Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together . . (Muriel Spark)

‘Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and a judging mouth, a precision instrument, a detail-warden of a mouth; she has five girls under her and two men.’ (The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark, 1970).

As with many of Muriel Spark’s sentences, there is something deadly about this one. It is that mouth, the ‘precision instrument’ which marks everything as ‘final’, and which comes closing down on me like a guillotine. Spark is terrific on forms of moral and social absolutism, but the structure of this sentence simulates the sort of charisma Spark writes about endlessly in all her novellas and short stories. Charisma stalks about the place like an cardinal point: you cannot miss it. It is as colourful and precise as the old-fashioned lipstick Lise, her protagonist, wears. The same can be said for her sentences. They come to a sharp and final point and on that point you are skewered.

And what does a charismatic sentence look like and how does it work? Well, here it it marked out with a strong visual form: that ‘final and judging mouth’ at the centre of the sentence which is built from the image of a ‘ruled line.’ But this line undergoes some transformation; it is first a set of lips. Spark was first and foremost a poet who turned her poetic hand to prose; a prose that pivots around a set of dynamic symbols. She was a Catholic and she saw the everyday world symbolically. Symbols, she believed, move and are moving. They work upon us; they seduce us with their awe and power.

But all symbols must be qualified, opened up, shown, put on display. See how Spark’s narrator qualifies those lips with 'her subordinate clause beginning with ‘when’: ‘when she does not speak or eat.’ So lips are turned into the ruled lines of a balance sheet only when Lise (the novella’s protagonist) is not speaking or eating.’

When: ‘at the time that’, on the occasion when . . . a conjunction.

And then there is the wonderful extended image of the ‘ruled line of a balance sheet’, because Lise is an accountant and she deals with numbers marshalled into strict lines: balance sheets, balance books, lines crossing over into squares tightly coordinated and controlled. Nothing spilling over, no excess — much like Spark’s style. Everything is compressed by that precision instrument — the lips — which only speak when necessary. The lips become a way of speaking about the writer’s style as much as they speak about Lise herself and her relationship to money.

So, in sum:

Spark runs through a series of qualifications that open up those lips, that mouth, to other delineating ‘marks’: the lipstick line, the balance sheet, the precision instrument, the warden with her ‘detail.’ All these additions suggest a set of sums that produce a charismatic effect upon what comes next: the five girls and two men. Her posse, her entourage, her coterie of followers, her workers — those she supervises. Her five plus two humans she manages.

And so the parts of the sentence, the subordinate clauses which begin with: when, are, marked, a, a, a, (three articles) are also a kind of grammatical and linguistic sum that culminate in the third person pronoun final sum: ‘she’. ‘She has five girls under her and two men.’ She is a subject for the duration of this sentence and the sentences following ‘she’ is not named. ‘She’ is kept apart from her ‘Lise’ in order to build up suspension.

Spark did not write: ‘She has five girls and two men under her because it is important we ‘see’ the ‘under her.’ Under is the preposition. ‘Her’ is the object of ‘she’. ‘Under’ here functions visually as a way of thinking about the layout of lines. Remember, the lips are pressed together like the ruled lines of a balance sheet? Under is also a way of marking out position and order within those lines (typically a sum is ordered as a vertical relationship from top to bottom).

Now, when I go back up over the sentence and read it once more I realise I’ve missed an ‘a’. I didn’t tot up: ‘a final and a judging mouth’. There are two 'a’s, a further article I missed in my poor accounting. By the end of this sentence, having read it several times over now from front and back, top to bottom, I sense that I too work under the management of the narrator: the ‘she’ who has many readers under her sway, far more than Lise’s modest supply of workers. She, after all, is Muriel Spark, the great Scottish writer who — in many senses — taught me the dynamic and taut structure of narrative.