Muriel Spark – The Complete Short Stories

He cites appalling statistics to show that 1.024 per cent of the time squandered each Christmas in reckless shopping and thoughtless churchgoing brings the nation closer to its doom by five years. A few readers protested, but Johnnie was able to demolish their muddled arguments, and meanwhile the Society for the Abolition of Christmas increased. But Johnnie was troubled. Not only did Christmas rage throughout the kingdom as usual that year, but he had private information that many of the Society’s members had broken the Oath of Abstention.

‘The Leaf Sweeper’, from The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

My first encounter with the writing of Muriel Spark was through the 1975 BBC adaptation of The Girls of Slender Means, which I had sought out after seeing it mentioned in one of Clive James’s TV reviews. I enjoyed the first episode more than I understood it. It was camp – arch, but not cold. Intrigued and hoping to get a handle on what was going on, I ordered the book as well as this short story collection.

The pace of Spark’s writing is abrasive. The things on the screen or the page are part of a work in which time moves as fast as it can do in the real world. Reading the Complete Short Stories collection, the style isn’t something you get used to, you need to keep readjusting to it. This makes it difficult to write about – unlike the first few reviews on this blog, I’ve struggled to pick out one story to talk about.

That said, The Leaf Sweeper, a sketch lasting only a few pages, was a highlight for me. Johnnie, an anti-Christmas firebrand who now sweeps the leaves outside a mental asylum, meets his ghost, a parodically upbeat, yuletide-loving figure who gets on the nerves of his aunt. It’s one of a number of ghost stories in the collection, except of course Spark is less interested in horror than in what can be done with the form, playing with different archetypes and narrative devices.

One of the things I liked about these stories is that no character is entirely on the writer’s side, and the lucidity of the storytelling suits the ambiguity of this characterisation. The anarchist poet from The Girls of Slender Means is another example – the didacticism of the character doesn’t preclude the sympathy of the author or the audience, even as he’s boring Jane (Miriam Margolyes) to death. It’s easy to imagine a more straightforwardly satirical version that wouldn’t be as good.

The stories vary in length and tone, with some not really getting started, throwing some exposition out there before you turn the page to find the next one waiting for you. Even when I didn’t get on with a story, however, there were usually elements of it that I found compelling – they can be as eclectic as the collection as a whole is. The ones I liked the most were generally the ones that had more in the way of characterisation, so maybe I’d get more out Spark’s novels.

The Little Photographer

She walked across the street, and looking for nothing in the window of a shop opposite she saw, through the glass, that he had come to the door of his own shop and was watching her. He had taken off his jacket and his shirt. The shop would be closed again, the siesta was not yet over. Then she noticed, for the first time, that he too was crippled, like his sister. His right foot was encased in a high fitted boot. Yet, curiously, the sight of this did not repel her, nor bring her to nervous laughter, as it had done before when she had seen the sister. His high boot had a fascination, strange, unknown.

Daphne Du Maurier is the only author I’ve covered on this blog so far whose work I wasn’t familiar with in any way beforehand – I’m borrowing the collection The Apple Tree: A Short Novel And Some Stories from the library – despite the fact that she’s the most well-known. The most notable story from the collection is The Birds, famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, but my favourite was The Little Photographer.

The Little Photographer is a short story set in a seaside town in France about the wife of a Marquis, who, while staying at a hotel, has a liaison with a Monsieur Paul, a man she first meets in a cellar below his shop, which fills the time while her husband is away. When she tries to end things, he threatens to blackmail her with the snapshots she posed for during the afternoons they spent together, which leaves her no choice but to push him off a cliff there and then.

As she is introduced to us, the protagonist envies the holidaymakers around her that she sees enjoying themselves, and this jealousy made me think of the central character in the Rosemary Tonks story I wrote about last month (which I described as having “a folk horror vibe”, although “gothic” might be a more accurate term) and the combination of romance and horror, both using anticipation and suspense to justify their contrivances.

Rather than being repetitive or predictable, it works because of the power of fear and love respectively, and a story like The Little Photographer rewards a second reading. When she then kills him, this act is both incongruous with the tone in one sense, but is also in keeping with the shameless narcissism of the protagonist’s voice. The prose immerses the reader by lowering their guard.

The sneering ableism of the quote above is an example of the hubris of the Marquise, whose actions and comeuppance are both handled by the writer with equal relish. After the poor man drowns, his sister, suspecting something’s up, makes herself known. In an echo of what happened at the beach, Monsieur Paul’s sister blackmails her with the photos, ominously suggesting “a more permanent arrangement” than the few thousand francs the Marquise offers her.

Fireworks For Elspeth / L’Elegance

Mr. Baldock, a mild little man who grew violets, was Elspeth’s godfather and now he looked at her as if he had been given a little seedling to cherish and it had suddenly grown into a rampant vine. ‘Can’t you get this nonsense out of her head?’ Elspeth had heard him ask Aunt Bevis. ‘Is nonsense the right word?’ asked Aunt Bevis. ‘Well, no,’ said Mr. Baldock. ‘But Elspeth! Our pretty little girl!’ ‘She’s not a little girl,’ said Aunt Bevis. ‘It seems so unnatural,’ said Mr. Baldock. ‘Elspeth dear, are you sure?’

The family were more definite. ‘She’s out of her mind!’ said Uncle Arthur. ‘Girls get like this,’ said Aunt Euphrosyne. ‘It’s usually anaemia.’ ‘Elspeth is not the least anaemic,’ said Mother. ‘She has a lovely colour,’ and she began to cry. ‘She’s serious, Euphy.’ ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Aunt Euphrosyne, ‘Elspeth! Not Elspeth! Why, she was always the naughty disobedient one.’

In the introduction to this story, Fireworks For Elspeth, in her 1968 collection Swans & Turtles, Rumer Godden recalls that in writing the novel Black Narcissus (famously adapted by Powell and Pressburger) she initially set out to write something of an anti-nun polemic, which may come as a surprise to the reader as the following short story, is, if anything, unsettling in its display of empathy.

The plot concerns a woman who is about to join a convent and the anguish involved both for her and for her disapproving friends and family, brought to a head at a lunch party arranged by Elspeth’s mum to mark her last day at home. The guests are aggressively well-intentioned in voicing their dismay, pitched somewhere between Joan of Arc’s sceptics and townspeople outraged about young women being lured from their bedrooms to Count Dracula’s castle.

Elspeth’s decision to become a nun is a threat to the sense of normality of her family and friends. There’s a generosity in depicting both of these perspectives – being able to isolate and understand them, whether they stand up to scrutiny or not – and giving them both agency. It’s about a nun, but as a story touching on social awkwardness, desire, and identity, it could be about any number of things.

I found out about Rumer Godden through L’Elégance, another short story in the collection, or rather its 1982 TV adaptation (with no accent on the ‘e’). It’s on YouTube here and stars a severely-fringed Geraldine McEwan as the aspirational Miss Mountford (changed from ‘Mountfort’ in the original), a devoted reader of the upmarket magazine of the title, who saves up for a brief visit to a fancy French hotel once a year, for some respite from her job at a department store.

Miss Mountford arrives with her pretensions to a social class above her own, with her pinky held high to sip tea and her nose deep in columns of lifestyle advice, and hoping to find everything as it was before, only to be disillusioned by the attentions she receives from the new chef, who drinks too much, and isn’t as good-looking as the man we glimpse her absentmindedly daydreaming about. The relationship between fantasy and reality is subtly played with, to great effect, in what is still a naturalistic story.

There was also an adaptation of Fireworks For Elspeth around the same time, but it’s not online, unfortunately, so I haven’t seen it. Anyway, the interiority of the protagonist and how they are seen by others is what strikes the reader about both stories, and an escape – albeit one which might seems odd or idiosyncratic to others – from a life that they are unsatisfied with. Depending on the situation, you might identify more with the gallery of pointed remarks and raised eyebrows or feel yourself on the receiving end.

The Pick-up or L’Ercole D’Oro

The manners of the pretty young woman couldn’t be worse. They’re revolting. She’s dressed as if she’s just got up; a lilac robe with the hood thrown back. It’s fastened deep down in the bosom, like a seductive dressing-gown, has trumpet sleeves and an embroidery of lilac beading on the shoulders. The colour suits her perfectly.

Rosemary Tonks’s 1973 short story The Pick-up or L’Ercole D’Oro, later re-published in the posthumous 2014 collection Bedouin of the London Evening, is an atmospheric piece told from the point of view of an old woman, Signora Danielli, in Venice. To summarise a story as opaque as this would be a challenge, even after reading it a few times, so I apologise in advance for anything I’ve misunderstood.

Sat outside a cafe, ‘the burnished man’ and ‘the lilac girl’ are being watched by Signora Danielli, Tonks’s self-insert character. She scrutinises their behaviour in a typically and gloriously spiteful way, with the lilac girl receiving the worst of her scorn. When a storm interrupts this activity, we flee to her home and meet the old woman’s husband, and it’s fair to say that they aren’t in love any more.

As with her two volumes of poetry, which make up the bulk of the collection, Tonks’s prose is psychedelic in its contempt, an allegory of bile defying the reader. Before this reissue, not a lot was known about Tonks’s life after she stopped writing – she had cut ties with her family, and there was a rumour that she had become a nun.

A wealth of biographical detail is to be found in Neil Astley’s introduction, revealing, among other things, that Tonks had converted to a fundamentalist form of Christianity after her divorce, borrowing her own books from libraries to burn them, on the basis that all books other than the Bible were the work of Satan.

The power of ideas and literature are a recurring theme in Tonks’s writing, amoral forces with an impressionable readership, and her later reclusivity and religious conversion offer a tempting point of comparison here. In her previous life as a poet and novelist, by contrast, Tonks made visits to palm readers in between adding to her collection of various spiritual artefacts from around the world.

I feel like there is a bit of a folk horror vibe with this story, it reminds me a bit of The Owl Service. Like Alan Garner’s work there’s a dissonance at play – the structure, the ritual of the story, is overwhelming, even if you’re not sure what exactly is happening. The nicknames given to the characters here add to the effect that you’re reading some kind of parable. The story ends with the old woman reflecting on her life as she watches an old rich man going off somewhere in the car with “a happy schoolgirl” – the aforementioned and previously derided lilac girl.

Bath Time

“You can’t live like this,” he said, and concentrated hard on the specification she’d handed him. “You know, you could do this much more cheaply and there’d be enough left to get the basics done on the rest of the flat. You’ve got to have a kitchen, and the bedroom and living room aren’t habitable.”

Jenny Diski’s 1995 short story ‘Bath Time’, from the collection The Vanishing Princess, is about a woman – Meg – who sets out to have a bath that lasts all day. We are introduced to her through the prism of the bathrooms she’s had, from childhood to the present day. The perfect bath is an ambition which was been undermined until now by the right conditions – enough hot water, and the guarantee of privacy – never coalescing.

What stands out about Bath Time is its stillness. The prose is understated, lending credibility to a conceptual premise that in turn provides a warmth it might otherwise lack. There’s a self-awareness about the neuroticism of Meg’s wishes even as we’re enveloped by her internal monologue. The reader is left feeling claustrophobic, perhaps appropriately.

Her daughter having moved out, Meg moves into a “near-derelict” flat “in a dingy road of dreary terraced houses” to spend all the money she has on creating her dream bathroom. She wants a boiler, she explains to the builder, rather than central heating, as she has no need for radiators – there’s only one room she cares about.

In Diski’s novelistic memoir Skating To Antarctica, published two years later, this same combination of sensory evocation and self-introspection is used as we are presented with a picture of nothingness. Diski is content with doing nothing, and the South Pole offers a purer distillation of nothing.

Both deal in a curious form of escapism. The author’s voice – introverted, agoraphobic – is juxtaposed with a search for an aestheticised idyll of comfort. The story comes to a close on the 24th of December, when, with the requirements finally met, Meg looks forward to tomorrow’s perfect bath.