A poet and novelist looks back on her life as a penniless author and describes her transformation into someone who lives for writing, who will do almost anything to protect her writing and who blurs the boundaries between life and fiction.

I love novels about authors and writing, particularly when they are commenting about the process and emotions of writing, such as Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel and Wifedom by Anna Funder, the latter also blurring boundaries between the real and imagined.

Fleur, an aspiring novelist, needs money and so starts to work for Sir Quentin, ‘on the grubby edge of the literary world’ , typing up the autobiographies that his group of rather pathetic writers, the Autobiographical Association, have started. So boring are their lives that Fleur decides to spice things up with a bit of rewriting of her own for them. Meanwhile, she continues to write her own novel but finds that life influences what she writes and also what she writes influences the lives of the Autobiographical Association (AA).

Fleur as a writer

The novel is written as a memoir in first person by Fleur looking back to a specific time, 1949, and living in a bedsit. I am guessing that Spark drew on her own experience for this. Fleur refers the AA to an autobiography by Cardinal Newman about his conversion to Catholicism, something that happened to Spark herself, and to Benvenuto Cellini, a goldsmith of 1649 who wrote that every man (!) should write his life story with his own hand. Both are insistent that the truth be told. When the AA tries this, it doesn’t work.

What happens during Fleur’s time with Sir Quentin is that she starts to see events from her book happening in real life, she is not a reliable narrator, and so starts a process which leads to the death of some of the group.

For years I had been working up to my novel Warrender Chase and had become accustomed to first fixing a fictional presence in my mind’s eye, then adding a history to it. In the case of Sir Quentin’s guests the histories had been presented before the physical characters had appeared. As they trooped in, I could immediately sense an abject depression about them. Not only had I read Sir Quentin’s fabulous lists of Who was Who among them, but I had also read the first chapters of their pathetic memoirs, and through typing them out and emphatically touching them up I think I had begun to consider them inventions of my own, based on the original inventions of Sir Quentin.

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What is slightly unnerving is that events continue to happen as in the book sometime after Fleur had left Sir Quentin’s employment.

As we move through the book, Fleur becomes more and more obsessed with writing, finishing Warrender Chase and starting her next book. Lovers accuse her of not being ‘with them’, frequently drifting away to her writing. She is prepared to lie and steal for her book even from her ‘best’ friend who used to be the wife of one of her lovers. But as Fleur says:

Writing is a way of trying to understand the world, to make sense of our experiences.

Flowers in the book

Fleur’s own name is an obvious candidate for mention. A flower suggests something a little dainty and delicate so here Spark is playing with us as Fleur is anything but. We also have Mrs Tims and Dottie mentioned as English Roses. They didn’t resemble roses but felt that they were English roses in their own minds.

But Beryl Tims was the better English Rose and the more frightful.

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We have these women wearing English rose lipstick and perfume just to accentuate the awfulness of them both.

There is also the sea anemone that is an animal turning into a flower – transforming before our eyes and a poem written by Fleur entitled Metamorphosis. We definitely have something about art and nature in this book but I am not quite sure what.

Stories within stories

There are three stories at play in this novel. We have one story that tells about the events after Fleur leaves the Autobiographical Association told in first person. She then moves on to say ‘ I will tell you about the Autobiographical Association’ and we move into a second story only to move back out again towards the first story at the end of the book. This first story set up as a memoir allows Spark to show us Fleur as young and old, penniless and successful and to recount the processes she experiences as a writer.

The process by which I created my characters was instinctive, the sum of my whole experience and of my own potential self: and so it always has been. Sometimes I don’t actually meet a character I have created in a novel until some time after the novel has been written and published.

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Modest as well!

The third story in this novel is Warrender Chase, the book Fleur is writing. We don’t really get much about its contents and it doesn’t have a section of its own rather a series of points indenting the other stories. It is, however, very closely related to the story of her work and the AA and therefore dependent on it. These two stories share characters and their behaviour, the same death and to all intents are the same story, the difference being that one is recorded on paper as a novel.

Here we have art preceding life although at other times, life preceding art.

Spark is almost god-like in this book, controlling the author and manipulating events as she tells them, allowing her to use Fleur as her spokesperson and it is extremely well done.

The title is also effective. Taken from a legal term, it shows us that authors loiter with intent, the intent being to listen and to gather material and turn it into stories, transforming the nuggets, whether they know they are doing it or not. As the policeman who meets Fleur sat on a gravestone writing wonders, is she aiding and abetting or obstructing. Is that what authors do?