by Muriel Spark
I didn’t read that message of Blunden’s until 1991 – rather too late to keep the date. I doubt if he really expected me to do so.
Sometimes one particular day in its entirety is vivid in one’s memory. On the way home from that Pforzheimer lunch I bumped into Father Philip Caraman, a ‘Farm Street’ Jesuit, editor of The Month. Philip Caraman was a much-loved friend of a great many writers, known and unknown, Catholic and otherwise. Philip said if I would walk back with him to the office he would give me a book to review. On the way there, I felt in the mood to entertain him with some amusing stories. He gave me the book to review and a cheque for fifteen pounds for having made him laugh.
In 1953 I was absorbed by the theological writings of John Henry Newman through whose influence I finally became a Roman Catholic. I tried the Church of England first, as being more ‘natural’ and near to home. But I felt uneasy. It was historically too new for me to take to. When I am asked about my conversion, why I became a Catholic, I can only say that the answer is both too easy and too difficult. The simple explanation is that I felt, the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I had always felt and known and believed; there was no blinding revelation in my case. The more difficult explanation would involve the step by step building up of a conviction; as Newman himself pointed out, when asked about his conversion, it was not a thing one could propound ‘between the soup and the fish’ at a dinner party. ‘Let them be to the trouble that I have been to,’ said Newman. Indeed, the existential quality of a religious experience cannot be simply summed up in general terms.
With Derek Stanford I later edited a selection of Cardinal Newman’s letters. Derek took charge of the Anglican letters and I those of his Catholic years. To help me, Philip Caraman lent me a bundle of Newman’s original letters to various Jesuits. I had them with me all the time I was working on the book. I found it good to touch the very papers that the sublime Father Newman had touched.
On 1 May 1954 I was received into the Church at Ealing Priory by the late Dom Ambrose Agius, a warm and kindly Maltese priest whom I had met at the Poetry Society. I had a great many Catholic friends; I suppose one is naturally drawn to others of like beliefs. My sponsors when I was received were June and Neville Braybrooke, both very good writers, who lived at Hampstead. June wrote exquisite novels under the name of Isobel English. I loved to visit them; they were brimming with intelligence and wit. Christine Brooke-Rose was then married to Jerzy Pietrievich, a Polish writer, fluent in English. I had a close friendship with them. Both were academics, and both had written highly interesting novels.
The non-Catholics of my close acquaintance were always willing to discuss theology, especially when it touched on a subject very important to me, the Book of Job. It seemed to me that the Comforters in Job were not at all distinct characters; they were very much of one type. They were, in fact, like modern interrogators who come to interview and mock the victim in shifts. I was to express part of this theory and conviction years later, in my novel, The Only Problem. My first novel, which I called The Comforters (a title I came to after much trial and error), describes the persecuting effect of the ‘voices’ experienced by the main character. As a title it is perhaps not precise enough.
In 1953 on my return from Edinburgh, feeling desperately weak, I wrote a review, in the Church of England Newspaper, of T.S. Eliot’s play The Confidential Clerk which was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival. The editor, the Rev. Clifford Rhodes, sent the review to Eliot, who replied to him, very favourably, on 30 September. Clifford Rhodes passed on Eliot’s reply to me. He thanked Rhodes for the critique of his play by me, and added:
I should have acknowledged it as soon as I read it, for it struck me as one of the two or three most intelligent reviews I had read. It seemed to me remarkable that anyone who could only have seen the play once, and certainly not have read it, should have grasped so much of its intention.
This, of course, made me feel very cheerful. I was already embarked on a study of Eliot. Frank Sheed of Sheed & Ward commissioned a short book.
So I continued my Eliot studies. But in 1954 shortly after my reception into the Church of Rome something strange occurred. Something strange was not surprising, because, foolishly, I had been taking dexedrine as an appetite suppressant, so that I would feel less hungry. It was a mad idea.
As I worked on the Eliot book one night the letters of the words I was reading became confused. They formed anagrams and crosswords. In a way, as long as this sensation lasted, I knew they were hallucinations. But I didn’t connect them with the dexedrine. It is difficult to convey how absolutely fascinating that involuntary word-game was. I thought at first that there was a code built into Eliot’s work and tried to decipher it. Next, I seemed to realize that this word-game went through other books by other authors. It appeared that they were phonetics of Greek, and were extracts from the Greek dramatists.
This experience lasted from 25 January to 22 April 1954. I saw Dr Lieber, a general practitioner, in Wimpole Street. Dr Lieber was an old friend, a private – that is to say, not a National Health – doctor. He agreed to treat me without fees until I was better again. But he explained that lots of women in those days of rationing gave up part of their share to their families, and consequently suffered from under-nourishment. I know he suspected that I ate the wrong food for while I was convalescent in the country he wrote to me frequently; I still have his letters. ‘Be sure to eat the right food,’ he says repeatedly.
My friends, June and Neville, Christine and Jerzy, were very sympathetic. I was aware of being surrounded by friends. Matter-of-fact Hugo Manning, a night-journalist who worked on Reuters, and also a poet and amateur philosopher, was a great source of moral support. As soon as I stopped taking dexedrine the delusions of the word-game stopped. But I felt ill, as I had felt at Edinburgh the previous year. I found a friend in Father Frank O’Malley, a kind of lay-psychologist and Jungian. He didn’t think I needed to go for psychiatric treatment, but I saw him often. In the mean time Graham Greene, through Derek Stanford, had offered to give me a monthly sum of twenty pounds until I got better. He really admired my work and was enthusiastic about helping me. With the cheque he would often send a few bottles of red wine – as I was happy to record when speaking at Graham’s memorial service–which took the edge off cold charity.
I took refuge first at Aylesford in Kent at the Carmelite monastery, and next at nearby Allington Castle, near Maidstone, a Carmelite stronghold of tertiary nuns. There I rented a cottage in the grounds, and it was there that I put into effect the determination I had fixed upon, to write a novel about my recent brief but extremely intense word-game experience.
It so happened that in 1954, in the crucial months of my illness, my name was beginning to flourish in the literary world. It was in a way frustrating that I was unable to respond positively to so many letters from publishers, magazines and universities who were writing to me then for stories, reviews, lectures. One letter was particularly tempting. It came from Alan Maclean, the fiction editor of Macmillan, London, a much larger publisher than any I had so far dealt with. Alan Maclean, who was the best-liked editor in London, asked me to write a novel for his firm; they would commission it (a thing unheard of, for first novels, in those days). Alan had been urged to look for new young talent, and got my address from Tony Strachan, who was then working at Macmillan.
Feeling weak, as I did, I replied that I didn’t write novels, only stories.
Back came a charming letter. A book of stories would be very acceptable. Was I interested? I think I said, yes, but I would need time to put a collection together.
After I was settled at Allington I began to think how I could go about writing a novel, and especially the novel about my hallucinations that I had resolved to write. I didn’t feel like ‘a novelist’ and before I could square it with my literary conscience to write a novel, I had to work out a novel-writing process peculiar to myself, and moreover, perform this act within the very novel I propos
ed to write. I felt, too, that the novel as an art form was essentially a variation of a poem. I was convinced that any good novel, or indeed any composition which called for a constructional sense, was essentially an extension of poetry. It is always comforting to come across a confirmation of one’s private feelings in the pronouncements of others who are more qualified to speak. I was particularly delighted when I came across the following piece of dialogue in a book of dialogue-criticism (Invitation to Learning, New York, 1942) mainly by the American scholars and writers, Huntington Cairns, Allen Tate (soon to be one of my closest friends) and Mark van Doren.
The magic piece of dialogue (they are discussing Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress) goes thus:
Van Doren: Why should we not say that this is trying to be a poem too? Any book that is trying to be good is trying to be a poem.
Tate: It is a poem because it deals with action conveyed through fictions of the imagination.
Van Doren: This would satisfy Aristotle’s definition of a poem.
All my hallucinatory experiences, looking back on them, seemed to integrate with this idea. I always tell students of my work, and interviewers, that I think of myself as predominantly a poet.
From the aspect of method, I could see that to create a character who suffered from verbal illusions on the printed page would be clumsy. So I made my main character ‘hear’ a typewriter with voices composing the novel itself. This novel, The Comforters, was published in February 1957. It was connected with a very curious literary coincidence that in fact turned out well in my favour.
Evelyn Waugh was, in the year 1954–55, someone quite outside of my orbit. But it happened that he, too, had been taking the wrong sort of pills precisely in 1954, and had suffered hallucinations, and had decided to write a novel about the experience. In his case, as most of his friends knew, he really did ‘hear’ voices. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold was the result, published in the summer of 1957.
He wrote in a letter:
Mr Pinfold’s experiences were almost exactly my own. I heard ‘voices’ such as I describe almost continuously day and night.
My novel was finished late in 1955. But before it was published there was a delay of a year, 1956. In the course of that year the proofs went round among literary people, one of whom was Gabriel Fielding, a very good novelist; his real name was Alan Barnsley, a medical doctor, practising in Maidstone. He knew about my illness but I believe he did not know about Waugh’s. He was, however, in touch with Waugh on some business, and in the course of correspondence Alan Barnsley sent Evelyn Waugh the proofs of my first novel.
Waugh replied that ‘the mechanics of the hallucinations are well managed. These particularly interested me as I am myself engaged on a similar subject.’ To his friend, Ann Fleming, he wrote
I have been sent proofs of a very clever first novel by a lady named Muriel Spark. The theme is a Catholic novelist suffering from hallucinations. It will appear quite soon. I am sure people will think it is by me. Please contradict such assertions.
On publication of my novel Evelyn Waugh was extremely generous, writing a most interesting essay on it in the Spectator.
Recently I asked Evelyn Waugh’s eldest son, Auberon (Bron) if he remembers his father’s reaction on getting those proofs of The Comforters while in the middle of writing his Pinfold.
All I remember [wrote Bron in reply] is him singing the praises of it, and saying how curious it was that you should be writing about the same sort of experience at the same time.
His attack, of course, was brought on by a mixture of chloral and bromide, yours by dexedrine, which should have the opposite effect to chloral and bromide. The sentence which jumps out from Evelyn Waugh’s review is surely: ‘It so happens that The Comforters came to me just as I had finished a story on a similar theme, and I was struck by how much more ambitious was Miss Spark’s essay and how much better she had accomplished it.’
In the middle of 1955, before I had finished my first novel, I moved back to London, fully restored and brimming with plans. By the end of the year I had a book of short stories The Go-Away Bird ready for the publisher, and early in 1956 I started my second novel, Robinson.
The year 1956 was still very difficult financially. The long delay in publishing my first novel was due to Macmillan’s getting cold feet about it. That novel was thought to be difficult, especially in those days – for it is true that one forms and ‘educates’ one’s own public. Readers of novels were not yet used to the likes of me, and some will never be. But with Evelyn Waugh’s first response and those of others who had seen the proofs, Macmillan took courage.
My digs in London were now 13 Baldwin Crescent, Camberwell, in a less fashionable part than in my old Kensington haunts. I had brought with me from the country a beautiful half-Persian stray cat, Bluebell, about whom I have written in poetry and prose. She was an extraordinary animal; I loved her dearly.
Father O’Malley and his cousin Teresa Walshe had found the place for me. The house was owned by Mrs Lazzari (Tiny), a wonderful Irish widow who had been married to an Italian cellist (‘so I understand the Artist’). I stayed with Tiny for years and years. She was then about sixty. Right from the start, Tiny took me under her wing, encouraged me in my literary work, discouraged the hangers-on (‘You’re a bad picker’ was her judgement of my choice of men-friends – how true!), and fed me her well-cooked meals for a very modest fee. Once, when I was depressed, Tiny made me pack my bags and accompany her ‘home’ to Cork, where we received a royal welcome from her daughter and their family.
Once, in a later and more prosperous year when I found Tiny heaving a scuttleful of coal for her fire from the cellar, and noticed how tired she looked, I said, ‘Tiny, let’s go to Paris tomorrow.’ Tiny put down her coal. ‘Okay,’ she said. She had never been abroad before. On that occasion, while I was seeing my agent, Tiny wandered off by herself; she came back bringing with her for lunch my friend, Joe McCrindle, owner and editor of Transatlantic Review, who had visited at Baldwin Crescent. ‘I bumped into Joe,’ Tiny said, airily, as if the rue du Cherche-Midi was somewhere off Oxford Street.
While waiting for my novel to appear, I worked part time at Peter Owen the publisher. I liked the atmosphere a lot. Peter was a young publisher who was interested in books by Cocteau, Hermann Hesse, Cesare Pavese. It was a joy to proof-read the translations of such writers. I was secretary, proof-reader, editor, publicity girl; Mrs Bool was secretary, office manager and filing clerk; and Erna Home, a rather myopic thick-lensed German refugee, was the book keeper. We were very attached to each other, there in the office at 50 Old Brompton Road, with one light bulb, bare boards on the floor, a long table which was the packing department, and Peter always retreating to his own tiny office to take phone calls from his uncles; one of them worked at Zwemmer the booksellers and gave us intellectual advice, and the other was a psychiatrist.
I worked at Peter Owen’s three days a week, and at home wrote stories and my second novel, a kind of adventure story, Robinson.
At the beginning of 1957 when The Comforters was finally published, everything changed. Derek Stanford was still an occasional visitor at 13 Baldwin Crescent, but he was very unwell in those years. He was heading for a nervous breakdown.
My years of hardship and dedication were now bearing fruit, but my mounting success was an irritant to Derek’s condition. There was nothing I could do about that. I tried to help by arranging with Macmillan to commission a new partnership-book by us both. They had paid an advance, which we shared. It was a second book on Cardinal Newman. But Derek had to give up the idea. His nervous state was acute. I had in fact felt rather under a strain as I was in a very awkward position. I readily allowed Derek’s advance on the book to be deducted from my Macmillan royalties. But I could hardly keep my name out of the papers. At Stanford’s request and to his expressed gratitude I wrote to Father O’Malley, who replied that he would see him. ‘It would seem that this has been going on for some time,’ he wrote. Plainl
y Fr. O’Malley felt it better for Derek to have professional help. The good priest sent him to Dr Elkesch and from there he was passed to the psychiatric department of Middlesex Hospital where he had treatment from a psychiatrist. To know that Derek was in safe professional hands was an enormous relief to me. He had been supportive throughout my illness, even to the point of packing up my papers and belongings in London for me when I went to recuperate in the country, and I wanted to be as considerate as possible. Derek wrote to me that he was advised not to see me; it made him ill. One evening when I was with a barrister friend, Tony (later Justice) Lincoln, waiting on the pavement for a cab, we had encountered Derek with some of his friends. This apparently – the meeting with me, not Tony Lincoln – upset Derek so much that he had to write to me about it. But I could hardly keep off the streets of London in order to avoid him. I wrote sympathetically, wishing him well. Later, Derek wrote to say he was going to marry an American girl named Delilah. Again, I wrote to wish him happiness. Whether he got married to Delilah or not I do not know. I lost sight of him after that and only heard of him when he wrote those shaky ‘memoirs’ of me.
But truly, I had now started a new life. Soon after publication of my novel in England Alan Maclean had found for me an American publisher, Lippincott. I was now able to give up my job with Peter Owen and write creatively, full time. ‘The Comforters’, wrote Lippincott in May 1957, ‘has caused a very agreeable stir among all of us who have read it.’ That is exactly the sort of thing a first novelist wants to hear from a publisher. In March, The New Yorker wrote that they had admired my story ‘The Portobello Road’ which had appeared in Macmillan’s Winter’s Tales. They wondered ‘if you won’t let us consider some of your stories for publication.’ This started my long and rewarding association with the magazine that is still considered the best in the world. Twice they have given up the whole of a week’s issue to publish one of my novels in its entirety.
