The Constant Rediscovery of Barbara Trapido
.jpg)
When Barbara Trapido was in her late twenties, a friend told her that she was lazy: she told such good stories, but she never wrote them down. Trapido did not think that she was lazy. Each morning, she took a bus from Durham, in northeast England, where she lived with her husband, Stanley, a lecturer at the university there, to Sunderland, an industrial town on the coast, where she taught drama and literature at a continuing-education college. Trapido loved her students. They were in their late teens, earnest and tasting freedom for the first time. She wrote her own abridged versions of difficult texts, to help them pass their exams. Trapido didn’t think she was lazy at all. Besides, the friend who’d said that she was—Margo Russell—was an overachiever. Like the Trapidos, Russell and her husband were political exiles from South Africa, where they had opposed the apartheid regime. The Russells were sociologists. They had young children and had blown up power lines belonging to the state.
But it was true that Trapido didn’t have ambitions to speak of. She never had. As a child, she had been small and wheezy, held close by her mother, Anneliese, who was herself an exile. Trapido was hopeless at sports and other worldly pursuits. Her sister, Fran, who was a year older, was much better at all that. In school, Trapido loved fiction and poetry, but she noticed that, where all the bright boys in her classes had plans—for future careers or to study abroad—there was no plan for her. She just assumed, if she even did that, that she would meet a man and get married and learn to cook and sew and have children and live in a bungalow like the one her parents had in Durban.
Russell was insistent. The Guardian was holding a short-story competition, and Trapido had to enter it. When she tried to come up with a story, she heard, very distinctly, the voices of a large family, talking loud, fast, and over one another. She closed her eyes and entered a soundscape. “I didn’t actually see them clearly,” Trapido told me recently. “What I saw was kind of shapes and the way people moved, the way people come to you in dreams.” More than anything, the experience reminded Trapido of her early childhood, when she would spend hours hiding in bamboo clumps in Durban, talking to people in her head. “I thought, Hey, this is playing. This is what I used to do—and I got really addicted to it.”
Her imaginary family—the Goldmans—became her constant companions. They accompanied her to the movies and to the seaside. She wrote down what they said: reams of argument and love. There were five—no, six—children. The mother, Jane, was beautiful and strong, but displaced from her own well-bred family. The two eldest sons, Roger and Jonathan, were captivating in different ways. Trapido wondered what would happen to the middle daughter, Rosie, who wasn’t as clever as her older brothers.
The Goldmans were both like and unlike everything that Trapido had ever known. The father, Jacob, was an ebullient, left-wing philosophy professor. (Trapido’s husband, Stanley, was charismatic; her father, F. J. Schuddeboom, was a math professor.) Jacob was Jewish, like Stanley and much of Trapido’s social circle in South Africa. More than anything, however, the Goldmans were English—and Trapido wasn’t English at all. Her parents spoke German at home. Her mother had been raised in bourgeois comfort on Lindenstrasse, in Berlin, the daughter of a Bauhaus architect. White culture in postwar South Africa was proudly British, but the Schuddebooms had no ties—ancestral or otherwise—to the United Kingdom. Trapido’s introduction to English writing was through books sent by a non-English-speaking grandmother from a bookstore in The Hague: Beatrix Potter, Cicely Mary Barker’s “Flower Fairy” books. When Trapido arrived in England, during the winter of 1963, at the age of twenty-two, it was almost too much to take in. The landscape and the seasons were straight out of Wordsworth. Durban had been repressed and orderly; London was teeming and noisy. Trapido abandoned a doctoral degree that she had been vaguely pursuing, in Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and took a job as a primary-school teacher in North London. Half the time, she couldn’t understand what the children were saying.
The Goldman material rapidly became too long for a short story. But it didn’t have a story, either. Trapido didn’t know what it was. She wrote about fifty pages and put them in a drawer. Then she had her first child, a daughter, who was often unwell. Then she had a son. In the meantime, Stanley became a professor at the University of Oxford. His Commonwealth-studies department, in a seventeenth-century hall in the center of the city became a haven for other South African émigrés and political thinkers, as did the Trapidos’ house, on Southmoor Road, a short bike ride away. Trapido was entirely consumed by her life as a mother and an academic’s wife. Stanley was wonderful but impractical. “He would argue and say, ‘No. My pullover isn’t inside out or back to front,’ ” she recalled. People were always coming and going. She didn’t read a novel for years. It was only when another friend—a mother in Oxford—showed her a few pages of a story she was working on that Trapido remembered the Goldmans and recognized that her own work was better. “Until then, I’d just assumed that anybody could write,” she said. “I began to realize that, actually, a lot of people can’t.” She shared the Goldman chapters, which were then almost ten years old, with a few people, who demanded to see more.
Trapido started to write again. She waited for everyone—the kids, Stanley, the visiting graduate students—to go to bed before she cleaned the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, stared into the dark, and summoned the Goldmans. She wrote in longhand, then tidied up on a typewriter, speaking every word aloud. Often, she addressed herself in a mirror that hung in a small room off the kitchen. “I felt I could cry into the mirror and move the chairs around and shout,” she said. She was fixated on rhythm—on how words sounded and the shapes they made upon the page—and the physical presence of her characters in the room. “It’s like staging something,” Trapido said. “You need to know the exits and the entrances. Or like a painting. You don’t want the fruit bowl just floating there—you need to have it on the surface.”
A story crystallized. A girl—Katherine—from a prim, quiet, middle-class home would enter the bohemian, rude world of the Goldmans. She would fall in love, or some version of it. Later, when the novel was published, critics compared it to the “Pursuit of Love,” by Nancy Mitford, for its sharp depiction of a raucous family. But, whereas Mitford used the figure of an outsider to write about her own milieu, here Trapido herself was the interloper, writing about a society that was foreign to her. Everyone just assumed she was English. “I think, Can’t you tell that I’m an outsider?” she said. “I’m just doing anthropology.”
Because Trapido wrote out loud, the book took on an incantatory quality. “I just kept rapping it out while I pushed swings, while I was riding my bike,” she said. “I’d find I was at the railway station when I was meant to be at the chemist’s.” By the time she sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape, a publishing house in London, Trapido could recite the entire book. She called it “Brother of the More Famous Jack,” a quip, made in the novel by Jacob Goldman, about W. B. Yeats’s younger brother, who was a painter. “The title was pretty random, really,” she said.
Cape rejected the novel immediately. Six months later, one of Trapido’s friends suggested that she try Victor Gollancz, a less fashionable but more heterodox publisher, which accepted “Jack” and barely changed a word. Trapido was asked to send a letter describing herself, which was published, to her embarrassment, on the book’s back cover: “I wrote my novel through many nights, at the kitchen table, in my fortieth year, having never before had the presumption.”
“Brother of the More Famous Jack” has been in print since 1982, and will be reissued by NYRB Classics this week. Like other perfect but not extremely famous novels, it has mostly been passed from people who adore it to people who have never heard of it. Trapido didn’t show the manuscript to her parents until it was about to go to the printer. Her mother was convinced that no one would publish it, because the language was so appalling. Her father said that he had found four spelling mistakes.
“That was all he said. So I don’t know what he thought of it, really,” Trapido told me, in one of two long conversations we had in Oxford this summer. She moved out of the house on Southmoor Road after Stanley died, in 2008, to a smaller place nearby, which backs onto a canal. Trapido sat on a sofa in her front room, facing a large brick fireplace. The walls were filled with paintings by her son and her granddaughter; classical music played through the radio. She is eighty-four and slyly funny. When I asked questions, she gave answers that were wildly long and circumlocutory, filled with reminiscences of absolute concreteness—the house that she used to walk past on her way to school in Durban; dressing up as Alice in Wonderland; buying oranges from a racist greengrocer in London in the seventies; people’s teeth and the clothes they wore—and which always swerved, unexpectedly and at the last moment, into precisely considered responses. As she spoke, Trapido often closed her eyes, raised her knees slightly, and brought her hands to the side of her head, as if to enter the anecdote more fully. Her son’s terrier, Beanie, snored quietly nearby. Trapido understood why everyone always asks her about “Jack,” even though she maintains that some of her six other novels are better. “I still quite like it,” she said fondly.
People remember where they were when they read “Brother of the More Famous Jack.” Mick Herron, the author of the “Slough House” spy novels, was an undergraduate at Oxford when the book was published. He saw the mostly rapturous reviews in the newspapers (the book won a Whitbread Prize for fiction) and read “Jack” in his top-floor bedroom, a few streets from where Trapido lived. “The verve was there right from the beginning,” Herron told me. (He wrote the introduction to the NYRB edition.) “But also it’s the subject matter. It is a kind of bohemian life style that she’s dangling as a possibility, the idea of running away and joining the circus.”
Katherine enters the world of the Goldmans after Jacob interviews her for a spot at his university. To her surprise, she soon meets the rest of the family after being brought to their house as the date of a dubious older boyfriend. Timid yet primed to rebel, Katherine is suddenly immersed in the squalor and the refinement of Goldman life: mess everywhere, blazing arguments, children singing Elizabethan lute songs. “There’s a wildness there which is immensely attractive and which she embraces,” Herron said. “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to embrace it myself, but I would have liked to be the person who did.”
During Katherine’s second evening with the Goldmans, Jane goes into labor while making supper. Jonathan, the second-oldest child, is doing his Latin homework at the kitchen table. The three youngest are playing snap on the floor. You can sense Trapido moving the furniture, speaking the parts, planning the entrances and exits:
Maggie O’Farrell, the author of “Hamnet,” read Trapido’s first four novels—including “Jack”—in the span of a few days in the fall of 1996, when she was twenty-four. She borrowed them from the library and devoured them in a damp bedsit in Camden, where she was living at the time, to prepare for a writing class that Trapido was teaching with Elspeth Barker, another novelist. By then, Trapido was well established, but she was generally considered to be a purveyor of “light fiction.” Her books didn’t strike O’Farrell that way at all. “Yes, there are funny bits about her novels,” she said. “Her perceptions about people and her characterizations are funny—as, you know, Dickens’s were. But, at the same time, she’s dealing with enormous themes of tragedy and displacement and emigration.” (Spoiler alert: “Jack” contains shocking sadness.) Instead, O’Farrell decided that Trapido worked in the genre of tragicomedy, which was reflected in the formal influences of her later books. Trapido’s “Temples of Delight” (1990), “Juggling” (1994), and “The Travelling Hornplayer” (1998) are inspired, respectively, by “The Magic Flute,” Elizabethan comedy, and a Schubert song cycle. “Nobody else really writes like her,” O’Farrell told me. “I could read one sentence and know instantly that it was her.”
During the course, O’Farrell noticed how closely Trapido’s spoken voice resembled that of her novels. “She feels like an embodiment of her writing. Narrative story and plot just exude from her,” she said. “She can craft an anecdote about waiting for a bus into something really fascinating and structured.” O’Farrell showed Trapido a manuscript that she was working on, which Trapido encouraged her to finish. She also introduced O’Farrell to her agent, Alexandra Pringle. The manuscript became O’Farrell’s first novel, “After You’d Gone.” “I wouldn’t have done it without Barbara, and I mean that sincerely,” O’Farrell told me. “I don’t think I could have written any of it.”
Pringle became the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing in 2000. She has worked with Trapido, as an agent or a publisher, for more than thirty years. For much of that time, she has been concerned with persuading people to read Trapido seriously, rather than merely for pleasure. “The thing about Barbara’s prose is, because it’s so dancing and light, it’s very easy to miss how intensely clever she is and how beautiful her writing is,” Pringle told me. Pringle met Trapido while she was writing “Juggling,” which contains a fictional student essay about Shakespeare’s comedies that was so good that Katherine Rundell, the writer and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, used it with her own students. Still, “Jack” will always have its own place among Trapido’s books—as her contribution to the genre that Pringle calls “boho girl on the loose.” “They’re some of my favorite novels,” Pringle said. Margaret Kennedy’s “The Constant Nymph,” Rose Macaulay’s “The World My Wilderness,” Elaine Dundy’s “The Dud Avocado,” Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle.” “It was very, very much in that tradition,” she said. “Clever, funny, eccentric, sexy.”
I first read “Jack” five or six years ago, around the time that my wife gave birth to our twin sons, bringing our number of children to four. Neither of us grew up in large families, and now, without ever particularly envisaging or desiring such a thing, we had created one. Meeting the Goldmans, through Katherine’s eyes, and falling in love with them (or at least the idea of them) was a tonic and a release: they were impossible and competitive and, like an overawed house guest, I wanted desperately to be one of them, or at least to be accepted into their midst.
“Thinking about it now, big families, they do occur in fiction, but it’s mostly children’s fiction, isn’t it?” Herron said, when we spoke. “When you’re young, you read about these big families because big families means more adventures are possible.” Herron was one of six children. “That’s all part of the chaos, I suppose. The bigger a family is, the less controlled it is. The more things can happen,” he said. “That leads to narrative, and that leads to story.” The Goldmans abandon London and raise their six children in a rambling, coffee-stained house on the South Downs, in Sussex. When the boys were two, we also moved out of London, to Oxford. In a twist that could be in a Barbara Trapido anecdote, we ended up living on Southmoor Road, a few doors down from where she wrote “Jack.”
When I reread the book this summer, I was amazed at how fleeting many of my favorite scenes are: Jane vomiting into the antique jug in the kitchen is followed, within a few lines, by Katherine self-consciously walking out with Roger—the eldest and most beautiful Goldman son—to pick blackberries: “I grow silently desperate, thinking that Roger will be gone in four days and all we do is have these dead-end conversations.” The chapters fly past, some less than two pages long. Trapido summons the strange elasticity of time when you are young. Seasons pass and nothing happens and then your whole life changes when somebody laughs at your joke, or doesn’t show up, leaving you sitting on a wall in the rain. “It is in our innocence, or in the loss of it, that we are formed in ways that can be reexamined but not undone,” Rachel Cusk writes, in the afterword of the most recent British edition of “Jack,” which was published in 2022. “This novel teaches us to reread our lives, to look again, and to understand what escaped us the first time.”
I noticed that scenes depicting the Goldman family are almost entirely written in the present tense, whereas the rest of the book is in the past. When I asked Trapido about this, she said that it was probably subconscious, or a mistake. Because the book was barely edited, it comes to us—still fresh and occasionally disorderly—from Trapido’s nighttime kitchen in 1981. She reread “Jack” recently and told me that, if she had the chance, she would probably change a few hair styles or phrases that seem dated now, and that she was puzzled that young people still read it at all. “It seems to me quite a period piece, really,” she said. “Why should they still go for it?”
Trapido refined her writing method after “Jack” was published. She would wake up, in the dark, and try to stay in an unmediated dream state. She bought a tape recorder and started playing her voice back to herself. She took great delight in the plots and solutions that would fall into her mind—betrayals and mishaps and chance meetings. “I started writing in a way that I think became much more patterned,” she said. “I got fascinated by patterns.” But the Goldmans never left her. The plots of all of Trapido’s novels intersect to some extent. (O’Farrell calls it the Trapido-verse.) The protagonists of “Jack” recur most fully in “The Travelling Hornplayer,” when Katherine, Roger, and Jonathan are all middle-aged. Trapido has toyed with writing a further sequel; her followers swap gossip about whether this is true, and whether she is still writing.
“I think it would be a really fun thing to do and not difficult,” Trapido told me, of working out the next installment. “Because it would just be like playing.” In her mind, the Goldmans have gathered for the eightieth birthday of Jane—the matriarch—who is now caring for her ailing brother, who had broken off relations when she married Jacob, all those years ago. The other day, Trapido wrote out a long rant from Jonathan. “He’s so stroppy and talky and kind of fun to write,” she said. This time, though, she was determined to give Katherine more of a voice. She also wondered what had become of Sam, one of the younger sons, the only one who could take the back off the washing machine. I asked Trapido if she could still hear the Goldmans as clearly as she had before. “Yeah,” she replied, in a deep and fixed way that was quite different from her usual tone. “I can still hear their voices.” And then she started to tell another story. ♦