Books I Suggest: Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means

 I'm assuming you already know about Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and perhaps someone has recommended her entertaining Memento Mori. But here's a delightful book you might not have run across,, The Girls of Slender Means (1963). 

            It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unexploded bomb in the garden, mentioned early on by one of the characters (Greggie, one of the three old maids in their fifties at the May of Teck Club—women aren’t supposed to stay past thirty, but these three are, so to speak, grandfathered in), can be expected to explode before the end of the book. But Greggie is not the most credible of characters, so we don’t take her too seriously.

            The May of Teck Club is a place established for “girls of slender means” working in London, and it’s the kind of closed circle of characters—the girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the elderly social group of Memento Mori—in which Muriel Spark does her best work. On this limited canvas, she paints her quirky characters with their absorbing motives— “few people…were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.” The frame for her plot is narrowly the time between the victory in Europe in the spring of 1945 and the victory over Japan in the late summer. But these events, which take up almost all the book, are actually looked back on from the perspective of the present, when Jane Wright, a journalist now, calls her former floormates from the Club to tell them of the death of Nicholas Farringdon, who had been a poet and an anarchist enamored of several girls from the floor. Surprisingly, Farringdon had become a Jesuit priest and was murdered in Haiti; possibly martyred, although the circumstances are not clear.

            Spark’s particular use of the ship of fools trope brings together a group of girls from the top floor of the Club as well as some men in their orbit. Jane works for a publisher who operates just on the edge of solvency, moving and changing his name when he can’t pay the bills, and who wants to publish—as inexpensively as possible—Nicholas’s book. Selina Redwood, the club beauty who values poise above all else, sleeps with Nicholas on the Club roof on clement nights during the summer. Joanna Childe is the statuesque blonde elocution teacher, whose taste in poetry becomes the club’s taste, and who fascinates Nicholas. Anne Baberton’s Schiaparelli gown is the preferred borrow for all the girls when they’re invited to fancy restaurants. Pauline Fox, the Club’s mad girl, often tells everyone she’s going out to dine with a famous actor. With these, Spark can skewer a particular segment of London’s end-of-the-war society, keep us smiling if not laughing outright, but also keep us a little worried for what’s going to happen to these financially precarious people (“Long ago in 1945,” the book begins, “all the nicest people in England were poor”) in a world about to be changed by the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

Books I Suggest: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

            Count Alexander Rostov, whose family estate, Idlehour, is in Nizhny Novgorod, is not shot by the Bolsheviks because his 1913 poem, “Where Is It Now?” was considered by them as a call to arms. We later discover that the poem was in fact written by Rostov’s friend Mikhail Mishkin, who would have been in danger from the Tzarists for having written it, so they agreed to let it be known that Rostov was its author. Instead of being shot, Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to a lifetime house arrest in the Hotel Metropol, where he contrives to turn a sentence into a favor. Though he is moved to a ten-by-ten room on an upper floor, Rostov, allowed to take whatever furniture will fit, takes his desk, whose legs are stacked inside with pieces of gold. Rostov determines to master his circumstances (rather than be mastered by them) by committing to the business of practicalities. His little society includes Andrey Duras, the maître d’hotel of the hotel’s best restaurant, the Boyarsky; Emil the cook; Audrios the bartender at the bar Rostov calls the Shalyapin, for the opera star who once frequented it; Marina, the seamstress of the hotel; Arkady, who mans the front desk; Nina Kulikova, the nine-year-old who shows Rostov the secrets of the hotel and then gives him her passkey as a parting gift; and Drosselmeyer, also known as Marshall Kutuzov, the one-eyed cat who takes milk and company from Rostov in earlier years and in later ones inhabits the hotel as a ghost.

            Other characters will enter Rostov’s life and change it, including a film actress named Anna who becomes a love interest, a five-year old child named Sofia whose temporary care of by Rostov turns out to be longer than he’d bargained for, and an oafish waiter in one of the Metropole’s restaurants he names the Bishop, who becomes a sometimes comic, sometimes not-so-funny feature of the Rostov’s life..

            Towles has a straightforward style characterized by the way one character will repeat what another has just said, epithets used to identify characters (Nina’s penchant for yellow when a child, Anna always described as “willowy,” and the bizarre head shape of the Bishop, Rostov’s main adversary in the book) and occasional odd failures of editing such as calling Colonel Osip Glebnikoff “the Captain” or Towles’s apparent belief that “malingering” means “loitering.” For me, it was a delightful read from beginning to end.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2024)

     I am probably one of a small subset of people who think a book like Allen's interesting--I found it fascinating. I've carried a notebook for decades, and could not now do without one. I wrote an essay on the subject of notebooks about fifteen years ago; it's in the collection of my essays called A Place to Read (2014). Here are some notes from my reading of The Notebook. I should affirm right away that I agree completely with Allen's assertion that notebooks allow the sort of writing, figuring, drawing, mapping, graphing, etc. that really does constitute thinking on paper.

    The Romans and earlier Mediterranean traders going back to a 1300BCE shipwreck used wax set in shallow indentations in hinged wooden boards to inscribe on, but real notebooks had to await the availability of paper. A papyrus codex survives from first-century Rome, and a parchment codex from the fourth, but papyrus was not readily available and parchment was expensive and time-consuming to make. The Persians and Arabs put together the western idea of the codex and the Chinese invention of paper about 800CE, but the idea didn’t catch on until King Jaume of Aragon took over the town of Xátiva and its paper-making factory from the Muslims in 1244.  
        Amatino Manucci, bookkeeper for Giovanni Farolfi, kept at least seven ledgers and notebooks for the business. His ledger is “the first surviving) example of double-entry bookkeeping” and dates from ˜ 1300. The paper codex notebook enables the process of double-entry bookkeeping: ink on paper is permanent and can’t be scraped off as on parchment. The bound ledger means a page cannot be removed without being obvious. These features make the ledger tamper-proof. 
        “Cimabue invented the sketchbook” asserts Allen. As Italian art became less Byzantine icon-like and more realistic in the work of Cimabue, his pupil Giotto (c.1267-1337), Duccio, and others, portable sketchbooks enabled constant practice in drawing from life as well as compendia of body parts, poses, architectural features and so on, and space to try out compositions for larger works.
        Ricordanzi were home account books, libri di ricordi (memoirs) and libri di famiglia kept track of family history and individual accomplishments. All of these show up in greater numbers in Florence than elsewhere, and here the zibaldone seems to have been invented. The word means mess, jumble, salad, and the books included everything: extracts from favorite authors, prayers, notes about planting, drawings, diary entries, and anything that struck the writer as worth recording. Allen devotes a chapter to a notable example, the notebook of Michael of Rhodes from the 1430s. Michael was a seaman who rose through the ranks and his book is full of mathematical problems, details of his career, illustrations of ropework, diagrams, details about shipbuilding and navigation, the last two less authoritative than they look. Michael may have used his notebook as a resume when he sought promotion and employment.
        Allen contrasts the notebooks of two friends: Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli, a peripatetic Franciscan friar, published his six-hundred-page notebook in vernacular Tuscan as Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in 1494 and made a great deal on the thousands of copies sold because, unusually for the time, he was granted copyright by Venice. Leonardo wrote and illustrated thirteen thousand pages of notebooks that survive and perhaps four times that in total in books from folio size down to small pocket ones. They are filled with lists of words, geometrical diagrams, sketches of faces, illustrations to show the workings of pumps and other useful machines and inventions, more fanciful flying machines, war machines, anatomical drawings, along with sums of money paid workers, the costs of his mother’s funeral, letters, speeches and self-contained essays—all written left-handed and backwards so as not to smudge the ink. None of it is really publishable, according to Martin Kemp, an authority on the notebooks, and we can’t imagine Leonardo taking the time to turn them into something that could be printed and sold.
        Allen covers the literary use of notebooks in various chapters. Chaucer, he says, was introduced to notebooks in Italy and probably made use of them while he was reading borrowed manuscripts of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Hamlet refers several times, once metaphorically, to his table-book. Hemingway was delighted, in 1956, to rediscover his notebooks from the ‘20s in a trunk in the Ritz basement, and he used them to reconstruct his memoir, A Moveable Feast, his last book. Patrick Leigh Fermor similarly recovered “The Green Diary,” a notebook from his walk across Europe, when he met up again in 1965 with his Rumanian mistress from the years just before the war. He mined the diary for two memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The most famous regular user of notebooks who turned scribbled entries into books was Bruce Chatwin, who became Leigh Fermor’s friend. 
        Allen notes that the availability of notebooks did not immediately lead to detailed log-keeping by ships’ masters. He contrasts the purely meteorological and navigational information recorded by one of the navigators named Albo in Magellan’s last expedition, with the much more detailed journal of Antonio Pigafetta, on another ship. Albo did not bother to record the loss of ships, a mutiny, or even Magellan’s death in a violent episode on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. But for the existence of Pigafetta’s account, Magellan’s reputation would never have recovered from the slanderous report of him given by the first expedition member to reach land. The importance of detailed written accounts would eventually result in logbooks that routinely supplied more than the weather and the ship’s course.
        Allen gives us examples of notebooks used in cookery, psychology, politics---Bob Graham’s meticulously detailed notebooks that helped elect him to the governorship and the Senate, hurt his chances in his campaign for the presidential nomination, and then proved false the Republicans’ charge that Democrats had been routinely briefed by the CIA about waterboarding during the Bush administration.

        It's a big book--over 400 pages--because the subject turns out to be much larger than anyone would have imagined, but it's also one you can read selectively in. Not me. I read every page.

Books I Suggest: Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader (2007)

             Here, as in Bennett’s play, A Question of Attribution (where Queen Elizabeth spars verbally with her art advisor, Anthony Blunt, whom she knows perfectly well is a spy), the reader can be confident that Bennett knows from up close the queen’s attitudes, manner of speaking, and daily round. The premise of The Uncommon Reader is that in her seventies, the queen begins to read seriously, and it changes her, first in small ways and then in quite a big one.

            Aside from Bennett’s ease with the details of the royal household and person, he gives us here a view of her intelligence and humor. Bennett’s style is clear and without mannerisms, a mixed style in which the vocabulary ranges from the professorial to slang from the gay world (dolly=pretty), from the military (“yomping” is Royal Marine slang for long distance marching with a full kit), to cricket (being “bowled a googly” is the equivalent of being thrown a curve), and just plain slang (duff=useless trash).

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954)

     Ebin Willoweed is one of the changed, coming out of his gormless thrall to his truly terrible, tyrant mother—she’s the most striking character portrayed in the book—to resume his writing career. What prompts the change is a tragedy in his Warwickshire village: the miller drowns himself, the butcher slits his throat, the baker drinks carbolic acid, and dozens die painfully. The villagers react like the torch-carrying mob in Frankenstein, marching to the house of an innocent man, with nasty results. 
    The already interesting Willoweeds, including the pretty second daughter Hattie, who’s obviously the child of a black father, become more interesting under the pressure of the gruesome plague that grips the village. Emma, the eldest Willoweed child, imagines a romantic young man who courts her—and finds him. All of this Barbara Comyns presents as if were the most common thing in the world. We laugh in places, even as the villagers drop. We are not prepared for it to end so quickly—the book is only about a hundred twenty pages—or so happily. Also, we like it.

Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays

            Davenport’s big book stood on my shelves for years, intimidating me. Finally, with the help of the audiobook Paul Woodson recorded in 2024, I tackled the essays, listening to and reading essays alternately, and found them surprising, enlightening, and entertaining.

            A couple of remarks of Davenport’s help sum up his approach to criticism: “Art is a matter of models” is the clearest of these; a little more cryptic is “the world is all of a piece,” which is slightly illuminated by a little more context:

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world…. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.

For Davenport the myths of northern European or gothic art, of the near and far East, and especially of the Roman and Greek world, are the way artists try to give voice to that harmony. In the title essay, he talks about these realms as the geography of the imagination in Poe, with examples, and then does the same for Joyce, O. Henry, and Grant Wood.

            Davenport is a clear and precise stylist, capable of on the one hand, a charming little New York Times essay of perhaps 1500 words on the writing of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and, on the other, attempts in essays of 12,000 words and more to link together the interconnected myths and intertextualities of Shelley, Ruskin, Whitman, Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Eudora Welty, whom Davenport believes “one of the greatest of American writers in all our history.”  

He is an inheritor of a newer and more refined version of structuralism when he talks about the world’s harmonies. He is also interested in form, and what he calls architectonics—he admits at one point the influence of the Russian Formalists on his criticism. In an essay on “Narrative Tone and Form,” for example, after pointing out that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein are “at work on identical linguistic phenomena,” Davenport traces the symmetries and similar cycles in the Iliad, the Odyssey, Dubliners, The Cantos, and other modernist writers—Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky. These writers form a kind of galaxy of influence for Davenport, and when he begins tracing connections in close reading, one often finds such passages as this, where he is discussing an unpublished book of poetry written by Ezra Pound for Hilda Doolittle called Hilda’s Book:

The first poem of Hilda’s Book opens with a hint of Whitman but proceeds as if by Yeats:

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

Of autumn our colors.

   But Celtic twilight and Yeatsian diction are but part of the strange beauty of “The Tree.” That a tree can be a persona at all is startling. Joyce, years later, will have a tree speak in his poem “Tilly” (Pomes Penyeach, l927). Pound’s poem trembles between the imitative and a strong originality. It is as precious as the early Yeats while having the masculine boldness of William Morris. It is both Ovidian and Thoreauvian.

I would have said Swinburnian, too.

            The influences Davenport sees operating on a line from Shelley and Yeats through Pound, Olson, and Zukofsky are affected from the sides, as it were, by scientists such as Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, and Darwin, and technicians such as Eadward Muybridge. Artists are of course important: Eakins, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Picasso, Braque, Grant Wood, whom Davenport calls “the great Formalist painter,” and Pavel Tchelitchew, who “began to conceal images within images in his pictures…in the 1930s” and in Cache-Cache, Phenomena, and other paintings revived a tradition of illusion in painting going back to Arcimboldo, da Vinci, and painters of trompe l’oeil works. The music of Charles Ives was also important.

            Davenport thinks appropriation a most suitable form of construction in literature: he loves, for example, Wordsworth’s beginning The Prelude with Satan’s words from Paradise Lost, reworked as “escaped / From the vast city, where I long had pined / A discontented sojourner; now free, / Free as a bird to settle where I will. / What dwelling shall receive me?”

            Many of these pieces are reviews—of one of Donald Hall’s collections of literary anecdotes, of a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, of a meeting at the Library of Congress to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry magazine. The style is consistent, though a careful observer could tease out differences when he is writing for the New York Times, National Review, or other large circulation periodicals versus his pieces that were published in little magazines and literary venues like Arion and The Iowa Review.

            Every reader will have favorites here. Mine include the comparisons of translations of the opening of Book Three of the Odyssey in the review of Richmond Lattimore’s version—which may appeal only to those of us who have struggled to learn Greek and read at least some Homer. And I like Davenport as teacher, as when he dives into close reading of Marianne Moore’s poems, or gives us a freewheeling interpretation of Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C.” But there is scarcely an essay of the forty where I have not stopped at some point to marvel at what he was doing.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES to be published by Genius Books

     Those of you who tune in for the Uncommon Mysteries I post here will be happy to learn that Genius Books has agreed to publish a collection of them to be titled Uncommon Mysteries: An Accidental History of Mystery Fiction. I'm hoping that the book will be out in the late summer of 2026. Genius Books published my last book in 1924--the one illustrated to the right here. These mystery notes began after I retired from teaching, as commentaries on the public radio station WKMS at Murray State University in Kentucky. I got interested in other writing projects after a year or two, but I have continued the mystery notes on my blog, and I now find I have notes on 120 authors and about 150 books, dating from the nineteenth century up to the 2020s, and that taken together they give a history of mystery fiction and all its subgenres of locked-room mysteries, cozies, police procedurals, hard-boiled detective stories, and so on. 

    I'll be continuing to post about my reading here, but for the mystery notes you'll have to wait for the book. Thanks for reading.