The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

First published: 1960

Type of work: Social satire/farce

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: Peckham Rye, England, a working-class and industrial district about two miles southeast of the central London area

Principal Characters:

• Dougal Douglas, a twenty-three-year-old, deformed shouldered Scottish holder of an M.A. from Edinburgh, who after joining the textile firm Meadows Meade induces turmoil in several characters’ lives
• Humphrey Place, a young refrigerator engineer, who becomes a friend and admirer of Dougal and who is also the subject of Peckham Rye’s “Ballad”
• Dixie Morse, Humphrey’s seventeen-year-old fiancee, a typist at Meadows Meade and single-mindedly bent on accumulating the money necessary for an upper-middleclass married life
• Trevor Lomas, Humphrey’s best man and an electrician employed by the London borough, who secretly heads a small, youthful criminal gang
• Merle Coverdale, the thirty-eight-year-old head of Dixie’s typing pool, who has been carrying on an extramarital affair for years with Vincent Druce, by whom she is murdered
• Vincent R. Druce, Managing Director of Meadows Meade, who has been unhappily married for years and hires Dougal as part of a recent textile trade association’s resolution that “Industry and the Arts must walk hand in hand”

The Novel

The novel’s title refers to the recollection and somewhat inaccurate balladlike retelling by Peckham Rye’s inhabitants of Humphrey Place’s jilting of Dixie Morse at their wedding (when he replied negatively to the minister’s question of whether he would take her as his wife), as well as this event’s antecedents and aftermath. The novel shows how this mishap and several related ones in the lives of other characters were precipitated by or associated with the appearance of Dougal Douglas in Peckham Rye: the mental breakdown of Mr. Weedin, Personnel Manager at Meadows Meade; the murder of Merle Coverdale (stabbed by a corkscrew in her neck nine times); Vincent Druce’s transformation into a paranoiac murderer; the fatal stroke of elderly Mrs. Belle Frierne, landlady of Dougal’s and Humphrey’s boardinghouse; and the arrest and probation for theft of thirteen-year-old Leslie Crewe, Dixie Morse’s half brother. Ultimately, Dougal Douglas is the catalyst for, rather than the primary cause of, these incidents, evoking from people and social institutions their inherent tendencies, traits, or weaknesses.

The Characters

Several facets of the novel, including aspects of Spark’s characterization, impart its balladic quality. Besides the sensationalized or lurid deeds of the characters (a staple of the popular ballad in Renaissance times, comparable to today’s scandal magazines and yellow-journalistic newspapers), the repetition used to portray them creates and accents epithet and refrain, two key components of the ballad. Thus, one member of Trevor Lomas’ gang is first identified in both chapters 1 and 7 as “Collie Gould, aged eighteen, unfit for National Service”; similarly, toward the close of chapter 1, the group at Meadows Meade which is informed about the jilting is described as “Dawn Waghorn, cone-winder, Annette Wren, trainee-seamer, Elaine Kent, processcontroller, Odette Hill, uptwister, Raymond Lowther, packer, Lucille Potter, gummer.” The epithets engender a flattening of character, appropriate to both Spark’s genre, satire, used to chastise human folly, and her emphasis on the intricate turnings of plot. This device also suggests the psychic and spiritual impoverishment produced by these characters’ industrialized, blue-collar world.

Habitual actions and expressions of several characters, in effect balladic refrains, like the epithets suggest characters’ being circumscribed or trapped by some obsession. In the novel’s second main depiction of her, Dixie is shown exercise-dancing while scrutinizing her bankbook; indeed, she almost always evidences her materialistic preoccupation with saving (together with explicit comment about it by her parents and fiance). Humphrey Place’s idee fixe is the maintenance of the proper roles of labor and management in the status quo, making Humphrey’s surname emblematic. Merle Coverdale’s repeated lament, “I’ve had a rotten life,” is graphically substantiated by the manner of her death. Though Dougal Douglas is the novel’s least constrained character, his deformed shoulder is mentioned at regular intervals no fewer than seventeen times; his revulsion at the others’ illness, nine times. “Quite frankly,” the verbal tic interlarding the speech and letters of Joyce Willis, wife of the co-owner and managing director of Drover Willis Textiles, conveys her continual fruitless striving to be intimate, authoritative, and at ease with others. Finally, the character with the most repetitive and tautologous speech of all, Vincent Druce, is the most repressed, his final brief outlet being his desperate physical violence perpetrated on the hapless Merle.

One narrative refrain, “I like/don’t like Dougal” or “he/she liked/didn’t like Dougal,” repeated like a litany throughout the novel, indicates the strong reactions generated by this character, deriving from his energy, vitality, and general irrepressibility. Another motif associated with him, the diabolical or demoniac, in its contrariety suggests Dougal’s (and humanity’s) potential for free-spirited role changes and depth or complexity of personality. For though he asserts to Humphrey, Mr. Weedin, and Merle that he is a wicked spirit or the Devil himself, contradictorily (as Merle notes) Dougal also claims to be able to exorcise the demonic in people, and truly, if more of them took his advice about fully engaging or enjoying life (even at the expense of factory absenteeism), their inner distresses might be eradicated.

Both Dougal’s intrusion into Peckham Rye’s apparently placid life and the puzzle of his true identity (Dougal is symbolically described as sitting like a monkey-puzzle tree in his job interview with Mr. Druce) are related to Spark’s recurrent theme in this and her other novels of the mystery that may suddenly appear amid the commonplace or familiar. Dougal displays two bumps on his head to Humphrey, Mr. Weedin, and Miss Frierne, which he claims to have been devil’s horns surgically removed; to the partially mad, religiously ranting old Nelly Mahone, he declares that he had goat horns when born that were later lost in a fight. On his walk through Peckham’s New Cemetery with Merle (one of several foreshadowings of her premature death), Dougal poses like both an angel and angel-devil on a headstone. On the other hand, Dougal is shown as very vulnerable and human when rebuffed by his graduate school sweetheart, several times weeping at this loss, and when blackmailed by young Leslie Crewe. A further complexity involved in this portrayal of his vulnerability, however, is the possibility, by the way Dougal raises his head from the table during his first weeping, at the company canteen, that he is at least partly dramatizing his plight as a covert courting technique directed at the attractive factory women.

Dougal Douglas’ very name is repetitive, concurring with the novel’s pervasive repetition. Yet Dougal demonstrates a freedom within this restraint by manipulating his name into three forms (one of several threes in the book, another recurrent motif in Spark’s novels)—Dougal Douglas, Douglas Dougal, and Mr. Dougal-Douglas—to allow himself to hold three jobs simultaneously (as a ghost writer of an autobiography and as “arts man” in two competing textile firms) and to enjoy other such unconventional liberties. Not only his Scottishness (he frequently uses the word “wee”) and theatricality show in Dougal’s disposition to leap, caper, and dance in many situations, but also his vivacity. Moreover, Dougal, formerly an actor in university plays, preserves freedom and flexibility in real life by diverse transformations into at least fifteen additional roles in his dealings with Mr. Druce, Elaine Kent (one of his three girlfriends) and patrons of Findlater’s Ballroom, the Lomas gang, and the police. Indeed, in the novel’s brief three page concluding chapter and denouement, Dougal’s further career after fleeing from Peckham is described as tape-recorder salesman to African witch doctors (who may use the device to combat modern skepticism, Dougal claims, which recalls Nelly Mahone’s earlier symbolic mistaking of his name as “Mr. Doubtless”), Franciscan novice, and finally successful author of “a lot of cock-eyed books.”

Critical Context

Muriel Spark’s first five novels—The Comforters (1957), Robinson (1958), Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), and The Bachelors (1960)—have much in common. All are set in the late 1950’s, and all draw on urban London and its environs for locale (the island castaway Jan in Robinson continually thinks about her relatives in the city). Further, they (and later novels) focus on a small, self-contained group. Finally, they share Spark’s techniques of narrative looping or the play between past and present, a short denouement or coda that wraps up loose ends and synopsizes characters’ later lives, and rather pointed symbolism in characters’ names.

All of Spark’s early novels evoke the dark part of human nature lurking in the depths and ready to erupt, manifested by some version of both murder and blackmail; life’s capacity for the sudden appearance of the occult or mysterious; and the importance of the religious sphere, implied more by negation in The Ballad of Peckham Rye than in her other works.

Virtually all of Spark’s novels, including The Ballad of Peckham Rye, are short and artistically finished, pervaded by symbolism and mordant humor or satire. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye the business world and urban working class receive more attention (unflattering) than in Spark’s other novels; this novel also differs from her other early works in its greater quantity of amusing farce (her most humorous book is probably Not to Disturb, published in 1971).

Bibliography

Baldanza, Frank. “Muriel Spark and the Occult,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. VI (Summer, 1965), pp. 190-203.

Kemp, Peter. Muriel Spark, 1974.

Malkoff, Karl. Muriel Spark, 1968.

Stanford, Derek. Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1963.

Stubbs, Patricia. Muriel Spark, 1973.