Rachel Cusk on Muriel Spark’s “The House of the Famous Poet”

I by no means felt the affect of Muriel Spark, although she was a considerable feminine determine in British literature. It’s a pity, as a result of there was a lot to be taught from her macabre, completely unsentimental artwork and its account of the unusual violence of dwelling. It was solely fairly lately, after I got here throughout a brand new quantity of her collected letters (meticulously edited by Dan Gunn), that I first felt confronted by her persona. The letters invited an investigation into each the life and the work.“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961) was Spark’s best-known novel, and was additionally the premise for a really profitable movie starring Maggie Smith. It was this movie, maybe, that cheapened Spark’s affect in my eyes after I was a younger author: the movie was widespread and humorous, qualities it’s troublesome to affiliate with this author at her savagely satirical greatest. The letters present that she was drastically inflated by the success of “Miss Jean Brodie,” and the fabric and cultural energy it signified. She got here from a disordered and working-class Scottish background and was the one mother or father of a kid whose mentally sick father frequently harassed her. Her life was a perennial effort to safe cash and recognition in a literary scene dominated by educated male snobs. As is usually the case, the tireless intuition of creativity usually thwarted this effort. However with “Miss Jean Brodie” Spark managed to please extra conventionally.The story “The Home of the Well-known Poet,” which was revealed in The New Yorker 5 years after “Miss Jean Brodie,” has lots of the hallmarks of Spark’s greatest writing. Her pure and melodious model, so swift and unpretentious, bears demise and hazard on its wings. The story begins in an autobiographical tone, with the narrator on a prepare from Edinburgh to London, in 1944. The sensation of an elemental unsafety that’s in some way joyously—or at the least spiritedly—borne is established right away within the description of a soldier within the prepare carriage who seems “excessively evil” however seems to be “extraordinarily light and sort.” Spark did write autobiography, however the autobiographical tone is comparatively uncommon in her fiction. Often, she favored to carry her fictional world and the individuals in it at a higher distance, in order that she might inflict violence on them. On this story, the violence is already throughout: it’s towards the tip of the Second World Warfare, and the world is in smoke and ruins. The individuals within the prepare carriage—together with the narrator—reside within the threadbare second.I took a number of issues from the story: the atomizing nature of disaster, which but grants a peculiar readability of notion; the electrical affect of fame; the haphazard high quality of expertise, which militates towards narrative; and the unstructured prospects of feminine affiliation. The story culminates within the concept of an “summary funeral”: I used to be intrigued and moved by this however couldn’t discover a method of answering it in my very own story, “Challenge.” I did, nevertheless, take two strains from the opening of “The Home of the Well-known Poet” and put them largely unaltered into my story—a genuflection to the grasp.Muriel Spark by no means forgot the presence and the ethical drawback of evil. It may be uncomfortable to learn her, as a result of, whereas she definitely provides no refuge in narrative, she provides little in artwork both. There isn’t any zone of privilege in her work—completely something can occur at any time. She assumes little or no, takes little with no consideration, and so the visible or perceptual aircraft of her writing is unusually heightened. In one other author, this would possibly bespeak a type of marginality, the one who observes as a result of she is basically powerless. In Spark, the impact is hallucinatory, leading to a sort of hyperreality that, to me, constitutes an attention-grabbing illustration of the mental expertise of femininity. The feminine alone, unconsoled by the parable of her cultural security, equally unconcerned with the query of her precise vulnerability, is a continuing determine in Spark’s fiction. She is a sort of lightning rod, attracting the world’s terror and hearth and conducting its reality, relatively than resisting or shaping it.I’m unsure who the well-known poet was, although I suppose I might discover out. ♦The Home of the Well-known PoetIt had the aspect of expertise—maybe even of reality, and I believed, in these days, that reality is stranger than fiction.