Signatures

by David Pryce-Jones

  Generosity to those he thought well of came naturally to him and the other side of the coin was readiness to call writers he didn’t think well of charlatans or hoodlums. I sent him my book about the Palestinians, The Face of Defeat, published in 1972, and he endorsed it: “It is really a book which everyone should read. The truth is that the Arabs did not have to be defeated. They could have stayed in their homes in Israel and lived a better life than in exile. The main thing is that you are an excellent writer and the facts speak for themselves.”

  Fame had already caught up with him. On the floor of the room in which he worked were a number of mail-bags which did not look as though they had been opened, or ever would be. “They’re always writing to me,” he said of his readers. “I can’t get away with anything.” He had a way of cocking his head to one side as if listening and learning, and immediate facial movements gave away his thoughts. “You aren’t a radical?” he asked, suddenly stricken with anxiety by something out of place that I must have said. There was a mischievous humor in him but my impression was that the fate he had managed to escape in Europe had given his inner self its special poignancy.

  Unusually in a contemporary writer, Singer let the doings and sayings of his characters speak for themselves rather than be a medium for the author’s voice. When I taught creative writing for an academic year at the University of Iowa, I tried to get it across that plain statement makes any and every character and context believable, even the most unfamiliar. By way of illustrating the point, we read in class some of the sketches in Singer’s memoir of his Polish-Jewish childhood, In My Father’s Court. One member of the class drew attention to himself by wearing a heavy tweed suit and a felt hat, a turnout not much seen in Iowa. He sat at the back of the room and never spoke. A day came when I spotted him in the university library laughing at what he was reading, which I saw was the score of orchestral music by Anton Webern. He was to tell me that he had once played the tuba in a band that had toured Batista’s Cuba. It was almost midnight a few days later when he rang the doorbell and handed me the manuscript of a novel with the title Bodkin. Barton Midwood had come into my life.

  Bodkin imagines a world in which all human endeavor is mere disturbance. The mysteriously silent individual at the back of the room had done consummate work. I sent the manuscript to my publisher, Arthur Cohen, the editorial director of Holt Rinehart and a man of exceptional intelligence. Thanks to Arthur, Bodkin was published by Random House in 1967. A review in the New Statesman of the English edition spoke of it with awe as “a literary discovery.” Francis King found it “weird and troubling.” Bart inscribed a copy for me. “I hope you enjoy this book. It is the best I have in me. If I had never met you, I should probably never have written it. If the author of The Stranger’s View [my novel of 1967] likes it, that will please me more than the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award or even an angry letter from the Pope.” Esquire, the Paris Review and other prestigious magazines published short stories of Bart’s that were collected in Phantoms (1970), his second book.

  Isaac Singer liked Bodkin. He said that Bart reminded him of Bruno Schulz, who was shot dead by a Gestapo man in the streets of his native town of Drohobycz in 1942 before he had had time fully to use his literary gift. My father was living in New York, and in the course of a visit to him I took the opportunity to introduce Bart to Isaac Singer. I was sure they’d get on. Unexpectedly Bart turned up in London, met Antonia, Clarissa’s younger sister, and was married to her for about a year or so before he returned alone to New York. A worried Isaac wrote to tell me that he had tried and failed to stop Bart calling round so often. Bart, he went on, was completely meshuggah, he had taken to coming up to knock on the door and then to lurking for long periods in the scrubby trees of the courtyard. Real life was taking the shape of one of Singer’s mystifying stories. As a precaution, he felt compelled to go with his wife and live in their apartment in Miami.

  MURIEL SPARK

  A Far Cry from Kensington

  1998

  THE FLIGHT PATH OF Muriel Spark is a wonder to behold. Her conviction was that the purpose of writing is to give pleasure, and in all her books she paid attention only to the innermost self that was her exclusive guide to that end. She had a poet’s instinct for the right form and a colloquial style all her own that allowed her to range the whole way from the comedy of manners up to the great unanswerable questions of the human condition. In an age when writers expect to be judged primarily by their sexual, social and political commitments and are therefore encouraged to be one more shocking than the other, Muriel’s wit and independent mind set were conservative as well as revolutionary, that strange combination that surfaces when things go wrong. Since she was speaking for lots of people with hopes and fears like hers, she was successful and deserved to be.

  Born in Edinburgh in 1918, Muriel identified herself as a Scot. “All my ways of thinking are Scottish,” she liked to emphasize, explaining that this meant “being rather precise.” A faint Scottish accent sometimes crept into her speech. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an ode to Edinburgh as Muriel remembered it from her youth: the haunted November twilight coming in across the Dean Bridge, Holyrood Palace where Mary Queen of Scots had once slept, the churches in frighteningly dark stone, “sober churchgoers and quiet workers,” and mothers who call their children “dear” when English mothers say “darling.” Like many others in the late Thirties, Miss Brodie thought Mussolini one of the greatest men in the world and she said as much as she set about shaping the personalities of teenage girls who were her pupils in the Marcia Blaine School. Famous Scots like Hume, Boswell and Robert Burns also have to be kept in mind.

  Close and mostly unexpected observation of detail gives Muriel’s prose its personal touch. An aside on the part of one of the several fictional writers in her novels notes how “A chance descriptive detail in the right place” brings a scene to life. A striking example occurs in Curriculum Vitae, her autobiography, where in the sentence that first introduces her father Bernard Camberg (known as Barney) she makes the major point that he was Jewish and the minor point that he wore the same clothes as other fathers and spoke as they did too. Employed by a rubber company as a fitter and mechanical engineer, he appears to be someone about whom there is nothing of great significance to say. According to Muriel, her mother Sarah (known as Cissy) Uezzell had “a rather rare old English name.” In spite of this surname, or perhaps because of it, Cissy was wholly or partly Jewish, a mixed heredity for which Muriel coined the phrase “Gentile Jewess” and used it in the plural as the title of one of her earliest stories. Granted her acceptance of Jewish as well as Scottish identity, Muriel belonged to a minority of a minority.

  Sydney Oswald Spark (known as Solly and later by his initials SOS, the Morse code signal to summon help) put in a truncated appearance in her life. Born in Lithuania like Barney’s parents, he had emigrated with his mother to Edinburgh. Thirteen years older than Muriel, he had a contract to teach mathematics in Southern Rhodesia, nowadays Zimbabwe, and in 1937 at the age of nineteen Muriel joined him out there. “Why I married this man,” she gives way to a rare burst of self-reproach in her autobiography, “I will probably never know. It was a disastrous choice.” A son, Robin, was born. Muriel did not care for the colonial company that was on offer socially; she never met Doris Lessing, a Rhodesian by birth, a future novelist and the same age as her. Moreover, Solly became alarmingly violent, showing more and more signs of a nervous disorder that was probably genetic and in any case condemned him to be a permanent hospital patient. Muriel saw no irony in retaining his surname on the grounds that Spark has “some ingredient of life and of fun” missing in Camberg.

  Escaping, Muriel spent the last year of the war in Britain. Fortunate at last, she was taken into the Political Warfare Executive, a covert operation that under the auspices of the BBC and the Foreign Office was broadcasting to Germans what now is designated as fake news. One aspect of her job was to take afternoon walks
with selected high-ranking prisoners of war and as prettily as possible extract stories from them that PWE could exploit. Muriel’s life at that point was imitating Muriel’s art.

  “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions,” is the opening sentence of The Girls Of Slender Means, published in 1963, by which time nasty people were rich, allowing for exceptions, or in the final words of that same opening paragraph, “the best of the rich being poor in spirit.” Muriel’s over-riding aim at the time was to establish herself as a writer. The ruthlessness with which she did so is recorded by her biographer Martin Stannard, though he calls it dynamism. A single page of his lengthy book covers the period when Muriel decided to make whatever sacrifices were necessary in order to write full-time. This involved a parting of the ways with lifelong consequences. First of all, she consciously cut loose from family life by dispatching Robin to be brought up by his grandparents in Edinburgh. She adopted a solitary life in a London boarding house with no way of anticipating that it would inspire fiction. Finally, she joined the staff of the Poetry Society, a marginal and even moribund organization that was a blind alley as far as literary careers were concerned. Stannard smoothes over all this by showering her with select adjectives that have nothing to do with the turmoil of that moment, for instance witty, irreverent, beautiful, placable [sic], capable, courteous, teasing and even sexy.

  She had a particular passion for the poems of John Masefield, the poet laureate, so old-school that he had been consigned to oblivion in his lifetime – which did not prevent Muriel from conducting an uncritical interview and writing a book about him. The poets and publishers who Stannard picks out as Muriel’s colleagues or acquaintances were part of the crowd shuffling in virtual anonymity along Grub Street with nowhere else to go. The one exception was Derek Stanford, more a scribbler than a journalist, and he too would have been forgotten except that he had had an affair with Muriel during the years of her self-discovery and wrote a book about her as well as his memoirs. There is evidence that people who ran into her felt pity for a young woman so dogged and so forlorn. The word went around Grub Street, “Please be kind to Muriel.”

  The public at large first heard of Muriel in 1951 when the Observer, an established Sunday newspaper owned by David Astor and required reading for liberals, held a competition for a Christmas short story. The prize was £250, a large sum at the time, large enough to attract some seven thousand entries. Philip Toynbee, the paper’s lead reviewer and the most influential of the prize’s three judges, later claimed to have “the slightly satanic feeling” that he had called Muriel into being.

  “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” Muriel’s winning story, is a surreal tour de force as astounding now as it then was. The protagonist, Samuel Cramer, a pseudonym Baudelaire had invented for himself, was said to be going strong in Paris early in the nineteenth century and is still going strong in 1946. Half poet and half journalist, he is occupied keeping a petrol pump four miles south of Victoria Falls in the Southern Rhodesia that Muriel had experienced. The voice of Muriel can be heard directly when Cramer says, “The greatest literature is the occasional kind, a mere afterthought.” Appearing in a draught of scorching air, the Seraph sets a destructive fire. Cramer’s initial friendliness turns into a hostile chase and the Seraph is last seen hurrying away “at about seventy miles an hour and skimming the tarmac strips with two of his six wings in swift motion, two folded over his face, and two covering his feet.”

  The Seraph, then, is both real and visionary, a mysterious conjuncture that Muriel is exploring for the first time. Religious belief in invisible divinity is an act of imagination and it seems probable that she deliberately left readers to discover meanings for themselves: Perhaps this is an allegory about God and Man, a projection of hellfire, even a fairy tale told for the sake of its beauty. Discussing Muriel’s religious disposition, Stannard has this to say: “The will of God and human will were at odds,” and he immediately elaborates, “It was, she believed, the will of God that she should be a Christian and a writer.”

  In 1954 Muriel converted to Catholicism. It so happened that the two outstanding British writers of that moment, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, were Catholics: the former supported her first by expressing in private letters his admiration for her fiction and then reviewing her exuberantly in The Spectator; and the latter organized a fund large enough for her to live on. However, Catholicism came between her and Derek Stanford. Increasingly critical of him, Muriel found refuge with the Carmelites at Aylesford Priory, a retreat for troubled Catholics. Perhaps she was not all that troubled, as she is quoted complaining of others there, “All these people hanging about, waiting for miracles.” The affair with Stanford came to an end in 1958, after which he came to represent in her mind the bad side of human nature. The iron entered into her soul when he sold to a university the letters she had written to him, and their lost intimacy was in the public domain. It is common knowledge that Hector Bartlett, scorned in A Far Cry from Kensington as a treacherous blackmailer and virtually cursed in dubious but memorable French as a pisseur de copie, is closely modeled on him.

  Memento Mori, published in 1959, questions reality altogether. Various elderly and distinguished people answer telephone calls, only to hear a disembodied voice that tells them, “Remember you must die,” the very words a handpicked slave had to whisper in the ear of a Roman emperor in the hour of his triumphal procession through the city. This parable, if parable it is, is left up in the air. The unidentifiable caller may be a villain or he may be God, and if the latter either benevolent or threatening.

  The Ballad of Peckham Rye, published the following year, is an equally brilliant existential parable, again if parable it is. Dixie and Humphrey are in church to be married. In accordance with the conventional ceremony, the vicar asks Humphrey if he will have Dixie for his wedded wife. No, says Humphrey, “to be quite frank I won’t,” and he drives away on his own. Responsibility for this scandalous conduct is laid on Dougal Douglas, a friend and neighbor. Though he could be innocent, the two bumps on his scalp where a plastic surgeon took away two horns are compromising. He says of himself lightly, “I’m to be one of the wicked spirits that wander through the world for the ruin of souls.” In short, human happiness is at the mercy of evil.

  Blackmail, betrayal and violence in these novels are merely the ways of the world. A good example is the incident that moves Memento Mori to its close. “The man by the dressing-table hesitated nervily [sic] for a moment, then swiftly he was by Lettie’s side. She opened wide her mouth and her yellow and brown eyes. He wrenched the stick from the old woman’s hand and, with the blunt end of it, battered her to death. It was her eighty-first year.” Even brutal murder is matter-of-fact. In contrast to the run of contemporary novelists, she is out neither to shock nor to moralize, only to record what confronts her. Muriel spent a month of 1961 traveling in Israel and researching for The Mandelbaum Gate. Like Muriel, its protagonist Barbara Vaughan is a Gentile Jewess and she intends to sort out some final truth about herself and the country where religious revelation originated. Instead, two symbolic characters, Abdul the Arab and Mendel the Jew, reduce everything to nonsense: “My father, blah, blah. Long live Ben Gurion! Long live Nasser! Long live Islam! Long live all fat men! Israel! My mother goes quack-quack all day!” Barbara disappears in a cloud of unknowing.

  Early in the summer of 1980, I was asked to interview Muriel. By then, she was either recognized and admired in literary pages as an original writer, or else held up in gossip columns as a paid-up member of the jet set. For several years she had lived and worked in New York, then in Rome and now in Tuscany. A narrow dusty track snaked through olive orchards to the house, actually a casa canonica complete with a dilapidated chapel, that Muriel shared with its owner, Penelope Jardine (known as Penny), an artist in her own right. As luck would have it, my father, Alan Pryce-Jones, was one of those who had been kind to Muriel. Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, he had com
missioned a lead essay from her. Known in the trade as a “Middle.” It was unsigned, but over the years she kept repeating how this piece had boosted her.

  Like most writers, Muriel had various fetishes about pens and notebooks. She wrote in a quite readable longhand in ink with very few corrections and never a second draft. She had an expression about being “on the production side” but believed in inspiration. Penny then typed, also taking care of correspondence with publishers, film producers, agents and accountants. An extravagance was that Muriel had shared ownership of a racehorse with Alan Maclean, brother of the Foreign Office traitor Donald Maclean and her editor at Macmillan’s.

  For six days of the week Muriel would sit at her desk and write. The seventh day, not necessarily Sunday, was always set aside for relaxing. Italy was good enough for Byron and Shelley, she liked to say, so it’s good enough for me. Muriel had bought a BMW, and Penny drove the two of them in it to lunch, usually in a restaurant in some isolated beauty spot, and on occasion to Florence, to Harold Acton or John Pope-Hennessy or us, last representatives of the British who in previous centuries used to settle in the city for the sake of its culture. Penny refused to fly, so they embarked on immense drives across Europe, often to accept some invitation. In 1998, Muriel did a reading at the annual literary festival in Hay-on- Wye, near my home. Afterwards she came to lunch bringing Doris Lessing, a friend of long standing and more than that, an alter ego. They reminisced – the one certain that human agency is decisive in this world, the other certain that it is not the whole story. Asking about a novel I was writing, Muriel borrowed from Shakespeare to hope it would be “something rich and strange.”