Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public, and the Private.

When the park is gone

Something there is that doesn't love Muriel Spark - and that something appears to be the film industry, including its television branch. This observation is prompted by the recent "Masterpiece Theatre" presentation of Memento Mori. Although my thematic dyspepsia applies as well to other attempts to film Spark novels - The Driver's Seat, The Abbess of Crewe, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - I will restrict my critique to "Momento Mori."

In a sense, the recent two-part "Masterpiece" version of Memento Mori offered abundant delights. No country contains so many superb actors as does England, including those actors capable of portraying aged cranks and assorted other Dickensian caricatures, all imported more or less faithfully from Spark's novel. This novel has no single protagonist, but it does offer several prominent attitudes and a pronounced invitation to sort these out and to see what rides on their differences. The book is hilariously, dead-seriously, and intriguingly about how a number of characters - all over seventy - react to their own telephone message: "Remember you must die." Readers are asked to see that some persons succeed in forcing themselves to forget that the telephone bell ever tolled for them. Other listeners hear the words as the threat of a murder and hasten to get Scotland Yard to trace the call. A third kind of listener responds that he's too busy listening to life's interests to waste any time and energy thinking on death. Another reaction is to acknowledge the words (rather than the caller) and in fact set one's house and one's self in order. A final response is the Christian one - to accede to the reminder and remember that Death is but first among the so-called Four Last things, the others being Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.

Spark's narrative strategy does justice to these various credibly human reactions. At the same time, the book emphasizes, in the epigraphs, in numbers of pages allotted to particular responses, and in placement of occasions, the secular calmness of Inspector Mortimer, who takes the call as a fortunate reminder of the importance of death to the relishing of this life as well as the Christian reactions of Charmian Colston and Jean Taylor, both of them Catholic converts. Taylor in fact comes closest to being a main character, and the narrator's last words emphasize Taylor's belief In short, the book is about a range of reactions. It relishes this human diversity and sympathizes with it, pitying the fear-ridden ones and pushing those of Mortimer and Taylor. We die of this or that medically specifiable problem, indeed; but we die as well of our lives. We are what we eat.

The film virtually disregards the book. Obviously the decision was made to play up codgerly eccentricity and the Hohnesian brand of mystery supposedly behind the telephone calls. This plan in turn required the playing down of Jean Taylor's role and the removal from the film of Alec Warner, the gerontologist who had briefly been Jean's lover and who remains both loyal to her and staunchly skeptical of everything beyond the social scientist's raw data. Jean's ideological squabbles with Alec, past and present, focus the materialistic-religious groundwork and thereby direct us to the different kind of mystery that is the point of this novel. By leaving Taylor in such a modest cubbyhole of the plot, by padding the minor role of caretaker and giving it to Maggie Smith, and by dropping virtually everything of spiritual import imposed narratively, the film settles for whimsy, for the sadness and pathos of fear and decline, and in the end for a thoroughly impossible cozy reunion for Chamian and Taylor - to absolutely no purpose, presumably, save to suggest how nice it would be for two old ladies to make up before the reaper calls. Nor is it gratuitous to note that Alistair Cooke, now retired from "Masterpiece Theatre," nearly absented himself from these doings. He had almost assuredly not read or not understood the novel, and had difficulty smiling patronizingly (for two weeks) over what he saw as this grand cast of oldsters engaged in a mysterious tale invented by a young Muriel Spark who, in these her later years, would very likely think otherwise of old age. In fact, almost thirty-five years and sixteen novels later, Muriel Spark has continued to display the same satirical insight and capacity for empathy evident in Memento Mori (1959). The real point, however, is that the producers and Cooke missed the point of this work. In short, the film failed the novel, and Cooke failed both.

My point is not, of course, that films can never be novels, or that deviation is intolerable. Rather, I think that directors should feel a serious commitment to novels as original scenarios, and should strive for the spirit of a given text: the rubric "based on" ought to carry weight. Spark's novels, heavily dependent as they are upon narrative authority for their philosophical and theological grounding, may simply be unfilmable on their own moral and aesthetic terms - unlike, for example, "Brideshead Revisited," a film that used voice-over and a realistic format to render Waugh's religious novel beautifully. But whether Spark's books are suited to the cinema or not, most of the attempts have proved disappointing - and none more so than Masterpiece Theatre's "Memento Mori." Cinema and television, especially the Public Broadcasting System, have adapted many novels to the screen. I think offhand of books by James, Dickens, Hardy, and Trollope; of thrillers, crime stories, and historical romances. Do producers miss Spark's theological foundation? Or do they simply regard it as death for ratings?

Joseph Hynes teaches modern literature at the University of Oregon. His study, The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark's Novels, was published in 1988.