Muriel Spark on personal morality after social crisis
Muriel Spark on personal morality after social crisis
Editor’s note: Madeleine Kearns writes a weekly column noting peculiar aspects of cultural, artistic, and natural marvels.
‘W rite about what you know” is advice sometimes given to writers. Muriel Spark, who knew about being a young woman, and about post-war Britain, heeded that instruction at age 45 when she wrote The Girls of Slender Means. Her short novel tells the story of some young women living in an Edwardian manor turned residency for under 30s, “the May of Teck Club,” in old Kensington, just after the Second World War. “Few people alive at the time,” Spark writes, “were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means.”
No sooner had I told my friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger that I believed this novel deserving of more attention (it was published in 1963, just after Spark’s most enduring novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) than he wrote to inform me that — well, what-do-you-know? — George Will had just referenced it in his Washington Post column. Will had focused on one scene in particular. The girls, gathering outside Buckingham Palace “to express themselves along with the rest of London on the victory in the war with Germany,” “clung to each other” and then, the next day, “began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things.” Will argued that this reckoning would be applicable to the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. “After wartime’s necessary collective exertions,” he wrote, “a solidarity that had been obligatory during danger was undesirable as normality.”
A closer reading would suggest that Spark’s point was more spiritual than political.
The plot of The Girls of Slender Means begins with news that Nicholas Farringdon, a Catholic missionary, has been martyred in Haiti. Farringdon had been an anarchist, well known to the girls at the club where he slept with one of its members, the beautiful Selina Redwood, on the roof. There are multiple flashbacks to this time, culminating in tragedy: An unexploded bomb goes off, setting the house on fire, and claiming the lives of a dozen girls. Among the dead is Joanna Childe, the daughter of a pastor, and a committed elocutionist, whose “religious strength” Farringdon was struck by. Intriguingly, Joanna’s witness does not stir his heart as much as Selina’s cruelty.
“Slender” has two meanings. The girls have neither extra money in their purses nor fat on their bones. Rationing is still in place, so too is vanity. Even the slenderest girls count their calories and declare bread-and-butter pudding to be “suicide.” The “very tall and slender” Selina Redwood eats only a “little bit of everything” and feels “starved all the time.” The girls have similar attitudes toward sex. Some of them are “prim and pretty young virgins who would never become fully-awakened women.” There are also “bossy ones in their late twenties who were too wide-awake ever to surrender to any man.” Again, Selina proves an exception, she sleeps “happily” with men so long as they do not wish “to possess her entirely.” She and Nicholas Farringdon conduct their affair on the roof, which he is able to access from the hotel next door.
In her colorful portrait, Spark endows even the most minor characters with charm. Dorothy, who could emit “a waterfall of debutante character,” uses words like “filthington” and “soapyjo,” maintaining these affectations during a personal crisis: “It was some months before she was to put her head round Jane’s door and announce, ‘Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.’” Jane, meanwhile, who works for a sketchy publisher and prides herself on doing “brain work,” sends duplicitous letters to famous writers in order to auction off their replies. George Bernard Shaw sends her a “disappointing,” typewritten reply:
Thank you for your letter in praise of my writings. As you say they have consoled you in your misfortunes I shall not attempt to gild the lily by my personal comments. As you say you desire no money I shall not press upon you my holograph signature which has some cash value. G.B.S.
Though she is often funny, Spark proceeds with moral seriousness, building up to the moment of tragedy, when the girls make their escape through the hatchet of the burning building. Some were used to sneaking out on the roof, stripping off entirely, slathering themselves in their soap and margarine rations for extra lubrication. But others, like pregnant Dorothy and podgy Joanna, one of the few characters of indisputable goodness, are incapable of fitting through the window. They are trapped. As slender Selina, who can fit in and out of the window with relative ease, returns into the burning building, storming past the doomed, in order to steal one of the girls’ Schiaparelli, a “marvelous dress, which caused a stir wherever it went,” a horrified Nicholas makes the sign of the cross. Later, it is explained that this was the precise moment of his conversion. He wrote on a manuscript that “a vision of evil may be as effective to conversion as a vision of good.”
Life in Britain did not just “go back to normal” after the war. Society was in tatters. The novel opens with strong reminders of this, images of “stony rubble” and “bomb-ripped buildings.” But Spark, who is allergic to sentimentality (she was Scottish, after all), writes that “there was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene. It would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody’s scope.” Hers is a rare get-on-with-it wit. Especially in a depressed society — one recovering from some collective crisis, like a war (or perhaps a pandemic) — those of “slender means,” to some extent everyone, must make a personal, moral choice about the kind of person they are to be.