'Dixie don't like him.' (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark, 1960)

There is a hilarious moment in Spark’s 1960 novel, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, when the popularity of the charismatic central character, Dougal Douglas, is discussed by several other characters. It is an impromptu symposium on Dougal’s likeability that feels very contemporary.

‘You’d better keep your eye on your friend Dougal Douglas. Trevor says he’s a dick.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Mavis said.

‘Nor do I,’ said Arthur.

‘No more do I,’ said Humphrey.

‘I know you think he’s perfect,’ Dixie said. ‘He can do no wrong, But I’m just telling you what Trevor said. So don’t say I didn’t tell you.’

‘Trevor’s having you on,’ Humphrey said. ‘He doesn’t like Dougal.’

'I like him,’ Arthur said.

‘I like him,’ Mavis said. ‘Our Leslie don’t like him. Dixie don’t like him.’

‘I like him,’ Humphrey said. ‘My sister Elsie doesn’t like him.’

I have read this passage out loud to myself several times now. I love the way it scampers around chasing its own monkey tail so to speak. This is Spark monkeying about with banal idioms and producing a comic chorus, a cartoonish echo chamber from gossip and hearsay, from local rumour. Dougal Douglas has already become a legend ‘on the Rye’ but at this point in the novel — nearing the end — there is what we might call in revolting contemporary speak, a ‘twitter pile on’. Everyone is putting in their penny worth of opinion. Everyone is out to get Dougal.

I’m always trying to teach students tone: how to produce tone, how to hear tone. Mavis’s wonderful:

‘Our Leslie don’t like him. Dixie don’t like him.’

(Leslie and Dixie are Mavis’s children) produces a lovely sulky heap to the end of the pile. And then Humphrey’s judicious, ‘I like him,’ but ‘My sister Elsie doesn’t like him,’ is a polite way of saying: Watch out for this one. He may not be all pretends to be. Bit of an upstart.

‘Doesn’t like’ and ‘don’t like’ have different tonal shades; one is more snappily determined than the other, more compressed. Mavis, mother of Dixie, has got the hump with Dougal Douglas and it sounds as though Dixie has too.

And as for Trevor, well he’s not present to speak for himself so there’s only Dixie to cast his vote, and Dixie don’t like him anyway.

For my brave friend, Kate.