The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

They were as dark as anything, and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them. Mussolini had put an end to unemployment with his fascisti and there was no litter in the streets. It occurred to Sandy, there at the end of the Middle Meadow Walk, that the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. That was all right, but it seemed, too, that Miss Brodie's disapproval of the Girl Guides had jealousy in it, there was an inconsistency, a fault. Perhaps the Guides were too much a rival fascisti, and Miss Brodie could not bear it. Sandy thought she might see about joining the Brownies. Then the group-fright seized her again, and it was necessary to put the idea aside, because she loved Miss Brodie.

Two years ago I finished the last of Muriel Spark's books, and I grieved. Last year I wanted to start reading them again, and I thought it would be fun to read them in the order I first read them--but my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was lent somewhere to someone, who hopefully read and enjoyed it, whoever they may be. So I reread Robinson instead, a strange and charming book. But this year, I really wanted to get back to Jean Brodie, and to find out whether it really is the best of Spark's books, or if I only remember it so fondly because it was the first (and of course, most famous). I'm pleased to report that it really is that book: riotous, shocking, mean-spirited, and deeply sad.

This time around, I found myself strangely more sympathetic toward Miss Brodie. The first time around I was a rookie teacher, and I still found myself sympathizing with the students rather than the faculty. Fifteen years on (!), I see in Miss Brodie some teachers I have known: people who use their classrooms to enact fantasies of control, perhaps because so much of life outside the classroom is uncontrollable. Miss Brodie is a fascist, an admirer of Mussolini, and fascism, too, is a fantasy of control and a childish one at that; a fantasy of perfect order by the suppression and exclusion of undesirable elements--those things that are not, as Brodie says, the "creme de la creme."

But the childishness of the fantasy is what makes Brodie a sad figure. I see now how she reduces class, and life, to a series of rote cliches and performative gestures. The fantasy has deadly consequences, of course--she urges one girl toward the war in Spain, and her death--but that makes it somehow more pathetic. And in Sandy Stranger, Brodie's betrayer, I see less an avenging angel than another kind of pettiness. Sandy seizes upon Brodie's fascist leanings to have her sacked, but it's not out of concern for the dead girl in Spain, or for poor stupid Mary Macgregor who is at the bottom of the Brodie totem pole. It's out of some other kind of pique, a resentment that Brodie takes on the role of God, as if Sandy herself is not a kind of planner and schemer.

A couple other things I noticed this time around: the "flash-forward" technique that I've always considered characteristic of Spark's technique is really much more prominent here. It's so mean-spirited: Spark can barely mention Mary Macgregor without reminding us that one day she's going to die in a fire, running "hither and thither" like an idiot. But it also takes on an air of predestination, as if Mary's ultimate death is inseparable from her essential identity, as essential as Sandy's taking the veil, or Miss Brodie's eventual betrayal and death. At the risk of repeating myself, Spark is always God, pushing her characters around, assigning them destinies. She's a cruel God, Calvin's God--she clearly thinks Mary Macgregor's death is funny, and it is. Perhaps by striking out against Miss Brodie, Sandy is striking out against Spark, too, but the joke's on her, because it's Spark who puts her in the nunnery.

Another thing: Jean Brodie is more of an Edinburgh novel than nearly anything Spark has written. I can't remember off the top of my head if any of her other novels are set in Edinburgh--many are London--and though I'm sure some of them are, I don't know the city is really central to any of them. But, among other things, Jean Brodie is a novel about the awakenings that come with coming-of-age, and one of the things that Sandy learns is the particular shape of middle-class Edinburgh life that surrounds her, and how it may differ from other kinds of life: "All she was conscious now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people." Part of that Edinburgh life is the bourgeois standards that keeps Jean Brodie from consummating her love for the art teacher Teddy Lloyd, and which drives her to recruit Rose, then Sandy, as her surrogate. Another part is Calvinism, and perhaps it's reacting against the pervasiveness of that religion that drives Sandy--like Spark herself--to Catholicism.

In this case, I think the critics got this one right. I have a few personal favorites among Spark's books, like The Mandelbaum Gate and The Takeover, and I think that Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry From Kensington may actually be more indicative of her style and themes, but everything about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie sings. There's no one like Miss Brodie--that particular mix of self-regard and pathetic smallness--in any of her other books, or any book, frankly. And it's enlivened by the irony of the young students' untutored viewpoints, which is a tactic Spark seems not to have much patience for in other books. It's the creme de la creme--Miss Muriel Spark in her prime.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

And there was that day when the enquiring young man came to see Sandy because of her strange book of psychology, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace," which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever.

"What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?"

Sandy said: "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."

I loved this book, though I never thought I would. I had heard of it years ago, on Time's list of the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century, and I admit I said at the time "I'll never read that one":

A slender novel but far from flimsy, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie enrolls the reader at Edinburgh's fictional Marcia Blaine School for Girls under the tutelage of one Jean Brodie, a magnetic, unconventional instructor whose favorite pupils—"the Brodie set"—are set apart from the rest of the student body by their superior attitudes and their intellectual awareness. The archly, tartly narrated adventures of these young girls and their eccentric, autocratic leader form a delightful group portrait, and something more: an immortal parable of the temptations of charisma and the dangers of power.

Edwardian girls' schools aren't exactly my thing. But I decided I would read it on the recommendation of James Wood, who had a lot of quite glowing things to say about it. In a discourse on character, he uses the titular character as a paragon of what a character can do who is not fleshed out in the most common sense--not bogged down by a thousand details in an effort to seem "round," which is a trope that Wood disdains.

"In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home with Miss Brodie," Wood writes. "We never see her in private, offstage. Always, she is the performing teacher, keeping a public face." Instead, we come to know Brodie through her pupils, the "Brodie set," whom she has picked to be her special clique in the school. And yet they provide us with much information--we know, in a roundabout way, that Brodie is in love with the art teacher, one-armed Mr. Lloyd, but he is married and so she is having an affair with the music teacher, Mr. Lowther. We know that there is a great deal of sadness and desperation in this situation and in her, but we only come to realize these things through the filter that is the Brodie girls. When, as young girls, two of them invent the details of a long-ago torrid affair between Brodie and a slain soldier, it becomes as much part of her identity as anything else in the novel.

And yet, it is Brodie who has her hands on the marionettes. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a novel about predetermination. The setting, Scotland, is the epicenter of Calvinism, and it is no coincidence that Brodie is eventually ousted for having fascist sympathies. In one of the most chilling bits, she encourages a girl to leave school and fight for Franco in Spain, where the girl meets her death.

For similar purposes Spark uses a technique that Wood calls "flash-forwards"--though the book is mostly written chronologically, at certain points Spark provides us with information about what happens to the characters. We know early on that the stupidest of them, Mary MacGregor, dies in a fire; we know that Brodie is ousted because of the betrayal of one of her own set. We even know that the traitor is Sandy, who later becomes a nun. Very little mystery is left, as if Spark is telling us that Brodie--as odious as she can be--is essentially successful in determining her girls' path in life, brick by brick, though perhaps in ways she did not anticipate.

Beyond all this, or in the midst of it, is Spark's style, which is economical to the hilt. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie clocks in at a clean 150 pages; not a word is wasted on extraneous description or puffery. Really, everything I've ever read seems like a cluttered mess in comparison. But form, in this case, is function: Perhaps Spark, whose style is so mannered, so well-organized and structured, is asking us if her role as a novelist isn't a little bit like Brodie's role as a teacher, guiding her proteges through every step.

Even still, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has a charming lightness and an slight sense of humor. Jean Brodie is a clown, meant to be laughed at, a series of sayings that become more absurd as they are repeated. How many times and for how many years can you tell people that you are "in your prime" until it becomes demonstrably false? Perhaps we really have free will, perhaps we move along like trains on rails--but what can you do besides smile at it?

Side note: This is the 49th book I've read from the Time list. I am considering going for the whole thing.