---
title: "Oddballs, loners and voyeurs"
date: "2014-09-15T10:37:11+01:00"
modified: "2014-09-15T10:37:11+01:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/oddballs-loners-and-voyeurs/"
post_id: 6281
---

# Oddballs, loners and voyeurs

![Muriel Spark](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/Muriel-Spark-web.jpg "Muriel Spark")

**This article is a preview from the Autumn 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can [find out more and subscribe here](/articles/4729/autumn-2014-new-humanist-is-out-now).**

By the time Muriel Spark died in Tuscany in 2006 she had been a grande dame for so long that it’s hard to think of her as anything but caustic, famous and acclaimed – a novel and essay writing machine who had published a book every year or so for nearly half a century, manipulating characters and plots with godlike ease. So when Fleur Talbot, the writer-narrator of Spark’s 1981 novel *Loitering with Intent* looks back on her earlier life “on the intellectual fringe” of postwar London and says, “How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,” it’s hard to think that her equally poised creator could ever have felt any differently. But in the middle of the 20th century, in 1954 to be exact, Muriel Spark was a divorced single mother in London bedsit land, who was earning and eating very little, taking too much Dexedrine and writing a book about TS Eliot. As she worked on the monograph, she began to hear Eliot’s voice and to believe that he was hiding threatening messages for her in his work – and posing as a window cleaner.

It was during this chaotic year that Spark converted to Catholicism – she defined herself as a “gentile Jewess” (her mother was half-Jewish, her father a Presbyterian) – and in the autumn she went to stay in a Carmelite convent and then in the grounds of a castle, until she was well enough to leave with five completed chapters of her first novel. It was the turning point of her life. Until then, Spark had published only criticism, biography and poetry, and a story that won the *Observer’s* short-story competition in 1951 (prize money: £250); in 1957 she published *The Comforters,* to generally good reviews and a glowing one from Evelyn Waugh. She wrote 21 more novels and bought herself a new piece of jewellery after finishing each one. Her fifth novel, *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,* made her name; an entire issue of the *New Yorker* was devoted to publishing it and later it was adapted into a play starring Vanessa Redgrave and a film starring Maggie Smith. In 1963 she moved to New York and four years later to Italy.

The reissue this year of six of Spark’s novels by New Directions in the US and of her selected essays and journalism under the new title *The Informed Air* (originally *The Golden Fleece*) feels like the first time the work has been free to float on the posthumous exchanges of literary reputation; the index-link to its creator’s presence has been cut. In an interview with the *New York Times* a few years ago the novelist Zoë Heller said: “I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters … If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.” Not only it is impossible to imagine wanting to be friends with anyone in Spark’s novels, it’s rare to find friendship at all. Spark’s characters are a rollcall of oddball loners and voyeurs – or artists; her work strongly suggests that the three are synonymous terms. It’s no accident that Jean Brodie, the figure who has eclipsed all of Spark’s creations, is in fact the most distantly viewed of them all. Brodie has become a byword for artistic temperament and Fascist sympathies, but it’s remarkable how little we know about her, or of what she’s thinking. The success of the 1969 film adaptation, with Maggie Smith at her most soignée, has rubbed out the hardest element to translate from page to screen: the novel’s manipulation of time.

*The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie* begins with Brodie’s pupils at 16, flashing back almost at once to them as ten-year-olds. From then on it moves around their lives and memories, marking its transitions showily: “Mary McGregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year…” or “It was twenty-eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat…” The girls are forever imagining their mentor, who is after all “the only sex-bestirred object in their daily environment”. There’s a surprising amount of sex in Spark’s novels: it’s always disruptive, but never the main event. As Lise, the main character of *The Driver’s Seat* (1970), reflects: “It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before.” Lise, however, is much more interested in the eroticism of death than sex; she spends the novel successfully arranging the circumstances of her own murder. *The Driver’s Seat* is perhaps the coldest, most controlled of Spark’s novels. Its present-tense narration stops the reader settling down and keeps us out of Lise’s thoughts; in comparison, Nicola Six’s attempt to arrange her own murder in Martin Amis’s *London Fields* is a fussy imitation. (“More is vulgar. One should have an innate sense of these things,” says Jean Brodie.)

Spark’s crisp, epigrammatic sentences often mask just how peculiar her novels are. *The Ballad of Peckham Rye* (1960) follows the enigmatic Dougal Douglas as he turns over the lives of everyone he meets. At no point do we have any idea what the main character thinks he is doing as he leads his double life, with two jobs and two names: he is Dougal Douglas on one side of Peckham Rye Common and Douglas Dougal on the other. He has a satanical air and two bumps on the head, which are likened to devil’s horns, knows more about the characters than any of them know about themselves and indirectly drives at least one of them to murder, before he melts away as mysteriously as he arrived. As in most of Spark’s novels, the fast-moving plot ends in an elegiac register not normally associated with her, which makes you reconsider everything that has gone before. So after Dougal Douglas has disappeared, one of the characters observes the following scene and has the last word: “It was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.” In the context of the novel this is an utterly surprising ending. It’s an effect Spark pulls off several times, perhaps most memorably in *The Driver’s Seat*, after the murder has finally taken place: in a reversal of traditional notions of suspense, we’re told as early as the third chapter that “She \[Lise\] will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie…” Spark’s most surprising register, then, seems to be that of compassion, when after making her characters suffer she grants them a moment of grace. In a 2001 essay, “The Writing Life”, she explained that “The main thing about a story is that it should end well, and perhaps it is not too much to say that a story’s ending casts its voice, colour, tone and shade over the whole work.”

Spark was a prickly, difficult figure with a remarkable gift for falling out with people and, after her mid-1950s breakdown, a ruthless ability to get her work done. In an essay called “The Desegregation of Art”, she claims that “ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left” and calls for “the liberation of our minds from the comfortable cells of lofty sentiment”. By the double standards by which male and female satirists are judged, this places her firmly in the “leading literary shrew” (as an anonymous misogynist once said of Brigid Brophy in the TLS) wing of 20th-century letters. But her essays reveal surprising sympathies – a recurring interest in the long, periodic sentences of Proust, Cardinal Newman, the Book of Job – that suggest Spark was attracted to forms of expression and reflection that also made her suspicious.

She is as critical of art as a separate category of life as any Situationist: “The art and literature of sentiment and emotion, however beautiful in itself, however stirring in its depiction of actuality, has to go. It cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society, but in reality it is a segregated activity.” Spark speaks far more briskly about religion when she does write about it – “I am a believer by nature. I would rather believe everything than nothing” – but, significantly, she doesn’t seem ever to have fallen out with God. Although Spark never says so, religion seems to have been where she tucked away sentiment and emotion, so she could concentrate on everything in the world she thought needed to be mocked out of existence.