What teenagers can teach us about love
Here they come: a cross-section of the young in trackies and crop tops or sarcastic slogan tees, fresh-faced with scattered freckles and acne, or made up with thick eyeliner and dark, moth-like fake lashes. Depressed, hyperactive, in love, against it, serious and often very silly, here are all the forms of girl (and those questioning whether they want to be known by that term at all) I remember from my own early teens, now sloping into a large barn at the base of a valley in Devon, to answer my questions about love.
For the last four summers I have taught on this residential creative writing week at an Arvon writing house with a cohort of Year 7s, 8s and 9s from a nearby state school. The activity weeks are their end-of-term treat. 'The cool kids do surf camp and the weird ones come here,' they tell me, which you can translate to mean we get the best of the bunch: the diary-keepers and the poets, those governed by electrical storms and pyrotechnic shows of feeling. The crème de la crème, as Jean Brodie would have put it.
When I'm teaching I often think of Muriel Spark's extraordinary novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about an unconventional Edinburgh teacher and the set of girls she attempts to model from childhood to adolescence. Spark describes what each member of the 'Brodie set' will become 'famous for' at secondary school, be it sex or mathematics. The kids I meet in Devon have an equally fine-tuned understanding of social dynamics – where they sit in the pecking order and what they are 'famous' for. It's staggering how much more open they are about sexuality than previous generations. The cooler you are, the less you experience homophobia around coming out, they say, explaining that, 'In rural areas, people just aren't exposed to that much diversity.'
I especially wanted to hear their thoughts on romantic love, as there is all this pre-run wisdom and oracular capacity in young people, as if those experiences already lie dormant within them. (This is how it feels in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, too; Spark defies chronology to leap ahead and describe what will become of the Brodie set in adulthood, as if such events are encoded into their DNA.) So for an hour, I sat with 12 of them on sofas in the barn while they described all they know and anticipate about the matters of love.
What is love?
– Love is like a fish.
A fish?!
– As there are all kinds of fish, from goldfish to sharks, there's also all kinds of love.
– It's like friendship, but you can be more vulnerable with a person you love.
– And there's some things you can't do with your friends! [All cackle.]– But your love shouldn't all be for one person. That's not how it's meant to work.
Why do we want to fall in love? And does it change us?
– I want someone to love so I don't feel lonely. It makes you happier. Even having a crush makes me feel happier for a bit.
– I mean, I'm a teenager, so I probably haven't got everything figured out yet, but I'm asexual and I think people falling in love is silly because you can't trust love.
– Like in Romeo and Juliet. We're reading it at school and they fall in love immediately and get married the next day! Then they die.
– Exactly: silly.
Are teenagers or adults better at loving relationships?
– Both are equally bad at it. Adults can't express their feelings and teenagers are awkward.
– I think adults have more issues to work around in love. People have this perception about love being perfect, but you forget everyone has issues.
– Some adults shouldn't even be adults.
– Yes, some of them can't even do their taxes.
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Are your parents your role models for love?
– Definitely not!
– Some married people might not be in love any more, and that's fine, but it affects the children.
– Having divorced parents makes you more aware that love might not always be there. But you can still be friends and not bitter, like my parents.
– Ooh a butterfly! [Everyone is momentarily distracted by a butterfly that flies in, then disappears up into the rafters.]– My parents aren't together and they don't get on. People always give that stereotype: 'You're going to end up like your dad.' But I'm really not. He says, 'What I've done is all for love,' and I've learned not to trust that.
How do you do love well?
– Don't try to solve all their problems.
– Communicate.
– Don't confuse love with wanting to be them. Sometimes I see a girl with cool eyeliner, and I think I love her, but actually maybe I just want her eyeliner.
– I'm autistic so maybe this is specific to me, but if you feel you can mask less with someone, then you should be with them.
Can love change the world?
– Yes, if all the world leaders became gay and kissed. If they actually loved each other, then there wouldn't be war or homophobia.
– But everyone already has love and they're still bad to other people and actually they often don't know how to love themselves.
– When the power of love overtakes the love of power, the world will be at peace. [Communal 'Woaaaah!']– I can't take credit. It's Jimi Hendrix.
[See also: Samuel Pepys's diary of a somebody]
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3 days ago
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Few people have immersed themselves in the lives of great writers as thoroughly as Edinburgh-born academic Dan Gunn. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... First, there were the 25 years spent putting together the four-volume selection of Samuel Beckett's letters. He finished that in 2016, but two years later started work on the letters of Muriel Spark. The first of two volumes is published later this month, and for Spark aficionados, it's pure gold. The letters don't have all the answers. 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At least that's what I thought as I followed her epistolary trail, noting how she switched from asking advice from Alan Maclean, the first editor of her books, to lambasting his failure to promote them properly. I've never read such sustained, imperious, angry eloquence. But perhaps, hints Gunn, it wasn't quite so simple. 'I was talking the other day with Alan Jenkins [a poet who had also known Spark] and I said that in this volume of her letters (1944-63) she's not that confident: she has doubts about her writing and her potential. And he said no, she never doubted her own genius. 'I think he's right, but I'm also right. I think she has an instinctive belief in her own utterly special way of looking at the world. How she translates that vision into writing is something else. 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Here she is, in typically blistering form, on 13 November 1961, just after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, telling Macmillan's why she wants to change some relatively minor detail of her contract: 'I know of no other writer on your list but myself," she writes, "who has had the opportunity to build an intelligent career in the world, or to get married, and who has consciously or deliberately set these safeties aside and endured poverty, and taken the risk of failure, in order to write well. 'It is not a spare-time hobby I am engaged in, but something for which I have had to sacrifice pleasures, and continually have to give up pleasures to do, and no matter how successful I become, I shall always have to make these sacrifices. It is not the kind of work that comes from a compromised life.' The letter, I should point out, continues in this rather magnificent vein for a full eight pages of Gunn's book. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The contrast with Beckett is enormous, Gunn says. 'He thought success was just a terrible mistake, that somehow they'd got it wrong. Once somebody published him, he didn't even consider moving. But Muriel believed in her success, and when it comes to publishers she does tend to think there are greener pastures somewhere else. She had great business acumen. I've transcribed hundreds if not thousands of her business letters, and though I didn't include many of them, cumulatively they're surprising - particularly as she doesn't write bestsellers, pot boilers, genre fiction. Her novels are too strange, too singular, and she never repeats herself. She writes the book she needs to write, and then says to her agents and publishers, 'You have one job and one job only - to make me money.'' Muriel Spark in 1983 | Getty Images This isn't as arrogant as it sounds, he says. 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Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Gunn is fully conscious of the fact that, as an editor of letters, he comes right at the end of a centuries-old tradition, one that vanished almost overnight with the arrival of email. 'There's a nostalgic element to representing a world we now don't know - where you had time to work out what you thought, sit down and write a letter. Certainly, Muriel put a lot of herself into those letters. But without letters, how are you ever going to reconstitute people's lives when they are dead?'
Scotsman
3 days ago
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Dan Gunn on reconstructing the life of Muriel Sparks through letters
Few people have immersed themselves in the lives of great writers as thoroughly as Edinburgh-born academic Dan Gunn. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... First, there were the 25 years spent putting together the four-volume selection of Samuel Beckett's letters. He finished that in 2016, but two years later started work on the letters of Muriel Spark. The first of two volumes is published later this month, and for Spark aficionados, it's pure gold. The letters don't have all the answers. There aren't any surviving ones from before 1944, so there isn't anything about her Edinburgh childhood, adolescence, marriage, emigration to Southern Rhodesia (now ZImbabwe), motherhood, or the collapse there of her marriage to her manic depressive, violent husband or her wartime intelligence work. There isn't even too much about her 1954 mental breakdown and subsequent conversion to Catholicism or the six weeks in which she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yet if you want to follow her through the 1950s, watch her hitting her stride as a writer in the most transformative decade of her life, when she moves from being an unknown poet to a literary superstar on both sides of the Atlantic, the letters are enormously important. Read them, and you can almost see the self-confidence grow within her. At least that's what I thought as I followed her epistolary trail, noting how she switched from asking advice from Alan Maclean, the first editor of her books, to lambasting his failure to promote them properly. I've never read such sustained, imperious, angry eloquence. But perhaps, hints Gunn, it wasn't quite so simple. 'I was talking the other day with Alan Jenkins [a poet who had also known Spark] and I said that in this volume of her letters (1944-63) she's not that confident: she has doubts about her writing and her potential. And he said no, she never doubted her own genius. 'I think he's right, but I'm also right. I think she has an instinctive belief in her own utterly special way of looking at the world. How she translates that vision into writing is something else. When she's 14 and she wins an [Edinburgh-wide] poetry prize she already knows that's her path but it's only when she really gets going with prose and maybe only after two or three novels that she really gets a sense of 'Wow, this is it! I'm on the path and it's recursive: it comes back.'' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Other writers might kowtow to their publishers, conscious of the debt they owe them in getting their work into print, especially when – as with Spark - they changed their own rules just to do so. She was never like that. Here she is, in typically blistering form, on 13 November 1961, just after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, telling Macmillan's why she wants to change some relatively minor detail of her contract: 'I know of no other writer on your list but myself," she writes, "who has had the opportunity to build an intelligent career in the world, or to get married, and who has consciously or deliberately set these safeties aside and endured poverty, and taken the risk of failure, in order to write well. 'It is not a spare-time hobby I am engaged in, but something for which I have had to sacrifice pleasures, and continually have to give up pleasures to do, and no matter how successful I become, I shall always have to make these sacrifices. It is not the kind of work that comes from a compromised life.' The letter, I should point out, continues in this rather magnificent vein for a full eight pages of Gunn's book. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The contrast with Beckett is enormous, Gunn says. 'He thought success was just a terrible mistake, that somehow they'd got it wrong. Once somebody published him, he didn't even consider moving. But Muriel believed in her success, and when it comes to publishers she does tend to think there are greener pastures somewhere else. She had great business acumen. I've transcribed hundreds if not thousands of her business letters, and though I didn't include many of them, cumulatively they're surprising - particularly as she doesn't write bestsellers, pot boilers, genre fiction. Her novels are too strange, too singular, and she never repeats herself. She writes the book she needs to write, and then says to her agents and publishers, 'You have one job and one job only - to make me money.'' Muriel Spark in 1983 | Getty Images This isn't as arrogant as it sounds, he says. ' I try to understand it in the context of her being a woman who had to support her family in a world of pretty creepy men, a lot of whom are trying to have at her in one way or another.' (Even, says her most recent biographer, Frances Wilson, to the extent of attempted rape.) Gunn met Spark 20 years ago when she was awarded an honorary degree by the American University of Paris, where he is a distinguished professor. 'She had a magical quality. Even though she could hardly see and was in considerable pain, she could completely command a room. She was so witty and clever, and the extent of her self-education was a revelation.' As was her charm. 'That was probably the hardest thing to communicate through her letters - unless I gave all the other side of the correspondence, which isn't really my job. But people loved her, absolutely loved her, which is why those publishers and agents put up with her being so extremely demanding.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Gunn is fully conscious of the fact that, as an editor of letters, he comes right at the end of a centuries-old tradition, one that vanished almost overnight with the arrival of email. 'There's a nostalgic element to representing a world we now don't know - where you had time to work out what you thought, sit down and write a letter. Certainly, Muriel put a lot of herself into those letters. But without letters, how are you ever going to reconstitute people's lives when they are dead?'
The Herald Scotland
11-08-2025
- The Herald Scotland
I felt like a voyeur reading this great Scottish writer's love letters
In his introduction Gunn, who edited Samuel Beckett's letters and teaches at the University of America in Paris, gives a precis of what she experienced in the years 1944-63: 'Spark went through impoverishment, betrayal, discrimination, assault, hunger, paranoid delusions, romantic disappointment, harassment from an erratic ex-husband, the death of a beloved father; nevertheless, she produced seven novels, an array of poems, essays, biographies, and critical introductions, as well as 1,500 letters – doubtless more, given some have been lost. Circumstances were stacked against her; nevertheless, she transformed herself from a little-known poet into a hugely successful and critically acclaimed novelist…' Nevertheless was one of Spark's favourite words, to be pronounced in the Morningside manner of her childhood: 'niverthelace'. It is baffling that, although she was an inveterate letter writer, no correspondence survives before 1944. Gunn speculates on the reasons, but no-one knows what happened to them. 'That more Spark letters do exist is certain,' he writes optimistically, in the hope, perhaps, of people scouring their attics. What remains, however, is abundant, illuminating Spark as no biographer could hope to. Anyone contemplating becoming a writer will learn a great deal from this judicious selection about how to protect their interests and reputation. As these letters vividly reveal, there were countless facets to Spark that made her such a dazzling, redoubtable individual: generosity, intellectual curiosity, a work ethic so punishing she frequently became ill, a desire for romantic love that would not impinge on her writing, and a tiger-like ability to defend her professional interests. Read more Unarguably the greatest Scottish writer of the 20th century, Spark was born to Barney and Sarah Camberg in Bruntsfield, Edinburgh, in February 1918. While her origins were ordinary, it soon became clear that she was not; her exceptional literary abilities were recognised while she was a young schoolgirl. In 1937, aged 18, she sailed to Southern Rhodesia to marry the teacher Sidney Oswald Spark. A year later she gave birth to their son Samuel, who renamed himself Robin. Shortly after, Sydney's mental instability became alarmingly evident, and Spark left him. In the years that followed, she fought for custody of Robin, sailed to war-time London, and eventually settled her son in Edinburgh, where he was raised by her parents with her financial support. The letters in which she writes about Robin confirm she did not, as myth has it, abandon him; he was often in her thoughts. Her tone whenever talking about him is warm, if a little detached 'I suppose he is at the collecting stage', she tells her lover, the writer Derek Stanford, in 1950, when itemising Robin's collections of beetles, butterflies and penknives. In letters to Robin, her fondness is palpable as, too, is the emotional distance between them. Observing Spark in the process of becoming a writer is revelatory. From her late twenties she was utterly focussed on her vocation as a poet, while exhausted by the need to make money; eventually the strain led to a breakdown. A letter requesting financial help from the Royal Literary Fund in 1950 reveals how close she came to penury. Once she turned to fiction, with The Comforters (1957), her financial fortunes began to improve. Writing to Stanford and other friends, Spark's personality shines: intense, sometimes tortured yet often playful and mordantly funny. She adored beautiful clothes, but was also spiritually questioning, converting first to Anglicanism and, later, to Catholicism, and agonising every step of the way. Her early love letters to Stanford make the reader feel like a voyeur: 'My darling Derek, I can't begin my day's work until I tell you how greatly I love you' (1949). Over the years, her gradual disenchantment is sad to witness. Towards the volume's end, by which time she had found international fame with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she loathed and despised him. His mistake? To sell her letters to a dealer, and publish a book about her life. Muriel Spark in her later years (Image: GORDON TERRIS) In common with others who made enemies of Spark, Stanford would be hit by epistolary missiles he would never forget. Even in extremis, Spark's caustic wit did not abandon her. Another on the receiving end of ballistic rage was her Macmillan editor Alan Maclean. Gunn offers choice examples of her fury – 'I am tired of your ridiculous lies, your broken promises, your complete waste of my time in discussion, when everything agreed upon is set aside by you in the most casual way.' - and yet, within months, all was forgiven. In Gunn, Spark's letters have found a worthy editor. His selection is carefully weighted to demonstrate the range of her correspondents – from family and writer friends such as Shirley Hazzard and Paul Scott, to the likes of John Updike and Evelyn Waugh, who were admirers of her novels. As well as allowing the reader to see the full expression of her personality, he also ensures the arc of her career – initially slow-burning, then suddenly meteoric - is clearly signposted. His scrupulous footnotes add a wealth of fascinating, sometimes gossipy information, and should not be skipped. My only reservation is the length of some of these letters, since on certain subjects Muriel would give vent over several pages. However, Gunn's justifications for never 'filleting' them are sound, among them that Spark would have viewed that as censorship. The result is a spellbinding portrait of the writer as a relatively young woman. It is impossible not to warm to her. She is entertaining, thoughtful, manic, affectionate, exasperated, flirtatious, apoplectic, occasionally pompous, more often self-deprecating, and never less than interesting. Masefield gave Spark the motto by which to navigate the bumps in the road; in Gunn's superb selection others will find comfort and inspiration in her own hard-won wisdom.
