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Episode 22: "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Spark
102 Plays10 months ago
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is upon us and it does not disappoint. Too much to say about this one and, as always, we could have gone an hour longer and still not covered it all. An absolutely fantastic novel and one that certainly lives up to the hype and praise that surrounds it.
Titles/authors mentioned:
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
- Ottessa Moshfegh
- Bryan Washington
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Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. How are you today? I'm well, Tom. I'm so excited about today's show.
00:00:21
Speaker
Yeah,
Why Discuss 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brody'?
00:00:22
Speaker
we've finally made it to the prime as I've been referring to it on the podcast. And I think even in just conversation, probably with random strangers, I've been calling talking about the prime and how it's coming towards me like a meteor.
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, today we're going to be talking about the Prime of Miss Jean Brody, Muriel Spark's sixth novel. You might call it the creme de la creme of the Muriel Spark. You certainly may. I think we're going to probably land on that point by the end of the podcast, absolutely.
Upcoming Podcast Break and Future Plans
00:00:55
Speaker
But a quick bit of housekeeping. This will be our last episode for this part of the season. We're going to take a little bit of a break. This episode should be going up on December 29th, and then we will be back in your ears in later January with more Muriel Spark, more of our friends and guests with their backlist picks and just more bookseller chat about books that we love.
00:01:23
Speaker
Today is all about the prime. Yeah. How do you want to kick this off, Laurie? There's an unbelievable amount to get into.
Unique Structure and Style of the Novel
00:01:35
Speaker
I mean, there's always an unbelievable unbelievable amount to get into with her books, but this one feels despite its brevity, just chock full of, I don't know, everything to chat about.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, this seems to me to be the UK boarding school novel that everything that's come afterwards in that type of genre is probably striving for.
00:02:11
Speaker
heavily gothic, although I do think there's some kind of gothic-y elements to it. It's so astute, it's very clever, and it's really damn funny. It's also kind of an oddity, I think, from the novels that came before it. I mean, it's certainly by the same writer, but
00:02:32
Speaker
it feels quite a bit different. I think it's a bit of a structural thing. She is jumping back and forth through time a lot in this novel. It's tracking over a pretty long period of time. And she
00:02:51
Speaker
creates characters and disposes of them in a very interesting way in this novel, but then they continue to circle back because they're not gone quite yet, and the action that's taking place earlier in the novel. I mean, earlier in the timeline of the novel. It just feels less
00:03:10
Speaker
You could certainly tell that the author of The Bachelors also wrote this novel, but I don't think you would say that they are similar novels necessarily. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking this a
Character Analysis and Comparisons
00:03:24
Speaker
bit.
00:03:24
Speaker
Well, I think that you could say that they're similar in so far as she identifies in this one, like she did in The Bachelors, a real type. I mean, obviously in The Bachelors, the type is are these, you know, young unmarried males living in London. And here it's Scottish boarding school to
00:03:53
Speaker
use a term that we'll be using throughout the episode set. Most of the faculty at this boarding school are kind of of a type. They're what you might expect from a very proper boarding school in Edinburgh, except for Miss Jean Brody in her prime, who's a very different
00:04:20
Speaker
And that causes a world of problems in the novel, and it makes it very interesting.
Exploring Character Lifetimes in Brief
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's that's one common thread that I see if that makes sense. Absolutely. And I mean, I think that's that's a really good point. There is a so this is a very, very short novel, like 137 pages, somehow manages to pack about eight different lives into it. And that's actually an undercount.
Miss Brody's Character and Influence
00:04:48
Speaker
I think it's like about 10 different lifetimes or
00:04:52
Speaker
large chunks of 10 characters of lifetimes are covered in great detail and some of the most important moments of those lives. But the beginning of chapter three, this is probably the passage, a passage that sounds the most like the opening to, and I specifically chose the bachelors because of the content of this. And this is describing Miss Brody and some of the other teachers at the school.
00:05:19
Speaker
There were legions of her kind during the 1930s, women from the age of 30 and upward, who crowded their war bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art or social welfare, education, or religion. The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marsha Blaine's School for Girls. It was in this that Miss Brody was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place.
00:05:48
Speaker
I made a note as I hit that portion saying, I guess this one could have been called the spinsters, you know, the bachelors by the spinsters. So certainly I think, and in a moment we'll dig into the plot a bit so this is a little more grounded, but certainly I think that Spark is doing, as you said, she's identified a type and she's kind of digging into the ramifications of
00:06:11
Speaker
what being that type or not quite fitting into that type means, kind of using it as a way to turn a different lens on the society of the time.
Societal Themes and Timeframe Discussion
00:06:23
Speaker
But I think that because of what she's doing, moving over a basically 30, almost 30 year period, she's giving more of a directional
00:06:38
Speaker
and more of an arrow of how things are progressing, where things are going, and not just this is what things are, not just cutting through society, giving you a cross-cutting of the spiritualists and how they interact, the communists and how they interact, the converted Catholics and how they interact. And of course, there's a converted Catholic in here. I think there's a different kind of momentum
00:07:06
Speaker
because of what she's doing with these girls, with Jean Brody, and yeah, how much time she's covering here.
00:07:16
Speaker
It is really short in length, but none of the books so far have been any more than 200 pages. But there is, I think, a certain pacing to this book that feels a little more urgent and kind of like it really
00:07:37
Speaker
It really sweeps you along.
Plot Overview and Brody Set Focus
00:07:40
Speaker
It's it's an extremely immersive book that you just kind of start it and you're like, wow, this is just getting crazier and crazier. Absolutely, it does. So, yeah, I guess let's do a little bit of the plot so that we.
00:07:55
Speaker
So our listeners who haven't dug into this yet, and I swear if there's one book that you read, it must be this one. But you should read all of MiroSpark. But let's ground this a little bit. So the Prime of Miss Jean Brody is following a group of
00:08:16
Speaker
schoolgirls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica, and Eunice, who are referred to as the Brody Set. They are in school, in private school, in Edinburgh, and
00:08:31
Speaker
Miss Brody has kind of singled these girls out and taking them under her wing with a very different style of education than is otherwise taught in the school. And she has them basically from the age of 10 or so until they're 12 when they move on to the senior school, but she maintains contact with them and continues to
00:08:58
Speaker
mentor and influence them, such that everyone else in the school notices them because they're part of this set and because of Miss Brody's reputation. But Brody also seems to have an eye for
00:09:15
Speaker
talent for engaging in interesting young women or young women who can be molded in a direction that makes them that way. That part's a little more unclear to me, but she clearly knows which girls are going to be something interesting as they develop, and they're all wildly different.
00:09:36
Speaker
Jenny is moves into drama and becomes an actress. You nice is a an athlete, amongst other things. Mary is the
00:09:47
Speaker
Well, Mary is sort of the black sheep of the group. She's described as not very bright. And in all of her interactions, that is, I mean, it's not even not very bright. She's just lost. I mean, it's kind of hard reading the sections about Mary. I certainly grew up with kids who you felt for because it just seemed like the whole world was going to be a challenge for them.
Mary: The Black Sheep Analysis
00:10:11
Speaker
But she kind of serves a function as the black sheep and to mix it up a bit, a scapegoat where Miss Brody and the other girls are able to heap a certain amount of scorn on her for what she's doing or what she's saying or not saying. And for Miss Brody anyways, puts into sharp relief what she thinks the girls should be doing. You've got Monica, who's a maths and sciences whiz, but
00:10:36
Speaker
also gets very angry and lashes out. And as the as the novel progresses, Brody and another care, one of the other girls, Sandy, start to kind of assign reasons behind.
00:10:49
Speaker
each girl's temperament. Why does Monica get so angry? And it's because she's so smart at math. She can't feel the spiritual side of things and that sort of thing. Brody's methods are very much looked, are frowned upon, not even frowned upon. The headmistress wants her gone. She thinks she's a bad influence. She's disruptive, but she can't come up with any good reason why she should be dismissed.
00:11:17
Speaker
Except we find out in the very early part of the novel that she is dismissed. And one of the Brody set is the one who betrays her and gives the information needed for her to be thrust out of her prime. I think that's a good starting point. Do you want to go into her prime a little bit there, Lori?
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, well maybe just generally talking about the eccentricity of Jean Brody. She's a woman that's traveled. She has a particular fondness for Italy and all things Italian.
00:11:53
Speaker
She's quite a helpless romantic. She likes to tell stories to her girls as they say it over and over again in the movie, which is quite extraordinary. I would recommend it as well.
00:12:13
Speaker
She talks about her past love life and gets into some personal details, into some romantic
Brody's Influence and Teacher Relationships
00:12:24
Speaker
kind of things that perhaps I think today no one would really blink in the eye.
00:12:32
Speaker
1930 in Scotland at a private boarding school, you know, you probably wouldn't talk about the passionate love that you had for the man who died on the battlefield in Flanders, you know, she almost.
00:12:48
Speaker
categorically refuses to teach the curriculum, the standard curriculum that she's supposed to be teaching. When she's supposed to be teaching history or other topics, she's pontificating about art or having them recite romantic poetry and memorize it.
00:13:08
Speaker
She takes the girls on all kinds of excursions. She's a big fan of having class outside in nature and having like picnic lunches while the other students are like eating their gruel in the boarding house cafeteria.
00:13:27
Speaker
She's attractive, she's not dowdy looking, and she is the envy of the other women instructors at the boarding school. At the same time, and I guess not so surprisingly,
00:13:44
Speaker
Because the women are all jealous of her, the two male teachers in particular are quite hot for her. And that causes a bit of a love triangle between Brody and two of the male instructors. Yeah. Mr. Lloyd, Teddy Lloyd, who is a
00:14:07
Speaker
The art teacher, a war veteran, Catholic, married with at least six children. And Gordon Lowther, who is the singing teacher, unmarried, wealthy, lived with his mother up until her passing a couple years prior to the start of the novel.
00:14:28
Speaker
you know, has a grand house and lands outside of Edinburgh. And yeah, it's one of the sort of big moments early in the novel where the girls
00:14:40
Speaker
think that they saw Miss Brody and Mr. Lloyd kissing passionately in the art room. So much so that they saw it so quickly that they can't quite convince themselves that they did see it, but they're pretty sure that they did. I believe it's Monica who spotted it and then is subject to an intense interrogation from Sandy. Sandy was trying so hard to make it clear in her head
00:15:08
Speaker
that it was possible that she was questioning every part of Monica's story and we see Monica get progressively angrier and angrier as Sandy doesn't back off at all. It's a funny interchange, but it also serves to reinforce a lot of what I think Spark is doing in this novel in that she's laying out a lot of the things that shape and form who these girls become, the kind of women they become, why they make the choices they do,
00:15:37
Speaker
in a few years' time to choose the professions they do, engage in the affairs they do. And Spark does this thing throughout where I mentioned earlier that she kind of disposes of characters. She tells us where they end up. She doesn't go any further than about 1958-59. So that actually catches the characters up to
00:16:02
Speaker
the time when all the other novels we've read are taking place, which is really, I think that's very clever and also very interesting because then the rest of the novel, I mean, 90% of it is taking place in the 30s and the run up to the Second World War in the wake of, you know, as I read about the spinsterhood, in the wake of the Great War.
00:16:24
Speaker
That is interesting the way that she presents that very much in the first pages of the book, letting you know, oh, this is what this girl became and what happened to her, almost like you would get an epilogue or something to a novel. But yeah, we're presented this upfront, including the sad news,
00:16:50
Speaker
that poor Mary McGregor
Brody's Romantic Past's Impact
00:16:52
Speaker
dies in a fire. We learn very, very early on. And you kind of feel from the get-go that Mary McGregor is going to be, like you said, one of those kind of unfortunate people in life that nothing really works out for.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, Mary is one that it seems is just sort of wandering through life and frightened. I mean, frightened or the world is just incomprehensible to her. The fire she dies in, she's trapped in a hallway. She runs from one side to the next and is presented with a fire on either side.
00:17:30
Speaker
And she just keeps running back and forth. She never tries to go into a room and see if there's a window she can go out of. She just keeps running back and forth, back and forth. And that's how she dies in 1943. And that's actually prefigured when she gets to the senior school and is in the science class.
00:17:50
Speaker
They're running an experiment with magnesium and Bunsen burners, and it causes, you know, once the magnesium heats up sufficiently, you basically have like massive flare going off, brighter than anything you can look at. But these are happening all around the room, and Mary starts running from one to the next, one to the next, trying to get away by not knowing how to get away. If Spark had done the scene in school first, that would be hysterical, right? This idea of this girl not being able to figure out like,
00:18:18
Speaker
A, it's controlled, and B, go somewhere else. Don't keep running back to the one you just ran away from. It's goldfish memory. But because she does it second, I don't know. There's something very sad. And Mary's tale is the sad one of the grouping. And Brody, after she is forced out of the school and towards the end of her life, she continues to see the girls.
00:18:44
Speaker
She remarks that maybe they should have been, she should have been nicer to Mary and all the girls at some point as adult women remark that maybe they should have been nicer to Mary. Yeah. Mary's, Mary's the exception it seems of the, of the six girls in the Brody set. Mary has neither looks nor smarts. So she is just kind of the hanger on, so to speak.
00:19:09
Speaker
But getting back to the two male teachers, a relationship with Mr. Lloyd is impossible because he is married and he is Catholic. And Brody proclaims him to be the love of this part of her life.
00:19:26
Speaker
She had a suitor who died in the Great War, Hugh, and she would tell the girls as part of this unusual education what she and Hugh would do, like the outings they would take, what he looked like, how she felt about him. But after she kissed Lloyd and falls in love with him, she starts to inflect her stories about Hugh with
00:19:55
Speaker
suggestions that he was artistic, that he was this. So she starts to blend, she's almost like self justifying her love as like, well, Hugh always was this and I'm just seeing it again. And then she does that further with Mr. Lawther, who the singing teacher, because now Hugh was a very good singer as well. But Lawther she takes up with kind of in place of Lloyd. It's not clear to me if it was to make Lloyd jealous or because
00:20:24
Speaker
because she needed someone in her life. And that one is kept very secret. Lauter clearly asks her for marriage and she refuses because he's just sort of a placeholder of sorts. Spark has such a great way of showing off and just demonstrating how the sexual mores as they were expressed in a lot of popular media are not remotely the sexual mores that were at play.
00:20:50
Speaker
and they're not the ones that she's interested in representing. She wants to show that people were having sex out of wedlock, that there were very complicated arrangements that people were making, people's motivations were all over the place. And it just brings a vitality and a dimensionality to her characters that is, I don't know, it gets,
00:21:17
Speaker
I think it earns a very quick buy-in from the reader that this is a writer who knows what they're doing and is representing something very interesting at the same time. One of
Theme of Transfiguration Through Art
00:21:26
Speaker
the funny things about Miss Brody's relationship with Teddy Lloyd, who, as you said, is the art teacher at the school,
00:21:39
Speaker
is that he paints portraits. That's kind of what he does. And he paints all different types of people. And in some point in the novel, he paints some of the girls in the Brody set.
00:21:57
Speaker
But the problem with all of his paintings is that Teddy Lloyd only has one muse, and that muse is Gene Brody. And so because of that influence on him, everyone's got Gene Brody's face, whether he's painting the girls at the school or just whoever, members of his family.
00:22:25
Speaker
Everyone ends up looking like Gene Brody, which I think is a really funny way to work the whole artistic muse kind of theme. We all hear about the tortured painters.
00:22:48
Speaker
and how they've, you know, they often have like these unrequited loves for people. But I've never heard of anyone, at least I'm not an art expert, but to say that, like, oh, the face, the face of all of the male and female people that you paint your entire life look exactly like your muse in terms of facial structure and expressions is is really funny to read about.
00:23:18
Speaker
And it's also I mean, it's also it's also kind of bizarre at the same time, right? I mean, like, kind of giving the game away ever so slightly when every time he presents a portrait, someone says, Oh, that looks a lot like Gene Brody. I mean, to the point that his wife Deirdre is eventually like, you know, I've never met this Miss Brody, maybe she should come over for maybe she would like to come over for tea sometime. And Teddy immediately goes, No, she won't like just like I
00:23:43
Speaker
try to keep those parts of his lives as separate as possible, which is really funny in its own way, I think. But it also gets to the notion, I think, of transfiguration that starts to show up throughout different points in the novel. Because, yes, a lot of them, certain elements of the portraits
00:24:05
Speaker
of what he's done with his brushwork, absolutely make the subject. I believe especially Rose is the one that he starts painting the most because, well, she's beautiful and she also is a phenomenal model. But elements of those portraits absolutely look like
00:24:25
Speaker
Gene Brody, but it's not like he's reproducing her every time. It's just, there's something that makes it look like Miss Brody. There's this greater sensibility that comes across and it's immediately recognizable to the girls in the set, especially Sandy, because they are, I mean, they are imbued with Gene Brody by the time all is said and done. But Transfiguration also,
00:24:53
Speaker
Also, that notion plays a big role in Sandy's life. The jump ahead information we get about Sandy is that
00:25:05
Speaker
She ends up a nun in a cloister, having written a book. She studies psychology and converts to Catholicism after her senior school experience. But she writes a book called The Transfiguration of the Common Place. And it seems that
00:25:29
Speaker
that experience and what she got out in that leads her into the cloister, but also makes her a celebrity of sorts. Converts, spiritual seekers, psychologists, folks from different faiths all come and speak to her.
00:25:47
Speaker
And so do her friends from the set while she's in cloister to get a sense of where did this come from? And we don't ever get any of the meat of the book. It's more hinted at by the things that Sandy thinks about and speaks of. But have you ever been to a cloistered convent? Well, I've visited some, but I've never spent the night there or anything.
00:26:17
Speaker
Um, I've been to a couple and just for our listeners who haven't experienced it, some cloister comments are fully cloistered. You will never interact with the nuns there. That just doesn't happen. Others do allow for engagement and that's a way for family to say hello for other folks to come by. But usually the way it's done and the way it's done here is that, um, there is a wall or a grill.
00:26:42
Speaker
a metal grill in between the religious order, whichever religious order it is, the nuns, and the folks, the way people who have come to talk, or that's an happy way of people. I'm overcomplicating this. Anyway, typically, and as it said in the novel, typically, folks just sit and they talk through the grill to one another. But when people come to see Sandy,
00:27:07
Speaker
Sandy's at the grill clutching it, almost like she's desperate to escape. There's an element of desperation to how she talks and what she's thinking. It suggests that she had a breakdown, I'm not sure, but there's an intensity to that that's really quite
00:27:28
Speaker
It's really quite interesting and fascinating and also fascinating when you pull in the outcomes for all the other of the set.
Futures of Brody Set and Sandy's Path
00:27:36
Speaker
We already know that Mary dies.
00:27:39
Speaker
Jenny does become an actress of moderate fame and travels around quite a bit with her husband who is a theater manager, I believe. Monica gets married but is going to be separated because she can't control her temper and she threw something in a fight at her husband's sister. Eunice marries a doctor. Rose marries a businessman, I believe.
00:28:06
Speaker
Um, and on and on. And so you've got this full range of outcomes and the spectrum, um, all from this set. And yeah, I, I just find that kind of fascinating. And he's, I frankly, I frankly think this is the kind of novel that you could, and there probably do exist. I didn't do that heavy of a lift of research, but there have to be like, what? A couple thousand like doctoral theses just going in on some element of this book. I mean, it just.
00:28:37
Speaker
It's an entire universe of experience within these pages. And that's true in all of her books, I think, but there's something even more happening in this one. Tell me if you agree with this premise. I feel that Sandy is similar in a lot of ways to
00:29:04
Speaker
It seems like in almost every Spark novel that we've read, there's a young woman that has some aspect of Sandy to her.
00:29:14
Speaker
She's a little bit weird, isn't really going to be your standard homemaker and mother of two, married with the white picket fence. She's ambitious in a way.
00:29:37
Speaker
also, in a way, very impractical, very smart, and really quirky. And I feel like we've read a number of novels so far where there is a character like that in the novel that's just and, you know, like in
00:30:00
Speaker
the comforters, you know, that that character was going through a spiritual, you know, kind of converted to Catholicism and then was, you know, constantly questioning, questioning her faith and and Catholicism and, you know, in the in the bachelors.
00:30:24
Speaker
We had we had a woman like that. I'm not remembering all of their names off the top of my head, but it just seems that that there's there's usually a young woman who is someone that that has secrets on some of the other people. And is just is just a bit edgy. Yeah, I would agree with that.
00:30:55
Speaker
I mean, certainly history could be the case that in some ways, Spark is tracing different outcomes for a certain character. If not for this, then this would be the case. Born at this time results in these particularities or these outcomes. Sure, that definitely more than tracks and makes sense and would be fitting with a lot of the themes that she's playing with.
00:31:23
Speaker
At this point,
Miss Brody's Fascist Beliefs Impact
00:31:24
Speaker
though, we should probably address an elephant in the room that folks who have read this are probably screaming that we haven't brought up yet. And that's that Miss Jean Brody, this beautiful, very different kind of educator, charting her own particular course through 1930s Edinburgh, is a fascist and is not
00:31:51
Speaker
And it's not just a fascist in terms of, we had that moment in Maria's where Deza describes, where Jack talks about how some writers you can tell are fascist just by their writing style. Well, she's not a fascist by her writing style or by a certain particular outlook. She full thrilledly supports Mussolini.
00:32:20
Speaker
Part of the way through the novel, she's going to take on her break a trip to Germany and Austria to see Hitler and the brown shirts because the brown shirts are so much more reliable than the black shirts and that Hitler, you can really con him to get things done. And there's no unemployment in these places and on and on. And from the beginning, I think you can get the feel that the Brody set isn't just a group of girls taken under the wing of an interested teacher, but there is a cult-like
00:32:50
Speaker
quality to how she's influencing them. I'm being very hesitant to use the word grooming, but there is, feels in a way an element of that. But yeah, I mean, whatever else Jean Brody is, she also is a fascist. It's a little hard to get
00:33:15
Speaker
your head around whether or not she's really thought very thoroughly about these fascist leaders, political philosophy. I mean, I would say Mussolini, I would just kind of almost throw that in there as just part of her adoration for
00:33:37
Speaker
anything Italian of that time. But you can't because she's also in love with Franco. So yeah, there's some reason. I almost think it's part of her romanticism. But she also talks to the girls a lot about being dependable and how
00:34:03
Speaker
important to trade, it is to be dependable. And so I think that in some ways she sees these regimes in these
00:34:16
Speaker
countries all under the umbrella of fascism as being dependable in some way or almost like you know what you're getting.
00:34:35
Speaker
She's very adamant that, at least in the case of Mussolini, that he's definitely making Italy like, you know, again, the creme de la creme, like this, you know, almost paradise on earth. There's definitely like an aesthetic principle, I think, that she finds attractive about the fascists. And I think that tying into her love for the Roman, as it were, the classical certainly falls
00:35:05
Speaker
It's really like dovetails with that. And yeah, I mean like there isn't a ton in here that's especially overtly political other than the fact that, you know, there's a.
00:35:19
Speaker
a strong anti-Franco viewpoint in the school among the teachers and the students. And when that's first introduced very late in the novel, when that comes up at the Spanish Civil War is taking place, you get the sense almost immediately that there will be at least one person who does not subscribe to that viewpoint, that you should be anti-Franco.
00:35:42
Speaker
She doesn't, and it leads to a pretty unfortunate outcome for a student. I do wonder if this has also sparked grappling with how ideologies and belief systems play out and influence outcomes, influence life choices.
00:36:06
Speaker
I mean, I said at the outset that her other novels give this cross section of society and belief systems, you know, and there's a lot of the spiritualists and all of the novels, it seems, and tension between forms of Christianity, but especially most especially within the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church between the folks born into it and those who converted to it.
00:36:34
Speaker
But here we have a sense of history to where Brody's choices lead, like what comes with it and what comes with, if it is just a sense of aesthetics that's so attractive, with the result of only paying attention to the aesthetics and not paying attention to the meat of it. I don't know, that sounds vaguely familiar to some of what's going on in our country currently.
00:37:03
Speaker
God, what a what a dumb species we are.
Brody's Educational Approach Analysis
00:37:06
Speaker
But anyways, she's obviously aware that she's dealing with a very malleable group of kids and she she comments on it to them. You know, I think that one of her favorite sayings is something like I'm putting old heads on young shoulders or something like that.
00:37:28
Speaker
And she's very, very proud of the fact that she's an educator. She is right now in her prime and she has a calling. She's almost, it's almost like a messianic kind of purpose that I'm going to, I'm forming, I'm molding these young women.
00:37:51
Speaker
But she seems to have no consciousness about the fact that of the of the dangerous side of that of her of her influence. And certainly none of the faculty members are buying her bullshit. So she doesn't really have influence with anyone but but these girls. And maybe that's what attracts her in her calling that she that she can kind of or thinks that she can form
00:38:21
Speaker
little Jean Brody's in her in her image and she even talks to to them about like
00:38:31
Speaker
Well, it's hard to say when each of you individually will be in your prime. It all happens at different times, you know, for everyone. But yeah, she certainly thinks she's got a duty. And she's extremely dedicated and she fights tooth and nail to not get kicked out of this school because
00:38:56
Speaker
She believes in what she's doing and it's really her whole identity, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really well said and a really big part of what
00:39:11
Speaker
was driving her and what interests her. It's also notable that she doesn't really, it's not like she has a set out of every school year. She basically has these girls and follows them for seven years. And once the girls are graduated, then we hear that there's a new set of girls that she's starting to develop and take under her sphere.
00:39:39
Speaker
And certainly, I think the messianic and the idea that this is not just a duty, but like a responsibility. I think that she that she that she has to do because that is what her role is. And and this is an expression of her prime. And I'm sure that a lot of the psychologists of the day would have had a field day describing what was motivating or so close to the Freudian era. I think a lot of
00:40:09
Speaker
chatter about the unconscious and, um, unknown desires, uh, in influencing Jean Brody's actions would be, would run rampant. And actually a point, um, as Sandy engages her studies in psychology, she does start to, uh, to assign some of that to, uh, to Jean Brody and to her, her fellows in, in the set.
00:40:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting to think if Jean Brody's beau hadn't died on the fields of Flanders and they actually married and had children. I mean, could you imagine what this woman would do to her own kids? I mean, it would have been like the most batshit mother-child experience.
00:40:59
Speaker
It would not, it would not have born, it would not have born very good fruit at all. Although who knows? Maybe she would have been, maybe she would have provided children to, uh, back Moseley. Yeah. I don't, I don't see very good outcomes from, from Jean Prodi having her own kids at all. I agree. Um,
00:41:19
Speaker
There's this one line and there are a bunch of amazing lines in here, but there's one that really jumped out at me. And this is about Jenny in the future or Jenny in 1958 or so when she's in Rome with her husband and standing on a train platform and she just. I'll just read it. It happened. She was standing with a man whom she did not know very well outside of famous building in Rome, waiting for the rain to stop.
00:41:41
Speaker
She was surprised by her reawakening of that same bullion and airy discovery of sex, a total sensation in which it was impossible to say was physical or mental, only that it contained the loss and guileless delight of her 11th year. She was supposed, she supposed herself to fall in love with a man who might, she thought, have been moved towards her in his own way out of the world of his own, the associations of which were largely unknown to her. There was nothing what, whatever to be done about it for Jenny Vang, contentedly married for 16 years past.
00:42:09
Speaker
But the concise happening filled her with astonishment whenever it came to mind in later days and with a sense of the hidden possibilities in all things. But it's also that, I mean, I think, I think two things, the associations of which were largely unknown to her and the hidden possibilities in all things is a lot of what this novel is about. Opportunities, paths not taken, but also how a moment
00:42:37
Speaker
that seems so inconsequential can play such an outsized role in a decision you make seven years down the line, or how it builds upon another moment and another moment and another moment leading to a choice that runs counter to everything you've done previously. And in this case, in this novel, it's
00:42:57
Speaker
the choice by one of the girls to betray Brody. And the head mistress, Miss McKay, has been trying to get these girls to give her something, anything, on Brody since Brody created the set.
00:43:14
Speaker
just constantly bringing them in for tea, asking them questions. I mean, even at one point, so when you graduate to the senior school, you can either go classical or modern. And Brody clearly thinks the girls should all go classical.
00:43:29
Speaker
and that's what all the girls want to do, but Mary can't because her grades aren't good enough. But in an effort to try and get Mary to like on her side, McKay lets her take Latin, lets her sort of kind of like bridge the gap a little bit.
00:43:44
Speaker
But, and this is another moment where it said that Mary is too stupid to realize what's taking place here. Um, McKay realizes after making this, you know, making this allowance and then bringing Mary in for tea, there's no way in hell Mary's ever going to get for anything worthwhile.
00:43:59
Speaker
But yeah, every year she tries to get something out of these girls that will incriminate, incriminate Brody or at least putting a pressure on Brody to force her to resign from the school. And it doesn't work until the girls are all out of school. And one of them does after resisting for seven years after being devoted to this woman for at that point, what, almost half their life.
00:44:29
Speaker
She makes a different choice and thrusts Jean Brody out of her prime.
Betrayal and Brody's Downfall
00:44:36
Speaker
It seems to me that I need to make a amendment to something that I said before, because there's a really interesting aspect of the novel that I want to talk with you about, Tom. And I had made a generalization that
00:44:52
Speaker
that Brody really didn't think about the negative aspects of her influence. There is something that she does do though very intentionally that it's hard to think that she would
00:45:09
Speaker
think that this was part of the education of the girls, but she picks out a surrogate for herself for Teddy Lloyd.
00:45:25
Speaker
She knows that she's Teddy Lloyd's muse. They have had at least some passion between them. But Brody also knows that there's no future there because he's married with six kids and he's never going to be not married Catholic with six kids. So it's obvious that he's not going to marry her.
00:45:52
Speaker
Um, and so first of all, I guess my question for you is why do you think that she, she wants, um, a surrogate for herself because she's, she, I think is in love with Teddy Lloyd.
00:46:09
Speaker
at this point. And then two, what a totally creepy, manipulative thing to do to a young girl, a young woman to kind of, because she knows Teddy Lloyd is
00:46:28
Speaker
A bit of a sexual predator so she she knows that it's probably not going to be all innocent if she if she sets up someone one of her set to be Modeling for for Teddy Lloyd and and she specifically picks out You know the prettiest girl in the set so I kind of wanted to talk with you about what you thinks going on there and
00:46:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is actually why I kind of shied away from using, but probably should have used the word grooming before. I mean, she is grooming the girl for this. And I think Jean Brody is very good at self-justification. I think that because she can't have Teddy, she feels that some element of herself could have Teddy and should have Teddy and the girls are
00:47:19
Speaker
in some ways and to her mind just versions and extensions of herself. So why not have one of the girls have an affair with Teddy? Why not have them report back on everything about it down to like, I mean, she knows that the portraits look like her because the girls are reporting back on it. She knows so much information because she is living through these girls experiences and
00:47:45
Speaker
to her way of thinking, I think this is how the girl comes into her prime. This is what she has been developing towards and that justifies creating the circumstances in her which she would have an affair with, would have sex with this teacher. And yeah, it's incredibly creepy.
00:48:10
Speaker
her methods of teaching you know they don't comport with any
00:48:18
Speaker
They don't comport with anything pretty standard, right? There's no
Manipulation and Grooming Issues
00:48:21
Speaker
real rote learning here, but there's also not really any serious development of the kids. Brody spends a lot of time talking about how she's trying to educate them, how she's trying to expand them, where everyone else is trying to intrude upon them and force them into things. And because she chose fairly smart girls, they're all able to cram and do well in their exams and pass and so on.
00:48:46
Speaker
There is an argument from Ms. McKay, the headmistress in particular, that Brody's methods aren't just unorthodox. They're not actually terribly helpful to these girls. Like, they are... Whether she's educating them or not, she's inducting them into something. And that I think... I don't know.
00:49:11
Speaker
For me, that's probably what allows her to push one of her girls into a situation that would lead to her having sex at like 16, 17 with a married adult man.
00:49:28
Speaker
Yeah, and it's very dangerous and potentially devastating for the girl if discovered. This is a faculty member. Presumably, especially in private boarding school in the 1930s Scotland, you're going to get expelled pretty quickly.
00:49:47
Speaker
if you're caught, the girl could become pregnant to this artist that feels that it's okay to have sex with your models, but it's no skin off his back because he's got a wife and he's Catholic and he's not going to be responsible for anything that happens. I don't know. It's just
00:50:08
Speaker
In all other respects, I think I can say I feel that although Brody is extremely She's she's irrational and illogical and Probably more than a little bit mad, but she seems to have a real affection for these girls Unless you want to argue that the only thing that she has affection for is how she can see her own self reflected back
00:50:39
Speaker
with these girls. But this just seems to be a mean thing to do, to set up this surrogate situation. Or maybe not mean, maybe as part of her philosophy, and I think you're right on that, Tom, about, oh, it's artistic and romantic to be a model for a painter kind of thing.
00:51:08
Speaker
But man, really irresponsible. But I guess the whole fascism thing is really irresponsible. Yeah. I mean, once once you establish the fascism bit, a lot of other things kind of not quite pale, but maybe slot into a slime to a different. You're not building the puzzle you thought you were. Let's put it that way. It's a it's a very it's a more of a fascist, a flashy puzzle.
00:51:34
Speaker
Yeah, no, I just think I won't go quite so far as to say that her affection for the girls is purely rooted in her seeing herself in them. I mean, I think it's damn close. I think it kind of straddles that line quite a bit. And that is what allows her to
00:51:55
Speaker
I mean, to turn a blind eye to whether or not they're really getting the education they need, because she's decided that they are, to continue to influence and in some ways control them, and to set them on the paths that she thinks they should be set on. And then once they're out of her reach, more or less, to start up with a new group, to create a new Brody set to move through the next seven years of the school.
00:52:22
Speaker
She's a really fascinating, strange, unsettling character, especially when we see her post forced resignation, retirement, what have you, and how small she becomes.
Brody's Decline Post-Retirement
00:52:36
Speaker
One of the last times like chronologically that we see her, she's not well. She dies like a month later. She's sick. But even before then, when she meets with her set,
00:52:49
Speaker
and they talk she just seems smaller and smaller and smaller and I believe it's Monica who and every time she brings up that she can't figure out which one of the girls betrayed her and maybe it was this person and it's never the person she's speaking to because she wants to keep them on side but maybe it was this one or maybe it was that one or this maybe they did for this reason I think it's Monica that reflects that um
00:53:16
Speaker
how different she seems from when Monica was a girl, how the Jean Brody of the 30s, the Jean Brody of Monica's 10th through 17th years would have been fighting, had fight in her. And this one is just defeated and trying to make sense of how she lost, which I don't know, maybe mirror some of the fascist elements too, I'm not sure.
00:53:45
Speaker
Well, mentioning the movie again, all of these contradictory, extravagant, eccentric, wonderful qualities that Spark creates in this novel for the character of Miss Jean Brody is played out with such skill by Dame Maggie Smith in the 1969 movie.
00:54:15
Speaker
I would highly recommend it because she brings out so many faucets of this really complicated character, the repellent aspects of her, and then the magnetic aspects of her too, and the ambition, and the romanticism, and the strength, but then also the
00:54:42
Speaker
you know, the fragility of her. It's just a really wonderful performance. May I read one of the those amazing lines that Muriel Spark is able to produce about a city cityscape?
Spark's Descriptive Writing of Edinburgh
00:54:57
Speaker
I mean, we talked about this in the Battle of Peckham Rye, how there was almost that cinematic quality to the final page and the sun hitting the park and all those things. And she just has such a sense of how
00:55:11
Speaker
how an urban space can just, I don't know, stun and bewilder and enliven someone. But throughout this, Edinburgh has often been described as fairly dark, very gray, imposing architecture, all of that. But here we have
00:55:35
Speaker
It was then that Miss Brody looked beautiful and fragile. Just as dark, heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets.
00:55:48
Speaker
There are masters of lighting who have been trying to create that effect in movies for decades. And sometimes they pull it off. Some great cinematographers out there. And there are writers who have been trying to, with one line, encapsulate how a scene can change. But I don't think there are many much better than Muriel Spark. Yeah, I agree. She's masterful. Tell me, Tom, do you have any title comps for this one?
00:56:18
Speaker
Oh, Christ. We don't usually do that for the sparks. I was not at all prepared. Maybe unfair for me because I've got I've got two. Why don't you then then do me a solid. Why don't you go first with at least one of them and we'll see if that jogs in any thoughts or if I have a moment to think. Okay.
00:56:40
Speaker
I would say that in some aspects, this book reminds me of The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
00:56:52
Speaker
in the fact that you've got a private school, you've got this instructor, teacher, professor's set, you know, the favored pupils and their own little clique and it's kind of, you know, they kind of can't see outside of, you know, their little bubble that they're in.
00:57:18
Speaker
I'm a manipulative adult who's really affecting the way these kids think about life in unorthodox ways. Of course, most people listening will probably have read The Secret History. I won't say that it goes to that kind of level of violence.
00:57:47
Speaker
But I did say at the start that there are some Gothic elements to the book, and maybe those are a little bit heavier on my mind because I saw the movie. You know, it's Scotland. Some of it takes place in the winter. So, you know, not much light, dark. And certainly I think the secret history is Gothic. So that's my first one.
00:58:14
Speaker
So one of the hard things I like really nailing and this happens to me sometimes even when I'm making a recommendation to a customer or to someone else is that if I'm like in the throes of a book or like really besotted by a book, it's very hard to think of anything else that's like it because you're just taking in so much of the whole of it. There's definitely a book that's
00:58:37
Speaker
And I think it's by a British writer that's like on the tip of my tongue that has a similar set up, but or not similar set up, but like a again, that boarding school feel that sort of thing, but I can't place it. It's not O Caledonia, is it? It is not. Is that your second one? No, that wasn't my second one. Have you read that one? I have not. Who's that by? I forget who did O Caledonia.
00:59:03
Speaker
Elspeth Barker, it looks like. Yeah, that's another one of those kind of like cult classics that just kind of, and it's written a little bit in this style, like the beginning of the novel starts where
00:59:19
Speaker
this this girl is like lying dead at the bottom of a staircase dressed in her mother's clothing. And then like you just get the whole backstory of like this dysfunctional home and how weird the girl is and that nobody in her family likes her because she's so weird. And there's some style style wise and atmosphere. I think there's some similarities.
00:59:47
Speaker
What's your second one now that you throw the third one in? My second one is like totally weird and quirky and it's only because of one element and it's the obsession with the character of Jean Brody to keep referring to herself and thinking of herself as being in her prime.
01:00:11
Speaker
So, I don't know whether you've ever read Mario Losavargos' Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. It's hilarious. It's a hilarious novel, but the
01:00:30
Speaker
The narrator of that novel is a man, I think he's in his 40s, but he goes on and on about how he's in the prime of his life. And then when he's talking about other people
01:00:46
Speaker
If they are of or about the same age as him, he'll like state their age and it'll be like, and of course he was in the prime of his life. And it's just this mantra that just keeps being repeated over and over again. And every time that Miss Brody talked about being in her prime, it reminds me of that very, very funny novel.
01:01:10
Speaker
Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to come up with one. I'm just still doing the whole reeling from from this one. Those are all really I mean, those all make a ton of sense. Secret history, history especially. And that raises a good question of it's interesting reading these and seeing
01:01:28
Speaker
what or who she may have influenced after the fact like who is who has done the full mural spark read through and it really shaped or or read enough of them or specific ones that had played such a significant role in um and what they did next um i mean just in terms of like spark as a writer on the whole some of kingsley amuses like especially his later work um the old devils i mean that
01:01:57
Speaker
I think she's a better writer. I mean, he's good. I'm not saying Kingsley Amos isn't good. I think she's better. But there are so many elements of the old devils that like almost feel, it almost feels like a mural spark type of book from this period that we've been reading. So maybe that's- Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one. It's following a bunch of old men in Wales in the 1980s that were all
01:02:22
Speaker
They all knew each other. I mean, it has a lot of similarities to Memento Mori. Shit, as I'm thinking about it. Most of them are in bad health. One of them has become an incredibly famous poet. They all were at school together. Some of them had the same girlfriend at different points. And now here they're in their 80s trying to kind of still make a go of things.
01:02:47
Speaker
are still drinking hard and it's a very, it's fun. But yeah, there's a certain, there's a real quality of a memento mori to it now that I'm thinking about it. So not a comp to Prime and Miss Jean Brody, maybe a comp to, from a few episodes back. We'll treat that as a win.
01:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there's got to be like a Tessa Muschveg author of our generation that's done a British boarding school book and it's been kind of like a, you know, a little bit of like a weird, nasty, manipulative kind of thing. And I'm just not, just not coming up with
01:03:33
Speaker
I haven't really dug into his, I haven't read his novel yet, but Brian Washington, I'm kind of curious about in terms of that. Because he does do a lot in terms of interpersonal interactions, and he does have a good eye for that sort of thing. He also had a tweet a while ago talking about
01:03:52
Speaker
the spark heads. So I get the feeling that he's definitely encountered some mural spark. But I'll have to give him a look and see if that's just a wild guess on my part that actually has some relationship to reality.
01:04:07
Speaker
I feel like there's a ton of novels up there about academia, like the college campus novel, which is what the secret history is. A lot of those, I think, just get into the politics of being at an institution like that and the dysfunction of
01:04:33
Speaker
the professors and the relationships. So yeah, I don't know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spring something on you that you weren't ready. And I didn't even think about the fact that we don't usually do that for the Spark. I guess I never really picked that up. I think it's a fun way to bring this first half season to an end.
01:04:56
Speaker
that's good, something different, maybe something we should do a little bit more of, or perhaps like, I don't know, we're reading a lot of books over a very long period of time from this author's life, so it may behoove us at some point to start, if we feel like it, saying whether we feel there are eras to it or there are particular movements that she's going through. I mean, I certainly think that these all
01:05:20
Speaker
These first six all hang together in a very particular way, and I'm curious what the next one will be like, because it feels like this is a punctuation mark of sorts, both because of how freaking good it is, and also because it's so thematically similar, but stylistically, I think, different from what came before. So we'll see. Well, it's been fun talking about it.
01:05:45
Speaker
This has been so much fun digging into all of Muriel Spark's work. I'm looking forward to everything we're gonna do in the new year. And I guess all the listeners, thanks for listening and hope you've been reading along or you haven't yet, you make some plans to do so. And we will talk to you in 2024. Happy holidays.