The penniless girls and their schemes to have fun (and to save themselves?)

Muriel Camberg married Sir Oswald Spark at the age of nineteen. The short-lived marriage left her with: a spell living in Rhodesia, a son, and a name meaning ‘spark’. Nomen omen, Muriel Spark was a brilliant writer, blessed with that spark. In Italy, her works are published by Adelphi; the most recent title to be released is "The Girls of Slender Means" (1963, translated by Monica Pareschi). The novella is set at the end of the war, in 1945, in a London ravaged by bombing and rationing, and the penniless young women are the lodgers at May of Teck, an elegant yet dilapidated Edwardian residence, reserved for ‘young ladies of modest means under the age of thirty who are forced to live away from their families in order to pursue a career in London’. What could be more unstoppable than a young woman and her boundless desires?

It is often in times of hardship that ingenuity flourishes, and this is certainly true of the boarders at the guesthouse; and ‘as they themselves realised to varying degrees, few people in the world at that time were more enchanting, more resourceful, more touching and likeable, and, incidentally, more cruel than these girls of modest means’. We observe their daily lives and the strategies they devise to secure what they desire, whether a position, an opportunity, or love. There is Jane, who works for a small publisher and is respected by the others for this reason; Joanna, the devoted daughter of a vicar with a passion for poetry; Selina, beautiful, shrewd and ruthless; the eccentric Pauline, who pretends to be dating the actor Jack Buchanan; and Anne, who has inherited a Schiaparelli evening gown from a wealthy aunt. The dress is the most coveted item in May of Teck, the most precious commodity in a sophisticated barter system where ration card stamps, tea, soap and margarine serve as currency. These latter items are instruments of freedom. In the top-floor bathroom, there is in fact a small window through which the girls sneak out onto the roof, where perhaps a lover or a night of revelry awaits them. Smearing themselves with soap or margarine (which is worth less, because it makes you put on weight) helps them slip out. Provided, of course, that they are slim. The original title is "The Girls of Slender Means", an idiomatic phrase meaning ‘of modest means’, but ‘slender’ also means, of course, slim.

“The question of weight and measurements was of the utmost importance on the top floor. Whether or not one could squeeze sideways through the toilet window”: these girls’ obsession with thinness serves their very freedom and, ultimately, as we shall see, their survival (a reminder: the book was written over sixty years ago). At a certain point, a dramatic event occurs that seems like a plot twist, but it isn’t, because Spark throws you off balance, takes you by surprise, yet always sets everything up, scattering clues, making you believe that everything is fine, but then it isn’t.

Is it a comedy or a tragedy? The lines, dry and sharp as arrows, unleash a comic energy, yet the events and circumstances are dramatic. The staging of the drama is at times comical, just like life itself, which, however adverse the circumstances may be, always offers a side that makes you laugh. Stripping people bare, laying them bare (literally), elicits an empathetic laugh, born of tenderness. In the long final scene, the girls parade like proper debutantes, one by one, but in grotesque circumstances. Spark lays reality bare and shows us the paradox of life: here are the tragic and the comic, always there, together. It takes you along, then veers off abruptly, changes direction and leaves you there, disoriented. With that obscene, unspeakable desire to measure your hips to see if you’d have been saved (of course not).