by Muriel Spark
I went round it touching everything. I sat at the poet’s desk. I lifted the pencils and smelt them. I wanted to draw the virtue out of everything, and make it my own. In the attic I found a pile of shabby books. These were mostly novels and volumes of nineteenth-century poets, the sort of books that might once have been prescribed school reading. But I didn’t bother much about the titles, I was intent on touching the books. I think I must have felt that by some sympathetic magic I could draw from the poet’s possessions some essence which would enable me to get down to my writing. Perhaps I ought to say here that I haven’t been particularly influenced in my work by this poet. It was merely the will to write that I wanted to acquire.
During the night the sirens went frequently and one heard the thud of the V-1s near or far. I didn’t take shelter, I didn’t see any need to on that occasion. I felt it was impossible that the poet’s house could be hit by a bomb.
Next morning early I went outside and stood exactly where I’d been when I first saw the garden from the door of the taxi. I wanted to get my first impressions for the second time. And this time I saw an absolute purpose in everything both outside and inside the house. I was intensely curious, and greatly impressed now by the unconventional quality of the house.
At this particular moment my life could have taken several courses. Everyone was thinking of what they were going to do after the war. A number of lively prospects involving whole new ways of life were opening before me at that moment. But suddenly in the poet’s house they all seemed unattractive beside the possibility of becoming a writer. One never knows if any particular decision is a right or a wrong one. But whatever its value, I came to this determination, and I was filled with a feeling of freedom and complete dedication which has never left me. And so this poet’s house in which I found myself by chance became for me a symbol of what I was to attempt to make of my life. Perhaps if I’d foreseen the difficulties I wouldn’t have had the courage to choose this particular vocation. But at that time I felt so confident that I would become a writer that before I left for the country I lifted the poet’s telephone and rang up a literary agent. I enquired if they would like my new book. So far I hadn’t written any book, but still I said: would they like to have it? I added that I was speaking from the house of the poet, whose name I didn’t hesitate to mention. Possibly on the strength of this the literary agent said, yes, yes they would like to see the book. I promised to send it the following week.
Of course it was some years before I wrote anything like a book and before I even discovered what kind of writing I could do best. But that evening when I was back in the country I started writing a poem. It was a terrible poem. But I made two copies of it and sent it to two magazines at once. Amazingly – because it really was a frightful poem – both magazines accepted it, which put me into a most encouraging dilemma. And I felt I was really set up in my literary career.
Since that time I’ve been in the houses of many poets and writers, though not as a trespasser. There’s always something special and something simple about a writer’s house. I’ve never met a really good writer who lives in high style. I think a stylish life is unsuitable to the writer, and very often in the house where there’s a mild disorder one finds the writer with the best powers of organising his work. Order where order is due.
[1960]
Footnote to ‘The Poet’s House’
The houses of famous writers have, to me, an ambiguous quality. First, they are houses like anyone else’s. If they had not been lived in by famous people there would be no plaque on the wall, no visitors to roam round the rooms. In some cases ordinary people are living there, hardly aware of the past illustrious occupants; one can easily see such a house in the light of everyday life, and the practical requirements of real estate.
But also, these houses invite an imaginative surrender. Lamb House at Rye, Sussex, for instance: a desirable small residence, especially in these days when large houses are a burden. But when we place Henry James in those rooms, in his study, assiduously composing his voluminous, his lovely novels, stories and long letters, entertaining Edith Wharton in the dining room, pacing round the garden, the very ordinariness of the scene gives place to a sense of wonder.
And the Brontës’ house at Haworth – if it had not been preserved as a museum it would surely by now be completely restructured inside. No-one could wander round these rooms without being struck by the smallness of their living space. The three Brontë sisters shared a bedroom hardly larger than a linen-cupboard; their workroom was the common living room.
The Casa Magni near Lerici where the poet Shelley lived, and from the terrace of which Mary Shelley looked out over the bay in her vigil for the boat which never returned, is now, from one point of view, merely a desirable property on the Ligurian coast. The windows of Byron’s apartments in Venice look out on the Grand Canal with modern eyes peering from behind the curtains.
But the fascination of a writer’s house arises from a combination of the spiritual and the concrete. We know that out of that bleak rectory in Yorkshire came Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and all the richly imaginative works of the Brontë sisters. We know that there in the Casa Magni, on the terrace, in the garden, Shelley wrote his last poems and filled the house with his febrile energy.
To me, a famous writer’s house is irresistible; I find sheer magic in the rooms, in the staircases, in the gardens. The more ordinary the scene, in fact, the more I succumb to sensation, wonder and awe.
***
Once I found myself in the house of a famous living poet without at first realising it. The memory of that experience still returns to me, although it was over forty years ago.
Memory is not a straight line. It is like a tree, spreading its branches in all directions. The more I remember this episode the more it ramifies in my mind.
The experience took place in 1944.
[…]
‘It was a small enough incident, but the experience was important to me,’ I wrote at that time. Indeed, it was in that house that I finally determined to become a writer by profession.
The famous poet was Louis MacNeice whose work I loved and admired tremendously. I had just been reading his poem ‘The Trolls’, written after an air-raid.
Death has a look of finality;
We think we lose something but if it were not for
Death we should have nothing to lose, existence
Because unlimited would merely be existence
Without incarnate value…
We thought a lot about death in those days. We didn’t speak much of our fear because we were all in it together. But certainly we were aware of the imminence of death, and felt the penetrating chill that accompanied the howl of the sirens.
[…]
I have always known that this occasion vitally strengthened my resolve to become a writer. In the short story I wrote eight years later, and my broadcast of sixteen years later, I reproduced some of the actual scenes of that event. The story tells of an imaginative meeting with a soldier, and a brush with death. It has taken me over forty years to realise that the quality of the experience was intensified by fear of those flying bombs and the knowledge that destruction might fall at any moment, even on the house of the famous poet.
Louis MacNeice is dead now. He would have recognised how the resolve to be a writer, to create, can be fortified by the coincidence of a certain time, a certain place. To me, this is conveyed in his poem ‘Off the Peg’:
The same tunes hang on pegs in the cloakrooms of the mind
That fitted us ten or twenty or thirty years ago
On occasions of love or grief; tin pan alley or folk
Or Lieder or nursery rhyme, when we open the door we find
The same tunes hanging in wait…
Many years later Louis MacNeice asked me to read a poem of mine, which he admired, at a poetry reading. I didn’t tell him, and I don’t think he ever knew, that I had been his uninvited guest, or h
ow much the ‘house of the famous poet’ had inspired the course of my life.
[1985]
My Madeleine
Proust’s madeleine fetish is well known. He dipped a small cake in a cup of tea; he put it to his lips; and the past came flooding back. He experienced the same effect when he tripped over a cobblestone in a courtyard.
Memory touchstones are most often connected with smells. Who is not moved to recall some previous experience by, for instance, a waft of honeysuckle, or the smoky whiff of a coal fire?
My Madeleine is an empty notebook. A friend who accompanied me one time into a stationer’s shop remarked, ‘You examine a notebook like a housewife in the market examining a fish.’ As soon as I see one (and I acquire many and many), I desire to fill it in. Whenever I am stuck for a new subject or something to write I go to my stock of notebooks and select a new one.
Long ago, in 1951, I saw advertised a prize for a short story on the subject of Christmas. The prize was two hundred and fifty pounds, a handsome sum in those days. It was a Saturday. I went out and bought a new notebook and then sat looking at the empty pages. My lovely school notebook, all ready to be written in, filled my mind.
I started writing a story on my favourite subjects, which at that time were angelology (the fascinating study of the order of angels) and the French poet Baudelaire. To make the story unusual, I placed it in Africa, on the River Zambesi, where I had lived for some years. The result was a story entitled ‘The Seraph, the Zambesi, and the Fanfarlo’ (since reduced to ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’). I finished writing it at about three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, then set about to type it. But I found I had too little typing paper. Saturday afternoon, all the stationer shops were shut. I walked round the streets of London’s South Kensington, where I was living at that time, and found nothing open which could possibly furnish me with typing paper. My friends, better off than I, were away for the weekend.
I felt an inner compulsion, an obsession, about finishing the story and mailing it off that day. Then I saw that there was a small art dealer’s shop with the owner inside. I had been in the shop before, merely to look at his modern paintings and discuss them, for I was much too poor to buy paintings.
No, he told me, he didn’t sell typing paper.
‘But you must have some of your own. Do give me, lend me, some,’ I said. ‘I need it, for a story.’
So he gave me a little sheaf of paper, and I finished and mailed the story. I promised I would buy a picture if I won the prize. It was stipulated that the author’s real name should be put in an envelope to accompany the entry, with a pseudonym on the outside. I chose the name Aquarius, my sign of the zodiac. I was lucky, and won the competition.
I bought from my art-dealer friend, for thirteen pounds, a charcoal drawing of a boy listening to a radio, by Stanley Spencer. I bought a dress for six pounds, the first new dress I had had in four years. I gave my mother fifty pounds to pay for my son’s bar mitzvah (we were a mixed-origin family, and my son wanted to be a Jew), and another fifty pounds went to another needy author, who, strangely enough, began to detest me from that day.*
[2000]
* Derek Stanford, who thought Muriel Spark was wasting her time writing fiction.
How I Became a Novelist
Although I have written five novels† I still have difficulty in thinking of myself as a novelist. Before I became a novelist I was a writer, and I have been attracted to writing ever since I could hold a pencil in my hand. In a sense I think it’s more accurate to call myself a writer than a novelist, because what I actually enjoy most of all about novel-writing is the act of putting pen to paper: writing away, and forgetting everything except my subject-matter.
The reason why I have turned to novels in the last few years goes back a long way. As a child I used to enjoy telling myself stories in which I, of course, always took the principal part. There were many exciting adventures and always a happy ending. And as I grew older I read every scrap of fiction I could lay my hands on. I was allowed to read anything I liked from the Sunday newspapers to The Pilgrim’s Progress. We had at home some bound volumes of Victorian ladies’ magazines, and I read all the romantic love stories most avidly. I was especially fond of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novels of adventure. There was no censorship, and there was a public library not far away. Sometimes, when I read a particularly impressive book, I used to extend the story in my imagination and make the characters live on in my own world of invention.
Also ever since I can remember I have had the habit of going over conversations which I have overheard, or in which I have taken part, and re-casting them in a neater form. You know the occasions when someone has said something provocative, or silly, or perhaps something pleasant – you do not think of the really good, appropriate, answer until afterwards, when it’s too late. I sometimes think, ‘I shouldn’t have said this or that. What I should have said was…’ and so on. This may be a silly habit, but it has had one practical purpose for me as a novelist: it has helped me with my dialogue. What I like doing is to make the characters in my novels say as nearly as possible what they ought to say, one remark thus provoking another. I enjoy making a foolish character say a very silly thing, and a clever character say something really intelligent. And sometimes a character can have a double-edged tongue and say something with two meanings. I enjoy contrasting such characters and seeing what happens, always in the hope that everything will be said and done more clearly and appropriately than in real life.
Up to 1955 I had been writing and editing books about nineteenth-century writers, particularly the Brontës whom I admired greatly, and Mary Shelley, the author of that thrilling novel, Frankenstein. I read and wrote a great deal of poetry and was especially enthusiastic about the narrative poems of John Masefield, particularly Reynard the Fox and Dauber. Later, when I was writing a book about Masefield and went to visit him I found his zest for life and dedication to the art of story-telling very stimulating and, in a way, infectious. I felt that I, too, wanted to write stories, but I was not sure how to begin.
One day I wrote a short story – it was my first – for a competition announced in the Observer. It was a very peculiar kind of story and it puzzled a lot of people, but it won the prize. The story was about an angel that appeared on the Zambesi river. I do not know what gave me the idea for the story, but certainly I believe in angels and I had been up the Zambesi on a boat.
Some time after this a publisher wrote to me and suggested that I should write a novel. I had been ill and was to be convalescent for some time. I had written nothing for over a year and in the meantime had entered the Roman Catholic Church – an important step for me, because from that time I began to see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings. I think it was this combination of circumstances which made it possible for me to attempt my first novel. On the practical side, my publishers gave me some money to start this non-existent novel, and I was also assisted by one or two generous patrons, including Graham Greene. I took a lonely cottage in the country and started writing The Comforters. I wrote the first sentence on the day I moved in, while the rooms were still a jumble of packing-paper and saucepans and books.
I soon found that novel-writing was the easiest thing I had ever done – far easier than writing a short story or a poem or a piece of criticism. I found that the novel enabled me to express the comic side of my mind and at the same time work out some serious theme. But because it came so easily I was in some doubt about its value. I still have the decided feeling that anything worth while is done with difficulty. And since I write my novels so quickly and easily I sometimes feel I am cheating. Of course, after finishing a novel I am always exhausted, and life seems unbearable for a week or two. But the actual writing is more like play than work.
The Comforters was published in 1957 and the reviews were very encouraging. It was made into a play for the wireless, and I think the play was an improvement on the book, because it showed the plo
t more clearly. When I started my next novel I was in an adventurous mood and I wrote a desert-island story called Robinson.
Then I decided to write a book about old people. It happened that a number of old people whom I had known as a child in Edinburgh were dying from one cause or another, and on my visits to Edinburgh I sometimes accompanied my mother to see them in hospital. When I saw them I was impressed by the power and persistence of the human spirit. They were paralysed or crippled in body, yet were still exerting characteristic influences on those around them and in the world outside. I saw a tragic side to this situation and a comic side as well. I called this novel Memento Mori.
Next I wanted to give my mind a holiday and to write something light and lyrical – as near a poem as a novel could get, and in as few words as possible. So I wrote The Ballad of Peckham Rye, the story of a curious young man who causes trouble and high jinks wherever he goes. I set the story among the young people of Peckham, which is near my home.
My fifth novel – The Bachelors – was published in October. There are so many confirmed bachelors living in London, with their funny little ways and eccentric ideas – doing their own shopping and washing out their socks in hand-basins, and I thought the subject might make an amusing book.
But having finished it I had to revise it thoroughly. One of the scenes in the book is a criminal trial, and court procedure must be accurately described. I do not enjoy going over a novel once I have written it, nor revising pieces here and there. On the whole I do very little re-writing. I dislike going back over my work – I always feel I might turn into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. Once a thing is written I like to finish with it, because so many other ideas come to me.