it. When she died, on Easter Tuesday, April 2017, I knew my life as a novelist was over. I had ceased to be the person that I once was, and I had lost the source from which I used to write. Maybe it had dried up; maybe I had lost access to it. I don’t know which. Sixteen months have now passed since her death, and, prompted by more information about the forthcoming exhibition, I am revisiting some of the thoughts I had about the nature of the unfinished, and about the characters and the story that I deserted, the story that deserted me. Here is a passage from what was then still shaping itself as a novel, though I had by this stage ceased to deploy a fictional narrator, and was speaking in my own embattled and bewildered narrative voice. I remind myself that this was written before Rebecca fell ill, before I had thought I would ever have to write the words “my daughter died.”
Extract from Butterfly:
Those little silvery-haired Polish girls chasing their bubbles reminded me of that famous painting by Gains-borough, of his daughters Mary and Margaret chasing a butterfly—a cabbage white, which art historians say was already dead when it was painted. Butterflies and bubbles, we have been taught, belong to the iconography of the ephemeral. Vanitas, vanitatis. Perhaps that’s why the children appeared to me to be so poignant, so emblematic. Painters of the past used to love to paint bubbles and butterflies, and, more glumly, skulls and bones, to remind us of our frailty. Bunyan used the chasing of the butterfly as an emblem for the vain pursuit of pleasure, though there wouldn’t have been much pleasure in it for the butterfly: he describes the eager little boy pursuing the creature through brambles and nettles and over molehills
as if all joy
all profits, honours, yea, and lasting pleasures
were wrapped up in her…
Bunyan condemns the child because “all his labour and his large outcry / is only for a silly butterfly.” The butterfly represents not itself, but “painted nothings and false joys,” although Bunyan does concede that it is “poor” as well as “silly.” (And maybe, in the writing of that period, the word “silly” suggests innocence rather than foolishness.)
In Gainsborough’s painting, the older sister seems to be restraining or warning the younger—against the prickles of the thistle on which the butterfly alights, against the folly and the probable disappointment of the chase.
Against, perhaps, the harming of the butterfly? The poor and silly harmless butterfly?
This last and perhaps anachronistic interpretation would have been recognized as a possibility by William Wordsworth, who, some fifty years later, describes how he used to hunt butterflies (to kill them or bottle them or pin them or mount them, or just for the fun of the chase?) until checked by his sister Dorothy (or, as she appears in the poem, Emmeline). Though in fact, when we look at the poem more closely, we see that both he and Dorothy, in their childish play “together chased the butterfly!” He continues
A very hunter did I rush
Upon the prey:—with leaps and springs
I followed on from brake to brush;
But she, God love her, feared to brush
The dust from off its wings.
Dorothy didn’t have the killer instinct, but she was prepared to join in the chase.
The non-harming instinct, the pathetic fallacy (though maybe it isn’t a fallacy) was a great leap forward for human beings. Wordsworth was mocked for employing it so often, but it also gave us Paul Nurse and his Nobel Prize and his work on DNA and the cell cycle. Nurse did not like to work with mice. He preferred yeast, which does not feel pain. Whether or not insects feel what we could call pain is a matter of dispute.
Gainsborough sketched and painted his daughters many times. The concept of childhood was born in the eighteenth century, and he had his models to hand. In the Ashmolean in Oxford there is a portrait of the younger daughter, Margaret, dressed in “peasant’s clothes,” or so the caption states. It is harvest time, and she is a peasant girl, gleaning. She has been following the plough, to gather the grains that fall for the poor. It is a tender but melancholy portrayal, of a young girl with cropped brown hair tied back in a minimal plain white bonnet, with a large sheaf of dark golden wheat verging clumsily towards her lap. The flesh tones are of blue and pink and grey, infinitely vulnerable, as are the tones of the clouded autumn sky above her. Her low-cut dress (not a peasant’s sturdy thistle-and-bristle-proof dress) is in tones of fading pink and gold and grey. Her eyes are large, sorrowful, subdued, apprehensive. Her head is gracefully inclined, her delicate nape exposed and fragile. Poignant, sad, anxious. Docile. Awaiting her fate.
Gainsborough was much affected by those pink-grey tones. There is another portrait by him of a little peasant girl collecting faggots in a wood. She has the same shades. She too looks trusting, sad, resigned, and docile.
Most of Gainsborough’s portraits of his two surviving daughters are said to be unfinished. He sketched them on the move and as they played. His firstborn had died as an infant, and maybe her early death cast a proleptic shadow over the lives of her sisters. Their lives, too, were in some ways unfinished and ended sadly. Although the evidence is that they were pretty, and grew into beauties, and moved in fashionable society in the marriage market of Bath, they do not seem to have been much courted, and only one of them married. Both are said to have fallen in love with a friend of (and sitter for) their father, the virtuoso oboist Johann Christian Fischer, and the elder one, Mary, married him, somewhat against her father’s wishes, but the marriage lasted only a matter of months. Both Mary and her sister Margaret were mentally unstable (requiring medical intervention by another notable family friend and portrait-sitter, Ralph Schomberg), and the two women ended up living quietly together, first in the pleasant West London suburb of Brook Green, then in Acton: an acquaintance commented that “Margaret is odd in her behaviour, and her sister quite deranged.” (Did they perhaps suffer from hereditary syphilis?) Mary is said to have believed that the Prince of Wales was in love with her: this would not have been as foolish a fancy as it would have been had it been entertained by you or me, as they did actually know the Prince of Wales, whom their father painted several times. But it did cause her to be accused of wasting her life in “vain pomp and self-complacency” and monarchical delusions.
Gainsborough painted everybody who was anybody. He also painted mushroom gatherers, swineherds, girls collecting faggots.
Dorothy/Emmeline Wordsworth also became deranged in mid-life, and spent many years with wandering wits confined to a Bath chair.
Bunyan might have drawn a moral from this. But I won’t.
[end of extract]
At this stage I made an abortive attempt to return to my fictional narrative, but instead wandered off into a dissertation about what happens to characters in unfinished novels, or unfinished characters in finished novels. Perhaps they wander forever in the limbo that Rudyard Kipling created for them, in his strange short story “The Last of the Stories,” first published in volume form in an even more curiously entitled collection, Abaft the Funnel. In this uncharacteristic tale, the Devil of Discontent, who lives at the bottom of Kipling’s inkpot, appears to him in a dream and transports him to the Limbo of Lost Endeavour, where the souls of all the characters go: “all the characters that are drawn in books, painted in novels, sketched in magazine articles, thumb-nailed in feuilletons or in anyway created by anybody and everybody who has had the fortune or misfortune to put his or her writings into print.” They gather in a domed hall, “more vast than visions could embrace” (a dome which bears a striking and appropriate resemblance to the Reading Room of the old British Library): many of them are cripples, and some possess odd eyes and parti-colored hair, “and every fourth woman seemed to be weeping.” These are the victims of careless authors or copy editors or proof readers. Kipling meets fifty-one of his own characters—he rightly prided himself on creating characters from a wide social spectrum—and finds himself reproached by some of them for misrepresentation. They complain that he didn’t understand them. They are caught between being marionettes and being fully human, and at the end they sing to their creator a wailing ovation:
But we brought forth and reared in hours
Of change, alarm, surprise.
What shelter to grow ripe is ours
What leisure to grow wise?
Alas, poor lost souls!
It would be inappropriate to describe Gainsborough’s unfinished portraits as abortive or unsuccessful, for we now praise and value highly the informality of the sketch, the suggestiveness of the hidden detail revealed by conservation, the evidence of second thoughts. We appreciate work in progress. The Gainsborough exhibition has much to say about his family feelings, his ambitions, his hopes for his daughters. And it establishes that in the well known and carefully posed painting of himself and his wife, The Artist with his Wife and Eldest Daughter Mary (c. 1748), the daughter who died in infancy was painted in after her death. She was retrieved from the grave for the family tableau.
My mind occasionally reverts to the half-realized characters in Butterfly, wandering in limbo. Odd little memories of my abortive research come back to me. When I went to study diptera at the Natural History Museum, all the other members of the extramural course were male, and most of them were middle-aged. There was one exception. He was a ten-year-old boy called Oscar. He had silver-gold hair, like the Polish girls, and he had a passion for diptera. He was there with his uncle, and he asked if they could sit with me over the lunch break. I was surprised and pleased. And he told me all about his strange love of flies. He fits in, somehow, into the unfinished portrait. I wonder where he is now. People don’t become entomologists now as they did in the Victorian era, and in the earlier years of the last century. Maybe I’d have given him a role in the novel if I’d developed it.
Perhaps I will print out Butterfly, and deposit it with the rest of my papers in the depths of the Cambridge University Library. Rebecca’s papers lie nearby, her published and unpublished poems and her diary and her literary correspondence, with their own Special Collec-tions reference number. And there they sleep until the second coming.
Margaret Drabble’s last novel, The Dark Flood Rises, was published in 2016. This essay in part commemorates her daughter, Rebecca Swift; details of the Rebecca Swift Foundation, which supports women poets, can be found at www.rebeccaswiftfoundaton.org.
