Figures in a Landscape by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11

Tea with Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark had a bad leg and an amazing reason for it. But her explanation seemed so like a plot twist in one of her own novels, and so stunningly comic, that I found myself listening with mounting hilarity at the completeness of her apparent invention.

“Well, you see, my hip surgeon in London wrote to me and said, ‘I now wish to be called Sarah, not William.’ He said, ‘I am a transvestite. I’m going to have an operation and become a woman.’”

“How awkward,” I said insincerely, hoping for more.

“I wouldn’t want to be operated on by a transsexual,” she went on. “I’d feel spooky. I don’t want to go to sleep on his table and wake up ‘Simon’ or somebody. Did you have lunch? We had a terrible lunch. I called down for some sandwiches. They were just awful. Sloshed with mayonnaise.”

I had been longing to meet Dame Muriel Spark, having read and reread her novels for most of my writing life, always stimulated by her peculiar truth, her originality of design, her omniscience, the boldness of her characterization. Her fiction defies pigeonholing, as she herself does, joyously.

One day after rereading Loitering with Intent on a Hawaiian beach and greatly admiring it, I wrote her on an impulse to say so. She replied from her home in Tuscany in a friendly way, with the sort of serenity that descends on some writers after a lengthy period of satisfying literary labor: you finish a book and are calmed. She confided that she had indeed just finished a new novel, about Lord Lucan. It seemed to me an inspired choice of character. In November 1974, Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, known to his friends as Lucky—though he was anything but—bludgeoned his nanny to death in a dark stairwell of his London house, believing she was his estranged wife. He then turned on his wife, who managed to escape and raise the alarm. Lucan vanished the next day, leaving an ambiguous note, saying he would “lie doggo for a bit,” and was never found.

Muriel said, We must meet, and we did at last when we were both passing through New York City.

Sitting in the half-dark of a hotel room, having tea, seemed a bit like a séance. Muriel is ageless in her talk, bright, funny, forthright—most of all stimulating, because she is interested in everything. The clarity of her pronouncements is like her prose style, crisply sudden and surprising. We talked about The Driver’s Seat, filmed as Identikit, starring Elizabeth Taylor. But she hadn’t liked it. “The main character is supposed to be neurotic, and Elizabeth Taylor was much too vulgar to be a neurotic woman.” We talked about Africa. She had lived in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where white farmers are being harried by angry Africans, egged on by the president. “[President] Mugabe is mad. He’s a power maniac. The press knows it but they pussyfoot around.” As for Italy, where she has lived since 1966, “It has a lot of drawbacks.

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