May 21, 2006

In the one month and five days since Muriel Spark died, I have read six of her novels and invented a cocktail in her honor, the Muriel Spark. The six novels are:

Loitering with Intent
The Bachelors
A Far Cry from Kensington
Symposium
Robinson
Paddington Station
The Finishing School

A whole bunch of vodka
Just a bit of grapefruit juice
Not very much Triple Sec

Shake with plenty of ice, strain into a chilled martini glass.

I don't know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she didn't really like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meager luggage. You didn't think of discarding them just because you didn't altogether like them. Life on the intellectual fringe in 1949 was a universe by itself. It was something like life in Eastern Europe today.
—Loitering with Intent

Robinson lit distress signals every night but when, two nights later, the searchers returned, a torrent of rain had quenched the flares. On both occasions the plane had retreated quickly out of the mist, fearful of our mountain. There was nothing but to wait for the pomegranate boat in August. —Robinson

It is always the same with people who make a fetish of self-control: they strike the most histrionic attitudes. —Robinson

Ewart Robinson suddenly had the desire to ring off. The act of gossiping with her over the telephone was a need, but the need was fulfilled in the act. He did not like it when the conversation seemed to be getting somewhere. —The Bachelors

"He's a pisseur de copie," I said, and I said it because I couldn't help it. It just came out.
      "Oh, God!" said Emma. "That epithet of yours. It's going the rounds and it's ruining Hector's career. I'm not claiming he's a genius, but—"
      "What was that you said, Mrs. Hawkins?" said Sir Alec. Colin Shoe looked up at the ceiling.
      "Pisseur de copie. It means that he pisses hack journalism, it means he urinates frightful prose." —A Far Cry from Kensington

Everybody stopped talking except Masie Young who decided to finish what she was saying to me about the universe. She sat with her crippled leg in its irons stuck out in front of her, which indeed did give her a sort of right to hold forth longer than anybody else.
—Loitering with Intent