It was a film poster that kick-started my love affair with Muriel Spark: a kohl-eyed Elizabeth Taylor with a halo of knives. I was immediately hooked.
The Muriel Spark centenary exhibition at the Scottish National Library documents the writer’s nomadic existence and escapist leaps. She lived in different countries, led many lives and managed to free herself from some pretty difficult situations. Muriel Spark: the constant exile who travelled light.
Spark was Edinburgh born and bred and her writing reflects certain Scottish influences. In her lyrical novels there’s often there’s a line that repeats itself throughout – a nod to the Border Ballads. There is also a Jekyll and Hyde duality – a deft combination of darkness and light. In the Scottish tradition she is sceptical, but not cynical; in fact her novels are cheerfully optimistic. Moreover she is rigorously questioning and discerning. “Don’t be fooled” is the underlying message in much of her work.
There is a certain irony in that the centenary celebrations are centred around Edinburgh. Spark left Edinburgh when she was 19 never to return to live there. Significantly it was a place where she felt consistently misunderstood.
“I think it’s necessary to leave Edinburgh,” Spark once said in an interview. Despite the breathtaking beauty of the city and its annual August shenanigans, there is something singularly oppressive about the place. Referred to among locals as a “village”, there is a certain requirement to conform, where blandness appears to go hand-in-hand with success and cliques are rife. Nowhere is this atmosphere captured so well as in Spark’s best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Jean Brodie – the charismatic teacher with whom her colleagues are so keen to find fault; a burgeoning narcissist who, in her increasing isolation, forms her own cult, exploiting her students and in some cases ruining their lives. It’s a classic case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor.
It’s unlikely that Muriel Spark would have thrived in Edinburgh. She was far too free-thinking and independent. Spurred into exile, her life became a constant bid for freedom.
It was Edinburgh that bred within me the conditions of exile; and what have I been doing since but moving from exile to exile. It has ceased to be a fate, it has become a calling.”
Spark’s writing rallies against groupthink and the ways in which people try to manipulate each other. Funny and playful, her lyrical, clear-eyed prose cuts through prejudice. Characters and plots defy expectation and question conventional wisdom. Endlessly inventive, Spark turns everything on its head.
The Novels
With 22 novels to enjoy in addition to poetry, short stories and biographies, Muriel Spark is the gift that keeps on giving. Whether you snorkel along the surface or dive deep, she is a constant revelation.
Spark’s novels seem to work in pairs, even when written years apart. The Comforters (1957) and Loitering with Intent (1981) feature female writers going against the grain whilst seeking to discern fact from fiction.
The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Hothouse by the East River (1973) make a great pairing for the way they handle extremes. Both stories have absurd plots and characters that question the line between sanity and madness. The Driver’s Seat, where a woman seeks her own murderer, is darkly funny whilst Hothouse is arguably more outrageous – worth reading alone for the psychiatrist-turned-butler if not the geriatric performance of Peter Pan.
The Girls of Slender Means (1963) works as a kind of sequel to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The Girls… could be Brodie’s girls making their way in the world: excitable young women inhabiting a London boarding house when tragedy strikes. Both feature enclosed groups of young women; both novels an exploration of good and evil.
The Public Image (1968) and Reality and Dreams (1996) are set in the film world, or rather behind-the-scenes. They explore the nature of fame (like a child with a momentum of its own), control, infidelity, blackmail, ambition, redundancy and the interplay of art and life.
In The Public Image, successful actress Annabel Christopher has a reputation as an “Lady-Tiger” (she is anything but) whilst the men closest to her deem her stupid and seek to undermine her with their various plots. Calm and sensible, Annabel is an understated feminist heroine, one who quietly outplays her manipulators then leaves them all behind. Not unlike the author herself.
There’s a lot of blackmail in my work and unspoken blackmail. I see it and I suffer from it. I don’t wear it. I always call people’s bluff. I can’t stand it.” – Muriel Spark
Spark’s preoccupation with the mechanics of fiction combined with her acceptance of the dual nature of reality, make her an author, perhaps the author for our time. By upending convention, she liberates the reader and in turn opens up a whole new world of possibility.
When life on earth seems all too crazy, there’s nothing like a trip to the moon to give you perspective. With the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, the lunar experience has never been so within reach. In cinemas there’s the awe-inspiring yet sobering Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, and/or have another excuse to visit Denmark and head to THE MOON: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
A scenic train ride just north of Copenhagen, Louisiana is worth a visit for its dreamy setting alone: a sea-side villa overlooking the Oresund Strait – Sweden lies just across the water – and whose back garden features a fairy-tale lake. It’s a place of calm and escape.
stars around the beautiful moon
hide back their luminous form
whenever all full she shines
on the earth
silvery
– Sappho
Take the anonymous back entrance to The Moon exhibition (Louisiana’s not big on signs) and you start with moon-inspired poetry (the finest from Sappho, Borges, Leopardi, Dickinson and Plath) and end being serenaded by a ghostly unmanned grand piano playing – what else? – Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata.
The museum presents “a multifaceted portrait of the Moon and its significance in modern culture” and it’s brilliant. With its 6 themes – Moonlight, Selenography, The Moon of Myth, The Moon Landing, The Colonisation of Space and Deep Time – the exhibition is almost guaranteed to re-ignite curiosity in a satellite that humans have perhaps come to take for granted, not least since we stuck a flag on it.
Deep Time explores the geology of the earth and moon with a plethora of fascinating facts. It reminds us that while the moon is moving away from the earth, the earth’s rotation is slowing down. More of a surprise was that the earth is technically pear-shaped.
In The Colonisation of Space, various architectural designs are on display for inhabiting the moon, the most attractive of which is China’s 3D-printed igloo. According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, no government can lay claim to any celestial body, not that it has stopped anyone from trying. Nor does it seem to have prevented the 100+ million pieces of space junk orbiting our planet. The seductive voices of musician Gruff Rhys and actress Sally Potter narrate two trippy short films on the subject.
The earth looked like a jewel floating in blackness.”
Video art features heavily throughout the exhibition and offers some of the most memorable experiences. Towards the end/beginning of the exhibition, an astronaut describes both the beauty of space and the physical challenges of returning to earth – thwarted balance and acceleration, heightened sensitivities and the sheer weight of everything: “My wristwatch felt like a bowling ball.” Adapting to earth, it turns out, is even harder than adapting to space.
Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality installation “To the Moon”
One way to avoid the massive come-down is to take a journey of a different kind and Louisiana offers that very thing. Artist Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality installation “To the Moon” is the absolute highlight of the exhibition. As if inhabiting a video-game, participants can walk on and float above the moon whilst extended arms allow for scrambling up craters. You have to trust where you are going for when you find yourself riding a donkey to the edge of a cosmic abyss or perched on the peak of a mountain, it’s a battle of the senses in order not to lose balance.
Both political and poetic, Anderson’s journey conjures feelings of wonder and loss. There is the sense of fragility of life on earth where images of dinosaurs and the word democracy become stardust. “I like stars,” Anderson says, “because we can’t harm them.”
The Moon Landing section offers stunning photographs by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong as well as fascinating work by the artist Robert Rauschenberg who was invited by NASA to witness the launch of Apollo 11. Lithographs and collages produced for the unpublished Stoned Moon book capture the sublime imagination and the sheer enormity of the mission. The text in his collages offer an amusing and poetic take: “Fantastic things happen when destinies bump and interlock.” Artist Yves Klein, meanwhile, provides a healthy does of scepticism. Klein was against the superpowers’ space programmes. Space travel, he believed, should take the form of a spiritual journey.
The Moon Landing section with lithographs and collages by Rauschenberg (right)
Symbol of Longing
The Moon of Myth explores the role of the moon in our imaginations with stories from Danish folklore, surrealist art from Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell and the world’s first sci-fi, Georges Méliès’ raucous hand-coloured A Trip to the Moon (1902) – a film that is very much out-there.
For the artists of Romanticism (the so-called “moon-light period” of 19th century European culture) the moon was a symbol of longing. “The sublime power of the moon lies in its distance from us: it is at once visible, accessible and yet at a distance and therefore unattainable.” In other words, the moon is the ultimate muse.
A still from George Melies’s `A Trip to the Moon’ (1902)
The Moonlight section features some gorgeous 19th century landscape paintings where “the frailty of human life is contrasted with the Moon’s eternal light.” It is somewhat ironic that artists were busy fetishising moonlight at a time when artificial light was fast taking over.
Moonlight nowadays has become an endangered species, an issue highlighted by Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight. It’s a work of art that does what it says on the tin – a single light bulb in a room. Outside, a set of 289 bulbs offer a lifetime’s supply of moonlight. After Laurie Anderson’s VR trip to the moon, the experience of sitting in a room with a single hanging light bulb was a tad underwhelming (but then I did the exhibition backwards). Paterson’s clinical work however encourages a renewed appreciation of the real thing.
Perhaps the most stunning images of the exhibition are NASA’S up close and personal photographs of the moon’s surface. Located in Selenography, this part of the exhibition tells the story of the mapping of the moon, an occupation that dates all the way back to Galileo in 1609, when, thanks to his improved telescope, he discovered that the surface of the moon was anything but perfect.
The NASA photographs are both beautiful and intriguing and include a shot of the mysterious dark side of the moon. Technically it’s not so dark (it’s officially called the far side of the moon) as the “dark side” receives just as much sunlight as its earth face.
Gleaming Lights of the Souls by Yayoi Kusama
A happy coincidence is the presence of the Yayoi Kusama installation, Gleaming Lights of the Souls. in the midst of THE MOON exhibition. In place since 2008, Gleaming Lights is a mirrored room full of tiny hanging lights that constantly change colour. With its 360° views of infinity, Gleaming Lights encourages a sense of wonder and embodies the spirit of THE MOON exhibition, a place where inner worlds and outer space collide.
First Man
For a blockbuster about space travel, First Man is surprisingly down-to-earth, subdued even. Director Damien Chazelle, whose previous films include La La Land and Whiplash, once again ventures behind the scenes of show business with a low-key biopic of Neil Armstrong, the man who fronted one of the 20th century’s greatest spectacles.
First Man is as much about one man’s grief as it is about stepping foot on the moon and the film plays on the lines between life and death. Devastated after the death of his young daughter, Armstrong remains the consummate professional, confident in his ability to get the job done. Humble, conscientious and tactiturn, Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) is a welcome antidote to the more usual bravado of the on-screen American hero.
Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in First Man (2018)
First man doesn’t glamourise space travel. In fact it does quite the opposite. As with the early days of aviation (see Mary S Lovell’s biography of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart) space travel was an uncomfortable and perilous endeavour where the slightest error could result in tragedy; it required high-intelligence and nerves of steel. Armstrong, of course, had both and thus narrowly avoids catastrophe on several occasions.
Not only does Armstrong lose his daughter to illness, he also loses friends and colleagues (who themselves leave families behind) in the name of the space race. First Man doesn’t offer a fixed view however it does question the point of space travel. There are scenes of protests claiming that the money would be better spent fixing problems on earth and that space travel is a white man’s game. Armstrong’s long-suffering and otherwise stoic wife Janet (Claire Foy) lets loose at one point in the film calling NASA“a bunch of boys making models out of balsa wood.”
Claire Foy as Janet Armstrong
Whilst politicians vie for prestige and scientists advocate for research, at a press conference, Armstrong is more circumspect: “Leaving the planet, and seeing how thin the atmosphere is that keeps us alive… seeing, with one’s own eyes, just how fragile human life is… gives a different perspective.”
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
First Man culminates with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (shout out to Second Man) landing and walking on the moon. Not only does the film manage to convey the sheer enormity of the achievement, it maintains the suspense even though we know the mission was successful. And rather than highlighting the moon landing as an American achievement (the flag is shown but not the moment when the flag was placed), Chazelle focusses more on human endeavour.
For Armstrong the moon landing was deeply personal. In the film he takes a moment to himself where he walks to a nearby crater and leaves his daughter’s bracelet. (Whether or not Armstrong really left anything on the moon we may never know unless we go back, however he did stray from the official plan.) Moreover, that a man of so few words should come up with the quote of the century is remarkable.
I loved First Man. But it’s not really about going to the moon. It’s about a man so desperately sad that he‘d risk his life to go on a faraway rock where everything is dead, silent, and still forever. “Do you think I’m standing out here because I want to talk to somebody?” – Elena Lazic, film critic
First Man is a fitting tribute to a man of extraordinary courage and by extension, all astronauts and their families. Brilliantly acted – Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy are wonderful. My only gripe is that the formidable Janet Armstrong doesn’t get a role beyond being the long-suffering wife. A recent New York Times interview with the Armstrong sons revealed that Janet taught synchronised swimming. Further research reveals that she founded the El Lago Aquanauts in 1964, a team in which many astronaut families were involved. At the time of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, the team were competing in the Nationals. Wouldn’t scenes of synchronised swimmers have contrasted beautifully with astronauts in space?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from THE MOON exhibition and First Man, it’s that, whilst space travel can take different forms, I never want to leave planet earth. And the moon? Best viewed from a distance.
THE MOON: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space exhibition poster
It is hardly surprising that Netflix made the decision to pull its slate from Cannes following hostility from the world’s most prestigious film festival. Festival Director Thierry Frémaux eased the competition ban on streaming films only to reinstate it out of the blue. Not only, his way of letting Netflix know was via an interview with an online film magazine, at the same time taking the opportunity to ban selfies on the red carpet.
To expect Netflix to play ball after such haughty treatment was unrealistic, not to mention short-sighted. Cannes prides itself on championing avant-garde cinema yet it fails to recognise that streaming is today’s new wave. In a battle between tradition and innovation, the festival seems reluctant to change.
It is not however unusual for cultural organisations which pride themselves on the unconventional to trip up when it comes to their own backyard. Suddenly that free spirit they are so keen to be associated with becomes a threat. Ironically the 2017 Palme d’Or winner The Square tackles this very subject: a satire on the high-self regard of the art world.
The rise of Netflix has met with much hostility, not only from Cannes and its supporters but also film industry insiders. Whilst you might expect those with vested interests such as TV executives and film distributors to oppose Netflix (even if they claim to be fighting to protect cinema rather than their own finances) it is the film journalists and media in general who have jumped at the chance to find fault with the streaming service. Netflix has been portrayed as the greedy purveyor of trash entertainment out to destroy the big screen experience, one with dodgy algorithms and poor recommendations which invests in innovative cinema only to then go and hide it.
“It doesn’t matter if everyone can watch a movie if no one actuallydoes,” complained one film critic, which would be fair to say if it wasn’t for the fact that Palme d’Or-winning films tend to get a limited theatrical release. Ironically streaming services give Palme d’Or winners a greater lifespan. The Square, for example, is currently available on – you guessed it – Netflix.
Maybe there are valid points within the criticism of Netflix. Surely as a fast-growing company chartering new territory there will be room for improvement. What makes Netflix different is that it is prepared to listen to criticism; it is surprisingly self-aware and not afraid to poke fun at itself.
Rather than congratulate Netflix however on its successful business model and willingness to invest in the industry critics seem all too keen to bash the newcomers simply because they saw an opportunity and took it. It’s almost as if Netflix forgot to ask permission before blind siding everyone with its success.
Only the Financial Times has given Netflix some kind of credit with its neutral but prolific coverage in recent weeks as the streaming platform announced a boom in international subscriptions and a doubling of its European content budget – a timely response to the naysayers.
Whilst hugely ambitious, Netflix is not without a sense of duty; the motto Freedom and Responsibility is key to its working culture. One wonders if Facebook might not have sold off users’ data to all and sundry had it shown a little more integrity in its quest for profit.
Behind the Scenes of the Completion of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind | Netflix
Whilst industry insiders will line up to defend the big screen experience (which isn’t necessarily under threat) you would be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who has worked with Netflix and who is willing to criticise them. Not only does Netflix give them the money and creative control to make the film they want, it offers the capacity to reach a wide audience.
When critics equate Netflix with the death of cinema, they often fail to acknowledge that the films Netflix have funded might not otherwise have been made. Moreover Netflix makes non-mainstream films accessible to a huge audience, including people who can’t afford or don’t have access to cinemas. In this respect, Netflix is democratising the film industry.
Netflix is not the only streaming platform, it is simply the most successful. Other companies are falling over themselves to get in on the act whilst the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are in talks to create a British streaming service. Yet it is Netflix that attracts all the criticism. Its closest rival Amazon Prime has got off lightly, perhaps due to its support for theatrical releases. Netflix meanwhile has become shorthand for the entire streaming industry.
Streaming services are a low-commitment way of consuming films and TV. They give the consumer choice, which includes not using them at all. There’s no point blaming Netflix for your Netflix addiction when you’re the one in control; not only, it’s remarkably easy to unsubscribe.
Rather than signalling the death of the beloved theatrical experience, streaming simply offers an alternative viewing experience. The two formats are not mutually exclusive, rather they are complimentary. Curzon cinema, for example, simultaneously screens films in theatres and online.
If cinema has survived TV, it should also survive streaming. It is a question of adapting and finding new ways of working. Besides, if you love film, it’s likely you’ll want to consume it wherever and however you can.
Muriel Spark’s feminism is one of the most interesting aspects of her work and one that, outside of academic circles, has not been given much attention. Spark never advertised herself nor her work as feminist, yet when you look at the life she led, it was one of a liberated woman who carved her own path.
“Muriel Spark was a feminist, but not like Germaine Greer,” said Alan Taylor recently – a journalist and friend of Spark. This remark brilliantly sums up Spark’s feminism. Greer was and remains outspoken and direct, whereas Spark was somewhat less obvious. Moreover, Spark’s feminism was not the main focus of her work.
“She is a great novelist who looks like a quieter novelist. An essay on Spark must be correspondingly loud,” said the writer Adam Thirlwell. And he’s right. It’s easy to overlook the deeper meanings in Spark’s writing as the surface is so light-hearted (what Ali Smith refers to as Spark’s blitheness) whilst her novels are deceptively short. Moreover, Spark credits readers with enough intelligence to work things out for themselves.
Hiding in plain sight: New Directions editions featuring Muriel Spark
I am an independent woman.”
Spark didn’t align herself with the feminist movement and wanted to be seen not as a female writer but as a writer. Paradoxically it’s this individualism that is the key to her feminism. Spark puts the onus on the individual to define herself, Spark’s own life being a case in point. She led an independent, unconventional life and became a successful writer in an industry dominated by men. Arguably she could have been even more successful had the patriarchal literary establishment given Spark due credit. Aside from Jean Brodie, Spark wrote another much 21 lesser-known novels.
Spark had a tough life with real economic hardship up until when she became a successful novelist in her early 40s. When she had money, she enjoyed it. She loved to buy clothes and jewellery with the proceeds of her work and interestingly, when writing The Driver’s Seat, arguably her most feminist novel, she spent most of her downtime shopping. “We have the receipts to prove it,” said Alan Taylor (evidence, should Spark ever need it; her life being one long paper-trail). Whilst she loved clothes, it’s hard not to see Spark’s shopping as an expression of her power and freedom.
For Spark, equal pay was the most important concern when it came to women’s rights. She understood that in a world dominated by patriarchal capitalism, equal pay would change the power dynamic. Equal pay remains a key feminist issue – see the recent gender pay gap data.
Give her ten shillings,” said the Baron.
“It’s a man.”
“Give him two pounds.”
– The Comforters
Spark’s novels don’t argue for women’s rights as such; rather they describe the situation of women living under patriarchy, very often in comic fashion. Her breezy humour and lightness of touch frequently belie the seriousness of her subject.
Heroines
One of Spark’s major and largely unrecognised achievements was to put women centre-stage: spirited, complicated and sometimes dangerous women like the charismatic narcissist Jean Brodie. Spark’s heroines are not necessarily nice. Spark frees women from the pressure to be likeable, rather they are off-beat women with agency.
Spark’s heroines are often working women. My favourite are the writers, notably Caroline in Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957), who navigates the novel as a character in a novel who is writing a book about novels. Caroline listens to her own “madness” – the voice of The Typing Ghost – and plays it at it’s own game. It’s a clever exposé of the mechanics of fiction – arguably Spark’s biggest preoccupation.
The Comforters also features the marvellous Louisa Jepp, a septuagenarian diamond smuggler and keen pickler, whose charm and nonchalance provide a successful distraction from her underhand dealings. She’s like Maude in the film Harold and Maude (1971) only without the teenage lover.
Fleur Talbot, the poet and would-be novelist in Loitering with Intent (1981) is perhaps Spark’s greatest heroine. Utterly self-assured (the novel starts off with her writing poetry in a graveyard) she is never cowed by other people’s expectations or by their attempts to control her: “I was not any sort of victim; I was simply not constituted for the role.” Fleur plays manipulators at their own game in a novel that riffs on the interplay between art and life, and truth and fiction. It’s also a novel where incidences of casual sexism – from both sexes – are met with a swift retort.
The second week of the job she asked me if I was going to get married.
“No I write poetry. I want to write. Marriage would interfere.”
Loitering with Intent is perhaps the most autobiographical of Spark’s novels in that it focuses on the joys of being a writer and reveals the tricks of Spark’s trade. “A valentine to the writing life” is how her former publisher Joseph Kanon describes it, “Nothing was more important to Spark than her work.” A lesson in the importance of self-belief and following your own nature, Loitering with Intent exudes confidence and has a lyrical, celebratory feel.
How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.”
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963) features a group of young women in a London boarding house with little ambition. Both charming and flawed, they live in happy ignorance of much of the outside world. They preoccupy themselves with striving to be thin enough to wear the Schiaparelli dress they all share and to be able to fit through a tiny window – the gateway to sex and sunshine, and in the case of a fire, survival itself. It’s a wonderful metaphor for the impossibility of patriarchal beauty standards. Significantly, the blocking-up of the trapdoor to the roof is the result of patriarchal ideas about premarital sex – an action that leads to tragedy.
Bread-and-butter pudding is suicidal.”
If the fire wasn’t enough to highlight female entrapment, male aggression seems unavoidable: “He raped her. She was amazed.” At the end of The Girls of Slender Means, Jane is sexually assaulted – “nothing whatsoever could be done about it” – then a woman is stabbed in the middle of a crowd that pays no heed. The violence comes out of nowhere and is over in a flash.
Murder
He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.”
-The Portobello Road
Women seem to “get it” quite a lot in Spark’s novels. In Memento Mori (1959) an old lady is randomly bludgeoned to death during a burglary. In The Bachelors (1960) a man plots the murder of his pregnant girlfriend after she refuses to get rid of the baby. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) a young woman is murdered with a corkscrew. In Not to Disturb (1972), a Baron kills his wife and their mutual lover, whilst Aiding and Abetting (2000) was inspired by Lord Lucan’s murder of the nanny in the place of his wife.
Violence as a way of control is something that Spark would have understood well, having herself experienced an abusive relationship in her young marriage to the mentally unstable and violent Sidney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.). Abusive relationships leave a mark and I would hazard a guess that Spark’s concern with how people manipulate and control one another, as well as the nature of truth and lies, is rooted in this painful experience. It’s a subject Spark further explored when writing black propaganda for MI6 during the Second World War.
The Driver’s Seat (1970)
As soon as I saw you I knew that you were the one. You’re my type.”
The Driver’s Seat – the story of a woman who seeks her own killer – Spark takes the typical figure of the passive female victim and makes her the author of her own destiny. In essence a joke, the novel riffs on the idea that women are “asking for it” whilst exploring the nature of control.
Fabulously funny, The Driver’s Seat plays against convention at every turn. It upends the traditional murder mystery and pokes fun at the holiday romance, all whilst satirising patriarchal attitudes (see my previous post.)
From mansplaining to attempted rape, the heroine Lise experiences almost constant aggression from men keen to subjugate her to their desires. To a certain extent Lise courts the attention of these men, only it’s all part of the game: she is the hunter posing as prey.
Madness
What a crazy bitch you have created.” – Alfred A Knopf
Whilst Lise could be seen to expose the spiritual void at the centre of patriarchal capitalism, what is perhaps more interesting is the way she embodies the idea of the stereotypical hysterical woman. Lise’s madness is a red herring.
Look again. Elizabeth Taylor as Lise in the film adaptation of The Driver’s Seat (1974)
The Driver’s Seat shows how oppression drives people to madness and self-sabotage. Second, it shows victim-blaming as a crazy notion because only a mad woman would instigate her own murder. And third, it highlights female hysteria as a patriarchal concept, where calling women mad is a useful way of controlling them.
When Spark was writing The Driver’s Seat, a drunk Gore Vidal took the opportunity to criticise Spark’s previous novel, The Public Image (1968), saying it was implausible, reminding her that “all women writers go mad.” Spark may not have cared what Vidal thought, however The Driver’s Seat would have been a satisfying response to the widespread notion of women writers being thought of as inherently mad. Not only, The Driver’s Seat works as a send-up of all the crazy women in literature.
Am I noticeably neurotic, do you think?”
Spark’s own period of madness in the mid-1950s – hallucinations as a result of taking the slimming pill Dexedrine – followed by her conversion to Catholicism, provided the inspiration for The Comforters, the book that kick-started her career as a novelist. Arguably, Spark’s hallucinations opened her mind to a much greater sense of creative possibility. Madness, a prominent theme in Spark’s work, isn’t necessarily something to be shunned.
“Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?”
-The Comforters
Victims and Oppressors
By making the Lise in The Driver’s Seat the author of her own death, Spark inverts the traditional notion of the victim as a passive object. The beautiful young woman brutally murdered is a trope that persists in fiction and on screen. Spark turns this trope on its head; giving the victim agency and putting her centre-stage. So often with crimes, it is the victim who is forgotten.
Not only, Spark questions the whole notion of victimhood. “I think there is a kind of truth in the story,” she wrote to her agent in October 1969. “In some of the murders one reads about one senses a sort of collusion and sometimes one begins to wonder which party is the ‘victim.’”
All oppression creates a state of war.” – Simone de Beauvoir
Whilst Spark comes dangerously close to feeding the victim-blaming narrative that is so pervasive when it comes to violence against women, what she is saying is far more nuanced. The Driver’s Seat explores the interplay of victim and aggressor and how that can be a vicious cycle that serves to perpetuate oppression. An oppressive society, Spark seems to suggest, makes victims of us all (albeit victims of varying degrees). Moreover, Spark shows how easily victims can become perpetrators.
Spark’s intention seems to be, by exposing the mechanisms at work in an oppressive society, to empower individuals to see past the gaslighting and to recognise to what extent they are colluding in the system and where they might in fact have some control.
The Art of Ridicule
Spark’s 1970 speech entitled “The Desegregation of Art” offers valuable insight into the thinking behind The Driver’s Seat. In her speech Spark talks about the victim-oppressor complex and how it is portrayed in literature and art. She suggests that, whilst art can temporarily evoke sympathy, it tends to reinforce people’s roles as over- or underdogs.
Spark proposes to replace the art of “sentiment and emotion” with the art of ridicule – her weapon of choice for tackling violence and oppression. “Violence in any form,” she says, should be “ruthlessly mocked.” It’s a speech that would strike a chord today.
The only effective art of our particular time is the satirical, the harsh and witty, the ironic and derisive. Because we have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd.”
The Dying Swan: Anna Pavlova
Death of the Authoress
It could be that The Driver’s Seat is a response to the sexism of the literary world at the time. In 1967 Roland Barthes published his theory on The Death of the Author managing to completely leave out women writers. Could The Driver’s Seat be Spark’s mocking response – The Death of the Authoress – whereby Lise performs her own twisted version of Anna Pavlova’s The Dying Swan? (In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brodie takes her charges to see Pavlova perform that very dance.)
Second Wave Feminism
The Driver’s Seat was published in 1970, the same year as feminist classics The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett. The Female Eunuch rebelled against the idea of women as sex objects, whilst Sexual Politics identified the patriarchy as “the most pervasive ideology of our culture.” Lise, it could be said, rebels against being a sex object, not just with her garish clothes and the picking up and dropping of men, but in doing away with her body entirely. It seems that, intentionally or not, Spark was tapping into the zeitgeist.
Take Back Control
It’s not just Lise in The Driver’s Seat who self-sabotages in the attempt to take back control. Sandy similarly self-sabotages in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when she betrays her domineering teacher, leading to her penance as a nun – one who greets visitors from behind bars.
Spark’s observations on the cycle of victimhood in The Driver’s Seat extend far beyond the novel’s feminist subject matter; they apply to any situation where the oppressed are tricked into self-sabotaging.
Spark’s playful, subversive fictions are a wonderful antidote to the chaos of the so-called post-truth age. They serve to liberate rather than contain: in deconstructing myths Spark opens up a world of possibility, and in doing so, puts the power in the hands of the reader.
Whilst Cannes Film Festival is set to announce its line-up tomorrow, the big story is that Netflix is pulling all five of its films in response to the festival’s backtracking. It seems that the most prestigious of film festivals can’t make up its mind as to how to handle the film industry’s latest incomers.
After last year’s festival where the streaming platform Netflix presented two feature films in competition, Cannes subsequently banned streaming films from official competition only to go back on the decision and admit five Netflix films. Then in March 2018, in an interview with a French film website, Festival director Thierry Frémaux announced that Netflix films would only be screened out of competition. Word on the boulevard is that Netflix have in response pulled its films from the festival altogether.
All of which means that five potentially great films will be excluded: Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico-set Roma, Jeremy Saulnier’s Alaskan thriller, Hold the Dark, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Greengrass’ Norway, based on the white-supremacist killer Anders Breivik, and not one but two Orson Welles-related films (the documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and Welle’s unfinished final film The Other Side of the World – surely a coup for any festival).
Old School: Cannes Festival Director Thierry Frémaux
When new kid on the block Netflix debuted its first films at Cannes last year – Okja directed by Bong Joon-Ho and The Meyerowitz Stories directed by Noah Baumbach (both brilliant) – both were booed during the title credits. Critics literally couldn’t wait to judge the films on their own merit. Instead it was all about principal: the assumption that films funded by streaming services signalled the death of cinema itself.
But do they? While for many people the big screen experience is no match for watching a film on a laptop, streaming services are a reality for which there is huge demand (Netflix alone has over 100 million subscribers worldwide). As long as people still have an appetite for going to the cinema (in the UK at least, cinema admissions are on the up) there is no reason why the two formats can’t co-exist.
Secondly, and perhaps foremost, the single biggest barrier to getting a film made is money. Not only does Netflix have pots of it (its content budget this year alone is a hefty $8 billion), it is willing to invest in films and documentaries that otherwise would not have been made. Take the Welles restoration, for example. “There would be no movie without them (Netflix). Every studio and financier in town passed on this film, for years,” said producer Frank Marshall. Furthermore, Netflix gives directors what they most crave: creative control.
On The Money: Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos
Netflix is a company that can afford to take a risk where traditional studios might hold back. “There’s no mechanism to make a movie like Okja today outside of what we’re doing,” said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos last year. “No studio would take that risk on a Korean director on a film that barely has any English language in it. And in my opinion while that may sound risky, putting it in the hands of director Bong? Not very risky at all.” Film’s new financier is clearly a man of taste.
In an ideal world all great films would get a theatrical release whether or not they are also streamed, however a theatrical release is no guarantee of quality. Moreover theatrical releases can also have distribution issues, as was the case with Bong Joon-Ho’s previous film Snowpiercer – the blockbuster-that-never-was. (Harvey Weinstein didn’t like the director’s cut – he deemed it “too clever” for a theatre audience and thus sabotaged its theatrical release.)
Whilst criticism of Netflix might stem from a passion for film, it seems that Cannes Film Festival is, to a certain extent, shooting itself in the foot with its protectionist attitude. If the purists are so in love with the art of film, why demean talented filmmakers with an out of competition slot and a likely showering of boos? And if the big screen is so essential, wouldn’t Cannes be the perfect opportunity to showcase a streaming film in large format?
Locked out: Zazie in the Metro (1960)
It is ironic that the golden age of French filmmaking was the famous New Wave period of the 1950s and 1960s, famed for its out-with-the-old in-with-the-new attitude (see my post on Zazie in the Metro) where filmmakers rejected the conventional and conservative, breaking with tradition to produce experimental, radical films that addressed key social issues. To quote the website New Wave Film, “These filmmakers proved that they didn’t need the mainstream studios to produce successful films on their own terms.” Sound familiar?
New Wave: Pierrot Le Fou (1965) on the Cannes 2018 poster
In fact, the official poster for Cannes features a still from the New Wave film Pierrot Le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard (1965). It’s a gorgeous poster yet somewhat ironic considering the attitude of Cannes towards streaming.
Rather than put up barriers, why not work together to help ensure the longevity of cinema in all formats? The Netflix-produced Welles restoration is a great example of how streaming services can contribute to the legacy of cinema. This is a situation where a little bit of goodwill could go a long way.
Streaming platforms and their role in filmmaking are only set to become stronger not least as Apple has now joined the field promising an initial investment of $1bn in TV and film production. Banning Netflix films from competing at Cannes will do nothing to stem the tide.
Whilst it appears that Netflix have until now been doing their best to woo Cannes, the retraction of its films from the festival indicates a significant shift in power. It’s easy to imagine that next year it will be Cannes wooing Netflix and not the other way round.
There’s a lesson to be taken from Zazie in the Metro. Zazie’s dream is to come to Paris and ride the Metro only when she arrives there’s a strike and she finds herself locked out. What does she do with all that energy and thirst for adventure? She sets out on foot and creates a whirlwind of her own. Cannes: be warned!
For her Fall 2018 collection, Miuccia Prada sent a riot of eye-popping neon and candy-coloured pastels across the Milanese night skyline. “My dream is for women to be able to go out in the street late at night and not be afraid,” said the designer, whose latest vision fits her feminist outlook. Famous for creating clothes with a dual purpose – clothes that are both powerful and feminine, serious and playful – Prada produced a collection that offers protection and charm, one that focuses on making women visible. Industrial chic meets after-party, these are clothes for an all-night bender.
The setting couldn’t have been more perfect for this glow-in-the-dark collection. The show was held in the new extension to the Prada Foundation in Milan, a former distillery turned art space. Simply called ‘Torre’, this striking white tower designed by OMA offers fabulous views of Milan whilst providing a welcome landmark for the area. Yet to be opened to the public so still in a sense a building site, the fourth floor had a nightclub feel, merging with the city’s nightscape by way of neon signs, a black mirrored floor and electronic music, complete with a drone filming proceedings.
Despite the feel-good colours on display, the show didn’t garner the best reviews. It could well be that the 15-minute wait for the lift that never came (surely a metaphor for something) made the fashion pack somewhat less receptive to the wares on display. Whilst not the most overtly sexy of shows, the juxtaposition of colours and fabrics has a charm of its own; these are clothes that grab your attention. There’s a certain modesty to them too; although the longer you look, the more they reveal.
I thought about Muriel Spark, in particular the Italophile/Mussolini enthusiast Jean Brodie, when visiting the Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 exhibition, currently running at the Prada Foundation. It’s an extensive exhibition that charts the role of art and culture between the wars in a country dominated by fascism (with interesting timing given the recent shift in Italian politics towards populism and the far-right). The exhibition puts the art into context by recreating original exhibitions and offering a detailed timeline of events, as well as documenting the extent to which artists collaborated with the regime. It is particularly strong on the Futurists and their art of explosive colour.
It was only when I saw the images from the Prada Fall show however that the Muriel Spark centenary editions immediately sprung to mind (all 22 of her novels are being reprinted by Polygon this year to mark the centenary of Spark’s birth). The eye-catching book jackets designed by Teresa Monachino come in a variety of mouth-watering candy pastels and bright neons. Much like the latest Prada collection, it is hard to avert your gaze.
And so, beset by the flu, I set about matching book covers with outfits (a surprisingly soothing activity, much like doing a jigsaw puzzle) with uncanny results.
Whilst the matchmaking worked wonderfully with the Polygon editions, the New Directions edition of The Driver’s Seat (below left) also has its counterpart.
New Directions Edition
Prada Fall 2018
The model (above right) looks like she could be the main character in The Driver’s Seat – Lise: a woman on a mission who could well have a knife in her handbag. The 1974 film adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor is overdue for a remake and Miuccia Prada would be the perfect collaborator.
Muriel Spark loved clothes and accessories. I don’t know of her relationship with the fashion house, if any, however I like to imagine that Miuccia Prada and Muriel Spark would have got on well: both strong, independent, commercially successful female artists with a clear vision; both productive and experimental, playing with form whilst exploring opposites and extremes; artists whose work offers a much deeper commentary behind the glossy facade.
For weeks the French film director and Oscar nominee AgnèsVarda has been doing the rounds of pre-Oscars engagements as a cardboard cut-out. It’s a genius move from the 89-year-old New Wave legend and her much younger co-director, the 35-year-old artist known as JR. Nominated for Best Documentary for Faces Places, the duo are hotly tipped to win what would be their first competitive Oscar. (Varda was awarded an Honorary Oscar last year.) It is a recognition that has been a long time coming.
Varda was the toast of Tinseltown at the pre-Oscars lunch and even managed to appear in the official nominees photograph alongside Greta Gerwig and Meryl Streep, whilst on a visit to San Francisco she cosied up to the hottest president on the planet, Justin Trudeau – all without leaving her sofa. It’s a magnificent feat and one that will hopefully be rewarded tonight as both Varda and JR attend the Oscars in person.
All Change
The Oscars, 90 years old this year, rarely gets it right which is all the more reason to celebrate when it does. For all the film industry’s faults – and never have its flaws been so on display – the Academy Awards is a celebration of film and the role it plays in our culture.
The new level of political awareness is a great thing because it means that change is coming. There’s no point letting a pig like Weinstein ruin the party when in less than 6 months, his influence has been almost entirely eradicated whilst the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have flourished. Similarly, the #OscarsSoWhite debacle has led to greater diversity in films and awards as well as an increased awareness of racial inequality. There is still a huge amount of inequality in the film industry but acknowledging it is the first step to taking action.
Viewing figures may be declining but the Academy Awards are still the most important visual platform in the film industry calendar. They are the perfect time to make a statement, whether that’s wearing all black in support of the Time’s Up movement or laying an egg whilst dressed as a swan à la Bjork in 2001 (right).
If the Academy wants more viewers, then I suggest that it gets the TV companies to stop charging audiences to watch. It might also be worth rescheduling the whole show to start at lunchtime rather than 8pm, that way Europeans can get their glitz fix whilst not losing any beauty sleep and Americans can get to bed early. Sunday is a school night after all.
Small Wonders
Whilst not entirely unhappy with this year’s Oscars nominations (it’s been a great year for film) there are some performances and films that have gone under the radar: Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, Olivia Cooke in the Limehouse Golem and the entire casts of the Beguiled, The Handmaiden and The Party. The performances I’ve really loved however are not always leads. Often a small part well-acted can transform a film – so I’ve come up with a new category: Best Cameo.
Nominations as follows:
Chloe Sevigny in The Snowman. A horror turned farce, The Snowman contained gems such as Chloe Sevigny as a chicken-slayer and her twin sister, as well as Val Kilmer doing his best Knausgaard impression. Sevigny has a sharp intelligence, great comic timing and a game approach.
Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name. Stuhlbarg’s performance as the boy’s father, Professor Perlman is gorgeous. His character has gravitas, sensitivity and warmth and delivers the speech of the century to his heartbroken son. A performance that is perfectly pitched.
Betty Gabriel in Get Out> A small part as the maid in Get Out but a crucial one. Gabriel’s terrifying facial expressions show the cracks in the facade. And no, you’re not imagining it!
Caleb Landry Jones in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Whilst his colleagues garnered all the acting accolades and will no doubt take home a few gongs tonight, it was Jones who lit up the screen as an advertising clerk with integrity: the man who kept his cool whilst everyone else was going crazy. A necessary, sane influence without whom the film might have spun off its axis.
Michelle Pfeiffer in Murder on the Orient Express. Pfeiffer was electric in Kenneth Branagh’s film all about Kenneth Branagh. Pfeiffer however had the world asking, where have you been? Someone needs to write her an entire film quick.
Douglas Booth in the Limehouse Golem. Booth plays a cross-dressing cabaret performer in this Peter Ackroyd adaptation: a feminist take on the Jack the Ripper story. Outrageously camp and beautifully ambiguous, Booth keeps the audience guessing until the very end.
And the winner is… Michael Stuhlbarg.
Best Dad: Michael Stuhlbarg as Professor Perlman in Call Me By Your Name
No better time than during a snowfall to pick up a book about polar bears. Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, published by Granta, is about three generations of polar bears in captivity, two of whom actually existed – the famous Knut of Berlin Zoo and his mother, Tosca.
Knut’s Russian grandmother is the first to take up the pen. A former tricyclist turned circus administrator who attends conferences on, for example, “The Significance of Bicycles in the National Economy” as part of her job. Bored by endless panel discussions, she takes up writing. Her autobiography becomes an instant bestseller.
“All penguin marriages are alike, while every polar marriage is different,” I wrote in Russian.
The grandmother has a daughter, Tosca, who she dreams will take the lead in Tchaikovsky’s Polar Bear Lake. Tosca’s talent as a ballerina however goes unrecognised so she joins the circus in East Berlin and forms a tango double-act with her life-long human trainer, Barbara.
The circus disbanded, Tosca gives birth to Knut in Berlin Zoo. Cute and lonely, Knut becomes a worldwide sensation and much as he comes to enjoy the act of performing, what he really craves is the love of his devoted keeper, Matthias.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a very playful book, at once gentle and biting. Big on irony, the bears have a child-like innocence that serves to highlight the absurdities of human behaviour, whilst the circus and zoo provide ideal settings for the human vs animal and nature vs nurture debates. The book does a brilliant job of blurring the lines between humans and animals, turning human superiority on its head and reminding the reader that humans are animals too, subject to the throes of nature and geared towards survival.
My evolution was clearly a regression.
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, the translation perfectly captures the wistful, poetic charm of the novel as well as its ascerbic humour, so much so that it won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2017.
Political but in the most disarming way. Feminism, inequality, animal rights and socialism all get a look in. The grandmother is oblivious to what being packed off to Siberia actually means (in fact, she welcomes the idea: “If anyone was a good fit for Siberia, it was me. Cold weather was my passion”) whilst Knut draws attention to immigration and racism with innocent frustration:
I don’t come from the North Pole. I’ve read several times in the newspaper that I was born in Berlin… Still, people kept saying I was from the North Pole, probably because of my snow-white fur.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear is also very good on the writing process – the impulse to write and its inherent frustrations – as well as resilience in the face of rejection, or worse, danger to one’s life.
The entire literary establishment had decided to give me the cold shoulder.
Dreamy, funny and endlessly quotable, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is an oddball book, one that treads lightly and is unexpectedly moving. The reader will likely come away feeling a little bit heartbroken (it’s hard not to fall in love with Knut), a little more human and a lot more animal.
Whilst Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a fictional biography of animals in captivity, Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply is the real life memoir of a woman who pushed freedom to the max.
“People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.”
Levy’s biography starts off mired in grief. A successful New York journalist with the world at her feet, Levy was married and pregnant when she travelled to Mongolia on assignment, only to miscarry by herself in a hotel bathroom. The miscarriage signalled the unravelling of her entire life and the destruction of the idea that as a woman in the 21st century, she could have it all.
Levy was a woman both privileged and hungry whose lust for life spectacularly backfired. Not surprisingly, the whole book centres around her miscarriage, a harrowing event that overshadows all others. Much as the book covers Levy’s childhood, her career and romantic adventures – all fascinating – there is the strong sense that everything in the book is either leading up to or following this earth-shattering event.
She is an excellent writer and the book is a gripping read. It jumps between journalistic assignments for The New Yorker and childhood flashbacks before charting her relationship with her wife, a lust-fuelled affair with her ex-girlfriend-turned-boyfriend, and Levy’s quest to become a mother. She describes her conflicting attitudes to motherhood and to life itself: her craving for adventure and security.
Levy’s family is particularly interesting. Like Knut, Levy has a Russian grandmother who fled to the West. Crucially, her mother had a lover who used to come and stay in the family home. It is perhaps no surprise that her parents ended up divorced. Her mother’s affair seems to be a contributing factor in Levy’s childhood insomnia and struggle with fidelity.
Reason, language, gender – and also loyalty, morality, decency – simply aren’t currency in the carnal world. This world is value-neutral. This world is inside out.
Levy is very good on gender (her assignments involve interviewing intersex athletes and radical feminists), on desire – that inexplicable animal magic that Levy compares to a drug, and on grief she is devastating:
I had a longing – ferocious, primal, limitless, crazed – for the only person I had ever made. The sleeping almonds of his eyes. The graceful wings of his rib cage. His living, moving arms. (His soul.)
The trauma is still very much present as the memoir comes to an end but Levy remains hopeful. She doesn’t regret becoming a mother, however heart-breaking the experience: “The ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for.” It is a testament to the power of motherhood.
Levy accepts that she has been forever changed. It is a profound realisation for Levy that, whilst for most of her life she has felt in control of her destiny, free to pursue her desires, she remains at the mercy of nature.
Nobody gets everything.
There are limits to freedom, it seems. Perhaps we are all animals in captivity. To quote Viktor Frankel in the book’s epigraph: “Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.”
Whilst The Prime of Jean Brodie is by a long way Muriel Spark’s most famous book, it is another, lesser-known novel that could well be her masterpiece. The Driver’s Seat, the story of a young woman who plots her own death at the hands of a convicted sex maniac, is the preferred Spark novel of many, including Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Written in Rome and published in 1970, The Driver’s Seat was Spark’s own favourite of her 22 novels. The 88-page thriller is also the favourite of another notable Scottish writer, Ian Rankin who describes it as “an incredibly slim and surreal slice of modern gothic” while The New Yorker magazine called it “her spiny treacherous masterpiece.”
Completely sick. In all the right ways.” – Tilda Swinton
Nicola Sturgeon and Ian Rankin came to an event at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall last week along with 2,000 others to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark. They talked about their admiration for Spark and read extracts from her life-long work. It turns out there is a lot of love for Edinburgh’s home-grown talent, even if she left the city that she felt didn’t really understand her to embark on a globe-trotting existence.
Muriel Spark exhibition poster
The event was part of the Muriel Spark 100 programme a year-long project to celebrate a writer who, despite her genius, risked disappearing into history, to become the hallowed secret of a select few. This resurrection has not only got people re-reading and re-evaluating Spark’s work in light of the current political climate, it has engaged a whole new audience.
The Muriel Spark exhibition at the National Library of Scotland is also part of the centenary programme. Organised by location rather than chronology, the exhibition conveys the extraordinary daring and self-possession in Spark’s life and work. Assisted by Spark’s meticulous archive – “One thing I have always known about my well ordered archive is that it would stand by me. The silent objective evidence of truth, should I ever need it” – the exhibition presents a woman who, in spite of various difficulties, remained very much in the driver’s seat.
In my beginning, is my end” – TS Eliot
In The Driver’s Seat, Lise, a 34-year-old woman fed up of her office job, flies south on holiday in search of adventure. Much like the French bestseller Lullaby whose end lies in its beginning (“The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.”), The Driver’s Seat is quick to tell the reader how it all ends: our heroine “will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie”
Whilst the reader is at first led to believe that Lise has been murdered and that all the men she encounters on her journey are suspects, it eventually transpires that Lise has not been looking for a lover, but for a killer.
Elizabeth Taylor in a poster for the film adaptation of The Driver’s Seat
The Driver’s Seat is a profoundly feminist novel, one that makes the French film Elle (where a woman plays cat and mouse with her rapist) look tame by comparison. It’s a satire, one that mocks the patriarchy, highlights its absurdities and exposes the emptiness behind the bright facade of modern life.
Lise’s motivations are never fully explained and Spark plays on this: “Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” But there are clues. There’s a mysterious period of illness in Lise’s past, a job that Lise is literally sick to death of and erratic behaviour that both hides and highlights Lise’s true purpose.
Lise’s entire journey involves leaving a trail of evidence. She wants to be noticed and she wants her killer to be caught. Her tantrum over a stain-proof dress seems mad until it transpires that Lise wants fabric that will stain – evidence to help convict her murderer. Lise is not simply a woman hell-bent on self-destruction, she is intent upon taking others with her; and by persuading a convicted sex-attacker to do the dirty deed, she is taking a symbolic revenge.
You’ll get caught, but at least you’ll have the illusion of a chance to get away.”
The men Lise encounters on her trip are the worst. Take Bill, for example, the macrobiotic cult leader with his “need” for a daily orgasm, an entitled bore and archetypal mansplainer (decades before the term was even invented). Then there is the mechanic who mistakes Lise for a student protester, dismisses her cause then tells her to “go back to the brothel” among other insults.
There is the sense that Lise has been, not only held back at work by men but badly let down in her personal life. It is her conversations with would-be murderer Richard that are the most revealing. Written at the end of the swinging sixties, the novel seems to question the freedom that the decade supposedly brought: “It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before… but the problem is afterwards. That is, if you aren’t just an animal. Most of the time, afterwards is pretty sad.”
The men in the novel do little to appease her trust. Lise narrowly escapes rape – twice! – before in each case stealing the man’s car (a clever reminder of who is in control, albeit temporarily).
Spark’s breezy lightness and ready humour belie a much darker reality. By making Lise the author of her own death, Spark takes female sacrifice under patriarchy to the extreme. It’s a perverse joke, an exaggeration for comic effect.
Kill me,” she says and repeats it in four languages.
Like the film Elle, The Driver’s Seat only works as a fantasy. Both works play with notions of victimhood and revenge within the safe space of fiction. Ever generous, Spark likes to remind the reader of the book’s fictional status with Lise clutching a paperback, a kind of ID, at key moments. Her murder imminent, Lise gives the book away: “Would you like a book to read? I don’t need it anymore.” Of course she doesn’t.
It’s a dark joke too when Lise goads her killer:
‘”A lot of women get killed,” he says.
“Yes, I know, they look for it.”
Whilst exposing the absurdity of implicating victims in acts of violence, Spark implicates the murderer instead. Not only, Spark turns the traditional notion of the passive female victim on its head by giving her agency and making her the star of the show..
The Driver’s Seat in translation (Spanish edition)
Reading The Driver’s Seat is an unexpectedly liberating experience. Maybe it’s Spark’s clever skewering of patriarchy, or perhaps it’s Lise’s refusal to conform in any way; there’s a sense of freedom in Lise that’s intoxicating. Or maybe it’s feeling most alive when you’re closest to death.
There is a kind of freedom too in renunciation, in leaving it all behind (Spark herself was a consummate escape artist), but that doesn’t take away from Spark’s damning criticism of the status quo – where attempts to take control can mean giving it all away.
Credit to Lauren Elkin for producing a work so empowering that simply leaving the house becomes a revolutionary experience.
In Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, author Lauren Elkin takes the traditionally male concept of the flâneur – “one who wanders aimlessly” – and turns it on its head by inserting women into the picture. I never thought that walking around noticing things was a thing until I read Elkin’s book; neither did Elkin until she moved to Paris and walking became her most meaningful way of interacting with the city. “I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting,” she says.
Just as women have been largely written out of history, Elkin takes it upon herself to write them back in. Women are not known for occupying public spaces, which is why flâneuse-ing feels so empowering.
The joy of walking in the city belongs to men and women alike.”
“The flâneuse,” says Elkin, “is a figure to be reckoned with… She voyages out and goes where she is not supposed to.” A figure of courage and inspiration, “she is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”
Elkin is in fine company. Her cultural history/memoir follows in the footsteps of such keen flâneuses as Virginia Woolf and George Sand as it explores the metropolitan hotspots of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City is a kind of flânerie in itself.
For the writer Jean Rhys, Paris was a both a refuge and a place to lose oneself. It is via Rhys that Elkin describes a doomed love affair of her own and the “addictive pleasure of despair” for which Paris was the perfect setting. Not only did walking offer temporary respite to Rhys and her characters, it was as a result of Rhys’ wandering that led her to taking up pen and ink.
Woolf too was well aware of the walking cure. “To walk alone in London is the greatest rest,” she noted. Walking offered freedom and inspiration, not least for the character of Mrs Dalloway. Woolf penned an essay on “street haunting” as she called it, a name which conjures up a wonderful image of ghostly observers travelling where they like.
“I am always looking for ghosts on the boulevards,” says Elkin with a poet’s eye, as she notes the traces of history and memories triggered by a walk. Paris, the city of revolutions and reinvention is explored via the writer George Sand, the “every day radical” for whom cross-dressing offered her the freedom of anonymity and crucially, speed: “I flew from one end of Paris to the other.”
In the labyrinthine city of Venice, Elkin shadows the subversive artist Sophie Calle as she follows unsuspecting targets in a game of hide-and-seek. Following becomes a subversive art as Calle reverses the typical man-stalks-woman chase and questions whether submission can in fact be a way of taking control.
Marching is a political act, but it’s a social one as well.”
Whereas Tokyo (all lifts and escalators) and Long Island (no pavements) present few opportunities for the urban flâneuse, it is Paris in which Elkin finds her feet. It is Paris where she becomes an accidental marcher then a deliberate one. She joins the collective in the tradition of “le manif” and explores the roots of the 1968 uprising, from which she draws some interesting conclusions. For Elkin 1968 was a turning point in which the French expressed a new-found solidarity with immigrants.
It is this sense of belonging to which Elkin continually returns. Elkin, a self-described “wanderer who wanted to be a settler” finds a sense of community in her Parisian neighbourhood. As does the film director Agnès Varda whose films are a kind of cinematic flânerie and le quartier a treasure trove of inspiration.
The first feminist act is to gaze.” – Agnès Varda
Dreamers, freedom-seekers, observers… in search of the “unexpected beauty of the quotidian,” for the flâneuse the rewards are plentiful, however they do not come without their responsibilities. For Elkin, “Learning to see meant not being able to look away.” The jet-set journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn felt this obligation too, but also a need: “I have to see before I can imagine.” In this way wandering becomes an act of empathy.
All things considered, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City is a persuasive invitation for women to take to the streets. In doing so, women claim the right to challenge “the invisible boundaries of the city” and to remake space on their own terms. “Space,” reaffirms Elkin, “is a feminist issue.” The city is there for the taking and all we need to do is go for a walk.
It was a film poster that kick-started my love affair with Muriel Spark: a kohl-eyed Elizabeth Taylor with a halo of knives. I was immediately hooked.
No better time than during a snowfall to pick up a book about polar bears. Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, published by Granta, is about three generations of polar bears in captivity, two of whom actually existed – the famous 
Jeanie in the Metro 