Read Online The Receptionist by Janet Groth - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Janet Groth
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coming across reviews that referred to her work as “biting,” “darkly witty,” and, some thought, “lacking in charity.” But to me she was generous and sweet. Later I could see what they meant—in Robinson, Memento Mori, and most of her numerous other novels, poems, and short stories. It was not until I was asked by Commonweal to review her 1983 novel, Loitering with Intent, that I began to get a handle on what Muriel Spark the writer was all about.
In the review, I draw the analogy Muriel frequently drew herself, between artistry and criminality, noting that both the artist and the criminal like to take us by surprise. Th e novel is Muriel’s nearest approach to a vade mecum for the study of her works. Her main character, a budding novelist named Fleur, evolves an artistic credo that fits neatly with her own. Fleur has a job editing the papers of some old society snobs and is accused of plundering these private papers (read private lives) for use in her own work. Fleur is not ready to call herself innocent of this charge: “I was aware of a daemon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more.”
Beneath its entertainments of plot and character, there is, as always in Muriel Spark novels, a spiritual discussion going on. Here, it is neatly entwined with the widely differing attitudes toward life of two famous autobiographers, Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini. Both are believers: one is a man of the cloth and an apologist for religion, the other an artist and craftsman. Fleur finds Newman’s reduction of the drama of faith to “two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings”—himself and his Creator—in Apologia pro vita sua quite “neurotic.” To Fleur a defrocked priest is also “a self-evident and luminous being.” And, she goes on, “So are you, so is my lousy landlord and the same goes for everyone I know. You can’t live with an I-and-thou relationship to God and doubt the reality of the rest of life.”
Cellini, the robust Renaissance craftsman, on the other hand, has inspired Fleur’s own writing, and it is particularly his trust in the material world that so delights her.
Th is is not to say the novel gives all the points to Cellini. Spark ultimately grants Newman the power to lead her heroine to the Catholic faith and to the disposition of her immortal soul. But it is in Cellini’s all-consuming focus on the making of art that Fleur/Muriel announces her own aesthetic. No overt proselytizing will intrude, and all other claims will fall before it. (In this light it becomes possible to understand Muriel’s imperviousness to her son’s hopes that she might evince a maternal pride in his own art, his painting: “I don’t think he’s any good and nothing will make me say so,” she informed an interviewer.) Freud fares scarcely better: “I don’t hold with psychology,” she once told me. Her no-nonsense approach to what in others might have been the murky stuff of psychological novels is especially apparent in Th e Driver’s Seat, a novella in which the heroine seeks out her own murderer in Rome. Upon reading it I joined the army of those who regard her works as so many small, perfect, polished gems.
Th e best chance I had to observe Muriel outside the office or a formal gathering came about in 1989 when, in consequence of a sabbatical I spent in Italy, I was her guest for the Christmas holiday. On that occasion there did gleam forth a sighting or two of the lady’s darker side. I was house-sitting in Cortona, some distance from where Muriel was staying with Penelope Jardine, her companion for the previous ten years. Nonetheless, Muriel invited me for Christmas dinner, and I made the following journal entry, on December 26, 1989, the day after I returned:
I arrived at the station in Arezzo at 5:45 p.m. Penelope was to pick me up at six.
Waiting outside the station, I shivered a bit; I
In the review, I draw the analogy Muriel frequently drew herself, between artistry and criminality, noting that both the artist and the criminal like to take us by surprise. Th e novel is Muriel’s nearest approach to a vade mecum for the study of her works. Her main character, a budding novelist named Fleur, evolves an artistic credo that fits neatly with her own. Fleur has a job editing the papers of some old society snobs and is accused of plundering these private papers (read private lives) for use in her own work. Fleur is not ready to call herself innocent of this charge: “I was aware of a daemon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more.”
Beneath its entertainments of plot and character, there is, as always in Muriel Spark novels, a spiritual discussion going on. Here, it is neatly entwined with the widely differing attitudes toward life of two famous autobiographers, Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini. Both are believers: one is a man of the cloth and an apologist for religion, the other an artist and craftsman. Fleur finds Newman’s reduction of the drama of faith to “two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings”—himself and his Creator—in Apologia pro vita sua quite “neurotic.” To Fleur a defrocked priest is also “a self-evident and luminous being.” And, she goes on, “So are you, so is my lousy landlord and the same goes for everyone I know. You can’t live with an I-and-thou relationship to God and doubt the reality of the rest of life.”
Cellini, the robust Renaissance craftsman, on the other hand, has inspired Fleur’s own writing, and it is particularly his trust in the material world that so delights her.
Th is is not to say the novel gives all the points to Cellini. Spark ultimately grants Newman the power to lead her heroine to the Catholic faith and to the disposition of her immortal soul. But it is in Cellini’s all-consuming focus on the making of art that Fleur/Muriel announces her own aesthetic. No overt proselytizing will intrude, and all other claims will fall before it. (In this light it becomes possible to understand Muriel’s imperviousness to her son’s hopes that she might evince a maternal pride in his own art, his painting: “I don’t think he’s any good and nothing will make me say so,” she informed an interviewer.) Freud fares scarcely better: “I don’t hold with psychology,” she once told me. Her no-nonsense approach to what in others might have been the murky stuff of psychological novels is especially apparent in Th e Driver’s Seat, a novella in which the heroine seeks out her own murderer in Rome. Upon reading it I joined the army of those who regard her works as so many small, perfect, polished gems.
Th e best chance I had to observe Muriel outside the office or a formal gathering came about in 1989 when, in consequence of a sabbatical I spent in Italy, I was her guest for the Christmas holiday. On that occasion there did gleam forth a sighting or two of the lady’s darker side. I was house-sitting in Cortona, some distance from where Muriel was staying with Penelope Jardine, her companion for the previous ten years. Nonetheless, Muriel invited me for Christmas dinner, and I made the following journal entry, on December 26, 1989, the day after I returned:
I arrived at the station in Arezzo at 5:45 p.m. Penelope was to pick me up at six.
Waiting outside the station, I shivered a bit; I
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