by Muriel Spark
‘Integrity … compassion …’ In fact, he had neither. Shortly after I had left the stormy Poetry Society and was settling down to my new job (on a periodical called European Affairs), and was also attending to my own much-neglected writings, I had the nastiest, meanest letter (21 April 1949) from Howard that it is conceivable to imagine, especially in contrast to his previous voluminous effusions of love and admiration. I believe I had already told him that I could not tie myself permanently to him, but that I could be a friend. Perhaps this rankled. Now that I could no longer be of use to him on the Poetry Review he accused me of past arrogance. ‘You attempted to ride roughshod over me’, etc. Now, he wrote, ‘You like to sit back and dream of the past glory.’ It was a very distasteful outburst; he gloated and jeered where previously he had flattered. He had, in fact, already said a few decidedly nasty things on those lines, in conversation, which I found quite awful. Even if he had been right about my ‘arrogance’ (which in fact was only editorship), his was a street-corner attitude. I thought it petty, low. But now, I was thoroughly amazed by that phrase, ‘dream of the past glory’. He meant the Poetry Review. I was at this moment thinking of publishing books in the future. I had no intention of making a career out of my job. And it struck me, that Sergeant’s ambitions were betraying him. I knew he was ambitious, but I had not realized how the intensity of an ambition could be out of all proportion to its object. ‘Glory’ was how he thought of that frightful ill-paid job I had just left. The best magazines at that time were in any case Horizon and Poetry London, both excellent. But to him the Poetry Society journal was ‘glory’.
Shortly after this I arranged to edit, jointly, a book of essays on Wordsworth to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1850. Howard rang me up in a great stew, claiming that I was disloyal to edit a book with another writer and not with him. I sent him about his business.
He then went to a publisher and arranged to do a rival book on Wordsworth.
I had a letter from Howard Sergeant, possibly about some poems, at a later time in the ’fifties. The writing paper made me shudder to think of what I had almost let myself in for. He had put on the letterhead his name in enormous type, followed by letters signifying various accountants’ organizations he belonged to or was a fellow of, in a size at least five times that of a normal professional statement of qualifications on a letterhead. ‘Letters after his name’ were evidently his idea of glory.
Many years later still, when I had published many books, and enjoyed a lot of success with my novels, I met Howard Sergeant. He said he felt he had behaved badly towards me. I looked at him politely. I really could not like that man.
Of those last years of the ’forties Colin Methven remains a constantly sweet memory. After his daughter Deirdre’s marriage I saw little of him. But Colin’s affection for me was warm and steady and I felt the same towards him. I really needed that friendship amidst the madness and frenzy of the Poetry Society. I worried about his health. His heart trouble prevented him from coming to London except on rare occasions.
Many times during my ordeal at the Poetry Society Colin would send a special messenger with tickets for the theatre, for Ascot, for art exhibitions. I could rarely use them. I had an increasing work-load that kept me busy often until eleven at night, not the least of which was a massive and useless correspondence with individual Society members. A lot of time was spent not only defending my position, but also considering manuscripts, pasting up the final format, as we did in those days when sending a magazine to press. On those late nights I would have to take a taxi home, always at my own expense. Throughout all this Colin was an unfailing source of good humour and light. I only have to catch a glimpse of his handwriting among my papers and I feel a glow of happiness.
Two years after I had left the Poetry Society, the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield, said to me, ‘All experience is good for an artist.’ I have always believed this to be true.
I transferred a number of my experiences in the Poetry Society, as I usually do, into a fictional background, in my novel Loitering With Intent.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After leaving the Poetry Society I became aware of the value of documentary evidence, both as a means of personal defence against inaccuracies and as an aid to one’s own memory. Consequently, since 1949 onwards I have thrown away practically nothing on paper. Almost every letter I have received, every note I have made, every cheque-book, every book of accounts, every appointments book, lists of names and addresses, my correspondence with publishers and agents throughout the world, with income tax departments, accountants, lawyers, turf accountants (I like racing when in England) – all and everything, I have conserved in a vast archive. The only, partial, exception are the letters of my friend and literary partner of the ’fifties, Derek Stanford. They arrived daily, so thick and fast, that I could not guard them all. Even so, more than five hundred of his letters survive.
After more than fifty years, this collection has amounted to a social history in itself. One thing I have always known about my well-ordered archive is that it would stand by me, the silent, objective evidence of truth, should I ever need it. It has given me the confidence to proceed calmly with my creative work during all these years when not a few rash writers, ‘scholars’ and journalists have made absurd and false statements about my life, based often on the faulty memory of one and copied in garbled form by the other. Supported, moreover, by the kindness of universities who have made available to me letters of mine which have been sold to them, I have always known that when the time came I could put the record straight wherever necessary. Scholars who have honoured me by writing books about my work, and students who choose my writings for their theses, can hardly be blamed for copying what they conceive to be ‘facts’ carelessly put about by the first ‘spokesman’.
Amongst my papers, those five hundred-plus letters from Derek Stanford are an invaluable guide to my everyday life, my whereabouts on almost any given day or week, the dates on which I moved from one small bed-sitting-room to another, and the work I was absorbed in. The letters came nearly all from Derek’s home at Hounslow, or occasionally from the Baldur Book Shop at Richmond where he had a part-time job. The letters also describe Derek’s literary activities and friendships. Sometimes I failed to open these near-daily letters, being too busy, and so I found them, recently, after nearly half a century, still sealed. Derek Stanford’s letters are full of his ailments, whether from hypochondria or from genuine illness, let us not split hairs. The fact is that phrases like ‘The worst has happened. I am in bed with a cold’ and ‘My doctors say that I must avoid the night air’ abound. It so happened that when I recently came upon one of Derek’s unopened letters addressed to me so long ago, I said to the friend who was helping me to sort them: ‘I bet it’s about his health.’ Sure enough, the note begins: ‘The worst has come to pass, and here I am still in bed on Monday morning.’ I tried another. It starts, ‘Had such a bad stomach-turn yesterday that I must decline the pleasure of going with you on Sunday to June and Neville’s’ (i.e. my friends June and Neville Braybrooke). And the next: ‘Unbelievable as it may seem, the worst has happened & I am down with another splendid cold & cough … The sneezes are abated somewhat to-day but the chest …’
Derek Stanford was a young critic and poet about my age. He was as different from the macho Howard Sergeant as could be imagined. Derek came from a respectable ordinary-class family. He was an only child and lived all the time I knew him with his parents at 46 Lulworth Avenue, Lampton, Hounslow. He was amusing, very eccentric, short, frail and almost totally bald. You could never imagine him on a dance floor or with a tennis racquet in his hand. He was bookish with scholarly leanings, but, as I found gradually, and later to my cost, wildly and almost constitutionally inaccurate.
From the first he was very keen to set up a literary partnership with me and I readily agreed. I found his company refreshing after Howard, and his love of literature infectious. Derek could not be bothered with man-w
oman jealousy. If I made or received a phone call in his presence, he never wanted to know, nor did he care who ‘the man’ was. This was civilized; I didn’t take any notice, and rightly, when Derek wrote to tell me about his previous sexual hang-ups ‘with men and women’. I felt his past was none of my business. I also felt his parents were none of my business, although he was extremely cagey about them – I never knew why. My own parents and Robin, I made available to everyone I knew. My mother liked Derek. She thought him out of the ordinary, ‘a character’. My father had reservations about this friendship. When in the course of a few years it fizzled out, my father was relieved, understandably remembering my marriage with a man whose background we knew nothing about. And when, even later on, after my name had acquired some definite fame, and Derek sold the letters (about seventy in number) I had written to him which survived, my father remarked that ‘the only decent thing that man did was not marry you’. By that time (in the ’sixties), I heartily agreed.
While on the subject of letters, I will take a leap forward to describe, now, the approach which was made to me about those letters I had written to Derek, how horrible it was.
Early in July 1963 an American dealer called Lew D. Feldman asked me if I had manuscripts and letters for sale. I said no, but when he pressed I let him come to my flat to ‘value’ the holograph manuscripts of my novels. I wrote to report to my lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, to tell him about that visit. Feldman wanted to take away all my papers in a taxi. Of course, I refused. He let drop that he had my letters to Derek Stanford, and might sell them back to me. I wrote to Michael Rubinstein: ‘I am far too proud to think of buying them back – even if they were wild and terrible I wouldn’t do so, and they are fairly mild.’ When I saw photocopies quite recently I realized how true this was. These letters are fluent, affectionate, sexless. They deal mainly with publishers and payments for work, literature and religion. However, what made me anxious was Feldman’s statement that he had ‘other material’. I wrote to Rubinstein to report: ‘When I pointed out that any writings of mine, apart from letters, … were stolen property, he said he quite saw this was a delicate point.’ Delicate point!
Not long after this I became aware of the loss from my trunks of two treasured notebooks of juvenilia and some early stories. The poems were written out carefully in my schoolgirl hand – some of them were quite mature poems. I asked my mother, did she know where they had gone? She searched high and low. She went to my school-friend Frances (Niven) Cowell who also looked among her things to see if I had left them with her, long ago; but no luck. Only lately have I discovered that I brought those poems to London from Edinburgh in the spring of 1952, describing them in a letter to Derek Stanford. The poems have now turned up in the libraries of two separate universities in the US, sold to them with another pile of my manuscript material by Feldman. This is by no means the fault of the universities, who assumed that Feldman was a regular dealer. I do not care so much about letters, the physical copies of which are, by law, the property of the recipient although the copyrights are mine. But I do care about my two stolen childhood notebooks. To me, they are family things. They are exactly what my son, my great-niece, or my great-nephews would appreciate to be left to them when I die. Instead, those notebooks of my young dreams went to line the pockets of unscrupulous strangers. As Frances writes, ‘It leaves a sore spot in the heart.’
I saw Feldman once more, in New York where I had gone to write, later in 1963. He again offered me those letters I had written to Stanford, now billed as ‘embarrassing’. On the advice of my lawyer I went along to Feldman’s flat to look at these much-vaunted letters. I took my agent and friend, Ivan von Auw, to give me moral support. Feldman took out from a drawer the pile of letters. (Of course, he did not show me my stolen manuscripts.) ‘Fifteen hundred dollars,’ said Feldman. It was horrible seeing his fingers clutching those handwritten pages of my earlier self, when I was so poor, so determined to face hardship in order to succeed in literature, and at one point so very ill from undernourishment. I took the pages and flicked them through without really reading them. Ivan had a sense of humour. ‘With fifteen hundred dollars she could go round the world,’ he said.
It was true that fifteen hundred dollars was a large sum in 1963. But I wouldn’t have bought back those letters at any price. Going down in the lift to the street door Ivan and I both agreed that we felt like having a bath. Instead Ivan took me for a lovely lunch at the Pavilion on East 57th Street.
Derek Stanford’s main fault as a critic was his inaccuracy. It brought in a great many complaints. A book he wrote on Christopher Fry was challenged publicly by Fry’s friend, Robert Gittings. I was so sorry for despondent Derek that I wrote to Gittings a sort of defence, but I was on the losing side. Robert Gittings pointed out that a silly dance-lyric had been attributed to Fry, which in fact was not his work, and recommended me to feel concern that Derek’s published works be accurate. It was often small facts, dates and titles that Derek couldn’t get right. He wrote an appreciation of Percy Lubbock in The Month to celebrate the award to Lubbock of an ‘OM’ which, Stanford pointed out, was far above a CBE. In fact it was a CBE that Lubbock received. In a literary collaborator, this carelessness puzzled me and worried me in those early ’fifties.
When, in the ’sixties, I was already a well-established writer, and after Stanford had sold my letters, I heard that he was to write a book about me, I shuddered. I didn’t feel ready yet for a book to be written about me in any case, and wrote to the Times Literary Supplement to express my feeling that the time was not ripe.
When the book came out it was, of course, packed with factual errors. These are some of the errors that scholars and students have been taking as fact ever since. I felt Stanford’s disregard for truth very uncharitable towards students and scholars who had put part of their life work into studying my writings, only to find, having taken Stanford’s word, that they had formed theories and drawn conclusions from false premises. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (25 October 1963), for one, was of course sceptical about much of what Stanford said. The reviewer wrote:
Perhaps a writer who refers to Miss Spark taking a fortnight off to read through Recherche dans le temps perdu [sic] rather puts himself out of court as a critic of fiction …
… He is keen to notice evidence of Miss Spark’s ‘delicate oral’ [sic] sense, but, perhaps because he is clearly out of sympathy with her complex attitude towards the Church of her adoption, he sees her wit as merely verbal, when it surely springs from more savage and spiritual depth.
Stanford resented my success as a novelist. He always made out that my narrative writing was a frivolous activity. (He endured, in fact, a nervous breakdown at the time of my first success.)
Having got off his chest this book containing a large number of inaccuracies, some of them merely foolish, about my personal life and my family, Stanford was virtually lost from sight for fourteen years. He surfaced again in 1977 with a book about the ’forties in which I feature prominently. His later memory, untutored and unsupported by anything so trivial as evidence or documents, now flourished and ran wild. I give Derek Stanford full marks for bright colours. Some of his inventions are truly exotic. But people wishing to have my biographical details are wrongly induced by Stanford’s self-styled spokesmanship to imagine that the few years in which Stanford was acquainted with me are the sum total of my life.
As an aid to scholars and students (I hereby beg them, in their own interests, to check with me before using any Stanford material that they are unable themselves to substantiate), I cite the following examples of sheer guesswork, mythomania, invention or what you will, on the part of Stanford:
He claims that my grandmother had gypsy blood. (I would challenge any genealogist to prove this picturesque proposition. Stanford bases his ‘evidence’ on the fact that one of my characters, Louisa Jepp, in my novel The Comforters is a half-gypsy.) He says that I went with him to visit an ‘Uncle Solly’ of mine, about mone
y. (I have asked round the family who this could be. We have no uncle or cousin or grandfather or great-uncle Solly. And nobody by that or any other name who was especially rich. I can only think Stanford has confused me here with someone else.) He writes that I was suckled till I was two years old. (My mother’s comment: ‘How ridiculous! There must be something wrong with the man.’) He says that I was in love with T.S. Eliot. (My comment: I never met Eliot. He was my parents’ age. But if Stanford thought I was in love with another man, why was he hanging around?) He claims that I went to ‘Eliot’s church’ in Gloucester Road. (Presumably Stanford wants to suggest that I was hanging around Eliot.) But I never went to any church in Gloucester Road. The church I attended until I became a Roman Catholic was, on the advice of the editor of the Church of England Newspaper, the nearest one to my home at 1 Queen’s Gate Terrace, St Augustine’s, Queen’s Gate. Stanford asserts that he met Miss Kay, the origin of my character Miss Brodie. (No, Miss Kay died before I knew Stanford. The teacher he met in London in 1949 was my senior English teacher, Alison Foster.)
It should not be assumed that by citing the few trivial examples above I accept the rest of Stanford’s claims as accurate. I could go on for pages. I would write off almost the lot as examples of fabulism, or an inadequate sense of objectivity.
But those efforts of Stanford do not have a pleasant tone. They contain a touch of the sniggering schoolboy, or of the gossip-columnist, that only scholars of equal leanings would seize on and elaborate. His attitude to me after my success was totally unmerited. Our friendship had long since fizzled out. But I had treated him generously, as had my family.
I owed him thanks for the fact that during an illness of mine he acted as intermediary between me and the world, and obtained for me enough money from well-wishers, notably Graham Greene, to be able to recuperate.