The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  Well, I employed an agent, David Higham Associates (earlier, Pearn, Pollinger & Higham). David Higham himself ran the firm, an old wooffie behind moustaches. It fell to my lot to deal with one of their men, Paul Scott, later a well-known novelist and author of the Raj Quartet, celebrated as a television series. I subsequently became friendly with Paul Scott, but I never put him at the highest level of fiction writing. At the time, he knew of my literary success, but when he read Robinson (if, in fact, he did read it) he wasn’t at all impressed. He asked me to come and see him about it. My clothes were old-fashioned but my best. He sat there pontifically with my manuscript in front of him on his desk, and said, after all, what was this novel about? A man and a girl on an island? It was, in fact, about a lot more than that. As he spoke, Paul flicked the typescript of my novel across the desk towards me with a contemptuous gesture of his third finger and thumb. I fairly loathed him for that. I said: ‘Don’t represent me if you don’t want to.’ ‘Oh,’ he condescended, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  That afternoon, it so happened, I had been summoned to meet Edith Sitwell. I went round to the Sesame Club, where Edith held court. I was still fuming against that ghastly agent, especially his rude gesture. The very thought of his touching my typescript now offended my guts.

  As soon as I caught sight of Edith Sitwell it brought a totally new dimension into my day. She was impressively grand, quite eccentric, but she had no doubt whatsoever of what the artist in literature was about. High priests and priestesses: that’s what we all were. She wore her usual loose, dramatic robes, her high, Plantagenet headdress. Her lovely hands were covered with the most beautiful rings I had ever seen actually worn: they were deep, deep, coloured stones – aquamarines, blue agates, large and pool-like. A junior editor from Macmillan, an alcoholic who thought nobody knew, was fawning and ‘hand-washing’ and fussing around her, a performance which Edith, with half-closed eyes, magnificently and pointedly ignored. She asked me what I would drink, suggesting her own preference, gin and pineapple juice.

  I had been in some trepidation lest Dame Edith should remember from seven years back an article I had written in Poetry Quarterly based on books by herself, Louis MacNeice and Kathleen Raine. In the course of the essay I had suggested something to the effect that W.B. Yeats was a ‘greater’ poet than Sitwell. This did not please her at all. She protested to the editor. I forget what happened next. The years pass … I am sitting next to the wonderful woman herself in the Sesame Club and she is telling me how taken she is by the mysterious qualities she finds in my writing. Plainly she has not connected me with the impudent reviewer of yore. Let it stay that way.

  With her was another equally splendid woman, about Dame Edith’s age of seventy. She was introduced as a ‘war heroine’. I fancy she was also a Dame. How I wish I could say who in fact she was. Another young editor from another publishing house had now joined the gin-and-pineapple party. I let my eyes rove among the Sesame Club attendants, wondering which of them was the one who was reputed to have ‘converted’ Dame Edith to Catholicism. I have put converted in inverted commas because I know that her actual entering the Catholic Church took place under the guidance of our mutual friend, Father Philip Caraman, SJ. The Sesame Club waiter, however, was no doubt the object of many conversations on the subject. I chose as a possibility an Italian-looking fellow with intelligent eyes.

  While a great many of these impressions played on my mind like a left-hand accompaniment on the piano, the main topics came forth like those played decisively with the right hand. Dame Edith wanted to tell me an amusing story of her youth, already knowing from my writings that it would be dear to my merry heart. Her father, Sir George Sitwell, she said, had received an anonymous letter accusing him of having an affair with a well-known woman of the village. Incensed, he wanted to find the culprit, and to that end posted up the letter in the window of the village post office, offering a £5 reward. Edith said it was one of the joys of those days for her to go down to the post office with her brothers and read the salacious letter.

  We found we had another friend in common, the poet Roy Campbell, whom I greatly admired, both as a person and as a poet. Edith told us with some relish how the critic Geoffrey Grigson had been accosted and slapped by Roy Campbell for having ‘insulted’ her in a review. Those were the days! (I felt, actually, that this was going a bit far, but when I looked up the review later on I saw that it was indeed decidedly and deliberately insulting.)

  Inevitably, I came out with my experience that very afternoon with my agent, showing her how he had flicked my typescript at me with his thumb and third finger. She took an intense interest in the story. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at him through them as if he was an insect. Just look and look.’ She showed me with her own eyeglasses, which were hanging on one of the chains around her neck, how it was done.

  I didn’t have any lorgnettes, but the next time I had an appointment with Paul Scott I meant to slip into my bag a magnifying glass, fully intending to subject him to a scrutiny if necessary. I forgot to do so, and anyway it wasn’t necessary. He had now read something else of mine. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you,’ were his words. I still think they were strange words, neither one thing nor another. But I thought of Edith Sitwell’s advice, and I simply didn’t care.

  [1997]

  Pensée: Miss Brodie on the Stage

  For any creative undertaking what you need is courage. It is the first requirement for an artist.

  Courage to adapt. Jay Allen has not transferred the words of my book to the stage script, she has rather lived and absorbed the book, and transferred the ideas, for dramatic purposes. It is a very successful technique when in the right hands. I think the duration of the play – over thirty years – testifies to the adaptability of the book.

  Every work of literature should make a world of its own. In my view this entails excluding all other worlds. The reader or the audience should not be aware of it, but actually this is achieved by isolating the girls from any family considerations. In real life they have mothers and fathers. In the play the parents do not appear. This provides an artistic concentration, and I think makes the production as a whole less diffused, more enjoyable.

  [1998]

  The Short Story

  The short story has generally one commanding idea whereas the novel should have several interacting ideas – in my view as many as there are chapters.

  It is not a bad system to write each chapter as if it were a short story.

  I did this once, in my novel The Mandelbaum Gate. It also allowed me to speak from the point of view of a different character in each chapter. This is also good from the commercial point of view. One can serialise or sell extracts more easily.

  (Incidentally the commercial point of view is not necessarily the adversary of art. The commercial discipline is no different from any other discipline, it should not have undue influence on the artistic process. The only adversary of art is bad art.)

  The short story does not bring the life-force of the characters to an end. If it is true as Aristotle said of tragedy that the story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, I would say that the short story deals mainly with the middle. The novel deals with all three, although there the middle is often the beginning, and it is possible to start with the end.

  For a short story I have said that a single idea is best. That is my opinion. For that reason it is often good to start with merely a title, but with one that contains the whole of the idea, the theme of the story.

  Finally, I would like to say that in my experience the short story is a more difficult form than the novel. To me, the more one writes the easier it is for the author, and sometimes for the reader the more boring.

  The short story is to me a form of poem and for that reason alone, difficult though it is, it is the form from which I derive the most pleasure.

 
[1989]

  Daughter of the Soil

  Within six weeks of publication in America Gone With the Wind had sold 326,000 copies. The English sales to date are close on a million and the book has recently been revived in paperback. The American sales [to date] are something like five million. The book contains over 400,000 words. It took seven years to write. When the English edition appeared in 1936, already surrounded by glamorous statistics, the Observer reviewer cattily submitted that it was somewhere between two and three pounds in weight.

  Perhaps because I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, Gone with the Wind in my teens I incline to think it appeals to the eternal teenager. It has an inspired (or at least unpremeditated) emotional immaturity, which is a requisite of every best-seller, and is sometimes a minor ingredient of great art. When I saw the film some years later on the quivering screen of a Central African bioscope I was less impressed. The passage of years, if it improves our taste, corrupts our joy. Reading those solemn pages again a few weeks ago I hardly recognised the book, and noted the repetitive tedium, the soporific padding, the callow ethic.

  What I found most dreary was the fact that nothing whatsoever is left to the reader’s dimmest intelligence. Every time a point of remote subtlety arises it is followed by a detailed explanation. Not a character opens his mouth to speak but a protracted gloss appears in the next paragraph. It is very disconcerting, when you have quite grasped a situation (and the situations are all simple), to find it being plugged home lest you should have made any mistake.

  All the same, the book remains an impressive one because it sweeps on and on, over and above its defects. Large gestures have a fascination. On its appearance in 1936 the cautious critics of these shores were, on the whole, surprised that such a big and best-seller could be so entertaining. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The author, Miss Margaret Mitchell, was killed by a drunken motorist in 1949. Gone with the Wind was her only book.

  ***

  There are two narrative streams in the book. One is Sherman’s progress from Atlanta to the sea, and the other is Scarlett O’Hara’s activities on the home front where she demonstrates without pause the life-force within her.

  The author was well versed in the Civil War period, her bias being strongly Southern. She must have made volumes of notes and I suppose she put them all in the book. She could tell you that the hoops of ladies’ dresses in those parts were worn narrower in 1866 than in 1865, jackets were shorter, bonnets out of style, curls worn at the back of the head. She knew how the Southern whites and blacks reacted to the war at its every stage. She knew the workings of the Ku-Klux, what the towns of Georgia looked like before, during and after the war. She had what you call a wide canvas and everything at her fingertips.

  Miss Mitchell was keen on sociology. If she implies once that the book is about a world in transition she does it a hundred times. She never tires of reflecting, in the voice of some defeated Southerner, ‘The old days had no glitter but they had a charm, a beauty, a slow-paced glamour.’ And that, as has been remarked above, is never enough. There are page-long preliminaries to every such utterance, in which the slow-paced glamour of the old days is shown to be definitely superseded by the glitter of the new.

  These discursions, representing the more ‘serious’ flavour of the book, continually interrupt the meaty human drama which centres round Scarlett O’Hara. The effect is the more incongruous in that Scarlett is by nature indifferent to the war and the Southern cause or any cause:

  She, Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton, alone had good hard-headed Irish sense. She wasn’t going to make a fool out of herself about the Cause …

  And so you are always wondering whose story it is, Scarlett’s or America’s. And you have two books for the price of one. It is undoubtedly Scarlett, however, who has been selling the book these twenty-odd years and who will probably sell it for another twenty before it finally departs with the wind.

  The moment Scarlett makes her entrance on the first page, in the cool shade of the porch at Tara, her father’s plantation, you realise she is going to be a woman of mettle.

  The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, wilful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanour.

  In course of time you learn that she is ruthless, selfish, courageous, and one who permits passion to do nothing if not take its course:

  There was a curious low roaring sound in her ears as of sea-shells held against them and through the sound she dimly heard the swift thudding of her heart. Her body seemed to melt into his and, for a timeless time, they stood fused together as his lips took hers hungrily as if he could never have enough.

  Few novelists would have ventured to take characters so patently out of stock, and few would have succeeded so well in enlivening at least two out of the four principal parts. Besides Scarlett, there is her male counterpart, Rhett Butler, darkly dangerous as Heathcliff, gruff as Mr Rochester, a cynic, a dandy, and a social outcast. But despite his exterior he has plenty of cold mush under the vest, as can be seen from his refusal to be parted from his child’s coffin. The antitypes of Scarlett and Rhett are Ashley Wilkes and his wife Melanie. Melanie is so virtuous she is nearly a half-wit. As for Ashley, though he is your Southern dreamer, much given to ‘book-learning’, he is the unattainable object of Scarlett’s desire.

  Ashley Wilkes – bah! [comments Rhett]. His breed is of no use or value in an upside-down world like ours. Whenever the world up-ends, his kind is the first to perish.

  Scarlett is no fool, she comes round to these sentiments in the end.

  ***

  She is essentially and consistently a daughter of the soil. That is what gives her character alone a certain memorable quality. Nothing at all really matters to her except the land, the physical soil, of her birth. Rather than give up her home for Yankee taxations she is prepared to sacrifice her status and reputation, to pick cotton with her former Negro slaves, to marry for money and march into business on her own account amidst the disapproval of a bereft Atlanta society. Whenever poverty threatens, the peasant in Scarlett emerges. ‘The silly fools,’ she fumes, ‘don’t seem to realize that you can’t be a lady without money.’ Not a noble character, only a sturdy and significant one, the survivor of the toughest, the indomitable New Woman of the West:

  I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help – except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.

  To evaluate a mammoth labour like Gone with the Wind, whether it is a good book or a bad book, seems irrelevant. Of course it is bad art. But you cannot say fairer than that it is, like our Albert Memorial, impressive.

  [1958]

  Heinrich Böll

  The contemporary German author I most admire is Heinrich Böll for the variety and steadiness of his vision and its extra-territorial dimensions; and for the stamina of his patient, almost documentary style. He portrays his characters indomitably proceeding with their lives within, against and in spite of the interference and imposed values of modern bureaucracies, and moulds with wit and intelligence these characters in their own sweet and sour uniqueness.

  Böll does not try any ‘magic’ as a writer. Whatever pains he takes as an author, they do not show. Böll’s narrative methods, especially where he uses the very data-building techniques of state machinery that he satirises, are wonderfully effective in filling the action with small cumulative surprises, items of information that would mean nothing to pinch-hearted bureaucrats or in computerised ministries. Böll is in charge of his own mind. In Group Portrait with Lady the state, whether it is operating the war machine or the peace machine, is expressed obliquely: it has the power and ignorance of the weather.

  I always find Böll’s novels warm, authentic and rich.

  [1977]

  Eyes and Noses

  I was given to think about noses by being given to think about eyes for an essay competition. And the more I thought about ey
es, the less I had to say about them, and the more did I ponder noses. Not that eyes lack scope: but for me there was too much scope: in particular, too many adjectives capable of being associated with eyes. Dry, ambiguous, blue, beastly, wee or haunting eyes are manageable, but after that, the deluge: the Arcturian eye, the strychnic and the televisionary eye, usher themselves to mind; and still to be embraced remain the United Provincial, the Jacobean, the extra-mural, the blunt and biting, eyes.

  I am for noses, because they are frugal as to adjectives and constant in form. It is said that the eyes are the windows of the soul. A fallacy; they are the windows of moods and inclinings, alarums and excursions, which act only as a magnet to more adjectives. No one with a flighty imagination should touch upon a subject which is prone to adjectives.

  It is not so with noses. For, incapable of deceit, noses express only themselves. But they mean much. In fact, the nose is the signpost of the soul. In the sweeping and general sense, that is. That anyone’s nose can be interpreted to mean ‘steady and cheerful’ or ‘homicidal and industrious’, I, as an aphysiognomist, truly doubt. I note that the nose of an officious bus conductor is, from base to tip, altogether too officious. He lets his bus take me past my stop. I am sure he has put the Evil Nose on me. I have to walk all the way back to the National Portrait Gallery, where, on the bust of John Keats, I see an identical nose lending itself an air of the compassionate sublime.