There are aspects of the obvious that can only be revealed to us by genius. It might, for instance, be said of Franz Kafka that he has enabled even those who have never read a line of his works to say of certain situations, “This is Kafkaesque,” and to know what was implied. Something of such a singular view that speaks a truth recognizable even to those who do not explore its origins, may be said to emanate from the works of Muriel Spark.
At this moment, when, in all the arts, novelty is frequently confused with quality, Mrs. Spark’s writings demonstrate how secondary—in fact, how incidental—are innovations of style and form to the work of the truly gifted: such innovation is a natural by-product of their originality rather than its main object. When the word “humorous” has little currency in literature or in life, her wit is employed to produce effects and insights only matched in contemporary fiction, in this reviewer’s opinion, by the glittering jests of Vladimir Nabokov. At a time when our “tolerance” tends to take the form of general agreement that we are all capable of the worst crimes had we but the conditions for committing them, Mrs. Spark interests herself instead in our capacities for choice and in the use we make of them; and in those forces of good and evil that she picks out, often gleefully, beneath their worldly camouflage.
In all Muriel Spark’s work there is a sense of high spirits and of, to use one of her own similes, “a mind like a blade.”
1 She does not posture instructively, not does she shade her work to appease reviewers and gladden the hearts of publishing companies: she writes to entertain, in the highest sense of the word—to allow us the exercise of our intellect and imagination, to extend our self-curiosity and enrich our view.
Such are the pleasures to be derived from the first volume of a projected series of Mrs. Spark’s collected stories and from her new, short novel. Short-story collections are often criticized as being “uneven”—presumably by those who prize uniformity in art—and it is not likely that these stories, some of them written years apart, should be of identical weight and tone. Mrs. Spark is a writer who has continually sought to develop and enlarge her art and, where necessary, to convulse it. It is precisely this “unevenness,” this diversity and range of the stories, that makes the volume extraordinary, for the author is prepared to observe us under any circumstances and to recount her impressions in the form she finds appropriate.
The stories take place in Africa, in Hampstead, on the moon. Some of them hinge on a single crucial incident, other recount a multiplicity of events inexorably brought to their common fulfillment. Several contain a difficult element of the supernatural; others, like the delightful “Alice Long’s Dachshunds” and “Daisy Overend,” go to the very roots of our nature. These stories—which, with their trains of thought that have been pursued in her novels, can now be viewed within the body of the writer’s work—seem at times varied enough to have been written by different authors: yet each is totally, movingly recognizable as hers.
Palinurus in
The Unquiet Grave, speaks of “the art which is distilled and crystallized out of a lucid, curious and passionate imagination.”
2 It is this passionate curiosity that extends the art of Mrs. Spark beyond the detachment that can so readily become its own victim. The uniqueness and secrecy of each soul is fascinating to her: “I found that Jennifer’s neurosis took the form of ‘same as.’ We are all the same, she would assert, infuriating me because I knew that God had made everyone unique.”
3 She will not let us vitiate our perceptions with sentiment, or allow us the doubtful refuge of clinical abstractions if we are to encounter the blessed in disguise; we must also recognize those in love with their own good will or with the virtuous sense of their own guilt, those who would have us conform to their own concept of sensibility.
In one of the strongest stories in this collection, “Bang-bang You’re Dead,” a woman finds herself complimenting a poet on verses she privately considers third-rate. “She did not know then,” the author tells us, “that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one’s capacity for forming true ones.”
4 In the same story we are told, “There is no health, she thought, for me, outside of honesty.”
5 Mrs. Spark’s literary strivings after this form of health can make the efforts of other authors seem as banal as a get-well card. No modern writer has given greater attention to our revelatory turns of phrase, or more richly conjured up the inflections of meaning in our language.
By the same token, her artistry in these stories is scrupulously disciplined. She does not indulge herself in enumerating sensations or cataloguing objects merely because she is aware of them: everything must bear on what she has to tell us. Nor does she seek, as narrator, to establish her own virtue as contrasted with the fallibility of those she writes about. There is no attempt, for example, in the fine first story in the collection, “The Portobello Road,” to palliate the stern decision that leads to the narrator’s death: if we assume the writer to be human, we must allow her characteristics that will not always please us. In much of the book there is a complex sense of ultimate order, which it may not be entirely fanciful to link to an Edinburgh upbringing.
One reads these brilliant stories with conscious pleasure in the author’s fresh, independent gift and in the vitality of her intelligence. And with a sharing of her own delight.
In
The Public Image, Mrs. Spark continues to sound deep waters. Annabel Christopher, a minor film actress who has suddenly, freakishly, become a star, has settled in Rome with her husband, Frederick, and their baby, in order to make a film there. Frederick, a seedy screenwriter, has brought his hanger-on, Billy, with whom he has shared the ever-widening periphery of Annabel’s success. When Frederick goes mad with envy and kills himself (on the spot “where they have placed the martyrdom of St. Paul”), leaving a set of letters and circumstances intended to destroy his wife’s career, Annabel at first reacts within her public image.
6 She is tempted to perpetuate the false identity built up for her by press agents and journalists, to suppress the facts of the suicide, and buy off the blackmailing Billy. In a series of flashbacks of ironic cast, we trace the events that have led Annabel to Rome and into temptation. At the end of the book, when repudiating the tyranny of what others wish her to be, she simply states the truth—unleashes it, one might say, on those around her—we follow her out of a courtroom and into a crowd where, divested of her public image, she goes unrecognized and free.
Throughout this parable Mrs. Spark employs her sense of actions that, accumulating over years, are at last irresistibly telescoped into a liberating calamity. As elsewhere in her work, she heightens suspense not by withholding facts but by causing us to speculate as to their effects on her characters. In this book, once again, suffering is being obliged to submit to those who would have us predictable and alike. Set in the film world, this is the most film-like of her novels—interiors and objects are distinct and significant, people are sharply captured in their moment of emergency. There is an endless, dreadful housewarming, a chorus of genially vacant neighbors, and a child who does not so much blurt out truth as take a fiendish satisfaction in her own guilelessness.
The equivocal nature of public curiosity, and its infringements of private life, are depicted here in their subtlety and their brutality. Those who speak for sanity—the wordless baby, a film director, a doctor, Frederick’s Italian mistress, and ultimately Annabel herself—appear not as total embodiments of reason and justice but surprising or irresolute, as in life. We are not required to approve of everything in Annabel, but to recognize her experience and the necessity of her choice. Similarly, the author does not find it necessary to “punish” the loathsome Billy: his punishment is to be that way.
In telling us this taut contemporary tale, Mrs. Spark displays all the directness and complexity of her art, and her poet’s accuracy of thought and word. Here is a remarkable writer stimulating us with her “harsh merriment,” and with her splendid chartings of human dissimilarity.
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