The House of the Famous Poet

26/03/2026

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Muriel Spark is often a writer of harsh judgments and cruel predictions, with the former available in observation, and the latter as a technique. A word often used to describe her sensibility is acerbic, with Charlotte Higgins noting her “slender novels share a wit that travels along a sliding scale from charming to acerbic to utterly deadly.” (Guardian) Sameer Rahim reckons “Muriel Spark's acerbic, unsettling novels populated by vivid types have their origins in her rackety life.” (Telegraph) The technique takes the form of prolepsis, with Spark telling you what will happen to a given character long before the novel has arrived at the moment when it will happen. We have Rose Bailey, who is a schoolgirl sitting in class who “six years later had a great reputation for sex.” (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) And from the same novel, there is “Mary MacGregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire…” Then we have The Driver’s Seat, where we are told the central character “…will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie.”
It isn’t hard to find the caustic observation exacerbated by the proleptic lurch. It is common enough for a novelist to judge their characters harshly, and often an omniscient narrator can show that they know rather more than their ignorant or innocent characters. But Spark goes further than that: she often throws them into a future unknown to them, but well within the remit of the all-knowing authorial presence. “The literature of sentiment and emotion”, Spark insisted, “however beautiful in itself, however stirring in its depiction of actuality, has to go.” She believed that readers “…feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel…I advocate the arts of satire and of ridicule. And I see no other living art form for the future.” (‘The Desegregation of Art’)
The acrid observation and proleptic devices give Spark’s work an aloof aesthetic, which means that sentimental feelings towards the characters are resisted, and the reader cannot get lost in the story. However, to understand an aspect of this latter resistance, first, it might be useful to differentiate between diegetic and non-diegetic prolepsis. When in Walter Scott’s story ‘The Two Drovers’, the central character’s clairvoyant aunt predicts he will soon have blood on his hands, or when Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol gets a visit from a ghost who warns him of the lonely future awaiting him, this is diegetic prolepsis, a claim made within the story and frequently by an extra-sensory presence. Spark instead usually practices non-diegetic prolepsis, anticipating events within the story from beyond its plot parameters. If Mary MacGregor were to have visited a palm reader, who informs her she will be dead at twenty-three, we might assume a terrible fate awaits her, but not quite a categorical one. One of the obvious advantages available to such proleptic containment is that the reader may feel that there is a chance the palm reader will be proved wrong: this is merely one character’s claim on the future, no matter if they appear to have second-sight. But when a third-person narrator tells you the character will be dead in the future, it leaves us much more aware of the narrator’s power over all of the figures within the text.
Spark’s ‘Desegregation of Art’ essay was published in 1970, almost a decade after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and the same year as The Driver’s Seat. It was also three years after John Barth’s ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, and three years before Philip Stevick’s ‘Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots . ..’, texts that emphasised literature’s self-reflexive capacity. If writers have run out of stories to tell, better to tell stories that become aware of their technique, hence a non-diegetic, as opposed to diegetic prolepsis. If Oedipus Rex and Macbeth had characters predicting the future, better in the middle of the 20th century to have the narrators do so instead, and the reader can be in on the act. It creates complicity between the reader and the writer, yet perhaps at the expense of the characters. However, another way of looking at it is by saying the work can be about much more than the characters.
For too long, literature was contained by the figures within the narration, and now instead the characters are merely byproducts of the writer: authors get to become, well, authorial. As Alain Robbe-Grillet says, claiming it is nonsense to suggest nothing goes on in modern novels, “just as we must not assume man’s absence on the pretext that the traditional character has disappeared, we must not identify the search for new narrative structures with an attempt to suppress any event, any passion, any adventure.” He sees that the books of Proust and Faulkner are full of stories, but in Proust “they dissolve in order to be recomposed to the advantage of a mental architecture of time…”, and in Faulkner “the development of themes and their many associations overwhelms all chronology to the point of seeming to bury again, to drown in the course of the novel what the narrative has just revealed.” (For a New Novel)
In Spark’s short story ‘The House of the Famous Poet’, the predictive aspect at the beginning is contained on this occasion by the first-person narrator, a woman within the tale who speaks of a moment during the war, the summer of 1944, and starts by telling us of a train she takes from Edinburgh to London. “There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.” This is far from a radical device: a narrator speaking about an experience that is of some importance, making clear to the reader that, of all the characters she sees on the train, she will be concentrating on two. One is a soldier who offers her a packet of cigarettes, the other is a woman who also accepts the soldier’s kind offer. He may be described as apelike, as the narrator thinks there “must have been some sanguinity in the parents”, given that he “was quite a throwback”, with Spark giving us the acrid description we expect, but he is also kind and extremely gentle. Out of the shared interest in cigarettes, the two women bond, and this blond-haired, big-boned girl asks if the narrator wants to stay for a while at the house she is looking after. While there, the narrator hears the sound of V-bombs going off nearby, and discovers too that the house belongs to a famous poet, one whose work she knows well and “many of whose poems I knew by heart.”
The narrator stays the night and, the next morning, the soldier from the train turns up at the door and offers to sell her an ‘abstract funeral’. She accepts, packs it into her luggage, and also acknowledges there was nothing to pack; that the reader will claim “‘it is only a notion. You cannot pack a notion into your bag. You cannot see the colour of a notion.” Yet she has the good sense to throw it out the window after seeing the soldier on another train. Even after he gets off, he is still there: after all, he is just a notion of himself. “Out of the window I chucked all my eight and sixpence worth of abstract funeral. I watched it fluttering over the fields and around the tops of camouflaged factories with the sun glittering richly upon it, until it was out of sight.”
That is a lot of description for a thing that can’t really exist — but this may be the point of Spark’s story: that fiction can represent the impossible if it so chooses, and we have already well-established that Spark is an author who believes she can do whatever she likes. However, that needn’t make the story trivial; it can even make it analogously profound — as though Spark takes advantage of the freedoms modern writers may have with the reflexivity of form, and proposes it can say interesting things about superstition, fate and a moment in history (WWII), where death was a constant presence. When the narrator says, earlier, “that you will complain that I am withholding evidence…You will insinuate that what I have just told you is pure fiction”, and “indeed, you may wonder if there is any evidence at all”, this is the writer claiming the right to what constitutes evidence or not. She doesn’t try to make it any more real, but plays up the idea that words are things on a page, and you can do anything with them you wish as long as the reader remains engaged in the mystery. Just as Spark’s narrator can tell the reader a character will die if and when it suits her, so she can throw in an abstract funeral that may or may not have consequences, depending on whether she thinks it ought to do so.
In ‘The House of the Famous Poet’, it does. The soldier tells her that the famous poet bought from him an abstract funeral as well, and we may assume that he kept it, and it cost him his life. “In the summer of 1944, a great many people were harshly and suddenly killed. The papers reported, in due course, those whose names were known to the public. One of these, the famous poet, had returned unexpectedly to his home at Swiss Cottage a few moments before it was directly hit by a flying bomb.” The central character gets rid of hers, and she survives. We don’t know for sure if, had she kept it, she would have lived and whether, if the poet had never bought one, he would be dead. Yet since this is the story the narrator tells, we may at least believe she thinks it likely this is what happened.
If Spark was famous for her casual narrative superiority and her observational unkindness, she was also a well-known Catholic convert, someone who found God around the same time she discovered an agent, and a regular publisher. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 to much acclaim, and the success continued. Spark, speaking on BBC Radio 4 to John Tusa, may have been “…just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right?…And somehow with my religion – whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know – but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence.” Spark may have been immensely successful without the conversion, but how could she ever know if it was talent and the acceptance of that talent which made her assured and famous, or that the glories were bestowed upon her by God? After all, she wasn’t in good shape before it. As Jenny Turner notes: “To approach one’s prime convinced of one’s genius as an artist, but with precious little formal recognition to show for it, must have been at least slightly enervating too. Semi-starvation, dexedrine, psychosis, a life materially collapsed to the point that Muriel Spark had to turn to her priest to help her find a place to live: this is just desperate, desperate stuff.” (London Review of Books)
What is partly so interesting about Spark’s work, life, religious beliefs and her technique, is that though she can be compared in some ways to other writers of her time, writers of the Nouveau roman, like Robbe-Grillet and Robert Pinget, and metafictionists, including John Barth and Robert Coover, her project would seem to be fundamentally different. The problem of narration for many became the problem of omniscience, which can seem a little too close to the religious: that those 19th-century novels were invoking God in their all-knowing narrators. “Who is describing the world in Balzac's novels?” Robbe-Grillet asks. “Who is that omniscient, omnipresent narrator appearing everywhere at once, simultaneously seeing the outside and the inside of things, following both the movements of a face and the impulses of conscience, knowing the present, the past, and the future of every enterprise? It can only be God.” (For a New Novel)
God is a problem for Robbe-Grillet but not for Spark. Instead of retreating from the modern novel and creating a new form, Spark insists that faith can have a very central role in contemporary fiction by pushing the all-knowing Balzacian narrator into self-reflexivity. Whether this is an advance or a retreat is open to debate, but Spark is one of the few 20th-century Catholicly inflected writers (Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor) who is also usually deemed a post-modernist, as if her style coincided with her belief, and had no need to contradict it. That may be a very happy accident indeed, and one Spark would probably propose as highly meaningful.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The House of the Famous Poet

Muriel Spark is often a writer of harsh judgments and cruel predictions, with the former available in observation, and the latter as a technique. A word often used to describe her sensibility is acerbic, with Charlotte Higgins noting her “slender novels share a wit that travels along a sliding scale from charming to acerbic to utterly deadly.” (Guardian) Sameer Rahim reckons “Muriel Spark's acerbic, unsettling novels populated by vivid types have their origins in her rackety life.” (Telegraph) The technique takes the form of prolepsis, with Spark telling you what will happen to a given character long before the novel has arrived at the moment when it will happen. We have Rose Bailey, who is a schoolgirl sitting in class who “six years later had a great reputation for sex.” (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) And from the same novel, there is “Mary MacGregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire…” Then we have The Driver’s Seat, where we are told the central character “…will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie.”
It isn’t hard to find the caustic observation exacerbated by the proleptic lurch. It is common enough for a novelist to judge their characters harshly, and often an omniscient narrator can show that they know rather more than their ignorant or innocent characters. But Spark goes further than that: she often throws them into a future unknown to them, but well within the remit of the all-knowing authorial presence. “The literature of sentiment and emotion”, Spark insisted, “however beautiful in itself, however stirring in its depiction of actuality, has to go.” She believed that readers “…feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel…I advocate the arts of satire and of ridicule. And I see no other living art form for the future.” (‘The Desegregation of Art’)
The acrid observation and proleptic devices give Spark’s work an aloof aesthetic, which means that sentimental feelings towards the characters are resisted, and the reader cannot get lost in the story. However, to understand an aspect of this latter resistance, first, it might be useful to differentiate between diegetic and non-diegetic prolepsis. When in Walter Scott’s story ‘The Two Drovers’, the central character’s clairvoyant aunt predicts he will soon have blood on his hands, or when Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol gets a visit from a ghost who warns him of the lonely future awaiting him, this is diegetic prolepsis, a claim made within the story and frequently by an extra-sensory presence. Spark instead usually practices non-diegetic prolepsis, anticipating events within the story from beyond its plot parameters. If Mary MacGregor were to have visited a palm reader, who informs her she will be dead at twenty-three, we might assume a terrible fate awaits her, but not quite a categorical one. One of the obvious advantages available to such proleptic containment is that the reader may feel that there is a chance the palm reader will be proved wrong: this is merely one character’s claim on the future, no matter if they appear to have second-sight. But when a third-person narrator tells you the character will be dead in the future, it leaves us much more aware of the narrator’s power over all of the figures within the text.
Spark’s ‘Desegregation of Art’ essay was published in 1970, almost a decade after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and the same year as The Driver’s Seat. It was also three years after John Barth’s ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, and three years before Philip Stevick’s ‘Scheherazade Runs Out of Plots . ..’, texts that emphasised literature’s self-reflexive capacity. If writers have run out of stories to tell, better to tell stories that become aware of their technique, hence a non-diegetic, as opposed to diegetic prolepsis. If Oedipus Rex and Macbeth had characters predicting the future, better in the middle of the 20th century to have the narrators do so instead, and the reader can be in on the act. It creates complicity between the reader and the writer, yet perhaps at the expense of the characters. However, another way of looking at it is by saying the work can be about much more than the characters.
For too long, literature was contained by the figures within the narration, and now instead the characters are merely byproducts of the writer: authors get to become, well, authorial. As Alain Robbe-Grillet says, claiming it is nonsense to suggest nothing goes on in modern novels, “just as we must not assume man’s absence on the pretext that the traditional character has disappeared, we must not identify the search for new narrative structures with an attempt to suppress any event, any passion, any adventure.” He sees that the books of Proust and Faulkner are full of stories, but in Proust “they dissolve in order to be recomposed to the advantage of a mental architecture of time…”, and in Faulkner “the development of themes and their many associations overwhelms all chronology to the point of seeming to bury again, to drown in the course of the novel what the narrative has just revealed.” (For a New Novel)
In Spark’s short story ‘The House of the Famous Poet’, the predictive aspect at the beginning is contained on this occasion by the first-person narrator, a woman within the tale who speaks of a moment during the war, the summer of 1944, and starts by telling us of a train she takes from Edinburgh to London. “There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason.” This is far from a radical device: a narrator speaking about an experience that is of some importance, making clear to the reader that, of all the characters she sees on the train, she will be concentrating on two. One is a soldier who offers her a packet of cigarettes, the other is a woman who also accepts the soldier’s kind offer. He may be described as apelike, as the narrator thinks there “must have been some sanguinity in the parents”, given that he “was quite a throwback”, with Spark giving us the acrid description we expect, but he is also kind and extremely gentle. Out of the shared interest in cigarettes, the two women bond, and this blond-haired, big-boned girl asks if the narrator wants to stay for a while at the house she is looking after. While there, the narrator hears the sound of V-bombs going off nearby, and discovers too that the house belongs to a famous poet, one whose work she knows well and “many of whose poems I knew by heart.”
The narrator stays the night and, the next morning, the soldier from the train turns up at the door and offers to sell her an ‘abstract funeral’. She accepts, packs it into her luggage, and also acknowledges there was nothing to pack; that the reader will claim “‘it is only a notion. You cannot pack a notion into your bag. You cannot see the colour of a notion.” Yet she has the good sense to throw it out the window after seeing the soldier on another train. Even after he gets off, he is still there: after all, he is just a notion of himself. “Out of the window I chucked all my eight and sixpence worth of abstract funeral. I watched it fluttering over the fields and around the tops of camouflaged factories with the sun glittering richly upon it, until it was out of sight.”
That is a lot of description for a thing that can’t really exist — but this may be the point of Spark’s story: that fiction can represent the impossible if it so chooses, and we have already well-established that Spark is an author who believes she can do whatever she likes. However, that needn’t make the story trivial; it can even make it analogously profound — as though Spark takes advantage of the freedoms modern writers may have with the reflexivity of form, and proposes it can say interesting things about superstition, fate and a moment in history (WWII), where death was a constant presence. When the narrator says, earlier, “that you will complain that I am withholding evidence…You will insinuate that what I have just told you is pure fiction”, and “indeed, you may wonder if there is any evidence at all”, this is the writer claiming the right to what constitutes evidence or not. She doesn’t try to make it any more real, but plays up the idea that words are things on a page, and you can do anything with them you wish as long as the reader remains engaged in the mystery. Just as Spark’s narrator can tell the reader a character will die if and when it suits her, so she can throw in an abstract funeral that may or may not have consequences, depending on whether she thinks it ought to do so.
In ‘The House of the Famous Poet’, it does. The soldier tells her that the famous poet bought from him an abstract funeral as well, and we may assume that he kept it, and it cost him his life. “In the summer of 1944, a great many people were harshly and suddenly killed. The papers reported, in due course, those whose names were known to the public. One of these, the famous poet, had returned unexpectedly to his home at Swiss Cottage a few moments before it was directly hit by a flying bomb.” The central character gets rid of hers, and she survives. We don’t know for sure if, had she kept it, she would have lived and whether, if the poet had never bought one, he would be dead. Yet since this is the story the narrator tells, we may at least believe she thinks it likely this is what happened.
If Spark was famous for her casual narrative superiority and her observational unkindness, she was also a well-known Catholic convert, someone who found God around the same time she discovered an agent, and a regular publisher. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 to much acclaim, and the success continued. Spark, speaking on BBC Radio 4 to John Tusa, may have been “…just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right?…And somehow with my religion – whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know – but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence.” Spark may have been immensely successful without the conversion, but how could she ever know if it was talent and the acceptance of that talent which made her assured and famous, or that the glories were bestowed upon her by God? After all, she wasn’t in good shape before it. As Jenny Turner notes: “To approach one’s prime convinced of one’s genius as an artist, but with precious little formal recognition to show for it, must have been at least slightly enervating too. Semi-starvation, dexedrine, psychosis, a life materially collapsed to the point that Muriel Spark had to turn to her priest to help her find a place to live: this is just desperate, desperate stuff.” (London Review of Books)
What is partly so interesting about Spark’s work, life, religious beliefs and her technique, is that though she can be compared in some ways to other writers of her time, writers of the Nouveau roman, like Robbe-Grillet and Robert Pinget, and metafictionists, including John Barth and Robert Coover, her project would seem to be fundamentally different. The problem of narration for many became the problem of omniscience, which can seem a little too close to the religious: that those 19th-century novels were invoking God in their all-knowing narrators. “Who is describing the world in Balzac's novels?” Robbe-Grillet asks. “Who is that omniscient, omnipresent narrator appearing everywhere at once, simultaneously seeing the outside and the inside of things, following both the movements of a face and the impulses of conscience, knowing the present, the past, and the future of every enterprise? It can only be God.” (For a New Novel)
God is a problem for Robbe-Grillet but not for Spark. Instead of retreating from the modern novel and creating a new form, Spark insists that faith can have a very central role in contemporary fiction by pushing the all-knowing Balzacian narrator into self-reflexivity. Whether this is an advance or a retreat is open to debate, but Spark is one of the few 20th-century Catholicly inflected writers (Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor) who is also usually deemed a post-modernist, as if her style coincided with her belief, and had no need to contradict it. That may be a very happy accident indeed, and one Spark would probably propose as highly meaningful.

© Tony McKibbin