Serious but not solemn

Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the fact that I had, at long last and after many false starts, written a novel myself and had it published.

The second reason to hesitate was more cogent. I had enjoyed her novels from the start. Memento Mori and The Bachelors were as clever and witty and as much fun as pre-Brideshead Waugh; they delighted us as undergraduates. Yet the question nagged: how serious was she? Difficult, I thought, to write a ‘New Assessment’ (this being the title of the series to which my little book would belong) of a writer whose ‘seriousness’ was in doubt. It is, in any case, hard to pin down comedy, and the task wasn’t made easier by her own remark, ‘I was asked to write a novel and I didn’t think much of novels — I thought it was an inferior way of writing.’ Indeed she always considered herself a poet, and conceived her novels as poems, the chief influence on them being The Border Ballads. Death strikes as abruptly in her novels as in the Ballads, or indeed in Waugh.

I wrote the book, but was never satisfied with it. Looking back over it in the days since her death, I find it makes some good points, yet I cannot rid myself of the impression that she escaped me. She was hard to pin down, slippery as a trout or mercury. She herself was polite about it, chiefly (I guess) because I had not trespassed on her private life — she was harsh and unforgiving towards those who did.