Proust's sardine

When I was in my mid-20s (and several times after), I read Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, one of her great novels about postwar life in London whose female protagonists were pretty much Muriel Spark herself. I just looked up a summary of Loitering with Intent because I couldn’t remember if one of the characters I was thinking of was in that novel or A Far Cry from Kensington. It was the former, as I’d suspected. 

Almost all of Muriel Spark’s novels are about writers or writing, and Loitering with Intent is no exception. The protagonist, Fleur Talbot, is a young woman who lives in a cold-water London bedsit with a coin-operated gas heater. Like all of London in the post-war years, Fleur is always a little hungry and always a little cold, but she never complains or even thinks of complaining. She is young and talented and free and loves her life as an aspiring writer and secretary for Sir Quentin Oliver’s Autobiographical Association. Sir Quentin is up to no good, and clever Fleur soon sees through him, but she holds herself aloof from the intrigue and drama swirling around the AA. The novel is told in the first person and Fleur often ends a chapter with the words "I went on my way rejoicing." 

Of course, Fleur is annoyingly smug and superior, as talented young people sometimes are. But I first read Loitering with Intent when I was 25 or so, and I recognized her among my friends and in myself. My friends and I were a bunch of wise-ass snarky post-college young quasi-professionals in 1980s Philadelphia and Fleur was a young Englishwoman in post-war London and we shared similar sensibilities and similar outlooks and a similar belief that we could participate in the productive economy as amused bystanders, superior to all of the career-driven striving that supposedly characterized young Americans in the 1980s or the social climbing snobbery that supposedly characterized young educated English people in the 1940s and 1950s. 

*****

Do you know how sometimes you read a scene in a novel or memoir and it just strikes you as perfect in some way, even if–especially if–the scene is really minor or trivial? There’s a scene in Loitering with Intent in which Fleur invites Sir Quentin’s elderly mother, Lady Edwina, to have dinner with her in her tiny bedsit. Fleur takes great pride in her refusal to acknowledge the social hierarchy that makes her an entirely unsuitable hostess for the aristocratic Lady Edwina, who is herself a rebel who loves to annoy her stuffy and pretentious son. Between post-war rationing and youthful poverty, Fleur has only sardines on toast and tea with powdered milk and a bit of her sugar ration to serve Lady Edwina, who is delighted by the simple, bohemian supper. The two sit in the tiny, cozy bedsit, listening to the wireless and drinking tea and laughing at Sir Quentin and his ridiculous pretensions and snobbery. 

Only now do I recognize that both Fleur and Lady Edwina are also rather insufferable. When I first read the book, I identified with Fleur and wished that I had my own Lady Edwina to hang out with. The next time I went grocery shopping (I used to shop at a tiny Korean corner market down the street from my apartment, because I didn’t have a car), I bought sardines and bread, and I had sardines on toast with tea for dinner several nights in a row. It was delicious. 

*****

A few days ago, I saw a headline that contained the words “COVID” and “rebound.” I pounced on the story, eager to read all about how experts from NIH and the CDC are seeing hopeful signs that the pandemic is ending and that the United States and the rest of the world are rebounding from COVID. Instead, it was a story about President Biden’s rebound infection that of course concluded with the usual austere reminder that this shit is not over, not even close, with a lighthearted little “oh by the way” note explaining that if you do get infected and take Paxlovid, you will probably recover quickly and then immediately get COVID again. Thinking about COVID makes me feel like I have COVID. But it’s all good, because at least it’s a break from worrying about monkeypox. 

“May you live in interesting times.” That saying is sounding more and more like a curse every day. I’d prefer, really, to live in far less interesting times. I’m sure that it was dull for Fleur Talbot’s generation in post-war Britain during the years of deprivation, but the worst was over, as far as they knew. Germany was defeated, the nightly bombing raids had ceased, and all they had to do was live with the rationing and the strikes and the general social upheaval resulting from two generations decimated by war. No big deal, right? Britain in 1948 might have been bleak, but I’d take it over Britain in 1939 any day of the week. 

*****

This all comes back to the sardines. I hadn’t given Muriel Spark or my youth in Philadelphia a single thought in quite some time but then one day I was working from home and looking for something to make for lunch and there it was–a can of sardines in mustard sauce that I’d bought months earlier. I didn’t have bread to toast, but I did have rice cakes, which are an excellent vehicle for sardines (or anything else). I spread some sardines on rice cakes and I was back in my tiny post-student apartment in West Philadelphia, avoiding the laundromat and imagining what it might have been like to be young in London in 1948. Some day, someone will wonder what it was like to be young in Philadelphia in 1987. They should call me. I'll tell them.