720
EOZIA WEISBERG
brilliant novel
Memento Mori
it was the world of the very old, so
decisive in its impact that one could barely imagine life before the
age of seventy; in
The Bachelors
it is the world of unmarried men
in London, prissy and pusillanimous creatures living in an hermetic
style.
Miss Spark, who knows that the novelist's first requirement
is to be entertaining, works the unusualness
of
her subject for all
it can yield: a weird exchange between two bachelors about the
high price of herbs in the London stores as they shop on Saturday
morning, a dead-pan discussion as to whether bachelors in the
privacy of their apartments urinate in the sink, a very amusing
scene in which a sex-hungry but sin-troubled bachelor who usually
keeps the girls off by eating onions meets one who likes the
smell.
As the plot moves along, Miss Spark arranges for the world
of the bachelors to cross the pitiful world of spiritualism: there is
a hint of a doubling of aridities.
If
Miss Spark is amiably mordant in
showing the ways of the bachelors, she is at her most refinedly cruel
in showing the cant, yet also the vague human aspirations behind
the cant, of spiritualism. Her pictures of the spiritualist milieu
bear a disconcerting resemblance to the inner life of the Communist
movement; a quarrel at a seance between rival factions, the distance
between inner elite ("the Interior Spiral") and manipulated fol–
lowers ("the Wider Infinity"), and the special hymn to the dead:
"We shall meet them all again by and by/By and by" sung to
the tune of "She'll 'be Coming 'Round the Mountain."
Now all this is odd, perverse, farcical, as are the characters
inhabiting this shabby demi-world: Patrick Seaton, the medium
who does a spot of blackmail on the side yet in some frightening
way is authentic, the widows who drape themselves round his
frothing messages, the fruity school teacher for whom it is all an
opportunity to spur the ladies into gossip and intrigue. Miss Spark
describes these specimens with a mixture of sadism and restraint
such as makes Mary McCarthy seem, by comparison, a nice good–
natured lady. The sadism is of the kind that lets her characters
ramble on and on, into total exposure and foolishness; the restraint
of the kind that holds the sadism tightly in check so that it will
not seem merely personal. And at no point does Miss Spark
