Writing With Intent: Muriel Spark on Sex and Prose Style

I'm still on my Muriel Spark kick. And, by the way, I did reread The Girls of Slender Means again. Once you start, you really can't stop.

I’m not sure if the schoolteacherish demeanor is deliberate, or just impatient

Now I'm in the middle of Loitering With Intent. Entertaining, of course, but not as easy a read as some of the others. It's about a writer, Fleur Talbot, who finds that aspects of reality begin the mimic events in a novel she has written. And Fleur gets accused of libeling people despite the fact that she wrote her novel before she met those people, or they did the things she wrote about.

It's inspired by the same period in Spark's life as A Far Cry From Kensington, though is more distant from the actual publishing milieu. It does have more sex, which plays a role in the quotation below. Fleur is talking to a frenemy, Dottie, whose husband Leslie Fleur has slept with. Despite their contentious relationship, which involves stolen manuscripts, among other misbehavior, Dottie and Fleur seem entangled for life. But I haven't finished the book yet.

Dottie and Fleur are talking on the phone. Dottie has just said that Fleur's book, Warrender Chase is "a thoroughly sick novel" (and, thus, we are reading a sick novel). In return, Fleur attacks Leslie's own literary work:

I could hear Dottie crying. I meant to tell her more about Leslie's prose, its frightful tautology. He never reached the point until it was undetectably lost in a web of multisyllabic words and images trowelled on like cement.

She said, "You didn't say this when you were sleeping with him."

"I didn't sleep with him for his prose style."

Muriel Spark herself has an economical way of telling a story, a manner I now aspire to, since all too often I am more Leslie than Fleur.