‘Spark’s Venice off-season is cold, just like her characters’
Territorial Rights may seem like a straightforward comedy of manners, but the Cold War and the politics of 1970s Europe are never far from the surface, writes Kapka Kassabova
Venice was very much his territory; it changed less than other places with the passing of time,’ we are told early on by a brisk narrator. This onesentence masterclass in narrative brevity introduces us to one of the themes and two of the characters in this deliciously black burlesque, as delicious as delusion – the Sparkian tragic flaw of choice – and as black as the miasma of the ‘gutter-canals’ at low tide.
Curran, whose territory Venice is, or so he thinks, is a cultivated, idly rich American-in-paris with a past. His way of sending someone packing: ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’ But Curran is limited by his rational reductiveness, and this is Venice offseason. With its gliding gondolas and mists, Venice is unmistakably a theatre of the subconscious mind, a half-submerged labyrinth of unfathomable intrigue. In the Angloamerican literary canon, foreigners who arrive in Venice looking for something, usually Byronic excess, tend to come to sticky ends in back alleys. Out of all of Spark’s novels,
Territorial Rights most resonates with the Henry Jamesian paradigm of innocents abroad – except that in Spark, there are no innocents. No matter how young – I’m thinking of the girls in The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie whose flash-forwarded lives nibble at their innocence in the present – the protagonists arrive on the page already tainted. The tracing of the original crime – sin, intended or committed, past or future, is one of the psychological thrills of her work.
Territorial Rights is no exception. Incidentally, flashes of Don’t
Look Now are inevitable. Daphne du Maurier’s story, and the film based on it, appeared several years before Territorial Rights. Here too we have two dear old sisters who aren’t what they seem, a funereal gondola cortège, an obsession with a church, and revenants of a guilty past glimpsed in the shadows.
By the time two more characters arrive at their lodgings, a relationship triangle is in place, mirrored neatly by a physical triangle that represents the various masks of Venice. Curran is lodged at the expensive, tasteless Lord Byron Hotel. Robert Leaver, a young English opportunist and vague student of art history, checks in at the cheaper Pensione Sofia. The pensione was formerly Villa Sofia, property of a ‘Bulgarian count’ until the end of the war. The war creeps in early on: Curran knows Venice from the war; the sister proprietesses of the pensione, Katerina and the delightfully named Eufemia, were in their prime during the war, and so on. “And so on,” Curran says tartly to Robert, for these two have an unhappy history. The third point of the triangle – one of several relational geometrical figures in the novel – is Robert’s new interest, Bulgarian artist Lina Pancev. A girl of slender means, she lodges in a half-rotten building by the canal and wears Parisian-bohemian clothes of dubious cleanliness. Alarm bells are meant to ring whenever we meet a sartorial disaster in a Spark novel: clothes mattered to her.
Despite defecting from her homecountry on a student exchange trip to Paris, Lina remains indoctrinated by her Communist upbringing, and her candid rigidity and ruthless resourcefulness provide much verbal comedy – “While I’m here, I ought to snoop.” Lina is searching for the grave of her father, Victor Pancev, mysteriously murdered in Venice at the end of the war for his part in a presumed plot to poison the Bulgarian tsar Boris. When Curran, who is suspiciously well informed, tells this to his old-time Venetian friend-socialite Countess de Winter (a fake countess), they have a good laugh. As a fellow felon, de Winter is one of few people in Curran’s life to have “the power to infuriate him”. This is how “usefulness” is measured in Territorial Rights, and usefulness is the only measure of relationship. Spark’s Venice off-season is cold and
“Byzantine” in Curran’s words, just like her characters’ hearts. These vile bodies fall in and out of alliances, and their ruses trip them up. Without delay, more coincidences pile on, the plot thickens, the past is churned like the unmarked grave of Victor Pancev, and Curran and de Winter aren’t laughing any more. Who will have the last laugh?
Territorial Rights is Spark’s fifteenth novel, written in 1978 when she had been in Italy for a decade. She lived in Italy for over 40 years, yet her most resonant novels are set in London and Edinburgh, and, apart from The
Public Image, The Driver’s Seat and The Takeover, this is her only fiction with an Italian setting. Her Venice is exclusively a place of expatriate encounters and estrangements, in keeping with her own territorial expertise and her self-view of being a “constitutional exile”.
But she was aware of the dark mood of 1970s Italy. Her arrival in the country coincided with the so-called
anni di piombo (years of lead) – 15 years of terrorist violence by neofascists, and Marxist and anarchist groups like the Red Brigades. It was the height of the Cold War, the entrenched ideologies of which were all about claiming minds and territories. This political turbulence infuses Territorial Rights. Characters are recruited by an unnamed
Alarm bells are meant to ring whenever we meet a sartorial disaster in a Spark novel: clothes mattered to her.
terrorist group in the Middle East. Robert’s earnest notes towards a novel reveal his brush with doctrinal Communism: “Grace Gregory, a former nightclub stripper of (c.) 1930 AD, at the height of the bourgeois-fascist London ethos, later contracts a marriage . . .”; or “In Venice, V. Pancev lodges at the luxury Villa Sofia, home of an elderly count . . . When asked later what happened to their prewar luxury friend Victor Pancev, Curran and the de Winters always answered that he was murdered either by avenging Bulgarian royalists or Italian partisans. In 1953 Riccardo de Winter dies leaving his luxury palazzo to his wife Violet.”
Robert himself is middle-class and very fond of luxury.
Elsewhere Spark channels the collective voice of a wealthy, selfish older generation: “The young people don’t need money very much these days”; “They all write novels”; “Typical of the young, they don’t care what happens to their friends”.
Territorial Rights is acutely of its time – and acutely relevant to ours.
Spark consciously downplays the darkness of the times and chooses to tune her territorial tug-of-war in the major key of a comedy of manners. Entanglements multiply as Robert’s father, a retired headmaster of a boarding school, turns up with his mistress, while his housebound wife back in Birmingham hires a detective agency. Not only this: a recognisably archetypal busybody called Grace Gregory, former matron at the same school, takes it upon herself to travel to Venice with her “bright and hairy” Jewish lodger Leo and sort out her friend’s errant husband (whose mistress she used to be – “otherwise he would have been a libertine”). Grace Gregory’s bigoted chirp is a Spark trademark: “Even for here where everyone’s a foreigner she’s a foreigner . . . I always say foreign girls are good for a boy to start with, don’t I, Leo?”
But unbeknown to these relative innocents with their “bourgeois” dramas, Lina and Robert may be followed by the Bulgarian Secret Services (which Spark calls ‘Balkan agents’ in an oversight; there was no such thing). When Robert goes missing, a genuinely sinister narrative possibility opens up, only to be diffused, but not in the way you’d expect. Venice, apparently a glamorous party-hub during the height of Nazi power, is haunted by its own secrets.
Almost a danse macabre but not quite, the collision of inflections, generations and prejudices is where the pleasure of Territorial Rights is to be had. It is also one of Spark’s most atmospheric novels. Even as it rejects the deeper psychological possibilities tugging at its own heart, its shadowplay effect sends you back to her early claustrophobic stories, including those set in Zimbabwe like ‘The Curtain Blown by the Breeze’ and ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’.
It was 1978 when the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was assassinated in London. He was approached by a stranger on Waterloo Bridge, stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella, and died in hospital later; the toxin in the pellet was identified as ricin. Scotland Yard kept Markov’s file open until a few years ago, but was unable to solve the case due to the uncooperativeness of the Bulgarian Interior Ministry. Though not proven, it is believed that the assassin was an Italian in the employ of the KGB and the Bulgarian Secret Services. Georgi Markov is yet to be fêted as the George Orwell of south-east Europe for his witty, devastating insights into totalitarian society. Spark would have loved his essays Reportages in Absentia, later published as The Truth That Killed, but I doubt that she read them. However, she would have heard of his murder through the British-expat grapevine. Sadly, and typically of the warped legacy of the Cold War, Markov remains better known in Britain for his death than for his extraordinary writing. There is no mention of this in Territorial Rights, but the year 1978 is significant, and I wonder if the story of the “umbrella murder” might have prompted Spark, at the last moment, into giving Lina Pancev Bulgarian nationality. Spark was a meticulous researcher, and I have no explanation other than hurriedness for the dissonance in her Bulgarian references.
Lina Pancev’s student exchange visit to Paris is implausible for a simple reason: the Iron Curtain. It didn’t allow such frivolities. Lina Pancev and her cousin had a privileged life in Communist Bulgaria, highly unlikely if their families were intimates of the royals during the war. People were executed with their extended families for a lot less. Victor Pancev was allegedly involved in a plot against the king. Though such a plot did not exist, Tsar Boris did die suddenly, after a visit to Hitler in 1943, and the causes of his death remain inconclusive, though most likely it was a heart attack. One hypothesis was that he was poisoned by Hitler for failing to deport Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jews. Anti-semitism was, unusually for Eastern Europe, relatively uncommon in Bulgaria, though there were Nazi government officials who energetically passed the so-called Law for Protection of the Nation which dispossessed many Jews and conscripted men into forced labour, ravaging communities and resulting in later mass emigration to Israel. But the fact remains that throughout the years when Bulgaria was a Nazi ally before switching sides, there was a concerted effort by civic society, politicians (the most prominent was a Communist MP), even the Orthodox Church, to save the Jewish community from deportation. Despite constant pressure from Germany, not a single person was deported. The story of the salvation of Bulgaria’s Jews is certainly complex and has its tragic counter-history in neighbouring Macedonia (The
Fragility of Goodness by Tzvetan Todorov is the best book on the subject), but it remains one of only two such European stories. The other is Denmark.
Nevertheless (or nevertheless) Spark made Lina Pancev into a grotesquely raving anti-semite. Lina is merely a character, of course, and characters should not be asked to carry the weight of entire nations, but the Bulgarian-italian political intrigue is where the frisson of
Territorial Rights is derived, and, in that sense, it carries some responsibility. It may not have been worth mentioning this, were it not for Spark’s own extreme sensitivity to how she was represented by others – suggesting an equivalent sensitivity about how she represented others. Grace Gregory speaks for the author when she points out: “Give people a story and they believe it, especially if there are one or two authentic facts and dates.”
Another inauthenticity is the count who owned Villa Sofia – Bulgaria had no aristocracy other than the royal family who were German imports. It is almost as if Spark needed the use of a Balkan nation, but wasn’t sufficiently interested to locate a real country, so she mashed up half facts into a proxy territory. But who hasn’t done this in a moment of inattention – we are none of us innocent. This authorial dissonance is in itself an intriguing subtext to the novel.
In later years, the question of Jewish identity and how to measure it became a point of conflict between Spark and her son Robin. Her best answer on this is in the story ‘The Gentile Jewesses’, but it wasn’t good enough for her son. Both their lives must have been poisoned by this tug-of-war, and reading extracts of their painful correspondence, it strikes me that it was above all a battle of egos. As in Territorial
Rights, no act of goodness is left unmentioned.
At one point, Curran observes the Venetians going about their business, “enviably in full charge of their own history”. But who among us fully owns their history? As the ugly past is being disinterred, ‘Countess’ de Winter appeals to Curran and to herself:
“We were different people then. Everything was different. Everyone else was different.” “We’re the same people,” Curran said. “Any other point of view is foolish. We wouldn’t be vulnerable if we were not the same people.”
Here is a clue to the predicament of Spark’s characters at large: they cannot be in charge of anything except their own illusions and disillusions. Perhaps surprisingly, it is the plainest character who becomes a tragic anti-heroine. How does Spark
achieve this in a black comedy of manners? Through poetry. “Poetry is that by which we live forever and ever unjaded,” said Robert Frost. Poetry is that which makes the Sparkian prose sing, siren-like, that which gives her fiction its addictive beauty and transcendence, and in her second novel Robinson and many of her stories, their hypnotic endings.
In a menagerie of jaded characters, Anthea is Little England personified. Spark took delight in ventriloquising her type: “She fumed at the thought of everyone having a good time . . . sleeping with each other in Italy”, while she thinks “of the cost of living here in the British Isles where people ought to be”. Too timid to know herself and only just recovering from a mental breakdown, Anthea is caught in a nightmare of pettiness. Confused and almost comatose with a “dissatisfaction that has no name”, she is the older, more inhibited prototype of the self-murdering Lise in The Driver’s Seat. Anthea senses that it is “her” destiny’ not to understand the real reasons behind life’s unsatisfactoriness. And so, at night, she dreams of the songs her grandmother sang in a distant Ayrshire childhood – just as young Muriel’s grandmother did. Spark could recite the Border Ballads by heart. It is here, in the dreaming mind untethered by territorial neuroses, that a note of truth is struck:
“There’s a youth in this city, it were a great pity,
that he from our lasses should wander awa;
For he’s bonie and braw . . .”