The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  The adjectives proper to noses can therefore be reduced to a few anthropological terms, so plain is the nose on your face. It is true that these peninsulas of the human landscape have their individual endearments. The people I admire most have noses which go off at all angles; they have nostrils like panniers, bellows, cabbage butterflies: in profile, they are cliff-edges, dromedaries, spouts of teapots and chianti-bottles. You can keep your tiny tip-tilts, which are for shop-window dummies. You can have your chiselled classicals, they are for a romantic taste. But what you prefer and what I fancy are beside the point, which is, that the nose has a function.

  It has three functions: olfactory, respiratory, and proclamatory, but the first two are also beside the point. The transcendent function of the nose is to proclaim humankind. That the nose is our tether between spirit and substance, Heaven and Earth, is evident from Genesis, ‘the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. The first thing that happened to Adam happened to his nose. Therefore the nose is an emblem at once of our dusty origin and our divine.

  Why else do infants reach out for our noses, except that they doubt whether we have got souls, like themselves? Remember that the newly born are, all unawares, deeply versed in the Book of Genesis. Thus counselled, our children clutch our emblematic noses, generously to give us the benefit of the doubt. Why do they consider a funny man with a false nose funny? Because, of course, they spot the heresy. He was quite a heretic, that Dong with a Luminous Nose of Edward Lear.

  If neither the utterance of Genesis nor the pathetic fate of the Dong convinces you, hear what John Donne said about the nose. ‘The worthiest member’, he said. Regrettably, he did not actually say that noses stand for souls, but I take him to have meant it. Also in support of my proposition, Rostand provides his Cyrano. No spirit could be choicer than Cyrano’s, no nose more monstrous. This dramatic issue between Cyrano’s prominent nose and his prominent soul properly testifies to my nose-soul theme.

  And I ask consideration of the case of the noses of Botticelli’s nymphs and goddesses, because it confirms my conviction. These figures have colds in their noses suggested by a touch of pink at the tip. And not without reason. Botticelli wished to convey the supreme spirituality of the exalted females. He understood that they exist, by nature, in an element so purified and perfect that when they came into a natural framework they would find the atmosphere odd. Giving them human form, in their immortal poses, he gave them a human reaction to change of climate, a cold.

  [1953]

  Simenon: A Phenomenal Writer

  […]

  Georges Simenon was born in 1903 at Liège, the elder of two brothers. His parents were of the petit bourgeoisie that Simenon’s books depict so thoroughly. He was attached to his father, an insurance man, but he rightly didn’t like his mother, a woman of narrow limitations who appears to have resented her elder son’s luminous talent. He had a Catholic education.

  In the First World War the Germans were in Liège until 1918. That year Simenon left school at the age of 15 and, after occupying himself with several jobs including that of pastry-cook, he joined the Gazette de Liège as a reporter. From then, at the age of 16, he was an undoubted success. He wrote articles and pulp novels for the Gazette, some of them of a vitriolic anti-semitic nature which he later repudiated as having been written under orders, although, as Pierre Assouline points out [in his book], they were written with apparent conviction.

  Simenon moved to Paris in 1922 and [the following year] married his fiancée, Regine, an art student otherwise known as Tigy. In Paris Simenon, who now devoted all his time to literature, had a tumultuous affair with the star entertainer Josephine Baker, after which he set off with Tigy and her maid, ‘Boule’, on a tour of France by river and canal. In 1929 he travelled the waterways of northern Europe and developed a new fictional character, Commissaire Maigret.

  In 1931 he arranged for a mammoth Parisian party, called the Anthropometric Ball, to be thrown to launch the Maigret novels. It went on all night, a wild and memorable success. (Maigret novels alone have since sold many millions of copies.) [The] next year, Simenon was saying, ‘I’m already 29 and I’ve only published 277 books.’ It is true that his travels in no way interfered with his astonishing output. Where other novelists of good quality take months, or years, to brood on the next novel, Simenon took one day to think about it, and roughly fourteen days to write a book. This also applies to his ‘hard’ novels, those masterpieces of psychology which caused André Gide to proclaim Simenon ‘the greatest novelist we have had this century’.

  In 1940 Simenon was once again caught in a German-occupied part of the world. Anyone who was making a living by writing in occupied countries during the two world wars could be said to be a collaborator. The questions are, how far and ardently did they collaborate, did they know exactly what they were collaborating with and did their political sympathies anyway affect or change their work? In Simenon’s case, he wrote for money – it was either that or do some totally different job – and it is very unlikely he could have known the full miseries and horrors of the Nazi system. But the answer to the third question is more elusive. I would say yes, a political bent, involvement or acquiescence does affect the work of a writer for better or worse. In the case of Simenon, his Germanic methodology and his racial prejudices are lurkingly present throughout everything he wrote. This impedes the longevity of his books. It gives them at times too old-fashioned and dated a flavour, far more than does the stove in the corner of Maigret’s office on the Quai des Orfèvres.

  Towards the end of the Occupation in 1944, Simenon sensed the way the wind was blowing. He sent a pig and a cask of red wine to the Resistance. He had already been investigated as a Jew on the basis of his name, which it was falsely alleged was originally Simon. On that occasion he had scratched around for his grandparents’ baptism certificates and eventually solved the problem by moving to a safer zone. Now, at the end of the war, he found himself blacklisted as a Nazi collaborator both in London and in France, where he was condemned by the purge committee at the Ministry of Arts and Letters. This was excessive. He lost no time in getting a visa for the United States, where he took his family in the autumn of 1945. There, in the peace of a form of democracy he had never before experienced, he met his second wife, Denise, and formed a second family with Tigy, his first wife, as part of it.

  He wrote some of his best non-detective novels during his American years, starting notably with the terrifying The Stain on the Snow (1948), so much admired by such contemporaries as Gide and T.S. Eliot. In [this novel] he created a criminal Dostoyevskian type of character, known and recognised more and more as our [twentieth] century wears on – the perpetrator of the gratuitous act, the motiveless crime.

  Here, the young anti-hero Frank, while under police interrogation, reflects to himself:

  Because … because. All his life he had seen people being wrong with their becauses … There was no because … It was a word for fools.

  Simenon’s life and literary worth are not to be considered outside the amazing statistics attached to them. He is said to have limited his vocabulary to 2,000 words, to avoid a ‘literary’ tone; it is true that he is wonderfully translatable, marvellously readable – lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of run-down hotels, cold, dark, barges, quay-side canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, pot-bellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen. The facility with which he wrote his newspaper columns in his boyhood remained with him to his last days. His self-discipline was formidable.

  Simenon returned to Europe in 1955, first to the South of France and finally to Switzerland. Boule was now Simenon’s mistress. His only daughter Marie-Jo, whom he adored, was born in 1953. She committed suicide in 1978 in her Paris apartment, mentally trapped by her hopeless love for her father. She had made six previous attempts at suicide. Simenon could not have prevented her act, but he and his writing
s were deeply affected by it.

  Pierre Assouline tells us:

  André Gide died without ever figuring out how the Simenon factory worked, though it must be said that Simenon never gave him any help, lest he kill his secret by revealing it. ‘How sincerely can I describe a novel’s gestation? It’s a form of self-deception, nothing more,’ he said as early as 1939. But it was a methodical self-deception, a technique polished by decades of practice … Eight or nine chapters in as many days.

  Simenon drank wine as he wrote. He took long walks to immerse himself into the conditions of his novel. He worked himself into what he called ‘a state of grace’ or trance, before he could enter ‘the novel mode’.

  In the early stages of the ‘trance’ he would sometimes pick up his mail at the post office, just to have a destination for his long walk. The excursion would then become a ritual, repeated at the same time each day, by the same route, for as long as it took him to complete the novel.

  Simenon left three sons. He died in Lausanne aged 86, a truly wonderful writer.

  [1997]

  The Book I Would Like to Have Written, and Why

  The book I would like to have written, and why? – I think I must be soused to the core by the deadly sin of pride. There are scores of my ‘favourite’ books on my shelves. Years pass, and when I come back to them at least 50 per cent disappoint me. I remember only once reading a new book – Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (it was before I started writing fiction) when I thought I’d like to have written that. I still admire it but would no longer like to have written it. The Book of Job enchants me above all other books in the Bible, but I would not want to have written it, or, if so, there are points of characterisation and philosophy on which I think I could improve.

  I have reached a stage where I would not want to have written anyone’s book – not the sonnets of Shakespeare, not the dialogues of Plato, not the notebooks of Kierkegaard, nor, to come nearer home, lovely stories like ‘Daisy Miller’ or T.F. Powys’s Mr Weston’s Good Wine – all old favourites. Nothing, even, by most most-admired contemporary novelist Heinrich Böll. In fact, I would not want to have written anything by anyone else, because they are ‘them’, and I am ‘me’. And I do not want to be anybody else but myself with all the ideas I want to convey, the stories I want to tell, maybe lesser works, but my own.

  [1981]

  Pensée: The Supernatural

  Some of my work can be described as gothic because it deals with the supernatural. I have often found that the supernatural is a good factor for intensifying the vision of a story. It gives an extra dimension. It also helps to increase the element of suspense by which the reader is induced to turn the pages.

  [2003]

  PART IV

  RELIGION, POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY

  The demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous.

  The Comforters

  The more religious people are, the more perplexing I find them.

  Memento Mori

  Myself, I have had to put up a psychological fight for my spiritual joy.

  What Images Return

  Testament of Faith

  This anthology of extracts from the testaments and teachings of Eastern and Western masters of the spiritual life, is a personal one – N. Gangulee, the compiler, says he found these selections helpful in his own ‘quest for self-realisation and peace’, but they are arranged here to have a broad universal application.

  The anthology shows, as T.S. Eliot who prefaces the book points out, ‘how frequently contemplatives of religions and civilisations remote from each other are saying the same thing’. Thus, Western thinkers from Eckhart to Aldous Huxley are set beside Sufi mystics and Jewish, Hindu, Moslem and Buddhist religious writers. If we find this surprising it is because we are accustomed to cutting a sharp vertical distinction between Eastern and Western ‘ways of thought’ – though, if the world’s thought is considered as a whole, distinguished only by different levels, then what is more surprising is the quite justified inclusion of Nietzsche, Whitman and Shelley in a book containing Fénelon and Pascal. Where these mystics, philosophers, devotional writers and poets meet, is on a plane transcending doctrine and orthodoxy. Eliot reminds the reader who discerns this common essence, that ‘no man has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion or at least a particular philosophy’.

  There are, however, many conflicting statements to be found in this selection; but it would not do to use the book as a means of philosophical comparison, firstly because Mr Gangulee disclaims such a purpose – his extracts are there to be meditated upon; and because, secondly, each quotation is orphaned from its context, though representing a unique moment of illumination. But the fact that there are discrepancies in thought rather challenges the seriousness of the compiler’s statement (concerning particularly those mystics he quotes), that ‘the ardours of their spiritual experience reveal … a positive proof of the immanence of the Divine Spirit within us’. It is merely the term ‘positive proof’ which may be questioned. The mystics have given their testament of faith; positive proof was not required by them, their evidence bears a non-scientific relation to Truth; nor is positive proof required for the conviction which their experiences may convey to others.

  The mystics represented here, many of them, are practical teachers in the exercise of meditation; and perhaps one of the most rewarding features of the work is that it contains many pronouncements on how to go about meditation; most of us to-day can only brood, and then only when time permits. We need the implicit pragmatical instructions of a Fénelon. Both Gangulee and Eliot are concerned to say what meditation really means. To use the book properly, Eliot tells us, ‘we have to abandon some of our usual motives for reading. We must surrender the Love of Power – whether over others, or over ourselves, or over the material world. We must abandon even the Love of Knowledge. We must not be distracted by interest in the personality of particular authors, or by delight in the phrases in which they have expressed their insights.’ The latter is the first difficulty which faces the modern reader in approaching any devotional work which does not attempt equally to delight and improve the reader. Gangulee’s instructional account of the directions for meditation in the Upanishads, likewise fulfils a profitable introductory purpose.

  [1951]

  Ailourophilia

  If I were not a Christian I would worship the Cat. The ancient Egyptians did so with much success. But at least it seems evident to me that the domestic cat is the aristocrat of the animal kingdom, occupying a place of quality in the Great Chain of Being second only to our aspiring, agitated and ever-evolving selves.

  The dog is known to possess a higher degree of intelligence than the cat. Cat addicts are inclined to challenge this fact. But I think the higher intelligence, as we commonly mean it, must be conceded to the dog, and the highest to ourselves. We need our intelligence more than we need anything, and so, for its purposes, does the dog. But with cats, as with all true aristocrats, intelligence is not the main thing; they do not need brains, since they have felicity.

  Dogs are easily enslaved; they willingly regard their masters as gods and spend their lives proving their obedience, usefulness and devotion. Cats prove nothing – they are above all that. They don’t even catch a mouse unless it suits them to do so. No cat will pledge itself for life to its human provider, nor in any way sell its deep, sweet soul. When it forms an attachment, it is by way of gracious concession mixed with convenience. Very aristocratic. When a cat voluntarily disappears from home, it is not from want of intelligence or sense of its whereabouts, it is merely because the whim has seized it to look for something less boring elsewhere.

  And, like aristocrats, they do not need stately homes. Whereas the bourgeois dog needs a kennel or a fireside in order to be a somebody, even the sleek alley cat retains the incomprehensible importance of its catness, and is silent unless tormented or raped to the fine p
oint of anguish.

  I cannot speak highly enough of the cat, its casual freedom of spirit, its aloof anarchism and its marvellous beauty. The Greeks, observing its fearful symmetry in motion, called the cat ailouros – a wave of the sea. Nothing restores the soul so much as the contemplation of a cat. In repose, it is like a lotus leaf. Its contentment is mystical; anatomists have still not discovered what or where the cat’s purr-box is.

  To my mind, the flower and consummation of the species was my late cat, Bluebell, short of whose perfection every other cat in history and literature inevitably falls.

  […]

  Bluebell was given to me when she was a kitten. Her origins were of no particular account. She was partly blue-Persian, of exquisite miniature build. Her fur was fluffy and curiously luminous; but not too long, not bushy, like the fur of a vulgar Ritzy Persian. On the lawn, before rain or in the early morning, she shone with a blue, unearthly light, while her eyes took on the vivid green of the grass. Curled on a chair indoors, she glowed mulberry-coloured. She always seemed to radiate from her small body some inward, spiritual colour. When she sat in the window on sunny days, her eyes were pure amber as they stared intently at outer space. I am sure she saw objects in space that I could not see.

  I never got used to Bluebell’s loveliness. When I woke in the morning to see her sitting, a sheer Act of Praise, on my dressing-table, securely waiting for some life to happen, I would gaze at her with awe and with awe.