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Atlantic
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
What Muriel Spark Knew About Childhood
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. 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. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: How not to fix American democracy 'Surface Support,' a poem by Michael D. Snediker Literature's enduring obsession with strange sisters Why so many MIT students are writing poetry 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 Out Next Week 📚 Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs 📚 Where Are You Really From, by Elaine Hsieh Chou 📚 Dominion, by Addie E. Citchens Your Weekend Read The Logic of the '9 to 5' Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day By Julie Beck Over the past couple of years, the vloggers of social media have taken to documenting their routines from 5 to 9 p.m. Some creators also make a morning version, the '5 to 9 before the 9 to 5,' starting at 5 a.m. These routines are highly edited, almost hypnotic, with quick cuts, each mini-scene overlaid with a time stamp. Hours pass in just a couple of minutes, and the compressed time highlights a sense of efficiency. The videos have big to-do-list energy; the satisfaction they offer is that of vicariously checking boxes.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Dan Gunn on reconstructing the life of Muriel Spark 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?'
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
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
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Tributes to Dundonian who became eminent director of the stars
Died: June 10, 2025 Alan Strachan, who has died aged 80, was a Dundonian who became an eminent theatre director and had success directing plays by the likes of Noel Coward, Terene Rattigan and Alan Ayckbourn. He also administered two theatres, the Mermaid in the City and the Greenwich Theatre, always choosing seasons that were attractive, imaginative and cast with stars that wanted to return to the live theatre after success elsewhere. His prestigious productions were often seen in Scotland and included a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1994) with Patricia Hodge as the spinster Miss Brodie and Edith Macarthur as the headmistress. Another notable achievement was the 2007 production of Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves - of which The Herald critic wrote 'the evening features a superb central performance from Nicholas Le Prevost'. In 2009 Strachan also had a great success with Entertaining Angels by Richard Everett starring Penelope Keith. In 2021 Strachan directed A Splinter of Ice to reopen the King;s [[Theatre]], Edinburgh, after its refurbishment. The play dealt with Kim Philby, safe in Moscow, justifying his treachery. Alan Lochart Thomson Strachan was born in Dundee, the second son of Ellen (nee Graham), who worked in the city's jam factories, and Roualeyn Strachan, a seed and plants manager in D&W Croll. Strachan attended Morgan Academy then read English literature at St Andrews University and Merton College, Oxford. He was active in the various theatre groups at Oxford and in 1969 appeared in Twelfth Night directed by Jonathan Miller. At St Andrews he spent much of his spare time working backstage at the Byre Theatre. There he met Jennifer Piercey who was appearing on stage. They married in 1977. When he came down from Oxford, Strachan worked at the Mermaid Theatre then directed by Bernard Miles. He was appointed co-associate director and scored a hit with Cowardy Custard in 1972 which he co-devised and directed. Coward came to the first night and caused quite a stir. Patricia Routledge was one of the stars and said of that first night, 'Coward was really quite frail by then and he had to be helped in through a fire door. The audience gave him a huge welcome. It was a memorable night.' The show had long runs in the west end and on Broadway. It was seen at the Pitlochry Festival in 1984. Read more 'He never gave up': tributes to patriarch of Scottish undertakers | The Herald Tributes to 'Mr Stirling': journalist dedicated to his home town | The Herald Tributes to countess who modernised royal Scottish castle | The Herald One of Strachan's outstanding successes was to direct the (then) ignored plays of Terrence Rattigan. In 1988 he directed the first West End revival of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Penelope Keith. Strachan's subtle direction brought a fresh appraisal of the play and allowed Keith to display real dramatic skills away from TV's The Good Life. In 1971 Strachan directed at the Mermaid Theatre The Old Boys by William Trevor. He cast Michael Redgrave in the lead despite knowing the actor had serious memory and nerve problems. Rehearsals went well but as the first night approached, Redgrave was a bag of nerves. 'Lines which were ringing with assurance now were stumbled for or escaped him completely,' Strachan wrote. The previews were a nightmare and Strachan evolved an ingenious scheme. He climbed into a tiny cubbyhole off-stage and communicated with Redgrave on a walkie-talkie and cued the actor his lines. All went well except when the hearing aid fell from Redgrave's ear with a resounding crash and, worse, one night Redgrave fiddled with the volume and the audience heard an intercom with a London taxi. Penelope Keith (Image: Newsquest) Strachan had a keen insight into the plays of Coward. He keenly developed their subtle comedy and in 1981 directed a feisty production of Present Laughter with Donald Sinden playing the lead as a rascal. From 1978 Strachan directed the Greenwich Theatre for ten years where he staged a wonderful assortment of plays that established the theatre as progressive and forward-thinking. While running Greenwich he maintained a close interest in the west end and in particular with Alec Guinness. In 1975 Guinness played the lead and Strachan directed Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novel, A Family and a Fortune, with Guinness and Rachel Kempson and then Yahoo an intense study of Jonathan Swift, the 17th-century Irish satirist. Strachan was also a noted biographer and in addition to writing biographies of Vivien Leigh, Michael Redgrave and Bernard Miles, he wrote the biography of his long-term collaborator, the West End producer Sir Michael Codron (Putting It On). In the past few years Strachan and his wife had lived in Invergowrie. She predeceased him and he is survived by his elder brother. ALASDAIR STEVEN At The Herald, we carry obituaries of notable people from the worlds of business, politics, arts and sport but sometimes we miss people who have led extraordinary lives. That's where you come in. If you know someone who deserves an obituary, please consider telling us about their lives. Contact
New Statesman
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What teenagers can teach us about love
Photo by Linn Heidi Stokkedal/Millennium Images, UK 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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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] Related
