“In this great comedy, what is it that she wants us to take seriously?”
Muriel Spark’s last novel, The Finishing School, puts jealousy and the frailties of an aspiring writer at the heart of the deft, funny satire, with plenty of subtle references to earlier work and themes for fans to enjoy, writes
Muriel Spark’s twentysecond and final novel The Finishing School, first published in 2004 when the author was 86, is a comic and satirical swansong. A book that makes the reader ask questions about endings and beginnings, it begins with a conversation about how to write fiction, and allows the reader to carry on a conversation that occurs in all of Spark’s work about reality and imagination. That conversation began with her very first novel The Comforters and ends with this one. She never writes novels where she pretends that she does not know that she is writing a novel; The Finishing School takes its place amongst her oeuvre with ease, part of the family of Spark Family Robinson. Spark wrote in her spiral notebooks, “A family truth is not like any other truth.” Amongst other things, The Finishing School expands the tradition in Spark where schools and teachers stand in for family. A novel’s truth is also not like any other truth.
‘You begin,’ he said, ‘by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can’t see across the lake, it’s too misty. You can’t see the other side.’ . . . ‘So,’ he said, ‘you must just write, when you set your scene, “the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.” Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, “The other side of the lake was just visible.”’
Right away, we are in typically Spark territory: the funny, fertile land of double mirrors. We’re never far away from knowing that the novelist controls what can be seen and what’s obscured. A little later, we hear: ‘The sky bulged, pregnant with water. The lake had been invisible under the mist for days.’ No longer a description, then. This is the truth. The truth is hidden in what seems real. The tension between what is real in fiction and what is real in real life is a subject that fascinates Spark. Some characters can be too close to real life to be able to be fictionally alive. Some real people miss out on the imaginative riches a fictional character might enjoy.
As one of Spark’s favourite writers Georges Simenon maintained: “We are all potentially characters in a novel – with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.” Or as Dougal says in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, “All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural . . . If you try to be too natural, see where it gets you.”
College Sunrise is the finishing school in question, a rather bad one at that. But Spark must have believed this would be her last book, and naming it The Finishing School is her parting joke with the reader. After this, she implies, she’s finished. What’s fascinating about this book is the way that it holds up a mirror to the other books, and somehow joins together a host of preoccupations and obsessions over the writing years. It makes the connections: betrayal and love, jealousy and selfishness,
education and art, Catholicism and murder, the past and the present, the private and the public. She’s fascinated by the different writerly affectations. The writer’s retreat for instance. When the writer retreats from The Public Image are they still in
The Driver’s Seat? When The Ballad of Peckham Rye meets The Girls of Slender Means, The Only Problem is A Far Cry from Kensington. When The Bachelors, Loitering with Intent greet The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at The Mandelbaum Gate, The Takeove r is
troubling. It is all in the end Reality
and Dreams.
All the way through this short and wildly funny novel, readers might ask themselves what else it is that Spark wants to teach us, wants us to see. Or, equally, what’s she hiding from us this time? In this great comedy, what is it that she wants us to take seriously? Maybe it’s the notion that fiction is both deadly serious and not serious at all, that to be a writer you are very possibly a sage and a fool. Maybe making things up is as silly as it is profound. Writers who go to creative writing classes, she seems to imply, are even more silly and possibly more selfish than other writers. This Spark poem could have come straight out of The Finishing
School:
The Creative Writing Class
‘There is,’ he declared. ‘Really?’ she grinned. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he stated. ‘Tomorrow,’ she burbled. ‘A majority,’ he chortled. ‘The statues?’ she enquired. ‘Public health,’ he opined. ‘The signature,’ she ventured. ‘Miss Universe,’ he emoted. ‘The confederation,’ she growled. ‘Hostile ethics!’ he exclaimed. ‘The Tears of Time,’ she choked. ‘Everything entire,’ he warbled. ‘It’s a mere obsession,’ she roared. ‘Develop the wolf,’ he demanded. ‘Done,’ she snarled. ‘On with the job,’ he guffawed. ‘Not unanimous,’ she yelled. ‘You’re breaking my jaw,’ he groaned.
‘Silence!’ she sneered.
Located now in Ouchy, on the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina run the school to support themselves through Rowland’s thwarted attempts to write a novel. The school is mobile and changes location. (The original title, which Spark ditched, was The Mobile Finishing School.) There’s a class of eight students of both sexes and mixed nationalities. We don’t really get to care about any of the pupils. The Finishing School does not teach lessons on character empathy. Rowland and Nina both teach alongside guest academic ‘Seraphim’. Nina teaches frivolous and funny classes where women learn to wear warm underwear. Rowland’s classes are on the ruthless creative process. Spark acquired prospectuses of Swiss boarding schools including St George’s (‘Theft, cheating and dishonesty of any kind are considered serious offences’). Among the sources for the novel were Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and
Modern Manners, containing such sentences as ‘courtesy and civility are not a matter of snobbery or class, we all know of duchesses who behave badly’, and Emily Post’s Etiquette
by Peggy Post, which encompasses advice on everything from how best to lay a table to the proper way to address an American president. (I wonder what Spark would have made of Trump. Candia Mcwilliam put it so elegantly at a wonderful event at Boswell Book Festival recently with Alan Taylor and Andrew O’hagan: “We are homesick for what Spark would have made of our times.”)
Rowland is struggling to write his novel, suffering from writer’s block. His efforts are made much worse by the appearance of red-haired 17-year-old Chris Wiley, who is selfconfidently writing a novel about jealousy and passion and Mary Queen of Scots, and not the least bit bothered by all the other published novels about Mary Queen of Scots. Rowland is intensely irritated by him. Rowland and Chris are as large as life in a cartoon kind of way.
‘What is the story? How does it develop? Historical novels – they have to develop. How . . . ?
‘No idea, Rowland. I can’t foresee the future. All I know is the story will happen,’ Chris tells Rowland.
This novel’s key theme is jealousy and passion, and the same goes for Chris’s novel and Rowland’s (The
Finishing School has a novel within a novel within a novel, a bit like a Russian doll), but it’s not a lover’s jealousy that is of interest here. Nina is at pains to point out that Rowland is not the least bit jealous of her affair with Dr Israel Brown. Writerly rivalry drives the hydro engine of The Finishing School .And what makes you laugh out loud is that the jealousy is spoken; even the stormy weather mirrors it back. And everyone at the school knows of Rowland’s terrible suffering. Not buried under the lake, writerly rivalry is relished and savoured. Spark has a laugh at Rowland’s terrible weakness – a long laugh, a last laugh. Yet, at the same time, she makes the jealousy dangerous, thrilling. Satire is exhilarating; it can go anywhere it likes. The two opposites may end up in bed together.
‘Nina now perceived that Rowland’s jealousy was an obsession. She believed firmly that Rowland could write a good novel if he was free of jealousy, envy, rivalry, or whatever it was that had got into his mind when he had first encountered young Chris. It was a real sickness, and Rowland would be paralysed as a writer and perhaps a teacher unless he could get over it.’
In her notebooks Spark copied out quotes on jealousy. “To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter” – Françoise Sagan. Or “The ear of jealousy heareth all things” from the Song of Solomon. In the National Library of Scotland, the manuscript of The Finishing
School resides in six Bothwell Spiral Notebooks which Spark got from James Thin’s book-shop on Edinburgh’s South Bridge. It amuses me that a novel about the spirals jealousy creates was written in spiral notebooks. Chris’s novel forces Rowland to create fiction out of truth; he makes observational notes about Chris and puts them straight into his novel. Rowland’s terrible insecurity, deliciously detailed, makes his own process spiral, as he becomes more and more desperate to stay in the writerly game, which in turn makes Chris feel used and abused. Spark, in this finishing school, enjoys exploring the ethics of the novel. The novel is a morality tale, a myth-attracter, a social community, high art, cheap. The novelist can be a priest, a thief, a cannibal, a healer. Rowland becomes so obsessed with Chris’s novel that he ransacks his bag. ‘Rowland emptied the bag onto the bed – what a pile – What he was looking for were notes and books connected with Chris’s novel. Where were they? He flicked through the notebooks; they were all school stuff. Nothing to do with Mary Stuart of Scotland and her sinister crew of courtiers. Rowland rummaged among the pile. Suspicious of everything, he didn’t altogether know why, Rowland lifted the items one by one.’ (Spark’s original notes even detail the contents of teenagers’ bags.)
Chris leaves Rowland mentally out of breath, completely thrown, always watchful. ‘Rowland could have stabbed the boy for his modesty and calm.’ There is no known way to deal with the situation. Rowland starts to criticise the kind of novel Chris is writing, the kind of popular novel that he deems inferior to the kind of novel Rowland would write. ‘Chris is writing a novel where he controls people.’
Under the innocent surface of the lake are many possibilities, hidden and hinted at but not dredged up from the depths. Somehow Spark manages to make the reader be suspicious of everyone in this small book. The reader circumnavigates the jealousy and despair. Maybe Chris isn’t writing a book at all, perhaps there’s nothing locked away, the reader thinks at one point. Or maybe Nina is deliberately upping the ante for her own reasons. Or maybe Chris is the one who is jealous of Rowland, who needs Rowland more than Rowland needs him. Maybe somebody is going to actually be murdered. And so we go on in spirals and circles in this strangely worked triangle. At any point another story could be told. ‘It is witty to say that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, or that a circle is a plane figure bounded by one line, every point of which is equidistant from a fixed centre. It is plain witty. Everyone knows what a straight line and a circle are,’ says Miss Jean Brodie. A kind of mirrored twin to The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, there are many ways of looking at the upsidedown lake in The Finishing School. Brodie’s set are replaced with small brush-stroke characters here, except for Chris. And the inspirational, maddening, anarchic, vocational teacher that is Miss Brodie – who believes that ‘education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul’, is replaced by the selfish, jealous, mentally unstable Rowland, whose wife Nina feels she is ‘awfully young to be tied to a man who is married to a novel’, who cares little about his pupils, only about what he can drain from them. If Miss Brodie is the radiator, Rowland Mahler is the drain. The characters in The
Finishing School don’t distinguish between insight and instinct, unlike the Brodie set. Rose ‘has instinct but no insight’, and Miss Brodie is always categorising people. Sandy has insight, she thinks. And yet Chris here, like Sandy, makes the reader question which one is the teacher and which the betrayer. Brodie is described towards the end, by Sandy, as an ‘unconscious Lesbian’, and Rowland is described many times in The Finishing School as an ‘unconscious gay’. When Rowland starts writing a novel, he brings what is in front of his eyes into it, his notes on Chris for instance, in the same way that Sandy and the others make up Miss Brodie’s love letters. There’s always a sense in a Spark book of reality being tampered with, and tampered with to the extent that a whole other reality is created, one that could only first exist in the imagination.
Only when a publisher visits and
declares that Chris’s novel is ‘actually a lot of shit’ – ‘“Oh, come,” said Rowland in a very soft, awed, voice’ – can Rowland relax; only when the envy is dissipated can he start writing and start loving.
The Finishing School is not a finishing school at all. The Finishing
School could just as well be a fusion school between seeming opposites. Spark finds a way in this last novel to put things together that have been kept separate: teacher and pupil, past and present, art and culture, popular and highbrow, real and the imaginary. What are we supposed to really believe? What are we towards the end of our writerly life, our ordinary life, supposed to believe? What are we supposed to care about really? Do we really care for the novel? Chris discovers that he needs Rowland’s jealousy to write. What do writers need to help them to write? What did Spark need? And what of the novel Chris is writing? It sounds like a novel Spark would never write and a novel her readers would never want to read. Its creator has the same red hair. But the red that comes through most in The Finishing School is the red of herrings. How many times did Spark attempt to finish The
Finishing School? Just as the book has two beginnings, it also has two
There’s always a sense in a Spark book of reality being tampered with, and tampered with to the extent that a whole other reality is created
endings. It has a creative writing class ending and an imaginatively truthful one.
Spark shows the tyranny in the so-called tolerant bohemian artistic school, where the pupils are in a sense less free than they were at Marcia Blaine’s, the rather bland school in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark is always concerned with how society organises itself and with how society tampers with perception and reality. The novel takes us through various staged endings, to get to the final one. ‘And she heard the dear voice of Hazel forecasting the weather on Sky News: “As we go through this evening and into tonight . . .”’ A book that began with a creative writing teacher teaching lessons on how to describe the weather ends with the news, with Hazel, reading the forecast of the actual weather, but on Sky News, not the BBC. Spark is already implying that there’s something not to be trusted about Sky News telling the story of the night sky. It is no more real, no less real, than the view of the mist on the lake. (The fact that Spark knew Hazel adds to the rich fusion of truth and fiction here. If a friend tells the news, does the news become less like news, and more like something else?)
There’s a kind of poetic justice to be found in all Spark’s books. The great thing about having all 22 of her books back and readily available is that you can re-read them all in relation to each other. These are books that still speak to our times, and in some instances eerily, presciently anticipate our times. Spark is a writer who will always keep up. As we go forward and into the night, here she is through these Brexit-trumpcambridge Analytica-facebooktwittering times. And we keep faith with her faith in the multiple forms of her original novels, adept as they are at always matching theme to form. As we go forward and into the night, Spark lights up the night sky. She is always igniting something.
This last book connects everything, including Spark’s poetry, her beginnings and endings. She reminds us through this intimate portrait of Rowland and Chris of the writer she is not. She is not one of those writers she describes in the poem ‘Authors’ Ghosts’, whose ‘ghosts creep back/ Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves/ And find the books they wrote.’ And maybe at the end of the long line of books, at the end of the long life, the best we can hope for is that we can have a good and hearty laugh at ourselves. We live our lives close to pastiche. We live lies that become truths. As Proust, another of Spark’s favourite writers, had it: “Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.”
There are two endings. ‘Do both,’ says the mysterious violinist character Giovanna. And Spark does both. The Finishing School doubles back to its own beginning, and goes further back to The
Comforters, stopping off to have a blether along the way with all the others. It is the perfect introduction in a way to the rest of her books. It is the kind of advice that you might be given were you to visit the mobile finishing school in Ouchy. Start at the end and go right back to the beginning . . . Spark’s notebooks on The Finishing
School contain the sentence that appears in the novel towards the end: ‘I think “waiter” is such a funny word. It is we who wait.’ The Finishing
School is a masterclass in how to hold the point back. Spark was at pains to get things right. At an event in the Purcell Room, after the publication of The Finishing School, she said she felt she sometimes did not give her readers proper value by writing such short books. Muriel Spark’s books may be short but, like a good dram, they have a long finish.