Lives in Writing (8 page)

Stannard sums up the relation between Spark’s metaphysics and her fictional innovations perceptively: ‘there was human time and there was God’s time. She played with these two spheres of reality: using ghost narrators, revealing endings to destroy conventional suspense, starting at the end or in the middle, fracturing the plausible surfaces of obsessive detail with sudden discontinuities.’ This daring deconstruction of the traditional realistic novel (and the realistic
noir
thriller) was most extreme in a sequence of short, spare novellas she produced in the late 1960s and the 1970s such as
The Driver’s Seat
(her personal favourite among her fictions) and
Not to Disturb.
In the former a woman pursues across Rome the man who must murder her; in the latter a butler presides over a crime of passion in a Swiss villa in a manner that is both God-like and Jeeves-like. Among other things they helped to make present-tense narration, hitherto rarely used by novelists, almost the default mode of contemporary fiction. The general public and some reviewers found these books baffling, and she had more commercial success later with novels like
Loitering with Intent
and
A Far Cry from Kensington
that drew on her early life to the same droll effect as the early novels.

After scraping through the dreaded test of the second novel with
Robinson
(1958) she produced, at the rate of one a year, a sequence of scintillating novels from
Memento Mori
to
The Girls of Slender Means
, while living in the unfashionable London suburb of Camberwell under the protection of a motherly landlady, and making occasional, not very enjoyable duty visits to her family in Edinburgh, who she felt exploited her increased prosperity. It was perhaps partly to put them at a distance that in the late 1960s she based herself for long periods in New York, occupying an office of her own at
The
New Yorker
. Later she settled in Rome, where she lived for many years in some style, escorted by a series of ornamental but usually gay or bisexual men. Stannard surmises that ‘she did not discover their sexuality until too late’ but one feels that, although she enjoyed dressing up glamorously and exerting her spell over men, subconsciously she did not want to be possessed by them and chose her male companions accordingly. From 1968 onwards she became more and more dependent on her friendship with Penelope Jardine, an artist resident in Rome, who acquired a derelict priest’s house and adjoining church in Tuscany and converted them into a home where Muriel eventually joined her, with Penelope, who was fifteen years younger, acting as her companion and secretary. Spark calmly denied they were lesbians, but Stannard says it was love that bound them together. Perhaps ‘a Boston marriage’ best describes their relationship. Muriel bought a series of automobiles in which she enjoyed being driven around Europe by Penelope, who had a fear of flying.

Spark’s later life was marred by illness and painful disability partly caused by incompetent medical care, which she endured with remarkable fortitude. She was less tolerant of what she considered harassment by her son, Robin, who accused her of denying her Jewish lineage and impugning his own by claiming that she was only ‘half-Jewish’. The issue turned on the exact nature of her maternal grandmother’s marriage, and the evidence, according to Stannard, is capable of different interpretations. Sadly this dispute permanently alienated mother and son, and brought Muriel some unfavourable publicity in Britain’s scandal-hungry press, which continued after her death in 2006 when it was revealed that she had cut Robin out of her will.

She was, it must be admitted, a difficult as well as fascinating woman to know personally or professionally. She was mercurial in temperament, restless and demanding, quick to take offence, chameleon-like in appearance, and capable of seeming to be two different women on successive days, as I discovered myself on the only occasions when I met her, one weekend in Rome in 1974, halfway through an Italian lecture tour for the British Council. The first was a supper given by the head of the council’s Roman office, when I was seated next to her. She was plainly dressed in a navy blue trouser suit which gave her (at that time) slender frame a gamine appearance, and was deferential to my academic status, though apparently unaware that I also wrote novels. More than once in the conversation, however, she claimed to know things which she had previously denied knowing. She had read my essay about
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, and appreciated it, and also mentioned with satisfaction Frank Kermode’s praise for her work – the approbation of academic critics evidently meant a lot to her. She told me that she had just finished a novel called
The Abbess of Crewe
based on Watergate, which she thought would be her best. (It was not.) The next evening I was invited to a large party at her apartment where she was transformed into a glamorous hostess, wearing a flowing robe and with a bouffant hair-do, moving among her guests with regal aloofness, and I had little opportunity to speak to her. Some acquaintances regarded her as a kind of white witch gifted with preternatural insight. Most found her eccentric and unpredictable, and some thought she was a little mad – an insinuation which, if she ever heard of it, would cause their excommunication from her friendship. Some of those character traits pervade her fiction, which is challenging rather than ingratiating. But as the heroine of
Loitering with Intent
, a portrait of the young Muriel Spark as aspiring writer, observes: ‘I wasn’t writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder.’ That aim the mature Spark triumphantly achieved.

1
Muriel Spark: the Biography
(2009).

I HAVE A
personal reason to feel very grateful to the film director John Boorman. In 1981 I was making notes for a comic novel about academics and writers jetting about the world to attend international conferences. I could think of plenty of amusing episodes and situations and representative character-types, including several from an earlier novel,
Changing Places
, but for a long time I was held up by the lack of a narrative structure to contain them all. In my notebook I wrote, ‘Could some myth serve, as in
Ulysses
?
E.g.
, the Grail legend.’ I was thinking of how James Joyce modelled his account of one day in the lives of a number of modern Dubliners on the story of Homer’s
Odyssey
. But I did nothing with the idea until, a little later, I happened to see Boorman’s film
Excalibur
, and was swept away by its exuberant and imaginative retelling of the Arthurian story. It set me thinking about correspondences between the Grail legend as it appears in chivalric romance and a modern story of academics and novelists competing with each other for professional glory and getting involved in amorous entanglements in various exotic settings. I started writing
Small World
.

There are many pleasures to be derived from John Boorman’s autobiography,
Adventures of a Suburban Boy
(2003), but for me its most interesting revelation was that the legendary quest for the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, incorporated by Malory in the
Morte d’Arthur
, and reinterpreted in modern times by Jessie Weston, T.S. Eliot and John Cowper Powys, among others, has deep roots in Boorman’s own life and psyche, and is the key to his cinematic
oeuvre.
He read
The Waste Land
and Powys’s
A Glastonbury Romance
as a teenager, excited and enraptured by these texts, and they made an enduring impression. His own book’s unassuming title encodes a heroic meaning: a quest for the cinematic Grail, the ultimate transcendent film, was the serial adventure that allowed Boorman to escape the spiritual wasteland of suburbia.

His first childhood home was a semi-detached house in Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, on the outskirts of London – one of 4 million built between the wars. ‘Four million of them! . . . Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘They all missed it, or got it wrong – the academics, the politicians, the upper classes. While they worried about socialism and fascism, the cuckoo had laid its egg in their nests and Margaret Thatcher would hatch out of it.’ Ironically, when he came to re-create his childhood in the Oscar-nominated
Hope and Glory
, he was obliged to build a simulated Rosehill Avenue on an abandoned airfield, because those streets of inter-war semis have been irrecoverably ‘improved’ – festooned with TV aerials, satellite dishes, double-glazed porches and other accoutrements of post-war affluence.

The Boormans had been affluent once. His paternal grandfather was a cheerfully eccentric inventor and businessman, sufficiently well-off to send his sons to public school, who lost all his money shortly after the First World War. John’s father George came back from interesting military service in India to painfully reduced circumstances, and was obliged to take a clerical job which he hated. He and his friend Herbert were both captivated by Ivy, the beautiful daughter of a Wimbledon publican. George popped the question and won her hand, but Ivy had always secretly preferred Herbert, and as the joy slowly leaked out of her marriage in the confines of Rosehill Avenue she turned increasingly to Herbert for solace. Thus was the triangular relationship of Arthur–Guinevere–Lancelot re-enacted in Metroland. The young John sensed what was going on, and felt guiltily complicit in the betrayal of his father, but George, embittered by the boring routine of his life, did not inspire great filial affection. Sometimes John disloyally wished that Herbert had been his dad.

The outbreak of the Second World War offered a kind of deliverance for all parties from this drab, repressed existence. ‘How wonderful was the war! . . . it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema, that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.’ George couldn’t wait to join up, though he was forty, but ironically, like many servicemen, found himself posted to safe barracks in the country while the bombs were falling on Rosehill Avenue. ‘We kids rampaged through the ruins, the semis opened up like dolls’ houses, the precious privacy shamefully exposed. We took pride in our collection of shrapnel.’

The pleasure and wonder that young boys, untroubled by adult anxieties, could derive from the Blitz were vividly evoked in
Hope and Glory
, but its most memorable scene belongs to a later phase of the war. In the First World War Ivy and her sisters had fled the threat of German Zeppelins by retreating to the Thames-side village of Shepperton where their father had a bungalow as a weekend retreat and holiday home. Now, driven by some atavistic urge, she took her own children back to Shepperton (still undeveloped and unspoiled) for safety, and so began John Boorman’s lifelong romance with rivers, of which the Thames was the archetype. He swam, and fished, boated and punted, and fell into a lock while the sluice was open, narrowly escaping drowning – the first of many brushes with death in his life.

He attended the local C. of E. school and sang in the parish choir, but when he failed the 11 plus his mother sent him to a private Roman Catholic grammar school run by the Salesian order, where he experienced the culture of corporal punishment sadly characteristic of Catholic education in those days. ‘The young brothers and priests seemed pent up, over-wound, their only release the infliction of pain.’ No attempt was made to convert him, but a devout chum with a shaky grasp of the relevant theology insisted on baptising him secretly in the school toilets, pulling the chain and catching the water in his hand before it was polluted by the toilet bowl. ‘I became, in a manner of speaking, a closet Catholic.’ Perhaps John Boorman did in fact acquire from this schooling a feeling for ritual and symbolism that is more Catholic than Protestant, and which left its mark on his films.

Towards the end of the war the school was destroyed by a ‘doodlebug’ (the V1 flying bomb) just as the academic year was due to begin, an episode with which Boorman ends
Hope and Glory
, in the scene where the blazered schoolboys deliriously celebrate on the bomb-site, and the director says in voice-over: ‘In all my life nothing has quite matched the perfect joy of that moment as my school lay in ruins and the river beckoned with the promise of stolen days.’ The idyll that followed was marred when he shot a kingfisher with an airgun and suffered bitter pangs of remorse. Imposing an adult interpretation on the event he comments: ‘I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored.’ When the family’s uninsured house burned down shortly afterwards he regarded it as a punishment for this sin and for his complicity in his mother’s infidelity. Whether that relationship was consummated is not clear, but when Herbert fell mortally ill Ivy nursed him devotedly and made no attempt to disguise her love for him from her husband. Her adolescent son purified himself by a ritual dip in the Thames, believing that if he could swim without causing a single ripple on the surface of the water he would recover the state of grace he had lost. ‘That experience, so profound, set me on a quest for images, through cinema, to try and recapture what I knew that day.’ At the time of writing, he still swam naked every morning in the cold river that runs past his house in Ireland.

A maverick Salesian teacher, Fr John McGuire, encouraged John to think he might become a writer, but the family’s circumstances prevented him from even thinking about going to university. He left school and became an autodidact, scraping a living from a door-to-door dry-cleaning service in partnership with a friend, reading promiscuously and haunting the cinema, while he waited for his call-up to National Service. He wrote articles on spec, a few of which were published by the
Manchester Guardian
, and did some broadcasting. With another friend, Barrie, he formed a Jules-and-Jim three-some with a girl called Pat. One day, in Barrie’s absence, he and Pat succumbed to sexual desire, and confessed the deed to Barrie, who was devastated – but only for a few hours, after which he announced that he now realised how shallow and banal Pat was. It was another, comic, re-enactment of the Arthurian triangle.