by Janet Groth
Muriel did not move into the eighteenth floor in a formal way until 1964, the year I began working for her. Her earlier stint had found her using only a borrowed cubicle. She was assigned one of the most desirable locations on eighteen, a corner office formerly belonging to A. J. Liebling, who had died on December 28, 1963. She immediately organized a paint job (a French blue was soon in place on the walls), and she added an oriental rug, a sofa cover, throw pillows, an armchair, and a well-framed oil over the couch. This unaccustomed attention to personal comfort and even luxury of surroundings set off a minor revolution. Requests flowed into the office manager from irate writers who demanded something other than the regulation gray walls with dirty Venetian blinds at the windows and straight wooden chairs and linoleum floors and metal filing cabinets that had constituted the norm for as long as the eighteenth floor had been in existence. They were given the OK to do it “as Mrs. Spark did it”—that is, to do it themselves. This area was the New Yorker domain for writers and a very few cartoonists, with me, the facilitator, in a sort of wide spot in the hall by the back stairs. A year or so earlier, some attempt had been made to create a “conversation pit” beneath the stairwell connecting us to the editorial floor above. It was not a success. Liebling, eyeing the dusty, rust-colored love seat and two matching chairs, said it reminded him of a third-class lounge on a second-class ship.
Mrs. Spark was careful not to request my services until after office hours or during lunchtime. Over the next year and a half I disappointed many seekers of favors, refusing many invitations of one kind or another in her name and in the cause of preserving her time for her writing. One correspondence she dealt with herself consisted of the light blue aerograms from her son Robin. “Set that aside,” she’d say when she saw one of those. “He’s asking for money again.” This struck me as cold, but then I was just at that moment learning of Robin’s existence. I had had no idea she had a son. Years later her autobiography would tell the story of how difficult it was for Muriel to get passage out of Africa in 1944, during the still lethal days of World War II. She records having left Robin in the care of Dominican nuns. She would also write of how she later brought him to Edinburgh and left him there with her parents, seeing him only intermittently then and after she was able to swing a place for him in a good English boarding school. Perhaps because he reminded her of the disastrous marriage that took her to Africa in the first place, Robin never evoked a maternal response in Muriel, yet she always found a way to see to his care. The astonishing transformation she had brought about in her own circumstances must have been equally difficult to pull off. Small wonder it was not accomplished without a breakdown.
Sometime in the early 1950s, as I understand it, when she was hounded out of her editorial job at the Poetry Review, she had a nervous collapse and lived for a time in a cloistered situation run by the Catholic Church. It was out of that experience that a new Muriel Spark emerged, a Catholic convert who would remain in the church for the rest of her life. She also became, during that incarceration, an artist who wrote the first of her many novels, The Comforters, about a young woman who has a mental breakdown that grants her mystical visions.
Opening her mail, as well as answering it, gained me insight into Muriel’s tastes and how she spent her time. In spite of all the refused invitations, she saw a great many people in a social way, often escorted by one of three or four personable young men she came across in her publisher’s office or in that of her agent Ivan von Auw. She saw Brendan Gill, the New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, and Ved Mehta, the Indian author and autobiographer, who was then writing on the Oxford philosophers. She saw other writers like Anne Fremantle and Shirley Hazzard and Shirley Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert translator. Her apartment in the Beaux Arts Hotel—a spacious one-bedroom done up in shades of ivory and baby blue with Louis Quinze furniture—placed her in the immediate environs of the Secretariat Building, though I don’t believe she socialized much with the visiting dignitaries. The UN setting took a sly hit in the title of her 1973 novel, The Hothouse by the East River, which was, however, only marginally set in New York and was, among other things, a fictionalization of her postwar intelligence work for MI6.
All these high-profile social contacts notwithstanding, it was my impression that Muriel was quite lonely and isolated in her New York years; she sometimes asked me, when I was dropping off typing or picking up new assignments, to stay for a cocktail before I went home. And when, by some fluke, she found herself unoccupied for Thanksgiving in 1965, she wound up having that holiday with my brother and me and some other friends of mine at Keens Chop House. She insisted on picking up the tab and took everybody home in her chauffeured limousine. That I remember no single witty thing she said on that occasion—or indeed much of anything else about it—I suspect has more to do with the excellent dry martinis at Keens than with the absence of any memorable talk. When Muriel was around, the talk was always memorable. She was, for example, very funny about the priestlings and the “sweet certainty” they evinced that her convert’s zeal would inspire in her the desire to drop the novel she was composing and travel to the far reaches of West Virginia to see them being ordained.
Summer was my vacation time (eight weeks, four of them with pay), and someone from the typing pool was tapped to fill in for me with Muriel. In 1966, when I mentioned that my summer plans included six weeks of study at Oxford, she was enthusiastic. She told me that she would have liked to go to university herself, if she’d had the chance, but that the family coffers in Edinburgh would stretch only so far as a business course, which had led her to a clerkship in a local department store.
One day in early June, I showed her a notice she’d received in the mail for something called the Sussex Lifeboat Ball. I remarked on the posh nature of this event and asked her if she had a special fondness for lifeboats. She laughed and corrected me; it was not the boats she was fond of but a racehorse named Lifeboat, of which she was a one-eighth owner. She cocked her head and looked at me: “Aren’t you going to be at Oxford during July? That is not so very far from Petworth House.” A glint in her eye, she asked, “Would you like to go?” I said I’d be enchanted, whereupon she dictated the following letter:
Captain the Hon. V. M. Wyndham-Quin, R.N.
Lifeboat House
42 Grosvenor Gardens
London, S.W. 1
England
Dear Captain Wyndham-Quin,
Thank you so much for your letter and notices of the Sussex Lifeboat Ball, which I so much regret having to miss. I shall be working in New York all summer . . .
However, a young American friend of mine, Miss Janet Groth, is studying at Oxford and would, I know, love to attend the ball. She’s a charming girl and I know she’ll enjoy it. If you will send me a ticket for two, I will see that she gets it in good time. I shall let you know if I find any other friends who would like to have tickets. Meantime, I enclose a check which includes a small donation to the Lifeboat Institution.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Muriel Spark
A couple of weeks later I brought her Captain Wyndham-Quin’s handwritten reply, noting his thanks for her donation to the Lifeboat Institution and his concluding paragraph, which announced that he would “look forward to seeing Janet Groth and one of her friends” at the ball. With the cheek that only the clueless possess, I told her I needed two more tickets so that not only an escort with a motor car but my good friends from London, Peter and Winifred Wroe, could attend.
The Wroes were part of a transplanted merry band of Yorkshiremen I met on the boat train from Paris to Calais on my first trip to Europe in 1959. We had bonded while making up rude lyrics to “Blue Moon” and staving off seasickness in the saloon of the Channel steamer. By the time we pulled into Victoria near midnight, we were fast friends. They took me home to stay on their couch, and I had been staying on their couch on every return visit to London since. I couldn’t imagine going
to a county ball without them. When I posed this condition to Muriel, she smiled and said, “I think that might be arranged.” We shot off another letter to Captain Wyndham-Quin and received his response in the next mail. Tickets for Miss Groth and three of her friends were enclosed.
I went to Ohrbach’s, a now defunct discount store on Thirty-Fourth Street, and found the ball gown of my dreams; it had a white top and a teal-and-white floral skirt with a pink bow at the waist. I drew a picture of it for Muriel.
My charter flight to England, enrollment at Oxford University, and settling into borrowed lodgings in a Mr. Throckmorton’s rooms in Exeter College all went off without a hitch. The day before I was to leave for London, I received an amusing letter from Winifred Wroe about her trials in coming up with a pumpkin and a Prince Charming. In the end she’d borrowed John Lansdale, with permission from his best girl, Agnes. John would, she wrote, “speed back from Cornwall to escort and transport.” In addition to his possessing an Austin automobile and a tuxedo, Winifred claimed he was “excellent at whispering behind potted palms.” And although she admitted to one hitch—“he cannot dance”—she assured me that he would be “delighted to hold you whilst you dance.”
I later shared this flavor-of-the-occasion letter with Muriel, showed her the accompanying photos, and reported on our drive at high speed from Camden Town to Petworth House. I told her, too, of our late arrival—we just missed being presented to Princess Marina, which was all to the good, since my curtsy was thought by Winifred to “need work.” I spoke of Winifred’s and my inspection of the ladies’ powder room, where a discreet placard told us that this chamber and bath were occupied by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin when he came to stay for the weekend. Then it was on to Buck’s fizzes in the great hall and a tour of the house, admiring the Adam fireplaces as we went. John, while not my Prince Charming, was indeed charming, and with his high brow and wispy blond beard, he reminded me of a prince—Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevky’s novel. After our tour of the premises, we paid a brief visit to the nightclub, where John held me in a rather dance-like position as I took a few twirls under the neon lighting specially installed for the occasion. At around 1:00 a.m. all the guests were invited to the gallery—a sort of indoor terrace with white furniture and, yes, potted palms—for a champagne supper of caviar and cucumber sandwiches. By two thirty we joined the last of the string of cars drawn up to the porte cochere and rolled down a graveled drive to wend our way back to London on the county roads of Sussex. Muriel said that by all indications and as county balls went, I’d had a good one.
While a far cry from an English county ball, I was able to return the invitation to the dance the following year. My coconspirator in the matter was Andrena (Andy) Bear, a leggy, sensational-looking blond who worked as the editor’s secretary in the Talk of the Town department, whose offices, like those of On and Off the Avenue, the fashion department, were located on the eighteenth floor. Andy was a great favorite of Charles Addams and Peter De Vries and a number of the forty or so other men whose offices were on that floor. (There were half a dozen women—besides Muriel—sprinkled around, too.) These men had a good eye for beauty, and they eyed Andy with evident pleasure. On good days and in the right light I had my admirers also, and we used to kid that, had we chosen to do so, we could have created quite a scandal.
A couple of things prompted our joining forces in the creation of a summer dance. First was the impromptu New Yorker jazz band I had helped bring about. All I’d had to do was put the right parties together. Two cartoonists, Lee Lorenz and Warren Miller, played trumpet and cornet (and Warren occasionally sang a vocal or two in tribute to his idol Fats Waller); Paul Brodeur played clarinet; Whitney Balliett, the magazine’s jazz critic, played drums; when she hosted the jam session in the solarium of her East Side town house, Daphne Hellman played the harp; and the Talk reporter Wally White sat in on piano, occasionally spelled by a New York Times reporter named Phil Benjamin. We always hoped The New Yorker’s editor in chief, William Shawn, an excellent piano player himself, would come, but he never did.
So we had the band; all we needed now was the hall. As if on cue, one of the band members, Lee Lorenz, received notice that he’d soon have to vacate his loft on Spring Street. The perfect time to hold a party there, we all agreed. Andy and I were to be the hostesses, and we had great fun with the planning. We decided to invite everyone we knew at the magazine to our “bash.” Of necessity (our budgets not stretching to more elaborate arrangements), we conceived it as a strictly blue-collar affair at which we would serve hot dogs, pretzels, and mustard, with a keg and setups for the BYOB crowd. It was fixed for a summer night in June 1967, and the stage was set for a first-class Greenwich Village “scene” involving high and low alike. Sort of like the annual anniversary dance at the St. Regis, but without the business department.
Most of the editorial department and many of the cartoonists were in attendance, and the odd matchups that resulted were a source of awe and sometimes wonder. Charles Addams, whose dinner companions ran to the likes of Joan Fontaine, Drue Heinz, and Jacqueline Kennedy, turned up in a black tie and, perhaps in homage to Andy, alone. Muriel arrived with a very young and handsome blond—a gent from her agent’s office, I was given to understand. She looked beautiful in a strapless yellow chiffon dress accessorized with silver stiletto slippers and a rhinestone brooch centered on its bosom. She sported some David Webb bracelets on her slender arms, and her hair was freshly done in a reddish-blond bouffant. She made a typically generous contribution to the festivities, her escort leaving at least a jeroboam of Dom Pérignon at the paper-draped bar. The band, getting the picture, launched into “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” and things took a decided upward turn.
The next big party I shared with Muriel was equally star studded, but in an international rather than an American vein. Muriel had moved to Italy in 1969 and engaged a series of English-speaking secretaries there until she found a permanent helpmeet, Penelope Jardine, in 1978. She continued to ask me for my assistance in dealing with her New York affairs and always sent checks to cover expenses and my services. In 1970, on a summer holiday, I was passing through Rome and received a note from Muriel inviting me to come to her “little supper.”
It was definitely more elegant than any little supper I could remember, taking place, as it did, in her apartment in the Palazzo Taverna, an Italian Renaissance structure that had once been the residence of Cardinal Orsini. An opera fan and a Puccini buff, I was amazed to see through a sliver of window the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo, from which at the end of act 3 Floria Tosca flings herself into the Tiber. The place was longer on walk-in stone fireplaces and octagonal coffered ceilings than on windows. It seemed that cardinals in their residences preferred privacy to public views.
The guests included old New Yorker pals Brendan Gill and Niccolò Tucci, which was lucky because they made me feel right at home in a crowd that might otherwise have been intimidating. There were a number of deposed European royals and a sprinkling of the Cinecittà crowd. Michelangelo Antonioni talked to me as he drank a glass of white wine. He spoke about his distaste for social gatherings of this kind, having made an exception that evening because of his esteem for “cara Muriel”—a conversation translated for us by his obliging personal assistant, an American college girl from Sarah Lawrence.
The only unsettling thing about this evening was Muriel’s gown, which was perhaps not quite suited to her age and station. The skirt had three fluted orange tiers, the uppermost poking out stiffly around her middle as she greeted her guests from the top of a sweeping stone staircase. Brendan Gill kissed her hand, grinned, and said, “You look like an ice cream cone,” only saving her smile by adding, “good enough to eat.” True, the salesperson should burn in hell for selling her that orange organza, but Muriel looked so pleased to be wearing it that all the would-be cats present at the gathering lost the will to triumph over her.
When Muriel made the arrangements to send me to the ball in Sus
sex, I felt like Cinderella. But as I think back on her delight in nice dresses and her frankness about the hardship she had undergone, it occurs to me that perhaps it was not I but she who was Cinderella. It just takes longer to get to the ball when you have to be your own fairy godmother. (For a period of six years during and just after the war, she had been too poor to buy any clothes at all.) To the extent that Muriel had a fairy godmother, he came in the form of Graham Greene. An admirer of her writing, Greene sent her twenty pounds a month in the period after her job at the Poetry Review fell through, but that was only to make ends meet.
Apart from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and other writing she sold to The New Yorker, I didn’t read Muriel’s work until I ceased being her secretary. It seems to me now that I avoided doing so out of a superstitious fear that I would learn something from it that would interfere with my perception of her as a benevolent employer. I was always coming across reviews that referred to her work as “biting,” “darkly witty,” and, some thought, “lacking in charity.” But to me she was generous and sweet. Later I could see what they meant—in Robinson, Memento Mori, and most of her numerous other novels, poems, and short stories. It was not until I was asked by Commonweal to review her 1983 novel, Loitering with Intent, that I began to get a handle on what Muriel Spark the writer was all about.
In the review, I draw the analogy Muriel frequently drew herself, between artistry and criminality, noting that both the artist and the criminal like to take us by surprise. The novel is Muriel’s nearest approach to a vade mecum for the study of her works. Her main character, a budding novelist named Fleur, evolves an artistic credo that fits neatly with her own. Fleur has a job editing the papers of some old society snobs and is accused of plundering these private papers (read private lives) for use in her own work. Fleur is not ready to call herself innocent of this charge: “I was aware of a daemon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more.”