That Book I Was Talking About to Pentimento and Anne-Marie

Okay, so I couldn't remember either the title or the author's name exactly. But this is it: Margaret Kim Peterson's Keeping House:  A Litany of Everyday Life.

In the comments to a previous post, several of us have been meditating on themes of domesticity and utopianism, and what happens when the two collide. The post itself is really nothing more than a collection of tossed-off responses, but the ensuing conversation has been good and thoughtful, and has covered some important philosophical ground. This, I suppose, is inevitable, since any question about why we do what we do also raises the necessary questions of why we are what we are, what our existence means, and whether there's a larger framework of existence beyond our own which informs all these things. At any rate, I'm enjoying the conversation, and of course, anyone is welcome to join in.

Why have I been neglecting the housework this week? Two words:  Muriel Spark. It's all her fault. Or, well, I lay the blame at the feet of the friend who so kindly invited us to dinner Tuesday night, plied us with gin-and-tonics, and then handed me a collection of three Muriel Spark novels:  Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington. From the moment the book fell into my hands, I was officially checked out of the conversation. Aelred and our friend talked about Leo Strauss, and I sat on the couch and read. And read. And read. Until I fell asleep, around 1:30 a.m., so soundly that at last the other two couldn't help noticing, and Aelred woke me up and we went home. It was a satisfactory evening altogether, giving me cause to contemplate the fact that your true friends are the people who really don't care that you're ignoring them;  they'd do the same to you, with no hard feelings.

I'd love to have some conversation about Muriel Spark, and while there are all kinds of things I could toss out to start it, the one which swims randomly to the surface of my mind right now is the motif of the anonymous caller, and of guilt and blackmail. In Memento Mori, elderly people are plagued by phone calls by an unknown person -- an amorphous unknown person, whose voice variously sounds upper- or lower-class, male or female, cheerful or threatening -- who delivers, always, the same message:  Remember that you will die. These occurrences accompany the intrusion into a circle of acquaintances of a sinister housekeeper bent on bleeding cash from people's kept secrets.

Meanwhile, in A Far Cry from Kensington, a character is driven to suicide by notes and phone calls from a person calling himself  "An Organiser," who preys on this character's vulnerability and gullibility in order to effect an utterly illusory revenge on the novel's narrator.

I don't quite know why I love these novels by mid-twentieth-century English women writers as much as I do. They're grim in their outlook, which is not that surprising, given the grimness of the postwar English lives their characters lead. And yet they crackle not only with life, but with truth, and I'll take them over a heartwarming read any old day. Heartwarming makes me suspicious;  give me instead an unexploded bomb in the garden, even though (and perhaps because) the old maxim about a gun in the first act always holds true, and although I like peace and comfort, I think truth is better for me.


It's probably not out of keeping with all this that I'm reading Treasure Island in its unabridged form to Helier and Crispina right now. We left off yesterday just as Jim has met up with Long John Silver for the first time, in his guise as kindly, formerly-and-soon-to-be-again-seafaring tavernkeeper.

"Is Long John Silver good?" Crispina asked.

"Wait and see," I said.

"Is he bad?"

"Wait and see."

Of course, the answer is that he's both:  thoroughly corrupted, yet capable of flashes of human kindness, if not actual charity. He is a liar from the first, and a liar to the end, yet he compels our sympathy, even as he compels Jim's. If he can't be good or merciful, he does move others to goodness and mercy -- which is something, at least in a fictional character. Treasure Island is the achievement that it is because of him;  he's the Gollum of that story, and as necessary to it, as he is, as Gollum is to The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I think that the greatness of both those stories (and it's a very similar greatness, and they are very similar stories, as it now occurs to me) lies in the existence of a character like this, a twisted soul in which goodness is perverted to evil, and evil, equally often, is perverted to something approaching goodness, or the memory of it.



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