Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  When the war ended she sent for Robin, but to her surprise and dismay he arrived accompanied by Ossie, who was not disposed to be co-operative about a divorce. He had resumed Jewish orthodoxy and was inculcating this in Robin to make the child bond with him rather than Muriel, while Robin, one may surmise, already had reason to feel that his mother had deserted him in infancy. Her solution to this imbroglio was to leave Robin in Edinburgh in the care of her mother, and go to London to start a literary career. It was, judged by normal maternal standards, a selfish decision, but it was selfishness for art’s sake. She was convinced that she was born to be a writer and throughout her life allowed nothing to stand in the way of that vocation. For a long time she pursued it as a poet, supporting herself in a variety of low-paid jobs associated with publishing and editing, and by producing literary biographies and anthologies, mostly in collaboration with Derek Stanford whom she met through the Poetry Society. This was then a haven for old-fashioned and mediocre versifiers, with some of whom she had flirtations and affairs, and with others feuds when she became the society’s secretary and the editor of its magazine.

  She was in some danger of languishing in this genteel end of Grub Street indefinitely, with no more than a sheaf of rejection slips to show for her poems, when in December 1950 she won a competition for a short story on a Christmas theme sponsored by the Observer newspaper which attracted nearly 7,000 entries. Her story, ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, described an angel gatecrashing a rather tawdry nativity play in Rhodesia in a manner both vivid and matter-of-fact, which Stannard plausibly suggests was the first example of magic realism in British writing. It seems to have been also the first piece of prose fiction Spark wrote for publication, and yet it instantly demonstrated that this – not verse – was the medium in which she could fulfil her artistic ambitions. ‘The whole tone of the narrative’, Stannard justly observes, ‘is suddenly lighter than that of the poetry, rippling with crisp, implicit mockery.’ She never was, and never would be, a great poet in verse, but her novels and novellas are essentially poetic in style and structure.

  This success was her first taste of fame, but she did not consolidate it rapidly or easily, for reasons to do with her troubled state of body and soul at the time. Stannard is particularly illuminating on this phase of her life, when she was moving towards Christian faith, first in the Anglican and finally in the Roman Catholic Church, conducting an on-off sexual relationship with the much less gifted Stanford, and trying to write her first novel, while keeping solvent, and her name in the public eye, with literary journalism. She wrote a review of T.S. Eliot’s play The Confidential Clerk which astonished the author with its insight, and his praise encouraged her to begin a critical study of Eliot’s work, but she was overdosing on Dexadrine in order to suppress appetite and work longer hours, which had the effect of making her temporarily deranged and convinced that Eliot’s writing was full of coded threatening messages to herself. All these experiences entered into her first novel, including the struggle to write it. The Comforters is about a young woman recently converted to Roman Catholicism who is having a nervous breakdown which takes the form of hearing an authorial voice tapping out on a phantom typewriter a prejudicial description of her thoughts in the novelistic third person. We would learn to call this ‘metafiction’.

  The Comforters was greatly admired when it was published in 1957, especially by Evelyn Waugh, who was struck by its similarities to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold which he was currently writing. Graham Greene, who had already been impressed by some unpublished stories he had been shown by Stanford, and was generously giving Spark financial help, added his praise. These were the two most distinguished living English novelists at the time, and both Catholic converts. Muriel Spark ‘completed a grand triumvirate of Catholic-convert novelists’, Stannard declares at the outset of his book, but the Catholicism expressed in her fiction is very different from Waugh’s unquestioning orthodoxy or Greene’s obsession with sin and salvation – much more playful, speculative, and unsympathetic to typical Catholic piety. The dogmatic certainties on which the ‘Catholic Novel’ was based were, however, soon to be called into question by the Second Vatican Council and the emergence of a much more pluralistic Church than the one she originally joined, so her increasingly idiosyncratic Catholicism caused less of a stir than it might otherwise have done. She openly criticised the papacy, for instance, did not attend mass regularly, and always avoided the sermon when she did. Her attraction to the Faith was basically metaphysical: she liked the idea of a transcendental order of truth against which to measure human vanity and folly, and was fascinated by the similarities and differences between the omniscience of God, the fictive omniscience of novelists, and the dangerous pretensions to omniscience of human beings like Miss Brodie. Sub specie aeternitatis human life was not tragic or pathetic, but comic or absurd. ‘I think it’s bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader – much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short,’ she told an interviewer in her deceptively insouciant style. This is what Kermode meant by the ‘cold’ quality of her work. In real life it could be disconcerting: he recalls that she could not see why a party he planned to give in New York in her honour should be cancelled because President Kennedy had been assassinated the day before, since ‘he was only dead because God wanted him’. She was not, however, indifferent to the problem of reconciling the evil and suffering in the world with the idea of God – indeed she considered it ‘the only problem’ in theology. But, drawing on her Jewish heritage, she approached it through the Old Testament rather than the New, especially the book of Job, where God himself in her view becomes an absurd character.

  Stannard sums up the relation between Spark’s metaphysics and her fictional innovations perceptively: ‘there was human time and there was God’s time. She played with these two spheres of reality: using ghost narrators, revealing endings to destroy conventional suspense, starting at the end or in the middle, fracturing the plausible surfaces of obsessive detail with sudden discontinuities.’ This daring deconstruction of the traditional realistic novel (and the realistic noir thriller) was most extreme in a sequence of short, spare novellas she produced in the late 1960s and the 1970s such as The Driver’s Seat (her personal favourite among her fictions) and Not to Disturb. In the former a woman pursues across Rome the man who must murder her; in the latter a butler presides over a crime of passion in a Swiss villa in a manner that is both God-like and Jeeves-like. Among other things they helped to make present-tense narration, hitherto rarely used by novelists, almost the default mode of contemporary fiction. The general public and some reviewers found these books baffling, and she had more commercial success later with novels like Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington that drew on her early life to the same droll effect as the early novels.

  After scraping through the dreaded test of the second novel with Robinson (1958) she produced, at the rate of one a year, a sequence of scintillating novels from Memento Mori to The Girls of Slender Means, while living in the unfashionable London suburb of Camberwell under the protection of a motherly landlady, and making occasional, not very enjoyable duty visits to her family in Edinburgh, who she felt exploited her increased prosperity. It was perhaps partly to put them at a distance that in the late 1960s she based herself for long periods in New York, occupying an office of her own at The New Yorker. Later she settled in Rome, where she lived for many years in some style, escorted by a series of ornamental but usually gay or bisexual men. Stannard surmises that ‘she did not discover their sexuality until too late’ but one feels that, although she enjoyed dressing up glamorously and exerting her spell over men, subconsciously she did not want to be possessed by them and chose her male companions accordingly. From 1968 onwards she became more and more dependent on her friendship with Penelope Jardine, an artist resident in Rome, who acquired a derelict priest’s house and adjoining church in Tuscany and converted them into a home where Muriel eventually joined he
r, with Penelope, who was fifteen years younger, acting as her companion and secretary. Spark calmly denied they were lesbians, but Stannard says it was love that bound them together. Perhaps ‘a Boston marriage’ best describes their relationship. Muriel bought a series of automobiles in which she enjoyed being driven around Europe by Penelope, who had a fear of flying.

  Spark’s later life was marred by illness and painful disability partly caused by incompetent medical care, which she endured with remarkable fortitude. She was less tolerant of what she considered harassment by her son, Robin, who accused her of denying her Jewish lineage and impugning his own by claiming that she was only ‘half-Jewish’. The issue turned on the exact nature of her maternal grandmother’s marriage, and the evidence, according to Stannard, is capable of different interpretations. Sadly this dispute permanently alienated mother and son, and brought Muriel some unfavourable publicity in Britain’s scandal-hungry press, which continued after her death in 2006 when it was revealed that she had cut Robin out of her will.

  She was, it must be admitted, a difficult as well as fascinating woman to know personally or professionally. She was mercurial in temperament, restless and demanding, quick to take offence, chameleon-like in appearance, and capable of seeming to be two different women on successive days, as I discovered myself on the only occasions when I met her, one weekend in Rome in 1974, halfway through an Italian lecture tour for the British Council. The first was a supper given by the head of the council’s Roman office, when I was seated next to her. She was plainly dressed in a navy blue trouser suit which gave her (at that time) slender frame a gamine appearance, and was deferential to my academic status, though apparently unaware that I also wrote novels. More than once in the conversation, however, she claimed to know things which she had previously denied knowing. She had read my essay about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and appreciated it, and also mentioned with satisfaction Frank Kermode’s praise for her work – the approbation of academic critics evidently meant a lot to her. She told me that she had just finished a novel called The Abbess of Crewe based on Watergate, which she thought would be her best. (It was not.) The next evening I was invited to a large party at her apartment where she was transformed into a glamorous hostess, wearing a flowing robe and with a bouffant hair-do, moving among her guests with regal aloofness, and I had little opportunity to speak to her. Some acquaintances regarded her as a kind of white witch gifted with preternatural insight. Most found her eccentric and unpredictable, and some thought she was a little mad – an insinuation which, if she ever heard of it, would cause their excommunication from her friendship. Some of those character traits pervade her fiction, which is challenging rather than ingratiating. But as the heroine of Loitering with Intent, a portrait of the young Muriel Spark as aspiring writer, observes: ‘I wasn’t writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder.’ That aim the mature Spark triumphantly achieved.

  * * *

  1 Muriel Spark: the Biography (2009).

  JOHN BOORMAN’S QUEST

  I HAVE A personal reason to feel very grateful to the film director John Boorman. In 1981 I was making notes for a comic novel about academics and writers jetting about the world to attend international conferences. I could think of plenty of amusing episodes and situations and representative character-types, including several from an earlier novel, Changing Places, but for a long time I was held up by the lack of a narrative structure to contain them all. In my notebook I wrote, ‘Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses? E.g., the Grail legend.’ I was thinking of how James Joyce modelled his account of one day in the lives of a number of modern Dubliners on the story of Homer’s Odyssey. But I did nothing with the idea until, a little later, I happened to see Boorman’s film Excalibur, and was swept away by its exuberant and imaginative retelling of the Arthurian story. It set me thinking about correspondences between the Grail legend as it appears in chivalric romance and a modern story of academics and novelists competing with each other for professional glory and getting involved in amorous entanglements in various exotic settings. I started writing Small World.

  There are many pleasures to be derived from John Boorman’s autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy (2003), but for me its most interesting revelation was that the legendary quest for the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, incorporated by Malory in the Morte d’Arthur, and reinterpreted in modern times by Jessie Weston, T.S. Eliot and John Cowper Powys, among others, has deep roots in Boorman’s own life and psyche, and is the key to his cinematic oeuvre. He read The Waste Land and Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance as a teenager, excited and enraptured by these texts, and they made an enduring impression. His own book’s unassuming title encodes a heroic meaning: a quest for the cinematic Grail, the ultimate transcendent film, was the serial adventure that allowed Boorman to escape the spiritual wasteland of suburbia.

  His first childhood home was a semi-detached house in Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, on the outskirts of London – one of 4 million built between the wars. ‘Four million of them! . . . Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘They all missed it, or got it wrong – the academics, the politicians, the upper classes. While they worried about socialism and fascism, the cuckoo had laid its egg in their nests and Margaret Thatcher would hatch out of it.’ Ironically, when he came to re-create his childhood in the Oscar-nominated Hope and Glory, he was obliged to build a simulated Rosehill Avenue on an abandoned airfield, because those streets of inter-war semis have been irrecoverably ‘improved’ – festooned with TV aerials, satellite dishes, double-glazed porches and other accoutrements of post-war affluence.

  The Boormans had been affluent once. His paternal grandfather was a cheerfully eccentric inventor and businessman, sufficiently well-off to send his sons to public school, who lost all his money shortly after the First World War. John’s father George came back from interesting military service in India to painfully reduced circumstances, and was obliged to take a clerical job which he hated. He and his friend Herbert were both captivated by Ivy, the beautiful daughter of a Wimbledon publican. George popped the question and won her hand, but Ivy had always secretly preferred Herbert, and as the joy slowly leaked out of her marriage in the confines of Rosehill Avenue she turned increasingly to Herbert for solace. Thus was the triangular relationship of Arthur–Guinevere–Lancelot re-enacted in Metroland. The young John sensed what was going on, and felt guiltily complicit in the betrayal of his father, but George, embittered by the boring routine of his life, did not inspire great filial affection. Sometimes John disloyally wished that Herbert had been his dad.

  The outbreak of the Second World War offered a kind of deliverance for all parties from this drab, repressed existence. ‘How wonderful was the war! . . . it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema, that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.’ George couldn’t wait to join up, though he was forty, but ironically, like many servicemen, found himself posted to safe barracks in the country while the bombs were falling on Rosehill Avenue. ‘We kids rampaged through the ruins, the semis opened up like dolls’ houses, the precious privacy shamefully exposed. We took pride in our collection of shrapnel.’

  The pleasure and wonder that young boys, untroubled by adult anxieties, could derive from the Blitz were vividly evoked in Hope and Glory, but its most memorable scene belongs to a later phase of the war. In the First World War Ivy and her sisters had fled the threat of German Zeppelins by retreating to the Thames-side village of Shepperton where their father had a bungalow as a weekend retreat and holiday home. Now, driven by some atavistic urge, she took her own children back to Shepperton (still undeveloped and unspoiled) for safety, and so began John Boorman’s lifelong romance with rivers, of which the Thames
was the archetype. He swam, and fished, boated and punted, and fell into a lock while the sluice was open, narrowly escaping drowning – the first of many brushes with death in his life.

  He attended the local C. of E. school and sang in the parish choir, but when he failed the 11 plus his mother sent him to a private Roman Catholic grammar school run by the Salesian order, where he experienced the culture of corporal punishment sadly characteristic of Catholic education in those days. ‘The young brothers and priests seemed pent up, over-wound, their only release the infliction of pain.’ No attempt was made to convert him, but a devout chum with a shaky grasp of the relevant theology insisted on baptising him secretly in the school toilets, pulling the chain and catching the water in his hand before it was polluted by the toilet bowl. ‘I became, in a manner of speaking, a closet Catholic.’ Perhaps John Boorman did in fact acquire from this schooling a feeling for ritual and symbolism that is more Catholic than Protestant, and which left its mark on his films.