Lifelong fan William Boyd on the genius of Muriel Spark
In A Far Cry From Kensington, Muriel Spark evokes 1950s London and the publishing world with unerring accuracy, writes author and lifelong fan William Boyd, in the latest in a series of essays celebrating her centenary. The novel also reveals much about S
Ionce wrote (apropos of Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark) that “sometimes readers form unique histories with the novels they read”. And, similarly, it comes to pass – but very much more rarely – that readers will occasionally form unique histories with the novelists who wrote those novels.
Muriel Spark is an exemplary case in point, as far as I’m concerned. Like most people, I came to Spark’s work through the 1969 film of The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie and this prompted me to start reading her other novels. I was encouraged by Evelyn Waugh’s endorsement, also – Waugh being a near-obsession of mine. I became a fan – and here was the beginning of my unique history with Spark – so much so that in 1976 I wrote to her and asked if I might come and visit her at her home in Italy with a view to writing a piece about her for the Oxford University student magazine, Isis.
I was 23 and had just moved to Oxford to write a PHD thesis on Shelley. My Shelley research work was going to take me to Tuscany for some weeks that summer and I thought I might capitalise on the opportunity to meet and interview some writers I admired and who happened to live in Italy. So I duly wrote to Muriel Spark and Gore Vidal. I had a swift and amiable reply from Spark apologising and saying such a visit would not be convenient (Vidal, on the other hand, agreed). Naturally, I was disappointed to miss out on meeting Spark, but I understood. Importunate interviewers are to be avoided if at all possible.
However, my fandom didn’t diminish. I carried on reading her novels, and then, as my own literary career advanced, I started to review them. The first novel I reviewed was Loitering with Intent for the
Sunday Times in 1981. For some baffling reason, my review was not particularly favourable. I can’t now explain those reservations because
Loitering with Intent has become one of my favourite Spark novels. Perhaps I was just having a bad day.
Despite this aberration, the next phase in my tangential relationship with Spark was that, 15 years after I first tried to meet her, I finally did. In 1991 I was asked by the Sunday Times to present Spark with the
Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. I said yes instantly and wrote a speech that I delivered, in front of Muriel Spark, at some grand venue in London attended by hundreds of guests. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:
26 March 1991 “My speech seemed to go down well. Muriel Spark was a tiny woman, slightly reserved but very nice. She seemed to be a little overwhelmed by the occasion and was really only able to utter a few words of thanks. There were 700 people there – all the great and the good. [A journalist], quite drunk, lurched up to Muriel and said: ‘I love Scots and I love Jews, so you’re a very special case.’ And then disappeared, leaving Muriel completely wordless.”
It was an impossible, deafening bun fight of an evening, not the best venue or ambience for what turned out to be our one and only encounter, but my speech was full of heartfelt praise so at least she knew what I thought of her work. My last connection with Spark was at third-hand when, in 2005, she relayed a request – via Penguin, her publishers and mine – that I would write the introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Ballad
of Peckham Rye. She said I would be her “beau idéal” as introducer. I needed no urging at all. She died a year later and so, alas, ended any chance of further meetings.
All this “unique history” is by way of preamble to A Far Cry from
Kensington – possibly my favourite Spark novel. Her novels are very varied – there are surreal novels, allegorical novels, some almost philosophical fables – but all are united by a tone of voice, a very dry sense of humour, and a particularly honed, terse style (John Updike called it a “prosy bluntness”). However, A
Far Cry, we can now see, belongs in a loose group of novels in the Sparkian canon that has a recognisable footing in history and the real world – environments that Spark was familiar with and with a clear connection to her biography. The
To mark Muriel Spark’s centenary, Polygon are republishing all 22 of her novels, with introductions by leading Scottish writers. To order the complete set plus Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor for £200, visit www. birlinn.co.uk
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the best paradigm of this mode, set squarely in the Edinburgh of her youth, and there is a sequence of four novels, written over many years, that take place in London in the 1940s and 1950s when Spark was living there – The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960),
The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Loitering with Intent (1981) and Afar Cry from Kensington (1988). Quite apart from the oblique light they shine on Spark’s life, these novels also form a wonderful incidental portrait of post-war London and its denizens.
A Far Cry from Kensington is set precisely in 1954 and ’55. It is narrated by a woman called Nancy Hawkins who is looking back, decades on from the 1950s, on her early life. The young Mrs Hawkins in 1954 is a war-widow and 28 years old (Spark was 26 in 1954 and separated from her husband). Mrs Hawkins is very fat: “I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and fat backside.” Mrs Hawkins – which is how she is referred to through most of the novel – is living in a boarding house in Kensington. The “Far Cry” of the title reflects the distance she has travelled since then. Her reminiscences centre around life in the house, with its assorted, eccentric tenants, and her rackety career in two London publishing houses, from the small and indigent (the Ullswater Press) to the large and prosperous (Mackintosh & Tooley) and, eventually, an intellectual magazine called the Highgate Review. However, what seems aleatory and anecdotal soon begins to take on narrative shape in the figure of a self-important, talentless man-of-letters called Hector Bartlett. Bartlett, mysteriously, like a virus, begins to infect all areas of Mrs Hawkins’ life – her job, her home, the people she knows. Very quickly she begins to hate Bartlett and describes him – to his face and to everyone who has connections with him – as a pisseur de copie. “It means,” Mrs Hawkins explains, “that he pisses hackjournalism, it means that he urinates frightful prose.”
Bartlett’s intrusion into Mrs Hawkins’ life provides the narrative momentum to A Far Cry . He blackmails a fellow lodger; his liaison with a chic, successful novelist called Emma Loy gets Mrs Hawkins fired from two jobs; Bartlett’s appalling manuscripts keep landing on her desk; but, in a significant way, the plot of A Far Cry is not what makes it beguiling. The novel is dominated by the character of Mrs Hawkins and her tone of voice and is full of her bons mots and theories about how to make the most of life. For example:
“I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do.” And, “Cultured people are not necessarily nicer people . . . Frequently, the reverse.” And, “[Friendship and loyalty] are ideals that can put too much of a strain on purposes which are perhaps more important.”
Mrs Hawkins is hugely confident and, in a real sense, a life force. People are drawn to her; people confess to her; people think she is wise and allknowing; people ask her advice about what they should do in all manner of difficult and compromising situations. And so, as the story of Mrs Hawkins’ reminiscences plays out, this comedy of manners in postwar London, with its bomb-sites and poor food, its meagre pleasures and low-rent aspirations, delivers many riches. Spark has the publishing world dead to rights; she understands the feeble ploys and manoeuvres of people on the make in the most modest and unassuming of ways; she relishes life’s inherent absurdity.
In this sense she reminds me of Chekhov – that other gimlet-eyed observer of the human predicament – who wrote, in 1888, that the writer “should not be a judge of his characters or what they say, but an impartial witness… It’s time for writers, especially writers of real artistic worth, to realise that in fact nothing can be understood in this world.”
In almost every detail I would say this was Spark’s credo, and that this studied disinterest, this amused incomprehension, is the essence of her writerly stance and is the source of all the dark human comedy in her work. Except that in the case of Afar
Cry, in the case of one character, she throws this credo out of the window.
Hector Bartlett is condemned from his very first appearance and becomes Mrs Hawkins’ whipping boy for the rest of the novel. His humiliating depiction is merciless and relentless. If one didn’t know why – didn’t know the backstory – then Bartlett’s portrait would seem almost shrill and over-vindictive. It sits somewhat uneasily in the novel; the Mrs Hawkins we have come to know wouldn’t really care about someone so nugatory and unpleasant as a Hector Bartlett, an appalling euphuistic fake, an egomaniacal pretentious bore. So why all the manifest distaste and contumely?
Of course we now know, since Spark’s death and Martin Stannard’s biography – and it was something of an open secret in literary circles at the time of the book’s publication in 1988, it should be said – that Hector Bartlett is the thinnest of thin disguises of a real person, one Derek Stanford. Stanford (1918–2008) was Spark’s lover and frequent collaborator during the 1950s. Their relationship ended in harsh acrimony and enduring recriminations.
A Far Cry is in a very obvious way a “novel of revenge” – a small sub-genre but one with some eminent members: Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Nabokov’s The Gift and Hemingway’s The
Torrents of Spring come immediately to mind. Spark indeed had her revenge: Derek Stanford, minor poet, anthologist and down-at-heel littérateur would be wholly forgotten today had he not been immortalised as Hector Bartlett, pisseur de copie.
But it would do the novel a disservice to categorise it solely as Spark’s counter-attack on her former lover. Other autobiographical elements give the novel and its many delights further depth. It is also, hindsight allows us to say, a self-portrait of the author at a precise time in her life.
Mrs Nancy Hawkins – with some minor alterations (Spark, though a diligent dieter, was never as fat as her alter ego) – is a vivacious and unforgettable portrait of the energetic and formidable young woman that was Muriel Spark, dead set on making her way in the world.
The publishing houses where Mrs Hawkins works are versions of publishing houses where Spark worked. The boarding house in Kensington is a clear simulacrum of the boarding house in Camberwell where Spark lived between 1955 and 1965. To see ourself as others see us is often problematic: to see ourself as we imagine ourself to be is another matter altogether.
In A Far Cry from Kensington, Spark, that most enigmatic, canny and secretive of novelists, draws back the veils that obscured her years in London in the 1950s and presents herself and her view of life and the world to us. As we read, we realise we are in the hands of a great artist: the experience is both revelatory and exhilarating.