Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

I love Muriel Spark’s strange, unpredictable, funny novels – and she seems like a fascinating person, too. So I was intrigued by Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo (2017) and delighted when my friend Phoebe gave it to me for my birthday last year.

I had an appointment with Muriel Spark in Arezzo, the Tuscan town where Vasari, fabled for his Lives of the Renaissance artists, was born and bred. Mrs Spark’s fax was brief and business-like. “My friend Penelope Jardine and I will come to Arezzo. I suggest we have dinner at the Continentale Hotel (not far from the station) and we can talk then. Daytimes very hot.

Taylor met Spark thus in 1990 to interview her in his capacity as a journalist. But from then on, until her death in 2006, Taylor was friends with Spark and her friend Penelope Jardine (and it doesn’t seem all that likely that ‘friend’ was a euphemism for something else). Appointment in Arezzo is an account of that friendship and his visits to their beautiful Italian home, as well as a sort of patchwork biography of other parts of her life. It isn’t an out-and-out biography, but he address parts of her life in organic tangents – her shortlived married, her estrangement from her son, the difficulties she experienced with an ex-friend who became the model for the ‘pisser of copy’ in A Far Cry From Kensington, and more. In fact, her relationship with her estranged son gets extensive covering, including lengthy quotes from letters. If anything dominates, it is this.

Because of this loose structure, he is able to explore avenues in a casual way. It feels a bit like a long conversation with one of her friends, rather than anything more formal. We are as likely to hear about their reaction to a burglary as we are about Spark’s writing technique. A menu is described with the same interest as her publishing history. Curiously, Taylor is pretty poor at telling anecdotes about Spark for which he is present – one about her time in America becomes a string of ‘then this happened, then this happened’ – but much better at relaying stories that he has heard from her. Or telling his own stories, of seeing the beauties of Tuscany. Spark is often called a Scottish novelist, but she set more novels in Italy than in Scotland, and spent many years of her life there. Taylor sees how crucial that environment is to the novelist she was in this period.

I really enjoyed anything in Appointment in Arezzo that showed the personal relationship Taylor had with Swift, because I am always more interested in a subjective portrait of a novelist than some attempt to rise above subjectivity – but I also loved when we can see what Spark thinks about her own writing:

I wanted to know what she saw as her achievement, her legacy, “I have realised myself,” she replied. “I have expressed something I brought into the world with me. I have liberated the novel in many ways, shown how anything whatever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek. I think I have opened doors and windows in the mind, and challenged fears – especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.

Neither Spark nor Taylor explain whether those fears are in the mind of author or reader – or both – but it is a typically Sparkian half-revelation. And I think, in fact, Appointment in Arezzo is a tribute to Spark’s influence over those who know her. If Taylor’s writing style is not like Spark’s, then perhaps only she could have inspired this curious memoir – unusual, resisting traditional structures, affectionate but also disconcerting – and, like Spark’s great novels, somehow coming together in all its curiousness to make something as satisfying as it is odd.

13 thoughts on “Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

  • August 24, 2020 at 8:19 am
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    That does sound like a very interesting read – there aren’t enough books about authors by their friends, are there, although I’m fortunate that there are two good Iris Murdoch ones!

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:15 pm
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      Oh that is fortunate! My favourite of this genre is the one Cicely Greig wrote about Ivy Compton-Burnett.

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  • August 24, 2020 at 9:52 am
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    This sounds as if it would go well with a television documentary I saw about Spark a while ago. By that time, she had died but Penelope was still living in the house, trying to sort the literary estate. Although interviewed for a while, Spark remained an enigmatic figure. I was struck by something she said about her faith (she was a Catholic convert, as I’m sure you know). She said she couldn’t really understand why, but ‘I just can’t not believe’.

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:16 pm
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      Oo that sounds good – must see if I can find that. And yes, her faith comes out very interestingly in some of her novels.

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:16 pm
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      Wasn’t she just!

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  • August 24, 2020 at 4:46 pm
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    I, too, am a big fan of Spark’s novels, although I’ve only read a relative few (my favorite is Memento Mori, closely followed by A Far Cry from Kensington). This sounds like a fascinating, unconventional glimpse into the life of a fascinating, unconventional artist; I’ll shelve it away for future reference.

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:17 pm
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      Memento Mori and A Far Cry are both so wonderful!

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  • August 24, 2020 at 5:12 pm
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    I really enjoyed this one, it is quite an unusual memoir, because of that loose structure you mention. It is quite an intimate account of a friendship though which I liked. I especially enjoyed the section about that peculiar ex-friend which was quite an episode.

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:19 pm
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      Oh yes! He is so good at the gossipy stories that he wasn’t integral to.

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    • August 27, 2020 at 5:19 pm
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      Please do!

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  • August 30, 2020 at 9:37 pm
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    Very interesting: Spark so enigmatic and strange. There is a fascinating interview with, I think, Lynn Barber that is riveting and hilarious to read. Spark never less than an interesting character…

    Meanwhile, is this a Freudian typo: ‘…showed the personal relationship Taylor had with Swift…’? Do you actually spend your time listening to of-the-moment music rather than reading mid-20C lady authors? 😉

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