Saturday, May 18, 2024

A far cry from Kensington. Muriel Spark 1988 175pg

  26/4/24 This is a conscious exercise in looking back and about the publishing world. In the post WW2 period.

 To a bad writer she had to look in his face and tell him exactly what she thinks about his urinating frightful prose. When you speak the plain truth out aloud how to survive the consequences. Post War London comes back to life the novel is distinctly revival.

1954. I was comfortable in my fatness known as a  wonderful woman and enjoyed universal affection. A large women is definitely somebody. Then decided to be thin and right away I noticed that people didn't confide in me their thoughts so much.
Milly kept the rooming house, had met her husband in her native Cork. Katy the book keeper had survived the concentration camps of the 1930s in Germany.
With the austerity of wartime there was a shortage of paper supplies and printers, while the public were avid for books. When a couple were fighting the policeman said don't come between a husband and wife till there is a lull.
If it is widely believed you have money and wealth, this belief creates confidence and confidence makes  business.
Refugees brought their courage with them. They knew  far better how to tap the resources of post war Britain than the locals. The Poles sent home parcels of warm clothing. Poles had left a  world of beaurocratic tyranny. Business cannot be carried out unless people are honest. Survivors of death camps were known to inflict on themselves later in life that, that they had escaped.
1954 Roger Bannister beat the 4 minute mile record  and became a brain surgeon later.
A person who is a good vivacious talker, he is bound to be a good writer unfortunately is not the case.
Pisseur de copie is a hack writer as a urinator of Journalistic copy.
Cultured people are not necessary nicer people . suitable jobs can be found through the most unlikely people. People love coincidence, so  tell everyone you are looking for a job.
On this new job the coworkers were handicapped in some way either physically or other, but the were agreeable people. A doctor struck off the roll or an accountant with a stammer or a woman with a port wine birthmark on her face. A daughter of a mass killer  and  Nancy was fat. They sent out manuscripts to readers who were mostly retired but were readers with a certain amount of education and earned some money from this. She wonders how many good writers never achieves what they should have.
To become a writer you have to write like letters to a good friend who will read it over and over as you write the story develops itself.  Before you marry someone see what he is like when drunk.
The upper class could not live and would disintegrate  without the ordinary class  while they could live with out the upper class. On the top of the bus now 10 years after the war ended, in London there were few streets intact and houses were separated by areas of a bomb gap. London was still sooty from coal fires.
During the war women went into the Lands Army to work in agriculture as the men were fighting. V1 bombs fell from July1944.
In England love and hate are entirely different things. They are not even opposites, love comes in first from the heart, hate arises basically from principle.
Nancy now worked for a group of homosexuals who were US refugees from Senator McCarthy's political persecution and were in Highgate, North London. Americans were also becoming very much at home in France and Italy. Here she was tired of being Mrs. Hawkins and wanted to be Nancy. Everyone in this office used first names and as she had  lost weight she could reinvent herself. It was easier to work for gays than strait men. Homosexualism was still against the law and it made them more hysterical than today.

 

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