The last of two great women writers - Muriel Spark and Sybille Bedford
The Golden Fleece: Essays by Muriel Spark edited by Penelope Jardine (Carcanet, £16.99)
Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford (Daunt Books, £9.99)
Towards the end of his life Evelyn Waugh frequently expressed his admiration for two contemporary women writers: Muriel Spark and Sybille Bedford. Both died in 2006.
Now Spark’s long-term, companion Penelope Jardine, has published, with too little fanfare, a collection of her miscellaneous writings, reviews, speeches and journalism. It’s an absolute treasure trove that really should have been produced more handsomely than in this dim paperback.
Here Spark writes with that unique firmness and clarity, that simplicity that is not simple at all, about so many subjects: Ravenna, Tuscany, Venice, Rome and Scotland; Cardinal Newman, Proust, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Book of Job; then again, about cats and dogs, or eyes and noses.
Asked to think about eyes for an essay competition in 1953, she states: “It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. A fallacy; they are the windows of moods and inclinings, alarums and excursions…
“It is not so with noses. For, incapable of deceit, noses express only themselves. But they mean much. In fact, the nose is the signpost of the soul.”
You can keep your tiny tip-tilts and your chiselled classicals, she declares: “The people I admire most have noses which go off at all angles: they have noses like cliffedges, dromedaries, spouts of teapots and chianti bottles.”
Truly, there was no one like Spark. Asked in 1981 to contribute to a New York Times feature on “The Book I would Like To Have Written and Why”, she responds: “In fact, I would not want to have written anything by anyone else, because they are ‘them’, and I am ‘me’. And I do not want to be anybody else but myself with all the ideas I want to convey, the stories I want to tell, maybe lesser works, but my own.” An essential book for all of us who love her.
Pleasures and Landscapes is a neat package of Sybille Bedford’s vivid, seductive travel, food and drink journalism, mostly extracted from an earlier collection As It Was (1990) but with a couple of pieces not previously gathered, including La Vie de Château — A Diary in Bordeaux 1978. “The lodestar was ever claret,” she says. Just so. Another treat.
