Loitering with Intent | Thornfield Hall

“But that day in the twentieth century I felt more than ever how good it is to be a woman and an artist there and then.” – The narrator of Muriel Spark’s “Loitering with Intent”

In the preface of her brilliant new biography, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Frances Wilson portrays Muriel Spark as a dominating writer who tries to control Martin Stannard’s authorized biography. Spark chose Stannard because she admired his biography of Evelyn Waugh.

“So much misinformation has been put out about me,” she told him before he began. When the biography was published, she was furious. “A hatchet job,” she told people.

Spark had many friends, but also frenemies and enemies: Wilson devotes a long chapter to her best friend-lover-turned-enemy, Derek Stanford, who wrote poems with her. They “literally finished each other’s sentences,” writes Wilson. I am most interested in Stanford because he is the model for Sir Quentin in her novel Loitering with Intent.

Certainly Spark was more difficult, and less mischievous than her alleged alter-ego, Fleur Talbot, the narrator of Loitering with Intent, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981. Fleur, a novelist, takes a job as a secretary for Sir Quentin, director of the Autobiographical Association. Quinn assures the small group of aristocrats in the Autobiographical Association that their memoirs will be locked away for 70 years.

Fleur finds the job easy, but she suspects Sir Quentin of a blackmail scam. As she types up the aristocrats’ first chapters, she enlivens them with melodramatic details. Some of the memoirists are dubious of the results, but others like it.

Sir Eric Findlay is dubious. “I say, Quentin, my memoir has been tampered with.” Apparently it is true that the butler locked him in the pantry and made him polish the silver (“How did you know that?”), but Sir Eric Findlay did not catch Nanny and the butler riding on his rocking horse.

Loitering with Intent is Muriel Spark at her best. Her writing is exquisite, spare, hilarious and ironic: her images jump off the page. Halfway through, the story turns into a parodic heist-and-counter-heist farce. The manuscript of Fleur’s first novel, Warrender Chase, is stolen, and the hilarious hunt is absurd and enthralling.

Still, we wonder: is Fleur really Spark’s alter-ego? Fleur/Spark is also the doppelganger of evil Sir Quentin/Derek Stanford. The fictional pair are closer than we think, if we examine the real-life relationship of Spark and Stanford. They are both in the writing game, but Spark is a talented writer of unusual novels, whereas Stanford was a wordy writer, not highly esteemed by the critics. Sir Quentin is equally verbose, creator of a dubious cult of autobiography and memoirs. In the biography of Spark, Wilson suggests that Stanford woud have been happier as an academic. He did go to Cambridge, but no one seems to know whether he graduated or not. But Wilson feels that writing was not his true calling.

Do read Spark if you haven’t. Her books are delightful. And Loitering with Intent is one of my favorites.

Maggie Smith in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

First, you have to understand that my mother was besotted with movies.

From toddlerhood, we accompanied her to the theater. It is fair to say that we saw EVERY movie not banned by the Catholic church.

That is, until The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I’m not sure how this slipped through the cracks. Mom hustled us out of there, so something must have been improper. I don’t know to this day if it was banned by the church, but it was banned by my mother. (Ironically, Spark converted to the Catholic church.)

And so years later, I’m reading Muriel Spark. I am cheered by Loitering with Intent, a witty novel narrated by Fleur, an eccentric novelist who entertains friends in a small rented single room. The landlord insists she is using a single room for double-room purposes, and that she must move to the expensive double room. Fleur laughs, but she is short of money, so soon she finda a job typing and polishing up memoirs for the Autobiographical Society. The members are rich, rather dull aristocrats, and love it when she makes things up.

But now… look below at what happened to my used 1980s copy of Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent. The spine has cracked and pages fall out in clumps as I read them. Damn it!

Well, I’m simply going to approach Spark’s Loitering in the style of hikers on the Appalachian trail. They rip out the pages they’ve read and burn them.