Primrose Pathfinder

THE WATERFALL by Margaret Drabble. 290 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.95.

The history of the English novel, heroines department, could be summarized as stories of Girls Who Dared To. They swooned, they wept, they rolled their eyes upward, but they dared to. They dared to, and did they ever pay for it, those primrose pathfinders, from Richardson's Clarissa to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Margaret Drabble is a presumably emancipated young Englishwoman in a presumably emancipated world. But her stories--at 30, she has written five brilliantly uneven novels--return atavistically to the primal theme. The difference is, society no longer really punishes the girls who dare to. They do the job themselves, wryly, with masochistic lashes of good old late-20th-century guilt.

In The Waterfall, Miss Drabble's self-victimizing heroine is the well-inhibited product of a "faintly clerical background." Jane Gray finds life's natural processes an overwhelming ordeal. Marriage is a great unease. Pregnancy is "almost unendurably frightening."

Nothing is too trivial to be a nightmare for Jane. Housekeeping is quite beyond her. Walking a child to nursery school takes every ounce of resolution she has.

Just after bearing her husband Malcolm a second child, Jane takes as lover her cousin's husband James. Malcolm is a successful musician. James is an unsuccessful garage owner and sportscar buff. But James, with his potency-symbol Maserati, can do one thing Malcolm never could: give Jane sexual satisfaction. (The problem of the modern girl who dares to is that, all too often, she is also the girl who can't.)

To less intelligent and less hung-up novelists than Miss Drabble, the Jameses of literature have been just the priapic princes to deliver a fair princess from her prison tower. For Miss Drabble, sexual love can also lead to the ultimate trap in which puritan self finally gives hedonist self the punishment it deserves. "I will invent a morality that condones me," Jane cries in desperation. "Though by doing so, I risk condemning all that I have been."

Almost like a suicide, she throws herself into "pure corrupted love," with Romeo and Juliet sounding doom in her mind: "These violent delights have violent ends." And in due course, another potency symbol--this time an Aston Martin--nearly kills the lovers. A curious kind of post-catastrophe serenity enters the novel. The puritan's dues have been paid, and for the moment all is in equilibrium. Jane, a blocked poet, can even write again.

But puritans are not got rid of that easily. Miss Drabble has composed her dazzling and anguished novel as a "schizoid third-person dialogue," with alternating sections written as "I" and as "she." "She" is mostly the girl who dares to. "I" is Freud's good old superego, self-recriminating, doing society's work even when society itself has lost its enthusiasm to play enforcer. It is the "I" that has the last word. The closing sentence of the novel reads significantly: "I prefer to suffer, I think."

But everything is not back where it all started from. The Waterfall, Miss Brabble's best work so far, is a superb audit on the profits and losses of love to a woman threatening to destroy herself and those who love her. In a masterful final-balance statement for Jane, Miss Drabble combines hope with scruple: "My need for James had not saved me from myself, but it had perhaps saved others from me."

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