The Girls of Slender Means

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie/The Girls of Slender Means/The Driver's Seat/The Only Problem (Everyman's Library, 2004)
by Muriel Spark
Scotland, 1963

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.  The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.  Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye.  All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

(The Girls of Slender Means, 129)

As I hope you can tell from all that rich descriptive detail packed into the opening paragraph of Muriel Spark's autobiographical novella, The Girls of Slender Means is a sly, eminently quotable, and carefully written affair that was a pleasure to read despite also seeming a little workmanlike in spirit when compared with the godlike The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Fortunately for all concerned, we don't punish people for releasing the book version of Give 'Em Enough Rope after they've already gifted us with The Clash.  In any event, much of Spark's focus in this love letter to postwar disillusion has to do with a group of young women of modest means rooming at the May of Teck Club in London at the close of World War II (just as Spark herself did at the Helena Club in 1944-45).  How will their wartime lives, along with those of the non-May of Teck Club men and women who enter their lives, change once the war has finally ended and adulthood beckons?  Spark gives one answer, an arch one, while describing the night when virtually all of London took to the streets to celebrate the victory against Germany: "Many liaisons, some permanent, were formed in the night, and numerous infants of experimental variety, delightful in hue of skin and racial structure, were born to the world in the due cycle of nine months after" (137).  And she gives another answer, a harrowing one, near the end of the novel, while describing two tragedies that befall May of Teck Club members and their friends and an unrelated act of random violence witnessed among the crowds taking to the streets to mark VJ night.  In between, art and romantic love and religion are held up to the light for scrutiny in a way that makes me wonder whether I might be holding The Girls of Slender Means to an impossibly high standard; at the very least, it's hard not to admire a writer of faith who can slam an insensitive country clergyman as being "this shepherd of the best prime mutton" (231) or a writer of any sort who can smack down the healing powers of young love with such a coldblooded dig as follows: "Joanna pressed down her feelings for the second curate and worked them off in tennis and the war effort" (141).  Muriel Spark, a writer with ice in her veins.