Spark and Cocteau Discuss My Book of Revelations
by Iain Hood, 6 October 2023
In this exclusive, Iain Hood and Renard Press surreptitiously brought Dame Muriel Spark and Jean Cocteau together to discuss their roles in My Book of Revelations. And they almost do.
SPARK
Hello, Jean. Fancy meeting you here.
COCTEAU
How d’you mean, Muriel? It was arranged. Back in the Café Royal, they said. Eleven for half past.
SPARK
Did ‘they’? I heard nothing about it. I was just in for my customary early lunch, every Tuesday now for the last… oh, well, since I died. Now I am free of the fetters of a worldly life I like to keep a little part of myself for the city of my birth and formation. And who, pray tell, are these ‘they’?
COCTEAU
‘They’? ‘They’? Well, ken, I thoucht you knew. ‘They’ are, eh, let me see. I jotted it down somewhere… (Cocteau fumbles in a jacket pocket.)
SPARK
No I did not know. I do not know. I have a dreadful feeling we are back in the hands of some malign spirit.
COCTEAU
Aye? Aye. Sans doute. You may huv been ambushed, likesay. Someone has pulled the old embuschier on you! Ha! Well, they told me to be here, onywise. If you’ve been making a regularity of it, nae doubt they took their opporchancity.
SPARK
‘They’ sound perfectly awful.
COCTEAU
They want us talkin aboot being in this lad Hood’s book. Yet another wee outing for our continuing legacies.
SPARK
Oh, that.
COCTEAU
Oh dear, Muriel. That sounded ominous.
SPARK
Yes, well, I wasn’t born to be a character in books, I was born rather to put them in books.
COCTEAU
C’mon. It wis like a wee holiday, that. Get tae huv a drink at New Year’s in here. I hud a great time, me.
SPARK
Did you now? I suppose it was all right. But the ‘lad’, as you call him, he has to put all the this and the that into his writing. A trickster. A huckster. A perfect fraud. And he puts that farmboy talk into his books. I cannot abide that.
COCTEAU
Aw, c’mon, Muriel. It’s all in fun.
SPARK
No. No. I don’t think it is, you see. He’s up to something. Oh, I’m not saying I don’t like it. Have you read Robbe-Grillet? (Spark’s eyes flash with a look of French nouveau roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet’s expression.)
COCTEAU
After my time.
SPARK
Oh, I love Robbe-Grillet. So cold, analytical. We need analysis. You know, I sometimes think we have had enough of the emotions, of the psychologies of characters. I mean, who wants to know? And anyway, writing is about writing, not about people.
COCTEAU
You’re sure?
SPARK
Not particularly. (Spark laughs her gentle, old lady, seen-it-all laugh.)
COCTEAU
You love a bit ay a plot, don’t you, Muriel? Nasty things happening to nasty people. I love yer plots.
SPARK
Well, I don’t know. I just start writing and I think I better liven things up. (More gentle laughter.)
COCTEAU
So, there ye go. This lad Hood was probably thinking, dum de dum dum, OK, Edinburgh. Millennium. Fireworks, Y2K hoaxer. Right, then, better liven things up a bit.
SPARK
Have you read it, this My Book of Revelations?
COCTEAU
Aye. Huv you?
SPARK
I have. Since I died and it would be too frightening for the reading public for me to be publishing more books I’ve taken to reading everything. I’m very catholic in my taste.
COCTEAU
So, yur still writing, then?
SPARK
Well, I channel my spirit through other writers, you know. Influences and all that.
COCTEAU
So that’s what you were doin here, through Hood, was it, aye?
SPARK
Certainly NOT! How dare you! What do you take me for?
COCTEAU
It’s jist, you said…
SPARK
Oh, I’m just joking, of course. My influence flies everywhere. I cannot control it. I wouldn’t bother trying if I could. How’s it all going for you, your influence on… things?
COCTEAU
Hing on. I’ll check the shopping website. (Cocteau pulls a vintage iPhone 1 out of his pocket.) Let’s see…
SPARK
Oh, I have one of those! Your phone. Exactly the same as mine!
COCTEAU
Aye. Who knew it, eh? The afterlife. Nuthin like anyone tells you. Everything like being a decade and a hauf out of date wi yer tech.
SPARK
Oh, I like it. So much more relaxing to be lo-fi, you know?
COCTEAU
Aye, well, here we go. Right-oh. What am I sellin, here? The English subtitle version of La Belle et la Bête; English translation of Les Enfants Terrible, a biography, Letter to the Americans, another biography, Orphée, the film not the novel; another biography, another bloody biography…
SPARK
What? What’s wrong?
COCTEAU
None of my greatest works, my poetry… My life looks more pruriently interestin to the swines than my work.
SPARK
Check Wikipedia.
COCTEAU
Oh aye. Hing on. (He scrolls and hits links.)
SPARK
Well?
COCTEAU
Dum dee dum… Right. Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau born blah blah blah, French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic blah blah blah… ane ay the foremost artists of the… influential figure in early twentieth-century art. Fair enough. Blah blah he is best known for his novels blah blah blah and films blah blah blah he was described as ‘one of the avant-garde’s most successful and influential filmmakers’! Why, this is outrageous! And look at this picture from 1923 they’re using. I look skelly! Look!
SPARK
You do not look skelly.
COCTEAU
I look bloody skelly, man! Look at me! I look skelly. Let’s look you up! (Cocteau starts frantically typing.)
SPARK
Oh, for God’s sake, Jean. Do not look me up. I really couldn’t care less.
COCTEAU
I’m looking you… AHA!!! Gorgeous photi, of COURSE!
SPARK
OMG!
COCTEAU
What’s this, OMG?
SPARK
I keep up with all linguistic trends, you know, but I only employ the most delightful. Anyway, OMG, that’s the bookish wistful toothache picture of me! Ha! How marvellously ridiculous! As though I ever wrote in that posture. I’d break my back! Between you and I, I think the photographer was trying to look down my top.
COCTEAU
And look what Wikipedia says about you. Poet… Poetry Society… poet… poetry… poet, poet, poet… poetic novels! Her grave describes her in one word… Spark died in 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant’Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto with one word after her name, POETA!
SPARK
Well, what do you have at your grave?
COCTEAU
Well, I have this design of my own devising where one of my own line drawings of the suffering Christ approaching his cross and a little—
SPARK
You see, you overcomplicate things, Jean. Keep them simple in future.
COCTEAU
Whit wis that thing you had aw the oldies saying in Memento Mori, Muriel?
SPARK
Remember you must die, Jean.
COCTEAU
Oh aye, that was it.
SPARK
Ah, it’s no matter. The dead are as much members of the parish as the living, they’re just more… peaceful. Yes. Peaceful. Anyway, what have ‘they’ sent you for and what are we supposed to be saying about this chap Hood and his My Book of Revelations?
COCTEAU
Oh, aye, eh, what we think about being in his book.
SPARK
I suppose this Hood is an author like any other.
COCTEAU
An all authors are the gods over their ane books, int they?
SPARK
Yes, like The Book of Job, my most favoured text.
COCTEAU
Yur quite a capricious god yersel, urn’t ye? Over yer characters.
SPARK
Well, I do what I want with them. My Miss Jean Brodie, for example—
COCTEAU
She’s a fascist.
SPARK
Well, I don’t know. I don’t say that, you know. She was accused of that. She admired Mussolini, but then a lot of people did, you know, even the Italians…
COCTEAU
An egotist, then.
SPARK
Oh, absolutely. Well, she was made by Edinburgh, of course.
COCTEAU
Anyway, it’s us in the bloody book, not Brodie. How d’ye feel about being a character in a book? This Hood’s book?
SPARK
I don’t really know. What does it say about him in Wikipedia? I don’t know the man.
COCTEAU
Hmm… OK, let’s see… Iain Hook, Iain Wood, Eleventh Hour… Ian A. – Ian Alastair Hood… The page ‘Iain Hood‘ does not exist. You can create a draft and submit it for review, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered. Hmm…
SPARK
I think you and I have nothing to say about that, then.
COCTEAU
Either that or we already said it.
SPARK
Yes… quite. Lunch?
COCTEAU
Why not? Game’s a bogey, naw?
SPARK
Quite.
My Book of Revelations
by Iain Hood
£10.00
The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland’s eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole’s entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the ‘bug problem’. Soon enough it’ll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year’s Day hangover?
A book about what we know and don’t know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?
‘This novel is driven by an inexhaustible stream of imagination and Hood’s fearless desire to leave narrative conventions behind and fly unfettered into a realm of pure ideas. There are definite echoes of Lanark… and a sense that the Glasgow-born Hood is joining in, and extending, a conversation that’s been going on in the more adventurous Scots literature for the past century.’ — Alastair Mabbott The Herald
Also available by Iain Hood
