Loitering with Intent

...Suehaslam," shesays, "I'manartist, not a reporter...

...Aside from the clear picture we get of her from her milieu, we learn almost as much about Fleur by virtue of the distaste she expresses for the type she regards as her opposite - a clinging, simpering, self-sacrificing sort of woman whom she tags whenever she finds one as "the English Rose" -and in whom she sees all kinds of character traits she can better do without...

...I was aware of a daemon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more...

...As she does so, she reflects that "one could take endless enchanting poems out of this book...

...What is more, she says, "I have never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist...

...For her part, Fleur maintains that a defrocked priest in the Association, Father Egbert Delaney, is also "a self-evident and luminous being...

...I didn't go in for motives, I never have.'') At the height of her difficulties with Sir Quentin, Fleur tells us of a night "I started to flick the pages of my beloved Cellini...

...And she is wonderfully resourceful within the frugal constraints of her book-filled single-bed-sitter...

...From Fleur's point of view, Sir Quentin possesses at least one invaluable asset - his mother, Lady Edwina...

...He is the director of his self-styled autobiographical society - akind of club made up of a handful of titled persons whom he has persuaded to let him help them write their memoirs...

...This old party is a novelist's delight, and Fleur is soon conspiring to abstract the red-taloned, tea-gowned - and frequently incontinent - old lady from her stuffy son's circle of sycophants and the clutches of his still stuffier housekeeper (known as "Beryl, Mrs...

...It is just the "more" that makes the difference, she suggests...

...Sir Quentin's moves to protect the "secrets" and, with them, his false dominion over the lives of his "subjects" prompt countermoves from Fleur as she tries to protect the integrity of her artistic creation and provide the sus-penseful plot line which moves the novel energetically along...

...Fleur herself is not ready to call herself innocent of this charge...

...Sir Quentin is, of course, a total hypocrite...

...Like Cellini's it is a record of the action and passion of the artist's life...

...Since Mrs...

...Chief villain and, in some ways, arch-criminal, of the piece, Sir Quentin Oliver, is a willowy old snob...

...But he soon discovers it is her artistry he must fear...

...I never described in my book what [my hero's motives were...

...Beneath these entertainments of plot and character, there is., as always in Mrs...

...Here it is neatly entwined with the contrasting views of two famous autobiographers,"Cardinal Newman and Benvenuto Cellini...

...Janet Groth THE TITLE Muriel Spark bestows upon upon this, her sixteenth novel, hints at an idea which persists throughout the work to the effect that there is some kind of relationship - at the very least a suggestive analogy - between art and crime...

...Spark, too, is an artist, she richly expands upon each of these elements...

...She learned nothing of use from me...

...As one reads the story of Fleur and her artist's passion and her woman's life in the mid-twentieth century, it must seem to all who do so with any feel for the magic of fiction that, in Loitering with Intent, one holds "just such an enchanting poem in one's hands...

...Both the artist and the criminal, Mrs...

...And, she goes on, "So are you", so is my lousy landlord and the same goes for everyone I know...

...I learned a lot in my life from Dottie, by her teaching me some precepts which I could usefully reject...

...You can't live with an I-and-thou...

...Spark's novels, a spiritual discussion going on as well...

...Indeed, there is such a one in the book...

...Fleur is, of course, often branded wicked and unnatural for these attitudes, but being her own woman, "well at ease," she goes her way rejoicing...

...She finds exquisite literary merits in Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, but brands his early mistrust of the material world and his reduction of the drama of faith to two figures' only - "two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator" - as ' 'quite a neurotic view of life.'' She calls it "a poetic vision only," and points out that it characterizes Newman as "a nineteenth century romantic...

...relationship to God and doubt the reality of the rest of life...

...Cellini, the robust Renaissance craftsman, on the other hand, has, as we know, inspired Fleur's own present memoir, and it is just Cellini's evident trust in the material world - which, after all, provides him with the materials of his art - that so delights her...

...The interesting thing is that in this brief and lighthearted novel, Mrs...

...Spark has managed to contain elements of both her autobiographical models...

...Poverty imposes hardships which bring indignation, but she is quite free of self-pity...

...As the novel opens Fleur is, as she herself describes it, in the thrilling situation of being an artist and a woman (she says it several times, always in that order) in the middle of the twentieth century...

...Spark seems to wish to remind us, habitually exist in a state of alert readiness to discomfort society in their separate ways - to take us, as it were, by surprise...

...Ultimately, he accuses Fleur of stealing these "secrets" and putting them into her novel - a serious matter in England, he points out, where libel laws are most strict...

...Between them they portray widely differing attitudes toward life...

...Fleur makes short work of the difference...

...We are reminded that though both are believers, one is a man of the cloth and, quite literally, an apologist for religion, while the other is an artist and a craftsman...

...As for Fleur, she is drawn as the very model of an independent woman...

...I simply showed the effect of his words, his hints...

...This enrages Fleur...

...As a result, Fleur is given more and more innocuous duties and separated entirely from the manuscripts, which, in spite of their dull contents, Sir Quentin has all along insisted contain "secrets" of the utmost importance...

...Undismayed by her current humble circumstances, she is exulting rather in the newly discovered conviction that she is possessed of the artistic powers of a novelist, and her first novel is just underway...

...Her uncanny acuity about people leads to an accusation that she is guilty, at the very least, of libel - on the grounds that people's lives are their private property and that she has set forth certain living persons' lives in her novel...

...He is given to correcting people's English and - much more harmfully - to showing the aristocratic but insecure members of his "Association" the error of their moral ways in such a fashion as to lay waste their spirits...

...Tims") to go for wheelchair romps on Hampstead Heath and later to partake of treats out of tins in Fleur's Kensington bed-sitter, Sir Quentin is at first disposed to employ Fleur's talents as an artist to "touch up'' not only the grammar but the contents of his society members' memoirs, which tend to be deplorably dull...

...Chief "loiterer," the heroine of the novel, and the best thing about this truly witty book, is Fleur Talbot, a young writer whose talents are often, in the course of it, confused with those of the criminal...

...An unscrupulous sort can take people's lives and meddle in them - both in a personal way and by writing about them - harmfully, even criminally...

...I had an art to practice and a life to live, and faith abounding," writes Fleur, "and I simply didn't have the time or the mentality for guilds and fasts and feasts and observances...

...should write down the tale of their life with their own hand" as applying to both genders, Fleur sets forth in the form of a first person narrative her own memoirs and her method of working as a novelist...

...But, Fleur insists, a novelist, conceiving people's lives as part poetry and part myth, makes of them something else entirely...

...At the same time, by making her heroine, Fleur, opt for Cellini's as "a far better model" for autobiography, Mrs...

...Taking Benvenuto Cellini's advice that "all men . . . who have done something of merit...

...Spark makes her a strong defender of her own brand of fiction, of the kind of novel which eschews psychological probing in favor of portraying character dramatically...

...She renders for us, for example, the postwar period in Europe in swift, sure, economical strokes...

...She tells how at this time in her life she takes on a job as a secretary to the director of an "Autobiographical Association...

...She is so successful in fact that her landlord darkly suspects her of leading a double-room life at single-room rates...

...Like Cardinal Newman's, Fleur's memoir is, among other things, a defense of her own brand of Christian faith...