Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  In an obituary of him I said that Kingsley Amis’s vision was in its way as bleak as Samuel Beckett’s, but cushioned and concealed by the conventions of the well-made novel. I should have inserted a rider, ‘from One Fat Englishman onwards’. With that qualification I stick to the comparison, much as it would have surprised and annoyed Kingsley Amis.

  Postscript

  New light was thrown on the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin by the latter’s remarkable correspondence with Monica Jones over some forty years, discovered after her death and not published until 2010 (Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite). When Larkin received the final revised typescript of Lucky Jim, the response he reported to her was generous and enthusiastic:

  I must say that Lucky Jim is now, to my mind, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, at least I think so. Only a printed copy can settle the question finally. But I don’t think anything can stop it being a howling success; it seems to me so entirely original that my own suggestions really pass unnoticed, as they were for the most part concerned with structure and plot. I don’t myself think anyone has been funny in this way before, and that even if he never writes anything else it will remain as a landmark.

  After Lucky Jim was the howling success he predicted, the tone of Larkin’s references to Amis changed noticeably. On 15 February 1955 he tells Monica:

  Kingsley never writes. I shouldn’t be surprised if he were fed up with me, in a shoulder-shrugging sort of way: I am of him, except as you say ‘the dog is so very comical.’ I was interested to hear that the book [Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, just completed] had gone to Gollancz – oh please God, make them return it, with a suggestion he ‘rewrites certain passages’! Nothing would please me more. And I refuse to believe he can write a book on his own – at least a good one. Still, we’ll see. In a sense he has behaved more consistently than I have: I sought his company because it gave me such a wonderful sense of relief – I’ve always wanted this ‘fourth form friend’ with whom I can pretend that things are not as they are – and pretended I was like him. Now I don’t feel like pretending any longer, and I suppose it looks like ‘turning against him’, although it’s not really . . . Probably he has been mistaken, to himself, about me.

  When Larkin reads a favourable review of That Uncertain Feeling in the New Statesman just before obtaining a copy, he writes to Monica, on 19 August 1955: ‘What the NS&N terms a brilliantly funny opening scene in a public library is, I am prepared to swear, taken from one of my Wellington letters. I remember writing it: “a sample encounter with a borrower.” . . . It irritates me powerfully to see this stuff, small though it may be, used for his credit & advantage.’ A couple of days later, having read the novel, he admits, ‘I was piling it on in the first scene, really, though there are spills & spars of a dialogue of mine in it. I contribute about 4 other gags in the course of the book, but they’ve mostly been adapted.’ Some years later (11 October 1960) he reports congratulating Robert Conquest ‘on replacing me as chief unpaid unacknowledged gagman to Amis Inc.’.

  One can understand Larkin’s sore feelings about the irony of his situation. There is always an element of rivalry in a friendship between artists in the same field, and Larkin found he had helped Amis to achieve a level of success and income neither of them had anticipated, and which was in painful contrast to the muted reception and sales of his own two published novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. It was not coincidental that he never completed the third novel he had started before Lucky Jim was published. Basic differences of character and attitude between the two men which had previously been latent became overt as time went on, and relations cooled to the extent that contact ceased for some years in the 1960s, after which they were undemonstratively reconciled and resumed their correspondence, though not with the spontaneity and frequency of old.

  In 2012 Richard Bradford, who had previously published biographies of both Amis (in 2001) and Larkin (in 2009), retraced the history of their relationship in The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, drawing on Letters to Monica and unpublished letters by Amis, and adding a good deal of tendentious speculation of his own. But he is probably correct in suggesting that Larkin’s increasing eminence as a poet enabled him to overcome his envy of Amis’s success.

  * * *

  1 The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006).

  2 Two items in Anthony Thwaite’s edition of Selected Letters (1992) throw interesting light on this poem. In a letter to Thwaite in March 1970, Larkin revealed that in an earlier draft the line ended: ‘could it be, Horatio?’ making the poem a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, ‘which may make better or worse sense, according to whether you think Horatio was a nicer chap than Hamlet or not’. He also explained what the poem ‘was meant to do . . . to postulate a situation where, in the eyes of the author, his friend got all the straightforward easy girls and he got all the neurotic difficult ones, leaving the reader to see that in fact the girls were all the same, and simply responded to the way they were treated. In other words the difference was in the friends and not in the girls.’ There were in fact significant differences between the women that Larkin and Amis were respectively involved with, but undoubtedly it was their own different characters and temperaments that determined the patterns of their sexual lives. In January 1978 Larkin reread the poem and commented in a letter to Thwaite: ‘My reaction was that in the first place it wasn’t at all funny: very sad and true; in the second, that the “joke” was either too obvious or too subtle to be seen.’ For these and other reasons he concluded: ‘we’ll have to leave it to the posthumous volume.’ That was Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Collected Poems (1988).

  A TRICKY UNDERTAKING: THE BIOGRAPHY OF MURIEL SPARK

  MURIEL SPARK PUBLISHED twenty-two novels in her lifetime, despite beginning relatively late at the age of thirty-nine, and at least half of them are classics by the only criterion that really matters – they invite and reward repeated rereading. She was arguably the most innovative British novelist writing in the second half of the twentieth century, extending the possibilities of fiction for other writers as well as for herself. Arriving on the English literary scene in the late 1950s, she challenged the aesthetic principles not only of the neo-realist novel of that decade, but also of the modernist novel from Henry James to Virginia Woolf, demonstrating a different style of story-telling we would learn to call postmodernist. She took the convention of the omniscient author familiar in classic nineteenth-century novels and applied it in a new, speeded-up, throwaway style to artfully contrived plots of a kind rare in twentieth-century literary fiction. Instead of hiding behind a character-narrator or cultivating a modernist ‘impersonality’, Spark’s authorial voice was up front, briskly summarising the characters and their actions, and shifting the temporal focus of the story – not with the deliberation of Joseph Conrad or Ford Madox Ford, but at dizzying speed, from present to past to future and back again, sometimes in a single paragraph. Solemn subjects, like guilt, religious faith and death, were dealt with in a bright and sparkling epigrammatic style. The supernatural, in the form of angels and devils, and the uncanny, like the untraceable telephone calls which remind the characters in Memento Mori that they must die, are apt to intrude disconcertingly into the modern secular world. She was, I believe, a liberating influence on a fertile generation of English women novelists that included Beryl Bainbridge, Fay Weldon, Alice Thomas Ellis and (in some of her work) Hilary Mantel. She herself had no obvious precursors, except perhaps Ivy Compton-Burnett. It is interesting to learn from Martin Stannard’s biography1 that Spark was in her formative years an enthusiastic reader of Compton-Burnett, whose work however has a much narrower range of themes and effects than her own.

  A truly original writer is a very rare bird, whose appearance is apt to disconcert other birds and bird-watchers. I was beginning my own career as a novelist and critic when Muriel Spark began publishing her fiction: in the former capacity I was unde
r the influence of the neo-realism of the 1950s and as a critic I revered the great modernists like Henry James, Conrad and Joyce. I was also interested in something called the Catholic Novel and had recently completed a thesis on the subject with concluding chapters on Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Muriel Spark didn’t fit into any of these categories, and although she was a convert to the Roman Catholic faith, and publicly admired by Greene and Waugh, her take on it was very different from theirs. Reviewing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961, I declared myself ‘beguiled . . . but not really stirred or involved or enlightened’. It was some time before I recognised it as a masterpiece and tried to make amends with an extended appreciation of the novel in my book The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971).

  There were, however, enough readers in the 1960s impressed by the wit, sharp observation and refreshing novelty of Spark’s narrative style to make her into a literary star quite quickly, especially in America. The New Yorker dedicated nearly a whole issue of the magazine to a slightly shortened version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, only the second time it had conferred such an honour. Nevertheless (a key word in Spark’s own vocabulary, one she heard often in childhood from the lips of scrupulous Scottish matrons) there was nearly always a significant mutter of dissent and dissatisfaction audible in the general buzz of approbation that greeted each new work, and it grew in volume as she became more and more uncompromisingly experimental in form and content. Reviewing The Only Problem in 1984, Frank Kermode described her as ‘our best novelist’ but added: ‘Although she is admired and giggled at, I doubt if this estimate is widely shared. This may be because virtuosos, especially cold ones, aren’t thought serious enough. Another reason is that although we have a special niche for certain religious novels, Mrs Spark’s kind of religion seems bafflingly idiosyncratic.’ Martin Stannard quotes this shrewd observation and his meticulous biography helps us to fill out and understand its implications.

  The history of this work is itself of interest. In 1992 Muriel Spark wrote an approving review of the second volume of Stannard’s biography of Evelyn Waugh and when he thanked her for it, she replied that she hoped she would be fortunate enough to find as sympathetic a biographer one day. Stannard tentatively offered his own services, and she invited him to visit her in Tuscany to discuss this ‘interesting idea’. Soon he was invited to write an authorised biography. No professional (or professorial) biographer could have resisted the opportunity, and he seized it, while wondering why a writer known for fiercely guarding her privacy should allow a total stranger to investigate her life without conditions. He was guaranteed independence, made free of a huge archive of her papers, and exhorted to ‘write about me as though I were dead’. Spark had just finished writing Curriculum Vitae, a memoir of her early life up to the publication of her first novel, and Stannard surmised that she resented the expenditure of time and energy required by this task, and decided to let someone else continue it while she got on with her creative work.

  Writing a biography of a living person is always a tricky undertaking, and Muriel Spark was no exception. She had been prompted to write Curriculum Vitae to correct what she regarded as misrepresentations of herself in an unauthorised biography by Derek Stanford, her lover and literary collaborator in the years before she became famous, and, as Stannard would soon discover, she was notorious for making imperious demands of her publishers, and frequently threatening to sue others for publishing false reports about her. The pile of documents made accessible to Stannard proved to contain nothing that was personally revealing, and indeed seemed more like a wall designed to conceal her private life. It was unlikely that such a volatile and controlling personality would maintain the promised hands-off stance towards her biography, and so it proved. Although Stannard has maintained a discreet silence on the subject, it is well known that when Spark read his finished manuscript she declared that it was ‘unfair’ to her, and withheld permission to publish it, a ban that was maintained for some time by her literary executor after her death in 2006. How the dispute was resolved we do not know, but this long-delayed book displays no trace of the frustration its author endured: its account of Muriel Spark impresses one as both sympathetic and accurate.

  Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in February 1918, the final year of the most terrible war the world had ever known, a circumstance she exploited in a brilliant magic-realist story ‘The First Year of My Life’, in which the preternaturally perceptive infant narrator comments caustically but silently on the folly and evil of the adult world in which she finds herself. Muriel’s father Bernard ‘Barney’ Camberg was a Jew, her mother Sarah (‘Cissy’) was according to her daughter half-Jewish, with a Christian mother, though the ambiguity of this lineage was to prove a source of much trouble in Muriel’s later years. There is, however, no reason to doubt her assertion that family life was not noticeably Jewish in matters of diet and ritual observances, that they rarely attended synagogue, and that its general ethos was liberal and secular. Socially they were at the top end of the working class, Barney being a skilled factory worker, and Cissy the offspring of small shopkeepers in Watford in the south of England. She seems to have been an amiable but rather lazy woman who, Stannard startlingly reveals, consumed a bottle of Madeira every day. That fact shows they were not poor, but their accommodation was limited: when Cissie’s widowed mother came to live with them Muriel had to give up her bedroom and slept for five years on a sofa in the kitchen. It is hard to imagine a modern teenager putting up with this for five days, but Spark claimed that she suffered no sense of deprivation. She found her grandmother an object of intense interest and helped uncomplainingly to care for her after she suffered a stroke and became bedridden and demented – experience which later bore fruit in Memento Mori.

  Neither of Muriel’s parents, Stannard observes, ‘had the faintest interest in literature’ and nor did her elder brother, Philip, who became an engineer. Her own interest was stimulated and fed primarily through education at the James Gillespie School which she attended from the age of five to seventeen. It was there that she fell into the hands of a teacher called Miss Kay, or, as she later wrote, ‘it might be said that she fell into my hands’ for Miss Kay was the model for Miss Brodie, whose ‘dazzling non-sequiturs’ she would later adapt as a compositional device. She also developed a fruitful friendship with a fellow pupil, Frances Niven, with whom she shared a passionate interest in reading and writing poetry, and made her debut in print at the age of twelve with five poems in an anthology called The Door of Youth. The following year, 1932, she entered a competition open to all Edinburgh schools for a poem on Sir Walter Scott, the centenary of whose death was then being celebrated, and won first prize.

  It wasn’t just her family’s limited means that prevented this obviously gifted girl from proceeding to university, for there were scholarships that might have been found for the purpose: Muriel herself had no great urge to do so. She sensed, probably correctly, that the academic study of literature would prevent her from exploring it in her own idiosyncratic way, and was anxious to make herself employable in the economically depressed 1930s. So she enrolled in business-oriented college courses in shorthand typing and précis-writing which stood her in good stead in the years to come, bringing her a variety of jobs that were not always rewarding in themselves but provided invaluable material for fiction (and no doubt helped to form her lucid, economical prose style). Three more years of formal education might have saved her from a disastrous marriage, but even that brought her experience she was able to turn to positive account in fiction. As the narrator of Loitering with Intent, Fleur Talbot, says: ‘everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.’

  The sexual liaisons and intrigues among the teachers and pupils which drive the plot of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, were, as Spark admitted, a fictional addition to the reality of her schooldays. Edinburgh in the 1930s was an intensely puritanical society, and premarital sex was simply not an opt
ion for a respectable young woman. ‘I never slept with anyone before I got married, because no-one anyway ever asked me,’ she told Stannard. ‘You didn’t. There wouldn’t have been anywhere to go. I wasn’t in that way of life.’ But she had boyfriends, and to the surprise of her friends and the dismay of her father she accepted at the age of nineteen a proposal of marriage from one of them, Sydney Oswald Spark, who was thirteen years older than herself and whom none of them liked or trusted. Why? He had an MA in Mathematics from Edinburgh University which may have impressed her, and she evidently enjoyed being the object of his infatuation, but if sex was a motive it was probably driven more by curiosity than desire on her part. (She told an interviewer in 1974 that she had rushed into marriage because it was then ‘the only way to get sex’.) That ‘Ossie’ as she called him (or later, ‘S.O.S.’) was a non-practising Jew perhaps made him seem a compatible spouse, given her own tenuous sense of Jewish identity; and he offered her an opportunity to see something of the great world, for he intended to go to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on a three-year teaching contract. He did not tell her, however, that he had been unable to hold down a teaching job in Scotland and had been seeing a psychiatrist.

  Ossie preceded Muriel to Africa, and they were married there in September 1937. The wedding night was inauspicious – ‘An awful mess. Awful. Such a botch-up,’ she commented years later – but she was soon pregnant, and soon aware too of her husband’s unstable character. She responded to the beauty of the African landscape, and the friendliness of the natives, but the arrogance and philistinism of white colonial society oppressed her, and combined with the increasingly threatening behaviour of her husband to precipitate a depression after her son Robin was born. Before long the Sparks were effectively separated. (Coincidentally another future novelist of distinction, Doris Lessing, was going through similar experience a few hundred miles away, but they were unknown to each other.) By the time the Second World War broke out Muriel was determined to return to the UK where she hoped to arrange for a divorce with custody of her child, and, after leaving Robin in the care of a Catholic convent school and moving to South Africa, she eventually arrived in a war-worn London in March 1944 and joyfully embraced its dangers and austerities (see The Girls of Slender Means). Her familiarity with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett sufficiently impressed an interviewer at the Foreign Office to land her a fascinating job in Sefton Delmer’s ‘Black Propaganda’ department, confusing the German population with radio broadcasts that cunningly mixed truth with invention (see The Hothouse by the East River).