Memento Mori: extract from Chapter One
She was forty-one years old, and at last earning enough from her writing to survive comfortably
Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain-pen and continued her letter:
One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.
The telephone rang. She lifted the receiver. As she had feared, the man spoke before she could say a word. When he had spoken the familiar sentence she said, ‘Who is that speaking, who is it?’
But the voice, as on eight previous occasions, had rung off.
Dame Lettie telephoned to the Assistant Inspector as she had been requested to do. ‘It has occurred again,’ she said. ‘I see. Did you notice the time?’ ‘It was only a moment ago.’ ‘The same thing?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the same. Surely you have some means of tracing –’
‘Yes, Dame Lettie, we will get him, of course.’
A few moments later Dame Lettie telephoned to her brother Godfrey. ‘Godfrey, it has happened again.’ ‘I’ll come and fetch you, Lettie,’ he
“perfectly sensible” when discussing her books, Charmian retains her novelist’s insight. She realises that her dementia has been the excuse Godfrey needed to take his revenge: “It was an instinctive reaction to the years of being a talented, celebrated woman’s husband, knowing himself to be reaping continually in her a harvest which he had not sown.” As interest in her novels revives, Charmian’s brain sharpens and her physical health improves. “Godfrey, after all, was not a clever man,” she muses, while plotting her escape from her husband and his bullying new housekeeper, Mrs Pettigrew, who wish to exert upon her “a firm hand”. Trust and betrayal are key
themes here, as they would be in The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published
just two years later.
Spark’s novels often feature a character who is a writer or publisher, somebody who seems to occupy a Spark-shaped space in the text. Charmian is a much more veiled example than, say, Fleur Talbot in Loitering with Intent ,but retrospective autobiographical readings do present themselves: the jealous lover, the disappointing son. (Although, at the time of writing, she remained friendly with her ex-lover Derek Stanford, and was immensely proud of her son Robin.) More pertinent is Charmian’s belief that “the art of fiction is very like the practice of deception”, an idea that Spark circled around throughout her writing life. In these current days of insisting that the truth be found in art, it is interesting to read a portrait of an author firm in her belief that fiction is not in itself true, but offers instead an image of the truth. Real life is different. In real life, for Charmian, and perhaps for Spark too, “Everything is in the Providence of God”.
Whereas we’re told that many of Charmian’s novels consisted of people saying “touché” to each other, Spark is known for the sharpness of her style. The narrator of Memento Mori is rovingly omniscient and wonderfully tough, a voice capable of observing Godfrey Colston standing there “arms dangling and legs apart, like a stage rustic” as well as noting the way a visitor to Jean Taylor looks carefully at her eyes to determine “a continuing intelligence amongst the ruins”. Old age is full of indignities, and Spark’s characters are spared none of them. Jean Taylor, a woman “practised in restraint”, embraces the “desolate humiliation” of the microcosm that is the Maud Long Ward as God’s will. She “did not hesitate, on one occasion when the nurse was dilatory, to wet the bed as the other grannies did so frequently”. The true horror to be feared is loss of control, and the loss of one’s identity that accompanies it. For the poet Guy Leet, this lies in the prospect of the physical incapacity to write. Looking “reproachfully” at his hands, he decides they might be “good for perhaps another year” in spite of the twisted fingers. “How primitive, Guy thought, life becomes in old age, when one may be surrounded by familiar comforts and yet more vulnerable to the action of nature than any young explorer at the Pole.” The triumph of the writing is that Spark creates just enough space (and no more) for the dawning of empathy. The physical jeopardy of old age creates palpable tension, the young’s lack of comprehension or active contempt for the old is lacerating, and when actual violence comes, it shocks us to our core.
To say Spark is an incisive writer is true, but her technique is perhaps more akin to selecting a specimen with a pair of tweezers and splaying it on a petri dish for examination under a microscope. All flaws are magnified, any moral core identified or found wanting. If circumstances dictate, the specimen may then be discarded, like poor Mary Mcgregor in The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie, who would die running “back and forth along the corridors” in a hotel fire. Sometimes Spark’s protagonists survive their novels and sometimes they don’t. It is giving little away to say that the body count in Memento Mori is high.
A novel about ageing and dying might be rather bleak, but Memento
Mori sparkles with a constant, satisfying humour. There is a farcical funeral, the internecine fighting of the literati is recognisable and hilarious, and the black humour as dark as it comes. Jean Taylor recalls being in her fifties and taking a sudden turn into the woods while walking with her ex-lover Alec Warner. She reassures herself with the thought: “Were they not usually young women who were strangled in woods by sexual maniacs?” On realizing that the path is in fact an innocent shortcut, and “he was not contemplating murder with indecent assault”, Jean relaxes. “How things do, she thought, come and go through a woman’s mind.” Uncomfortable tangles of sex and violence are a Spark trademark, and we can see in this a foreshadowing of Lise’s fate in The Driver’s Seat. The scene between Jean and Alec points to more fundamental concerns though. He takes Jean walking to pose one of the biggest questions to be grappled with: “Do you think, Jean, that other people exist?” The evidence Jean offers fits perfectly with the novel’s title and themes. On coming to a graveyard, she says, “Why bother to bury people if they don’t exist?”
Alec’s existential considerations develop into a fervent amateur gerontology. As we might expect, his attempts to study old age into submission come to naught. A fire destroys his meticulous research, and although he himself is spared, the only comfort he is left with is to follow Cardinal Newman’s suggestion and associate himself with the illnesses and decline of his friends (as opposed to “the great Confessor Saints”): “What were they sick, what did they die of?” The novel’s ending is masterful, exemplifying one of the greatest literary tricks that Spark employs: the ability to write in a way that can be called postmodern, or experimental, while never losing sight of the humanity at the core of the work. Within two brief paragraphs, our cast is reduced to a list of its ailments, its flesh sublimated into the wormy clay, and we are offered a striking and poignant metaphysical note on which to meditate as we close the book. The characters may have failed, but it is right that we should exercise our compassion towards them. Memento Mori is one of Spark’s best novels precisely because of how much is held in perfect balance: play and seriousness, entertainment and challenge, readable plot and postmodern derailment.
When the novel first appeared, it marked a pivotal point in Spark’s career. Her admirers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh loved it. It remained Greene’s favourite of all her novels, and Waugh thought it “singularly gruesome”. Tremendous critical success followed, in the UK at least. (The US took slightly longer to warm to her talents.) VS Naipaul reviewed it as “brilliant, startling and original”. Not bad for a work that Macmillan refused to contract until the manuscript was complete, and a vindication of Spark’s insistence that she would not welcome editorial input. She was forty-one years old, and at last earning enough from her writing to survive comfortably (and, indeed, to buy herself a diamond ring). She had published three novels within three years, and the advance for her next, The Ballad of Peckham
Rye, doubled. It would soon be time to think of matters such as public image and the ideal conditions for the continued production of art.
Across such a glittering oeuvre as Spark’s, Memento Mori continues to stand out for the contemporary reader. Its structure and tone are pitch-perfect, and it has an uncanny knack for making us laugh while making us think. The two central female characters are wise, loveable and deeply memorable, if that is we are to be allowed to retain our memories. At the same time as being absolutely specific and of its period, it is universal. For what could be more timeless, more perennially disruptive to our psyches and more consoling than the counsel given by the anonymous caller throughout
Memento Mori? And how would each of us answer, if we took the call and were told to remember we must die?
said. ‘You must spend the night with us.’
‘Nonsense. There is no danger. It is merely a disturbance.’ ‘What did he say?’ ‘The same thing. And quite matterof-fact, not really threatening. Of course the man’s mad. I don’t know what the police are thinking of, they must be sleeping. It’s been going on for six weeks now.’ ‘Just those words?’ ‘Just the same words – Remember
you must die – nothing more.’ ‘He must be a maniac,’ said Godfrey.
Godfrey’s wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology. Charmian was eightyfive. The other day a journalist from a weekly paper had been to see her. Godfrey had subsequently read aloud to her the young man’s article:
… By the fire sat a frail old lady, a lady who once set the whole of the literary world (if not the Thames) on fire …Despite her age, this legendary figure is still abundantly alive …
Charmian felt herself dropping off, and so she said to the maid who was arranging the magazines on the long oak table by the window, ‘Taylor, I am dropping off to sleep for five minutes. Telephone to St Mark’s and say I am coming.’ Just at that moment Godfrey entered the room holding his hat and wearing his outdoor coat. ‘What’s that you say?’ he said. ‘Oh, Godfrey, you made me start.’
‘Taylor …’ he repeated, ‘St Mark’s … Don’t you realise there is no maid in this room, and furthermore, you are not in Venice?’
‘Come and get warm by the fire,’ she said, ‘and take your coat off ’; for she thought he had just come in from the street.
‘I am about to go out,’ he said. ‘I am going to fetch Lettie who is to stop with us tonight. She has been troubled by another of those anonymous calls.’
‘That was a pleasant young man who called the other day,’ said Charmian. ‘Which young man?’ ‘From the paper. The one who wrote –’
‘That was five years and two months ago,’ said Godfrey.
‘Why can’t one be kind to her?’ he asked himself as he drove to Lettie’s house in Hampstead. ‘Why can’t one be more gentle?’ He himself was eighty-seven, and in charge of all his faculties. Whenever he considered his own behaviour he thought of himself not as ‘I’ but as ‘one’.
‘One has one’s difficulties with Charmian,’ he told himself.
‘Nonsense,’ said Lettie. ‘I have no enemies.’
‘Think,’ said Godfrey. ‘Think hard.’ ‘The red lights,’ said Lettie. ‘And don’t talk to me as if I were Charmian.’
‘Lettie, if you please, I do not need to be told how to drive. I observed the lights.’ He had braked hard, and Dame Lettie was jerked forward.
She gave a meaningful sigh which, when the green lights came on, made him drive all the faster.
‘You know, Godfrey,’ she said, ‘you are wonderful for your age.’
‘So everyone says.’ His driving pace became moderate; her sigh of relief was inaudible, her patting herself on the back, invisible.
‘In your position,’ he said, ‘you must have enemies.’ ‘Nonsense.’ ‘I say yes.’ He accelerated. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’ He slowed down again, but Dame Lettie thought, I wish I hadn’t come.
They were at Knightsbridge. It was only a matter of keeping him happy till they reached Kensington Church Street and turned into Vicarage Gardens where Godfrey and Charmian lived.
‘I have written to Eric,’ she said, ‘about his book. Of course, he has something of his mother’s former brilliance, but it did seem to me that the subject-matter lacked the joy and hope which was the mark of a good novel in those days.’
‘I couldn’t read the book,’ said Godfrey. ‘I simply could not go on with it. A motor salesman in Leeds and his wife spending a night in a hotel with that communist librarian … Where does it all lead you?’ Eric was his son. Eric was fiftysix and had recently published his second novel.
‘He’ll never do as well as Charmian did,’ Godfrey said. ‘Try as he may.’ ‘Well, I can’t quite agree with that,’ said Lettie, seeing that they had now pulled up in front of the house. ‘Eric has a hard streak of realism which Charmian never –’
Godfrey had got out and slammed the door. Dame Lettie sighed and followed him into the house, wishing she hadn’t come.