The lost leader

AUBERON WAUGH

Collected Stories I Muriel Spark (Macmillan 30s)

Collected Poems 1 Muriel Spark (Macmillan 28s) Of all the talent and energy which has poured down the brain drain to America since the war, the loss which should cause civilised England the most grief is that of Muriel Spark. Mrs Spark may be polite enough, in con- versation, to say that she has been driven away by our vindictive taxation or by our national policy of persecuting all but the most determinedly second-rate writers, but the sad truth, I'suspect, is that we were beginning to bore her.

Even if she decided never to write another word we should have no right to complain. Her existing oeuvre, if it consisted only of The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Bachelors and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, would ensure her place in the gratitude of all English- men who still read books, not to mention her place in English letters. Perhaps it is better not to mention this last consideration. In America, where the resources of the English literary industry are so enormous, it must be more difficult than here to avoid pandering to it. The worst turn Graham Greene ever did to the art of letters was to divide his books into 'novels' and 'entertainments,' as if there need be a distinction between the two. Already in The Mandelbaum Gate, excellent though it is, one discerns Mrs Spark succumbing to the temptation to write an 'important' novel rather than doing what she has proved her ability to do by simply writing a good novel. The critics, of course, responded to her deference.

But she is too good a writer, just as Mr Greene is, to need to defer in this way. To become an Advanced Level set book in English, the modern novel has two hurdles to clear: the first, on publication, consists of the weekly book reviewers, who judge it for its com- passion and for its adoption of approved social attitudes; the second, a smaller collection of even bigger twerps, apply stricter standards to see if it is boring enough to be judged 'important.' Has the book trade come to such a pass that writers of Mr Greene's and Mrs Spark's excellence need set their caps at the school textbook market?

These two books from Mrs Spark suggest another way out. Collected Stories includes all the old favourites from Voice at Play and The Go-Away Birds with a few additions. 'The Black Madonna,' which tells of a liberal, Catholic couple who unaccountably give birth to a black baby, still remains, for the reviewer, the most enjoyable short story he has read in the English language. Another—`The Curtain Blown by the Breeze'—about an African small town white community, has the most ingeni- ously described plot. But it is in another story, much less good than either of these, that I fancy Mrs Spark reveals the way in which she will preserve her sanity and her artistic integrity in the seductive role of a New York literary lioness.

In fact, 'The Seraph and the Zambezi' appeared some time before her American life began. Those who read it then were puzzled, and 'puzzling' still seems the kindest adjective which is appropriate. It concerns Samuel Cramer, an unknown Romantic writer of the early nineteenth century whom Mrs Spark has chosen to reanimate and place in a Central African settlement in 1946. He runs a boarding house near the Victoria Falls; plans a Nativity play which is visited by a seraph from Heaven over whom they pour petrol which starts a fire. After a few extraordinarily pedestrian remarks, the seraph flies off and that is the end of the story. What are we to make of it?

The answer I would like to suggest is 'nothing.' Mrs Spark is not one to be frightened of the fantastic, but this is no more than an exercise in whimsy. I may be being uncom- monly insensitive, but the story appeared to me to represent, no more than a writer who had-begun to taste the wine of critical acclaim and who had decided to push her luck. 'Don't ask a woman to read her reviews and write,' seemed to be the moral.

Until, that is, one has examined some of her later pieces. The only unpublished story in- cluded here—`The Playhouse Called Remark- able'—seems, at first glance, like 'The Seraph and the Zambezi,' to be rubbish. A second reading tends to confirm this. In so far as it signifies anything, it is a pedantic, long-winded joke about the sources of artistic inspiration perhaps suggesting, in a somewhat whimsical fashion, that Art is the only remaining avenue of approach to God in this secular age. But is it not impossible-by any standards of logical or artistic consistency, to suspect that the author of Memento Mori could be guilty of such a banal, didactic intention? Who is she mocking? Obviously her reviewers. Equally certainly, the literary intelligentsia of London and New York. But I rather fancy that her mockery is aimed—far more than at the pre- vailing literary climate—at herself : at the whole idea that her superior imagination, powers of perception, ability to communicate— any of the qualities which might be supposed to comprise her creative vocation—are of the slightest importance. It is an awareness which must come to any Christian artist who is not, by nature, cast in the role of preacher. Non- Christian artists can make a religion of their talents, just as non-Christian critics worship at the shrine of Art, but for the Christian it is easier to see the falseness of this attitude than

it is to decide the extent to which possession of these highly secular talents involves a re- sponsibility to their source.

Mrs Spark asks these or similar question: herself in Collected Poems. The first two poems, in fact, may contain the key to her dilemma:.

'What is Truth true of?

And what good's a God's-eye-view of Anyone to anyone But God?'

This is from the second poem: 'Against the Transcendentalists.' The first, by contrast, is a highly metaphysical conceit, describing how the poet perceives the absence of a vision: 'The void exists as bulk defined it, The cat subsiding down a basement Leaves a catlessness behind it. That vision, then, shall I concede is Proved by a void capacity.'

This line of speculation is not so different from the sort of thing which used to intrigue Lewis Carroll. Indeed her long poem, 'The Ballad of the Fanfarlo,' could easily be inter- preted as nonsense verse. She returns to Samuel Cramer as her hero, which is surely an ominous sign: 'And where do you come from, Samuel Cramer, From the yellow light to the red? I come from the dancing Fanfarlo She lies on her fever bed.' .

From a border ballad, the poem wanders through almost every known poet; there are simultaneous echoes of Carroll and Coleridge, of Byron, of Chesterton ('And when the hawk shall creep in the earth/And hogs rest in the sun.').

This poem, the longest and presumably the most 'important' in the book, could be read as a somewhat half-hearted parody of Eliot's method of writing poetry; it could be read as straight humour; or simply as a jell d'esprit, the product of an idle moment. The writer does not seem to have made up her mind. She will leave it to the critics, and laugh a little at their tortuous explanations. The trouble is that in none of the roles—as an apocalyptic vision, as parody or as straight humour—is it quite good enough. Mrs Spark may be laugh- ing away at the other side of the Atlantic, but the world of English letters will have suffered a tragic loss when it can no longer laugh with her.