A woman taking control of all of her life, including its end
The Driver’s Seat – the hinge between Muriel Spark’s earlier and later styles – is an extraordinary work, a crime novel in which the protagonist devises and organises her own murder, writes
Many years ago, when I was a young editor, I received a note from the Oxford professor John Bayley that was written on the back of a receipt from a recent shopping trip he’d taken with his wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch. I can remember precisely what was printed on the receipt: “4 x baked beans. 4 x pilchards. 2 x Gordon’s gin. Chocolate. A loaf.” The wild revelry of the Bayley–murdoch household can scarcely be imagined, yet I did imagine it, and wondered to what extent Iris’s love of pilchards might explain her portrait of romantic idealism in The Sea, The Sea. Literary criticism, that noble art, spends too much time scrutinizing one’s childhood as opposed to the contents of one’s shopping basket, a circumstance that would surely have amused Muriel Spark, given her distrust of biography and her love of department stores.
At the National Library of Scotland, a wonderful style bible is hidden in the Spark archive. You have to look for it, secreted among the troves of family correspondence, the manuscripts and invitations, the letters to publishers and film producers and the like. Let us call it, for fun, the holy grail of the postmodern novel: hundreds of receipts and chequebook stubs, notes to shop assistants, bills and till receipts, a veritable tickertape parade of developing selfhood, all of it related to shopping. For me, this heap of inky detritus tells a story of taste and desire that very few biographies can, and very few novels either, for that matter.
Spark was never shy about her love of the shops. “I do love clothes,” she said in 1971 to the BBC’S arts programme, Scope, “I like well-cut clothes.” She offered a big smile. She didn’t get to have many when she was young, but “I’ve been making up for it ever since.” In common with a very select group of novelists, Spark’s shopping wasn’t just about her having clothes, it was about inhabiting a world of style and basking in the ordinary rituals of maintenance and self-improvement. When she gave an interview to Country Life in the year of The Driver’s Seat’s publication, she wrote to a friend that “it was so nice to be in the human columns for a change”. There is a very Sparkian note to that “the human columns,” as if the literary pages couldn’t always be trusted to perceive the wellsprings of the literary condition. I feel there’s a sort of wisdom in the chequebook stubs, an account of life that is not frivolous or irrelevant but modern, wilful and expressive.
She wrote The Driver’s Seat in under eight weeks in 1969. Trips away from her desk in Rome were mainly for shopping. Surveying the available data – oh, yes, literary investigation! – I see she bought a hairpiece from Elizabeth Arden for 50,000 lire (the exchange rate at the time was 3,000 lire to the pound). Around the same time, she spent 30,000 on a bag. She bought several blouses, a gold suit and brown trousers, a number of dresses, and while on her first trip to Florence she bought a blouse for 90,000 lire. As the year went on, her shopping grew more extravagant. She bought an evening suit from Sorelle Fontana for 100,000 lire. Shoes from Fiorentini. A white coat from Moda. And along the way she would meet people at restaurants, Er Macellaio, Passetto Roma on Via Zanardelli, or have tea at Babington’s English Tea Room (“Walnut cake. Shortbread”) before returning to the Palazzo Taverna to get on with writing the novel, or . . . wait a minute . . . to order by post Christian Dior pantyhose from Bergdorf Goodman (“Black Orchid,” “Coffee Tone”) or materials more obviously essential to her writing process, notebooks from James Thin in Edinburgh and black biros from Harrods in London.
I mean, what is shopping, what is a purchase, if not a more or less intense moment of desire settled by a sudden
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act of volition? Which brings us to the heart of The Driver’s Seat .Onthe opening page of the manuscript she wrote, with one of those new biros, the title “Predestination,” before scoring it out and writing “Secret Mission.” That wouldn’t do either, so she replaced it at the top of the page with the words “The Driver’s Seat.” (We will come back to those rejected titles in due course.) The novel opens in, you guessed it, a boutique, where our heroine, Lise, is getting into an argument about a dress. The shop assistant, it appears, has had the temerity to offer Lise a dress that won’t stain. “Get this thing off me. Off me, at once,” Lise shouts. And right there, at the top of the novel, a sort of deadly philosophy bleeds out of commercial normalcy. Is Lise so provoked by the idea of a stainless dress because she, herself, is already stained, or is it that she must have a garment that will show blood? Both are possible, and Lise is already arranging her fate. Our heroine leaves the shop and makes her way down the street, “scanning the windows for the dress she needs, the necessary dress.” Eventually, she steps into somewhere else. She finds the outfit. “A lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright V’s of orange, mauve and blue.” She soon joins with it a summer coat of red and white stripes. Lise is satisfied. She is leaving her office job after sixteen years and is travelling to an unnamed southern city that we might understand to be Rome. We know very quickly, because the narrator tells us, that Lise is on an existential errand, a journey to complete her undoing and have herself killed, and yet the darkness seems lit by a kind of comedy, as if it is the times themselves that are absurd.
A man sitting beside her on the plane moves seats, later saying he was frightened. Everything is thus reversed. When we meet up with him again, he will seem like the coerced one, but isn’t he the murderer? Spark deconstructs the murder mystery novel with The Driver’s Seat, turning everything on its head, not least the easy separation of killer and killed. As very often with Spark, you look from an eccentric character to a knowing author or a plausible god, to say, “Who is in charge here?” Who, indeed, is in the driver’s seat? The novel is a philosophical conundrum drenched in dread, a late twentiethcentury masque, “a whydunnit in Q-sharp Major” as Lise says of the novel she carries onto the plane. And yet there is an inquiring energy in
The Driver’s Seat that is spare and Spark-like, moving the characters around, without sentiment, to meet the lineaments of a comfortless world. “What magic you have,” Alfred A Knopf, Spark’s American publisher, wrote to her at the time, “and what a crazy bitch you have created.” But to her author, Lise was more recognisable than that; she was an elaboration of a possible type. “I think there is a kind of truth in the story,” she wrote to her agent on 20 October 1969. “In some of the murders one reads about one senses a sort of collusion and sometimes one begins to wonder which party is the ‘victim.’” Dangerous stuff, but there you have it.
Spark considered Simenon to be “a truly wonderful writer”. In a short piece she wrote on the prolific Belgian thrill-meister, she praises his exactitude and his Dostoevskian way with character, his skill with the type of person who is “known and recognised more and more as our [twentieth] century wears on – the perpetrator of the gratuitous act, the motiveless crime.” In The Driver’s
Seat, Spark goes a step further than Simenon, reverses him in fact, and produces a narrative in which all those terms might be questioned. Who perpetrates the murder in
The Driver’s Seat? And what is the motive? When people say that Spark is a postmodern novelist, this is probably what they mean: she takes exhausted literary formulae and turns them in on themselves. Is Lise engaged in a semi-comedic attempt at self-slaughter? Does she design her fate? Or is she a little symbol of her times, a cold war heroine, for whom an agreeable affair with an almost random gentleman might take the form of a mutually assured destruction? (Recall that rejected title: “Special Mission.” Is it just me or is there a whiff of 1970s détente about that phrase?)
That other rejected title, “Predestination,” must bring us to more local (and more Scottish) religious concerns. I have no thesis to sell you, only that Spark must have known, when she wrote that word, how it has a special place in the literary heart of her own country, how the “auld licht” of the Scottish reformed church believed our lives are predestined, and that writers such as Robert Burns, James Hogg and her beloved Robert Louis Stevenson – in whose garden at Howard Place she played as a child – consort in their work with a universe in which the idea of free will, of human goodness and human evil, is constantly challenged by God’s Plan, the Word of Him in the driver’s seat. Tangentially, perhaps, the novel is a play on that, a vivid staging of a debate on Providence she could have heard at James Gillespie’s High School.
Spark once praised Proust for having “a sacramental view of life which is nothing more than a balanced regard for matter and spirit.” That sacramental view is everywhere in the startling un-romance of this novel, where the matter is gaudy dresses, travel routines, things to buy (such as a paper-knife) and the spirit is of the age – alienated, comfortless and, finally, nihilistic. More than Samuel Beckett, she pictures man as a problematic creature in a cold universe, but where he saw bare trees, trash cans and empty rooms, she sees department stores, shorthaul flights, hotel lobbies and sudden encounters with known strangers. Spark had always been interested in self-sufficient oddballs, but
The Driver’s Seat plumbs a deeper psychology, exploring a path for the female ego in a universe of puny expectations. At the time she wrote the book, a woman’s right to plan her own execution was not chief among the arguments of women’s liberation, but novels are not editorials, and Spark offers her reader a perverse vision of a terrible volition. Kafka would have loved it, Thomas Mann would have greatly envied the power of her dark materials: Lise is what nobody would expect but what everybody will recognise, a person crazed in the attempt to take control of her existence and call the shots.
Most novelists with a body of work can admit to a single novel that works as a hinge between their early and later styles. For my money, The
Driver’s Seat is that novel for Spark. While the girls of slender means are fighting over a Schiaparelli dress and consorting with notions of mercy, and Miss Jean Brodie is calling her own shots and inventing a milieu, they are also steeped in a world of social realism, a London where all the nice people are poor, or an Edinburgh of rocks and sentiments. Later in her work, the world, while not depleted of Sparkian detail and social truth, has more fully entered into the world of dreams and visions, a more filmic, and at times more gothic, landscape of unreality. The film of Brodie was released in 1969, the year she wrote
The Driver’s Seat, and she was keen that the latter should also be taken on by producers. “I know the movie business is in the doldrums just at the moment,” she wrote to her agent, “but I can’t help entertaining hopes for The Driver’s Seat. It is written very
Spark had always been interested in self-sufficient oddballs, but The Driver’s Seat plumbs a deeper psychology
like a film script and although I agree with you that it would take a skilful director I think the thing is to get a good actress.”
A good director soon appeared in the shape of Luchino Visconti, though not for long. “Visconti arrived in a large car with a chauffeur,” Spark writes on 16 November 1970. “He wore a scruffy dark shirt; he owns two enormous villas and belongs to a family of Milanese millionaires and is a raging Communist – presumably with other people’s money.” Then she was visited by a producer, Joseph Janni (the producer of Billy Liar and
Poor Cow). “One never knows how much these people mean what they say,” Spark wrote afterwards, “but he did spend hour after hour explaining my book to me. He said things like ‘You have to understand a character like Lise’ and I said, ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He vowed he was going to do the movie with Visconti.” In the end, neither man was involved, and the eventual movie, Identikit, starring a shrieking Elizabeth Taylor and a suitably spaced-out Andy Warhol, was a bit of a flop. Spark said Taylor was less like a woman looking to be murdered and more like someone in want of a martini.
Beyond reality, but rising from it, there were things that caught the moral attention of Spark, and victimhood was one. The word is now charged with a super-abundance of electrical power – our culture is a veritable strip of neon signs that flash “Victim” – but The Driver’s Seat may offer a singular and parallax view of what is meant by “assent,” “control,” and indeed “victimhood.” It is part of Spark’s genius to identify a moral aporia and fully imagine the conditions both within and without it, not arguing for it, not justifying it, but doing as the great thriller-writers do, freeing the suppressed terror and letting it radiate into the large, open mind of fiction. Gore Vidal, so reliable in missing the point of other writers, mistook Spark’s maturing talent for the kind of madness he too seldom saw in men. Just as she was beginning to write The Driver’s Seat, she was at a dinner with him. He told her she was cracking up as a writer. “He didn’t really think The Public Image [her previous novel] was a plausible story,” she reported, “that all women writers crack up, and in this I resembled Carson Mccullers. His list of gratuitous complaints continued at length but as he seemed to be drunk at the time I didn’t protest beyond pointing out that I am prettier than was the late and admirable Carson Mccullers.”
Spark was funny and dark and well ahead of her time. She left that dinner party to continue writing a novel about what a female character might encounter when she encounters the worst at her own behest. The Driver’s
Seat is a brilliant manipulation of our expectations, a glass of malt whisky in the middle of a fever, a hallucinogenic journey into moral doubt. It is hard to think of any novelist, in today’s environment, who would risk creating a female character who plots her own victimisation. But courage is as courage does. Spark wrote it fifty years ago and the result is a little masterpiece of fiction.