To mark the centenary of Edinburgh-born writer Muriel Spark’s birth, the Manchester Literature Festival presented a celebration of the author and her many, varied works (encompassing poems, essays, short stories, and twenty-two novels) as two fellow Scottish writers – journalist and friend of Spark, Alan Taylor, and novelist and current Makar (the Scottish poet laureate) Jackie Kay – discussed Spark’s private and creative lives.
Taylor and Kay both bubbled with enthusiasm over the subject of Spark and her writing and the discussion was presented as a conversation between the two (with the chance for questions from the audience at the end) rather than a straight-up lecture. There were fascinating insights into how Spark regarded herself as a poet and that ‘poet’ is actually the epitaph on her gravestone – something which is remarkable when Spark is better known as a prose novelist although, as Kay discussed, her beginnings as a poet fed through into her prose writing style as, in Kay’s own words, “Poems are wee books.” Such was the young Spark’s dedication to the art of poetry, that she would go to the public library in Edinburgh and borrow works from the great Romantic poets and proceed to “improve them,” which was a very Muriel Spark thing to do, according to Taylor. There was much discussion of Spark’s teacher, Christine Kay (a namesake of Jackie Kay but no relation), who would become the basis for Spark’s most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie; like Brodie, Christine Kay would often speak of being ‘in her prime’ and refer to the girls under her care as the ‘crème de la crème,’ and was admiring of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. In many respects, Christine Kay lit the literary spark within Spark (pun fully intended) and her influence could be felt throughout all of Spark’s work, not just The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; indeed, Jackie Kay remarked that the running theme throughout Spark’s work was a fascination with the truth and the ‘truth’ – the real truth and imagined truth. Many works of Spark stylistically make conscious efforts to remind the reader that they are reading a construct but at the same time undercut that revelation of artifice with some genuinely real, often terrifyingly truthful moments. As Kay mused on what Spark would have made of the current climate of ‘fake news,’ Taylor rather wryly noted that Spark, with her fascination of constructed and real truths, could have ended up as Donald Trump’s speech writer were she alive today – a thought which filled Kay with dread! As a well-travelled writer, Spark would also have disapproved of Brexit, according to Taylor who also discussed that Spark, for all her literary skill, was certainly no domestic goddess, having never even boiled a kettle in her life.
Other fascinating discoveries of the evening included the fact that Spark’s personal favourite of her own works was not The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which, as her most famous work, tended to overshadow the other twenty-one novels she wrote (not to mention all the poems and short stories) but was, in fact, The Driver’s Seat. This 1970 novel, short, sharp, and highly disturbing, tells the story of Lise who, we learn early on, dies while on holiday. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Lise’s death isn’t the tragic accident we initially suspect and something far more sinister is at work. The book is bleak, sparse, and chilling, and was Spark’s attempt at writing a ‘Nouveau Roman’ style book, very much in the tradition of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet. While it may not be most readers’ choice of Spark’s best novel, it is easy to see why Spark herself considered it her best. What was also revealing, was when Taylor said that Spark rarely made major changes or revisions to her manuscripts, often “her first draft was her final draft.”
The discussion between Taylor and Kay was interspersed by readings from several of Spark’s works: her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, provided a startling passage about Christine Kay; an extract from the Watergate allegory The Abbess of Crewe highlighted Spark’s sparkling satirical streak; the section read from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tapped into the adolescent pranks of teenage follies, and Kay even read a poem from Spark’s final novel, The Finishing School which demonstrated that even near the end of her life, Spark’s gifts with words never left her.
Perhaps the most fascinating revelation of all, was Taylor’s remark that Spark would go to get her hair done and tell the hairdresser to “make me look different” and that her attitude to her hairstyle was the same when she came to write a novel – each one of her twenty-two prose novels presents a different style, a different way of seeing things. Spark was well served by this evening celebrating her work and that work can be well served by people discovering and rediscovering each one of those novels, as well as the essays, short stories, and poems.
Reportage - Andrew Marsden
on - 9/10/18
on - 9/10/18
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