Spotlight on … Muriel Spark Aiding and Abetting (2000)

 

‘God, or the absence of God, has always been Muriel Spark’s subject, so it comes as little surprise that the Devil makes an appearance on the very first page of her new novel. A patient explains his problem to a psychiatrist: ” ‘I have come to consult you,’ he said, ‘because I have no peace of mind. Twenty-five years ago I sold my soul to the Devil.’ ”

‘By page three we learn that the patient has arrived at the offices of Dr Hildegard Wolf on the recommendation of a friend, a troubled priest, who gives him this insight into her methods: ” ‘She advised me not to try to pray. She advised me to shut up and listen. Read the gospel, she said. Jesus is praying to you for sympathy. You have to see his point of view, what he had to put up with. Listen, don’t talk. Read the Bible. Take it in. God is talking, not you.’ ”

‘This may sound like an unconventional therapeutic tack, but Dr Wolf, whose skill has been “perfected by herself”, is not simply iconoclastic; she is also a charlatan. She is her own creation – she has changed her identity, shedding a previous life in which she was Beate Pappenheim, the famous stigmatic of Munich – and a fake. Now, she sits in a sumptuous suite on the Boulevard St Germain, charging her clients $1,500 for sessions that last three-quarters of an hour, effecting a talking cure that consists mainly of her own idle chatter about her carefully crafted life.

‘Hildegard is another of Spark’s diabolical characters, the latest in a long line that includes the monstrous Jean Brodie and the Abbess of Crewe, whose penchant for surveillance enabled Spark to mount an effective satire on Watergate. Fuelled by their belief in a particular destiny – their own – these maniacal manipulators elevate themselves to positions beyond law, ethics, morality – in fact, as the Abbess herself notes, to the realm of mythology, where action and charisma count for all. But if Aiding and Abetting has a theme, it is that sympathy is both relative and unpredictable: in other words, when monsters are cornered, their charisma begins to work overtime and we may not find ourselves invulnerable to their charms.

‘Hildegard’s Faustian patient tells her that he is Lord Lucan. She has become used to such grandiose claims: when her new charge strolls into her consulting room, she already has a disturbed Lord Lucan on her books. And the dilemma of which man, if either, to believe, and whether she should be treating guilt or delusion, or both, becomes secondary the minute one of them threatens to place a call to Interpol and acquaint them with the whereabouts of the vanished stigmatic. As the novel unfolds, the psychiatrist herself becomes the quarry, with the two would-be Earls circling menacingly around her, themselves startled by a fresh threat of capture.

‘Spark’s economical, elliptical prose is alive with understated comedy: one has the sense that her talent for farce is constantly held in check by the seriousness of her ideas. One of the Lucan-chasers, an old gaming pal named Joe stirred into belated curiosity by his attraction to a young woman trying to write a Lucan book, ponders the persistent allure of the case, and decides that “the disappearance of Lucan partakes of the realistic-surrealistic”, a description that could equally well apply to this novel, whose byways are vivid with malice and deliciously subtle spite.

‘In the novel’s realistic strand – if one can term “realistic” an invented present for one of the world’s most notorious escapees – Spark concerns herself not simply with the psychological truths that might underwrite Lucan’s botched attempt to murder his wife (a brutal attack that left the couple’s nanny with her head caved in in a Belgravia basement), but with the motives that inspired his friends and confidants – his aiders and abetters – to spirit him away beyond the reach of the law. He was, by several accounts, a dullard, an obsessional gambler, a sexual sadist, a ruthless man whose social charms barely concealed his fecklessness. “He beat his wife with a cane,” notes Hildegard. “Very sick, that.”

‘But, like Dr Wolf and Jean Brodie before her, Lucan was also a determined and consummate actor, as Joe points out: “There was a kind of psychological paralysis, almost an unconscious conspiracy to let him get away. It was not only that he was a member of the aristocracy, a prominent upper-class fellow, it was that he had pitched his life and all his living arrangements to that proposition. His proposition was: I am a seventh Earl, I am an aristocrat, therefore I can do what I like, I am untouchable.”

‘As she skilfully evokes the vanishing world of the nobly born – endless games of baccarat and poker, the Clermont Club, the races – Spark invests it with its own moral atmosphere. Reflecting on the delayed advent of conscience among Lucan’s protectors, Joe notes that “since Lucan’s day, snobs have been greatly marginalized”, suggesting that few of them would now be able to afford the luxury of funding a ne’er-do-well’s furtive travels around the globe.

‘And not simply one ne’er-do-well, but two. As the man we are more inclined to believe in as Lucan starts to display real psychological distress – the effect, he reckons, of being declared legally dead by his wife – the more we come to view his doppelgänger as the true source of evil in the novel. His persecution of both “Lucky” and Hildegard is low-grade, trashy; by comparison, they are class acts. Suddenly, we find ourselves in sympathy with a murderer and a fraudster.

‘There are flaws in this ambitious, rewardingly complex novel. A recurrent motif of blood, for example, links Hildegard, or Beate, who covered herself with her menstrual blood to fake the five wounds that made her famous, and Lucan, whose memories of murder are fraught with the excessive and unstaunchable flow that issued from the head of his nanny. “Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood,” Hildegard muses.

‘But these quibbles should not detract from the enjoyment of this exceptionally intelligent book. It is hard to think of another writer who could devise such a brashly absurd plot and then execute it with both flair and gravity. Spark has always had the facility to be silkily suave as she goes about examining our predilection for worshipping false gods. In Aiding and Abetting, it is the nature of charm that attracts her unflinching eye, and that proves itself to be very much in the eye of the beholder.’ — Alex Clark

 

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Further

Official Muriel Spark Website
The Muriel Spark Society
Audio: Muriel Spark interviewed @ the BBC
Muriel Spark Archive
Muriel Spark Obituary
Muriel Spark @ goodreads
Muriel Spark @ New Directions
‘Killing Her Softly’
‘What Muriel Spark Saw’
‘Transfigured’
‘Better Boundaries, With Muriel Spark’
“AND SHE WENT ON HER WAY REJOICING”
‘SMALL, BUT PERFECTLY FORMED
‘GENUINE ARTIFICE’
‘How Muriel Spark rescued Mary Shelley’
‘Surface and Structure: Reading Muriel Spark’s “The Driver’s Seat”‘
‘How to Tell If You Are in a Muriel Spark Novel’
‘Muriel Spark, Moral Hypnotist’
‘Meeting Muriel Spark’
‘Muriel Spark leaves millions to woman friend rather than son’
‘The first half of Muriel Spark’
‘IS MURIEL SPARK TOO FUNNY TO GET THE RESPECT SHE’S DUE?’
‘MURIEL SPARK: THE DRIVER’S SEAT’
‘Muriel Spark’s Novels: Concepts of Self’
‘The Rediscovered Genius of Muriel Spark’
Buy ‘Aiding and Abetting’

 

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Muriel Spark on Lord Lucan

The seventh Lord Lucan, by all reports, was a very boring man. That was the point I kept in my mind when I wrote Aiding and Abetting, a fictionalised account of Lucan’s post-murderous wanderings. (To depict a boring person as such, without being boring, was, incidentally, quite difficult.)

I inquired of numerous people who had met him, at school, in the army, in later life: this boring factor was the most constant. He was also, even for those days, a musical snob. Approaching 40, he was simply not imaginative enough to take up a guitar-playing hippy identity.

For these, and many other deeply psychological reasons, I think it extremely unlikely that Lucan would have had it in him to take up the life of a jungle hippy in Goa, as a new book, Dead Lucky, alleges. If he had, he would never have been able to resist expressing some uninhibited sentiments about his past. In that environment, he would have talked about his children to whom, in fact, Lucan had been very much attached.

I have not seen the book, and look forward to reading it. But, though physical resemblances are part of the argument, they are not enough. While I was doing research for my novel I received quite a few letters from people who were convinced that they had seen and talked to Lucan, but none of their descriptions fitted the psychological picture of the stupid gambler, occupation: aristocrat, deeply in debt, who dressed to kill, and did kill.

Even if he had not murdered the nanny by mistake and had achieved his aim of killing his wife, he would have been the first suspect. He was much too stupid to be able to take on a totally new identity. I feel that he simply got away and stayed abroad incognito.

A police officer involved in the case wrote to me a few years ago that he and many of his fellow officers believed Lucan to be still alive. In a subsequent TV programme his widow asserted that he had died of drink. Although in my novel I brought him to a stickier end, I think Lady Lucan is probably right.

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Extras

Sandy Moffat on painting Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark Quotes

Ian Rankin reads from Muriel Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

Muriel Spark tells a joke

 

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Gallery

Muriel Spark’s writing desk

 

letter from Elizabeth Taylor

 

A diary entry from September 1966

 

Young Spark crowned ‘Queen of Poetry’

 

Betting slip from a horserace

 

The first manuscript page of Spark’s novel, Aiding and Abetting

 

Muriel Spark’s grave

 

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Interview
from tobylitt

 

TOBYLITT: In Curriculum Vitae you say, ‘It seemed to me that the Comforters of Job were not at all distinct characters; they were very much of one type. They were, in fact, like modern interrogators who come to interview and mock the victim in shifts.’ Do you enjoy doing interviews?

MURIEL SPARK: Interviews can be stimulating. It depends on the intelligence of the interviewer.

TL: At a rough guess, how many inteviews have you been subjected to in your life?

MS: About five a year.

TL: Of these interviews, were any particularly memorable? For what reason?

MS: Frank Kermode interviewed me in my early days. It is an oft-quoted classic interview.

TL: What is the question that you are most commonly asked, during interviews?

MS: Do I write by hand?

TL: Is there any questions that you wish you were asked more often, in interview?

MS: No.

TL: Answer the above question as if I had put it to you as part of this interview.

TL: No idea.

TL: Have you yourself ever interviewed anyone particularly memorable? Who? Where? Why?

MS: Masefield (see my introduction to the revised edition).

TL: Given a choice, which person – living, dead, divine, mythical, semi-mythical, or fictional – would you choose to interview? Why? What would you ask them? Where would this interview take place?

MS: M. Heger, Charlotte Brontë’s master at Brussels. I would ask did he encourage her as a lover.

TL: Have you ever read or studied interviews with other writers? I’m thinking, in particular, of the Paris Review series.

MS: Yes. The Paris Review is good. I’ve had two PR interviews, neither of which has surfaced.

TL: Your latest novel, Aiding and Abetting, is centred around an interview of sorts – a psychoanalytic session. Do you believe in ‘the talking cure’?

MS: Never heard of it before. Psychiatrists are mostly fake, but they obtain results merely by being consulted.

TL: Do you ever feel that during an interview you have been prompted to come up with a new idea – an idea that has subsequently contributed to the writing of fiction?

MS: Yes, but I don’t recall any specific occasion.

TL: How do you usually feel, and what do you usually do, after you have finished an interview?

MS: Take a rest and think over what the conversation was about.

 

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Book

Muriel Spark Aiding and Abetting
Penguin

‘In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose.

‘When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. As Dr. Wolf sets about deciding which of her patients, if either, is the real Lucan, she finds herself in a fierce battle of wills and an exciting chase across Europe. For someone is deceiving someone, and it may be the good …’ — Penguin

 

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Excerpt

The receptionist looked tinier than ever as she showed the tall, tall Englishman into the studio of Dr. Hildegard Wolf, the psychiatrist who had come from Bavaria, then Prague, Dresden, Avila, Marseilles, then London, and now settled in Paris.

“I have come to consult you,” he said, “because I have no peace of mind. Twenty-five years ago I sold my soul to the Devil.” The Englishman spoke in a very foreign French.
“Would you feel easier,” she said, “if we spoke in English? I am an English speaker of a sort since I was a student.”

“Far easier,” he said, “although, in a sense, it makes the reality more distressing. What I have to tell you is an English story.”

Dr. Wolf’s therapeutic methods had been perfected by herself. They had made her virtually the most successful psychiatrist in Paris, or at least the most sought-after. At the same time she was tentatively copied; those who tried to do so generally failed. The method alone did not suffice. Her personality was needed as well.

What she did for the most part was talk about herself throughout the first three sessions, turning only casually on the problems of her patients; then, gradually, in an offhand way she would induce them to begin to discuss themselves. Some patients, angered, did not return after the first or at least second session, conducted on these lines. Others remonstrated, “Don’t you want to hear about my problem?”

“No, quite frankly, I don’t very much.”

Many, fascinated, returned to her studio and it was they who, so it was widely claimed, reaped their reward. By now her method was famous and even studied in the universities. The Wolf method.

“I sold my soul to the Devil.”

“Once in my life,” she said, “I had a chance to do that. Only I wasn’t offered enough. Let me tell you about it . . .”

He had heard that she would do just this. The friend who had recommended her to him, a priest who had been through her hands during a troubled period, told him, “She advised me not to try to pray. She advised me to shut up and listen. Read the Gospel, she said. Jesus is praying to you for sympathy. You have to see his point of view, what he had to put up with. Listen, don’t talk. Read the Bible. Take it in. God is talking, not you.”

Her new patient sat still and listened, luxuriating in the expenditure of money which he would have found impossible only three weeks ago. For twenty-five years, since he was struck down in England by a disaster, he had been a furtive fugitive, always precariously beholden to his friends, his many friends, but still, playing the role of benefactors, their numbers diminishing. Three weeks ago his nickname Lucky had become a solidified fact. He was lucky. He had in fact discovered some money waiting for him on the death of one of his main aiders and abetters. It had been locked in a safe, waiting for him to turn up. He could afford to have a conscience. He could now consult at leisure one of the most expensive and most highly recommended psychiatrists in Paris. “You have to listen to her, she makes you listen, first of all,” they said?”they” being at least four people. He sat blissfully in his smart clothes and listened. He sat before her desk in a leather chair with arms; he lounged. It was strange how so many people of the past had been under the impression he had already collected the money left for him in a special account. Even his benefactor’s wife had not known about its existence.

He might, in fact, have been anybody. But she arranged for the money to be handed over without a question. His name was Lucky and lucky he was indeed.

But money did not last. He gambled greatly.

The windows of Dr. Wolf’s consulting rooms on the Boulevard St. Germain were double-glazed to allow only a pleasing hum of traffic to penetrate.

“I don’t know how it struck you,” said Hildegard (Dr. Wolf) to her patient. “But to me, selling one’s soul to the Devil involves murder. Anything less is not worthy of the designation. You can sell your soul to a number of agents, let’s face it, but to the Devil there has to be a killing or so involved. In my case, it was many years ago, I was treating a patient who became psychologically dependent on me. A young man, not very nice. His problem was a tendency to suicide. One was tempted to encourage him in his desire. He was simply nasty, simply cruel. His fortune was immense. I was offered a sum of money by his cousin, the next of kin, to slide this awful young man down the slope. But I didn’t. I sensed the meanness of the cousin, and doubted whether he would really have parted with the money once my patient was dead. I refused. Perhaps, if I had been offered a substantially larger sum, I would have made that pact with the Devil. Who knows? As it was, I said no, I wouldn’t urge the awful young man to take his own life. In fact I encouraged him to live. But to do otherwise would have definitely, I think, led to his death and I would have been guilty of murder.”

“Did he ever take his life, then?”

“No, he is alive today.”

The Englishman was looking at Hildegard in a penetrating way as if to read her true thoughts. Perhaps he wondered if she was in fact trying to tell him that she doubted his story. He wanted to get away from her office, now. He had paid for his first session on demand, a very stiff fee, as he reckoned, of fifteen hundred dollars for three quarters of an hour. But she talked on. He sat and listened with a large bulging leather briefcase at his feet.

For the rest of the period she told him she had been living in Paris now for over twelve years, and found it congenial to her way of life and her work. She told him she had a great many friends in the fields of medicine, music, religion and art, and although well into her forties, it was just possible she might still marry. “But I would never give up my profession,” she said. “I do so love it.”

His time was up, and she had not asked him a single question about himself. She took it for granted he would continue with her. She shook hands and told him to fix his next appointment with the receptionist. Which, in fact, he did.

It was towards the end of that month that Hildegard asked him her first question.

“What can I do for you?” she said, as if he was positively intruding on her professional time.

He gave her an arrogant look, sweeping her face. “First,” he said, “I have to tell you that I’m wanted by the police on two counts: murder and attempted murder. I have been wanted for over twenty years. I am the missing Lord Lucan.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** PL, Hi. It was super scary, the draft thing. It weighed heavily on my whole generation when I was in high school. Right, okay, you’d do public service stuff. Much less scary, but god knows you have better things to do with your days, so I still hope you get skipped. Serbia seems pretty intense, for sure. On the sites where I search for the monthly slaves, the vast majority are in the UK, but the most extreme ones are often in Serbia. Don’t think I’ll be vacationing there any time soon. Did you load up on new clothes? Anything especially, I don’t know, fancy? Oh, ha ha, no, the piece you’re referring to is a fictional phone conversation between Thurston and a fanatical fan boy. It was written as the liner notes for Sonic Youth’s ‘Sister’ album, but I don’t think current versions of the album still have it. It’s called ‘Phoner’. It’s in one of my books, either ‘Smothered in Hugs’ or ‘Ugly Man’, I can’t remember which. Thanks, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. I loved the new PT episode. I think it was the trippiest, most acid one. Great structure. It totally gave me an acid flashback (with maybe some E mixed in about a third off the way through) in the good way. As a side note, I had a short period of collecting samples of people saying ‘oh my god’ in movies, and I’d never heard that one before, and it’s a great one. Thank you, maestro. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, yes, funding too, although festivals get funded in France, so that’s not the only reason. There just seems to be a general fear out there of the new and foreseen and adventurous that I don’t understand. To me those three qualities are always the ultimate goal. But oh well. Well, then, your love of yesterday would come in very handy, wouldn’t he? Love explaining to the Parisian Chipotle outlet that cheese quesadillas are a standard item of Mexican food and that not offering it on their menu is an outrage, G. ** Gus Cali Girls, Hey, Gus. Thanks! Yeah, dying for you to see the film. Whoa, how did the Clementi poem go over? What’s it like, if you can say? And big congrats on the postgrad prize! Your prize giver is admirably adventurous. Cool, you sound plenty productive. I’m obviously totally with you on Clementi. If you get the chance, watch his film ‘In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal’. It’s the most narrative film he directed by far, and it’s amazing, and it has a great, insane score. I’ll get to your email today. Yesterday got eaten by a bunch of stuff. The very best boomeranging back to you. ** Bill, Ha ha. Fred Camper, a passionate fella, god love him. Eek, that Enorchestra sounds a little scary. Bad scary. But it’s the thought that counts, one supposes? I was hoping they’d be more like Portsmouth Sinfonia, ha ha. ** Nasir, A birthday non-celebrator after my own heart. Well, my late mom’s birthday was on the 14th, which is close, but I didn’t mark the occasion except with a complicated thought or two. I hope to read your piece today. Yesterday got packed with brain-frying film related stuff. Excited to! ** Misanthrope, Okay, what is this ‘cornhole’? It’s obviously not the usual cornhole if your mom did it, not that I know your mom well enough to suppose that. October: might be hard? I’m reading at the Poetry Project in NYC at the beginning of October, and then Zac and I are going on from there to LA for a Halloween haunt hunt. But hopefully we can sort it out to be able to see you guys. Well, a young lad wanting to make an innocent trip to Europe seems like a normal enough thing. And you’re just his, uh, tutor? ** Brendan, Brendan! Buddy! Your hero, yes! Dude, the film is all but finally completely finished! And we’re gonna bring it to LA and show you, I think in May at this point because we still have a tiny more polishing to do. How are you, man? Big love, me. ** Uday, Well, you managed to get two comments public today, so … hm. I’ve never completely understood why luddite is a pejorative term. Boring? Even with you onstage? I don’t believe it. I, of course, am similarly high on those sentences, yes. I would only be a commenter/reviewer on those sites. Even at my youngest and most utmost, I was never quite a commodity anyone would want to purchase. But, you, however, I’m sure, not that I’ve seen you, of course, would be profile worthy. What’s your selling point(s)? ** Harper, Welcome back to the grind. The smoking grind. It’s true, you probably should have quit when you had the luxury to, but, oh well, and I didn’t quit even with bronchitis, like I think I said, and I wasn’t young at the time even. This anti-smoking fascist bullshit is so fucking obnoxious. Get a life, you non-smoking assholes! ** Darby 👨‍💻, Hey, D-ster. Hi, Frankie. It’s cold here today, so Frankie sounds especially charming. Yes, enter the writing comp, absolutely! Pretend I’m holding a squirt gun to your head. I went to community college for two years, and it was good. I got a lot better at my writing while I was there. I like looking at cooking, but I’m way too impatient a person to cook. I’m a 100% microwave guy. Well, I do boil water on a stove for pasta too. But that’s it. I’ll look at The Korean Vegan. Thank you. Give Frankie a … what does Frankie like? … whatever Frankie likes for me. ** Dev, Hi. Was it a scenic drive? I’ve never been to Memphis. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Tennessee even. I do really want to go to Dollywood. Did being in N.O. decide anything? Paris is great. I’m a big, big fan. You should come to Europe/Paris sometime when you get the opportunity. It’s really nice over here. It’s much more peaceful than the US. Or Paris is. Thanks very much for the tips. I’ve scribbled them down, and I’ll purse them one by one. Yeah, Stephen knows his Metal, that’s for sure. Thanks! You back home now? ** Okay. Today I’m spotlighting one of my favorites amongst Muriel Sparks’s novels, and there you go. See you tomorrow.