The disinterest can also shade into ruthlessness. There has always been a nail-paring objectivity about Muriel Spark’s authorial style (this is what drew Evelyn Waugh to praise her first novel) and it provides delectable pleasures throughout her work, Reality and Dreams included. This aloofness can breed a certain air of cynicism or fatalism and gives rise to the darkness that seems to haunt the story. Tom and his brood are lightweights, people we care little for, whose lives and concerns, from one point of view, seem almost nugatory.
A conclusion that is perhaps borne out by the novel’s opening sentence, Tom’s ingenuous aperçu. What, indeed, if we are mere figments in one of God’s dreams? Where does that leave us? “As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods”—so Gloucester famously observed in King Lear and Spark’s wise and disturbing fiction often exploits a similar sense of human insubstantiality and unimportance with great subtlety and skill. Of course there is another layer here, apart from the nihilistic, that is readily developed. We can detect a God-like presence hovering over the action of the novel — that of the author: these characters are characters in one of Muriel Spark’s dreams. The dream/reality, art/life theme is further enhanced by the fact that Tom’s films all start from dreams he has had. He then makes these films “real” through the wholly unreal medium of film. Just as the plot slips and slides, and the characters’ various fates chop and change almost at whim so too does our sense of the reality of what we are reading shift and blur. There is, in the end, only one person who can make sense of the whole can of worms — the artist.
However, in Reality and Dreams the controlling role of Muriel Spark is a little too overt, I feel. Her unique sensibility functions best when the voice is subjective, the point of view confined or in first person, as in her two wonderful late novels A Far Cry from Kensington and Loitering with Intent. This method localizes, and validates, that clear-eyed, unabashedly, brutally honest gaze on the world and its denizens. Omniscient narration has the opposite effect: the mode has its attractions but, in this day and age, it can seem a little too manipulative and knowing. Perhaps in this elderly century (and Spark makes some play with this notion) the predetermined, the ordered, the sense of everything-in-its-place is fundamentally inimical. In our novels, that most controlled of artefacts, we need at least the illusion of uncertainty, of ignorance, of the random.
Reflecting on his dream notion Tom concedes that, “‘Our dreams, yes, are insubstantial; the dreams of God, no. They are real, frighteningly real. They bulge with flesh, they drip with blood.’ My own dreams, said Tom to himself, are shadows, my arguments — all shadows.” The dreams of Muriel Spark, as we have seen in her exemplary oeuvre, are frighteningly real, also, and bulge and drip to great effect. Reality and Dreams, however, is a little muted, and a certain shadowiness detracts from the real frisson. We may not have, in this latest novel, Muriel Spark in her full symphonic majesty but we can still relish the real pleasures of this work on a smaller scale — a nocturne, say, a suite, a variation on certain themes — as we wait impatiently for the major work to resume.
1999
Frederic Manning (Introduction to Her Privates We)
Two brief quotations will serve as the best introduction to this unique and extraordinary novel, the finest novel, in my opinion, to have come out of the First World War. The scene takes place in the reserve lines in the Somme valley in northern France during the late summer of 1916. A corporal is dressing-down the men in his section.
“You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat quick. See? You miserable beggar, you! A bloody cow like you’s sufficient to demoralize a whole muckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work for a change.”
Nothing too unusual here: standard NCO aggression, an attempt to render the colloquial nature of the speech by dropping the odd consonant, perhaps a hint of a more refined sensibility present in the way Corporal Hamley’s entry into the tent is so precisely described. But now here is the same passage as it was originally written and as it was originally meant to be read.
“You shut your blasted mouth, see!” said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. “An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat, quick. See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cunt like you’s sufficient to demoralise a whole fuckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work, for a change.”
It is remarkable the change wrought by the good old Anglo-Saxon demotic of “bugger,” “cunt” and “fuckin’.” What was familiar, stereotypical, almost parodic, becomes suddenly real — the whole situation charged and violent. And in its wider context — the First World War — a whole new resonance emerges. Those monochrome images we know so well — Tommies puffing on their fags, troops marching through French villages, the lunar landscape of no man’s land — suddenly have a different import. Suddenly, a veil is stripped away. These are real men, real soldiers — and all soldiers swear, vilely, constantly. This is a world where corporals call their men “cunts.”
Her Privates We was not the title chosen for the first, unexpurgated edition of this novel which was privately printed and issued in an impression of some 600 copies, and is what you will read here. Frederic Manning called this version of his book The Middle Parts of Fortune, changing the title for the later, bowdlerized, public version. And, even though we have had the uncensored novel for some three decades now, the book’s fame and reputation have always been associated with the second title. Both titles, in fact, come from Hamlet (Act II, scene 2) when Hamlet indulges in a bit of saucy badinage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When Hamlet asks how the “good lads” are, Guildenstern replies: “Happy in that we are not over-happy/On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.”
HAMLET: Nor the soles of her shoe?
ROSENCRANTZ: Neither, my lord.
HAMLET: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours.
GUILDENSTERN: Faith, her privates we.
HAMLET: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true, she is a strumpet. What’s the news?
I take the allusion in several ways. First, I think Manning acknowledges that the very coarseness of the book is its strongest and most shocking asset. Especially in 1930, when it was published, even the cleaned-up version would have seemed relentlessly profane. Second, it draws attention to the role of luck and blind chance in men’s lives, particularly in a war. And third, it advertises the book’s intellectual seriousness. For although this is a novel about private soldiers, those at the bottom end of the army’s food chain, the authorial brain informing it is rigorously intelligent and clear-eyed. And, as if to ram that point home, every chapter has a Shakespearean epigraph.