Advocates' Library, Edinburgh

Members of the Society are visiting this prestigious library, and Parliament House, in Edinburgh tomorrow.
With thanks to Andrea Longson, we very much look forward to our exclusive visit.

The Driver's Seat

For anyone in London there is a superb window display in Waterstone's Piccadilly featuring Lise.
And on Saturday 23 April Januce Galloway is giving a masterclass there on Spark. Spaces are limited so contact the branch beforehand.
Thanks Waterstones for all the thought you've put into this.

Tweet by WaterstonesPicc on Twitter

	WaterstonesPicc (@WaterstonesPicc)
22/04/2016, 09:24 @gewylie1 Sure! Our windows are big. We have Lise in the window, I made her a special outfit #TheDriversSeat pic.twitter.com/SBzso5gcE1

Muriel Spark the Poet

(The following is a brief piece I was asked to send to the BBC in January when the programme 'The Poetic Spark' was being devised.)

Muriel Spark stated: 'I write as a poet...my novels come under the category of poetics rather than fiction...' 
'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet.  I do not write 'poetic' prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perception of events are those of a poet.  Whether in prose or verse, all creative writing is mysteriously connected with music and I always hope this factor is apparent throughout my work.'
(Spark, Tuscany, 2003: Preface to All the Poems, Carcanet, 2004)

Certainly, her novels carry the signatures of poetry: they are concise, allusive, elusive and open to a variety of readings and interpretations.

When I was asked to give a talk at the Tramway, Glasgow, for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Driver's Seat in 2015,  I emphasised the influence on her development as a writer of reading Scottish ballads at her school, James Gillespie's in Edinburgh.

Border Ballads were the real spark for Spark.  Aged ten, she called them her favourite reading material: 'In Edinburgh [they] are best read in the long dark winters...They were cruel and lyrical at the same time and I think they had a great effect on my later literary work.' ('When I was Ten', The Golden Fleece, ed Jardine, Carcanet, 2014)  She entitled one of her novels The Ballad of Peckham Rye, probably as homage to their influence.  The ballads are the very stuff of a Spark novel with their sense of the macabre, their time shifts, their violence, their short, sharp and enigmatic dark narratives written with a deceptively light touch.  The ballads are dispassionate and leave the reader to work out their hidden messages: why was the twa corbies' knight so casually abandoned?  Why was Lord Randall poisoned?

To conclude: in my opinion, the poetry of Spark is more self-revealing than her novels.  She described herself as 'a constitutional exile' and it is in poems such as 'Abroad', 'Communication', 'Standing in the Field', 'Hats' and 'Edinburgh Villanelle' among others that you find this sense of dislocation and exile but, importantly, not unhappiness.

The inscription on her gravestone, translated there into Italian, comes, appropriately, from her poem 'Canaan':

'Not a leaf

Repeats itself, we only repeat the word.'

Gail Wylie

April 2016

The Poetic Spark

To mark 10 years since Muriel Spark's death A L Kennedy presents a programme on Muriel Spark's poetry on Sunday 10 April at 4.30 pm on BBC Radio 4.  Contributors include Alan Taylor and Penelope Jardine.
More information can be found on the websites of BBC Radio 4 and Carcanet

Rome 2016

The Society's trip to Rome (15 - 20 March 2016) was a huge success.
Martin Gray of Learn Italy and our incomparable guide Agnes Crawford of @understandrome gave the 17 Society members an unforgettable visit.
Agnes had gone out of her way to research Muriel Spark's residences in Rome's Centro Storico from the Hotel Raphael to the Palazzo Taverna.  We all had an excellent day walking in this fascinating part of Rome.
Agnes had also found the exact site of the setting of 'The Takeover' in Nemi - a small town in the hills outside Rome, and the farmer on whose land much of the novel is set (including Diana's Temple) gave us glasses of his own wine and bread with his own olive oil. We were delighted to be joined for lunch in Nemi by Penelope Jardine, Airdrie Armstrong and their friend Alison.
We also visited Ancient Rome, Keats' grave, the Catacombs, and much more. One evening we were joined for dinner by Ivan Castiglione, an actor in last year's National Theatree of Scotland's production of 'The Driver's Seat'. 
On our free day some of us went to the newly excavated (and work in progress) Domus Aurea, Nero's Golden House; some visited the Forum and the Palatine Hill; others went to the Vatican City or the Piazza Campidoglio.  Rome is a city which offers something for everyone.  We learnt so much - and we also had a great deal of fun.
On our final morning we went to the superb gallery at the Villa Borghese.
We stayed at the friendly Lancelot Hotel, by the Colosseum, whose attentive staff added to our great experience.  Our thanks to all at the hotel, to Martin, to Agnes and to our accomplished coach driver Giuseppe.
It was a visit which offered first time vistors special insights into Rome, reminded those of us who had been before what a wonderful city it is, and let us all understand exactly why Muriel Spark chose to live there.

Day 1 at the Caracalla Baths

                                           

Day 1 at a part of the aquaduct at the Via Appia

                                  

One of many lively and delicious meals

One of Muriel Spark's flats in the Centro Storico

Another location near one of  Muriel Spark's flats

Ivan Castiglione joining us for dinner

The Hotel Raphael, Spark's first port of call in Rome

Agnes telling us about the Palazzo Taverna

Palazzo Taverna - Spark lived in one of these apartments

'The Takeover' setting: The Temple of Diana

'The Takeover' setting: The Devil's Grottoes

At 'The Takeover' setting: enjoying Signor de Santis' wine

The Lake at Nemi

Arrivederci Roma!

David Bowie's top 100 books

'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' is included in Bowie's favourite 100 books. 
To see the full list, go to http://gu.com/p/3j7a2/sbl

Review of The Golden Mean by John Glenday (Picador, 2015)

The final poem of Glenday’s previous collection, Grain, states:

                Not one of us will live forever
               The world is far too beautiful for that.

His new collection, The Golden Mean, picks up this thread of cherishing transcience and weaves it into an intriguing narrative of what it means to be alive.  By using the four elements, he takes us on journeys through fire and air, on roads and tracks, on and into the sea and rivers in a search for life’s ‘golden mean’, that perfect balance of proportions. 

However, like the donkey in ‘The Flight into Egypt’ who is ‘on a pointless journey he knows has barely begun’, the poet alerts his readers to the impossibility of finding that balance. So destinations become far less important than the very journeys themselves.  Glenday takes us  ‘somewhere’ where ‘everywhere’s possible’: whether that’s the flight of Noah’s ravens or an imaginary city: ‘Let’s head for a place, neighbouring and impossible’  (Abaton). 

The frequent motif of birds, including his favourite skylark, move from the ground to the air; space, lightness, translucence are the essence of Glenday’s poetry.   The mind’s eye of the reader looks upwards to stars (‘Constellation’) – in other poems to light, to sails, fire, seedheads and skies.  And even within each poem, many of which are short, lie those important spaces which reveal what is missing. 

The spaces in the lines (a post-script note informs this form is a Viking ballad-metre) of ‘The Lost Boy’ serve to highlight the son who is no longer there:

                If fine rhymes        rang like iron
                hammered bright,       hot with meaning
                they might weigh        more in my heart.
                Brave songs don’t       bring the dead home.

As contrast, the earthbound poems reveal harsher realities.  To be bound to the earth, or caged, or imprisoned is the worst thing that can happen to us. The dark fable ‘Ill Will’ is mired in soil both literal and metaphorical; the ‘Humpback Embryo’ never stood a chance:  to bury the séance books in ‘Our Dad’ ‘felt worse/ than burning somehow – imagine words gasping for air.’  The doomed soldiers on the eve of the Battle of the Somme (The Big Push) also imagine gasping for air:

                …Just for a while to have no weight, to go drifting
                clear of thought and world, was utter bliss. 

Glenday wrong-foots us with all his allusions to escape and journeying.  He is not an advocate of looking elsewhere for balance simply because there is too much to appreciate in the world around us. The title of this collection ‘The Golden Mean’ does not simply allude to that perfect balance of proportions.  Glenday celebrates the ‘mean’ – the humble, the ordinary, the common things in life and want us to recognise these as golden.  Keeping clear of ‘rich soil’ because ‘a grain of truth’ will  ‘grow poorly’ there, and behind the apparent flippancy of  ‘This world is nothing much’, his insistence on observing and honouring the ordinary makes it exceptional. British pearls, dismissed by Tacitus as being ‘exceptionally poor’ are worn by ‘their women…as if winter were a jewel.’  There are no poems about large showy flowers,  but primroses or ‘Fireweed’; instead of  grand architecture there’s a dockyard;  no polished marble but a simple ‘White Stone’ or ‘Rubble’; no grand paintings but ‘Self Portrait in a Dirty Window’: no heroic warriors, but the names of the world’s unknown or overlooked soldiers whose names make their own poetry (Lest We Forget):  ‘so many brief, important things’  (My Mother’s Favourite Flower).

‘The Walkers’ of the final poem, those ghosts who cross water, follow dirt roads, return ‘grieving for all the things we could never hold again’  to ask ‘if you might heal the world’.  ‘The Golden Mean’ reminds us of the fragility of life; his recurring motif of hands alerts his readers to hold on to, and cherish, the ordinary, humble, mean things which provide the transcient, overlooked beauty of the world we live in.

Gail Wylie                                                                                  October 2015

New poetry collection from John Glenday

John Glenday's eagerly awaited fourth collection of poetry, The Golden Mean (published by Picador), will be published on Thursday 10th September.   This comes six years after the highly acclaimed Grain which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award and Griffin International Poetry Prize. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie goes digital

Canongate has just announced that it is to be the digital publisher of nine of Spark's novels, beginning with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  The Bachelors will follow in December 2015, and The Finishing School in Spring 2016.  Other novels to be published as e books will be: The Abbess of Crewe, Not to Disturb, The Only Problem, Robinson, The Takeover and Aiding and Abetting.

The Driver's Seat - an introduction

Click here

Thanks to the National Theatre of Scotland for sending us this link to a video trailer of the director and cast discussing The Driver's Seat.

Muriel Spark wrote:

'I have always claimed that I write as a poet, that my novels come under the category of poetics rather than fiction.'  (from the essay 'The Art of Verse', 1999)

National Theatre of Scotland

Exciting news - the National Theatre of Scotland are to bring 'The Driver's Seat' to the Lyceum in Edinburgh and the Tramway in Glasgow this summer.  Directed by Laurie Sansom, the daring and innovative style of the NTS will suit perfectly this darkest of Spark's novels.  The Muriel Spark Society welcome this initiative and look forward immensely to seeing this on stage.

http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

Twitter

Muriel Spark Society - now on Twitter.
Click here

Guardian interview with Penelope Jardine

by Susanna Rustin in last Saturday's (5 July) Guardian here

"The last of two great women writers - Muriel Spark and Sybille Bedford"

An Evening Standard review by David Sexton of the recently published collection of Muriel Spark's essays The Golden Fleece ..."It's an absolute treasure trove".   He also reviews Sybille Bedford's Pleasures and Landscapes.   Both authors died in 2006 and the reviewer cites Evelyn Waugh's admiration for them..

The Ballad of Peckham Rye...

...at this year's East Dulwich Literary Festival.   Professor Martin Stannard will be giving a lecture on this early novel by Muriel Spark on Monday 30th June at 7.30 pm.   Professor Stannard will also have an early BBC Radio recording of the book.   Tickets are £2.50 and are available from Rye Books in East Dulwich (Tel: 020 3581 1850) or can be reserved by contacting David Workman at D.Workman@harrisdulwichgirls.org.uk

Follow this link for further details about the lecture and to find out more about the Festival itselfwhich will host a variety of events including a reading and discussion by Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales on 1st July.

A book review in the London Evening Standard...

 ...that mentions Muriel Spark's 'sweet singing voice'.   The review is of Lynn Barber's autobiography A Curious Career.   Fascinating reading anyway, covering a wide range of her celebrity interviews, but it might be worth trying to find the original interview with Muriel Spark online somewhere?

"You have to live with the mystery"...

says Muriel Spark, quoted in this post by Parul Seghal on yesterday's New Yorker website.

Penelope Jardine on Woman's Hour

Here is a link to a podcast of yesterday's (27th March) BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour (available for download for a further 29 days) where Penelope Jardine discusses The Golden Fleece essays.