A new biography of Muriel Spark, astounding novelist

[Robin Landseadel]

Oedipa Maas with a good wind behind her.

	"They were breezes that the old women, the mourning-ones, of
	Montesilvano knew by names.

	"Dino—Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams"
	 Nick Tosches.

	"Many men" (saith he) "come to this malady by continual study, 	and  
night-waking, and of all other men, scholars are most 		subject to  
it"; and such, Rhasis adds, "that have commonly the 	finest  
wits" (Cont. lib. I, tract. 9). Marsilius Ficinus, de sanit.
	tuenda, lib. I, cap. 7, puts melancholy amongst one of those five 	 
principal plagues of students, 'tis a common moll unto them all,
	and almost in some measure an inseparable companion. Varro
	belike for that cause calls tristes philosophos et severos
	[philosophers sad and austere]; severe, sad, dry, tetric, are
	common epithets to scholars: and Patricius therefore,' in the
	institution of princes, would not have them to be great students.
	For (as Machiavel holds) study weakens their bodies, dulls the
	spirits, abates their strength and courage; and good scholars
	are never good soldiers, which a certain Goth well perceived,
	for when his countrymen came into Greece, and would have
	burned all their books, he cried out against it, by all means they
	should not do it; "Leave them that plague, which in time will
	consume all their vigour, and martial spirits." The Turks
	abdicated Corcutus, the next heir, from the empire, because he
	was so much given to his book: and 'tis the common tenent of
	the world, that learning dulls and diminisheth the spirits, and so
	per consequens produceth melancholy.

	"The Anatomy of Melancholy" —
	"Among Causes Of Melancholy, Overmuch Study"
	 Robert Burton

On Apr 22, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:

>
>
> http://www.salon.com/books/biography/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/04/20/muriel_spark
>
> "After her Observer winnings dwindled, she took Dexedrine diet pills  
> not
> only to stay slim but to keep her food costs down. The hallucinatory,
> paranoiac effects of amphetamine poisoning were unknown at the time,  
> and
> Spark had always been given to intense literary passions, so friends  
> saw
> nothing amiss in her fixation on T. S. Eliot's Christian play "The
> Confidential Clerk" until she began to speak of threatening codes  
> that she
> believed were embedded in the text and directed at her. "Obsessively  
> she
> began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with  
> anagrams
> and cryptographic experiments." As her delusions intensified, she  
> became
> convinced that Eliot had taken a job with some of her acquaintances  
> as a
> window-washer in order to rifle through their papers."
>
>
> Heikki