The Receptionist (6 page)

R
EMEMBERING
M
URIEL

I
MET MURIEL SPARK FOR
the first time in 1961, when she was assigned an office on “my floor.” At the time she was seeing
Th
e Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
into press. Although four or five earlier works of fiction had brought her some recognition in Britain, it was her novel of the sinister Scottish schoolteacher that was to earn her international fame. It also broke a precedent at the magazine as the first time a piece of fiction was to make up so much of the editorial content of an issue. In 1964, Mrs. Spark (as I called her then) asked me to “moonlight” as her private secretary. She told me she was being inundated with mail from fans and from the young men she termed her “priestlings”: the numerous Catholic theology students who wrote to her—she was a famous convert—wanting her to attend their ordinations. I was to handle her personal correspondence, keeping the priestlings, and the world in general, at bay in order to let her get on with her work. As she wrote in her autobiography, “ ‘Fame’s dizzy heights’ are more often than not a great pain in the neck.”

I saw her for the last time in Arezzo, when we had lunch in the stately old dining room of the Hotel Minerva in June 2004. By then we had become something more than employer and employee but something less than intimate friends. My dealings with her, even when I worked for her, had more to do with something we liked about each other than with her as a famous writer. For years she sent me copies of her books and I sent her my far fewer academic publications. We wrote every Christmas, and we were always glad to see each other. In the shadow of her death in April 2006, I am conscious, as I never was while she lived, that our connection was a remarkable if slender thing.

Muriel Spark was a tiny woman, and in the early days of our acquaintance, she possessed a headful of red-blond ringlets, a fluting voice, and the features of a porcelain shepherdess. To the English ear her voice always retained a Scots accent, but to me it seemed that of a well-educated English person.
Th
ere was, in any case, a good deal of music in it. She loved nice clothes, and even when she was working hard on the nitty-gritty editorial chores of getting galleys prepared for the printer, she would wear clingy print dresses of Liberty silk and lovely, shapely Italian shoes with small heels. She appreciated good jewelry and had sizable bills with David Webb to prove it. I expect that she learned a good deal about the subject when she spent several years in the 1940s working at
Argentor,
the publication of the National Jewellers’ Association in Britain. Her petite figure was the result of a dramatic change that she brought to bear upon her own life in her late twenties. She had been, in a description the
New Yorker
contributor and collector of literary scuttlebutt Brendan Gill delighted in telling around the office, “positively obese” and the very picture of a drab bookworm when she came to postwar London to seek her way (having shed a husband in South Africa).
Th
en, in Brendan’s telling, she began to work for a famous poet. (“Was it T. S. Eliot? Was it one of the Sitwells?” Actually, it was the
Poetry Review,
a venue for the work of not one poet but many.) “And before you knew it,” Brendan would recount enthusiastically, “she had taken over the poet, taken over his office, brought her weight down by three stone, turned herself from an ugly duckling into a swan, and published a literary masterpiece to boot!”
Th
e masterpiece was her novel
Memento Mori.

Muriel did not move into the eighteenth floor in a formal way until 1964, the year I began working for her. Her earlier stint had found her using only a borrowed cubicle. She was assigned one of the most desirable locations on eighteen, a corner office formerly belonging to A. J. Liebling, who had died on December 28, 1963. She immediately organized a paint job (a French blue was soon in place on the walls), and she added an oriental rug, a sofa cover, throw pillows, an armchair, and a well-framed oil over the couch.
Th
is unaccustomed attention to personal comfort and even luxury of surroundings set off a minor revolution. Requests flowed into the office manager from irate writers who demanded something other than the regulation gray walls with dirty Venetian blinds at the windows and straight wooden chairs and linoleum floors and metal filing cabinets that had constituted the norm for as long as the eighteenth floor had been in existence.
Th
ey were given the OK to do it “as Mrs. Spark did it”—that is, to do it themselves.
Th
is area was the
New Yorker
domain for writers and a very few cartoonists, with me, the facilitator, in a sort of wide spot in the hall by the back stairs. A year or so earlier, some attempt had been made to create a “conversation pit” beneath the stairwell connecting us to the editorial floor above. It was not a success. Liebling, eyeing the dusty, rust-colored love seat and two matching chairs, said it reminded him of a third-class lounge on a second-class ship.

Mrs. Spark was careful not to request my services until after office hours or during lunchtime. Over the next year and a half I disappointed many seekers of favors, refusing many invitations of one kind or another in her name and in the cause of preserving her time for her writing. One correspondence she dealt with herself consisted of the light blue aerograms from her son Robin. “Set that aside,” she’d say when she saw one of those. “He’s asking for money again.”
Th
is struck me as cold, but then I was just at that moment learning of Robin’s existence. I had had no idea she had a son. Years later her autobiography would tell the story of how difficult it was for Muriel to get passage out of Africa in 1944, during the still lethal days of World War II. She records having left Robin in the care of Dominican nuns. She would also write of how she later brought him to Edinburgh and left him there with her parents, seeing him only intermittently then and after she was able to swing a place for him in a good English boarding school. Perhaps because he reminded her of the disastrous marriage that took her to Africa in the first place, Robin never evoked a maternal response in Muriel, yet she always found a way to see to his care.
Th
e astonishing transformation she had brought about in her own circumstances must have been equally difficult to pull off. Small wonder it was not accomplished without a breakdown.

Sometime in the early 1950s, as I understand it, when she was hounded out of her editorial job at the
Poetry Review,
she had a nervous collapse and lived for a time in a cloistered situation run by the Catholic Church. It was out of that experience that a new Muriel Spark emerged, a Catholic convert who would remain in the church for the rest of her life. She also became, during that incarceration, an artist who wrote the first of her many novels,
Th
e Comforters,
about a young woman who has a mental breakdown that grants her mystical visions.

Opening her mail, as well as answering it, gained me insight into Muriel’s tastes and how she spent her time. In spite of all the refused invitations, she saw a great many people in a social way, often escorted by one of three or four personable young men she came across in her publisher’s office or in that of her agent Ivan von Auw. She saw Brendan Gill, the
New Yorker
poetry editor Howard Moss, and Ved Mehta, the Indian author and autobiographer, who was then writing on the Oxford philosophers. She saw other writers like Anne Fremantle and Shirley Hazzard and Shirley Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert translator. Her apartment in the Beaux Arts Hotel—a spacious one-bedroom done up in shades of ivory and baby blue with Louis Quinze furniture—placed her in the immediate environs of the Secretariat Building, though I don’t believe she socialized much with the visiting dignitaries.
Th
e UN setting took a sly hit in the title of her 1973 novel,
Th
e Hothouse by the East River,
which was, however, only marginally set in New York and was, among other things, a fictionalization of her postwar intelligence work for MI6.

All these high-profile social contacts notwithstanding, it was my impression that Muriel was quite lonely and isolated in her New York years; she sometimes asked me, when I was dropping off typing or picking up new assignments, to stay for a cocktail before I went home. And when, by some fluke, she found herself unoccupied for
Th
anksgiving in 1965, she wound up having that holiday with my brother and me and some other friends of mine at Keens Chop House. She insisted on picking up the tab and took everybody home in her chauffeured limousine.
Th
at I remember no single witty thing she said on that occasion—or indeed much of anything else about it—I suspect has more to do with the excellent dry martinis at Keens than with the absence of any memorable talk. When Muriel was around, the talk was always memorable. She was, for example, very funny about the priestlings and the “sweet certainty” they evinced that her convert’s zeal would inspire in her the desire to drop the novel she was composing and travel to the far reaches of West Virginia to see them being ordained.

Summer was my vacation time (eight weeks, four of them with pay), and someone from the typing pool was tapped to fill in for me with Muriel. In 1966, when I mentioned that my summer plans included six weeks of study at Oxford, she was enthusiastic. She told me that she would have liked to go to university herself, if she’d had the chance, but that the family coffers in Edinburgh would stretch only so far as a business course, which had led her to a clerkship in a local department store.

One day in early June, I showed her a notice she’d received in the mail for something called the Sussex Lifeboat Ball. I remarked on the posh nature of this event and asked her if she had a special fondness for lifeboats. She laughed and corrected me; it was not the boats she was fond of but a racehorse named Lifeboat, of which she was a one-eighth owner. She cocked her head and looked at me: “Aren’t you going to be at Oxford during July?
Th
at is not so very far from Petworth House.” A glint in her eye, she asked, “Would you like to go?” I said I’d be enchanted, whereupon she dictated the following letter:

Captain the Hon. V. M. Wyndham-Quin, R.N.

Lifeboat House

42 Grosvenor Gardens

London, S.W. 1

England

Dear Captain Wyndham-Quin,

Th
ank you so much for your letter and notices of the Sussex Lifeboat Ball, which I so much regret having to miss. I shall be working in New York all summer . . .

However, a young American friend of mine, Miss Janet Groth, is studying at Oxford and would, I know, love to attend the ball. She’s a charming girl and I know she’ll enjoy it. If you will send me a ticket for two, I will see that she gets it in good time. I shall let you know if I find any other friends who would like to have tickets. Meantime, I enclose a check which includes a small donation to the Lifeboat Institution.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Muriel Spark

A couple of weeks later I brought her Captain Wyndham-Quin’s handwritten reply, noting his thanks for her donation to the Lifeboat Institution and his concluding paragraph, which announced that he would “look forward to seeing Janet Groth and one of her friends” at the ball. With the cheek that only the clueless possess, I told her I needed two more tickets so that not only an escort with a motor car but my good friends from London, Peter and Winifred Wroe, could attend.

Th
e Wroes were part of a transplanted merry band of Yorkshiremen I met on the boat train from Paris to Calais on my first trip to Europe in 1959. We had bonded while making up rude lyrics to “Blue Moon” and staving off seasickness in the saloon of the Channel steamer. By the time we pulled into Victoria near midnight, we were fast friends.
Th
ey took me home to stay on their couch, and I had been staying on their couch on every return visit to London since. I couldn’t imagine going to a county ball without them. When I posed this condition to Muriel, she smiled and said, “I think that might be arranged.” We shot off another letter to Captain Wyndham-Quin and received his response in the next mail. Tickets for Miss Groth and three of her friends were enclosed.

I went to Ohrbach’s, a now defunct discount store on
Th
irty-Fourth Street, and found the ball gown of my dreams; it had a white top and a teal-and-white floral skirt with a pink bow at the waist. I drew a picture of it for Muriel.

My charter flight to England, enrollment at Oxford University, and settling into borrowed lodgings in a Mr.
Th
rockmorton’s rooms in Exeter College all went off without a hitch.
Th
e day before I was to leave for London, I received an amusing letter from Winifred Wroe about her trials in coming up with a pumpkin and a Prince Charming. In the end she’d borrowed John Lansdale, with permission from his best girl, Agnes. John would, she wrote, “speed back from Cornwall to escort and transport.” In addition to his possessing an Austin automobile and a tuxedo, Winifred claimed he was “excellent at whispering behind potted palms.” And although she admitted to one hitch—
“
he cannot dance”—she assured me that he would be “delighted to hold you whilst you dance.”

I later shared this flavor-of-the-occasion letter with Muriel, showed her the accompanying photos, and reported on our drive at high speed from Camden Town to Petworth House. I told her, too, of our late arrival—we just missed being presented to Princess Marina, which was all to the good, since my curtsy was thought by Winifred to “need work.” I spoke of Winifred’s and my inspection of the ladies’ powder room, where a discreet placard told us that this chamber and bath were occupied by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin when he came to stay for the weekend.
Th
en it was on to Buck’s fizzes in the great hall and a tour of the house, admiring the Adam fireplaces as we went. John, while not
my
Prince Charming, was indeed charming, and with his high brow and wispy blond beard, he reminded me of a prince—Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevky’s novel. After our tour of the premises, we paid a brief visit to the nightclub, where John held me in a rather dance-like position as I took a few twirls under the neon lighting specially installed for the occasion. At around 1:00 a.m. all the guests were invited to the gallery—a sort of indoor terrace with white furniture and, yes, potted palms—for a champagne supper of caviar and cucumber sandwiches. By two thirty we joined the last of the string of cars drawn up to the porte cochere and rolled down a graveled drive to wend our way back to London on the county roads of Sussex. Muriel said that by all indications and as county balls went, I’d had a good one.