A Middle Aged Lady In Camberwell

During Lockdown2, I lapsed into rereading Muriel Spark after plucking her 1950s volume of short stories The Go Away Bird from my shelves. It's forty years since I read that and all seven of the novels she published between 1957-1963 including not only The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by which 'Dame Muriel' is best remembered today, but also The Ballad of Peckham Rye which had been in my mind to reread given that I live now within walking distance of Peckham and know it reasonably well. I had assumed that Spark lived there for a while in order to write the novel, but was astonished to find on reading her Wikipedia entry the following sentence: 'Between 1955 and 1965 she lived in a bedsit at 13 Baldwin Crescent, Camberwell, south-east London.' 

13 Baldwin Crescent, Camberwell

In other words, Spark lived in Camberwell (which merges into Peckham) during the whole period in which she wrote two early novels and five of her best-known novels, the other three being Memento Mori, The Bachelors and The Girls of Slender Means. Before then she had led what can be called (with the usual irony) an interesting life. Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh, she was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, fictionalised later in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. At the age of 19, she became engaged to Sydney Oswald Spark and followed him to Southern Africa where he had a teaching contract. They married in Salisbury ('Rhodesia') and she gave birth to a son, Robin, in 1938. Sydney, however, turned out to have mental health problems which led to episodes of violent abuse. In 1943, she managed to obtain a divorce on grounds of desertion (her own) and the following year sailed back to Britain on a troopship. In 1945, after stashing Robin with her parents, she scraped a living in the London literary world as poet, editor, short story writer and jobbing author. There were difficult relationships with two other writers, a conversion to Catholicism and, in 1954, a breakdown in which she hallucinated that TS Eliot was sending her coded messages. These were almost certainly caused by Dexedrine, an amphetamine prescribed by her GP as treatment for 'anxiety neurosis'.

When she moved into Baldwin Crescent in August 1955, Spark had spent the previous ten months in retreat at two Carmelite establishments in Aylesford, Kent, where she wrote much of her first novel The Comforters. The Camberwell house had been recommended to her, partly on the grounds that its formidable landlady 'Tiny' Lazzari (who became Spark's friend and protector) was a Catholic. The anonymity of its location deep in the South London suburbs must also have appealed to Spark who wanted peace to get on with her writing and distance from an ex-lover. She occupied not exactly 'a bedsit' but 'a pair of cramped attic rooms adjacent to a kitchen, and looking out over the back garden' according to her biographer Martin Stannard who describes the area thus:

'Baldwin Crescent was a quiet street behind the thundering traffic of Camberwell New Road. Turning left down this, Muriel could catch a bus to central London or walk to the Oval Tube station in ten minutes; turning right, she soon reached the shops, Camberwell Green, and, further on, Peckham Rye. It was a rackety district. In 1955 the Catholic congregation predominantly comprised Irish immigrants where now it is predominantly Afro-Caribbean. Otherwise, the area is much the same today: tumultuous, largely working-class, spliced with some tranquil rows of yellow-brick houses like Baldwin Crescent left over from Victorian and Edwardian prosperity.'

Apart from the dubious claim that the Oval tube can be reached in a ten minute walk, this seems an accurate enough description of Camberwell and Peckham today. The tumult is caused not only by the traffic along Camberwell New Road and its continuation eastward, but by the diversity and vivacity of the inhabitants, particularly around Rye Lane which is the pulsating heart of Peckham. Strictly speaking, Peckham Rye is the name of the famous common at the far end of Rye Lane, rather than - as Stannard suggests above - of the district itself. By contrast, the area around Baldwin Crescent in Camberwell is still a quiet, leafy enclave with a slight shabbiness to some of the houses despite gentrification. An attractive park, Myatt's Fields, is only a few minutes walk away. Stannard mentions 'a new Catholic church...just round the corner' where Spark would have worshipped and this is presumably the Church of the Sacred Heart on Knatchbull Road.

Side view: Spark had the back half of the attic

With her relentless writing schedule, Muriel Spark published seven novels while living in her Camberwell 'retreat'. The Comforters (1957), a semi-autobiographical account of a breakdown, hallucinations, flight to a retreat, received good reviews on the whole, including a rave notice by Evelyn Waugh. It enabled her to quit her part time job with the publisher Peter Owen and become a full time author. Her next, Robinson (1958), involves three survivors of a plane crash on an island owned by the eponymous Mr Robinson. Stannard describes it as 'a puzzling story' and critical opinion was divided. Luckily, the breakthrough novel came next: Memento Mori (1959) in which a group of elderly people receive anonymous phone calls with the message 'Remember you must die.' The reviews were a writer's dream. 'Brilliant, startling and original' - VS Naipaul; 'This funny and macabre book has delighted me' - Graham Greene; 'A brilliant and singularly gruesome achievement' - Waugh. It brought her a degree of celebrity although not quite to 'household name' level. One reporter noted at a Fortnum's book signing event that despite the 'macabre theme of her novel, Miss Spark turned out to be a bright and cheerful character who, when she was not signing copies...was helpfully wrapping Easter cards for customers who mistook her for an assistant.' But publication of her next novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) brought newspaper reporters to 13 Baldwin Crescent where Mrs Lazzari granted them access to the author in her upper sanctum.

George Millar of the Daily Express found himself interviewing a 'middle aged lady in Camberwell... with something dreamy, almost couldn't-care-less apparent in her attitude, standing at the doors of fame.' While JWM Thomson from the Evening Standard had the nerve to write: ' I am frankly surprised to find her still living in an unsophisticated...corner of London. The house is one of those tall, prim properties where Camberwell has tried to be a bit above itself.' Thomson wonders why she hasn't moved to 'some more chic (and expensive) address', but Spark tells him that she finds life 'quiet and peaceful' in the area and that success and prosperity still seem 'flimsy and insubstantial.' She comments that she's never had the money for travel and has only been abroad once, whereas 'all the little working girls of Peckham I wrote about take their holidays quite naturally.'

Muriel Spark in her Baldwin Crescent attic - 'small, plainly and darkly dressed,
good-looking with a hint of tension' Evening Standard, March 1960

That changed dramatically with the publication of her next two novels: The Bachelors in October 1960 and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961. The money poured in and she moved from the attic down into the first floor flat at Baldwin Crescent which she redecorated and refurnished. A small step, but as Stannard says, a 'symbolic act. Another new life was beginning...' In the summer, she spent several weeks in Israel and Jordan researching for a future novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965). In October, an edited version of Jean Brodie was published in The New Yorker, taking up the whole of its 14 October issue and making her the first British female author to receive that honour. In January 1962, she flew to New York where she was feted both by her publisher, Lippincott, and by the New Yorker. The book was published on the 17th 'to a crescendo of adulation' (Stannard).There were parties, press interviews, dinners, visits to hit Broadway shows and 'a party at the St Regis hotel where Updike, W.H.Auden and Lionel Trilling paid homage...'. In October, she visited New York again and was given her own office in the New Yorker building to work on The Girls Of Slender Means. That visit lasted for three months and over the next three years, she spent more and more time in America, even giving a course at Rutger's University.

She retained her Camberwell base, however, 'and could still not cure herself of homesickness for the relaxing damp chill of England. She could hide in Baldwin Crescent with Mrs Lazzari guarding door and telephone, filling spaces with supportive chatter' (Stannard). The end was in sight, however. Her last stay there was in the 'freezing British summer' of 1965 while awaiting publication of The Mandelbaum Gate. Back in New York that autumn, she made her decision and wrote to Mrs Lazzari - 'a tender note but firm' - informing her. In November, Harrods were brought in to clear the flat and sell its contents. 'All the bric-à-brac her parents had sent was to go, her collection of dolls and teddy bears, her pinkish three-piece suite.' Her publisher was given a rocking chair and a Stanley Spencer drawing. 'Various items went to Mrs Lazzari as farewell presents. It was an evacuation of all relics from previous lives.' During the next year, not only was Britain abandoned, but America too. The pressures of public life there were too much and she had come to regard New York as 'a snakepit of gossip and impertinence' (surely not). She moved to Italy and lived there first in Rome, then in Tuscany, until her death in 2006. She wrote almost to the end, publishing another fourteen novels, short stories, children's stories, poetry and an autobiography.

But what of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, the local novel of her Camberwell years? Begun at Aylesford in September 1958, it was written mostly in the Camberwell attic and finished by February 1959. It concerns the arrival in Peckham of Dougal Douglas, a young Scottish graduate who has a 'hump shoulder', the ability to 'turn his right wrist at an extraordinary back-hand outward angle and...get a man by the throat as with a claw' (which comes in useful later in the novel) and two lumps on his head from an operation which, he claims, 'took away the two horns.' Dougal talks himself into a job as an 'arts man' with a local factory, hired to 'bring vision into the lives of the workers.' What transpires instead is  neatly summarised in the blurb of my Penguin copy: 'absenteeism, fraud, blackmail, violence and murder, portrayed with Sparkian black satire.' In fact, Dougal is little more than a mischief-maker and shapeshifter rather than a satanic presence, but skilled at bringing out the worst in the other characters. 

First edition cover (1960)

It's an enjoyable read, but anyone hoping to find an in-depth evocation of Peckham in the 1950s may be disappointed. Mentions of local landmarks including pubs and cemeteries are sprinkled here and there and a few historical celebrities are exhumed including Ruskin, Mendelssohn and Boudica (who according to local legend is buried under Peckham Rye), but there is little description of the physical environment or the street life. The Rye is depicted as a convenient place for the ancient pastimes of courtship and fist-fighting, but otherwise neutralised by woolly phrases like 'the dusky scope of the Rye's broad lyrical acres'. In the final paragraph of the novel, the Rye undergoes a fleeting transfiguration as someone drives past it, and perhaps that is the problem. Spark is more concerned with an ideal world, touched by the hand of God, rather than the fine detail of the world we inhabit.

As for Dougal's prowess as a shape-shifter (Stannard uses this word and Spark writes in one passage 'Dougal changed his shape'), I found it corny and embarrassing as in this scene where he drags a dustbin lid onto a dance floor:

    'Next, Dougal sat on his haunches and banged a message out on a tom-tom. He sprang up and with  the lid on his head was a Chinese coolie eating melancholy rice. He was an ardent cyclist, crouched     over handlebars and pedalling uphill with the lid between his knees. He was an old woman with an         umbrella; he stood on the upturned edges of the lid and speared fish from his rocking canoe; he was      a man at the wheel of a racing car...'

Or he was an end-of-pier impressionist who'd fallen on hard times. It's not quite the shape-shifting of mythology or classic horror fiction. 

The novel's strengths lie in lively interactions between the various characters and Mrs Spark's droll humour as in this depiction of a 1950s-style adulterous sex scene:

   '...they went into the bedroom and took  off their clothes in a steady rhythm. Merle took off her cardigan and Mr Druce took off his coat. Merle went to the wardrobe and brought out a green quilted silk dressing-gown. Mr Druce went to the wardrobe and found his blue dressing-gown with the white spots. Merle took off her blouse and Mr Druce his waistcoat. Merle put the dressing-gown over her shoulders and, concealed by it, took off the rest of her clothes with modest gestures. Mr Druce slid his braces and emerged from his trousers. These he folded carefully and, padding across the room to the window, laid them on a chair...'

'Emerged from his trousers' is typically 'Sparkian'. Perhaps he folds them carefully because he'll be going home to his wife afterwards. By the way, the murder mentioned earlier is quite startling when it happens if only for the abrupt but vivid manner in which it's depicted.

As part of my 'research' for this blogpost, I watched the documentary film 'The Many Primes of  Muriel Spark', first broadcast in 2018 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Spark's birth and available on You Tube. Fronted by Kirsty Wark, it is a fascinating and informative film which, however, completely fails to mention her years in Camberwell, despite featuring several of the novels which she wrote during those years. This is a considerable slight given that the film is structured around the places in which she lived: Edinburgh, Southern Africa, Kensington, New York and Italy. Presumably Camberwell was seen as a dull backwater south of the river and literally 'unfitting'. And true enough, it can't compete for 'glamour' with any of those other locations, but it is the place where Spark grounded herself and wrote the first of what turned out to be 22 novels. South-East Londoners can claim her as a 'local writer' for at least part of that career and perhaps the most fertile and important part at that. 

Muriel Spark has been labelled 'the first magic realist' and a 'postmodernist' writer. I would describe her writing as being direct and quirky, natural but with both sinister and supernatural additives, leavened with a droll sense of humour. And although no writer can really be described as 'unique', Spark comes close. In her personal life, she was a woman of great resilience and independence. 'I'm drawn to her daring,' says Kirsty Wark. 'Not only in her fiction, but in the way that she conducted her life.' Those are well-chosen words, because 'conduct her life' is precisely what she did, overcoming adversity, reinventing herself, fighting battles with publishers and agents and generally asserting her independence in a male world. I can't resist finishing with the brief biographical note which she provided to her first publisher, Macmillan, back in 1956, which shows, in prototype, her humour, imagination and determination:

'Born in ice cave of southern Tyrol year 609 B.C. of centaur stock, mother descended Venus. Muriel Spark rose from the waves as is well known. Demands fabulous fees.

Sadly, they didn't use it.

[Acknowledgement: this post relies heavily on Martin Stannard's excellent book Muriel Spark: The Biography]