Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography – Muriel Spark

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Kim Randall Cox

I am a Muriel Spark enthusiast, so the prospect of reading and reviewing Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography excited me. My favorite of her novels, Memento Mori, is always on my nightstand for easy access. Spark’s novels, slender, darkly humorous, and ultimately serious in quality and tone, did not prepare me for the author’s lightly sketched autobiography.

Spark approaches her childhood gently, viewing it through a veil of mist and time. The incidents and vignettes of her family life are told with a mellow and distant affection. She draws the backdrop of her childhood, 1930s Edinburgh, deftly and with great nostalgia. Descriptions of the soprano who lived above them, singing nightly, the Buttercup Dairy Company, where the girl on duty would cut, pat and stamp the butter into pretty portions, and the visitors to their home and their town, including a royal couple, are compelling. The most vivid scenes center on the James Gillespie School. Spark describes her teachers, fellow students, and the course of her studies. One particular teacher, Christina Kay, captured the imagination and affection of her students. Spark was a favorite of Miss Kay and enjoyed being treated to cultural activities outside school. Spark fondly remembers attending a poetry reading by John Masefield, about the time he was Poet Laureate, and watching Anna Pavlova dance The Death of the Swan. The influence of Miss Kay proved indelible and far reaching. Spark used Miss Kay as the model for her most famous character, Miss Jean Brodie.

After leaving school, Spark attended college, taking classes in literature, taught at a private school for girls and small boys to obtain free secretarial instruction, and worked for a ladies clothing store. While socializing, she met the man she would later follow to Africa to marry, Sydney Oswald Spark. The marriage lasted seven years and produced one son. Spark later referred to the union as “disastrous”. War broke out during Spark’s time in Africa and she began to long for home. Transportation became difficult; the needs of troop movement took precedence over private travel. By the time Spark secured passage to England, her son, born in Africa, had turned six years old. She left him in the care of a convent school and traveled to England where she found work in the Foreign Office. This is perhaps the most intriguing chapter of the book. Spark worked as a secretary for a department that provided disinformation to the German people via radio. Using real German names and addresses, and German POWs as announcers, faux news stories traveled over the airwaves, embedded with negative bits of information designed to sway the German people against the Nazi government. Spark continued this work until just after the end of the war.

After the war, Spark worked for a trade magazine before becoming the editor of Poetry Review. By this time, her son traveled from Africa to Scotland to live with her parents while Spark continued on in London. Spark describes living in boarding houses and rented rooms, giving the impression of not only poverty but also instability. From the end of the war until the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, Spark lived a life on the edge. She supported herself by writing and editing books about Masefield, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, and with full-time and part-time clerical and secretarial jobs, as well as sometimes having no regular job at all. Spark ate infrequently and famously took Dexedrine to inhibit her appetite. Oddly enough, becoming ill and having hallucinations provided the idea that became her first novel.

Spark covers thirty-nine years of her life in 213 pages, including an introduction and twelve pages of photographs. The coverage is shallow and told exclusively from a self-flattering point of view. Spark’s account of events in her life sometimes complements but frequently contradicts other sources of information. Spark skewers her rivals and antagonists with biting wit. At times she is judgmental, even cruel, revealing highly personal and unflattering details about those who she considered betrayers. This is particularly evident when she recounts her tenure at Poetry Review. Those who did not support her were relegated to enemy status.

If you are interested in an insightful, comprehensive retrospective of Spark’s life, you won’t find it here. This autobiography provides a peek into Muriel Spark’s remarkable mind, reveals some of the origins of her work, and details a recollection of her life in her characteristically simple but engrossing and engaging style.

By Blood – Ellen Ullman

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Kim Randall Cox

Our narrator, a professor on leave from his university, takes an office in an aging, once-grand, old building in downtown San Francisco. It’s late summer, 1974. San Francisco thrums along despite an undercurrent of chaos and fear. The Zodiac Killer still prowls Northern California, the economy is stagnant all over the United States, and kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst dominates the headlines. The professor plans to prepare a series of lectures on Aeschylus’ play, The Eumenides, in his newly acquired work space. Like the protagonist in the Greek tragedy, the professor is pursued, by his own demons rather than the vengeful Furies of the play. We soon learn the professor’s leave is involuntary; he has fled at least part way across the country to avoid confronting the aftermath of some vaguely defined wrongdoing. The misdeed, the investigation, and the flight induce the latest episode of what the professor terms his “nervous condition”. The professor rented the office to add routine to his life and give himself a reason to leave his rented, shabby beachfront house. It’s a rocky beginning: ”The dark emotions seemed to be part of my body, instinctual, issuing from the cells as surely as saliva or blood or urine, and with as little conscious opportunity to intervene in their production.”

Within a month, his routine is more or less established and he writes the first workable notes for his lecture. The building is quiet. It calms him. Then one morning as he works, he notices the acoustics of his office changed. White noise emanates from the space next door. Just above the electronic din, he hears distinct sounds he recognizes as indistinct conversation. As he listens, irritated at the interruption, the noise stops. Two female voices drift through the slightest of doors between the offices. Captivated by the voice of the patient in the psychotherapist’s chair, he begins eavesdropping in earnest, taking great pains to remain inaudible as well as invisible.

Soon his life revolves around the appointments of his “dear patient”. He overhears her concerns, her troubles. Problems at home with her girlfriend, varying from squabbles about housekeeping to fundamental differences in their views of lesbian politics. But the problem that fascinates him most is her adoption, what the patient refers to as her “mysterious origins”. The patient describes a little girl, just a baby, she once encountered in a foundling hospital:

“Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. In her bones and blood and skin. And nothing would ever change that verdict. She was going to have a hard time in this world. I looked at that little baby — she was still screaming; why didn’t somebody soothe her now, for God’s sake? — and I wondered: What would I have done? How deep and dark and terrible that cylinder must have seemed. Would I have been able to do it: reach in and find the shiny little happiness at the bottom?”

The therapist, believing the patient recreates unhealthy romances based on her relationship with her adoptive mother, encourages and even pushes the patient to explore her adoption and the reasons for the secrecy surrounding her birth. Unknowingly, the therapist sets in motion events that dredge up decades-old secrets that reach around the globe, encompassing Germany after the fall of Hitler, the establishment of the Israeli state, and the role of the Catholic Church in safeguarding the Jewish children of post-war Europe.

Ellen Ullman’s story drips with literary allusions and brims with redolent, enthralling language, creating a shifting, slightly Gothic, and richly layered tale of a man’s obsession with, and interference in, a young woman’s search for her genetic origins. The patient unwittingly takes on the role of the professor’s surrogate. By experiencing her therapy, anonymously funneling information about her adoption, and living vicariously through her, he hopes to find a parallel peace for himself. The intimacy of the voyeuristic relationship is, of course, one-sided; the creation and delusion of an obsessive man. Both truth and lies emerge as the patient follows her biological family tree. In the end, we are left to decide the importance of identity, genetics, and family just as the patient will: for ourselves.

Delicate Edible Birds — Lauren Groff

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Kim Randall Cox

Each and every drama in Lauren Groff’s short story collection Delicate Edible Birds devastates the reader. Vonnegut advises writers in his amusing way to “be a sadist”. Groff paid attention. Her achingly graceful, pointed prose leaves no question that her characters suffer. Some grieve, some deteriorate, some agonize but in consequential, life-altering ways, each character hurts.

In “Sir Fleeting”, a grandmother reminisces about her own romantic life on the eve of her granddaughter’s wedding. Ancel de Chair, a charming, mysterious and wealthy French baron weaves in and out of her three marriages, beginning during that first honeymoon. A rabble of butterflies alights in 1956 Buenos Aries, delighting the baron even as her husband is disgusted by the infestation. Urged outside by the French playboy, she sees the wonder in his eyes as he captures the swarm on film.

The butterflies seethed over the streets, turned buildings into shuddering things, turned the most stoic of people into sleepwalkers, marveling at the delicate dreams at their feet.

This moment, frozen in her mind, comes back to her again and again. Ancel charms her each time he enters her life, with kisses and sweet words in elevators, a half-naked hotel flirtation, and happily trapped in a corner where the baron seems to notice no one else inhabiting the room. Never does he begin a full-on affair, but never does he wander far from her mind. As the wedding approaches, he returns, joins her for tea, and only after he is gone does she realize, with horror, the hidden character of the man who occupied years and years of her fantasies.

The title story ends the collection. We find ourselves in France during World War II among an international group of journalists. The story belongs to Bern, the lone woman amid a varied group of men. As Hitler invades Paris, the writers and photographers flee through the countryside barely ahead of the Nazis. Bern is a woman on the cusp of a changing world. She curses, she fights, she invites calamity, and she sleeps with whomever catches her eye without thought of consequences. As they flee, their Jeep runs out of gas on a godforsaken rural road, so the men push the vehicle until lights appear ahead like a vision. But the haven quickly turns into a prison and Bern’s feminine assets into a deficit. Locked in a provincial farmer’s barn, the group is united to protect Bern’s body and her dignity. But as the days pass, hunger and desperation at the approach of Nazi forces mount, disconnecting first one and then another of the men who’ve known Bern from the idea of protecting her questionable honor. The consequences Bern never entertained are dire.

Each story shines light on the mysterious complexity of the the human mind and its capacity for injury. Groff explores the relative strengths and weaknesses of her characters’ resolve, the immeasurable pain withstood by some, the paltry annoyances which cause others to break. It seems there are monsters among us; some are born, some are raised, and some emerge under unimaginable duress from the most ordinary of women and men. Those unfortunate ones, those forced monsters, can only endure their trials through denial or regret, if they manage to endure at all.

Beautiful Books, Old and New – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Kim Randall Cox

I love books. When I was a young woman, I wanted a house full of shelves filled with splendid books. Mama shopped the garage sales and estate sales on the weekends then, as she still sometimes does now, and she used to drag me with her. Once — only once — I hit the jackpot. At the estate sale of a majestic old home, I found a box full of gorgeous hardbound books covered in leather or cloth and labeled inside. The labels were glued inside the front covers, each volume numbered and dated by hand, once atop the shelves of the F. F. Duell Library. I’ve no idea who Duell might have been but I know F. F. Duell once existed because I hold a piece of that life in my hand. It’s an old book, purchased on November 15, 1913, for fifty cents, according to the meticulous label. It’s titled The Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m not the first owner, nor, most likely, the second. The copyright is 1900, so the book was thirteen years old before Duell picked it up. It has a red cloth cover and brittle, browning deckle-edge pages. The book is in poor shape and is probably worth nothing except to me.

I’d never paid much attention to Emerson before pulling that book out of the box. He struck me as vaguely important, probably because of my childhood Louisa May Alcott fixation. The frontispiece is a black and white photo of an old man in formal dress with white hair and a rather large nose. Then I began to read. Things like “Uriel”, “Bacchus”, and “The Sphynx”. My favorite by far is so short I can share it in full:

The Amulet

Your picture smiles as first it smiled,

The ring you gave is still the same,

Your letter tells, O changing child,

No tidings since it came.

Give me an amulet

That keeps intelligence with you,

Red when you love, and rosier red,

And when you love not, pale and blue.

Alas, that neither bonds nor vows

Can certify possession;

Torments me still the fear that love

Died in its last expression.

I fell in love with Emerson upon reading this poem. It’s perfect still to my mind. Especially at seventeen, I identified with the verse. Emerson loves someone. He doubts his beloved. He’s neurotic. He begins a sentence with “and”, a particular fault of mine according to my high school English teacher. Emerson was my first literary love.

So how could I possibly resist The Annotated Emerson?

The poetry is but a small part of this lovely volume. It contains those I’ve mentioned except “The Amulet”. The best bits and pieces of Emerson’s writing, collected by David Mikics into one lengthy, heavy, grand volume. There are essays on John Brown and Thoreau, a letter Emerson once wrote to President Martin Van Buren in defense of the Cherokee nation, and an address on emancipation in 1844. Emerson thought, wrote, spoke, and demonstrated his beliefs. The annotations are glorious. They range from noting that “empyrean” means heavens or sky, to illuminating, insightful comparisons of phrases in different pieces, accentuating strands of thought that course through Emerson’s belief system and his body of work.

Annotated collections aren’t on everyone’s list of must-read books. If you like Emerson at all, have an interest in his life’s work and the history of the time, or just love having a handsome, detailed, engrossing book to dip in and out of, this is a great volume to own. I had to have it.

Those Across the River – Christopher Buehlman

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Kim Randall Cox

“He came out to see me in the cage because I belonged to him.”

What an opening line. This story, set in 1935, is full of hints and insinuations just begging to be pieced together. Frank Nichols, a veteran of the First World War, inherits an old home in rural Georgia from his aunt along with a letter telling him not to live in the house. Outside the little town of Whitbrow sits an old cotton plantation, abandoned and decaying. Frank is an American History professor who’s left the university in disgrace over his dalliance with another professor’s wife. There’s little work in Ann Arbor for a stigmatized professor and an inexperienced teacher, so Frank takes Dora, the other professor’s wife, down to Georgia to begin a new life with her.

The old plantation was once owned by Frank’s great-grandfather, a Confederate soldier who refused to free his slaves even after emancipation. The slaves revolted, savagely killed the family, and destroyed their remains along with much of the property. Frank feels anxious about mining the history of his mother’s family, the Savoyards. The Savoyard that rode with Napoleon had a son who made his fortune in New Orleans. The next Savoyard, Frank’s great-grandfather, sold everything in Louisiana to purchase a cotton plantation in Georgia. From there came an illegitimate child who grew into a moocher and a drunk and the father of two daughters, one of them Frank’s mother. That’s quite a decline of the family, and he’s afraid what he might find. Frank is sure he can tease out old stories and long forgotten details from the people and the records of Whitbrow. There is a dark secret waiting to be unearthed.

Just after they’ve arrived, Frank and Dora are invited to a social in the town square. They attend, not knowing what to expect, and find themselves watching what Frank calls “some pagan-rooted festival” where young girls festoon the necks of hogs with wildflowers before the animals are led away from the square, out past the edge of town and toward the river. The townspeople follow, singing, stopping at the last house and watching two men and two pigs enter the woods.

Frank suffers nightmares, visions of the war, and they permeate his waking hours as well. Walking through the woods just over the river, he’s reminded of recovering from his wounds in Glastonbury, England. His mind wanders and he loses the trail. Deep into the woods, Frank encounters a boy, dirty and half-clothed. Much to Frank’s discomfort, the boy follows him, mirroring his movements, keeping a precise distance between them. When Frank begins to talk, and then yell, the boy throws rocks quite accurately, hitting Frank and breaking the camera he carries. The boy’s behavior is menacing, and Frank imagines him saying:

Yes, by all means chase me off the path, and when night comes I will show you other games besides the following and the rock-throwing.

This is a tale of suspense, of horror, of a life gone wrong. Christopher Buehlman creates a dark, foreboding atmosphere immediately, adding pitch-perfect details of character and setting. Buehlman writes suggestive, expressive, entirely beautiful prose. He evokes the 1930s with subtle touches of period language, glimpses of rural life with Southern gothic flavor, and exquisite description. Something evil is happening here, and you know it from the start.