Merely Players: Stories of Stage Life Book

Before I started this book, I listened to Muriel Spark speaking on a BBC documentary about her approach to novel writing. Sometimes, she said, she'd start with the title and build the novel from it. At other times, she'd start with the ending, and then make up a story that might lead to it. When I reached the end of this book, it occurred to me that she had combined both those methods in creating this novel, odd as that may sound. Take the final three lines of the final page:
'Did you settle the bill?' he said.
I said, 'Yes.'
It was a far cry from Kensington.

Although the first character is simply talking about settling the lunch bill, the second is referring to settling a very old score. The story recounts the many occasions when the second character, a WWII widow called Mrs Hawkins, attempts to settle that score, and even though this final occasion happens in Italy many years later rather than in Kensington as on previous occasions, she settles it with the same three French words she's used on previous occasions. It seems that French is the only language capable of conveying the venom she wants to inject into her message.

The venomous message is aimed at would-be author Hector Bartlett whom twenty-eight year-old Mrs Hawkins runs up against while working in publishing in London in the 1950s. Every time he turns up in the story, she hisses the words, 'pisseur de copie' at him, a term that implies he's only capable of hack journalism.

Even though Bartlett is shown to be a very unscrupulous and sinister character in the later parts of the story, it's difficult for the reader to understand why Mrs Hawkins, who is otherwise a very fair-minded young person, should have harbored such intense dislike for him from the beginning. The fact that he is not a very good writer doesn't seem reason enough for so much vitriol. And while much of the narrative focuses on the inside workings of publishing, and the many Girls of Slender Means who served the industry, I felt that too much of it was taken up with the far-fetched sub-plot Spark created around Hector Bartlett, and which quickly became unrelated to writing or publishing. The Bartlett part of the book left me puzzled although I enjoyed the rest of the book a lot, especially because it contained some fine characters and some excellent observations. This one for instance:
Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main idea. So that you didn't have to listen much at all, but just wait for the big splash.
And this:
I was tired of the whole scene and longed to be able to go into a bookshop as in former times and choose a book without being aware of all that went into the making of it.

Soon after I'd finished the novel, I picked up Spark's autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, and discovered the 'original' of Hector Bartlett'and the possible reason for all the vitriol. When she was in her late twenties and divorced from Sydney Spark whom she'd married at nineteen, Muriel found work in London in publishing. She met up with would-be writer Derek Stanford, and although she disliked his florid writing style, she collaborated with him on several poetry projects one of which was a handbook for students called 'A Tribute to Wordsworth'. However, she maintains that when her independently written book on Mary Shelley was published around 1952 to great acclaim, he took her success very badly. Over the course of the next few years, he turned from friend to enemy, eventually selling her letters, and publishing an unauthorized biography containing many inaccuracies about her private life.

In Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark, which I'm currently reading, Alan Taylor confirms that Stanford was indeed the inspiration for Bartlett:
In the story of Muriel's own life, Derek Stanford occupies the unenviable role of cad and betrayer. He was her Iago and her Mark Anthony. They first met in 1947 when she was working at the Poetry Society and he was looking for some kind of literary work. In A Far Cry from Kensington she reimagined him as Hector Bartlett, a pushy, third-rate hack -a 'pisseur de copie' or 'urinator of journalistic copy' who 'vomited literary matter' -with upper-class pretensions. Whenever his name cropped up in conversation, which it did from time to time, it was invariably in the guise of someone whom she had once trusted, perhaps even loved, and whom she now thought of as beyond the pale. She was well aware that no matter what she said or did she could not erase him from her past.

Alan Taylor claims that this experience made her very wary of what others wrote about her for the rest of her life; she reacted bitterly whenever any unauthorized recollections about her appeared in print. 'I have been troubled throughout my life by one mythomaniac [Derek Stanford] and do not propose my biography to be distorted by another of those.'

The solution of course was to write her own biography, Curriculum Vitae. Unfortunately she wrote only the first volume which stops around the time in which A Far Cry from Kensington is set. If we want to know more, we have no choice but to read what others wrote about her.
Or we can stick to the novels. She emerges quite clearly in their pages.