Assorted Prose (39 page)

Since Hawthorne praised Trollope’s novels as “solid, substantial … as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case,” American writers have coveted the assurance that enables their British counterparts to build persuasively and at length upon the overheard, the glimpsed, and the guessed. When, however, like Henry James, they boldly attempt to appropriate to themselves this ability, strange things result; James’ novels, for all their lovely furniture, remain pilgrim’s progresses whose substance thins gaseously beyond the edges of the moral issue. There is intrinsic in the novel of knowledgeability a crisis that no refinement of form can avoid: How does all this information add up? The crisis is not acute if the author believes that life adds up to nothing. But Mrs. Spark surely does not believe this. She writes as a Roman Catholic—very much so. Catholic converts dot her
casts of characters, and theological questions nag on all sides. Yet the effect of all this evident concern is to form a shell of hints around a hollow center; our sense of Mrs. Spark, for all she tells, not telling all she knows, becomes unnerving. Her God seems neither the dreadful
deus absconditus
of Pascal and Greene nor the sunny
lux mundi
who illumines the broad optimism of Aquinas and Chesterton. As in a photograph of a solar eclipse, a corona of heresy and anxiety surrounds a perfectly black, blank disc. To be fair, this probably is, through Mrs. Spark’s eyes, an accurate photograph. Then why does she bother to shock our materialist credulity with so much casual, trivial supernaturalism? In this book Patrick Seton indubitably
does
make contact with the dead; in
Memento Mori
it apparently really
is
Death itself on the telephone; in
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Dougal Douglas may or may not be a devil; in
The Comforters
the heroine hears the author’s typewriter clacking as it writes the book. In one short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” Mrs. Spark entirely drops the reins on her otherworldliness. A heavenly seraph inexplicably interrupts the performance of an African Christmas pageant, and the marvel is described in an intense flight of what I can only call comic mysticism:

This is gorgeous medieval illumination, but the text it adorns remains dreary and unimpressed. A little later, this astonishing creature is prosaically
observed skimming along the highway “at about seventy miles an hour.” Perhaps this is the way it would be. The spiritual fatigue of the West has proceeded so far that the distinction between reality and unreality is no longer one to which much passion can attach. Miracles are now and again reported in the middle pages of newspapers, and no one bothers to disprove them.

Mrs. Spark, following Firbank and Waugh, carries on that traditional bemusement with which English converts to Catholicism seem to regard the church of their choice. A character in her first novel remarks that “the True Church was awful, though unfortunately, one couldn’t deny, true.” Our impression is less that the Church has an overpowering case than that the world is too flimsy and foolish to offer much resistance to the leap of faith. Nor is it very heartily suggested that being a Christian improves or comforts one; Mrs. Spark’s Catholic characters differ from the others only in having the articles of an ancient creed built into their grids of reflexes, predispositions, and quirks. The possibility of redemption hovers over Sparkland rather bleakly. The people have neither much body nor much soul; they are bundles of nerves. The unimpeachable triumph of
Memento Mori
may spring from the fact that old people actually have, by and large, shrivelled to such neural skeletons, which twitch uninhibited by the claims of flesh, sense, or the future. But her young people seem thin; perhaps, more materially realized, they would repel the incursions of her impudent witchcraft. I do not mean to complain; it is just the metaphysical
ambiance
, vaguely earnest and wryly grim, that gives Mrs. Spark’s fiction its final fillip of interest. Her books narrow, through the lucid complications of incident, toward a culminating focus, in a sentence or two, of virtually total obscurity. In
The Bachelors
, the sentences are:

Thus Mrs. Spark adds it all up; and such irrational numbers, which can never be carried to their final terms, perhaps do compose the true sum. If I, for my part, resist consignment to the ranks of demons, it is
because a convincing depiction of evil needs somewhere in it a glimmer of the good. This Mrs. Spark does not provide; her moral cosmos is limited by a certain personal impatience. But her sharp invention and austere style have in them something of Dante, and there are signs in
The Bachelors
that she is preparing to leave the sulphuric and antic scene she has mastered for the more familiar terraces of purgatory.

 
BETWEEN A WEDDING AND A FUNERAL

T
HE
G
IRLS OF
S
LENDER
M
EANS
, by Muriel Spark. 176 pp. Knopf, 1963.

The fiction of Muriel Spark, which burst upon English literature as something supernaturally impersonal and coolly fantastic, has taken a turn toward autobiography and history. Her last novel,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, concerned the female students of an inwardly Fascistic Scots schoolmarm in the middle nineteen-thirties—the era when Mrs. Spark herself was a schoolgirl in Edinburgh. Her new novel,
The Girls of Slender Means
, again concerns a group of young women, this time ten years older and resident, like the authoress herself, in London in 1945. The historical and physical context is firmly set in the first, characteristically beautiful paragraph:

Those familiar with Mrs. Spark’s severe economy of method will not be surprised to know that, at the unspecified destination the reader reaches on page 176 of this short novel, unusual demands are made on the mind’s eye, and almost every phrase in these first sentences can be seen in retrospect as an omen.

“Ominous,” indeed, is the adjective at the heart of Mrs. Spark’s witchcraft, though she rarely deigns to use it. The undercurrents of destruction, cruelty, madness, and—ever more insistently—sexual repression are allowed to run unspoken, welling up here and there, as they do in life, with an unexpectedness that would be comic if we could laugh. An unfettered laugh implies release, however fleeting, from reality, and Mrs. Spark, for all her surface prankishness and verbal shrugging, never quite relinquishes her claim that the farcical world of her portrayal is the
real
world, contingent on an actual doom. The catastrophe that climaxes
The Girls of Slender Means
is all the more vivid and believable for being rather casually rendered.

I will refrain from revealing the catastrophe. Though the lax manners that currently obtain in book reviews condone plot-blabbing, the discourtesy seems double in the case of a writer whose plots are so pure. There is little in Mrs. Spark’s books that is
not
plot. Virtually fanatic is her adherence to Chekhov’s dictum that a gun mentioned on the first page must be discharged by the last. But she is less interested in the shot than in the subtler action of the recoil. Her plots are as luxuriant and mysterious as her style is spare and clear; her deliberate clarity, like Kafka’s, ironically underlines the mysteriousness of what is being said. She is mysterious as both Agatha Christie and Isak Dinesen are mysterious; like the former, she is utterly at home in the many-roomed mansion of English society, and, like the latter, she has nourished her vision on the inhuman landscape of Africa. Her people suggest tropical flora and fauna in their grotesque specialization; like giraffes and flower-imitating insects, they have no second thoughts. The palpable darkness that lurks behind her social friezes, truncating a figure here and swallowing one whole there, is an African darkness—that is, the darkness of what is not known in the universe; this merges with the social darkness, what is not known in people, the darkness wherein murders are planned, legacies coveted, and love affairs and religious conversions hatched. Like detective stories, her novels pose puzzles temporarily; like parables, they pose puzzles finally.

In general,
The Girls of Slender Means
is about being young and female and poor in London in 1945, that supremely eventful year when the Hitlerian holocaust ended and the Balance of Terror began. In England, Churchill was defeated by Labour, and in London undetonated bombs sometimes tardily exploded in the rubble. On V-E Day, and again on V-J Day, the Royal Family, “four small straight digits,” punctually appeared upon the floodlit balcony of Buckingham Palace every half hour and dutifully waved to the monstrous crowd below, whose “huge organic murmur” was “different from anything like the voice of animate matter but rather more a cataract or a geological disturbance”—“something,” as one character observes, “between a wedding and a funeral on a world scale.” In this historical hesitation between a wedding and a funeral, amid the precarious ruins of London, live and thrive the girls of the May of Teck Club, a tall brick house in Kensington devoted, since “some remote and innocent Edwardian date,” to “the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.”

The innocent savagery of youth would appear to be the theme; the girls “were not greatly given to scruples and consideration for others, by virtue of their unblighted spirits.” The loveliest of these unblighted spirits, Selina Redwood (“Selina’s long unsurpassable legs arranged themselves diagonally from the deep chair where she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll”), undertakes an affair with a young anarchist, Nicholas Farringdon: “In the meantime she looked at Nicholas … and thought she could use him.” Nicholas, who eventually will die as a Christian martyr in Haiti, delightedly agrees to be used, while keeping his spiritual eye on Joanna Childe, “large, with light shiny hair, blue eyes and deep-pink cheeks.” Joanna, a minister’s daughter, having loved a curate in vain, has “decided to enter maimed into the Kingdom of Heaven,” and, rather than defile her first love by falling in love again, has declined to respond to another
curate, a clerical gallant who loves her and who is immortalized in a sentence:

Having denied herself this vegetable treat, Joanna diverts her sexual energy into elocution lessons, which involve the declamation aloud of much anthology poetry, skillfully chosen by Mrs. Spark to give her dormitory halls a weird and ominous clangor.

The triangle of Selina, Nicholas, and Joanna is the book’s center, around which Mrs. Spark circumscribes other designs, using as her drawing implement one Jane Wright, a plump girl of slender means connected with “the world of books” and probably, like Sandy Stranger in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, the writer’s modestly disguised stand-in. The rest is plot. The girls—a dozen or so are named—do and say this and that, often hilariously: Dorothy Markham, who talks like a debutante, opens Jane’s door and announces, “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.” Naked and slippery with rationed soap, the girls test their slenderness against a tiny bathroom window, seven inches by fourteen, which leads onto a roof whose uses are various. In the end, this window becomes a vital escape hatch, and the degrees of slenderness—But here I am, at the catastrophe again. Read the book in confidence that there is one, and in confidence that Mrs. Spark’s darkling imagination, playing across the concrete details of a remembered historical moment, is as phosphorescent as ever.