I first read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie very rapidly and while reading made quiet moos of concern and befuddlement. There was a Miss Brodie in her prime! Her girls were the crème de la crème! Rose Stanley was famous for sex! When I finished I put the novel down and took a moment to contemplate. “What a weird little book,” I said to no one in particular, and closed the file on Miss Brodie. Later, thinking this analysis unsatisfactory and contrary to the spirit of the Modern Library Revue, I decided to have another look. As this novel does have the advantage of being a little book, I read it twice more. Today I can say confidently that it is, indeed, a weird little book. Now, though, my use of “weird” incorporates more of the word’s bewitching and macabre aspects, and fewer of its heeggh-I-don’t-get-it ones.
Brief books are dangerous for me, because I am a swift reader and not always a careful one. Big books, when they are not too patently formal experiments, seem better suited to my taste and temperament. I have something of the philistine in me and short important novels, for no really good reason, threaten artsiness and unfulfillment. They seem as though they are harder to write, and I worry their authors have more to prove. How will you make your novel memorable when it it looks so diminutive, sitting there on the shelf? They require an economy that is against my nature.
I had been meandering through A Suitable Boy, which is familiar and soothes my soul, and I had to forcibly change gears to appreciate Muriel Spark. This novel is not something huge and engrossing to help you forget the common round of day. It is over quickly, and you have to pay attention all the way through. It is a dark and lovely poem, written by the possessor of a sinister wit. It is a deep pool in an enchanted forest.
Muriel Spark wrote a very nice piece for The New Yorker in which she described her years at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls in Edinburgh, the inspiration for the Marcia Blaine School of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. What I like about the piece, and what I find remarkable in contrast with this sort of creepy novel, is the lightheartedness, warmth, and happiness with which Spark remembers this bygone epoch of young ladies’ education. This is an education which seems in small ways rather gruesome to me. Most of the young men are gone, for example, because they died in the Great War, and if they didn’t die they were maimed. The science teacher tells the girls “Poor little Tommy Jones/ We’ll see him no more,/ For what he thought was H2O/ Was H2SO4.” And there’s Mr. Gordon, the history teacher, in connection with whom Spark writes, “The innocence of our minds and the universal decency of our schoolteachers’ comportment can be gathered from the fact that he used to make me sit at the front of the class so that he could stroke my hair while teaching, without anyone thinking at all ill of him.”
And yet this time, which seems prime with the makings of a dark novel, inspired Spark’s childhood friend to write, “we had the best life.” Spark concurs: “In spite of the fact that we had no television, that in my home at least we had no electricity all during the thirties (only beautiful gaslight), that there were no antibiotics and no Pill, I incline to think that [she] is right.”
Then Ms. Kay, the inspiration for Jean Brodie herself: “In a sense, Ms. Kay was nothing like Ms. Brodie. In another sense, she was far above and beyond her Brodie counterpart.” Ms. Kay was immediately recognizable to all her former students in Spark’s novel, and remembered fondly by the same. Spark records Ms. Kay’s position on rain gear:
Why make a wet day more dreary than it is? We should wear bright coats, and carry blue umbrellas, or green…I would like to see a gray coat and skirt for the spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. ‘Citron’ means ‘lemon’; it is a yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue. One would wear a citron beret in Paris with a gray suit.
How heavenly to come under the tutelage of Ms. Kay! Reading the happiness with which Spark described her childhood, I vacillated between thinking I had perhaps read too much grotesquery into the novel, and admiring the artistry which turns a picturesque figure of memory and the interwar spunkiness of the youth into the dubious heroines of an unsettling book. Because I was unsettled by this book. What I read into it is the particular weirdness and villainy of women; both the author and her subjects have that hint of the stuff for which they used to burn ladies at the stake. The recurring sentences become incantations, some of them biblical, like an inverted cross. And how else to take the death of stupid Mary Macgregor who, we are reminded with cruel repetition, “ran hither and thither till she died”?
Poor Mary! Miss Brodie tells the girls that silence is golden and calls on Mary to repeat:
Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, ‘Golden.’
‘What did I say was golden?’
Mary cast her eyes around her and up above. Sandy whispered, ‘The falling leaves.’
‘The falling leaves,’ said Mary.
‘Plainly,’ said Miss Brodie, ‘you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me I would make of you the crème de la crème.’
The novel is cruel, and often comic in its cruelty. A man exposes himself to Jenny, one of the Brodie set, as she walks by the Water of Leith. After the initial shock and the subsequent parental hindrance of Jenny’s movements, the event “brought nothing but good. The subject fell under two headings: first, the man himself and the nature of what he had exposed to view, and secondly the policewoman” for whom the girls form an intense passion (the Brodie set in their sex talk sound very like the Mitford sisters in theirs).
Spark, who wrote in her memoir of school that she was “destined to poetry by all my mentors,” in her novel uses the tools of poetry to change the sense and meaning of prose in an unnerving way:
That spring she monopolised with her class the benches under the elm from which could be seen an endless avenue of dark pink May trees, and heard the trotting of horses in time to the turning wheels of light carts returning home empty by a hidden lane from their early morning rounds.
There is a rhythm to her writing, even apart from the periodic repetitions.
Sandy, the saboteur of the Brodie set, the betrayer of Brodie, converts to Catholicism, joins a convent and attracts a following by writing a treatise on “the nature of moral perception” called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” Spark, with her incantations and her twisty prose and her new words like “unbrainfully,” in her own way transfigures the commonplace on both the spiritual and literal planes: the sunset is “streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on every-day life.” The girls of the Brodie set compete with each other on the “windswept hockey fields which lay like the graves of the martyrs exposed to the weather in an outer suburb.” And then one pretender to the Brodie set is actually martyred–the nonentical Joyce Emily, urged by Miss Brodie the fascist to venture off in aid of unspeakable Franco.
The novel is not wholly sinister; it has something of the piquant flavor of Spark’s happy school days. I think it is a fine place novel too, with Edinburgh (which, as Sandy finds when she enters the convent, is actually a multiplicity of Edinburghs) making itself felt as the backdrop to the book’s action. The hills that surround them are the Pentland hills, the writers in the girls’ cosmos are Stevenson, Burns, Walter Scott. There is Scottish pride here.
This novel is like Sandy’s eyes–famous for being small, but photographic, and containing manifold secrets. It is a weird little book. I didn’t quite like it first, but now I reckon it among the crème de la crème.
For no reason at all, I always thought this book was about horses and cavalry officers. (This is a good example of why, when you ask me a question and I answer, you should be careful to ascertain whether I know the answer, or if it’s just a feeling I have. Especially when I am giving you directions.) So, this novel, which I never wanted to read because I thought it was about horses, piqued my interest when I saw it mentioned in conjunction with Revolutionary Road (which I’ve yet to read) and forgotten novels about men feeling sad even though they have a lot of nice items in their homes. Because, rather than horses, that’s what Appointment in Samarra is about. It is about the nameless malaise of the moneyed man of the modern era – the madness which no Cadillac can assuage. And it’s about alcoholism. Two of your popular literary themes, really.
So I read it, and it’s great. It’s like a lewd version of The Beautiful and Damned, but set in Pennsylvania, where people are slightly less fancy. The novel centers around Julian English, a cash-poor upper-cruster, who runs a Cadillac dealership. (Fitzgerald upper-crusters are too posh to even have jobs, let alone jobs in the automotive industry.) Julian drinks to excess with great frequency, and one day he throws a drink in a man’s face at the club, because the man is rich and fat and Irish Catholic and just de trop, somehow. And even though everyone in Gibbsville, PA is always doing grotesque drunken things at the club, this is for some reason the limit, and society begins to close ranks against Julian. After that, things go to complete shit very quickly. Julian, through desperation or madness or sheer orneriness, continues to behave badly, digging himself deeper with his peers and his wife, all the while drinking enough to kill an ox. At the end of the novel, his demise (figurative or literal, take your pick) is so inevitable it’s not even a spoiler. The title, taken from the epigraph, taken from Maugham, tells all.
Secondly, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this comparison, in addition to having obvious similarities with Fitzgerald (the man and the work), Appointment in Samarra is like a depression-era, mid-atlantic precursor to Under the Volcano. Not in its scope; Appointment in Samarra is a crude, meaningless sketch compared to the insanely complex (although perhaps equally meaningless) cosmologies that Malcolm Lowry wove together around Geoffrey Firmin. But the core of each novel is similar – the last day (or three) in the life of a man who is doomed. Each man (educated, posh), should be able to take himself in hand and pull himself together and stop drinking and stop perpetrating pointless cruelties on their respective wives, but they can’t, and they don’t, and you know they won’t from the first. They share the same fatal trajectory. But while Appointment in Samarra is easier and more fun to read, I thought Under the Volcano was sadder and better (so did the Modern Library, it seems); Firmin feels like a more real character, maybe because he was more of Lowry than English was of O’Hara. Or maybe because Lowry, a doomed, disastrous virtuoso, pulled himself together for one monumental achievement, while O’Hara, who sounds like a more garden-variety pain in the ass, managed to spread his talent out over a longer career. That’s just a feeling I have, though.
I've noticed that over the last few months this site has started to resemble a high school English class in regard to the books that it discusses and champions, which makes me feel like I want to delete it from my bookmarks. Actually, I think I will. I don't see the point of coming here anymore. Maybe I will check back in at the end of the year to see if your aversion to contemporary fiction, both domestic and foreign, has waned. I doubt it will, though. This site seems to be stuck in the past, dissecting corpses that have already been picked clean. Have fun.
Anonymous, I know your IP address well, and if you removing us from your bookmarks means I won't have to delete your often rude comments, that's just fine with me. Since the above comment is about as close to civil as your comments have ever been, however, I'll leave it up for posterity.
Did your book get panned or something? Geez.
Wow, I love comment drama! You tell him/her, Max! And I feel sort of annoyed, because didn't I **just** interview Joe Meno about his book The Great Perhaps which came out **this** month of **this** year? If that's not contemporary, I don't know what is. Geeze!
If I didn't comment on your site you wouldn't have hardly any comments. And you know my IP address? Ohhhhh nooooo! Are you going to send the Internet Police to come and take away my computer? You know, short of a death threat or something insidious like that, rude, agressive comments are par for the course. I've also left a lot of nice comments. If you don't want the rabble commenting on your site then you should put a velvet rope around it.
My point isn't that I could or would track you down (though I do know where you work). I have much better things to do with my time than try to track down an Anonymous internet hater. My point is that whenever we get an obnoxious comment, it traces back to you (and I know this because of your IP and the way you attempt to wield your words like blunt objects). If you disagree with what we're doing here, why don't you try participating in a constructive conversation about it. We're nothing if not receptive to our readers, whose ideas drive much of the content on the site. And furthermore, as Edan pointed out, your complaint is borderline ludicrous. Nowhere have we ever written that The Millions' mission is to cover literary fiction exclusively. In the last 24 hours alone we've run a post that's gotten over a dozen comments and we've offered a unique look at a highly anticipated work of literary fiction… Your problem is what exactly?
I for one find it refreshing that a blog devotes this kind of space (increasingly more precious in the digital medium, considering the attention span of most blog readers) to revisit minor classics. Anonymous, to readers who appreciate good writing, being "stuck in the past" is not something that invites derision. The reason we still talk about novels that were written before you were a twinkle in your daddy's eye is because they invite a renewed and earnest (key word there) dialogue. I happen to enjoy the fact that the Millions often suggests a tone that you characterize as "high school English class." It reminds me that there are others out there equally engaged in sifting through an historically vast literary landscape and constantly finding something that demands to be discussed anew.
P.S. If you had at some point attended the aforementioned high school English class, you might remember that it's "with regard" and not "in regard."
Ha! Not to mention: "…wouldn't have hardly any…" and "agressive." Perhaps Anonymous the First should crack open a literary "corpse" or two and improve his/her language skills.