The Basics:
About Emdashes | Email us
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Features & Columns:
Headline Shooter
On the Spot
Looked Into
I’ve admired Muriel Spark ever since a friend recommended her 1981 novel, Loitering with Intent, which I know I found delightful, though I cannot, now, remember a word of it. But I found other work of hers less congenial, and neglected her until a few weeks ago, when Emily tipped me off to a fascinating 2006 piece by Philip Weiss in The New York Observer chronicling Spark’s relationship with The New Yorker.
The Observer post is actually the second of two, and they’re both worth reading. The first gives an opinionated, informative overview of Spark’s entire oeuvre and a few details of her life. From the second, we learn that Spark was in her most prolific period when she came to TNY’s attention in the late 1950s, and soon published her most famous novel of all, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in the October 14, 1961, issue. This was news to me, so I went back to my Complete New Yorker and found that, although it is not true, as Weiss claims, that the “entire issue†was devoted to Brodie, as with John Hersey’s Hiroshima in 1946, a significant portion of it was.
You could tell … that Frau Lublonitsch had built the whole thing up from nothing by her own wits and industry. But she worked pitiably hard. She did all the cooking. She supervised the household, and, without moving hurriedly, she sped into the running of the establishment like the maniac drivers from Vienna who tore along the highroad in front of her place. She scoured the huge pans herself, wielding her podgy arm round and round; clearly, she trusted none of the girls to do the job properly. She was not above sweeping the floor, feeding the pigs, and serving in the butcher’s shop, where she would patiently hold one after another great sausage under her customer’s nose for him to smell its quality. She did not sit down, except to take her dinner in the kitchen, from her rising at dawn to her retiring at one in the morning.Compare the Frau, then, with her bedroom, glimpsed briefly by the narrator:
It was imperially magnificent. It was done in red and gold. I saw a canopied bed, built high, splendidly covered with a scarlet quilt. The pillows were piled up at the head—about four of them, very white. The bed head was deep dark wood, touched with gilt. A golden fringe hung from the canopy …What in the world, one wonders, is the stolid, monochromatic Frau doing with such a bedroom? It’s an odd juxtaposition, and all the more intriguing for being unexplained.
The floor of the bedroom was covered with a carpet of red that was probably crimson but that, against the scarlet of the bed, looked purple. On the walls on either side of the bed hung Turkish carpets whose background was an opulently dull, more ancient red—almost black where the canopy cast its shade.
In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I traveled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.Nothing could be more mundane than this: we know the season and the year, and that it’s wartime in Britain. The narrator continues on to describe the two passengers she “remembers well,†a soldier of simian aspect and a young woman named Elise who works as “a domestic helper and nursemaid†in a London house. Elise invites the narrator to stay, and the narrator accepts because “at that time I was in the way of thinking that the discovery of an educated servant girl was valuable and something to be gone deeper into. It had the element of experience—perhaps even of truth, and I believed, in those days, that truth is stranger than fiction.†In other words, the narrator deigns to accept Elise’s invitation because she sees her as a curiosity.
“It’s an abstract funeral,†he explained…She packs the abstract funeral into her “holdall†and into her pockets, and she runs out the door for her cab, “with the rest of my funeral trailing behind me.â€
He took it out and I examined it carefully, greatly comforted. It was very much the sort of thing I had wanted—rather more purple in parts than I would have liked, for I was not in favor of this color of mourning. Still, I thought I could tone it down a bit.
You will complain that I am withholding evidence. Indeed, you may wonder if there is any evidence at all. “An abstract funeral,†you will say, “is neither here nor there. It is only a notion. You cannot pack a notion into your bag. You cannot see the color of a notion.â€Insinuate it? I’d’ve told her that flat-out. From this point on, the story is no longer “pure fiction,†and we realize that it never was. It’s about an idea, a “notion†about notions—a meta-notion. On the train, the narrator meets the soldier again, learns that he makes these funerals “by hand,†and that both Elise and the famous poet have bought abstract funerals of their own. The soldier gets off the train, and after it leaves the station, mysteriously reappears.
You will insinuate that what I have just told you is pure fiction.
“You again,†I said…This is unbearably cute, and it’s the point where I find Spark’s insistence on calling attention to the artifice of her story most irritating. The problem with metafiction and allegory is that they tend to punish the reader. Metafictionists want to frustrate the reader’s conventional, time-worn expectations of plot and character; allegorical writers deform the materials of the tale they are telling in order to make didactic points. Both forms can be intriguing and even perfect for their subject matter, but such instances are exceptions, not the rule.
“No,†he said, “I got off at the last station. I’m only a notion of myself.â€
When I reflect how Elise and the poet were taken in—how they calmly allowed a well-meaning solder to sell them the notion of a funeral—I remind myself that one day I will accept, and so will you, an abstract funeral, and make no complaints.The solider is, of course, the angel of death. He makes people’s funerals “by hand,†he comes and goes as he pleases (regardless of the laws of physics), and is only a “notion†until he becomes terrifyingly real, and the quotidian materials of everyday life—the cracked bathrooms, the dried-up inkwells—in which we invest so much of our emotional lives (as we see the narrator do when she visits the poet’s house) are all that we leave behind, poignant testimonies to our existence—so long as someone survives us who can bear witness. And with this finale, “The House of the Famous Poet†almost manages to have it both ways, to be both a meta-notion and a tragedy.
Comments
Hooray! You’ve salvaged what I found to be a maddening story. I still prefer “Ormolu,” but at least I can now see that “The House of the Famous Poet†is more than merely a perverse exercise.
It was maddening, all right. I confess I don’t always have the necessary patience to unpack stories like this (and some are too comfortable with their obscurity for my taste), but it can be very gratifying to work out a plausible explication.
One thing that ran through my head, though: I don’t think TNY would publish “The House of the Famous Poet” today, if submitted by a living author. Then again, it’s hard to imagine such a situation arising, as Spark’s brand of strangeness and opacity is unusual, to say the least.
The Observer articles are by Philip Weiss:
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2006/04/intellectual_mo.html
Thanks, Jonathan. Much appreciated. I’ve dated the post accordingly.
Bravo. And remember Memento Mori? Good litcrit
but with soul.