The Essence of the Brontes Read online

  THE ESSENCE OF THE BRONTËS

  A COMPILATION WITH ESSAYS

  MURIEL SPARK

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Muriel Spark and the Brontës

  by Boyd Tonkin

  Foreword by Muriel Spark

  List of Illustrations

  1 The Brontës as Teachers

  2 Letters of the Brontës

  Introduction

  The Letters

  3 Emily Brontë: Her Life

  One: Fact and Legend

  Two: The Basic Story

  Three: General

  Appendix

  4 Selected Poems of Emily Brontë

  Introduction

  The Poems

  5 At Emily Brontë’s Grave, Haworth, April 1961

  6 My Favourite Villain: Heathcliff

  Principal Works of the Brontës

  About the Author

  Also by Muriel Spark from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many of the Brontë letters first appeared in Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Others are taken from the text of The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (vols. 1–4 of The Shakespeare Head Brontë) edited by T.J. Wise and J.A. Symington (1932) (rep. Basil Blackwell 1980). For permission to reprint these letters, grateful acknowledgements are due to Messrs Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

  The letters selected have been printed in full except in a few cases where irrelevant text has been omitted; in such cases the omissions have been indicated.

  For valuable assistance concerning the text of these letters the editor is deeply indebted to the late Mr H.K. Grant, Hon. Librarian of the Poetry Society.

  The text for ‘Emily Brontë: Her Life’ is taken from Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, London, 1953, and New York, 1966.

  Selections from Emily Brontë’s poetry first appeared in Selected Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Muriel Spark, London, 1952.

  The ‘Bookstand’ piece was originally broadcast by the BBC on 16 April 1961. ‘My Favourite Villain was originally broadcast on the BBC Light Programme ‘Woman’s Hour’, 12 October i960.

  For permission to use the amended variation on the text of Emily Brontë’s poems, acknowledgements are due to C.W. Hatfield’s Complete Poems of Emily Brontë and the publishers of that work, Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press.

  INTRODUCTION

  MURIEL SPARK AND THE BRONTËS

  Boyd Tonkin

  In 1976, by then long resident in Italy, Muriel Spark resumed a correspondence with her old friend Hugo Manning. One letter from Rome thanks him for the gift of a book about the Brontës. For the fêted and garlanded writer, now in her late fifties and 14 novels into a career that would comprise 22 in all as well as short stories, drama and autobiography, the book brought back memories. It sent her to a time when she had nothing and had, so far, done almost nothing of the work that she truly valued. To Manning, a poet, journalist and fellow spiritual seeker whom she had known and liked in her penniless Kensington bedsit years of the early 1950s, she recalled ‘my days of Brontë study’, along with ‘all the poverty, adventure and hope that went with them’.

  That mellow reminiscence conjures up the picture of striving apprentice author learning from the Haworth sisters in a spirit of humility, emulation and admiration. True, for three or four years after 1949, the Brontës’ lives and works became something of an obsession for Spark. Among the four siblings, it was the author of Wuthering Heights who most directly engaged her. A BBC television script from 1961 confesses that ‘For many years I was intensely occupied by Emily Brontë – almost haunted’. Already a divorced mother, but separated from her son Robin (who lived with her parents in Edinburgh), Spark had bounced around shabby post-war London from room to room and job to job – most notably, as the secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of its journal Poetry Review. Tethered to this shambolic and penurious Bohemia, she dreamed of the proud autonomy that would allow her to flourish as a woman and an artist. No wonder the sibyls of the West Riding appealed.

  Her first book, published in 19 51, was Child of Light, a ‘reassessment’ of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley still strikingly modern in its perceptive rescue of the author of Frankenstein from the shadow of her husband and parents. By the time of its appearance, however, the Brontës had taken charge. Spark’s plan for a joint biography to partner a new edition of Anne’s works came to nothing. Still, from that project she salvaged an edition of the family’s letters, published in 1954. She also edited an edition of Emily’s verse (1952) and then, partly in collaboration with poet and critic Derek Stanford, her lover, collaborator, fellow-adventurer and (for a while) soulmate, produced a wider critical-biographical study (1953). These were fringe productions, researched and edited on a shoestring by aspirational young literati under the patronage of shiftless rogues and mavericks. The phrase ‘labour of love’ does indeed apply. But, as with Spark’s co-dependent link to the erratic and exasperating Stanford, other emotions came into play as well.

  Turn to what she wrote about the Brontë sisters, and – as so often with Spark – every presumption will be overthrown. (She did have some sympathy to spare for drifting and bibulous brother Branwell, so like the London literary barflies she knew, but says little about him except to note that ‘his great misfortune was that he was a man’ – and thus exempt from his sisters’ elevating struggle.) Page by waspish, probing page, she does not hail a trio of role models or genuflect before a family of sainted path-finders. Quite the opposite. Spark tends to take the Brontë greatness as read, save for a warm appreciation of the ‘traditional aspects’ of Emily’s verse against the unjustified neglect of ‘anthologists’.

  Instead, she fires at the Yorkshire heroines a sceptical salvo of reservations, qualifications, caveats and critiques. From her impatience with Charlotte as a bossy ‘impresario’ who turned her family into catchpenny melodrama, and her disgust with Emily’s ‘perverted martyrdom’, through to her verdict, as late as 1992, that poor overlooked Anne was in the end ‘not good enough’, a querulous, suspicious or even downright hostile note recurs. Spark may love the Brontës and their work, but that does not mean she likes them very much.

  What is going on here? A sentimental or conventional reader might expect the hero-worship due to stalwart godmothers in art from a successor who indirectly took the profit from their pains. Yet Spark – never in any way sentimental or conventional – sees flaws, marks limits and scolds follies at every turn. Many of her assessments read not so much like a cool appraisal as a family quarrel, bitter and intimate. She may deplore the Brontës’ posthumous encirclement by soppy ‘legend’ and unfounded speculation. Yet Spark herself reaches the point where she can say about Emily that ‘if she had not died of consumption, she would have died mentally deranged’. This, we feel, is strictly personal.

  So Spark’s involvement with the Brontës as critic, editor and fragmentary biographer does not take the form of simple homage or tribute. It serves instead as an exorcism or perhaps an inoculation. She has to get the sisters out of her system, if necessary by ingesting as much of their unquiet spirit as will protect her against fixture attacks. In the essay on the Brontës as teachers – impossible to read now without thinking of Miss Jean Brodie, whose Prime would arrive in 1961 – Spark writes that ‘genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble, or at least finding fault’. That ‘thwarting’ and its rancorous side-effects seemed to dog her at this period. As Martin Stannard’s exemplary biography of Spark puts it, ‘In her art and life she demanded acknowledgement while
receiving little in either sphere. She was not breaking through as a major poet and Stanford was hesitant about marriage.’ In her early thirties, stalled on more than one front, the fledgling poet, not-yet-novelist and woman of letters found in the Brontës both a deeply tempting path through hardship to glorious achievement – and the wrong road for her. She inflicted trouble and found fault with them, the better to define her own best route.

  This intimate dispute had tangled roots. On Spark as both poet and critic, the rebooted classicism associated with T.S. Eliot in his post-war pomp cast a sort of spell. Already separate in outlook and aesthetics, she had via the Poetry Society and its ramshackle hangers-on had quite enough of the surreal balderdash of the ‘Neo-Romantic’ movement. Her pen was from the first, as Auden wrote of Christopher Isherwood’s, ‘strict and adult’. In her visit to Haworth churchyard for the BBC she would remark – in cooler, more balanced terms than the lonely striver of a decade previously could muster – on the gulf between Emily’s dedication to ‘primitive forces of life and death’ and her own fictional art of ironic, analytic miniaturism, developing like ‘cells in a honeycomb’.

  The great erotic rhapsodies in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would not so much leave her cold as chill her with the risks of a self-effacing surrender. For Charlotte, as she notes with no sign of any approval, ‘the submission of a strong personality to one even stronger signified love on the highest level’. So much for Mr Rochester. As for Heathcliff, in a Woman’s Hour broadcast in 1960 about her ‘Favourite Villain’, she calls him a ‘real Prince of Darkness’ and – crucially – ‘a kind of moral hypnotist’. Only by these critical acts of exorcism, we sense, did Spark believe that she could snap out of the Brontë hypnosis. She had both to face down her tempters, and transform or convert them.

  Hence the somewhat eccentric discussion of Wuthering Heights. Spark deems Emily a ‘natural celibate’ in search of a ‘mystical union’ and a woman who ‘does not appear to have needed any object of amorous and sexual attention’. Many readers of Emily’s novel, a work devoured and adored since 1848 by young readers who crave a life that revolves around ‘amorous and sexual attention’, will be baffled by this judgment. It is certainly not a self-portrait of the author who wrote it. When Spark writes that ‘it is a generally observed fact that Emily’s men and women appear to be “sexless”’, the jaws of Cathy and Heathcliff’s devotees will hit the floor. But such a wayward judgment might contain a glimpse of what Spark then hoped she could, or should, become.

  Spark views Emily as a mystic without a vocation, indeed a nun manquée, who in the absence of true faith ‘became her own Absolute’ and sacrificed her life to this blasphemous self-image. However strained the reading, Spark stuck by it. In Curriculum Vitae, her selective memoir from 1992, she calls the Emily essay ‘my most closely reasoned piece of non-fictional prose’. To her, Emily in effect committed suicide through self-neglect and so yielded up her own life and gift on the altar of Romantic narcissism, since Romanticism always drives its acolytes towards the ‘test of action. So ends the ‘impassioned superwoman, not a mighty self-fashioner but a frail consumptive on the windswept winter moor who shuns doctors and refuses medicine. And yet, ‘In an earlier age, Emily Brontë would most possibly have thrived in a convent’.

  Here’s the nub: Spark’s ‘haunting’ by the sisters coincides with her gradual transition from unbelief to Christian faith. Spark had never felt close to the creed of her Jewish forebears. Yet by 1949 she could tell Stanford that ‘I shall set out on a pilgrimage… searching for Faith’. As warnings, rivals, tempters, the Brontë clan and their archetypal pantheism served as stages along that path. If Nature and Imagination were their gods, the gods had failed. Step by step, she sought an ecclesiastical rock rather than a moorland cairn. As she shuttled between the bedsits of Kensington, she also began to frequent its churches: first Anglican, from 1952, and then Roman Catholic. She was confirmed into the Church of England in 1953 but a year later had already moved along to Rome. For a while after her reception into the Church, she even thought of becoming a nun.

  Her Brontë immersion accompanied the crises and journeys that would re-make the jobbing literary aspirant into a lifelong, and deeply original, novelist. Her pilgrimage to faith met other obstacles. Slowly, painfully, she broke with Stanford. Over-use of Dexedrine – a kind of amphetamine – plunged her briefly into paranoid delusions in which T.S. Eliot played a bizarrely prominent part. But by 1952 she had won the Observer’s Christmas short-story competition (out of 7,000 entries) for ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, which draws on the natural wonders she had seen in Southern Rhodesia during her ill-fated marriage. It is, as Stannard writes, ‘a surreal Nativity story, but it is also about her own rebirth’. Her introduction to the Brontë letters picks out the ‘element of storm’ as a key to the sisters’ art, with ‘some cataclysmic event of nature’ put to work as the ‘sympathetic manifestation of some inner, personal tempest’. This is just how Spark’s own career in fiction gets under way, but – a defining proviso – with a supernatural agent imported to lift the scene beyond merely human dread or desire. By then, approaching 34, Spark had outlived Emily and Anne Brontë, if not yet Charlotte. Now her angelic ‘seraph’ rises above the thunderous cataract. Heathcliff, of course, must haunt the moorland rocks forever.

  At this stage Spark seems to yearn, seraph-like, to rise high above the ferment. To do so she must both imbibe and become immune to the Brontës, a ‘tribe’ so near to her and yet so far. Her presentation of them strenuously keeps its distance from identification or idolatry, precisely because both attitudes might come so readily. Charlotte, as instigator and manager of the Brontë family myth, comes under criticism for the relentless self-dramatisation which makes mountains out of molehills and a spectacle out of ‘every triviality of her daily existence’. Emily, meanwhile, suffers from ‘aloofness and unsociability’, not to mention the ‘misanthropic turn of mind’ disclosed by her love for animals.

  Perhaps the lady doth protest too much. The Brontës, after all, offered Spark a mirror or a reflecting pool that might have swallowed her whole. Look at the letters that she selected, and at many points they read almost like a displaced manifesto for their editor. After her double bereavement, with Emily and Anne gone, Charlotte writes that ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me up when I was sinking… its active exercise has kept my head above water since’. Defiantly, she proclaims to G.H. Lewes that ‘Out of obscurity I came, to obscurity I can easily return’, and that ‘I cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is most elegant and charming in femininity’. She also tells Lewes that ‘I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman’. As for the despised governess’s celebrated apologia in Jane Eyre, it would have struck as resonant a chord with Spark at this time as with any other reader. ‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart!’

  Yeats wrote, in the year of Muriel Spark’s birth, that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ Her beef with the Brontës represents a quarrel with herself. Out of it came a ‘vocation’ at least as intense as theirs but, in her terms, less self-consuming and self-worshipping. In later years, when the intimate threat posed by the sisters had passed, an underlying affinity comes back into plain sight. Spark’s renewed connection with Hugo Manning helped to plant the seed for the semi-autobiographical novel Loitering with Intent (1981). Its novelist heroine Fleur Talbot suffers less confusion, isolation and near-despair than her creator. Fleur does, however, espouse a view of fiction as a quest to realise a myth of the self that sounds almost Brontëan. For her, ‘Without a mythology, a novel is nothing. The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker’. At such moments Spark surely stands beside and behind her heroine rather than passing judgment in hindsight on a deceived younger self.

&nbs
p; In 1988, with A Far Cry from Kensington, Spark returned to her apprentice years. In that novel, her reconciliation with the sisters feels more complete. Its heroine Nancy Hawkins at one point slips into an explicitly Brontë-esque state of alienation and hallucination on a London bus. ‘I felt like Lucy Snowe in “Villette”,’ she reports, ‘who walked, solitary in Brussels on a summer night, among the festival crowds’. By this time the muse of comedy – classical, balanced, ironic comedy – has long prevailed for Spark. The delusions, the fixations, of youth arouse sympathy but carry no risk. No longer seducers, tempters or antagonists, the Brontës can serve as odd, beloved friends again.

  Foreword

  More than most authors, especially those of the nineteenth century, the Brontës were aware of themselves as personalities. They fully understood the dramatic properties of their position. Charlotte, the spokeswoman of the tribe, never failed to present a picture of dramatized loneliness and scenic effects when writing about her family. It was as if she knew that their family situation and their talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity. Their lives, even apart from their writings, formed a work of art. Haworth Parsonage overlooked the graveyard. Life bordered on death. Three lonely girls, a morose widowed father and a frantic brother, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a perfect scenario.

  In this book I have put together my own writings on the Brontës together with a selection of family letters and a selection of Emily’s poems.

  Charlotte’s letters have been chosen with the express intention of presenting a “Brontë autobiography’. I found, when I first chose these letters for my book, The Brontë Letters (1954), that they lent themselves to a dramatic story-telling arrangement. Charlotte put the family personality into these letters, most of which were addressed to her friend, Ellen Nussey.