So begins the Editor’s Preface in the torn and battered paperback copy of Memento Mori that I picked up in a used book store in some forgotten city. Was it Wilmington, Delaware? It might have been.
They get the feeling that they, as well as her characters, are being sharply and relentlessly scrutinized, and this creates in them a mixed sense of involvement and unease. Indeed, her readers, like some of her reviewers, are never quite sure what Miss Spark is up to. Her novels and short stories are brief and unsentimental. The dialogue is overheard with something that is not quite malice, yet as her people speak, they give themselves away; they do this not in a phrase or even a chapter; it is a cumulative process. As one reviewer has remarked, it is not so much what she says that is fascinating; it is waiting for what she will say next. And all the time Miss Spark herself seems to stand by, cool, disinterested, and not in the least inclined to help either the character or the reader.
I’d have to admit that I had an opposite reaction to the text -- maybe because I had the benefit of reading the Editor’s Preface and being tipped off to her intentions. I knew exactly what Miss Spark was up to, and I did not find it in any way interesting.
The theme of Memento Mori (the Latin words mean “remember that thou must die”) is old age -- what British critic V. S. Pritchett calls, in his new introduction to this special edition, “the great suppressed and censored subject of contemporary society.” One reason writers avoid the subject of old age is that it makes them and their readers uncomfortable.
This, despite the fact that I began reading this book shortly after my father died -- indeed, started reading it on the airplane down to my now-widowed mother’s house in suburban Phoenix, and consumed a good chunk of it late at night as I lay in her guest bedroom reflecting back on a day of experiencing bittersweet memories and of making sterile funeral arrangements.
The cast of characters in the book are almost entirely elderly, and one by one they each start receiving a series of annoying prank phone calls, in which the caller cryptically and only says to them, “Remember you must die.”
Those telephone calls may create a common panic but they do nothing to purify or change the hearts and minds of the hearers. They go their set, seemingly predestined ways with the malice or jealousy or acquisitiveness -- or even goodness -- that not even the prospect of death can do much to alter.
And this, evidently, is what Miss Spark is “doing” in the novel.
Her oldsters may not have much nobility but they are indisputably human. And if the book does nothing else, it demonstrates how hard it is to approach tranquility at the end of a long life marked by the deceits, subterfuges and willful departures from ordinary decency that plague all men at all times.
That’s intriguing, and it should have struck me as doubly so at that particular moment in my own life -- as the universal that it describes would be as true about my own father as it must be about me and everyone else on the planet. But I think it’s worth noting that here I have quoted only what the editor has said about Miss Spark’s words, and none of Miss Spark’s words themselves. In many ways, if I were to try to summarize my reaction to the book, it would somehow hinge on this reality. What people say about the book is far more interesting than the book itself.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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