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Wrappers. Spine slightly worn at foot, upper cover slightly marked. Inscribed by Muriel Spark to Derek Stanford, "For Derek - The joy of Christmas in anticipation. 18.11.54 Muriel"; with Stanford's homemade tab tipped in and his markings in the text (ruling off the first eight lines - for a reading?; underlining the final line of p.[3]). "The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: / Let him continue in the spirit of wonder / At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext; / So that the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree . . . / May not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habitation, the fatigue, the tedium, / The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure, / Or in the piety of the convert . . ." Muriel Spark was a new convert, if not always a pious one; she had been received into the Catholic Church seven months earlier, on 1 May - ominously, for Stanford, as her increasing religiosity demanded his own submission to the Church's authority if their physical relationship was to continue. She had also, since the summer of 1953, when she had gone to Edinburgh to review (for The Church of England Newspaper) the first performance of The Confidential Clerk, been preoccupied with its author. Her review had struck him, he told a friend, as "one of the two or three most intelligent reviews I had read. It seemed to me remarkable that anyone who could only have seen the play once, and certainly not have read it, should have grasped so much of its intention." Spark resolved to write a book about Eliot, and even received a commission to do so from Sheed & Ward. Deluded, however, by the Dexedrine she was taking as an appetite suppressant, she began hallucinating about her subject, convinced in January 1954, at the time she started taking religious instruction, that he was sending her threatening messages. She was only reassured after Stanford wrote to Eliot in March to confirm he had not smuggled a code into The Confidential Clerk ("If there is any code concealed," he replied, "I shall be interested to know what it is"). Stanford also set about securing funds from David Astor, Graham Greene and others so that she could move out of London to recover. In October, the month before she sent Stanford this Ariel Poem, she had moved to Kent, to Aylesford Priory, where she didn't write a book on Eliot but started work on her first novel - on the publication of which the paths of Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, so long a "couple", diverged. When Spark became famous with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Stanford wrote Muriel Spark: a biographical and critical study (1963), making matters worse with his "literary memoirs" Inside the Forties (1977), and he transmuted from devoted friend and collaborator into the Hector Bartlett of Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), "pisseur de copie" and author of "ridiculous old-age memoirs" ("the falsities . . . the vaunted revelations . . . the pathetic inventions . . .") subtitled "Farewell, Leicester Square". Seller Inventory # 29M100239
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