“Spark is a mercurial writer. Now you see her, now you don’t”
In the first of a series of esssays written to mark the hundredth anniversary of Muriel Spark’s birth, Allan Massie looks at the events that led up to the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, and shows how some of its themes foreshadow her late
Muriel Spark was in her fortieth year when her first novel was published in 1957. Few who knew her in London in the decade after the war would have predicted the success and celebrity that followed. Her personal life had been difficult, her literary career undistinguished, even drab. Brought up in an Edinburgh tenement, daughter of a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, she had flourished at school, where, by her own account, she was regarded as the licensed Poet and Dreamer. She chose not to go on to university, instead taking a course in précis writing and becoming a shorthand typist.
Anxious to get away, she married young. Her husband, Solly Spark, was almost old enough to be her father. She accompanied him to Rhodesia where he had a teaching post. A son, Robin, was born. Her husband was unbalanced and violent; she left him. A couple of years later she managed to return to England on a troopship. Robin had meanwhile been consigned to the care of some nuns. She retrieved him after the war, taking him to Edinburgh to be brought up by her parents. Mother and son were never close.
In London in the last year of the war she found a post in the department of Political Intelligence in the Foreign Office. It was Propaganda work; her duties were principally secretarial.
A spell as Secretary of the Poetry Society, responsible for its magazine, proved contentious and disagreeable. She published a collection of her own poems, to no fanfare, and wrote books on Mary Shelley, the Brontës and John Masefield, collaborating with her lover Derek Stanford; that relationship would end in acrimony, each resentful of the other. A short story won an Observer competition, but in her mid thirties she was a minor figure who had made little mark in literary London. She was poor, overweight and unhappy.
Two things changed her life. She became a Roman Catholic and suffered a nervous breakdown. Her conversion was intellectual rather than emotional. She recognised that, as the heroine of The Comforters thinks, “the demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous. Christians who don’t realise that from the start are not faithful. They are dishonest; their teachers are talking in their sleep. ‘Love one another . . . brethren, beloved . . . your brother, neighbour, love, love, love’ – do they know what they are saying?” Her Catholicism has puzzled readers by the absence of charity. Her faith belongs more to the Old Testament than the New, to the jealous God Jehovah rather than to “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild”. She is given to judgement rather than empathy; her judgements are as sharp and decided as those of a Jewish prophet or Scots Presbyterian minister.
The nervous breakdown had physical causes. To lose weight and suppress her appetite she took Dexedrine, a then fashionable amphetamine. She began to hear voices. According to her generally reticent exercise in autobiography,
Curriculum Vitae, she was working on a book about TS Eliot when the text became disordered. Words were mixed up. “They formed anagrams and crosswords. In a way as long as this sensation lasted, I knew they were hallucinations. But I didn’t connect them with the Dexedrine.” This strikes me as defensively disingenuous. Hearing voices is frightening. Seeing words rearrange themselves on the page, as if of their own volition, is alarming. Hallucinations have an urgent and terrifying reality; it is rare for the afflicted to know them for what they are. Spark however had a need to be in control. To admit to having lost control was a weakness. In her novels the narrative voice is always utterly assured. But I suspect that at the time she was scared stiff.
Be that as it may, her conversion and the experience of a bout of madness made a novelist of her. The first gave her a settled viewpoint, the second direct experience of the fragility of personality.
There was a problem however. “I was asked to write a novel and I didn’t think much of novels – I thought it was an inferior way of writing” – inferior, that is, to poetry, to the Border ballads, so abrupt, so rapid in their shifts from light to darkness, which she had delighted in since her childhood and which were indeed to influence her way of writing novels. Later, in Curriculum
Vitae, she rationalised this turn to “an inferior way”. “Before I could square it with my literary conscience to write a novel I had to work out a novel-writing process peculiar to myself, and perform this act within the very novel I proposed to write. I felt, too, that the novel as an art-form was essentially a variation of a poem. I was convinced that any good novel, or indeed any composition which called for a constructional sense, was essentially an expression of poetry.” One may accept this, while adding that, like many novelists Spark formed a theory of the novel to justify her own practice. “Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got
to make up your mind it’s not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it.” This is not a remarkable observation. Even the most dourly “realistic” of novelists should assent. Fiction is selective; more of life and the truth of life (whatever this may be) is omitted than included. On the other hand the idea that fiction is “a kind of parable” is questionable. A parable is effective only if it can be interpreted and its meaning grasped. But novels, like poetry, may be appreciated without being understood. One thinks Spark must have known this; perhaps the parable is a red herring. Certainly her own novels resist easy interpretation. This is part of their charm.
Novels are made from experience (which includes the reading of other novels), observation and imagination. Approaching the middle stage of life Spark was well equipped, rich in all these elements. She had experienced a happy childhood, adolescent success, a difficult and frightening marriage, poverty (comparative poverty, that is), love of a sort, and betrayal. She had been guilty of betrayal herself. She had been converted to a faith which she rightly found demanding, and she had recently enjoyed the inestimable gift (for a novelist) of going off her head. Her observation was sharp; she had a magpie’s eye and an alert ear. Her imagination was penetrating. She might affect not to think much of novels and perhaps did indeed regard a novel as “an inferior way of writing”, but everything had prepared her for a career as a novelist, however reluctant she might be to admit this, and she would of course prove to be a better novelist than poet.
There are two plots in The
Comforters. One is fanciful and improbable; the other imaginative and convincingly real. The first is charming; the second disturbing. The plots are not distinct, for the same characters people both, but there is no thematic connection. The marriage of the related but distinct plots is imperfect as it isn’t in
Memento Mori, the finest, and most assured success, of her early London novels. Nevertheless there is evidence of what would come to be recognised as the characteristic Spark touch: the unreal plot is presented in realistic style (even if the realism is also whimsical); the real one engages with religious mysteries and flirts with the supernatural.
The novel opens as light comedy:
“On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.
‘I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the B.B.C. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’ Laurence shouted from the window, ‘Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.’
She puckered and beamed up at him.
‘Shouting from the window,’ she said to the baker.”
Their relationship is established with lovely economy – “puckered” is a good word.
Louisa Jepp, the part-gypsy grandmother, and Laurence adore each other. Laurence finds her endlessly engaging and amusing, but he is also an inquisitive young man who thinks his grandmother is up to something. His suspicion is confirmed when he finds diamonds concealed in a loaf of bread and then when he comes upon her entertaining a rather rum group of somewhat shifty friends, Mr Webster the baker and the Hogarths, a father and his crippled son. Grandmama has a gang, he tells his girlfriend Caroline, and speculates, light-heartedly, that they may be Communist spies. The discovery of the jewels suggests otherwise and indeed the gang are engaged in smuggling diamonds from the Continent, Louisa communicating with her friends by carrier pigeon.
The tone of this strand of the novel is very much of its period; it belongs to the world of Ealing comedy, Lavender
Hill Mob and The Ladykillers .The means by which the diamonds are smuggled into the country in plaster casts of saints, carried by the crippled boy in his wheelchair, echo
The Lavender Hill Mob. In that film stolen gold bars are melted down and reconstituted as models of the Eiffel Tower. In the novel the diamonds are transported to their London contact, or fence, concealed in tins of Louisa’s home-made pickles, and this also breathes the atmosphere of Ealing Studios, with Louisa a character to be played by Margaret Rutherford.
Laurence is the link between the novel’s two plots. Caroline, a writer engaged in a study of ‘Form in the Modern Novel’, has abstained from sex since her conversion to Catholicism. (Surprisingly this doesn’t disturb Laurence.) Now she has gone to Yorkshire for a ‘Retreat’. She is a neurotic, but quite happy to recognise that she is: a priest will tell her that ‘neurotics never go mad’ – a line that sounds a note which one will come to view as characteristically Sparkian. The Retreat is not a success; she is oppressed by the housekeeper at the Pilgrim Centre of St Philumena, a Mrs Hogg, formerly a servant in the Manders family. Mrs Hogg tells her that everything she herself does is guided by “Our Lady”: “I ask a question and she answers . . . The words come to me – but of course you won’t know much about that. You have to be experienced in the spiritual life.” Caroline finds her repulsive and soon “began to reflect that Mrs Hogg could become an obsession, the demon of that carnal hypocrisy which struck her mind whenever she came across a gathering of Catholics or Jews engaged in their morbid communal pleasures”. It doesn’t occur to her – or perhaps to Spark? – that in keeping Laurence on a string she may be guilty of “carnal hypocrisy” herself. Be that as it may, she flees the Retreat and returns to London.
The tone of the novel shifts. Caroline, alone in her flat, begins to hear voices. “Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts . . . There seemed, then, to have been more than one voice: it was a recitative, a chanting in unison. It was something like a concurrent series of echoes . . .” In a panic, she makes ready to flee to her friend, the Baron, with the voice or Typing Ghost remarking on “the difference between this frenzied packing operation and the deliberate care she had taken, in spite of her rage, to fold and fit her possessions into place at St Philumena’s less than a day ago failed to register. Tap.” Before long the Typing Ghost will insist that it is writing a novel and that Caroline and all the other characters in it are fictitious – the claim then regularly made in a prefatory note to novels in order to forestall any possible libel actions.
Caroline is therefore immediately brought up against questions which were to be repeatedly asked in Spark’s novels: what is reality? Is it what presents itself to the senses? If so, in what sense are the voices she hears less real than her conversations with Laurence and the Baron? Or do they belong to a different order of reality? In what sense is Mrs Hogg’s account of her conversations with the Virgin Mary to be considered less real than the voices by which Caroline is assailed? And in what sense is a novel – a work of fiction – to be considered a reflection of reality? It is no wonder that Caroline has been experiencing difficulty in writing the chapter on Realism in her study of ‘Form in the Modern Novel’.
The Comforters is a novel which, interesting and at times compelling in itself, contains the germ of an idea which was to be central to Spark’s mature fiction: the disturbing and destructive nature of egoism with its inability to perceive the world objectively. So Mrs Hogg’s “lust for converts to the Faith was terrifying, for by the faith she meant herself “. Mrs Hogg is indeed the dominating presence in the novel: all the other characters fading beside her. She is a formidable figure with her oppressive physicality and her cloying egoistic religiosity. Yet by concentrating on her particular characteristics – “the tremendous and increasing bosom” for which she seeks in vain “an effectual garment to harness it” until at last “she had taken to wearing nothing regardless beneath her billowing blouses. ‘As God made me,’ she may have thought in justification” – Spark paradoxically reveals her emptiness. She is a mischief-maker who makes no real mischief, though in the novel’s dramatic end Caroline recognises that if she could not “free herself from Mrs Hogg, they must both go under”.
Spark is a comic novelist, and a metaphysical one delighting in what Dr Johnson called “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. She is a mercurial, a slippery, writer. Now you see her, now you don’t. You think you have grasped her meaning; then it eludes you.
“‘Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?’ ‘Largely,’ said the Baron.
The Comforters contains the germ of an idea which was to be central to Spark’s mature fiction: the disturbing and destructive nature of egoism
‘I resist the proposition,’ Caroline said.
‘That is an intolerant attitude.’ ‘It’s the only alternative to demonstrating the proposition,’ Caroline said.”
But the question is left open.
There are weaknesses in this first novel – for instance the Baron’s feeble and futile obsession with the Black Mass and his absurd insistence that Mervyn Hogarth is “the foremost diabolist in England”. There are lines which belong to an inferior and more ordinary way of novel-writing with the careless use of signifying adverbs: for instance, “She remarked ruefully” and “Caroline seized the phone angrily”.
But this follows immediately a delightful sentence: “She [Mrs Hogg] left, pathetic and lumpy as a public response.” One may also think that Caroline’s voices are too easily disposed of, even while acknowledging that this was perhaps how Spark dealt with her own bout of madness, putting it out of her mind with the same decisiveness as Caroline packed her case before leaving her Retreat.
Yet what an unusual, and unusually confident first novel this is, a tyro’s work certainly, but one which anticipates the assured successes of the London novels which followed in such quick succession, especially
Memento Mori and The Bachelors. It has a wonderful puckish lightheartedness and already the dandy elegance that characterised her finest novels. I was eighteen when I first read The Comforters. It delighted me then; it still delights me now, sixty years on.
More importantly it delighted Evelyn Waugh. Sent a proof copy by the publishers, he replied: “The first half, up to the motor accident, is brilliant. The second half rather diffuse. The mechanics of the hallucination are well managed. These particularly interested me as I am myself engaged on a similar subject.” That was The Ordeal of
Gilbert Pinfold, Waugh’s account of when he himself heard accusing voices and, as he put it, went off his head. Pinfold is a more coherent work, a finer piece of craftsmanship, but Waugh called The Comforters “remarkable, brilliantly original and fascinating”, and urged friends to read it. He would continue to recommend her novels and in 1960 wrote to her to say he was “dazzled by Bachelors ,the cleverest and most elegant of all your clever and elegant books’”
Writing about her youth in Edinburgh, Spark recalled that the essential characteristic Edinburgh word was “nevertheless”. A statement might be made, apparently truthfully, or an argument advanced, seemingly cogently; nevertheless there was always something to be said on the other side. “I believe myself to be well indoctrinated by the habit of thought which calls for this word . . . I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea. It was on the nevertheless principle that I became a Catholic.” For anyone “well indoctrinated by this habit of thought”, things may be what they seem to be; nevertheless they may not. One reads, or should read, her novels in this spirit. They may seem light as a May morning, airy and insubstantial; nevertheless they are serious. They make you smile and laugh; nevertheless the reflections they provoke may be dark and grim.