A Novel in its Prime: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

There are so many reasons to dislike the titular character of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  She is a lover of Mussolini and the fascist regimes seizing control in Europe in the early 1930s.  Even after the war is over, the worst thing she can say about Hitler is that he “was rather naughty.”  She is entirely self-centered, wishing to impose her own views of the world onto her students, even as she claims that she is doing the opposite.  Her form of lecturing is to talk about herself, her lovers, and her experiences, and she expects the girls to scramble hard at home to learn what they need to in order to pass end of term exams.  And of course her designs to have an affair with a man vicariously through one of her students is nothing short of disturbing.  Moreover, the narrator can be very dismissive of the woman: “It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head,” which only suggests that Miss Brodie’s level of insanity can only be saved by relativity.  “In this light,” Spark sums up her passage describing the “type” of woman Miss Brodie is, “there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie.  Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her.”   

Nevertheless, even with all these character flaws, Miss Brodie is a captivating woman, as captivating to us as she is to the set of six girls that she has taken under her wings.  I cannot help but admire her determination, her confidence, her headstrong nature.  I cannot help but love her desire to teach matters of real life instead of lessons to be memorized.  And I cannot help but feel the tragic weight of her prime and her fall.  Add to this vibrant and complicated character the lives of six young women entering maturity and you have the makings of a wonderful tale.

But of course, what makes the novel so incredible (and it is truly incredible) is not the characters or the story but the writing.  Spark’s style is wry and ironic and straightforward and suggestive.  These characters and their relationships come to us so simply and simultaneously laden with meaning.  One of my favorite techniques is the way that she slides from one moment in time to another, reminding us, for example, that Mary Macgregor will die horribly in a hotel fire running back and forth from one set of flames to another until she falls down and dies, and then proceed with a story of the abuse heaped upon Mary by her classmates and teacher in what were to be the best years of Mary’s short life.  As we read the novel and consider Miss Brodie and her realm of influence, Spark continuously throws us way down the road to see where the girls are and what their recollections of Miss Brodie are.  Eunice, the sporty girl, will later marry and visit Miss Brodie’s grave on a trip to Edinburgh, but it is made clear from her conversation with her husband that she has not talked of Miss Brodie throughout the whole of their marriage.  So even as Miss Brodie declares, “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life,” we are let in on the fact that these girls will not be hers for life.  All this movement allows Spark to tell her story and keep us as readers unsettled about what it all means.  Miss Brodie is neither hero nor villain, neither culprit nor victim.  Or she is both and all.

Similarly, Sandy, the girl whose story this is as much as it is Miss Brodie’s, is a difficult to place character.  On the one hand, her flights of fancy in which she has conversations with fictional characters and fictionalizes the lives of people around her is completely winning.  On the other hand, her hardening as she sees through Miss Brodie’s plans and understands her to be a flawed human can be painful to behold.  In a lot of ways, this is the story of a girl who leaves the childish world, where adults are heroic and brave, and enters adulthood, where she comes to learn that everyone is messed up and selfish and flawed.  She gains the knowledge of weakness before she has the experience of her own weakness to allow her to feel compassion for the struggles of her erstwhile heroes.  At one point, Miss Brodie talks about her long-ago forefather, Willie Brodie, “a man of substance, a cabinet maker and designer of gibbets” who “died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising.”  It is clear that Sandy is the gibbet of Miss Brodie’s own devising, the insightful girl she instructed and led to the point that Sandy gave the headmistress the ammunition she needed to fire Miss Brodie with this explanation: “I’m not really interested in world affairs . . . only in putting a stop to Miss Brodie.” 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is funny and heartbreaking and thought-provoking and a blast to read.  It is intellectual and emotional.  It is simple in its thrust and complicated in its content.  It is one of those books I wanted to fly through and crawl through at the same time because I didn’t want it to end. 

The Soul of The Moviegoer

As always, spoilers lie ahead, so read on at your own informative peril!

The titular moviegoer of Walker Percy’s 1961 debut novel is John Bickerson Bolling, known to some as Jack and to others as Binx.  Binx, who narrates the novel in the first person, describes himself as a moviegoer, and he applies the descriptor to others throughout the novel, such as his half-brother, Lonnie.  Most interestingly, he applies it to a man on a bus.  Binx is riding from a business conference in Chicago to his home in New Orleans when he meets a man he calls a “romantic” with a well modeled but diminutive head.  Binx finally says of him: “He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies.”

Welcome to the world of Binx Bolling.  Binx is a philosopher who is constantly seeking order in the world around him.  At 29 years of age, Binx works as a stock and bond broker for his uncle’s brokerage firm, but while he has made a good portion of money and has a well-to-do family to fall back on, he is trying to find his way in the world.  And the world, to our overwrought narrator, is dark and troublesome. It is the way that the narrator and his view of the world come into focus that makes The Moviegoer such a captivating and interesting novel.

I have praised again and again the art of the first person narration in this collection of blog posts, and Percy does everything right in revealing his character.  In the opening section, Binx seems like a pleasant young gentleman who enjoys mass transit to cars and watching movies in out-of-the-way theaters to parties and social gatherings.  He has a brief conversation with the owner of the theater and seems to enjoy making contact with his fellow human beings.  But as the story unfolds we come to learn that these habits are more of a pathological way of dealing with the world than originating in some country charm.  What Binx fears more than anything else is becoming an Anyone who is Anywhere or a No one who is Nowhere.  It was at a theater

that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra.  It was during a re-release of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth . . .  As Montgomery Cliff was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail.  Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?

So now he uses movies and the theaters they play in to ground himself in the particulars of the here and now.    As he says shortly after, “All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season.”  He cannot watch a movie until he makes contact with someone who works there and learns something of his or her life, at which point the viewing becomes a particular experience, anchored and unrepeatable, and Binx is safely Binx and Binx alone in this particular spot and only in this particular spot.  It is such a fantastic character trait, made all the more fantastic in his use of movies, which can play anywhere at any time!  I would think that Binx would be attracted to live performances that are by their very nature un-repeatable.  If anyone knows why movies, I would be much obliged to hear why!

Binx is a veteran of the Korean War, and it is unclear whether the war played any part in the shaping of his fears and concerns.  His cousin Kate has her own existential crisis that mirrors Binx’s, and she has not been to war.  But since Kate and Binx share no blood, there is clearly no suggestion that genetics is responsible.  The answer, of course, and the reason we find Binx and Kate to be interesting centers, is that their existential crises of personhood are tied to the modern world, the same world Kate’s stepmother bemoans as changing for the worse at all times. The thing at stake for both Kate and Binx (and by extension for all of us) is how can we be the person we are or should be with all the pressure to be the person we ought to be?  Is there even an actual “me” or “you”?  Kate’s approach is to run from trap to trap, as Binx observes, to corner herself and to flee again.  Binx attempts to set up a world that is structured and labeled and philosophized to a point of comprehension.  He delights in creating terms like “search,” “rotation,” “certification,” and “doubling.”  We see the height of his need of structure when he arrives in Chicago near the end of the novel, haunted by the “genie-soul” of the city.  He needs to understand the place he is in or be conquered by it:   

Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff—tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets—in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.

Percy paints Binx’s desperation and vulnerability so beautifully that we are simultaneously invited to identify with Binx’s fear and allowed to see it for what it is.  By letting us see directly through Binx’s eyes and feel his very thoughts through the first person narration, we are granted a kind of double vision, seeing the world as Binx’s sees it superimposed over our own understanding of the world.

As I have said in other blog posts, any good first-person story is first and foremost about the character of the narrator.  Binx is both solid and vulnerable, intelligent and broken, fighting and enduring.  There is enough beauty in the characters and the world to make up for the horrible moments of racism, sexism, and homophobia that crop up without warning, and I would gladly recommend the novel to anyone who enjoys a first-person story with a philosophical and psychological flavor.  It is a short and powerful book that continues to grow on me as I think about all the little moments I noted in my margins.

The Big Catch

I have been thinking a lot lately about the co-existence of comedy and tragedy, of the serious and the surreal.  Of course both things exist in the larger landscape of art, but to bring the two elements together under one cover is no mean feat.  The Coen Brothers’ Fargo is an excellent example of a work of art that provides gut-wrenching drama with side-splitting laughter so that you don’t know whether you want to laugh or cry.  There is something so satisfying for me to be able to invest emotionally and intellectually in a dramatic world while at the same time being allowed to ponder over and laugh at the absurdities that fuel that world.  It’s really, in the end, a greedy desire to ask for a single work of art to do all that.

Such a coming together of the serious and the comic can be found in Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic, Catch-22, though it achieves such a coming together in a way far different from Fargo.  Fargo treats its world very seriously, even as the characters are held up for our amusement.  The world of Catch-22 is a source of amusement from the opening chapter.  In fact, even though the book takes place in the theater of war, the tone is unrelentingly comic.  Heller doesn’t miss a single opportunity to turn lines in on themselves to create comedy from nothing.  There are of course a million examples, so I’ll just throw out a few.  On one of his missions with Kid Sampson, Yossarian creates trouble in order to get the plane turned around.  Kid Sampson assures Yossarian that everything is alright, to which Yossarian worries: “Something was terribly wrong if everything was alright.”  Nately’s childhood is described like so: “He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him.”  The expected is always subverted by Heller to create unexpected humor.

The humor is of course a court jester’s humor, the art of turning things on their head that seems simultaneously playful and rife with meaning.  On the one hand, the jokes seem like linguistic playthings, but they have punch because they seem to reveal an upside-down truth about the world that makes sense when you unravel it.  Like Kent in King Lear’s court, Heller makes us laugh while merely reporting a twisted truth.  And part of the point is obviously that in the world of war and the bureaucratic system of the military all things normal are crazy and all things crazy become normal.  And this is where the first tension between comedy and drama are at play in the novel, because the comedy points to the fact that there is nothing funny in forcing young men to risk their lives going on 30 extra missions to glorify a colonel who wants to be a general.

I found this opening and first two-thirds of the novel to be incredibly enjoyable.  The characters and their exchanges are crazy and clever and insightful, and I found myself wanting to write down lines from every page and often entire pages of dialogue and narration.  Had the book been nothing more than this set of jokes and subversions, I would have been very happy.  But the true power of the book comes from where Heller goes in the last portion of it.

At some point, it seems to me, the kid gloves come off quietly, and the comedy gets darker and darker.  I trace it to about the time that McWatt accidently bisects Kid Sampson on the raft and then spirals up and flies purposefully into a mountain.  Doc Daneeka is the next casualty.  He is reported dead because McWatt put him on the flight manifesto as a courtesy to the doctor so that he could meet his required flight time.  The wheels of bureaucracy grind the doctor into a ghostly pulp when everyone refuses to believe he is alive even though he is standing right before them.  Up to this point in the novel, the humor seems pretty victimless.  Characters have hard times, and nameless soldiers die (especially in Milo’s attack on the camp, say), but we as readers are kept a safe distance from having to deal with any of the actual fallout.  Heller keeps the focus on the humor and not on the dangers.  The humor turns sickly sweet in our mouths as we watch Doc Daneeka’s life crumble away beneath him and the deaths pile up.  In fact, the refusal to acknowledge Doc Daneeka’s existence is the first point where there appears to be real hostility behind the wielding of the bureaucratic machine.  The upper brass is only too happy to have the doctor out of their way, and if doing so costs the doctor his life and livelihood, they are only too happy to live with that.

It’s at this point that the novel races to its conclusion, and the humor gets stickier and the stakes get higher.  Chaplain Tappman’s interrogation, while ending harmlessly enough, is genuinely terrifying.  The comedy of misunderstanding has real threat and power behind it and we as readers are not allowed to simply enjoy the zany actions without consequence.  Aarfy’s rape and killing in Rome is every bit as bizarre as earlier portions of the novel, but we are now with a broken Yossarian who is too in touch with the imbalances of power to see anything enjoyable in the humor.  The comedy is still there in both these scenes, but the drama itself is increased, and that is the real act of greatness that makes Catch-22 a fantastic novel. 

My edition of the novel comes with a set of essays and remembrances, and I was struck by Bob Gottlieb’s comment that he made in 1958 as an editor assigned to the novel:  “I still love this crazy book and very much want to do it.  It is a very rare approach to war—humor that slowly turns to horror.”  My thoughts exactly.

It is wonderful to finally have gotten to read this giant of American literature.  It has met and surpassed all my expectations.