Mandelbaum Gate, The.
INSCRIBED TO HER EDITOR, WILLIAM SHAWN
Spark, Muriel. The Mandelbaum Gate. New York: Knopf, 1965.
8vo.; topstained green; bright red cloth; stamped in green, black and gilt; cream dust-jacket, printed in teal, fuchsia and black; spine sunned; one small tear at top of upper cover; corners bumped. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; typography, jacket design and binding designed by George Salter. A presentation copy, inscribed: For William Shawn, gratefully and with all happy wishes, from/Muriel Spark/Oct. 1965. Shawn was Sparks’s longtime editor at The New Yorker; Spark started writing for the magazine in 1957, with the publication of her story, “The Portobello Road.” A few of her other stories were published in the following years, but upon the submission of her sixth novel, The Prime of Ms. Jean Brodie, the magazine decided to devote an entire issue to the novel; it ran in October, 1961. Sections of The Mandelbaum Gate also were printed in the magazine.
The Mandelbaum Gate is divided into two parts; part one consists of six chapters, part two has one chapter. Spark tells a “suspense-filled story of high adventure in which the lives of Arab and Jew, Catholic pilgrim and British diplomat become entangled. …Mrs. Spark has created a many-faceted novel: a seriousness of purpose underlies the comic element and a wealth of information enriches a superb story” (dust-jacket). In his New York Times review of the book, Malcolm Bradbury expands upon this description, saying, “[Spark] can, as this book shows, deal gravely with religious problems in a context that seems not to invite such gravity” (October 31, 1965).
The Mandelbaum Gate is the story of Barbara Vaughan, an English woman who grew up in a religiously divided household: with an upper-middle class English father and an English-Jewish mother. Vaughan travels to Israel, and, as Bradbury explains, “meets her Jewishness” Spark includes many exciting plot twists – incidents of espionage, amnesia, and seduction, all ensconced in a “gay atmosphere of literary conspicuous consumption.” Bradbury sums up the various contradictory aspects of this book:
“The Mandelbaum Gate" is not, then, a religious novel or a political novel or a novel of sentiments or a spy story. It engages with all of these possibilities and settles with none. What unifies it is an eclectic and intellectual sensibility – a sensibility with a sharp awareness of the variety of human motives, which involves us realistically, and a sense of the exotic and implausible, which generates a plot and so involves us in tensions, dangers, and excitements. She is superb in the management of her materials. The cast is vast, threaded with interrelated persons of numerous nationalities and backgrounds. The time-scheme is involuted. The points of view from which we see the action are multiple. The problems are wide-ranging. The effect, however, is to give a density that is primarily constructional. One of the characters comments, ‘Everything’s a subject for Christian pilgrimage if you widen the scope enough,’ and Miss Spark certainly widens the scope.
Spark was awarded the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award (1965), and James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1966) for this book.
Spark has been labeled as a critical enigma: “Described as an artist, a serious and accomplished writer, a moralist engaged with the human predicament, wildly entertaining, and a joy to read, Spark has nevertheless, in [Patricia] Stubbs’s opinion, ‘succeeded triumphantly in evading classification.’" It has also been noted that “Spark’s novels do not seem to reflect her strong religious and moral preoccupations” (BRC). The contents of The Mandelbaum Gate, then, meet these descriptions.
Spark (1918-2006) was born in Scotland, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Protestant English mother; in 1954 she converted to Roman Catholicism. She attended James Gillespie’s High School for Girls in Edinburgh and Heriot Watt College. In 1937 she married Sydney O. Spark – who was mentally ill – and with whom she lived in Rhodesia for seven years, and had a son, Robin. The marriage ended in divorce and she had a turbulent relationship with her son. Before she published her first book, The Comforters (1957), she worked in the Political Intelligence Department of Britain’s Foreign Office; and also worked in various editorial capacities at Argentor – a jewelry trade art magazine – as well as the Poetry Review, European Affairs and Forum; she was also the general secretary of the Poetry Society.
The Comforters was the book that inaugurated her lengthy and prolific writing career – she continued to publish books regularly up until her death – but she had won a short story prize in 1951 for, “The Seraph and the Zambesi.” She met with considerable popular and critical success for several books, including: Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Territorial Rights (1979), Loitering with Intent (1981), The Abbess of Crewe (1973), Symposium (1990), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000). Several of her books were adapted for the stage, as well as big and small screens; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was produced in various theatres and made into a movie; Memento Mori and The Girls of Slender Means were both adapted for the BBC.
She was given many awards, including being made an Officer of Arts and Letters in France (1988), and a Dame of the British Empire (1993); and honorary degrees from half a dozen universities in the United Kingdom: the University of Strathclyde, the University of Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, Watt University, the University of St. Andrews, and Oxford University.
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