Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

First published: 1981

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: 1949-1950

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Fleur Talbot, a novelist
• Sir Quentin Oliver, the founder and leader of The Autobiographical Association
• Edwina Oliver, Sir Quentin’s aged mother
• Beryl Tims, Sir Quentin’s housekeeper
• Dottie, the wife of Fleur’s lover
• Solly, a reporter and poet, a friend of Fleur
• Wally, a friend of Fleur who is employed by the War Office

The Novel

The beginning of Loitering with Intent hints at the novel’s playful exploration of opposites and the ways in which these oppositions frequently coexist: appearance versus reality, life versus fiction, invention versus truth. Fleur Talbot, the narrator, relates a time when she was sitting in a graveyard, writing a poem. She was unemployed, living in a sparsely furnished bed-sittingroom, let by what she describes as a “swinish” landlord. All this should have been the cause for severe depression, but Fleur remembers that, in fact, her morale was high. As a novelist, all these experiences, including the swinishness of her landlord, were opportunities for her to transform reality into fiction; they were novels waiting to be written by her, a woman whose name, like those of many people, did not suit her reality. After all, as Fleur writes, there are always the Joys who are melancholy, the Victors who are timid, the Glorias who are inglorious, and the Angelas who are materialistic. Names and appearances are deceiving in life and in Loitering with Intent.

In telling the story of her life between 1949 and 1950, Fleur thinks back to the time ten months before the episode in the graveyard when she received a letter from a friend telling about an employment opportunity with Sir Quentin Oliver, a pretentious man obsessed with the group he had founded and continued to lead, The Autobiographical Association. Though Fleur would have preferred working for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), she needed the job and accepted the position as secretary to Sir Oliver. The specifics of her position included editing the memoirs of the ten members of The Autobiographical Association. Sir Oliver’s plan was to put these manuscripts away for seventy years, until the autobiographers were dead. Fleur embarked on her job, simultaneously continuing work on a novel she had begun. These two lines of work—editing autobiographies and writing novels— should have been distinct paths, the former dealing with real life and history, the latter dealing with fiction and invention. In fact, they become indistinguishable, their uncanny overlap providing the plot line for Loitering with Intent.

Becoming acquainted with the eccentric members of The Autobiographical Association, Fleur notices dramatic resemblances between them and the characters in her novel Warrender Chase. Sir Oliver, for example, closely resembles Warrender, even though Fleur had outlined and developed the character of Warrender long before she took the job with Sir Oliver. Beryl Tims, Sir Oliver’s prim and prissy housekeeper, is uncannily similar to Charlotte, Warrender’s mother. Other real-life people also resemble the characters already created by Fleur, and their dialogue, including specific phrases, eerily echoes words Fleur had written in her role as novelist. Fleur’s two worlds were becoming one.

As she observes this mixing of worlds, Fleur also observes the ways in which Sir Oliver exerts an overpowering influence upon his household and the members of The Autobiographical Association. In his gurulike role, he controls virtually every aspect of their lives and even goes so far as to administer to them what he alleges are diet pills, a medication that is later discovered to be dangerous in the dosages he provided. The two people Sir Oliver cannot control, however, become friends with each other: Fleur and Edwina Oliver, Quentin Oliver’s aged, invalid, eccentric mother. Fleur and Edwina both see through the manipulation of Sir Oliver, and both recognize his dangerous megalomania.

In addition to drugging the members of the association, Sir Oliver resorts to other kinds of manipulation, including arranging for the theft of Fleur’s manuscript, which Oliver believes is a roman a clef that reveals too much about himself and his autobiographical associates. This theft prompts Fleur to respond in kind, and she steals the memoirs of the associates from Oliver’s study, only to discover that Oliver has plagiarized her work, incorporating Fleur’s fiction into the associates’ supposedly nonfictional memoirs. These thefts, plus a real-life suicide which may or may not have been accidental, create an aura of the detective story around Loitering with Intent. In fact, it is indeed a mystery, but the question is not so much “Whodunit?” as it is a series of esoteric questions about reality, life, and truth. In the end, the easy questions are answered in straightforward fashion by Fleur in the last pages of the book. She not only explains how Sir Oliver is exposed and how she retrieves her manuscript but also explains what happens to all the other characters in the book. Yet she does not explain the inexplicable. The series of imponderable questions remains for readers to ponder.

The Characters

Fleur Talbot is a character whose very identity parallels the challenge she undertakes. She is an autobiographer, relating her life story in this novel, but she is also a novelist, one whose business is not the facts of life but the myths of fiction. This mixture of life and fiction is the challenge she faces when she agrees to edit the autobiographical works of others while she continues to create the fictional worlds in her novels. Whether it is life imitating art or art imitating life, Fleur’s identities and professions become indistinguishable, and Fleur delights in that lack of neatness. She reveals that delight in a sentence she repeats at the beginning and end of this novel, which is also Fleur’s autobiography: “How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.”

Because it is Fleur’s story, told by and about her, Loitering with Intent is really Fleur’s creation of herself, an act she accomplishes by telling of her many creative processes: writing novels, stealing manuscripts, exposing criminal behavior, and finally, writing her own self-portrait. Each of these processes is a game in itself, one which Fleur relates with apparent delight; beneath each of these games, however, lie serious questions which the narrator carefully interjects. She asks, for example, the classic question, “What is truth?” Her answer suggests the complexity of fact-finding and truth-telling for the novelist: “When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.” Fleur the playful creator is simultaneously Fleur the serious questioner.

Juggling these playful and serious dimensions, Fleur describes a collection of people whose eccentricities are revealed through her careful cataloging of their external appearances. There is Sir Oliver himself, described as having a right shoulder that “seemed to protrude further than the left as if fixed in the position for shaking hands, so that his general look was very slightly askew. He had an air which said, I am distinguished.” There is Sir Oliver’s mother, Edwina, with her four greenish teeth, her prewar tea-gowns of black lace, and her problem of “fluxive precipitations,” the euphemism her son uses for Edwina’s habit of wetting the floor. There are also the members of The Autobiographical Association, each of whom possesses some unique physical oddity, from Maisie’s “caged leg” to Father Egbert’s face which “resembled a snowman’s with small black pebbles for eyes, nose and mouth.” They are a strange collection of humanity, to be sure, but they are not so fantastic as to be incredible. As Sir Oliver says early in the novel, truth is stranger than fiction, and these characters are truthfully fictitious.

Critical Context

Muriel Spark is a prolific writer, having produced numerous novels, short stories, poems, and critical and biographical studies. Because of her productivity, she is a tempting target for critics; in addition, in evaluating her novels, many critics emphasize their technical qualities, suggesting that the content is less important than the style. Loitering with Intent invites that kind of critique, given its apparent playfulness with the mystery genre and its careful attention to developing eccentric, colorful characters. Yet like her earlier and perhaps her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962), Loitering with Intent is deceptive in its subtle integration of technique and meaning. Its particular strength may be its ability to deceive readers with an appearance of lightness and superficiality, just as the characters in the novel are themselves misled by appearances and externals.

Bibliography

America. CXLV, August 29, 1981, p. 98.

Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984. “Fun and Games with Life-Stories,” by Valerie Bold, discusses Spark’s penchant for weaving her life into her fiction. Faith Pullin discusses Spark’s use of duplicity in her essay “Autonomy and Fabulation in the Fiction of Muriel Spark.”

Christian Science Monitor. LXXIII, July 13, 1981, p. B6.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. The introduction classifies all Spark’s eighteen novels into three phases and describes the development of her typical literary form. Extensive bibliography. Index references to Loitering with Intent.

Hynes, Joseph. The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark’s Novels. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. Hynes sees his work as attempting to handle both the wit and the seriousness of Spark’s novels without neglecting either one. The index offers references to the novel. Extended bibliography.

Hynes, Joseph, ed. Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. A collection of essays on the writer’s life and art. “Taking and Making: The Page as Looking-Glass” contains a brief thematic analysis of Loitering with Intent, describing it as an autobiographical parody.

Library Journal. CVI, May 15, 1981, p. 1101.

Little, Judy. Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. The imagery of comedy expresses an inherent rebellion. When Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark evaluate life between the sexes, they are doing more than suggesting a little common sense; they are urging a radical “new plot” in life and literature.

The New Republic. CLXXXIV, May 30, 1981, p. 34.

The New York Review of Books. XXVIII, June 25, 1981, p. 45.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI, May 31, 1981, p. 11.

The New Yorker. LVII, June 8, 1981, p. 148.

Newsweek. XCVII, May 18, 1981, p. 113.

Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. Muriel Spark. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. The autobiographical introductory chapter explains the influence of John Henry Newman on the personal life of Muriel Spark. Chapter 11, “Intense Detachment,” refers to Fleur’s lack of self-seeking as an author and, in spite of the fact that she is an ardent Roman Catholic convert, Spark’s detached handling of religion in the novel.

Saturday Review. VIII, August, 1981, p. 79.

Sproxton, Judy. The Women of Muriel Spark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Fleur’s intuitive feeling for goodness and love of her writing are stressed.

Times Literary Supplement. May 22, 1981, p. 651.

Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. The influences of Catholic fiction, realism, and postmodernism on the work of Muriel Spark are discussed. Loitering with Intent receives particular attention in the chapter “Plots and Plotters.”