'Loitering With Intent' By Muriel Spark (8-3-18)

http://lukeford.net/blog/?p=122984 From the New York Times in 1981:

”Words should convey ideas of truth and wonder,” says Fleur (whom we can be forgiven for thinking is Miss Spark’s alter ego); ”I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.” Folly and weakness, guilt and sin, sadism and treachery, should be treated ”with a light and heartless hand. It seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with a pen and paper.”

”Loitering with Intent” is Fleur’s memoir, written in the fullness of her days, ”of that small part of my life and all that happened in the middle of the twentieth century, those months of 1949-50.” Like her beloved Benvenuto Cellini, ”comically contradictory in his actions… boastful … about his work,” Fleur, drinking in bizarre events and terrible people, committing all to memory, ”by the grace of God, goes on her way rejoicing.”

When the novel opens, Fleur has no apparent reason for rejoicing: She has no job and no prospects and little money. She rents a dreary bed-sitting room from a swinish landlord and has appropriated unto herself a handsome, self-centered lover, Leslie, who is married to her friend Dottie – ”a Catholic, greatly addicted to the cult of the Virgin Mary about whose favors she fooled herself quite a bit, constantly betraying her quite good mind by simpering about Our Lady.” Fleur too is a Catholic, ”but not that sort at all. … If it was true, as Dottie always said, that I was taking terrible risks with my immortal soul, I would have been incapable of caution on those grounds. I had an art to practice and a life to live, and faith abounding … I’ve never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist.”

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