A Far Cry from Kensington:
Hosmer, Robert E.
BOOKS Mrs. Hawkins strikes back A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON Muriel Spark Houghton Mifflin, $17.95, 189 pp. Robert E. Homer On holiday in Tuscany, sometime in the mid-1980s, the protagonist of...
...The orbits of these three groups overlap not only because of Mrs...
...I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and fat backside...
...Spark has constructed a plot-or series of interconnected plots-that involves suicide, spiritualism, ethnic politics, and nights at the opera, among other things...
...his wife, Mabel, invariably accuses Mrs...
...In some cases, as in her narrative of a dinner party at the home of Ian Tooley or her description of the homosexual principals who run the Highgate Review, a publication Mrs...
...Thoroughly self-aware, she does a personal inventory of sorts early on: There was something about me, Mrs...
...The besieged Mrs...
...Hawkins first works, another at her second employer, Makintosh and Tooley-seem galleries of eccentric personalities in their own right...
...Ian Tooley, director of the second, believes in radionics, a bogus science based on the "power'' of a black box and hires help who have obvious physical imperfections and debilities so that rejected authors will likely not retaliate...
...Like Jane Wright in the former novel, Mrs...
...for concentration on a writing project, get a cat...
...Moreover, this novel ends with hope, offering the reader a glimpse of Mrs...
...Spark's novels-The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori spring to mind-this is a novel about groups of people...
...Photographs of the time show me with a moon-face, two ample chins and sleepy eyes...
...Hawkins receives a spate of phone calls, some of gratitude, some of reproach, from Mabel...
...The pains showed...
...Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it...
...Hawkins lives at 14 Church End Villas, a rooming house run by Milly Sanders, an Irish landlady with "narrative skill [that] was considerable...
...Spark's earlier novels...
...if you are contemplating marriage, see your intended one drunk first...
...Like a number of Mrs...
...Hawkins but also because of the malign interference of one Hector Bartlett, a hack writer who will go to great lengths in his attempts to be published...
...I looked comfortable...
...At one point, after obtaining a new job for Patrick when Ullswater goes under, Mrs...
...One day when she can take his verbal assaults no longer, she spits the epithet at him and her troubles begin...
...But several elements in A Far Cry are unexpected, or at least take unaccustomed turns, in a novel by Mrs...
...So far, so typical...
...Hawkins edits after leaving Makintosh and Tooley, Mrs...
...Spark's satire is light and playful...
...and Isobel Lederer, a young secretary who calls her father in Sussex daily...
...and she responds, "Yes...
...Wit and humor we have come to expect from her, and here she does not disappoint...
...A Far Cry from Kensington takes the reader back to territory Mrs...
...Robert E. Homer On holiday in Tuscany, sometime in the mid-1980s, the protagonist of this, Muriel Spark's eighteenth novel, pays the bill for luncheon at a restaurant "within a restored medieval castle famous for Dante's once having slept there," and moves toward the door...
...But when her arrows are aimed at Hector Bartlett, there is venom on the tips...
...I hardly listened to her on the phone, so that my answers didn't always correspond to what she was saying: "It was a pleasure, Mabel...
...William Todd, a medical student...
...One feels that the great comic dance of William in his cotton pajamas and Mrs...
...Kate Parker, a compulsively organized twenty-five-year-old nurse with a hygienic obsession...
...His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words...
...It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God...
...Spark has not been able to take Mrs...
...Hawkins, now long married to Dr...
...Hawkins simply cannot keep silent, you see, deriving distinct satisfaction from telling everyone what she thinks of Hector Bartlett ("it feels like preaching the gospel,'' she declares...
...In A Far Cry from Kensington Muriel Spark does more than her protagonist: with characteristic wit and economy, as well as somewhat uncharacteristic humor and vituperation, she has settled a few scores: against publishers, editors, hack writers, quacks of several stripes, and one pisseur de copie in particular...
...Hector has attached himself to Emma Loy, a successful novelist, and she causes Mrs...
...Her first explosion is typical: Pisseur de copie...
...Hawkins, I take incalculable pains with my prose style...
...I hope everything will go well with you, now," I said once, when she was actually accusing me of "doing it upside down" with her husband...
...Thin, with a gray face and white wispy hair, it was, after all these years, Hector Bartlett...
...At Ullswater Press, a young man named Patrick is the packer and sorter of books...
...I was abundantly aware of it, and indeed abundance was the impression I gave...
...At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line...
...After Wanda Podolak's suicide, Mrs...
...Hawkins, that invited confidences...
...Hawkins to lose her job first at the Press, then at Makintosh and Tooley...
...it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do...
...All dispensations are gratis: "I offer this advice without fee...
...What is unexpected and delightfully so, is the element of sex comedy we find in A Far Cry...
...Hawkins on her way to the Ullswater Press, Hector says things like, "Mrs...
...With her usual economical ability to discern the telling detail and record the resonant remark, Mrs...
...Two other groups-one at the Ullswa-ter Press, where Mrs...
...The advice that Mrs...
...Hawkins notes: For Patrick's sake I tried to humor her as long as I could...
...Hawkins is fat, indeed she is enormous, and works in publishing...
...Hawkins herself notes, "I have always been free with advice...
...Hawkins dominates this new novel in a way that Jane Wright did not...
...but Mrs...
...the grief which is latent in relics like Wanda's pair of shoes has no equivalent at all...
...is more inexpressible than the funeral...
...it is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians...
...Hawkins's advice fully: it is not enough for her "to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God...
...As Mrs...
...Hawkins, I take incalculable pains with my prose style," and she responds, in thought only, "pisseur de copie...
...Regularly accosting Mrs...
...Hawkins sifts through the dressmaker's personal effects and reflects: "The sadness of these last gatherings of personal effects...
...Martin York, a principal of the former firm, goes to jail for forgery and fraud...
...A Far Cry from Kensington reads like a mystery novel, albeit a somewhat metaphysical member of that species, with Hector Bartlett meant to be a satanic magician infusing the plots with his malign presence and Nancy Hawkins, an Anglo-Catholic of assurance and conviction, a polar force of moral energy set against the hack...
...Hawkins dispenses contains both: for rheumatism, eat a banana a day...
...Second, this novel is animated, on occasion, by a palpable depth of feeling, something a number of critics have been unable to discern in Mrs...
...Pisseur de copie," I hissed...
...He did indeed...
...Hawkins of seducing him...
...Hawkins in her black lace dress forty years before, in the garden at #14 Church End Villas, has come full circle...
...it is included in the price of this book," she tells the reader...
...No trouble on my part...
...but it is one thing to hand out advice and another to persuade people to accept it...
...Spark has made her own: post-World War II London, on the fringes of literary life in slightly seedy Kensington, the world of The Girls of Slender Means and Loitering with Intent, to a time (it's 1954) when Britain had not yet fully recovered from blackouts and air raids...
...Hawkins, returns to her car, where her husband asks, "Did you settle your bill...
...An overheard remark, "Yes, there's a wealth of wild flowers and butterflies," catches her attention: Something about the tourist-brochure quality of the phrase made me look at the speaker...
...A Far Cry from Kensington gives more pleasure than lunch in a castle where Dante once slept...
...The vehemence of this scorn, considered within the context of a novel with undeniable autobiographical resonances, teases the reader...
...Basil Carlin and his wife, Eva, a circumspect, childless couple...
...Nancy Todd, the former Mrs...
...also resident are Wanda Podolak, a "Polish dressmaker whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity...
...Hawkins receives confidences and dispenses advice from a carefully-defined position: I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature...
...Third, though we expect a sharply satirical edge in the writing of this artist who once declared that "ridicule is the only weapon we [writers] have left," the satire in A Far Cry is occasionally more vituperative than usual...
...Todd, on holiday in Tuscany...
Vol. 115 • October 1988 • No. 17
