While I enjoy reading literary criticism of a variety of stripes, nothing beats lit crit written by one terrific writer in appreciation of the work of another terrific writer. I always want to leap up and leg it to my Macbook to scan the digisphere for sackfuls of cheap used copies by both writers, or hop the bus for my favorite new and used bookstores downtown. If I weren’t in the middle of a Cormac McCarthy marathon right now, that’s what I’d be doing with Catholic novelists Muriel Spark and David Lodge after reading Lodge’s appreciation of Spark (“The Prime of Muriel Spark”) in the latest New York Review of Books. The occasion, of course: the recent publication of Martin Stannard’s six-hundred-plus page biography of Spark.
Here’s a taste of Lodge’s quality:
A truly original writer is a very rare bird, whose appearance is apt to disconcert other birds and bird-watchers at first. I was beginning my own career as a novelist and critic when Muriel Spark began publishing her fiction: in the former capacity I was under the influence of the neorealism of the British “Angry Young Men” era, and as a critic I revered the great moderns like Henry James, Conrad, and Joyce. I was also interested in something called the Catholic Novel, and had written a thesis on the subject. Muriel Spark didn’t fit any of these categories: she was a postmodernist before the term was known to literary criticism, and although she was a convert to the Catholic faith, her take on it was very different from Graham Greene’s or Evelyn Waugh’s. Reviewing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961 I declared myself “beguiled…but not really stirred or involved or enlightened.” It was some time before I realized that the disappointment was entirely my own fault and that the novel was a masterpiece.
Lucky for us, this is not the only thing by David Lodge on Muriel Spark to be had on the internet. Lodge published a much longer and more “lit crit”-ish piece in 1985 (“Marvels and Nasty Surprises”) in The New York Times Book Review. Among the insights and paragraphic gems is a wonderful (and funny) little section on the Calvinist vs. Catholic tension in Spark’s work in re: Predestination vs. Providence, always a thorny subject and much shoved about in the history of Christian theology:
In this story ["The Black Madonna"] there is a streak of that authorial vindictiveness toward her own characters which some readers cite as a reason for not succumbing to Mrs. Spark’s literary skill. It is perfectly true that her imagination is fascinated by revenge, humiliation and ironic reversals, and that she looks upon pain and death with a dry, glittering eye. Nevertheless, in the novels, if not always in the short stories, this cruel streak in her work is restrained and tempered by the comic spirit. One may recall Sandy Stranger’s appalled fascination with Calvinism, especially the doctrine of predestination, ”the belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died.” It is the very seductiveness of this idea that impels Sandy to embrace the more merciful, if no less mysterious theology of Catholicism; and the omniscient narrator of Mrs. Spark’s novels is more Catholic than Calvinist. However grim and black their humor may appear, the providential plot to which these books obliquely allude is a divine comedy.
Wonderful stuff.
For the 1985 NYT article, click here.
For the recent NYRB article (“The Prime of Muriel Spark”), click here.
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