Curriculum Vitae

by Muriel Spark

  Robert Armstrong contributed a poem to one of his Civil Service journals which badly plagiarized the work of another, rather fine poet, Arnold Vincent Bowen. When this was discovered by sheer accident, and Armstrong was confronted with it, he explained that he was trying to put the poet ‘on the map’.

  I must say something here about Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, mentioned in Armstrong’s letter. He was a former ambassador, a very pleasant man of about sixty, my parents’ generation. He took me frequently to the theatre, which I loved, and which his wife Lady Effie didn’t care for. Eugen supported me entirely throughout the ensuing strife at the Poetry Society. He was a Vice-President. His interest in me was by no means romantic. Indeed, to the bewilderment of some members of the Council (Armstrong and his friends), Effie used often to pick up Eugen and me and drop us off at the theatre in her chauffeur-driven car.

  ‘Have a good time,’ she would say. These aristocratic airs appalled and shocked my puritanical bourgeois opponents. Eugen gave some poetry readings which it was my job to organize weekly. He read beautifully.

  When Eugen took me for dinner I used to love to hear his stories of how the Battle of the River Plate was won by a stroke of diplomatic bluff. Eugen had been, in fact, responsible for the scuttling of the Graf Spee in 1939 when he was British Minister at Montevideo.

  (Many years later, in the early ’seventies in Rome, I found to my pleasure that the Millington-Drakes had the flat above mine in the Palazzo Taverna. I used to slip up to Effie for tea whenever I wanted a tea. I am fond of their son, Teddy, who lives near me in Tuscany – a very close friend.)

  There is something about a passion for poetry that brings out a primitive reaction, especially in non-poets, that is, the ‘poetry lovers’. Anthony Whittome’s words, quoted above, ‘The poetry world seems inherently faction-ridden and fissiparous…’, seem undeniably true when I look at those of my documents, reports and letters that I fortunately rescued from oblivion when I left the Society.

  An anonymous letter now reached the wife of the Chairman of the Society. It fell short of the mark, since it accused me of running around the West End at night with her husband, whereas the good woman knew quite well he was home every night. He was an elderly, home-loving type. I had sometimes been out to lunch with him. I didn’t see eye to eye with his reactionary ideas about poetry and we didn’t get on so very well on that score. But I was prepared to be patient.

  The question was, who had sent the anonymous letter? I wanted to hand it to the police, but the general feeling, on the advice of Toby Humphreys, the best of all legal experts on our Executive Committee, was to ignore it. We had two main suspects amongst the grievance-bearers, but no proof.

  Young poets had begun to drop in to see me at Portman Square. The Society’s offices were in a pretty Georgian house. I occupied a small room on the ground floor opposite a large office where Miss Cracroft, the Registrar, and two helpers worked. Miss Cracroft, known as Cray, was a handsome middle-aged woman; she looked after auditions for a gold-medal examination in elocution that was held every year for schoolchildren. It was a profitable venture and brought a good income into the Society. I left that side to Cray. She also took charge of the subscriptions and the banking. The office ran itself. I hardly ever went into the big office. A secretary called Barbara would take letters in shorthand whenever I needed her, which was seldom, and she typed the minutes of the executive meetings which I attended as Secretary of the Society. But I devoted my main energies to the Review.

  The young poets were full of hope that there would now be a place for them in the newly organized magazine. I did make a place for a number of them. There was no outstanding talent, but the type of verse they wrote was totally different from what had gone before. Irregular rhythms, strange ideas, free modes of expression were what enraged quite a lot of the former readers, although by no means all. One of my most staunch supporters was an eighty-two-year-old widower, Brigadier General Sir George Cockerell (who, as a young man, had heard Liszt play). He used to invite me, with other younger people of his acquaintance, artists, writers and singers, to his lovely house at Hyde Park Corner for dinner. I suppose this caused envy among the people he didn’t invite. But he liked amusing people, and could not stand bores.

  The young poets brought me poetic tributes – poems dedicated to myself – which I lapped up contentedly without letting them influence me in the slightest.

  One enraged reader who joined in the campaign of harassment against me was Dr Marie Stopes, the famous birth control expert – on that account, much to be admired. She was absolutely opposed to my idea of poetry. Up to his death three years earlier she had been living with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fatal lover of Oscar Wilde, an arrangement which I imagine would satisfy any woman’s craving for birth control. I met her at one of our meetings and knew she disliked me intensely on sight. I was young and pretty and she had totally succumbed to the law of gravity without attempting to do a thing about it.

  She wrote me a bitchy letter to ask me, was it true my husband had divorced me. I wrote back telling her to mind her own business; my private life had nothing to do with my work. She wrote back (27 May 1948):

  … as a Vice President and a member long concerned for the good name of the Poetry Society, I am fully entitled to be informed and to make enquiries about yourself.

  Mr Harding [a former Chairman] told me that your husband had divorced you. I enquired of another person why I had been misinformed by him and not told this fact.

  I request you to inform me whether or not your husband divorced you …

  I wrote back (29 May 1948):

  I have received your outrageously impudent letter of 27th May.

  My private affairs are no concern of yours and your malicious interest in them seems to me to be most unwholesome. You have no rights whatsoever to make enquiries about me – all enquiries necessary were made by those who appointed me and confirmed my appointment. I must say that your attitude fills me with contempt, as it would all right-thinking people.

  I heard no more directly, but indirectly she did what damage she could.

  I calculated, anyway, that the worst damage anyone could do me in that frustrated environment was to cause me to lose my job. I had begun to feel the job was not worth it, for I wasn’t able to move into the flat I had been promised. But I was determined to work well so long as I held the position of editor.

  Perhaps my most annoying contestant was a banker and amateur literary man of sixty, William Kean Seymour, a born mediocrity. He told me he had himself very much wanted the job of editor and had been disappointed when it came to me. I had occasion to remind him of this in later letters, fortunately salvaged by me. Kean Seymour had written some books of poetry.

  My first encounters with him were very cordial. He would call into the office and if I had time I would go round the corner for a cup of tea with him. He was married to a novelist, Rosalind Wade, whom I met at a dinner party. She treated me with eloquent coldness. Kean Seymour came round the next day in a state of agitation, apologizing for his wife. I asked him what was the matter. He said he had been unable to sleep at nights and had spent those nights walking up and down some corridor or gallery, because he had been thinking of me. He had told his wife all about it.

  I told him he had better inform her that his feelings for me were not reciprocated and that he was putting me in a false position. But this seemed to please him. I got him out of the office and wrote a letter to his wife telling her plainly that I didn’t want her husband and that I already had a boyfriend (which was true). I have no record of Rosalind Wade’s reply but I gained the distinct impression that she was more annoyed that I didn’t want her husband than if I did.

  William Kean Seymour saw my letter and came bursting into my office demanding to know if it was true that I had a boyfriend, and who he was.

  I told him. It was Howard Sergeant, a young accountant and poet who was active in the Poetry Society and who edited a magazine of his o
wn called Outposts. Howard had been my boyfriend since I first went to work at the Poetry Society, among so many unspeakable people. One big attraction of Howard was that he danced so beautifully. I loved to go dancing with him and often did. Another attraction was that he was fairly manly.

  William Kean Seymour turned totally against me from that day. In no other job have I ever had to deal with such utterly abnormal people. Yes, it is true, poetry does something to them.

  Kean Seymour had written to me after the publication of my first number, griping about the absence from it of one of his articles. In one of the frantic letters I have now before me, he put his complaint on to his friends – they had ‘looked in vain’ for his piece. ‘So many people have expressed pleasure in my more or less regular articles that it seems to me a pity to disappoint them.’ I tried in vain to placate him. But that fellow would come into the office behaving as if it was his own domain. I repeatedly asked him not to do so. He accused me of holding ‘underground meetings’. He assured me that he was ‘not an ally’. I replied that we were all in the office extremely busy. We were short-staffed. I wrote snootily:

  I have had reason to complain on several occasions of your manner of lifting and reading papers which happen to be lying on my desk, and of giving instructions to my staff without permission…. If you wish to see me, please telephone and make an appointment.

  I had often found him in the busy working office taking tea with the staff, pumping them for information which was by no means secret or sensational. Cray and the two girls were simply polite, but puzzled. I reminded Kean Seymour there were over three thousand members and subscribers to the magazine. I had to be concerned for all their rights, not those of one in particular.

  The printers came to see me in bewilderment. Did they take orders from me or from a Mr Robert Armstrong? He had come to question them about the magazine.

  And so it went on. I wonder what an intelligent young woman today would do in such circumstances. I hated to have ‘allies’. My supporters were all leading normal lives. The more talented poets and intelligent people like Sir George Cockerell, the Treasurer, John Graddon, the Librarian, H.K. Grant, Toby Humphreys, Eugen Millington-Drake, Mrs Violet Adamson, Dom Ambrose Agius OSB and many others and, as it turned out later, people prominent in the literary establishment, were far too civilized to plot and plan the downfall of an opposition in a cultural society. It would not have occurred to them, far less to me, to write letters to the Presidents of the Society, first Lord Wavell then Lord David Cecil, bombarding them with complaints, as did those disappointed poets, resentful of anything new. The Presidents never turned up at meetings; their positions were purely nominal. Naturally, a great many people resigned in my support when I left rather than engage in further turmoil.

  General meetings would often be led by Marie Stopes literally shaking her fist and making inflammatory, wild pronouncements. I think she was demented at this stage of her life. I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control. On one occasion the Chairman’s wife brandished her umbrella in Dr Stopes’ face. ‘Mabel, Mabel!’ called her husband. ‘Stop it at once. Sit down.’ Although all of the Society’s three thousand members were not waving their rejection-slips in over-heated indignation, it did seem to me and my friends that a great many were doing so. Numerous members seemed to think their increased subscription had bought space in the magazine for their poetry. I learned that to be an editor you have to be completely independent in fact as well as intention.

  I thought wistfully of Argentor, also a society’s journal, and yet so interesting and of such a high standard. But I knew that when I left the Poetry Review at least it could not, for a long time, return to the poor parish-magazine level at which I had found it.

  On 29 August 1948, writing to a new member of the Council who was extremely sympathetic and asked me for my views, I wrote that the dissatisfied groups were:

  a. People who fundamentally resent a young woman in authority, and especially when their own work is being judged.

  b. People who themselves wish to edit Poetry Review. There are two, of whom I am definitely aware, on the Council.

  I have tried hard to exercise tact with these members and have succeeded in some cases. For more than a year I have been tactful and charming until my face aches of it…. There is a constant re-grouping of sides and it seems to me the aims of the Society are being forgotten.

  The name of this new member was Collin Brookes. Strangely, I cannot recall his face as I can that of most people, and vividly, after forty-four years. I remember only his completely reasonable and unruffled attitude, which was outstanding in that environment.

  (I wrote the above, as I wrote all personal and semi-personal letters, on my own writing paper, because Robert Armstrong had raised the petty question in a council meeting, whether I used Poetry Society paper for letters to my supporters in the Society and therefore at the Society’s expense. I could have pointed out that he wrote all his letters about his poems and Poetry Society business on Inland Revenue government paper, in other words at the taxpayer’s expense, but I didn’t feel I could sink quite so low.)

  I had already started looking for a better job. Colin Methven wrote from Perthshire, advising me strongly not to resign. I had kept him closely informed. His packing cases were still piled up in Portman Square, but I agreed at a committee meeting, and it was recorded in the minutes that I agreed, that we should not evict the previous editor, and only await the outcome of negotiations for the other flat (which was the one I had been promised). In fact I had been thoroughly tricked, and Colin Methven, among many, was well aware of it. He felt, as did Toby Humphreys, that if I resigned I would sacrifice my right even to severance pay. I chose to be dismissed rather than resign, much to the Chairman’s annoyance, for I then got three months’ pay when, in his words, the Society ‘terminated the services of the editor.’ Three months was little enough. Colin wanted me to stand out for far more. This was on the advice of his solicitor, whom he had consulted.

  But I was delighted to get out of that scene of strife and of that mortal sin of art, pomposity. I went to stay at the Humphreys’. All the main newspapers were informed by my opponents of their version of the story, but they invariably backfired, and the story was reported unfavourably to the Society, the remaining members of which were furious. There had been, with my leaving, a considerable exodus of poets, good and bad. (I must admit that a great many of the men and women who gave me their devoted allegiance were very feeble writers.)

  Answering the questions of the press about the list of resignations from the Poetry Society, the Chairman put it: ‘There was a slight difference of opinion about the retention or non-retention of Mrs Spark …’

  But differences of opinion continue to this day. Even as I write, arrives a press cutting dated 27 January 1992 from the Daily Telegraph, headed: PRESIDENT QUITS IN POETRY SOCIETY ROW. (The row is about the purchase of new premises for the Society.)

  With the help of Toby Humphreys and a group of breakaway poets I founded a new magazine, Forum. This was well received in the papers, but it couldn’t continue long without a subsidy. However, by that time I had a new full-time job and was replanning my life. I broke entirely with my boyfriend of eighteen months, Howard Sergeant.

  Howard was a travelling accountant and was often away. He had been a staunch supporter of the Poetry Review, although often, I thought, rather too interfering. He was an extremely jealous man. He loathed my friend, the good Treasurer of the Society, John Graddon, and felt he could do the job better. More than anything, according to the hundreds of letters he sent me and which I find among my papers, he disliked what he called my ‘liking for male company’. I was unable to take this as seriously as he evidently meant it. I agreed heartily that I liked male company, especially as I lived in a club with at least sixty girls. I told him I also liked the company of women who liked male company. But Howard’s letters expressed his own lack of confidenc
e. He swore eternal love but was upset because, for instance, I had told him that if any relationship interfered with my natural bond with my son I would break the relationship. He brooded on this. He set up quarrels with any other eligible men I merely went out with. He confronted one of them at home, at eight in the morning.

  I am told by independent readers that the love poems he wrote me are quite good. I don’t know about that. They are written to an egocentric idea, or an impossible ideal. He didn’t begin to know me. He himself was in his early thirties, married and getting a divorce. The divorce had not proceeded as far as he had led me to believe. Howard wrote a long anguished letter describing a scene with his wife in which he had ‘told’ her. He repeated a lot of her arguments against their divorce, many of which I thought perfectly sound, especially when she pointed out to him that I would never be able to keep his house clean without assistance which he could not afford. I was, in fact, distressed to be dragged into a sordid business I had imagined was virtually all settled.

  Twice, when Deirdre Methven asked me to bring someone along to one of her dances, I took Howard. He was presentable enough, tall and fair, but he didn’t go down well with the Methven party. Colin didn’t think him right for me. My parents thought he wasn’t ‘good enough’. I sensed that my son, Robin, although he said nothing, would never care for him. One day I woke up and decided I didn’t like him, either. I had good reason.

  Howard’s favourite words were ‘integrity’ and ‘compassion’. He was forever invoking these attributes. If, coming out of a night spot, he couldn’t persuade a cab to take us home, he would shout at the driver, ‘Have you no compassion?’ By this time I knew that I could never marry Howard, on the grounds of his deficient sense of humour alone.