Entries from Discussion Group - Slaves of Golconda

June, 2006

Muriel Spark: Curriculum Vitae

tags: Muriel Spark

Curriculum Vitae is Muriel Spark’s attempt to answer what she calls the essential poet’s question: Who am I? Like a true professional she researched her own life, digging up old documents and consulting friends and family to corroborate her own memories. The autobiography describes the first 39 years of her life, from her birth to the publication of her first book, The Comforters, in 1957. If there is an answer in Curriculum Vitae to the question of who she was, it is simply that she was a writer. Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to an English mother and Scottish father, and although her family was poor, her formative years were rich with experience—perfect for a future writer. Spark’s parents included her in their vibrant social life, and she encountered a great variety of interesting and memorable people before starting her formal education. I suspect she picked up part of her penchant for observing people from her parents who would talk about their acquaintances in front of their daughter, often making fun of them and giving them nicknames. The main beneficiary of Scottish philanthropy over several centuries was education, so Spark was able to go to a good school at little or no cost to her parents. Education was held in awe, and the Scottish idea was that nobody should be denied this privilege. At Gillespie’s Girls’ School she was taught by many excellent teachers, including the “exhilarating and impressive” Miss Christina Kay who was the model for Miss Brodie. Miss Kay lived a rich and adventurous life and shared it with her girls, stimulating Muriel’s imagination and thirst for experience of her own.What filled our minds with wonder and make Christina Kay so memorable was the personal drama and poetry within which everything in her classroom happened.From a young age Spark showed an aptitude for poetry and literature, and was encouraged and supported in this at home and at school. Miss Kay predicted my future as a writer in the most emphatic terms. I felt I had hardly much choice in the matter.She read all the poetry and fiction she could get her hands on, and sought feedback on her poems and stories from friends and teachers. By the time she left school she was already an award-winning and published poet. Despite her obvious talent and intelligence, she did not pursue a university degree, partly due to a lack of money, and partly because she preferred to study on her own. She did take some writing and secretarial courses that enabled her to enter the working world and gain more of the life experience she was looking for. At the age of 18 she met and married Sydney Spark and moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he was posted as a teacher. The marriage was “disastrous.” She calls her husband “mentally ill,” but what she describes, in very detached language, is a violent, abusive man. Spark never describes what he did to her or anyone else, nor does she say how she felt about it. She does say she feared for her life, which propelled her to obtain a divorce. Spark longed to leave Africa, partly because of her domestic situation, and partly because she could not tolerate the hideous racism of the white colonists. “Life in the colony was eating my heart away.” By this time the war had started and civilian transport was restricted, but with a little trickery she did secure a passage home for herself. She had to leave her son behind because children could not be transported in to the UK; indeed many were being shipped out for safekeeping. Friends and relatives questioned whether she wouldn’t be safer in Africa, but she wanted to “experience” the war. In fact she chose to settle in London rather than Edinburgh in order to witness the bombing. All women under 45 without family obligations were required to join the war effort. Spark’s employment agent turned out to be an avid reader, and as they conversed about literature and poetry the agent soon realized Spark had a superior intellect. As a result she was posted to intelligence work, helping to create and distribute anti-Nazi propaganda via fake German radio stations. Spark began to feel a “definite desire” that gaining experience was no longer enough, but that she wanted to “give experience” to the reader with her writing. It was a vague feeling, however, and she didn’t feel ready to try it yet. After the war she worked in publishing, eventually becoming the editor of Poetry Review. Her attempts to raise the quality of the journal and welcome more modern poets was met with fierce and underhanded resistance and she was eventually forced out. After that she became a “hoarder” of all her records, papers, letters, etc. so that she could submit “documentary evidence” the next time she was attacked. This apparently continued for the rest of her life, and now that she has passed I imagine her archives will be of great interest to Spark scholars. She also had another unsuccessful relationship with a possessive and vindictive man. She cobbled a living together by working for magazines and writing literary biography and criticism, but it was barely enough to keep body and soul together. A combination of post-war rationing, self-neglect, and Dexedrine (an appetite suppressant) led to malnourishment and she eventually had to leave London to convalesce. There are hints that alcohol was also a problem, but no more than hints. It was her friends that kept her afloat through all her troubles, and she remembers them with great fondness. By the mid-50’s she started making a name for herself in the literary world and was commissioned to write her first novel, an unusual thing in that day. The timing was right because she was already shifting her work towards story-telling.I was now moving, myself, from lyric poetry to narrative verse. This was the start of my move in literature towards the short story and then the novel.The book ends with the success of her first novel, The Comforters, which is based on the word hallucinations she had while taking Dexedrine, and also on the Book of Job. She writes of that book:I didn’t feel like ‘a novelist’ and before I could square it with my literary conscience to write a novel, I had to work out the novel-writing process peculiar to myself, and moreover, perform this act within the very novel I proposed to write.As a Catholic convert myself I was looking for what she would say about her own conversion experience. I find it difficult to explain why I became a Catholic and it seems to be no different for Spark.The simple explanation is that I felt the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I have always felt and known and believed. … The more difficult explanation would involve the step by step building up of a conviction. … Indeed, the existential quality of a religious experience cannot be simply summed up in general terms.Some of those steps undoubtedly took place with Father Frank O’Malley, who counselled her during her illness, and during her convalescence at two Carmelite monasteries. Unfortunately for the curious, she keeps the details of those experiences to herself. Indeed she keeps a lot to herself, relating the facts of her experiences without much emotion or personal comment. Some crucial moments are described only through her friends’ comments. She says next to nothing about her son, and as I mentioned earlier, very little about her marriage. Perhaps this reflects her Anglo-Scottish background. She writes that “It was certainly an attitude typical of Edinburgh to deny feelings for the sake of principle,” and the English are not known for emotionality. One has to read between the lines to infer where her feelings were involved. Loyal friends are clearly one thing she feels passionate about, particularly, I imagine, since her romantic relationships were so disappointing. (A friend called her “a bad picker” of men.) The book was also written in part to “put the record straight” after a former friend and writing partner wrote unauthorized accounts of her that were filled with inaccuracies. She does the research into the facts of her life that he did not, and she refutes his work through her narrative and directly in her account of her (non-romantic) relationship with him. A word to the wise: take any works about Spark by Derek Sanford (and works based on his works) with a grain of salt. She describes his “disregard for the truth” as “very uncharitable towards students and scholars,” but I believe she herself felt betrayed and deeply hurt. This book is her public response to that betrayal. In the last chapter she writes:Since I wrote my first novel I have passed the years occupied with ever more work, many travels, and adventures. Friends, famous and obscure, abound in my life-story. That will be the subject of another volume.Sadly for us she did not write that volume before her death this year. Let’s hope her next biographer will be as scrupulous as she was in writing Curriculum Vitae. Muriel Spark, rest in peace.
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Miss Brodie and The Finishing School

tags: Muriel Spark

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.” Rowland took off his reading glasses to stare at his creative writing class whose parents’ money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around sixteen to seventeen years of age, some more, some a little less. “So,” he said, “you must just write, when you set your scene, ‘the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.’ Or is you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write,’The other side of the lake was just visible.’ But as you are settingthe scene, don’t make any emphasis as yet. It’s too soon, for instance, for you to write, ‘The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.’ That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don’t want to make a point as yet.” So begins Muriel Spark’s last novel, The Finishing School, a satiric look at a private progressive institution that Miss Jean Brodie in her prime would have been quick to deem a “crank” school and would have been loathe to be associated with. Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina Parker operate College Sunrise, a school where parents with “dire wealth” consent to send their teenagers for a year or two to get them out of the way. College Sunrise could not in any way compete with the famous schools and finishing establishments recommended by Gabbitas, Thring and Wingate in shiny colored brochures. Indeed, College Sunrise was almost unknown in the more distinctive educational circles, and in cases where it was known, it was frequently dismised as being rather shady. The fact that it moved house from time to time, that it seldom offered a tennis court and that its various swimming pools looked greasy, were the subject of gossip when the subject arose, but it was known that there had so far been no sexual scandals and that it was an advanced sort of school, bohemian, artistic, tolerant. What they smoked or sniffed was little different from the drug-taking habits of any other school, whether it be housed in Lausanne or in a street in Wakefield. When the novel opens College Sunrise is in operation on the lake at Ouchy after previously being located in Brussels and Vienna. Nina conducts “casual afternoon comme il faut talks” with the school’s eight students (“‘Be careful who takes you to Ascot,’ she said, ‘because, unless you have married a rich husband, he is probably a crook.’") while Rowland teaches creative writing. In fact, one of the students, 17-year-old Chris Wiley, red-haired, handsome, annoyingly self-assured, has enrolled in College Sunrise specifically so that he can write his historically inaccurate novel on Mary, Queen of Scots. Rowland reads the opening pages of Chris’ novel, finds them “quite good,” and then experiences a debilitating case of writer’s block where his own novel is concerned. Most of Spark’s novel is thereafter concerned with the uneasy relationship between Rowland and Chris: Rowland’s jealousy at first amuses Chris, who taunts Rowland with his hidden-away work-in-progress and thrives on reports that Rowland has been searching his belongings in a desperate attempt to find it. Later, after Nina is finally able to convince Rowland that his obsession with Chris’ novel is bordering on insanity and he seeks a cure by temporarily checking into a monastery, Chris finds he requires Rowland’s presence or else he is unable to write. Clearly, the madness goes both ways. Nina wants Chris gone but realizes his tuition is needed less the school go under. She begins an affair with an art historian who lives in a neighboring villa. Rowland knows and doesn’t care; he’s busy attempting to sleep with the servant who is sleeping with Chris. Nina, her lover, and the students all speculate whether Rowland’s obsession with Chris’ novel is actually a case of misplaced homosexual desire. Finally, two of the publishers Chris has sent his novel to come to Ouchy and begin to offer a bit of perspective on Chris’s talent and prospects. Chris’ confidence is momentarily shaken, but he’s quick to once again manipulate those around him, especially when he sees Rowland’s chances at literary success wax considerably. I won’t say who or how, but someone almost dies. Now, while I loved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I remained largely indifferent to The Finishing School. I read it twice to see if I could put my finger on what kept it from being a more enjoyable, a more memorable read. The best I could come up with is that Spark’s natural inclination to omit all but of vital import undercut her efforts here. Chris and Rowland discuss whether they feel their characters take on a life of their own; Chris maintains that his are firmly under his control and can do nothing he does not will. Spark’s characters here definitely fall under strict authorial control; she pushes them about to advance her story without bringing them fully to life. And why she chose to have the character whose writing is called “actually a lot of shit” by a prospective publisher, who recognizes that Chris’ approaching success is based on his youth, not his talent, be the one whose methods most mimic her own is definitely beyond my understanding. I also thought that the use of flash forwards, which I am, in general, exceedingly fond of, and found most effective in Jean Brodie (and in The Driver’s Seat, which I read last month), undercut my concern in The Finishing School. While knowing that Miss Brodie is to be betrayed, that Sandy will become a nun, that Mary will be killed in a fire (or that that strange Lise is going to be murdered before morning comes), heightens the suspense and keeps me engaged with how future events are to come about, foreknowledge here deflated my interest. Why should I care now about the state of Rowland and Nina’s marriage when I know she’s going to be much happier as an art historian married to someone else? Why should I care now that Chris’ novel is no good if he’s still going to manage to get it published? Why should I care now about any of the students at the Sunrise School when I know they all have enough money or family prestige to take the rough edges off their years to come? Based on these two books, I’d have to say that if an author can’t or isn’t willing to vary her style and technique from book to book, she ought to take care that the stories she has to tell will work with her style rather than against it. I’m late getting this posted compared to everyone else, so I’ll wait to discuss Jean Brodie in the Metaxu Cafe forums. I will say I’m glad this Slaves of Golconda reading gave me reason to read it again--I read it back in high school and retained very little--and that I do intend to read more by Spark. I’m going to chose titles for the most part, though, from the first half of her career when her style is economical, but not yet miserly. I don’t have a problem meeting a writer halfway, but I’m not willing to do more than that.
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The Mastery of Muriel Spark

tags: Muriel Spark

I read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark maybe eight or ten years ago.  I had little recollection of the story other than it was about a teacher who has a particular group of favorite students.  The novel was set in 1930s…
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

tags: Muriel Spark

I liked this book well enough to read it twice, one time right after the other. It was well worth the re-read. The story is about the “Brodie set,” six girls whom Miss Jean Brodie, a schoolteacher, takes under her wing, nurturing them and teaching them her version of culture – and sometimes the regular school lessons too. Spark sums up each of the girls in a few phrases which she repeats throughout the book. There is Monica Douglas, “famous mostly for mathematics which she could do in her brain, and for her anger which, when it was lively enough, drove her to slap out to right and left.” There is Rose Stanley, “famous for sex,” Eunice Gardiner, “small, neat and famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamourous swimming,” Jenny Gray, who will become an actress and is “the prettiest and most graceful girl of the set,” and Mary Macgregor “whose fame rested on her being a silent lump, a nobody whom everybody could blame.” Most importantly, though, there is Sandy Stranger, whom the book will follow most closely. She is famous for her squinty, disconcerting eyes. Brodie is an unconventional teacher; she spends much class time telling stories, some of which are about her love life, and while she tells stories she sometimes asks students to hold up their books so that if the headmistress walks into the classroom they will look like they are working. She doesn’t balk at instilling her particular eccentric opinions and biases, and while she claims the sciences have their place, she makes it clear that art is what really matters. Most importantly, she forms her “set,” the girls she cultivates particular relationships with, and who remain loyal to her even once they have passed through her classroom and moved on to higher grades. Her unconventional teaching and the loyalty of this set upset the other teachers and the headmistress, who spend the book scheming to get rid of Miss Brodie. This forms part of the tension of the novel: will she lose her job? Will the girls remain loyal to her? Who is it who finally betrayed her? The nature of Brodie’s relationship with the girls is what’s really at the center of the novel, and this relationship changes – at first they admire her and follow her almost unthinkingly, and as the novel progresses, the girls grow up, and begin to question her, Sandy especially. And Brodie herself changes, from an idealistic, independent role model, dedicating the “prime of her life” to the girls, to something much more sinister. Sandy must separate herself from Brodie in order to figure out who she is and to become an adult. Sandy struggles with the feeling that she is too-closely identified with Brodie quite early on; in one scene when Sandy is tempted to be nice to Mary, a girl to whom almost no one is nice, she stops when she realizes Brodie is nearby: “The sound of Miss Brodie’s presence, just when it was on the tip of Sandy’s tongue to be nice to Mary Macgregor, arrested the urge. Sandy looked back at her companions, and understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose. She was even more frightened then, by her temptation to be nice to Mary Macgregor, since by this action she would separate herself, and be lonely, and blameable in a more dreadful way than Mary who, although officially the faulty one, was at least inside Miss Brodie’s category of heroines in the making.” And, ominously, Brodie admires Mussolini and the fascists. The novel is set in the 1930s, and we as readers understand just what it means to admire Mussolini. And here are Sandy’s thoughts, shortly after the passage quoted above: “It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie’s fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching alone. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie’s disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.” So Sandy’s struggle with Brodie – her love for her, her admiration for her, her suspicion of her, and eventually her feeling of suffocation because of her – becomes a way of thinking about the larger cultural lure of and struggle with fascism. The girls’ curiosity about sex is a part of the story too; they try to imagine Brodie with her lovers and figure out the mechanics of sex, and then they observe in fascination as she begins an affair with one instructor, Mr. Lowther, and falls in love with another, Mr. Lloyd. They are both thrilled and horrified. But Brodie crosses a line when she starts scheming to turn the now late-adolescent Rose into Mr. Lloyd’s lover, as a proxy for herself. Sandy is fully aware of what is going on, and reacts in her own, completely unexpected way. Near the end of the novel, she tries to come to terms with what is happening: “She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago sitting under the elm tree telling her first simple love story and wondered to what extent it was Miss Brodie who had developed complications throughout the years, and to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.” It is when Sandy realizes that Brodie “thinks she is Providence … she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end” that she is able to separate herself fully. Sandy is a mysterious character; I’m intrigued by her decision to become a nun, and I’m not sure I fully understand it, except that she has a longing for order, inspired in part by Brodie: “All the time they were under her influence she and her actions were outside the context of right and wrong. It was twenty-five years before Sandy had so far recovered from a creeping vision of disorder that she could look back and recognize that Miss Brodie’s defective sense of self-criticism had not been without its beneficent and enlarging effects … “ Sandy seems to shuttle back and forth between longing for order and feeling stifled by an order too powerfully imposed on her. It takes her a long time, and perhaps it also takes the experience of being a nun, to learn to value a fruitful disorder. But this is something that as an adolescent she is not prepared to deal with. The writing style is spare and economical, and Spark uses repetition – of the girls’ defining characteristics, of the phrase “the prime of life,” – which creates a sense of an incantation, as though she can conjure up a sense of her characters, not through the accretion of detail, but by dwelling on the most telling details over and over again. And she moves around in time, skipping back and forth while the story slowly reveals itself. It’s as though she’s circling around the main point, approaching it from many angles, giving us the story in a disjointed way that over time begins to come together. I found Sandy’s artistic interests intriguing; here Spark dwells on the way the artist seeks out patterns and creates patterns out of life. Sandy realizes after a while that Brodie embellishes her stories and changes them to suit her moods. In this example, the girls are thinking about Brodie’s retelling of the story of her love affair with Hugh, an event that predates the novel: “This was the first time the girls had heard of Hugh’s artistic leanings. Sandy puzzled over this and took counsel with Jenny, and it came to them both that Miss Brodie was making her new story fit the old. Thereafter the two girls listened with double ears, and the rest of the class with single.” Sandy is fascinated by this method of making patterns with facts, and is divided between her admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct. This is the same conflict we saw in Sandy’s response to Brodie’s “group-think,” the lure of Brodie’s cult of personality and the fear of chaos she evokes. Sandy is attracted and repelled by Brodie’s disorder, the willingness to play with facts if this makes a better story, the impulse to shape the world to meet the demands of art. Spark’s own shaping of the raw materials of life is obvious in the novel; she draws attention through the repetition and the shifts in time to the fact that the novel is a constructed, made thing. She is not straightforwardly “realistic.” Her characters have life and interest, but she is more concerned with locating the patterns of their lives and interactions than with accumulating detail about them, in the way most novels do. Spark does brilliant things with her short form; using just a few details, she creates the sense of real, complete human beings, but her economy of detail also allows the underlying lines and patterns to shine through.
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In the Prime of Her Hubris

tags: Muriel Spark

Where to start with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? On the surface the book is simple, Jean Brodie, teacher, a woman in her prime, and the six girls who are the Brodie set. Miss Brodie’s methods of teaching are unorthodox but the girls are…
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Slaves of Golconda: Muriel Spark

tags: Muriel Spark

If not for the Slaves of Golconda, your Bibliothecary most likely would never have picked up a book by Muriel Spark. Now, in the past two months, we have read two: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Loitering With Intent. The second was not…
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