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David Wilson's Literary Quiz
A new literary quiz at irregular intervals, usually with a theme. This week: The greatest living chick writer, Dame Muriel
Spark, has been dead for three years, but this has not affected her status: the competition is effectively non-existent. The
usual rules for a single-author Quiz apply: the answer Muriel Spark scores nul points. No proper names have
been changed! Not that that will help you much. And the novels are extracted in strict chronological order of publication
(the tenth extract is not from a novel). Off you go, Sparkites!
The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen,
of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers
at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once.
I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.
David J Wilson.
Quiz No. 139
1)
If you ask me how I remember the island, what it was like to be stranded there by misadventure for
nearly three months, I would answer that it was a time and landscape of the mind if I did not have the visible signs to summon
its materiality: my journal, the cat, the newspaper cuttings, the curiosity of my friends; and my sisters - how they always
look at me, I think, as one returned from the dead.
Answer
2)
Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain pen and continued her letter:
One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war
I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.
The telephone rang. She lifted the receiver. As she had feared, the man spoke before she could say
a word. When he had spoken the familiar sentence she said, "Who is that speaking, who is it?"
But the voice, as on eight previous occasions, had rung off.
Answer
3)
The girls could not take off their panama hats because this was not far from the school gates and
hatlessness was an offence. Certain departures from the proper set of the hat on the head were overlooked in the case of fourth-form
girls and upwards so long as nobody wore their hat at an angle. But there were other subtle variants from the ordinary rule
of wearing the brim turned up at the back and down at the front. The five girls, standing very close to each other because
of the boys, wore their hats each with a definite difference.
Answer
4)
Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of
the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like
giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins
of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wall-papers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room,
exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing: sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor
ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made
unusual demands on the mind's eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich
being poor in spirit.
Answer
5)
The other servants fall silent as Lister enters the room.
"Their life," says Lister, "a general mist of error. Their death, a general storm of error." – I
quote from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, an English dramatist of old."
"When you say a thing is not impossible, that isn't quite as if to say it's possible," says Eleanor
who, although younger than Lister, is his aunt. She is taking off her outdoor clothes. "Only technically is the not impossible,
possible."
"We are not discussing possibilities today," Lister says. "Today we speak of facts. This is not the
time for inconsequential talk."
Answer
6)
If it were only true that all's well that ends well, if only it were true.
She stamps her right foot.
She says, "I'll try the other one," sitting down to let the saleman lift her left foot and nicely
interlock it with the other shoe.
He says, "They fit like a glove." The voice is foreignly correct and dutiful.
She stands, now, and walks a little space to the mirror, watching first the shoes as she walks, and
then, half-turning, her leg's reflection. It is a hot, hot day of July in her New York. She looks next at the heel.
She looks over at the other shoes on the floor beside the chair, three of them beside their three
open boxes and two worn shoes lying on their sides. Finally, she glances at the saleman.
He focuses his eyes on the shoes.
Answer
7)
"This is rape!" His voice was reaching a pitch it had never reached before and went higher still as
he surveyed the wreckage. "This is violation!"
It was not rape, it was a robbery.
He was Lord Suzy; his title was hereditary, so that when this was explained to busy people before
their meeting him they were inclined to say, "Yes, but what about him?" It is true that he had done nothing very much. He
was approaching the dangerous age of fifty, said to be the time of the male menopause. His two previous marriages and divorces
had passed like the storms of old sea-voyages.
Answer
8)
He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams.
The first thing he discerned when he regained consciousness was a woman in white. This angel was calling
him by his first name, Tom, although they had never been introduced.
"Are you a nun?" he said.
"No, I'm Jasmine. I'm a nurse. Come on, Tom, I've got to wake you up. I've got to put this other pillow
under your head. And lift the top part of your bed, like this .... " She manipulated with her foot a lever of the hospital
bed so that he was slightly raised. "Otherwise," she said, "you might feel groggy." She stuck a thermometer in his mouth before
he had time to speak, and took his wrist in her hand, looking at her watch. He saw by her watch that it was twenty past twelve.
The sun was visible behind the curtains, so it must have been daytime.
Answer
9)
"You begin," he said, "by setting your scene. You have to see your scene, either in reality
or in imagination. For instance, from here you can see across the lake. But on a day like this you can't see across the lake,
it's too misty. You can't see the other side." Rowland took off his teaching glasses to stare at his creative writing class
whose parents' money was being thus spent: two boys and three girls around sixteen to seventeen years of age, some more, some
a little less. "So," he said, "you must just write, when you set your scene, 'the other side of the lake was hidden in mist.'
Or if you want to exercise imagination, on a day like today, you can write, 'The other side of the lake was just visible.'
But as you are setting the scene, don't make any emphasis as yet. It's too soon, for instance, for you to write, 'The
other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.' That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don't want to
make a point as yet."
Answer
10)
Bread came from Howden's, the shop above the ovens where it was made. The pavement outside the shop
was warm, and hot air steamed out of a grating near the door. The floury baker and his boy (known, not unkindly, as 'the daft
laddie,' since he was rather simple) were white all over, the baker wore a white hat, flat at the top like an upturned pie-dish,
the boy's was also flat-topped: they carried trays of bread on their heads. As they came up with their trays of bread into
the shop their faces and hands, their overalls were white, and their shoes were flour-dusted.
Answer
1)
Robinson (1958). Not the least of the problems Dame Muriel surmounted with sublime elegance in her career was that
of following up an initial success. The Comforters had been a dream debut: this, her second novel, was an equal triumph,
exciting, deceptive, and many-layered.
Back to Question 1
2)
Memento Mori (1959). Perhaps only a youngish writer would think of making a deadpan comic masterpiece out of the inevitability
of dissolution ....
Back to Question 2
3)
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The jackpot! Soon afterwards, Ms Spark went to live in Switzerland.
Back to Question 3
4)
The Girls Of Slender Means (1963). The Beeb dramatised this in the mid-seventies. Even by their standards, it was a
brilliant success. Impossible to forget Miriam Margoyles stuffing herself with chocolate, and saying, "I'm doing brain
work!"
Back to Question 4
5)
Not To Disturb (1971). This was perhaps Ms Spark's most disturbing work to date .... I suspect that Ms Spark had read
a dithyramb on the genius of Henry Green, and thought, "I could do better than that!" She was right.
Back to Question 5
6)
The Hothouse By The East River (1973). The disturbingness-quotient reaches new heights in this novel, loosely based
on Ms Spark's own experiences during Dubya-Dubya-Two. She had gone to an employment consultant, and had taken an Ivy Compton-Burnett
novel with her to while away what she knew would be a long wait. When, eventually, she was ushered into the consultant's office,
she put the novel face-down on the desk in front of her. The consultant reached forward and looked at the title. "Ohhhh! Ivy
Compton-Burnett!" she said. "I expect you would like an interesting job." Ms Spark gave demure assent. The consultant
reached into a filing-cabinet, and pulled out a card. "Would you like to do secret work for the Foreign Office?" she said.
Back to Question 6
7)
The Symposium (1990). Until a few years ago, I owned nothing worth stealing. Then I became a gun-collector. Now, I
dream that someone will try to steal them .... As I often say to my friends at the gun-club: "They can get in, but
they won't get out."
Back to Question 7
8)
Reality And Dreams (1996). An unusual novel, even by Dame Muriel's standards. It contains one of the most frightening
and unpleasant female characters in our literature.
Back to Question 8
9)
The Finishing School (2004). If, as I expect will be the case, human cloning turns out to be a chimaera, this is Dame
Muriel's last novel. I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
Back to Question 9
10)
Curriculum Vitae (1992). Not quite an autobiography, but a sublimely delightful series of autobiographical essays -
the only book of its kind which is comparable to Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Untimely death! to have robbed us of this
great writeress, who now stands in lonely splendour in the Elysian Fields with Jane Austen and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Back to Question 10
Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com
Return to Start
Last Updated: 8 May 2009
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