by Janet Groth
Beneath its entertainments of plot and character, there is, as always in Muriel Spark novels, a spiritual discussion going on. Here, it is neatly entwined with the widely differing attitudes toward life of two famous autobiographers, Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini. Both are believers: one is a man of the cloth and an apologist for religion, the other an artist and craftsman. Fleur finds Newman’s reduction of the drama of faith to “two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings”—himself and his Creator—in Apologia pro vita sua quite “neurotic.” To Fleur a defrocked priest is also “a self-evident and luminous being.” And, she goes on, “So are you, so is my lousy landlord and the same goes for everyone I know. You can’t live with an I-and-thou relationship to God and doubt the reality of the rest of life.”
Cellini, the robust Renaissance craftsman, on the other hand, has inspired Fleur’s own writing, and it is particularly his trust in the material world that so delights her.
This is not to say the novel gives all the points to Cellini. Spark ultimately grants Newman the power to lead her heroine to the Catholic faith and to the disposition of her immortal soul. But it is in Cellini’s all-consuming focus on the making of art that Fleur/Muriel announces her own aesthetic. No overt proselytizing will intrude, and all other claims will fall before it. (In this light it becomes possible to understand Muriel’s imperviousness to her son’s hopes that she might evince a maternal pride in his own art, his painting: “I don’t think he’s any good and nothing will make me say so,” she informed an interviewer.) Freud fares scarcely better: “I don’t hold with psychology,” she once told me. Her no-nonsense approach to what in others might have been the murky stuff of psychological novels is especially apparent in The Driver’s Seat, a novella in which the heroine seeks out her own murderer in Rome. Upon reading it I joined the army of those who regard her works as so many small, perfect, polished gems.
The best chance I had to observe Muriel outside the office or a formal gathering came about in 1989 when, in consequence of a sabbatical I spent in Italy, I was her guest for the Christmas holiday. On that occasion there did gleam forth a sighting or two of the lady’s darker side. I was house-sitting in Cortona, some distance from where Muriel was staying with Penelope Jardine, her companion for the previous ten years. Nonetheless, Muriel invited me for Christmas dinner, and I made the following journal entry, on December 26, 1989, the day after I returned:
I arrived at the station in Arezzo at 5:45 p.m. Penelope was to pick me up at six.
Waiting outside the station, I shivered a bit; I was wearing only a light raincoat and the station thermometer showed six degrees Celsius. But Penelope was prompt, driving up to the curb at 6:03 in a dusty, almost new Alfa Romeo, which I later discovered belongs to Muriel but which she doesn’t drive.
Penelope, a woman of about fifty-five with a mild, pleasant face, no makeup, and short, light brown hair, shrugged off the half-hour drive involved in fetching me and the still longer drive involved in taking me back to Cortona at the end of the evening. “I expect we’ll be fairly merry by then,” she said. “We’ll scarcely notice.”
I asked how Penelope, a Scot, a sculptor and painter, had come to purchase the thirteenth-century church she and Muriel were renovating. She said that years before, when she was living in Rome, she had been told that the Catholic Church was selling many of its smaller holdings in Italy; a friend took her to the local bishop, who helped her to accomplish the purchase.
We now arrived at the walled town of Oliveto, above which the house is situated. She paused to show me a small chapel at a crossroads.
“That chapel consecrates the spot where the last plague victim died—about the period of I promessi sposi,” she said, turning up the steep hill of their drive. “So Muriel and I like to say we live above the plague line.”
Muriel, looking nice in a black chiffon skirt with a touch of what may have been feathers or fur at the hem and a beaded black mohair sweater, greeted me with a hug. Both she and Penelope seemed pleased over my present to them of Moët & Chandon. We discussed whether to have champagne immediately or wait for the other guests, deciding to wait a bit (it was just quarter of seven). Muriel said that they had been glued to the television following the swiftly unfolding events in Romania and that if I didn’t mind they would like to watch the news at seven o’clock. I said I’d like to and asked what the latest information was. Both mentioned in shocked tones the mounting death toll being attributed to troops still faithful to the repressive Ceausescu, who’d been executed that afternoon. Muriel at one point broke out bitterly, “Seventy thousand dead and there the survivors sit, without so much as an aspirin.”
We then ascended to Muriel’s bedroom and watched a half hour of almost unrelieved bad news. Violence in the Romanian city of Timisoara. Muriel was worried about a young friend who lives there—a translator of her books—who had just had a baby. Violence in Jerusalem. Candlelit masses in the streets of Prague and Bucharest. In a brief nod to the good news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a snippet of Leonard Bernstein conducting a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the Brandenburg Gate. Then, back to the grim, with a captured kidnapper telecasting an appeal to his Italian cohorts to give themselves up and restore their victim to his family unharmed.
Afterward we came down to Penelope’s bedroom/sitting room and attempted to get into a more festive frame of mind. The room was cheerful, featuring chintz and pillows and Christmas decorations. I commented on two oil portraits, asking if they were done by Penelope. I was told the one of Muriel, in profile, was. “It belongs to Penny,” said Muriel. Then she added, “She hasn’t given it to me.” She said that the other, showing a young and dashing Penelope, had been done by a friend in Rome.
Somehow, Muriel got going on Africa—not Rhodesia, site of her unhappy marriage, but South Africa and South Africans. She became so heated about it that Penelope asked, with a laugh, “What other nationalities are there, I wonder, we can banish wholesale?” It seemed that Australians, too, aroused Muriel’s ire. “I never met one who wasn’t vulgar in the extreme—look at Germaine [Greer], for example, although I quite like her. I have to send word ahead if I’m going to see her to ask them to get her to please leave out the four-letter words if I’m to stay in the room with her.” She looked at us fiercely: “And she just manages to do it.” The Italians were all right, she said, because Italians “always allow for a court of appeal.”
We had drinks, Irish whiskey and water for me, red wine for Muriel, and gin and tonic for Penelope. Muriel gave me a little present wrapped in stiff, brownish-maroon paper. Inside was a pottery dish, heart shaped, with a blue-and-white figure of a bird on a heart-shaped branch. “It was just a little something I saw in an antiques shop in Arezzo that I thought you might like,” said Muriel.
“I love it,” I said. And I did.
There were to be just two other guests, I was told. An English architect and collector of art named Frederick Fuchs (Freddie) and his friend, a young Italian named Dario, arrived bearing huge pots of pink geraniums. After a tour of the house, we gathered around a table set up in Penelope’s bedroom and feasted on a four-course dinner: guinea fowl served with good local Chianti, followed by Christmas pudding and champagne.
Art was, naturally, a recurrent topic. Freddie was soon telling us how the Japanese—“the big buyers nowadays”—were making it possible for collectors like him to own works by Italian masters; it seemed the masters were experiencing a depressed market because the Japanese didn’t care for religious subjects. What was being bought, said Freddie, were “these scribbles by Twombly,” an action painter of the fifties; they were going for hundreds of thousands. This brought up other action painters; Arshile Gorky was mentioned. Freddie wondered if anybody had seen the nasty crack Gorky’s daughter Maro had made about Muriel in a piece on the artists of the Chianti valley for Harper’s & Queen, the October issue, he thought it was.
“What nasty crack?” asked Muriel, sharply on t
he alert. “What did she say about me?” But Freddie was mum. Only later, when I was in the sitting room and the others were in the kitchen preparing the coffee and Muriel was upstairs, did Penelope succeed in getting it out of Freddie that the nasty crack consisted of Maro Gorky’s referring to Muriel as “that old crone in the red wig.” At the dinner table, however, it was already clear that Muriel was furious: “She’s never met me; I can’t think what she can have to say about me.” Penelope said, “She’d better watch out. Muriel may sue.”
Earlier in the evening, Italy had been spared, but after the reference to Maro’s “nasty crack,” Muriel burst out, “I shall leave Tuscany; I will, if rude things are going to be said about me. I’ll get right out.”
Freddie tried to downplay what he now saw had been an indiscretion, and Dario denounced Maro as a hateful woman who was only being nasty because she couldn’t stand it that she owed every little scrap of importance she could claim in the world to the fact that she had a famous father. But Muriel was not sidetracked. She went upstairs to her office to telephone Maro Gorky in an effort to confront her on the spot.
When Muriel came down into the kitchen, Penelope matter-of-factly reported what Freddie had been reluctant to say, that the crack was a reference to Muriel as “that old crone in a red wig,” to which Muriel cried, “I’ve never owned a wig. And I don’t dye my hair red. What does she know about it anyway? She’s never even met me!”
Once again, Freddie said he was sorry he’d ever brought it up.
We finally settled in the sitting room with coffee, and the conversation turned to other things. Still Muriel was glum. At one point she asked, quite out of the blue, if Maro had children, and being told she had “a boy and a girl,” such a strange look came over her face that I feared for their well-being. I remembered that earlier, when Penelope, having opened the bottle, was just preparing to pour us all champagne, Muriel had said to the room at large, “Never pour with your left hand—it was the hand the Borgias used. They’d open the hinged ring they wore on the third finger of that hand, then turn the poison it contained into the vessel as they poured.” She demonstrated neatly with a hinged ring of her own, and wound up, “So you must never pour left-handed.”
I could easily imagine that had Maro Gorky been in the room at this moment, Muriel might have offered her a glass of champagne and poured it for her with her left hand.
It was just as well that Maro Gorky was not reachable that night. Freddie had not got his facts right. There was a nasty crack in Harper’s & Queen, and it did occur in an article about Maro Gorky’s rude luncheons and dinners for the English colony in the Chianti valley. But the author of the crack is described as a recently arrived man, a “high-pitched screamer” who was nowhere near as talented as Muriel, and the color of the wig was “orange.”
At eleven the party broke up, all of us leaving together, Muriel and Penelope to see me home to Cortona, Freddie and Dario to repair to Freddie’s house in Florence.
The traffic was heavy at first, then devolved to almost none when the driving became hazardous because of the fog. Both Penelope and Muriel insisted they didn’t mind the lateness of the hour or the more than ninety miles of driving involved in getting me home and themselves back. I was originally to have stayed over, but they’d thought better of this plan, saying it was the scarcity of done-up rooms that posed a problem of where to put me. This was confirmed by the tour I’d been given as I arrived. I’d seen a small, peach-colored room that was Muriel’s, and seen the studio couch/daybed in the library, where I was told Penelope slept. I’d even watched television in the one and dined in the other. But full of the aura of rather poisonous gossip Freddie had brought to the dinner table, and fed by a sense of disappointment, I allowed myself to wonder whether the real reason had been their reluctance to let me see that they shared a bed.
I began to let my imagination ride along with me on the trip back to Cortona. I imagined as more truth than exaggeration Muriel’s humorous references to how Penny ordered her around, forcing her into slave labor in the olive grove attached to the church grounds each picking season. She also claimed she had been press-ganged into the work of redecorating the chapel, an area Penelope used as her studio. I found more evidence—of Penelope’s devotion if not of her dominatrix tendencies—in the portrait she’d done of Muriel and wouldn’t give her. On Muriel’s side, I considered her preference for female company dating back to Miss Kay’s class at James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh (the model for Miss Brodie and her “set”). Then there were her difficulties with men: a husband who went off his rocker, and two lovers who delivered her literary stabs in the back. An Irish landlady of hers once observed, “You’re a bad picker,” and Muriel could only respond, “How true!” Add to this her predilection for women’s clubs (chiefly one called the Helena, renamed the May of Teck in The Girls of Slender Means). And hadn’t she also had a female flatmate for years in Rhodesia?
Unsurprisingly, there had been plenty of gossip about Muriel and Penelope’s relationship.
Against these hints of full-blown passion between the two women were Muriel’s repeated denials in print. “We’re not lesbians, you know,” she’d said in answering some impertinent interviewer. On another occasion she had described the relationship between her and Penelope as “old-fashioned friendship.” Finally, I came to the conclusion that it was of no importance to anyone but them and none of my business. Snap out of it, I said to myself, and pay attention so you can help with the driving.
Penelope was being very offhand about the fog, though as an expert driver she was clearly concerned about it. At this point we could scarcely see the line in the center of the road. Suddenly she began to hum, rather loudly, a tune I recognized. Soon Muriel and I were humming, then lustily singing along. “By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,” we warbled.
I got out at my house a little before midnight. Watching the lights of the Alfa Romeo swing down the drive, I imagined first Penelope, then Muriel, breaking into song as they wound down to the valley floor, where the fog would envelop them once more.
But I am not satisfied to have this be the last glimpse I give of Muriel Spark. While this 1989 Christmas encounter in Tuscany brought out more of her sharper side, the luncheon we had together in Arezzo in 2004 made me aware once more of what a great soul she was. So lightly easy in her charity, in her generous treatment of me, her solicitude about my life and its twists and turns, as she became aware of them, in our infrequent exchanges of letters.
The last time we met she had to make a great effort to come all the way to Arezzo to accommodate a reunion with me on my brief sojourn in the area. By then she had turned eighty-four, and over the intervening years she had suffered hip and eye surgeries and a quantity of serious illnesses and flare-ups. But there she was, on a bright hot day in June, motoring with Penelope several tens of miles to treat me to lunch in the Hotel Minerva, where we were the only guests in the chandeliered grandeur of a great fancy dining room.
As if to justify all the expense—the waiting staff and the attentions of the maître d’, the gilded trolleys of delicacies trotted out for her to select from—Muriel stood ready to, and did, order a great many more dishes and a great deal more vino, both rosso and bianco, than we could possibly eat or drink. Her condition rendered her able to partake only sparingly of any of it. Yet there she was, cheerfully inquiring after my welfare, my hopes, and my projects, and giving an enthusiastic account of her recent turn as a writer in residence at a private school somewhere, I thought she said, near the French-Swiss border. I felt certain she had taken the post not because she needed the money—though she always liked to add to her stash—but because she saw its potential as material for her work. Sure enough, her last novel, The Finishing School, takes place in just such a setting.
When we went to the car to part, she was ready with a warm embrace, a smile for the camera, and many expressions of affection. It was a fitting last memory that I am grateful for havi
ng gone to some trouble myself in order to achieve.
Soon after my return to America, the word came that Muriel could not give me her response to my latest book because her sight had now entirely failed her. And then, on April 13, 2006, her life was over.
Penelope informed me that a memorial was being arranged in London for the following April. I asked my old friends from the Sussex Lifeboat Ball, Peter and Winifred Wroe, to attend in my stead. They described it as a wonderful concert in Wigmore Hall, well attended, consisting of beautiful music, exquisitely played, with not a somber note sounded.
Penelope wrote her appreciation for my attendance by proxy and said she had not yet been able to discipline herself to cheerfulness in a life without Muriel, describing herself as “like a child dragged kicking and screaming from the party, longing for more chocolate cake.”
So there, in the Arezzo parking lot, fresh from pressing upon me a huge great slice of chocolate cake, is where I leave her. Good-bye, Muriel, and grazie mille.
ROUGH PASSAGE T0HROUGH THE NEW YORKER ART DEPARTMENT
JACK KAHN WAS MISTAKEN when he said I’d never risen from my post as receptionist of the eighteenth floor. In April 1959, when I had been at The New Yorker for a year and a half, I was thrilled to be promoted to work as an assistant in the art department on twenty. As it turned out, I stayed there a mere six months, but the job had personal repercussions for me that nearly cost me my life.