by Muriel Spark
[1960]
† By the end of her life Muriel Spark had written 22 novels.
The Writing Life
‘The Editor thanks you for your kind contribution but regrets he is unable to publish it.’ My mail was full of such messages in those early days in the 1950s, when ‘I commenced author’, as the phrase went.
What came with the rejection slips were poems and essays. I hadn’t yet got around to stories.
At the time I was sharing part of my meagre life with a man my own age, a literary critic; he possessed lots of literary information, which I found fascinating, even useful. (But I suspected he had no idea what to do with his knowledge, and so it proved.)
We sent out our productions always accompanied by a stamped and addressed envelope; otherwise we wouldn’t see our pieces of work again. (I must interpose a memory of the then poet laureate John Masefield, already old and famous and honoured, whose exquisite manners were expressed even to the point of sending that stamped, addressed envelope every time he sent a poem to, say, the Times Literary Supplement, although of course he knew full well that the grateful editor would receive his poem with joy.)
I must say that my rejection slips, if they fell out of the envelopes at the rate of more than two in one day, depressed me greatly. However, I had a list of possible weeklies and little magazines to hand, and immediately I put the poem or article into a new envelope with a new letter to the editor and a new SAE. If the work I was offering looked shop-worn, I would type it out again. The money for these stamps for my outgoing mail was a pressing part of my budget in those days.
Thinking back, it is surprising how many – almost all, in fact – of my once-rejected pieces were subsequently published, as I began to make my name. Among the rejects, of course, I found some which, on reflection, I was not quite happy with. Those I put aside. But the majority of those one-time rejects have become a part of my oeuvre, studied in universities.
I started writing stories after my first story, ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, won first place in a competition run by the London Observer. My companion blew up when he heard that I had ‘wasted my time’ writing the story for the competition, and was quite put out when I won the prize, although he didn’t mind sharing it.
At that time I found it really good to have a literary companion. Sharing the same profession, though in conditions of considerable poverty, gave me the courage to resist any other course of action. Occasionally I took office jobs to help out, but I was always drawn back to freelance writing, especially when eventually I obtained some advance money for books from various publishers. I was given fifty pounds to write my book on Mary Shelley. Somehow I managed to do it well and thoroughly. I revised it a few years ago, and it is in print to-day; I can honestly say I am proud of this work.
Sharing my working life with the man in question in the early ’50s was, however, a great problem. Severe rationing of food was still in force, and as he was mainly living at home with his parents, they kept his ration book. Roughly three days a week he stayed and worked with me, and he shared my food rations. I was really hungry and undernourished in those days and had to pay the price in a few years’ time in the mid-1950s, when my health broke down.
Some good emerged from that, however. I broke with the man I had shared with, and felt the wonderful breath of freedom. Soon I recovered from my illness, wrote stories and started a novel. It was commissioned by Macmillan, London – an act that brought a great deal of criticism down on their heads: in those days publishers did not commission first novels. They gave me one hundred pounds. Graham Greene, who admired my stories, heard of my difficulties through my ex-companion; he voluntarily sent me a monthly cheque with some bottles of wine for two years to enable me to write without economic stress. My first novel, The Comforters, was a success. I was suddenly ‘the new young thing’. Graham was delighted, and of course from that time on I was able to fend for myself. I shall never forget Graham’s sweet thoughtfulness.
The success of my creative work was a great relief to me. I was reminded of the marvellous Italian author Leonardo Sciascia’s advice to writers: ‘Want as much money as you like, but be careful not to need it.’
I was now, also, Evelyn Waugh’s favourite author, since The Comforters touched on a subject, hallucinations, which he himself was working on in his novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold; he was generous enough to write a review of my novel in the Spectator, in which he said that I had handled the subject better than he had done. Imagine the effect this had on a penniless first-novel author.
I find it difficult to re-read the novels and abundant stories I have written in the many years since then. Each one represents the convictions and humours of the writing personality I was at the time.
Thought is the main ingredient of a creative work, and thought goes with intention of some sort. I remember visiting Auden at his house in Austria some years before he died. He was re-writing some of his poems. He said to me, ‘I’m not changing my first intentions, but getting closer to what I really meant.’
What a writer really means can come to light in a great many mysterious ways. On that same visit Auden told me that a typist had rendered the words ‘foreign ports’ in a poem in his handwriting as ‘foreign poets’. ‘I realised that “poets” was the word I really meant,’ Auden said.
I found that once I’ve started on a work, the subject acts as a magnet, almost as if I were consciously surfing the Internet for information. I suppose this has to do with a functioning of our powers of observation. So many facts and phenomena that would normally go unnoticed in the course of a day simply present themselves, as if they positively wanted to be in the book. On occasion this selective process can even influence a book. As an example I can even cite one of my novels, The Only Problem.
It deals with the problem of good and evil as it is expressed in the biblical Book of Job. The main character in the book is studying the biblical text and the mysterious problems involved in God’s relation to humankind depicted by the patriarch Job. I had come to a part of the book where nothing seemed to square. I had, for some reason quite unknown to myself, placed the scene of action near Epinal in France. Then I went there en route to England with my artist friend Penelope Jardine.
Soon after our arrival at Epinal, my friend was looking at one of the numerous tourist brochures littered about the hotel room. Suddenly she said, ‘There is a museum here at Epinal containing a famous painting of Job and his wife by Georges de La Tour.’ It was the turning point of my book. We went to look at the painting, and I could see that it would give me all the impetus and logic I needed for continuing with my story. But why had I already chosen Epinal? I know I had never before heard of this painting. And why did Penelope happen to look at that brochure?
Creativity is mysterious. I have been writing since the age of nine, when, on a corner of the kitchen table I wrote an ‘improved’ version of Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper’. (I called him ‘the Piper pied’ to rhyme with ‘he cried’.) I gave my poem a happy ending, not being at all satisfied with the children of Hamelin disappearing into a mountainside forever, as Browning made them do.
Since then I have learned that happiness or unhappiness in endings is irrelevant. The main thing about a story is that it should end well, and perhaps it is not too much to say that a story’s ending casts its voice, colour, tone and shade over the whole work.
[2001]
Living in Rome
I settled in Rome long ago in 1967 because I found myself returning there, staying longer and longer. I think what attracted me most was the immediate touch of antiquity on everyday life. If you live in central Rome you only have to walk down the street and you come to a fountain by Bernini in which children are playing or a Michelangelo embassy or some fine fifteenth-century building with to-day’s washing hanging out. The names Bramante, Raphael and Borromini become like familiar friends. One comes into the territory of the Republican ages, the Caesars, the emperors and the medie
val popes at any turn in the road, and any bus stop; and there is the Rome of Garibaldi’s troops, of Keats and Shelley, of Arthur Hugh Clough (whose narrative poem Amours de Voyage contains one of the funniest descriptions of the English in Rome during the troubles of 1848). Byron’s Rome, Henry James’s Rome is here; and Mussolini’s big fat dream Rome with grandiose popular centres and concepts.
The first apartment I occupied was in the Piazza di Tor Sanguigna not far from the Tiber on the corner of Via Coronari, an ancient street of antique furniture shops. I was at that time dazzled by the adjacent Piazza Navona, and indeed I still am; I greatly desired to find a more permanent home in the Piazza. I did find a flat there, with a picturesque view of the marvellous Bernini fountain, but devoid of everything else including water. The bathroom and the kitchen, explained the landlord, and the plumbing, electricity and other trivialities were to be laid on by the lucky tenant who succeeded in obtaining from him a contract limited to one year’s residence. The rent alone was high. I knew right away that the project was impossible, but I still enjoy the memory, as I did the experience, of standing in that dark vaulted cave-like apartment while the landlord explained in a mixture of Italian, French and English those terms which I discerned by careful deciphering were exorbitant. I fairly egged him on as far as my powers in Italian permitted, so keen was I to see with my novelist’s curiosity how far he would go. The tenant had to be an American, he said. I replied that I was a Scot, but that I doubted if he would find an American to pour capital into his property with a tenure of one year. He replied that the apartment was in a famous fifteenth-century building in which many famous lords had lived, which was true enough. So he went on, while I looked out of the window watching the baroque fountain playing in the fine October light of Rome. The theatrical figure representing the Nile, with his great hand held up as if to ward off some falling masonry, seemed apt to my situation. ‘Speak to me,’ Michelangelo is said to have challenged his Roman statue of Moses; and indeed, the sculptures of Rome do speak.
[…]
I moved to an apartment full of history in the Palazzo Taverna and I radiated out from there. The palazzo was at the top of the Via Coronari overlooking Castel Sant’Angelo. The main room was enormous, a renaissance Cardinal Orsini’s library. The upper walls and the ceilings were painted with classical scenes and Orsini emblems. I didn’t try to furnish it, but made a sitting room in a remote corner while the rest of the room with its polished Roman tiles was for going for walks. It would have made a good skating rink. In one of the corridors a Roman pillar had been let into the wall. By this time I was used to permanent residence in historic Rome. Part of the excitement of visiting one’s friends was to see what portion of history their living-space occupied. It is practically impossible to live in Rome without finding oneself encamped in history and often overwhelmed by beauty; a statue, a fresco, the perspective of a scene through an archway, with always the busy portière at the door-lodge, making no nonsense about it.
The wives of ambassadors to Rome are hard put to it to seat their guests according to protocol; there are several different hierarchies. In the first place, Italy is a republic. Then, there is an Old Aristocracy whose ancestors were Popes; they were, up to the early 1970s, very much on ceremony if they deigned to go outside their palace walls at all. The New Aristocracy comprise the hurly-burly of princes and counts who have sprung up since the time of Napoleon. Bourbon descendants fall somewhere among this category but I know neither where nor who does know. Ex-monarchs usually find their way to Rome which is another headache for the embassies; and the Vatican with its cardinals and ambassadors top the cake. Fortunately these were not my problems, for whenever I throw a party, high or low as it may include, I make it a buffet.
[…]
The Palazzo Taverna with its fountain in the great courtyard, its arches and small courtyards was fun to live in and my echoing Cardinal’s room was to many of my friends one of the wonders of the world. My cats used to love to sit on a rug while we whizzed them round the vast floor. After dinner everyone in the Palazzo would go down to the courtyard to take the air with the neighbours. One of the fascinations of Old Rome is that there are no exclusive neighbourhoods. Rich and poor live on top of each other.
I go to the Rome opera in the winter. Each year on the night the opera opens there is always a great embracing and greeting of fellow ticket-holders, and ‘Bentornato’ (‘Welcome back’) all round. One never sees these people anywhere else; they are one’s opera friends.
Whether it was a good or a bad performance on the Opera’s second night the film director Luchino Visconti was always there with his friends or rather, as is the way with Italian film directors, his court. ‘Good or bad, I like opera,’ he said. On one special evening, when Montserrat Caballé was singing in a Bellini opera, the rain started coming in the roof. Now, a well-known Roman of that time was the late Mario Praz, a critic and scholar of English literature. (He wrote The Romantic Agony.) He was said to have the Evil Eye and was known as the Malocchio. This nickname wasn’t attributed with any repugnance, but rather as an affectionately recorded and realistic fact (for such people are regarded as carriers rather than operators of the Evil Eye). He was extremely generous-minded towards young writers. Naturally, everyone noticed when Mario Praz was present at a party, and if so, waited for the disaster. There was usually a stolen car at the end of the evening, or someone was called away because his uncle had died. Well, when I saw the rain coming in the roof of the Opera, and heard the commotion behind me, I looked round instinctively for Mario Praz. Sure enough, there was our dear Malocchio and party sitting under the afflicted spot. When he died he was mourned on a national scale. (The Italians put their artists and people of letters on a higher level than anywhere else I have known.) Before his house could be unsealed for his heirs, the robbers got in and looted his lifetime’s collection of museum pieces and memorabilia.
In the summer I always try to see the open-air performance of Aida at the Caracalla Baths. These mighty ruins are extremely well adapted to a mammoth spectacle. The ancient Romans, for whom the Baths were built as a social and cultural centre, would have loved Aida in this setting with its superabundance of camels and cavalry, its luxurious scenery and massed troops.
[…]
I think it is a great blessing to us that the Baths have fallen into ruin, nature’s magnificent sculptures that they are. The original must have been of decidedly totalitarian dimensions. Against a late afternoon October light all Rome looks sublime and especially the ruins of Caracalla. They are flood-lit at night; the environs used to be a favourite night-walk but nobody takes lonely walks in Rome any more. The footpads are rife. Even the girls of the night, with their picturesque road-side bonfires, have deserted the vicinity of the Baths, and the nightingales sing to the ghosts.
Wherever I live I am in the writer’s condition: work is pleasure and pleasure is work. I find Rome a good place to work. The ordinary Roman is nearly always a ‘character’, which is to say there are no ordinary Romans and therefore life among them, although it may be exasperating at times, is never boring. The extraordinary Byzantine bureaucracy of Italian living, and the usual bothers of life are always present, but if I can get a glimpse of the Pantheon even passing in a taxi on my way to fulfil some banal commission I find the journey worthwhile. At night, if I go to dine in one of the excellent trattorie near the Pantheon, I love to walk round in the great solid portico for a while. It is sheer harmony: the bulk is practically airborne.
My stay at the Palazzo Taverna came to an end after three years when the landlady wanted the flat ‘for her daughter’. My next flat looked out on the Tiber at the front, and, at the back, on the roof-tops and winding alleys of ancient Trastevere. Here again I had one big room surrounded by a few small rooms. The best thing about it was the view of the river at night with a moving bracelet of traffic on either side of the Tiber and over the bridges; and if I was working very late at night I loved to go for a walk in my big
room and look out at the three flood-lit monuments of my window view: the clock-tower of Santa Maria in Trastevere; up on the Janiculum hill the Fountain of Acqua Paola; and behind it the church of St Peter in Montorio. Eventually my landlady wanted this apartment, too, ‘for her daughter’. Tired of landladies’ daughters I acquired for my own the apartment I live in now, a small but very exciting place just emerging from slumdom. It is in a street between Piazza Farnese, where Michelangelo added a floor to what is now the French Embassy, and the great Campo dei Fiori, the colourful flower and fruit market. This is deep in the Rome of the Renaissance. My apartment dates from the fourteenth century at the back and fifteenth at the front. It belonged to an inn called La Vacca owned by La Vanozza, mistress of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI and mother of Cesare Borgia. Her coat of arms, those of her husband and those of the Pope, all three joined, are set in the outside wall near my windows. When the workmen were getting this apartment ready for me they tore down some paper which covered the ceilings to reveal beautiful woodwork. A window was found in a wall leading to the main part of La Vanozza’s property. Embedded in the old tiles of the floor they found the remains of a speaking tube that communicated with the street door. Whether or not this was used by La Vanozza’s fifteenth-century call-girls I will never know.
[1983]
Venice
Most people who write about Venice do not tell you what they think of it but how they feel. Venice is a city not to inspire thought but sensations. I think it is something to do with the compound of air, water, architecture and the acoustics. Like the effect of these elements on the ear, there are acoustics of the heart. One can think in Venice, but not about Venice. One absorbs the marvellous place, often while thinking about something else.