The Fanfarlo and Other Verse

Small 8vo., original stitched card wraps, lettered in red to covers; pp. [vii], 6-35, [i]; a very good example, lightly sunned to the backstrip and in a thin strip to the lower cover; small crease to lower right hand corner of text throughout; pages a touch toned to the outer margin. 

First edition. This copy warmly inscribed by Spark to the publisher and later literary agent Gillon Aitkin: “For Gillon / from Muriel / with/ Thank-you’s / for an / afternoon’s / shopping”. The inscription is dated in 1961, the same year in which Spark published her best-known work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 

Gillon Aitken (1938-2016) worked at both Chapman & Hall and Hamish Hamilton before embarking on a career as a literary agent. It was during the 1950s, before his solo career, that he met Muriel Spark. He immediately became an early supporter of her work, as well as other figures in her literary circle. When Fanfarlo was published, Spark was living in a bedsit in Camberwell, south-east London, and was struggling to find a publisher. Aitken was one of her greatest advocates and friends at that time, and it has been suggested that the pair were even romantically involved. Regardless of the nature of their relationship, dedications as well as biographical footnotes in her earliest writings often attest to their mutual fondness and appreciation for one another. 

Spark’s first ever work, which combines poetry with fiction. A symbolist ballad, it directly adapts the opening lines taken from Baudelaire’s Le Fanfarlo, and in many ways can be seen as the early definitive writings of the surreal and magical-realist style which defined her later work.

A unique association copy.  

SKU: 1800194