The Girls of Slender Means

"It was kind of like a hostel. It’s almost as autobiographical as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Her teacher Miss Christina Kay was very like Miss Jean Brodie. But then, not very like Miss Jean Brodie. The first thing to say of The Girls of Slender Means is that when I went to London when I was 18, I lived in a male equivalent of this club. These clubs were quite the norm in those days. If you went and worked for the civil service, before you found a flat or your own place to stay, they would find somewhere for you to stay so you could get used to working and the routine of staying in this place. And they were full of fascinating characters, who were doing bizarre things like the girls were doing in The Girls of Slender Means . So I can see where she’s coming from entirely. I always think of The Girls of Slender Means as a sequel of sorts to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . Because if you think of the girls in The Prime as around about 10, 11 or so, now they’re in their late teens. They’ve moved away from their upbringing and school and now they’re making their way in the big world. The imperative was to get to London as quickly as you could, and to try to make it there. I went to London thinking I was going to become Dylan Thomas – thank God I didn’t. Also, like The Prime , it’s set in a closed world. You can manipulate a group of people within a closed world. The other thing is – and she’s unusual in this – for such short novels, her casts were huge. You try to put these things on stage, nobody can afford to do it because you need so many actors and actresses. All these characters have to be extraordinarily delineated. They all have to operate within each other, and then she has to tell a story. The period I think is totally brilliant. Right at the end. And you have this absolutely shocking climax to the book. Flash forwards and flashbacks. She was postmodern before the phrase was invented. All it was for her – this is her Scottish Presbyterian sensibility – was just stating the obvious. ‘I’m writing a novel. We know what’s happening, let’s not pretend otherwise,’ you know? So that’s the part of it. It’s not any tricksiness or whatever. It’s like saying, ‘Look: you’re reading a thriller. Of course the novelist knows how the thriller is going to end. So I’m going to tell you how it ends before it’s even begun. So let’s get that out of the way now and get onto more important things.’ That’s absolutely wonderful. When she appeared at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2004, I remember a young woman putting her hand up and asking her the question: had she ever been in the situation in which, while writing her novels, one of the minor characters had grown bigger and bigger until he or she began to take over the novel. Muriel just looked askance and said, very quietly: ‘How would that happen?’ She said: ‘I’ve heard of novelists that has happened to. But I’m writing a novel, I’m in charge. So how would it surprise me?’ That’s a good question. She had an idea – a pip in the apple – and the idea would germinate. To germinate it, she’d do a lot of reading and research around this amorphous idea. So, she wrote about Lord Lucan in Aiding and Abetting, she wrote about the Watergate scandal in The Abbess of Crewe , she wrote about Mary Queen of Scots in The Finishing School . She’d do a lot of reading about all these subjects. How that pertained to what she was going to then write, how the novel was going to materialise, it’s difficult to tell. But she would do that, she would make notes and think about it. Then there would come a point when she felt she had accumulated enough material, enough detail and enough notes, enough thought, that it was time to ‘pounce,’ as she said. “She would write the shorter of these novels in a matter of six to eight weeks” She would have a working title, as novelists always do. Quite often her working titles were no good, as is inevitable, but when she started to write it was extremely concentrated. She would write fast, by hand in Bothwell spiral notebooks she bought in quantity from James Thin’s bookshop in Edinburgh, and more often than not she would write the shorter of these novels in a matter of six to eight weeks. Occasionally when she got stuck, she would make the unusual choice of checking into a hospital in Rome, where the nuns were keen that the people who were there weren’t ill, and she’d get on with writing her novel. She’s the only novelist I know who checked into hospitals to write books. It was a good hospital, the private hospital that the Pope used: the Salvator Mundi. No no no, it was pretty much like a retreat. I don’t know too much about the hospital. I once asked her if she ever saw the Pope there. She said: ‘No, but how would I know? He was probably in disguise.’ I think a lot of people who were there were getting plastic surgery. By and large, the idea was that she would be kept warm, she’d be fed. Her every desire was catered for. You have to remember that – this is quite unusual too – that Muriel was the least domestic person on the planet. Her mother had told her at an early age that if she didn’t learn to do something, no one could ask her to do it. And nobody abided by that as carefully as Muriel did. Doris and Muriel both regretted the fact that when they were in what was then Rhodesia at a particular age, they were only 50 miles apart. Their life there would have been much easier, and much more congenial, if they had known that and known each other. 50 miles in Rhodesia was nothing to travel. What they think of them as mothers? It actually makes me sick to hear some people talk about them in a way to suggest that they were somehow neglectful, or that they abandoned their children, or that they lacked maternal instincts or whatever. I don’t know exactly the details of Doris’s set up, but I know she looked after her son Peter for many, many years, and with a kind of dedication that was quite outstanding. “When Doris Lessing and Muriel lived in Rhodesia, they were only fifty miles apart” In Muriel’s case, she unfortunately married a man who was probably manic-depressive and had violent tendencies. Nevertheless in Rhodesia, where they had Robin, he was given custody of Robin. And therefore, whether Muriel wanted to look after him or not, she couldn’t. All she could do to protect him was to send him to school where he would be away from her dangerous husband. Then when she finally came back to Britain, she was the only member of the family – including her mother and father at that stage – who was capable of earning a living. And she was only capable of earning a living in her chosen profession as a writer in London. So what did she do? She took Robin out of her husband’s hands, sent Robin to be brought up by her very loving mother and father, while she got on with earning a living and sending all the money back home. She was like a modern refugee in that sense, working all hours of the day and night, in extreme circumstances, to send them money. How that’s neglectful, I don’t know. Now that isn’t to say that Robin didn’t feel neglected, he did. But that’s his problem. It’s never is. And one of the other things that’s also never remarked upon is – and I don’t want to come over as some kind of crypto-feminist, or whatever, it’s just straight forward as far as I’m concerned – that the 1950s is meant to be the decade of the Angry Young Men. Well, they’re all pretty ordinary writers. Whereas the decade of the 1950s was the decade of Nadine Gordimer , Iris Murdoch , Doris Lessing , Brigid Brophy , Elizabeth Taylor , Muriel Spark, and on and on and on you could go. Nobody seems to think this is remarkable. Least of all, academics! Well, I don’t think anybody deserves that kind of attention. I mean, she might have done previously, but I think this generation of academics is pretty uninspiring. They’re basically phenomenon spotters. They can’t spot whether anything’s any good or not, they can’t tell whether a sentence sings, or dies like a bell that’s lost its tone."