Chapter One of The Comforters by Muriel Spark, with an introduction by Allan Massie

There are two plots in The Comforters. One is fanciful and improbable; the other imaginative and convincingly real. The first is charming; the second disturbing. The plots are not distinct, for the same characters people both, but there is no thematic connection. The marriage of the related but distinct plots is imperfect as it isn’t in Memento Mori, the finest, and most assured success, of Muriel Spark’s early London novels. Nevertheless there is evidence of what would come to be recognised as the characteristic Spark touch: the unreal plot is presented in realistic style (even if the realism is also whimsical); the real one engages with religious mysteries and flirts with the supernatural.The novel opens as light comedy:“On the first day of his holiday Laurence Manders woke to hear his grandmother’s voice below.‘I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the B.B.C. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’ Laurence shouted from the window, ‘Grandmother, I adore white bread and I have no fads.’ She puckered and beamed up at him.‘Shouting from the window,’ she said to the baker.”Their relationship is established with lovely economy – “puckered” is a good word.Louisa Jepp, the part-gypsy grandmother, and Laurence adore each other. Laurence finds her endlessly engaging and amusing, but he is also an inquisitive young man who thinks his grandmother is up to something. His suspicion is confirmed when he finds diamonds concealed in a loaf of bread and then when he comes upon her entertaining a rather rum group of somewhat shifty friends, Mr Webster the baker and the Hogarths, a father and his crippled son. Grandmama has a gang, he tells his girlfriend Caroline, and speculates, light-heartedly, that they may be Communist spies. The discovery of the jewels suggests otherwise and indeed the gang are engaged in smuggling diamonds from the Continent, Louisa communicating with her friends by carrier pigeon.The tone of this strand of the novel is very much of its period; it belongs to the world of Ealing comedy, Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers. The means by which the diamonds are smuggled into the country in plaster casts of saints, carried by the crippled boy in his wheelchair, echo The Lavender Hill Mob. In that film stolen gold bars are melted down and reconstituted as models of the Eiffel Tower. In the novel the diamonds are transported to their London contact, or fence, concealed in tins of Louisa’s home-made pickles, and this also breathes the atmosphere of Ealing Studios, with Louisa a character to be played by Margaret Rutherford.Laurence is the link between the novel’s two plots. Caroline, a writer engaged in a study of ‘Form in the Modern Novel’, has abstained from sex since her conversion to Catholicism. (Surprisingly this doesn’t disturb Laurence.) Now she has gone to Yorkshire for a ‘Retreat’. She is a neurotic, but quite happy to recognise that she is: a priest will tell her that ‘neurotics never go mad’ – a line that sounds a note which one will come to view as characteristically Sparkian. The Retreat is not a success; she is oppressed by the housekeeper at the Pilgrim Centre of St Philumena, a Mrs Hogg, formerly a servant in the Manders family. Mrs Hogg tells her that everything she herself does is guided by “Our Lady.” Caroline finds her repulsive and soon “began to reflect that Mrs Hogg could become an obsession, the demon of that carnal hypocrisy which struck her mind whenever she came across a gathering of Catholics or Jews engaged in their morbid communal pleasures”. It doesn’t occur to her – or perhaps to Spark? – that in keeping Laurence on a string she may be guilty of “carnal hypocrisy” herself. Be that as it may, she flees the Retreat and returns to London.The tone of the novel shifts. Caroline, alone in her flat, begins to hear voices. In a panic, she makes ready to flee to her friend, the Baron, with the voice or Typing Ghost remarking on “the difference between this frenzied packing operation and the deliberate care she had taken, in spite of her rage, to fold and fit her possessions into place at St Philumena’s less than a day ago failed to register. Tap.” Before long the Typing Ghost will insist that it is writing a novel and that Caroline and all the other characters in it are fictitious – the claim then regularly made in a prefatory note to novels in order to forestall any possible libel actions.Caroline is therefore immediately brought up against questions which were to be repeatedly asked in Spark’s novels: what is reality? Is it what presents itself to the senses? If so, in what sense are the voices she hears less real than her conversations with Laurence and the Baron? Or do they belong to a different order of reality? In what sense is Mrs Hogg’s account of her conversations with the Virgin Mary to be considered less real than the voices by which Caroline is assailed? And in what sense is a novel – a work of fiction – to be considered a reflection of reality? It is no wonder that Caroline has been experiencing difficulty in writing the chapter on Realism in her study of ‘Form in the Modern Novel’. - Allan Massie