Absurdity & intelligence
Muriel Spark wrote her Manhattan-set novel The Hothouse by the East River while living the high life in New York. In it she damned the vacuous existence of the city’s rich inhabitants, drawing on her wartime experiences to feed the satire, writes Ian Rank
As early as 1965, Muriel Spark had a title in mind for a new book. That title was Hothouse East
River. The novel itself, however, would not appear until 1973, much changed from its original incarnation, as Spark herself would confide during a 1970 interview with the Guardian newspaper: “I’m so interested in the present tense that I’ve redone a book I’ve been working on for three years, The Hot House
by the East River, and put it all in the present tense.” The present tense gives the illusion of immediacy and veracity – this story is happening right now, in real time. Spark had used the present tense to good effect in The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Not
to Disturb (1971). The first of those books was chilling in the extreme, the second an almost theatrical farce.
The Hothouse by the East River would combine elements of both.
For a few years in the 1960s, Spark made Manhattan her home. The New
Yorker magazine had helped cement her fame in the US by publishing the near complete text of her novel
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ina single issue (14 October 1961), and a dedicated office, redecorated to her taste, was held for her within the magazine’s HQ should she ever need to use it. Yet the novel she would eventually pen about New York would be one of her strangest, most jarring works, painting an unflattering portrait of the city’s wealthier denizens and their spiritually empty lives.
Elsa is a socialite. She came from nothing and apparently made her fortune from real estate – though the details are kept hazy, for reasons which eventually become apparent. Her husband Paul thinks she is mad. She stares out of the window of their apartment at nothing in particular for hours on end, and reckons that the shoe salesman she met at the start of the story is actually a German POW, Kiel, she and Paul worked alongside at a black ops site in England during World War Two. (Spark herself worked in just such a facility, as part of a team which sent transmissions to Europe in the guise of a German radio station. Spark, when not at her desk, would take the prisoners for walks in the countryside, just as Elsa used to do.) But the shoe salesman, Paul reasons, cannot be Kiel – he is far too young. Elsa, however, is sure she is right, while her analyst Garven is more interested in his client’s shadow, which always falls the wrong way. Elsa and Paul’s son Pierre, meantime, is putting together a stage version of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, in which all the roles will be played by geriatrics. Is Elsa then a Peter Pan figure herself, whose shadow has not been sewn back correctly? Is she living in a Neverland of her own construction?
Peter Pan haunts this short, troublesome novel, as does the ghost of The Great Gatsby, alongside echoes of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. It is not a story to wear its borrowings lightly, but retains an atmosphere all of its own. The dialogue belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd: language falls apart; meaning becomes elusive or elliptical. The book opens with the shoe salesman Kiel telling Elsa that the pair she is trying on ‘fit like a glove’, in an echo of the opening of The Driver’s Seat. The seemingly neurotic Elsa feels like a close cousin to Lise in that earlier book, but Spark’s style has altered somewhat. The flash-forwards of The Driver’s Seat – we learn what is to be Lise’s fate as early as chapter three – are resisted here. The mystery will only slowly be solved by reader and characters both, and at the end we may still not be entirely clear what has just occurred.
Between publication of The Driver’s Seat and Hothouse Spark gave a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was published as The Desegregation of Art and clarifies the novelist’s objectives at the time, so much so that it is worth quoting from at length:
“I only say that the art and literature of sentiment and emotion, however beautiful in itself, however striking in its depiction of actuality, has to go. It cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society, but
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