Honest literature for a dishonest time
Watergate prompted Muriel Spark to write The Abbess of Crewe in 1974, relocating the machinations of the White House to an English provincial convent. Its deft and funny dissection of the scandal belies its real target – every dishonest power structure un
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
What has fiction to do with truth? What has art to do with life? At the front of the manuscript of what would become her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark inserted a handwritten caveat: “I think it is obvious that none of my novels is a literal history of real events. (It would be a blow to my pride of invention if anyone thought so.) But as I was brought up in Edinburgh during the period described in this novel, perhaps it is necessary to say that this, in particular, is a work of fiction, not disguised autobiography. And I hope it bears whatever truth is proper to an honest creative process.”
Pride of invention. Proper truth. Honest creative process. All her writing life Spark was asking herself questions about the workings of morality, above all the moralities of art. So what might The Abbess of
Crewe – her 1974 novel inspired by Watergate, the biggest international political scandal of the twentieth century – have to do with the reallife process it satirises? Such a weighty subject, such a slim, lightfooted work: it is the most directly referential novel of the whole Spark oeuvre. It came out to reviews in newspapers whose pages were still full of the news stories and fallout from Watergate, which took its name from the complex of apartments and offices in downtown Washington where, in June 1972, a bungled break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters was the first uncovering of evidence, in the land of the free, of widespread bugging, underhand surveillances, cash-inhand deals, lies, scape-goatings and deceptions riddling not just Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign but the whole presidential power structure.
Spark downgrades the Oval Office, the American seat of power, to a nunnery in a north-west English town named after a railway junction. (Crewe was a place Spark associated with what might be called a very real surreality, an enforced midwar boredom, hiatus, impotence. “If you travelled long distances by train during the war,” she wrote in ‘The Poet’s House’ in 1960, “you’ll probably remember how the trains used to stop at some big station like Crewe or York, or at some large junction, and seemed to forget to go on. Sometimes a train would simply wait at a place for four or five hours at a time.”) She recasts the real-life US skulduggery as a rompy comedy of manners, a power struggle between a bunch of holier-than-thou nuns around whose election of a new abbess a nationwide scandal arises – after the theft of a thimble from the sewing-box of one of the sisters. “Such a scandal could never arise in the United States of America,” Alexandra, the Abbess-to-be, exclaims. “They have a sense of proportion and they understand Human Nature over there; it’s the secret of their success.”
Alexandra spends the novel managing the “crisis of leadership in the Abbey” by assuring her own election against strong opposition from Sister Felicity, a free-love-loving nun of “insufferable charisma” who wants to transform the old establishment into a “love-abbey”. The old guard is worried: Felicity is polling alarmingly well among the nuns. So trees are bugged, walls are bugged, hush money changes hands, third-rate burglary happens, things are deleted from tapes by executive privilege.
Meanwhile, the Abbey embraces the twentieth century with courses in understanding electronics and surveillance replacing the “daily curriculum” of “book-binding and hand-weaving”; its nuns sit at mealtimes listening to Scripture readings which pivot suddenly, seamlessly, from useful biblical tract and instructive adage – “Where there has been a quarrel, to make peace before sunset” – to quite different “readings”: “Systems of recording sound come in the form of variations of magnetization along a continuous tape of, or coated with, or impregnated with, ferro-magnetic material . . . Here endeth the reading. Deo gratias.” These nuns, led by the nose, not noticing (or caring?) what they’re taking into themselves at every mealtime – along with the catfood the Abbey feeds them, “perfectly nourishing and tasty . . . bought cheaply and in bulk” – end every meal and reading in unthinking unison, “Amen.”
The Abbess of Crewe is another of Spark’s studies of worldly group dynamics. It comes after a run of novels (The Public Image, The Driver’s Seat, Not to Disturb) whose visions of insanity reveal madness as something societal, cultural. It was published between The Hothouse by the East River (1973) and The Takeover (1976); in the former the dead of Europe, wandering the earth after the Second World War, shadow-occupy the New World, cultivating their ghostly survival by psychoanalysis. Spark interrupted the writing of the latter, in which a man declares himself a god and makes up a new religion based solely on himself, to write The Abbess of Crewe ,and Watergate also figures in The Takeover for just a sliver of a moment: “the current American government scandals of which everyone’s latent anarchism drank deep that summer”. The book is born out of analyses and takes to heart this surfacing, satisfying, profound anarchism.
The novel’s source was in itself about matters of slightness and weightiness. Martin Stannard, in his 2009 biography of Spark, notes the “extensive” research for a slim novel, the “bulge” of folders of cuttings about it in Spark’s archive, the piles of books “on politics, electronics, the Benedictine Order”. But Stannard recalls, too, how it arose from a piece of pure perspective shift. Spark, visiting Sri Lanka in November 1973, was reading a local newspaper on the beach. She read the headlining story, about a local politician who had attended parliament in an unbuttoned shirt, and saw how it knocked the paper’s Watergate report into just a “tiny paragraph” well down the page and knew she was on to something – a new book, to be delivered fast. She spoke to her publishers and sorted a contract for it, separately from the one for The Takeover.
Sure enough, The Abbess of Crewe is scattered with Sparkian reappropriations of Nixonian figures, and tropes and catchphrases in the news which anyone who lived through Watergate would immediately recognise: “in it up to the neck”, “the scandal stops at . . .”, “two of the finest nuns I have ever had the privilege to know”, “poetry deleted”.
This last, for instance, is a take on the president’s face-saving “expletives deleted” command, given as some expletive-riddled tapes were about to come to public consciousness. (For a list of probable parody-equivalents between fictional figures and real-life figures, please see the note at the end of this introduction.)
With its four-decades-old Watergate references, the novel aims at targets that won’t necessarily mean anything other than a strangely hyped-up rhetoric to readers who don’t recognise its contemporary references. In any case, as Spark said in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s
Kaleidoscope when the novel came out, “I thought the whole Watergate thing was greatly exaggerated. I didn’t want to do a direct satire on Nixon, and I haven’t done that.”
Its real subject is a merry and liberated perspective. Its real target is every dishonest power structure under heaven.
“O rare Abbess of Crewe!” Here’s a novel so slim in the hands that it’s as if it gestures to text-thinness itself. Reading it produces a kind of spacey porousness, a breathability. Its slightness is deceptive. It is written so tightly, it is so layered a work, that its lightness is miraculous.
It opens with the phrase: “What is wrong?” Its first paragraph puns on the notion of receptivity – it’ll soon become apparent just how “receptive”, poetically, metaphysically and electronically, everything round us is. The paragraph ends on a joke at the expense of Roman Catholic birth-control methods, a spin on the traditional rhythm method. Something quite other is coming to birth here. Its first page reveals deep judgementalism quite casually at work, a “whine of bewilderment”, the “voice of the very stupid”, and a hierarchy of silence, voice and power, of order and Order, in a world so “receptive”, so sensitive to what’s happening in it that it’s “as if the trees are listening”. They are. They’ve been bugged, in an abbey full of “eavesdropping devices” working for and against its own inhabitants. But they’re also “listening” in a figurative poetic mode (what might be called a different rhythm method altogether), because behind everything throughout this novel, the natural and the supernatural world are unassumingly present, even by their near-absence or traduced transformations, via the art process – even though this is the kind of abbey that renders God “innocuous”: its nuns suspecting “no eavesdropping device more innocuous than God to be making a chronicle of their present privacy”; one where words like “faithful” and “obedient” have come to mean the “little cylindrical ears in the walls” which “faithfully” send what they pick up to “spools, spools and spools” of tape that “twirl obediently for hours and many hours”, a place where “God in his heaven” is likened to Sister Felicity’s thimble “lying in its place in her sewing box”. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost? God the Thimble.
Something very like those fictional bugged abbey trees figured vividly in real life for Spark, from the time she spent working in Intelligence in the Second World War, in “Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare”, witnessing the inventing and spreading of “detailed truth with believable lies”. She writes about this time in her autobiography,
Curriculum Vitae: “another source of intelligence came from the prisoner of war camps. The walls of their quarters were bugged as were the trees under which they strolled. This yielded the average soldier’s state of mind and the latest slang expressions.” Her experience in black ops made her sensitive to and versatile with language on levels both rhetorical and inventive. It also fed her fascination with fictions, truths, definitely with lies, which, as she wrote in Curriculum Vitae, act “like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect”, and the blood of the intellect matters vitally to Spark, since, as a character