Thomas Mallon’s excellent essay on the novelist Muriel Spark is in the April 5 edition of The New Yorker, focused on her astringent and precise eccentricities. Her short stories in that magazine have been for me a decades-long treasure. From one I remember a sentence about champagne: “Through its murk bubbles climbed.”
Fallon quotes from Spark’s Loitering with Intent from 1981, her character Fleur Talbot, like her a writer:
When people say nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.
Because Mallon’s full essay is behind a subscribers-only pay wall, here are three more moments from it:
Spark in New York with an office at The New Yorker looks out a window and sees the flashing sign of the Time-Life Building. She told Shirley Hazzard that “When it says ‘Time,’ I write. When it says ‘Life,’ I want to go out.”
Spark on messages:
I haven’t got a message to give to the world, it’s the world that gives me messages.
And living in Rome, she loved what she called its “immediate touch of antiquity on everyday life.” Spark died in 2006.
Regina, thanks for the reminder to read more of Muriel Spark. As I read your piece, I couldn’t help myself–I felt the stick of a needle, smelled straw, and heard “Hallo, George” all at once.