What Muriel Spark Knew About Childhood

The Atlantic

3 days ago

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The most recent issue of The Atlantic taught me that the Scottish author Muriel Spark had, according to Judith Shulevitz, 'a steely command of omniscience,' and frequently played with 'selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices.' I knew that Spark was funny, and that her work was highly recommended by people whose taste I respect. But I quickly realized I had very few other facts at my disposal. Most important, I'd never read her writing. So before I'd even finished Shulevitz's review of a new biography of the novelist, I downloaded The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie —Spark's best-known work—from my local library.
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The novella's title character works at an Edinburgh school for girls in the 1930s; she's an outré teacher who has marked a special group of pupils as 'hers.' She cares very little for teaching the approved curriculum. Instead, she takes her students to the theater; she walks them through Edinburgh's Old Town; she regales them with tales of her former loves; she praises the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. Her girls, she notes, will benefit far more from the artistic education provided by Brodie 'in her prime'—unmarried and pushing 40, she is entirely aware of her sexual and intellectual power, which are both at their peak.
But the story, while named for Brodie, is not actually about her; it is primarily told through the recollections of the girls, and one in particular: Sandy, who in her adulthood has become a nun. The book's main question is not what will become of Brodie—we know from the early pages that she will be fired from the school, 'betrayed' by one of her chosen girls. Instead, it investigates the heady, hormonal days of adolescence, and the moral education of the students.
That last theme is where Spark's 'central concern,' as Shulevitz puts it, becomes clear. The author was a Catholic convert, and her writing is full of characters searching for, asking about, and turning to God. For the girls, whom Brodie begins shaping when they're barely tweens, their teacher is something like a deity: at times hard to understand, often capricious, but ultimately fascinating, beautiful, and never wrong. As they grow up, most of the kids simply become who they were always going to be, shaking off Brodie's rules and stipulations and following their own whims. But Sandy feels her teacher's authority for the rest of her life. Her entanglement with Brodie, which continues into her late teens, leads her down a winding path that culminates in her own conversion to Catholicism. Her act of submission to the Church, which requires her to shed her individuality, is actually her final moment of separation from her former mentor: She has allowed God to dethrone her teacher.
But even though Sandy's conversion mirrors Spark's own, I was surprised and pleased to see that the author doesn't make Sandy a perfect nun, devoted solely to the Church, free of Brodie's shadow. Instead, Spark is realistic about the effect a particularly magnetic figure can have on a young, impressionable person. Many years later, when Sandy is asked who or what most influenced her, it's Brodie's name on her lips. Similarly, Spark's is on mine. I've now got Memento Mori and Loitering With Intent, two of her other novels, waiting for me on my e-reader.
The Judgments of Muriel Spark
By Judith Shulevitz
The novelist liked playing God—a very capricious one.
What to Read
The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan
Tan coped with the political tumult of 2016 by returning to two of her childhood refuges: nature and art. Drawing was an early hobby of hers, but she'd felt discouraged from taking it seriously. At 65, she took 'nature journaling' lessons to learn how to depict and interpret the world around her—most notably the inter-avian dramas of the birds behind her Bay Area home. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a disarming account of one year of Tan's domestic bird-watching, a book 'filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naive observations,' she writes. That naivete is endearing: The accomplished novelist becomes a novice, trying to improve through eager dedication. Over the course of this engaging book, her illustrations grow more sophisticated, more assured—leaving readers with a portrait of the hobbyist as an emerging artist. — Sophia Stewart
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