made up as it was of a rather self-regarding and heavily male in-crowd (she had unhappy affairs with more than one member of it) quick to classify female aspirants to their number as neurotics, bluestockings (unfeminine, unprepossessing and sex-starved in one) or scribblers of something inconsequential called ‘women’s books’.* That Mrs Spark’s literary intuition picked resistance to classification as its hallmark seems an astute subconscious choice and no surprise. What makes one prickle with delight is how seductively she accomplishes it; how naturally, in the disguise of character, she is able to assume aplomb.
As for subject matter, what surer to stand on than one’s own two feet? ‘She had all these years of really great experience,’ says her fan the crime-writer Ian Rankin, ‘from wartime London, Edinburgh, breakdowns, Africa, her Jewish heritage, marriages going bad – and it’s all there, laid out on the page for people to explore, book by book.’
It’s also not there, of course. This writing is not autobiographical reportage or police-report detail. Instead, it uses her small place in the scheme of things as a conduit, and attends to the transformations of Art. ‘I don’t see what else you can draw on for fiction but your life,’ she said. ‘Not only your own life but what you’ve learned or grasped about other people’s. It’s one’s own experience after all. What else can it be? All writers do this.’ Of course they do. It’s just that some have more bother acknowledging it than others. As befits a writer with a clear understanding of her own mortality, Mrs Spark grasps her own life and those of her characters with the same hands. Often, in a wonderful gesture of self-implication, her narrator is ‘I’. Far from being ‘harsh’ or ‘aloof’, Mrs S is there too, at the heart of the crowd, as both observer and observed.
Though much of Muriel Spark’s fame rests in her novels (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori, Loitering with Intent and The Driver’s Seat are my list of stand-outs), the lady herself felt happier with her shorter work: the bigger picture in fewer words. You may recognise some themes. Five are set in Africa, a country where the near-tangible, menacing pervasiveness of heat can turn milk and men’s minds with equal ease. Colonial life is full of drink, careless social divisions and latent sexual violence. In this jungle, the unexpected is guaranteed. ‘The blacks look happy enough,’ says one complacent onlooker in ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead’. ‘“Did you have any trouble with them in those days?” “No,” said Sybil. “Only with the whites.”’ World-weary Sybil knows more than she says.
‘The Go-Away Bird’, a more traditionally structured tale, weaves signs and portents, misreadings and an ominous sense of growing tension towards its ghastly end. Mrs Van der Merwe (‘A Curtain Blown by the Wind’) can change her surroundings and even her expectations, but not her dreadful, almost pre-destined, vulnerability. Most of us, Spark implies, see what we want to see and what we want to see is not necessarily what’s there.
Ghosts are everywhere, some on buses or in office-blocks, some (the catching kind) in doctors’ surgeries, and others wave innocuous hellos on the Portobello Road. Angels and demons (further explorations of the plausible Edinburgh time-and-motion demon from the novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye) drift back and forth carrying fags and parcels; they manifest as cranky uncles and irritable, drug-wary cooks. Do not be surprised if you laugh even as death surrounds you – some tales (like ‘The Executor’, which makes fun of golf, fishing, the moral high ground and the Edinburgh stereotype), provoke it all too well.
You will encounter protagonists who have been corrupted, sucked dry of purpose and wired to the moon. Some are from the moon. Mrs Spark, famously Catholic and somewhat nervous, has fun even with the religious and the ‘highly strung’. ‘Come Along Marjorie’, a glimpse of life in a religious retreat, details the (first person) author and other ‘neurotics’ with such relentless plain-speaking, I smiled all the way through. Till the end of course. ‘The Black Madonna’ carries everything a stage further into near-unsayable black farce. Bugger hushed reverence: Mrs Spark speaks as she finds. A master blender of the lightest lights with dreadful dark, Spark went her own way for over forty years, and that dogged originality is what I hope you enjoy most. Remember we are dust, by all means. But look out for the primary colours. Rejoice. Take in the Art.
* In 2004, I recall the estimable Gerard Carruthers of Glasgow University confiding, in a taped interview, that a friend of his father’s, on finding he was interested in the work of Spark, asked him if he was ‘still reading those women’s books’ – perhaps it still goes on.
THE GO-AWAY BIRD
1
All over the Colony it was possible to hear the subtle voice of the grey-crested lourie, commonly known as the go-away bird by its call, “go’way, go’way”. It was possible to hear the bird, but very few did, for it was part of the background to everything, a choir of birds and beasts, the crackle of vegetation in the great prevalent sunlight, and the soft rhythmic pad of natives, as they went barefoot and in single-file, from kraal to kraal.
Out shooting with her uncle and her young friends, happy under her wide-brimmed hat, Daphne du Toit would sometimes hear the go-away bird. Sometimes, during the school holidays, her aunt and uncle would have the young neighbours over from farms thirty miles distant. They would scrounge a lift into the nearest township – “the dorp” they called it, for it was no more than a sandy main street in a valley, frequently cut off in the rainy season, when the rivers would swell above the bridges.
As they rumbled down the hill in the Ford V8 the uneven line of corrugated iron roofs would rise to meet them, and presently the car would stop outside the post office which was also the headquarters of the Native Commissioner. They would spill out to receive calls and glances of recognition from the white population. Natives would appear from nowhere to group themselves a few yards from the car, grinning with a kind of interest. They would amble past the general European store, two or three native stores and a dozen haphazard houses with voices of women scolding their servants rising from behind the torn mosquito-wire around the dark stoeps. Though it was a British colony, most of the people who lived in the dorp and its vicinity were Afrikaners, or Dutch as they were simply called. Daphne’s father had been Dutch, but her mother had been a Patterson from England, and since their death she had lived with her mother’s relations, the Chakata Pattersons, who understood, but preferred not to speak Afrikaans. Chakata was sixty, he had been very much older than Daphne’s mother, and his own children were married, were farming in other colonies. Chakata nourished a passionate love for the natives. No one had called him James for thirty-odd years; he went by the natives’ name for him, Chakata. He loved the natives as much as he hated the Dutch.
Daphne had come into his household when she was six, both parents then being dead. That year Chakata was awarded an OBE for his model native villages. Daphne remembered the great creaky motor-vans and horse-drawn, sometimes ox-drawn, covered wagons pouring into the farm from far distances, thirty miles or five hundred miles away, neighbours come to congratulate Chakata. The empty bottles piled up in the yard. The native boys ran about all day to attend to the guests, some of whom slept in the house, most of whom bedded down in their wagons. Some were Dutch, and these, when they dismounted from their wagons, would kneel to thank God for a safe arrival. They would then shout their orders to their servants and go to greet Old Tuys who had come out to welcome them. Chakata always fell back a little behind Old Tuys when Dutch visitors came to the farm. This was out of courtesy and tact for Old Tuys, the tobacco manager on Chakata’s farm who was Dutch, and Chakata felt that these Afrikaners would want to linger first with him, and exchange something sociable in Afrikaans. As for Chakata, although he spoke at least twenty native dialects, he would no more think of speaking Afrikaans than he would think of speaking French. The Dutch visitors would have to
