The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark has been remembered lately: She was born in 1918 so this is her centenary. She ended her life in Tuscany, a grand old lady, having grown up in Edinburgh – and she has a gang of  massive fans, the leader of whom is William Boyd. I’d never read her stuff, but I was affected by the outpouring, so I stopped at the library and picked up this – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – published in 1961 and supposedly a masterpiece.

And it was a masterpiece. It was the kind of book that lights up a room with an aura. It was only short, but every perfect sentence needed close attention. From the opening scene, where the schoolgirls are flirting with a bunch of boys at the school gates, a row of bicycles separating them, to the tragic unraveling of Jean Brodie, the story reads like it could only be one way – the exact way Spark wrote it – unfolding like a protein crystal or a developing blue whale embryo. It was an amazing creation.

The eponymous Jean Brodie is a very unusual schoolteacher at a rather wonderful Edinburgh girls’ school in the 1930s. The school is quite conventional, dedicated to giving young women a solid, well-rounded education in Arts and Sciences and Sports, but Miss Brodie is a maverick who takes a small group of chosen girls under her wing and tries to broaden their minds. This involves walking them round Edinburgh, serving them tea at her flat, and regaling them with stories of her love affairs and European travels. She also earnestly discusses with them her conflict with the school itself – which she realizes is keen to oust her. The girls, 11 years old at the beginning, are thrilled to be taken into the adult world in this way and made party to such previously unimagined, adult disagreements. They form ‘The Brodie set’ and are loyal to Miss Brodie and snooty to everyone else.

As the novel points out, there were at this time in Edinburgh many women just like Miss Brodie – unmarried women who’d lost their sweethearts in the Great War and yet were confident, worldly, full of ideas. It’s just that most of them weren’t schoolteachers. Miss Brodie, as she herself repeatedly, proudly states, is in the prime of her life – and she will dedicate that prime, she says, entirely to her girls. Yet the way she subverts their education is troublesome, she’s often scornful, she’s suspicious and sometimes, at least to one of the girls, Mary, she’s unkind. By type she is a self-appointed prophet.

How all this is revealed is a matter of great art. One way is that the girls begin to see past Miss Brodie – they get older and begin to recognize her obsessions. Another is Spark’s projecting into the future, so that we learn how the girls discuss Miss Brodie years later, when, grown up, they reminisce about their schooldays. Lastly, as Miss Brodie’s fears of betrayal deepen, her actions become more extreme – to the point that she manoeuvers one girl into a love affair with the art master.

By this point we’ve come a long way. We no longer view Miss Brodie as just an inspirational teacher.

Suspiciousness is the chief characteristic of a prophet. That’s an axiom. One of my favorite books, as a boy, was a sports novel by Brian Glanville called The Olympian that covered this brilliantly. The story begins with this 19-year-old club runner named Ike Low on the running track at Gospel Oak in North London. As Low comes round the bend, this old man in a grey sweater is shouting at him, ‘Keep your head up! Use your arms!’ Low thinks, ‘Oh sod off, you daft old cunt!’ but later the man appears in the changing rooms. Now it’s different. The old man stands with blazing blue eyes, and starts talking at Low about what makes a great athlete and a million other things. There’s something compelling about his crazy patter and Low realizes – it doesn’t need to be said – that the old man is going to train him.

Now, the old man, Sam Dee, is a maverick athletic coach with strong philosophical ideas about how to train (on Hampstead Heath), what to eat (no meat) and how to prepare for races (learn to go through the pain barrier). The trouble is, the athletics establishment hates Dee – they’re always trying to banish him – and so he demands total loyalty from his runners, and of course at some point, perhaps when they lose form, those same runners are going to question his methods and Dee will feel betrayed. This is exactly what happens after Ike becomes the world’s greatest miler (long before Coe and Steve Ovett and Cram did in real life). The novel then intensely examines the coach-athlete relationship.

I once worked for an Argentinean psychiatrist named Freddie G who was another prophet in the same mold. Freddie had a small hospital for adolescents that he ran on the lines of a therapeutic community. He was a maverick genius, adored by his flock of patients and acolytes, with a huge capacity to surprise people and create suspense and get through to teenagers. However he also did nutty things, like chain smoking cigarettes in front of the kids, and he wouldn’t bow to the authorities when they told him to modernize the unit. In the end they just wanted to close it down – close him down – and this must have fed into his suspiciousness. At my first community meeting (a daily ritual in the hospital) I made the grave error of taking notes. Freddie’s eyes fell on me, a silence descended, and then, in heavily accentuated words, came the Argentinian’s verdict: “I feel as if we’re under… police surveillance! Anything I say may be taken down and used in evidence against me!” Well, I felt like a bastard, like a collaborator after the liberation, like the subject of a public denunciation. And I thought: “You could have just fucking asked me to stop making notes!”

So who betrays Miss Jean Brodie? It’s one of her own girls, Sandy – the last one she suspects – the one who in later life becomes a nun in a convent, who at age 18 sleeps with the art master, and who at 17 has had enough of “that tiresome woman” and supplies the headmistress with the means to crucify her. Poor old Jean Brodie! She is forced to retire in 1939 to spend her last few years working out the betrayal. As to the reader’s feelings, they’re complex, because as the girls will all remember, later in their lives, Miss Brodie has been their mentor and their hero and their inspiration.