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.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009)
by Muriel Spark
Scotland, 1961

Considering the ridiculous # of times I've put off hooking up w/reputed brainy vixen Muriel Spark despite the enthusiastically proffered introductions of high class book pimps like Frances of Nonsuch Book and Séamus of Vapour Trails, I guess I only have myself to blame for this long-overdue admission: man, am I smitten...in terms more properly suited to this quick-reading but thorny morality tale set in 1930s Edinburgh at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, what I'm trying to get at is that I found The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be a superb, surprisingly complex novella that actually manages to live up to its massive hype with a spare, low-key style and an unpredictability that feels organic rather than forced--and even though Spark's authorial voice was every bit as recognizably distinctive as advertised ("flattening their scorn beneath the chariot wheels of her superiority," on page 56, will have to serve as the soundbite du jour), I so enjoyed the rest of her prose while immersed in it that I was variously reminded of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten for its unconventional but intensely felt characterization, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse for a deft but devastating fast-forwarding storytelling technique that's used on occasion throughout the work, and Marguerite Duras' Moderato cantabile for the novelist's complete command of her material amid a stripped-down economy of scale...of course, perhaps the easiest way for me to xmit my newfound appreciation for some of the more aesthetically fetching aspects of Spark's contempo classic is to contrast her high degree of difficulty portrayal of the title character, a charismatic and influential teacher who will suffer a betrayal less for her "experimental" pedagogy or for being an open admirer of some of the fascist changes taking place in 1930s Germany, Italy, and Spain and more from the personal animus of a couple of moral fascists including one from within her inner circle, with the light touch evident in this miniaturized portrait of one of Brodie's impressionable young students: "Eunice Gardiner discovered the Industrial Revolution, its rights and wrongs, to such an extent that the history teacher, a vegetarian communist, had high hopes of her which were dashed within a few months when Eunice reverted to reading novels based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots" (87-88).  Intellectually speaking, a hot date.

Muriel Spark (1918-2006)