Muriel Spark Reading Week: The Finishing School

I’m running out of steam somewhat, I confess, as the end of Muriel Spark Reading Week approaches. That is partly because of general lassitude related to a dietary mishap, and partly because The Finishing School isn’t in quite the same league as the other Sparks I’ve read in the past few days. It’s still perfectly enjoyable, and I feel obliged to post about it here out of loyalty to the Project, even if what I write will inevitably be a bit half-arsed.

The Finishing School is Spark’s final novel, published in 2004. The titular establishment is the itinerant College Sunrise, currently based in Ouchy, Switzerland, a finishing school of sorts where the indolent rich children of Europe waste time at their parents’ expense while pondering what they might do with their lives. The title is a pun, because the focus is on two characters who are currently writing books – star pupil Chris, seventeen, who has nearly completed a historical novel about Mary, Queen of Scots, and has youth-bewitched publishers snapping at his heels like malnourished piranhas; and teacher Rowland, who frequently claims to be finishing his own novel, but has in fact barely started it, paralysed as he is into writer’s block by his jealousy of Chris.

The central plot of Rowland’s obsession with Chris – which consumes his mind to such an extent that he barely notices he has become a cuckold, and fails to care about it when he does – is an engaging and exciting one. Just how far will his jealousy provoke him? you wonder. As Chris becomes aware of Rowland’s feelings, he eggs him on, claiming that the knowledge of Rowland’s mental derangement inspires him to write, and they establish a kind of mutual open antagonism with sexual undertones. Other characters wonder aloud whether Rowland is in fact gay and in love with Chris. The eventual destiny of these two characters made me laugh out loud.

It recalled The Driver’s Seat in one respect, that of complicity in one’s own harm. Chris and Rowland’s games of one-upmanship always have a sinister, murderous undertone, and the reader half-expects one if not both of them to be killed by the end. Certainly Rowland’s behaviour suggests that he is ready to die as long as he can take Chris down with him. He frequently fantasises about Chris’s death.

And yet, in spite of all this excitement, the novel feels somehow less than the sum of its parts. Apart from the shenanigans involving Rowland and Chris, there is not a great deal to stimulate the interest. The other characters do not spring off the page as perhaps they should (or as one might expect, given Spark’s past record). The book ends with a series of short paragraphs relating what happens to each character in the future – the academic staff, the support staff and the pupils – and to be brutally honest I struggled to remember who they all were, and to work out whether their fates were appropriate or not, and, I regret, to find it in myself to care. I couldn’t see much to this book beyond the superficial reading as a psychological thriller – but taken at that level it is a pleasure.

And, Muriel Spark being Muriel Spark, you can still open a page at random and see something like this:

Rowland wrote:

‘The two visitors, young aunt and somewhat older nephew, walked sedately up the path.’ He took out ‘sedately’ and put in ‘carelessly’. Then he took that out and put in ‘casually’. Then he wrote, ‘She still had a slight limp.’

Ali Smith’s Guardian review, written at the time of publication, is infinitely more perceptive and interesting than what I’ve written. You may read it here.

I offer my thanks to the people behind Muriel Spark Reading Week. It has been a great joy to be part of it, and I look forward to following up recommendations from elsewhere once a decent interval has elapsed. Now I am going to revisit an old favourite, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Happy reading, one and all!

Muriel Spark Reading Week: Curriculum Vitae

I’ve always had the impression that Muriel Spark’s 1992 memoir, Curriculum Vitae, was an anomaly. This is because I generally think of Spark as a very private person, probably on the basis of her periodic refusals to be drawn on the question of her relationship with her long-term ‘companion’ Penelope Jardine. Of course, I see now that there is a difference between reclusiveness and the dislike of prurient speculation. All the same, I didn’t imagine Spark would have written such a book entirely of her own volition. Sure enough, she confesses in the introduction:

So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known, that I felt it time to put the record straight.

Regardless of her motivation for writing the book, it comes as a delight to find that this memoir of Spark’s first 39 years is as much of a joy to read as her novels, and I am tempted to say even more so. I cannot think of another volume of biography, let alone autobiography, I have loved so unreservedly. Spark’s memories of childhood are extraordinarily vivid, and yet this is not a work of the imagination. In the spirit of her record-straightening agenda she promises that she has not written anything incapable of verification by a third party. The Edinburgh of the 1920s and 30s comes fully to life, as do her friends and relations – I imagine her impeccable ear for dialogue was informed largely by attending the conversations of her aunts, as Alan Bennett famously did those of his.

In a book full of highlights, the lengthy section on Spark’s teacher Christina Kay, the prototype for Jean Brodie, stands out. We are lucky indeed if in our childhood we encounter just one character as impressive as Kay.

… it is in another letter that Elizabeth Vance brings back to me the flavour and sense of Miss Kay in her classroom sixty years ago.

‘During recent scenes on television of the reunification of Germany, from Berlin, and over the sounds of bands playing and fireworks banging, I heard the commentator mention Unter den Linden — and I was back in Miss Kay’s class and she was saying “In Berlin there is a street called Unter den Linden — that means ‘under the lime trees’, girls, and there are many furriers’ shops in that street.”’

‘Many furriers’ shops …’ That was typical of those dazzling non-sequiturs of Miss Kay’s which filled my young heart with joy. One could see in one’s mind’s eye a parade of rich overindulged German ladies, already swathed in furs, stepping out grandly under the lime trees of Berlin.

The inspirations for many of the characters and situations of Spark’s novels are revealed in the pages of Curriculum Vitae, which whets my appetite for reading her later fiction, particularly Loitering with Intent, which draws on her tenure as editor of the Poetry Review journal. This is by some way the most entertaining section of the book, and certainly the cattiest. The Poetry Review then was a bit like the Church of England now, suffering from a lot of preposterous infighting and various schisms, presumably to the great amusement of those outside. Spark had enormous trouble reconciling the factions.

One enraged reader who joined in the campaign of harassment against me was Dr Marie Stopes, the famous birth control expert — on that account, much to be admired. She was absolutely opposed to my idea of poetry. Up to his death three years earlier she had been living with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fatal lover of Oscar Wilde, an arrangement which I imagine would satisfy any woman’s craving for birth control. I met her at one of our meetings and knew she disliked me intensely on sight. I was young and pretty and she had totally succumbed to the law of gravity without attempting to do a thing about it.

Spark later bemoans the fact that it was Stopes who was the birth control pioneer and not her mother.

When I write that this book may be an even greater joy than Spark’s novels, what I mean is that it’s a more immediate pleasure on account of its being an easier book to read (and therefore ideal for the lazy reader like me). There always seems to be something cryptic about each novel, a reluctance to yield up its meaning. That’s why the only novel of Spark’s I feel I really get is the one I’ve read more than once, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In this book, Spark hides nothing. On the contrary, she lays everything bare in her commitment to fact – that is, if one takes her at face value, which on the basis of the novels may be a dangerous thing to do. What an enormous shame that the mooted companion volume was never written. At least we can be thankful for this one.

Muriel Spark Reading Week: The Driver’s Seat

Simon of Stuck in a Book finds himself the originator of Muriel Spark Reading Week. Who knows, perhaps it will become an annual occurrence. I love Dame Muriel. In fact, I find I have read nine of her books, including all but one of her pre-1970 novels (The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie many times, The Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate, The Public Image and The Abbess of Crewe). That tally shall rise this week.

I hadn’t intended to blog about my Sparkian endeavours, but what’s the point in having a blog if you don’t use it? So here we are. And an exciting start to the week with The Driver’s Seat (1970).

This is a book which culminates in a murder, but it is not so much a whodunnit as a whydunnit (a term used towards the end of the book). In some respects it reminded me of one of my favourite short novels, Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), which is a dispassionate (though not passionless) dissection of the events leading up to a crime. Reading that book for the first time, funnily enough, made me think of Muriel Spark. They both delight in the teaser, the little snippet of future information dropped in here or there, which is also much in evidence in The Driver’s Seat:

Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.

And later:

So she lays the trail, presently to be followed by Interpol and elaborated upon with due art by the journalists of Europe for the few days it takes for her identity to be established.

Lise is the book’s protagonist, and also the victim of the murder. It’s all right for me to write that down here, just as it’s all right for me to tell you that Mary Macgregor of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie dies in a hotel fire at 23, because these are items Spark presents to the reader before the fact. We are not to treat the book’s plot as the be-all and end-all. Spark is an adept plotter, and on dissection her books exhibit a meticulous care of construction, but to focus on the plot is often to miss the point. The things that happen around the things that happen may be of greater importance.

Lise is 34 years old and works in an office. She has never had a holiday. On the verge of some form of neurotic crisis, she cedes to the pressings of her colleagues and jets off to Italy. We are not told precisely where Lise comes from or where she goes, but the inference to be drawn is that she is from the North, probably Denmark. A woman from Johannesburg accosts her at the airport:

‘Excuse me?’ says Lise politely, in a foreignly accented English, ‘what is that you’re looking for?’

‘Oh,’ the woman says, ‘I thought you were American.’

‘No, but I can speak four languages enough to make myself understood.’

It turns out that Lise is telling the truth here, but generally speaking it is hard to tell at any one time whether she is or not. It’s a neat twist on the convention of the unreliable narrative: the narrative itself is unimpeachable in its truthfulness, but the protagonist is not. The story is told in the third person, and while Lise’s actions are related with exactitude, her thoughts are rarely touched on. Like the García Márquez, or Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), another close relation of this book, The Driver’s Seat is effectively a piece of reportage, and Spark frequently draws attention to the fact that although Lise’s actions are clear, her motivations are not.

She looks at herself in the glass, touches her hair, then locks her suitcase. She finds the car-keys that she had failed to leave behind this morning and attaches them once more to her key-ring. She puts the bunch of keys in her hand-bag, picks up her paperback book and goes out, locking the door behind her. Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?

Lise is flighty and unpredictable. Perhaps her sudden emancipation from work has affected her mind. In the opening scene she shouts down a sales assistant with entirely disproportionate violence for having the audacity to suggest that she buy a stain-resistant dress for her holiday. (‘As if I would want a dress that doesn’t show the stains!’ she later scoffs. The full import of this comment becomes clear later on.) On the afternoon of her arrival, she enters the ladies’ cloakroom in a department store with her new companion, the elderly widow Mrs Fiedke. Mrs Fiedke does not come out of her cubicle, and Lise fears she may have collapsed. Lise leaves, ostensibly to find help, but instead goes shopping. Mrs Fiedke rejoins her presently, and apologises for having fallen asleep.

Later, she admits:

‘I’m a widow … and an intellectual. I come from a family of intellectuals. My late husband was an intellectual. We had no children. He was killed in a motor accident. He was a bad driver, anyway. He was a hypochondriac, which means that he imagined that he had every illness under the sun.’

This might give a clue to the origin of Lise’s eccentricities if it were absolutely credible, but she shows such a fantastical streak elsewhere in the book that the waters are muddy. Is it ever possible to be certain that anything about her is what it seems? From the start, Lise appears to have some special purpose in mind for her holiday – sex, perhaps? Her cavalier attitude towards her passport and keys once she has arrived suggest that she does not intend to return. Is she running away from something? As the ending comes in sight, the reader’s perspectives shift, the focus changes. Spark is a master at this. John Lanchester, in the introduction to the current Penguin edition:

Her stories always pose a set of questions. In the course of the novel most of them are resolved … But once we have the answer, the larger sense of mystery and strangeness in the book always remains, and we are left with a lingering sense that the question we’ve had answered somehow misses a larger point.

The title of the novel is very acute. I think we are meant to leave the book asking ourselves, who is in the driver’s seat? Lise? One of the men she encounters? Or perhaps some higher power… It’s a question I will ponder for some time.

I can’t leave the book without reference to the brilliant and frequent passages of dialogue at cross-purposes that pepper Spark’s writing. This is one of her darker novels, but it’s full of humour.

As they drift with the outgoing shoppers into the sunny street, Mrs Fiedke says, ‘I hope he’s on that plane. There was some talk that he would go to Barcelona first to meet his mother, then on here to meet up with me. But I wouldn’t play. I just said No! No flying from Barcelona, I said. I’m a strict believer, in fact, a Witness, but I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don’t. I’ve been told the Scandinavian airlines are fairly reliable in that respect.’

Chain blog post

The Argumentative Old Git has very kindly nominated me to participate in a meme/chain letter-type thing. Well, I customarily pride myself on my adamantine resistance to chain letters, exhortations to ‘post this as ur facebook status for 1 hour’ and the like. But I can’t ignore a meme. Thank you kindly, Old Git.

It is now incumbent upon me to:

1) tell everyone something about myself that nobody else knows

2) link to a post that fits the following categories: most beautiful piece; most helpful piece; most popular piece; most underrated piece; most pride-worthy piece; most surprisingly successful piece; most controversial piece

and, finally,

3) nominate 7 other bloggers to participate

Let’s get going.

1) Hard, this. If you’ve read this blog before, you will know that writing about myself is probably my greatest preoccupation, and one from which the existence of a presumably infinite number of more fascinating subjects has seldom distracted me. But, having racked my brains, there is one thing I have not mentioned before. When I am watching television on my own and see someone being interviewed, I sometimes pause or mute the television and answer the question on their behalf. If it’s a sporting interview, I can usually be assured of providing a more interesting and/or erudite response than the interviewee. But the other week I was Sammy Davis, Jr. for a short period. A bit presumptuous for a middle-class white boy, but that’s the way I roll. My shameful secret no more. I suppose it arises from the lamentable fact that nobody is asking me questions on TV, in spite of my periodic desire for them to do so, even if it’s only about how City failed to find the net in the second half despite the two-man advantage.

2) A rather narcissistic exercise, but it will be over soon, and perhaps you would like to google some pornography afterwards to cleanse your soul.

Most beautiful piece: this is my most beautiful piece, and will remain so until such time as the YouTube video embedded in it is removed. It contains a lot of Brahms and not very much of me, and that is as it should be. Click on it and press play before continuing.

Most helpful piece: if this blog is ever helpful, it happens by accident. Certainly my intention is to misinform as much as possible. But it is nice when people come across it by chance because it provides something of particular interest to them. I think of welcome comments on my posts about the sculptor Georg Ehrlich and Eric Linklater’s novel The Wind on the Moon.

Most popular piece: 10 Beatles songs. I suspect this has been the most popular post in terms of hits because of referrals from Google Image Search. Still, some good stuff there.

Most underrated piece: a couple of pieces I am fond of, both of which refer tangentially to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, have been spectacularly underperused. They are Memory triggers, in which I successfully predicted that Carlos Tévez would score away at Blackpool, and A fantasy, which at a measly 5 hits is my least loved blog post. Perhaps it’s just that Hartley isn’t cool.

Most pride-worthy piece: I suppose I’m happy when I write something that rises above the mundane. There are a couple of moderately successful poetic pastiches here and here.

Most surprisingly successful piece: there was quite a lot of traffic when I wrote about the final of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, perhaps because so few other people appeared to be doing the same. Until last month, the day on which I posted it was the blog’s busiest one.

Most controversial piece: oh, you’ve got the wrong blog. But I imagine this would ruffle a few feathers if it got into the wrong hands.

3) Forgive me for neglecting to nominate seven other bloggers to take part. It’s not that I don’t care. But if you would like to, please follow this example. It’s been fun looking over the past couple of years and finding things I’d quite forgotten I’d written. Shalom.