The Receptionist (7 page)

While a far cry from an English county ball, I was able to return the invitation to the dance the following year. My coconspirator in the matter was Andrena (Andy) Bear, a leggy, sensational-looking blond who worked as the editor’s secretary in the Talk of the Town department, whose offices, like those of On and Off the Avenue, the fashion department, were located on the eighteenth floor. Andy was a great favorite of Charles Addams and Peter De Vries and a number of the forty or so other men whose offices were on that floor. (
Th
ere were half a dozen women—besides Muriel—sprinkled around, too.)
Th
ese men had a good eye for beauty, and they eyed Andy with evident pleasure. On good days and in the right light I had my admirers also, and we used to kid that, had we chosen to do so, we could have created quite a scandal.

A couple of things prompted our joining forces in the creation of a summer dance. First was the impromptu
New Yorker
jazz band I had helped bring about. All I’d had to do was put the right parties together. Two cartoonists, Lee Lorenz and Warren Miller, played trumpet and cornet (and Warren occasionally sang a vocal or two in tribute to his idol Fats Waller); Paul Brodeur played clarinet; Whitney Balliett, the magazine’s jazz critic, played drums; when she hosted the jam session in the solarium of her East Side town house, Daphne Hellman played the harp; and the Talk reporter Wally White sat in on piano, occasionally spelled by a
New York Times
reporter named Phil Benjamin. We always hoped
Th
e New Yorker
’s editor in chief, William Shawn, an excellent piano player himself, would come, but he never did.

So we had the band; all we needed now was the hall. As if on cue, one of the band members, Lee Lorenz, received notice that he’d soon have to vacate his loft on Spring Street.
Th
e perfect time to hold a party there, we all agreed. Andy and I were to be the hostesses, and we had great fun with the planning. We decided to invite everyone we knew at the magazine to our “bash.” Of necessity (our budgets not stretching to more elaborate arrangements), we conceived it as a strictly blue-collar affair at which we would serve hot dogs, pretzels, and mustard, with a keg and setups for the BYOB crowd. It was fixed for a summer night in June 1967, and the stage was set for a first-class Greenwich Village “scene” involving high and low alike. Sort of like the annual anniversary dance at the St. Regis, but without the business department.

Most of the editorial department and many of the cartoonists were in attendance, and the odd matchups that resulted were a source of awe and sometimes wonder. Charles Addams, whose dinner companions ran to the likes of Joan Fontaine, Drue Heinz, and Jacqueline Kennedy, turned up in a black tie and, perhaps in homage to Andy, alone. Muriel arrived with a very young and handsome blond—a gent from her agent’s office, I was given to understand. She looked beautiful in a strapless yellow chiffon dress accessorized with silver stiletto slippers and a rhinestone brooch centered on its bosom. She sported some David Webb bracelets on her slender arms, and her hair was freshly done in a reddish-blond bouffant. She made a typically generous contribution to the festivities, her escort leaving at least a jeroboam of Dom Pérignon at the paper-draped bar.
Th
e band, getting the picture, launched into “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” and things took a decided upward turn.

Th
e next big party I shared with Muriel was equally star studded, but in an international rather than an American vein. Muriel had moved to Italy in 1969 and engaged a series of English-speaking secretaries there until she found a permanent helpmeet, Penelope Jardine, in 1978. She continued to ask me for my assistance in dealing with her New York affairs and always sent checks to cover expenses and my services. In 1970, on a summer holiday, I was passing through Rome and received a note from Muriel inviting me to come to her “little supper.”

It was definitely more elegant than any little supper I could remember, taking place, as it did, in her apartment in the Palazzo Taverna, an Italian Renaissance structure that had once been the residence of Cardinal Orsini. An opera fan and a Puccini buff, I was amazed to see through a sliver of window the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo, from which at the end of act 3 Floria Tosca flings herself into the Tiber.
Th
e place was longer on walk-in stone fireplaces and octagonal coffered ceilings than on windows. It seemed that cardinals in their residences preferred privacy to public views.

Th
e guests included old
New Yorker
pals Brendan Gill and Niccolò Tucci, which was lucky because they made me feel right at home in a crowd that might otherwise have been intimidating.
Th
ere were a number of deposed European royals and a sprinkling of the Cinecittà crowd. Michelangelo Antonioni talked to me as he drank a glass of white wine. He spoke about his distaste for social gatherings of this kind, having made an exception that evening because of his esteem for “cara Muriel”—a conversation translated for us by his obliging personal assistant, an American college girl from Sarah Lawrence.

Th
e only unsettling thing about this evening was Muriel’s gown, which was perhaps not quite suited to her age and station.
Th
e skirt had three fluted orange tiers, the uppermost poking out stiffly around her middle as she greeted her guests from the top of a sweeping stone staircase. Brendan Gill kissed her hand, grinned, and said, “You look like an ice cream cone,” only saving her smile by adding, “good enough to eat.” True, the salesperson should burn in hell for selling her that orange organza, but Muriel looked so pleased to be wearing it that all the would-be cats present at the gathering lost the will to triumph over her.

When Muriel made the arrangements to send me to the ball in Sussex, I felt like Cinderella. But as I think back on her delight in nice dresses and her frankness about the hardship she had undergone, it occurs to me that perhaps it was not I but she who was Cinderella. It just takes longer to get to the ball when you have to be your own fairy godmother. (For a period of six years during and just after the war, she had been too poor to buy any clothes at all.) To the extent that Muriel had a fairy godmother, he came in the form of Graham Greene. An admirer of her writing, Greene sent her twenty pounds a month in the period after her job at the
Poetry Review
fell through, but that was only to make ends meet.

Apart from
Th
e Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and other writing she sold to
Th
e
New Yorker,
I didn’t read Muriel’s work until I ceased being her secretary. It seems to me now that I avoided doing so out of a superstitious fear that I would learn something from it that would interfere with my perception of her as a benevolent employer. I was always coming across reviews that referred to her work as “biting,” “darkly witty,” and, some thought, “lacking in charity.” But to me she was generous and sweet. Later I could see what they meant—in
Robinson,
Memento Mori,
and most of her numerous other novels, poems, and short stories. It was not until I was asked by
Commonweal
to review her 1983 novel,
Loitering with Intent,
that I began to get a handle on what Muriel Spark the writer was all about.

In the review, I draw the analogy Muriel frequently drew herself, between artistry and criminality, noting that both the artist and the criminal like to take us by surprise.
Th
e novel is Muriel’s nearest approach to a vade mecum for the study of her works. Her main character, a budding novelist named Fleur, evolves an artistic credo that fits neatly with her own. Fleur has a job editing the papers of some old society snobs and is accused of plundering these private papers (read private lives) for use in her own work. Fleur is not ready to call herself innocent of this charge: “I was aware of a
daemon
inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more.”

Beneath its entertainments of plot and character, there is, as always in Muriel Spark novels, a spiritual discussion going on. Here, it is neatly entwined with the widely differing attitudes toward life of two famous autobiographers, Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini. Both are believers: one is a man of the cloth and an apologist for religion, the other an artist and craftsman. Fleur finds Newman’s reduction of the drama of faith to “two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings”—himself and his Creator—in
Apologia pro vita sua
quite “neurotic.” To Fleur a defrocked priest is also “a self-evident and luminous being.” And, she goes on, “So are you, so is my lousy landlord and the same goes for everyone I know. You can’t live with an I-and-thou relationship to God and doubt the reality of the rest of life.”

Cellini, the robust Renaissance craftsman, on the other hand, has inspired Fleur’s own writing, and it is particularly his trust in the material world that so delights her.

Th
is is not to say the novel gives all the points to Cellini. Spark ultimately grants Newman the power to lead her heroine to the Catholic faith and to the disposition of her immortal soul. But it is in Cellini’s all-consuming focus on the making of art that Fleur/Muriel announces her own aesthetic. No overt proselytizing will intrude, and all other claims will fall before it. (In this light it becomes possible to understand Muriel’s imperviousness to her son’s hopes that she might evince a maternal pride in his own art, his painting: “I don’t think he’s any good and nothing will make me say so,” she informed an interviewer.) Freud fares scarcely better: “I don’t hold with psychology,” she once told me. Her no-nonsense approach to what in others might have been the murky stuff of psychological novels is especially apparent in
Th
e Driver’s Seat,
a novella in which the heroine seeks out her own murderer in Rome. Upon reading it I joined the army of those who regard her works as so many small, perfect, polished gems.

Th
e best chance I had to observe Muriel outside the office or a formal gathering came about in 1989 when, in consequence of a sabbatical I spent in Italy, I was her guest for the Christmas holiday. On that occasion there did gleam forth a sighting or two of the lady’s darker side. I was house-sitting in Cortona, some distance from where Muriel was staying with Penelope Jardine, her companion for the previous ten years. Nonetheless, Muriel invited me for Christmas dinner, and I made the following journal entry, on December 26, 1989, the day after I returned:

I arrived at the station in Arezzo at 5:45 p.m. Penelope was to pick me up at six.

Waiting outside the station, I shivered a bit; I was wearing only a light raincoat and the station thermometer showed six degrees Celsius. But Penelope was prompt, driving up to the curb at 6:03 in a dusty, almost new Alfa Romeo, which I later discovered belongs to Muriel but which she doesn’t drive.

Penelope, a woman of about fifty-five with a mild, pleasant face, no makeup, and short, light brown hair, shrugged off the half-hour drive involved in fetching me and the still longer drive involved in taking me back to Cortona at the end of the evening. “I expect we’ll be fairly merry by then,” she said. “We’ll scarcely notice.”

I asked how Penelope, a Scot, a sculptor and painter, had come to purchase the thirteenth-century church she and Muriel were renovating. She said that years before, when she was living in Rome, she had been told that the Catholic Church was selling many of its smaller holdings in Italy; a friend took her to the local bishop, who helped her to accomplish the purchase.

We now arrived at the walled town of Oliveto, above which the house is situated. She paused to show me a small chapel at a crossroads.

“
Th
at chapel consecrates the spot where the last plague victim died—about the period of
I promessi sposi,
” she said, turning up the steep hill of their drive. “So Muriel and I like to say we live above the plague line.”

Muriel, looking nice in a black chiffon skirt with a touch of what may have been feathers or fur at the hem and a beaded black mohair sweater, greeted me with a hug. Both she and Penelope seemed pleased over my present to them of Moët & Chandon. We discussed whether to have champagne immediately or wait for the other guests, deciding to wait a bit (it was just quarter of seven). Muriel said that they had been glued to the television following the swiftly unfolding events in Romania and that if I didn’t mind they would like to watch the news at seven o’clock. I said I’d like to and asked what the latest information was. Both mentioned in shocked tones the mounting death toll being attributed to troops still faithful to the repressive Ceausescu, who’d been executed that afternoon. Muriel at one point broke out bitterly, “Seventy thousand dead and there the survivors sit, without so much as an aspirin.”

We then ascended to Muriel’s bedroom and watched a half hour of almost unrelieved bad news. Violence in the Romanian city of Timisoara. Muriel was worried about a young friend who lives there—a translator of her books—who had just had a baby. Violence in Jerusalem. Candlelit masses in the streets of Prague and Bucharest. In a brief nod to the good news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a snippet of Leonard Bernstein conducting a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the Brandenburg Gate.
Th
en, back to the grim, with a captured kidnapper telecasting an appeal to his Italian cohorts to give themselves up and restore their victim to his family unharmed.

Afterward we came down to Penelope’s bedroom/sitting room and attempted to get into a more festive frame of mind.
Th
e room was cheerful, featuring chintz and pillows and Christmas decorations. I commented on two oil portraits, asking if they were done by Penelope. I was told the one of Muriel, in profile, was. “It belongs to Penny,” said Muriel.
Th
en she added, “She hasn’t given it to me.” She said that the other, showing a young and dashing Penelope, had been done by a friend in Rome.