The Chandeliers of the Metropole: A Vivid Glow Upon the Just and the Unjust in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat.

Hosmer, Robert Ellis, Jr.

Abstract

Arguably Muriel Spark's greatest novel, The Driver's Seat (1970) has never received its fair share of critical attention. Often dismissed as a mysterious trifle, it is just that, a mystery, but not a trifle at all. Contextualised within the canon of Spark's work, The Driver's Seat is an eschatologically-focused parable with an emphatically spiritual point. It is to be viewed sub specie aeternitatis, or under 'a vivid glow [that falls] upon the just and the unjust alike.' Seen thus, the observation of Spark's protagonist, Lise, 'It's getting late. It's getting terribly late,' resounds with the force of a Biblical injunction. She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14. (2)

This sinuously elegant first sentence from Chapter Three of Muriel Spark's tenth novel, The Driver's Seat (1970), stopped some readers in their tracks. One critic asked, 'what can you say about a writer who does things like this to a reader? (3) then he lapsed into a little plot summary before ending with an acknowledgement of being 'mystified' by the novel. He was not alone. Another confessed 'I have to admit that I could not make head or tail of it, it seems totally pointless.' (4) It wasn't so much the detached, almost clinical description of a brutal death; ends of that sort, whether accomplished by suffocation ('The Portobello Road,' n.d.), or corkscrew (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, i960) or fire (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, i960; The Girls of Slender Means, 1963) or suicidal leap (The Public Image, 1968) were commonplace, if not essential, in Spark's previous fictions. And it wasn't so much that the plot line had been given away, indeed tossed away like yesterday's newspaper, before the novel had barely begun, for Spark had already shown herself mistress of the multiple uses of proleptic irony, with calculated technical control.

Rather, the puzzled dissatisfaction of early readers and critics lay elsewhere, in two distinct areas: the construction of the 'character' of Lise, the murder victim; and the perceived lack of Spark's characteristic religious concerns in this novel. Most critics located their irritation in the first category: one declared, 'there are not women like this' (5) while another lamented that 'one becomes detached to the point of boredom' (6)--as if either verisimilitude or empathy were non-negotiable requirements for evaluating fictional characters. Still another complained that Spark never takes the reader into the mind of Lise, and for that offense, he described her as a 'surface novelist. (7)

Few reviewers discussed the perceived absence of the spiritual from the novel; but one who did was a major critic who had often contextualsied and interpreted Spark's fiction brilliantly. Frank Kermode noted that The Driver's Seat bore no trace of what he called the 'religious plots' of her earlier work. (8)

In the time between publication and now the novel has received little extended scholarly, critical attention. Ian Rankin's probing 'Surface and Structure: Reading Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat' (1985) is a singular and notable exception. In Muriel Spark: The Biography (2009) Martin Stannard gives The Driver's Seat short shrift, typically letting plot summary and review cuttings stand in for incisive literary analysis. Jonathan Kemp's '"Her Lips Are Slightly Parted": The Ineffability of Erotic Sociality in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat' (2008) offers what he calls 'a queer reading' of the novel, but the essay seems rather more concerned with varieties of contemporary critical theory than with the novel itself. And, most recently, Tim Parks, in a lengthy essay for The New York Review of Books, gave it only one paragraph, acknowledging it as 'a schematic tour de force,' (9) but saying little more.

Perhaps it is now time to re-examine The Driver's Seat and ponder its significance anew, especially in light of the author's own estimate of the novel. More than once she delivered the judgment she offered in 1987, when she had published seventeen of the twenty-two novels she would write: 'The Driver's Seat is to my mind my best novel.' (10) As late as 2000, when she had published three more novels, she reiterated that estimate: ' I think my best book, my favorite novel, is called The Driver's Seat. (11) This neglected novel from the Spark canon is indeed a masterpiece, the best of all Spark's twenty-two novels, and perhaps some of what entitles the novel to that status can be found by responding to those critics who wrote about it upon publication in 1970.

The Driver's Seat chronicles the last thirty-six hours in the life of Lise, a thirty-four-year-old woman who works for a firm of accountants, probably in Copenhagen (we cannot be sure of that any more than of a number of other things in this novel). Lise is going on holiday in the South; she bids her colleagues goodbye, saying 'I'm going to have the time of my life. (12) It sounds a bit like a Cosmopolitan magazine story from the 1960s (attractive, fairly young, single woman heads south for some fun in the sun) but it's anything but that. Something's awry here and we know it soon.

Shopping for holiday clothes before her departure, Lise is delighted with a particularly garish outfit, but, when the sales girl tells her it has the advantage of being made of stain-resisting fabric, Lise screams, 'Get this thing off me. Off at once, (13) before shrieking, 'Do you think I spill things on my clothes? Do I look as if I don't eat properly?' (14) and leaving the store. In another store she selects another dress ('a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright V's of orange, mauve, and blue' (15)) and adds a coat with red and white stripes to complete the ensemble ('"They go very well together," Lise says' (16)), and off she goes while onlookers guffaw. Hysterical laughter punctuates Lise's outlandish behavior, but she will not be deterred: she is a woman with a purpose.

From the moment of her arrival at the airport, Lise searches for the man who is her 'type,' edgily surveying every man in that quest, consistently concluding, 'he's not my type.' Her maniacal laughter, off-putting remarks and frantic behavior would be enough to alarm any man. We might think that she is just looking for a temporary hook-up, but such is not the case. Spark's construction of Lise pre-empts the vital sexual component altogether: what Lise tells one would-be seducer--'I don't want sex with you. I'm not interested in sex' (17)--is repeated several times in the course of the novel. Lise's interests, as well as Spark's, lie elsewhere.

Lise has something else in mind altogether: she is looking for the man she wants to kill her. And she will succeed in short order.

For most of the novel Lise searches. Several suitably bizarre candidates--a macrobiotics guru, an English lord, an Arab sheik, a department store clerk--are rejected ('not my type'). In the end, Lise's type has been there all along: a fellow passenger boarding that morning at Gate Fourteen is her type. As the novel spirals toward the end, Spark's prose increases in speed and intensity, mirroring Lise's increasing desperation. She finds her man again and dragoons him into service: tryouts are over, the role's been cast. 'Richard' assumes his role in the death scenario she has written so that 'she is found dead from multiple stab wounds.'

Such a skeletal summary would not necessarily seem to be the stuff of a literary masterpiece but Spark's strategies and complex, multilayered narrative raise the status of The Driver's Seat well beyond a run-of-the-mill textual exercise. The novel is far more than lethal parody of a cheap romance novel. And though it has some of the elements of the traditional detective story, there is really nothing here to detect, and very little suspense. Determining the who of this whodunit does not require the services of Hercule Poirot. The Driver's Seat is a mystery, but in ways more profound than the ordinary. Attempting to answer several questions may illuminate some of the mystery: What is The Driver's Seat? Who is Lise? Why did she do it? What is the message of the novel?

Spark once said of The Driver's Seat, 'I did the whole thing like a Greek play', (18) and certainly in its clarity, economy, and its idiosyncratic use of some elements from the Aristotelian paradigm, it does bring to mind those great ancient texts. Moreover, though readers do not know the plot line beforehand, as is the case in so many Greek tragedies, they do know it soon enough so that their concerns, like those of the spectators gathered at Athens or Epidaurus, lie with how that plot would be realised. Spark knew that 'wanting to know what happened is not so strong as wanting to know how.,(19) And, in an ironic reversal, it may be more accurate to say that rather than being pursued by the Furies, as is sometimes the case in Greek tragedy, Lise pursues them. The novel's last paragraph explicitly Greek tragedy: Richard envisions being taken into police custody and sees his imminent interrogation, but the final focus is not on that activity but on the uniforms of the interrogators with their 'holsters and epaulets and all those trapping devised to protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and fear.' (20) While The Driver's Seat is not a perfectly conforming Aristotelian tragedy, those last six words are something more than mere rhythmic repetition: they are an insistent reminder of the cathartic effect of having peered into the abyss without having fallen in ourselves, part of the essential experience of Greek tragedy.

Yet, The Driver's Seat displays greater kinship with the nouveau roman. At the time of its composition, Spark was particularly captivated by the stories of Alain Robbe-Grillet, master of the genre. She gives us a dispassionate, almost clinical (and that is appropriate, considering the novel is, from one angle, a case history of psychological illness), description of the protagonist and her external world. Indeed, we know more about Lise's flat, about the food served her on the airplane, about her hotel room, and about secondary characters than we ever know about Lise. All we do know is severely limited and quite cryptic: Lise is thin, her height is about five-foot six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted, a very light streaked lock sweeping from the middle of her hair-line to the top of her crown; her hair is cut short at the sides and back, and is styled high. She might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six, but hardly younger, hardly older [...] She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Lise's eyes are widely-spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. Her nose is short [. .] (21)

So much for the physical presence of the protagonist.

Whatever biographical 'facts' Lise herself chooses to reveal at moments in the novel are fabrications, inventions from whole cloth, as, for example in her encounter with Carlo, a lecherous mechanic in whose garage she takes refuge when caught up in a student protest march. She tells him more than one version of her life--at first she says, 'I'm only tourist, a teacher from Iowa, New Jersey' (22) then embroiders things a little more, telling him, 'I'm a widow and an intellectual'. (23) Time and again she reinvents her biography. Lise makes it up as she goes along, constructing new, entirely fictitious, multiples selves as she encounters other characters en route to her final destination.

We do not know enough about Lise to care about her. What little we 'know' is external, entirely superficial and carefully nuanced by adverbs ('perhaps,' 'evidently,' 'apparently') and verbs ('may be,' 'seems'). What we might feel sure of--e.g., 'her lips are a straight line. Her nose is short'," (24) is entirely inconsequential. Further undermining the reader's confidence in assembling the puzzle pieces of 'Lise' here is a Narrator whose use of explicit interrogatives intensifies the atmospherics of doubt and disbelief. Several moments are of particular import in this regard. First, just before leaving her apartment building Lise had intended to leave an envelope with car keys in it at the desk, but she does not, and the Narrator comments, '[...] but whether she has failed to leave it at the door-keeper's desk by intention, or whether through the distraction of the woman's laughter, one could not tell from her serene face with lips slightly parted.' (25) Two other moments, carefully juxtaposed (only one paragraph separates them), enhance the interrogative effects. In the first, Lise, having gotten to her hotel room and settled in, examines the contents of her suitcase: the Narrator tells us, 'Lise is lifting the corners of her carefully packed things, as if in absentminded accompaniment to some thought, who knows what?' (26) Shortly afterwards, having pinpointed the exact spot for her own murder on a map, she sets her room in order and exits; the Narrator asks, 'Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?' (27) The cumulative effect of this interrogative strategy, particularly in conjunction with Spark's use of that 'as if' construction (it occurs at least twenty-eight times in the novel) is to shroud everything in this novel in a great cloud of unknowing. Everything contributes to the reader's sense of uncertainty and unease.

This is certainly a novel about identity politics and intentionality. Lise is a casualty of the chaos of contemporary life, and her painful, frantic attempts to fashion an identity for herself in the whirlpool of anonymity, alienation, and illness are disturbing. One of the few things we do learn about her is that 'she has worked continually, except for the months of illness';28 at only one place do we have access, perhaps, to some information about those months: in conversation with her murderer, who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital where he had 'six years' treatment', (29) Lise responds knowingly, asking, 'were the walls of the clinic pale green in all the rooms? Was there a great big tough man in the dormitory at night, patrolling up and down, every so often, just in case?' (30) revealing, perhaps, some of her own history. If so, it only confirms what we knew in the novel's first few paragraphs.

Lise draws attention to herself time and again in the novel not only on her shopping excursion but at nearly even' stop along the way to the pavilion of death. She will make an impression. She will be remembered. She will have an identity. And the irony of it all is that it will be the one 'constructed by the method of the identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages." (31) Ultimately, Interpol constructs a very public, if partial, identity for Lise. Only in a very late novel, Aiding and Abetting (2001) did Muriel Spark pay anything like such explicit, focused and insightful attention to the shifting and fluid dynamics of identity construction.

Lise is certainly an artist of the self, a constructor of character whose strategies are much like those of the novelist, perhaps even more like those of the auteur so central to critical discussion of that period of French filmmaking known as the Nouvelle Vague. Lise is, or thinks that she is, in charge of every detail of her death scenario: the script, the location, the choreography, the casting. With 'absolute purpose', (31) " with 'satisfaction at her own dominance over the situation', (33) 'without hesitation', (34) calculating every action, every gesture 'deliberately', (35) she brings her project to life, or rather, to death. This is not to say that there are not moments when things appear to falter. Occasionally, she is frustrated, her confidence does flag, her certainty seems suspended. And she does not seem to realise the full implications of what she does, or does she? On the last page of the novel, the Narrator continues, 'As the knife descends towards her throat, she screams, evidendy perceiving how final is finality.' (36) It is not Lise's fault that this final scene is not played exactly according to her script.

And in all these aspects but the last she is so much like the novelist. The Driver's Seat is a novel about itself, i.e., it is a novel about making a novel. Once again, we are reminded of the 'Greek' element in the novel, for it is a deliberately metafictional exercise just as some scenes in Greek tragedies, e.g., Dionysus' staging the costuming of Pentheus as sacrificial victim in Euripides' Bacchae, is a deliberately metatheatrical exercise. Lise is Spark's surrogate novelist--constructing plots, arranging scenes, testing actors, creating contexts for action. The stunning distinction, of course, is that only the novelist really has that 'absolute purpose' about the performance, for she alone has complete control over all that happens in the text: unlike life in the world, subject to events arbitrary, random, and often unplanned, life in the novel is subject only to strict authorial control. Lise is deluded, for she assumes a divine omniscience and omnipotence that can never be hers. Despite her meticulous planning of her own death, she fails, inevitably, at its perfect execution. In giving instructions to Richard, Lise is emphatic, 'I don't want any sex,' she shouts. 'You can have it afterwards. (37) But he violates that condition, raping her before plunging the knife in.

Spark never had any intention of answering the 'why did she do it?' question. As she told one interviewer, 'you don't know why the things that happen happen.' (38) She never felt an obligation to explain anything, to anyone. After all, this is a writer who once said, 'I don't go in much for motives. I never have.' (39) Her Narrator frequently teases the reader, perhaps most explicitly about Lise's motivation Rankin has shrewdly pointed to the one place in the text that might provide some clue about Lise's motivation. In Chapter Six, the next-to-the last scene of this drama, Lise's companion tells her that she is getting morbid and she responds, 'It makes me sad. I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lovely grief again. I miss it so much already.' (40) But what does that tell us, really?

Spark's lack of interest in, nearly complete disregard for, traditional readerly concerns with plot and character directs her reader to look elsewhere. In a way at least as tantalising, the Narrator teases the reader about the point of the whole fictional exercise. Lise buys and parades about with a book she describes as 'a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message.' (41) That title is no casual or accidental touch. Contemporary literary theory to the contrary, Spark's novels do have messages.

Once, in an interview with Frank Kermode, Spark declared: I don't claim that my novels are truth I claim that they are fiction, out of which truth emerges [...] I am interested in truth-absolute truth-and I don't pretend that what I'm writing is more than an imaginative extension of the truth - something inventive. [...] what I write is not true - it is a pack of lies. There is metaphorical truth and moral truth, and they call anagogical truth, in which I believe things which are difficult to believe, but I believe them. (42)

Fiction is nothing but a pack of lies, lies that reveal truths. For Spark, a woman who took the Roman Catholic faith to which she converted in 1954 seriously, those truths always provided context and perspective for fiction. Bradbury's observation that 'we should take her preoccupations with plots and grids and fictions as more than a part of a current speculative rage for aesthetic order, but also as a distinct urgency about truth--a desire to rouse through the model of the writer's action the eschatological questions' (43), stands. What Spark herself noted in 1993 was fundamental: 'there's a life beyond this and these events [here and now] are not the most important things. They're not important in the long run.' (44) In the end (a dangerous phrase re: Spark's novels, to be sure), The Driver's Seat is a serious spiritual exercise with that 'religious plot' Kermode failed to discern, for beyond the level of Lise, beyond the level of the novelist herself, lies another level, the only one that counts in Spark's calculus, the Divine.

A certain degree of the divine infuses all fiction, of course: the omniscience and omnipotence traditionally associated with the divine is the novelist's within the parameters of the text. Believer or non-believer, the novelist plays the role of the divinity. Certainly Spark's very deliberate metafictional strategies foreground such a consideration. Amplifying the spiritual dimension of The Driver's Seat is a feature that also disturbs critics and readers: Spark casts the novel in the present tense and deliberately disrupts chronological sequence. Why? Because, from the divine perspective, all time is one: 'past,' 'present,' and 'future' are mere human constructs, indivisible parts of one great reality. Spark follows the directive of one of her characters from her eleventh (and next) novel, Not to Disturb (1971): 'Let us not strain after vulgar chronology.'(45)

Complementing this strategy is a very limited, but quite effective use of reference. Lise spends an afternoon shopping with an elderly woman, Mrs Fiedke, who offers an opinion about travel that resonates, declaring, 'I'm a strict believer, in fact a Witness, but I never trust the airline from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.' (46) A ridiculous sentiment, perhaps, but in the silence after the laughter dies, lies something: a sign to look to another level quite.

Like a talented auteur, Spark sets the lighting for the performance that is The Driver's Seat. Having escaped the rapacious clutches of Carlo, Lise snags a taxi and rushes to meet Bill for drinks at his hotel. Their delayed rendezvous takes place under 'the chandeliers of the Metropole, dispensing a vivid glow upon the just and the unjust alike.' (47) Spark's language echoes a famous Scriptural passage (Matthew 5.45: 'for he causes his sun to rise on the unjust as well as the just') and beautifully contextualises not only that meeting. It is the light of another world that illuminates the actions of this novel and creates its most appropriate interpretive context. Under that glow we see Lise's actions for what they are: delusional attempts to usurp the absolute certainty and dominance that never belongs to humankind, only occasionally and temporarily to the novelist, but ultimately to God, the omniscient and omnipotent plot maker. Interrogated once about why her Narrator in The Driver's Seat says he has no idea what Lise is thinking, Spark's response was telling, 'Yes, God knows. In that book it wasn't for the author to say.' (48)

The Driver's Seat is a parable in the great tradition of Christian Scripture. Singularly free though it is from explicit reference to any elements of (udaeo-Christian texts or practices, The Driver's Seat, with its verbal tenses collapsed into an oxymoronic present, its withering indictment of human 'absolute purpose' and 'satisfaction at [...] dominance over the situation,' shifts ultimate focus beyond text, beyond author, to the Great Beyond. Perhaps Spark would have us heed Lise's observation, 'It's getting late. It's getting terribly late.' (49)

Smith College, Northampton, USA

Notes

(1) I am grateful, as always, to Penelope Jardine, Muriel Spark's literary executor, for permissions and helpful comments, and to my colleague, Prof. Justina Gregory, Dept. of Classical Languages and Literature, Smith College, for offering valuable insights.

(2) Muriel Spark, The Driver'sSeat (New York: New Directions Press, 2014), p. 21.

(3) James R. Frakes, 'Her Own Murder' in Washington Post Book World, 10 October 1970, p. 2.

(4) Auberon Waugh, 'On New Novels' in The Spectator, 20 November 1971, p. 12.

(5) Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 79.

(6) Pllizabeth pjaston, 'The Driver's Seat' in Saturday Review, 10 October 1970, p. 6;.

(7) Peter Wolfe, 'Choosing the Death' in The New Republic, 3 October 1970, p. 27.

(8) Frank Kermode, 'Sheerer Spark' in The listener 24 September 1970, p. 425. Certainly The Driver's Seat received far less critical attention than its predecessor, The Mandetbaum Gate (1965); for a number of critics the latter novel, a longer and more capacious exercise, marked what they saw as a shift towards more traditional, 'realistic' novels. Such would not be the case, however. Spark's next five novels, The Public Image (1968); The Driver's Seat (1970); Not to Disturb (1971); The Hothouse by the Bast River (1973) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), went in a new direction as Spark's fascination with the fictions of Robbe-Grillet and Beckett and the films of Antonioni and Resnais led her to experiments in technique and compression (only one of these novels approaches one hundred fifty pages, the others just break one hundred pages). They are the most difficult--and intellectually challenging--in the Spark canon. Some delayed recognition for The Driver's Seat came in 2010 when it was nominated for the 'Lost Booker Prize.'

(9) Tim Parks, 'Muriel Spark: Moral Hypnotist' in The New York Review of Books, 9 October 2014.

(10) Allan Massie, 'Spark of Inspiration' in The Times, 1 August 1987, p. 18.

(11) Robert E. Hosmer Jr, 'An Interview with Dame Muriel Spark' in Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 2005, p. 13;.

(12) 7'Af Driver's Seat, p. 7.

(13) Ibid., p. 5.

(14) Ibid., p. 6.

(15) Ibid., p. 7.

(16) Ibid., p. 8.

(17) Ibid., p. 65.

(18) Allan Massie, 'Spark of Inspiration' in The Times, 1 August 1987, p. 18.

(19) Stephen Schiff, 'Muriel Spark Between the Lines' in The New Yorker, 24 May 1993, p. 42.

(20) The Driver's Seat, p. 88.

(21) Ibid., p. 15.

(22) Ibid., p. 63.

(23) Ibid., p. 77.

(24) Ibid., p. 15.

(25) Ibid., p. 13.

(26) Ibid., pp. 40-41.

(27) Ibid., p. 41.

(28) Ibid., p. 6.

(29) Ibid., p. 85.

(30) Ibid., p. 85.

(31) Ibid., p. 1

(32) Ibid., p. 6.

(33) Ibid., p. 6.

(34) Ibid., p. 38.

(35) Ibid., p. 39.

(36) Ibid., p. 88.

(37) Ibid., p. 88.

(38) SchitT, p. 43.

(39) Spark, in conversation with Robert K. Hosmer, San Giovanni d'Oliveto, 16 March 1999.

(40) The Driver's Seat, p. 79.

(41) The Driver's Seat, p. 84.

(42) Frank Kermode, 'The House of Fiction' in The Partisan Review. XXX, 1, Spring 1963, pp. 80-81.

(43) Malcolm Bradbury, 'Muriel Spark's Fingernails' in Critical Quarterly 14:3, 1972, p. 247.

(44) Schiff, p. 43.

(45) Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb (New York: New Directions Press, 2010), p. 37-(46) The Driver's Seat, p. 56.

(47) Ibid., p. 91.

(48) Sara Frankl, 'An Interview with Muriel Spark' in Partisan Review, LIV 1987, p. 454.

(49) The Driver's Seat, p. 73.