POETS Day! Muriel Spark
Illustration by Rene Sears
I’d take a POETS Day for certain this week as I’m not sure what we’ll be up to next week. Doubtless we’ll be wondering how Argentina and pretty much everybody else gets to know who won their election a few hours after the polls close and we have to wait eons for plumbers to come and fix our water main. There will likely be uncertainty.
So this week, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sneak some fun free time off this week because this time next, you’ll probably be boarding up windows or fitting pepper spray proof goggle and face mask combos, depending on whether things seem to be going your way.
“Democracy dies in darkness” is the current take. I prefer “A good many thing go on in the dark besides Santa Claus.” Hoover meant by that that there are back room dealings and secrets not shared and we have no idea… I always liked to think he meant fun stuff; trysts and forbidden fruit tastings and the like.
Go do the fun stuff for tomorrow (or through Tuesday, unless you did it at leisure during the last few weeks depending on where you live) we vote.
***
I read a Muriel Spark book. The experience prompted me to read another. And read other’s takes on what I read. And reconsider. And re-read. It’s an endeavor. I still struggle not to say Sparks.
I started with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, as I assume most do. Before reading I’d thought of it as a YA book along the lines of Little Women. The writing is matter of fact; declarative and unassuming in a way I first thought campy, but that’s not right. There’s an air of authority about the narration, as if it’s by someone cheerfully telling a tale but ready to “Shush!” most incisively should anyone act up or indulge a distraction.
A Goodreads reviewer named Fionnuala posits that Sandy Stranger, one of the characters and among Miss Jean’s “favorites,” is the narrator telling the tale from a third person point of view. I think she’s right. Agreeing with Fionnuala makes you feel a bit like a conspiracy theorist as there are a lot of little oddities and loose ends that feel magically resolved when seen as she suggests. But it’s an even richer story if you do and it fits as Sandy is, by the time of her theoretical retrospective narration, a nun; cheerful authority and shushing being her type’s received mission and faculty.
I’ve read it three times now, and as I type, I’m thinking a fourth is in order. That said, I might like her first novel, The Comforters, more. Like Jean Brodie, it’s playful. Also like Jean Brodie, it’s awash in the conflict between Catholic works and Calvinist predestination. Much of her work is.
from Faith and Works
Muriel Spark (1918-2006)My friend is always doing Good
But doubts the Meaning of his labour,
While I by Faith am much imbued
And can’t be bothered with my Neighbour.
She’s a Catholic convert and takes the side of the Church, if that wasn’t clear from the above, although she’s got a protestant streak through her as if she’s withholding the right to indulge in heresy on the chance that one should catch her fancy.
Her writing is playful. I get the sense that she enjoys descriptions that leave it to the reader to extrapolate meaning based on experience; a character goes through his grandmother’s vanity, mentally cataloguing the contents and the brush’s condition, and being pleased that he’s concluded something about the woman based on what he sees Spark follows simply with “That’s what Laurence was like.”
She could extrapolate, but the reader gets the character.
I came across this excerpt from A Far Cry from Kensington, which I haven’t read.
“You are writing a letter to a friend,” was the sort of thing I used to say. “And this is a dear and close friend, real – or better – invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you. Now, you are not writing about the relationship between your friend and yourself; you take that for granted. You are only confiding an experience that you think only he will enjoy reading. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers. Before starting the letter rehearse in your mind what you are going to tell; something, your story. But don’t rehearse too much, the story will develop as you go along, especially if you write to a special friend, man or woman, to make them smile or laugh or cry, or anything you like so long as you know it will interest. Remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off.”
That’s writing advice from one character to another so there’s no guarantee that it’s the attitudinal stance Spark takes when writing her fiction, but it is. She runs right up to the edge of crossing formal sensibilities with little near heresies, but she never quite does. I get the sense that she’s fending off her internal editor with “They’ll get it.”
She wrote an essay about when she decided to become a professional writer. She’d considered the idea, but it was something on the horizon; to be pursued. In “The Poet’s House” she describes an interrupted trip. It was during World War II and her train stopped. At the time, it wasn’t unusual for passenger trains to wait on the tracks for four or five hours. There were troop exercises, movements, and German bombings to contend with. This wait was five hours, eventually arriving in London but far too late to make her Edinburgh train. She had very little money and no idea where to stay for the night, but over the five stagnant hours she’d made friends with a fellow passenger. The new friend, a woman around her age, was a domestic of some sort. Spark doesn’t say what sort, but she lived in a house in which the “master and mistress” were away so Sparks was welcome.
The master referenced turned out to be a famous poet. On finding out, Sparks was overcome. “I went round it touching everything. I sat at the poet’s desk. I lifted the pencils and smelt them. I wanted to draw the virtue out of everything, and make it my own.” That’s what Muriel was like.
She spent the night with sirens and the occasional “thud of the V-1s near or far.” She noted a Morrison shelter in the house but didn’t make use. “I felt it was impossible that the poet’s house could be hit by a bomb.”
She was enervated. The next morning she called a publishing house, being sure to let them know that “I was speaking from the house of the poet, whose name I didn’t hesitate to mention,” and asked if they were interested in her book. They were interested. She didn’t have a book, nor would she for a couple of years, but that’s impressive. She also wrote a poem and sent it off to two magazines and both wanted it, which caused a problem but a welcome one.
In “Comment on ‘The Poet’s House’,” she reveals the master. “It was Louis MacNeice. I am sure he would not have been embarrassed by the story, for his part, but rather amused…” It’s a charming and funny tale. You should hear her tell it.
All the Poems of Muriel Spark is, I think, a collection of many of the poems of Muriel Spark. She notes in the introduction “Not all were in my view successful enough to be offered in the present volume.” I take that to mean there are poems that were not included, though it could mean there are poems included she’d rather have excluded.
She’s funny about her older work.
from Edinburgh Villanelle
Waters no provident whim made wine
Fail to infuriate the dull
Heart of Midlothian, never mine.Municipal monumentts confine
What ghosts return to ridicule
These eyes that saw the saturnine
Heart of Midlothian, never mine.
“What did I mean by ‘Heart of Midlothian, never mine.’?” she writes. It’s one of the pivotal, of the two repeating, lines in the poem, but it’s old, circa 1950 in a book compiled for 2004 publication. “I have no idea what I meant by the words in the poem, ‘never mine’, and yet I meant them at the time. And I have let them rest as they are, along with other unfathomable lines.”
She mentions Auden and his habit of going back and rewriting or updating works; “touching up,” she called it. Such tinkering was not for her.
from Authors’ Ghosts
Whole pages are added, re-written revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
Have passed, the reader
Picks up the book—But was it like that?
I don’t remember this… Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it—
The author’s very touch is here, there, and there,
Where it wasn’t before, and something’s missing—
I could have sworn…
There’s a documentary with Ian Rankin about Spark that the internet claims is available on Apple TV, but that’s damn lies and trickery. I can’t find it streaming anywhere at the moment. My copy of The Driver’s Seat, the good librarian’s favorite of her novels, was supposed to have arrived yesterday, but some combination of shipping delays and Halloween tomfoolery has conspired against me. Amazon’s given a new delivery date of Saturday. I enjoyed reading the library’s copy of All the Poems enough to have ordered a copy for myself but it’s only available from some third or eighth party vendor so I should have it in hand in time for Thanksgiving. It’s not easy being a Spark zealot, having converted so late in life, but it’s so far been rewarding and I’m almost to the point where I’m not saying “… I mean Spark.”
She should be remembered and studied primarily for her prose, but a last word from her towards this space’s purpose: “…I can state my conviction that. For creative writing of any sort, an early apprenticeship as a poet is a wonderful stimulant and start.”
