Death calls collect
Halloween stories are easy to come by in our society. We seem to ache for tales of ghosts, witches, and monsters, and there are plenty of books, both classic (Frankenstein, Dracula) and modern (anything from the King, Stephen section of the bookstore) with which to fill that need. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, that enthusiasm does not seem to have spilled over to the liturgical days traditionally connected to the now secularized celebration of Halloween: All Saint’s and All Soul’s Day. While it’s easy enough to come up with ad hoc reading lists for All Saint’s Day – not only historical and traditional accounts of saint’s lives, but modernized re-tellings like Frederic Buechner’s wonderful novels Godric and Brendan – the choices for edifying All Soul’s Day reading are less obvious.
This relative dearth makes a certain sense. All Soul’s Day lacks the luster of its neighbors on the calendar: it’s a little creepy, but not nearly so much as Halloween, and it lacks the inspirational potential of All Saint’s Day, with its roll call of the cloud of witnesses. The whole purpose of the day, after all, is to pray for those poor souls not yet experiencing the beatific vision, and by extension to remember our own ultimate end as frail, fallen humans. That call to remembrance is summed up in the famous phrase memento mori: remember you must die.
By good chance, Memento Mori happens to be the title of the book I’d mark out as the premier All Soul’s Day reading. Muriel Spark’s novel of that name came in the middle of her peerless run of early books, and sometimes gets overshadowed by more famous novels like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means. While the book lacks a little of the stylistic flair of those two novels – not so many pirouettes through time via proleptic flashes forward – as a work of biting satire and merciless plumbing of the depths of human psychology, it’s as strong as any of Spark’s fiction.
Like most of her early novels, Memento Mori also sets out Spark’s particular vision of sin and human frailty. Unlike many works that romanticize the struggle against sin, whether through the suggestion that to sin is to act heroically, or the suggestion, present in the novels of her patron and fellow Catholic novelist Graham Greene, that to resist takes a titanic effort of the will, Spark suggests sin as a mundane facet of human life, one that subtly worms its way into human relations and leads us toward damnation not through spectacular temptation, but through distraction. Memento Mori gives readers the clearest instantiation of this idea of sin as distraction by tying the petty moral failings of the book’s characters to their unwillingness to come to terms with that other most human frailty: their own mortality.
The plot centers on a group of elderly British aristocrats, most of whom have known each other for half a century or more. Members of this social circle – novelist Charmian Colston and her brewer magnate husband Godfrey; Godfrey’s spinster sister Dame Lettie; coldly scientific sociologist Alec Warner; enthusiastic poet Percy Mannering; and many more – begin to receive mysterious phone calls from a man who only ever says one thing: Remember you must die. More puzzling still is the fact that the voice on the phone changes depending on the call’s recipient; sometimes it’s that of a callow youth, sometimes an old-timer, on occasion even a woman’s voice. The untraceable origins of the call frighten some of the listeners and anger others, but the group as a whole begins to work its way toward fingering the man behind it all, even as the members individually pursue their own scattered ends, from adulterous dalliances to extortion schemes.
As Spark spins out the web of her intricate plotline, she gradually constricts the cord around her characters, subjecting them one by one to the necessities of mortality. Characters die frequently in the book, but never in ways that arouse a sense of terror, disgust, or pity. Rather, the deaths exist primarily as fodder for the living characters, who process their own proximity to dying in various ways. Consider the poet Percy Mannering, who relishes funerals as a source of “thrilling awe” because each new death “gave him something fresh to feel.” Because Percy cannot make sense of death as a general principle, he only experiences the deaths of his friends as discrete events, sans broader meaning.
On the opposite side of the spectrum stands Alec Warner, who must make of everyone he knows a case study, and who frequently catalogs, via an ironic musing on a quote from St. John Henry Newman, “What were they sick, what did they die of?” While Percy cannot abstract from particulars to form an accurate picture of death, Alec cannot put any flesh on the skeleton outline of his sketch of death. He abstracts from every situation via his catalog of notecards, where he has turned his acquaintances into pseudonymous representations of various types, stripped of all human significance. In doing so, he manages to transform the diseases that might confront him with his own mortality into symptoms to be compartmentalized and forgotten.
The inability to grapple with death (the “first of the Four Last Things to be ever remembered,” as Spark reminds us in a quote from the Penny Catechism that provides the book both one of its epigraphs and its final line) pervades the book. In fact, the human desire to avoid an honest reckoning with the reality of death allows Spark to pull off the novel’s greatest narrative trick: never revealing the source of the calls. Like most of the characters, we as readers get absorbed into the quest to unmask the voice behind the calls. Yet the book’s wisest characters, retired police Inspector Henry Mortimer and Jean Taylor, Charmian’s long time maid who now resides in a hospital wing for the aged, both ignore this mystery in favor of absorbing the message itself.
Mortimer, in a key scene when most of the interested parties have gathered at his house to receive his help in the matter, deflects their obsession with knowing who has been calling by trying to convince them of the need to reconcile themselves to their memento mori: “Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid.” Jean Taylor likewise meditates on the mystery of death as she sits, cut off from the world, in her hospital bed. It is this meditation which gives her perspective on the moral failings of those around her, especially her former employers Charmian and Godfrey, whose marriage simmers with unspoken bitterness over a long history of infidelities and jealousies. Only Jean can see that reconciliation can only come about through honest reckoning.
For most of the other characters, however, death and sin are twin terrors to be ducked at all costs. Scheming Mrs. Pettigrew, who first takes money from Godfrey in exchange for showing him her stockinged legs, then attempts to blackmail him for his indiscretions, goes so far as to completely occlude the phone calls from her mind, to “go quite blank where it was concerned,” a forgetfulness that Spark ties also her to vanity, as she has completely forgotten her own history of plastic surgery. Unable to confront reality, Mrs. Pettigrew takes solace in selective memory.
The book’s clearest example of avoidance, though, comes in the character of Godfrey, a man who can contend neither with his own failings nor his rapidly approaching death. Throughout the book he demonstrates an obsession with the degree to which other people are losing their “faculties,” a reference point by which he makes himself feel better about his own weakened state. Likewise, when his wife Charmian, a Catholic convert, suggests the benefits of the Ignatian exercise of going over the sins of one’s day in the evening, he reacts with vehemence, arguing that “that type of examination of conscience is designed to enslave the individual and inhibit his freedom of action.” Ironically, if Godfrey were to submit himself to such an examination, he might find true freedom, the ability to come clean to his wife about the past and extricate himself from Mrs. Pettigrew’s extortion racket. But he cannot do so, any more than he can come to terms with his forthcoming death, and so he remains captive to forces outside himself.
Spark never lets us lose the whiff of the absurd that accompanies her character’s various peccadilloes. Passions which in the young might appear both glamorous and dangerous shrink down here to their barest essences: what connection does an old man catching a glimpse at some knickers bear to the libido dominandus of a Don Juan? The point, however, is not to make fun of the elderly for the failings of body and mind, but to show all of us that, when we view them sub species aeternitatis, as Spark’s famously detached writing style usually compels us to do, those temptations that in the moment threaten to overwhelm us with their grandiosity become strangely insignificant. In the light of those Four Last Things – Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven – our petty vanities appear vanishingly small. That’s a useful reminder for us, who too often cannot stop for death, as we ponder the inevitable this All Soul’s Day, and long after.
Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a postdoctoral fellow in the Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University.
