Don't get on the bad side of a Muriel Spark character

I like to say that I like the writing of Muriel Spark, but then, if only to myself, have to admit that this is based solely on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her most famous work, the movie version of which impressed me, at 13, with its sophistication...and, by extension my own, and on The Girls of Slender Means, which I love, and have read a couple times.

So, feeling somewhat at loose fictional ends, I got from the library one of those Book of the Month Club omnibus volumes where several separate books, complete with their own margins, fonts, and pagination, are squished together between hard covers, as through some mysterious geologic process. This one has, in addition to TGSM, which I plan to read for a third time, Memento Mori and the book I checked the volume out for, A Far Cry From Kensington.

It is told in a slippery time structure similar to the other two I have read, with the narrator (in this case, Nancy Hawkins, describing her life in 1954, when she worked at a dying publishing house) free to hint at what is to come, contrasting how she felt about something when it happened to how she feels about it as she is writing, and unexpectedly telling you a character's fate, or alternately, revealing something about her own past.

She has just met a character who will clearly be significant in her life (although I, the naive reader, have no idea why yet):

At this point the man whom I came to call the pisseur de copie enters my story. I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in the phrase 'pisseur de copie', but the description remained in my mind, and I attached it to a great many of the writers who hung around or wanted to meet Martin York [her boss, failing and now seemingly committing serious fraud]; and finally I attached it for life to one man alone, Hector Bartlett.

Then, somewhat further on:

Pisseur de copie! Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it.

'Mrs Hawkins, I take incalculable pains with my prose style.'

He did indeed. The pains showed. His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.

If you are a writer, you might sometimes wonder what the employees at your publisher really think of your work. Perhaps better not to inquire.