Edinburgh International Book Festival round-up: Paul French | Dan Gunn | Mark Watson

I remember the way he talked about it - in pithy tabloidese, each sentence like a movie pitch. He knows China backwards, having made his money as a marketing expert predicting the country’s future while all the time fascinated by its wild, pre-communist, 20th century past.

Which is where Wallis Simpson comes in. In French’s new book, Her Lotus Year, she arrives in Shanghai because she’s heard she’ll be able to get a divorce there from her abusive US Navy pilot husband Win (“He’s America’s first Top Gun. Taller and more handsome than Tom Cruise but with worse planes”).

“Shanghai back then was the maddest place in the world,” said French. “Whatever you can imagine, times it by ten.”

It’s a city of warlords, brothels, drugs, famine, and jazz. We know about its degeneracy, because that’s what the so-called China Dossier - the one that accused Wallis of sexual practices so outré that when she read it the Queen Mother is reputed to have required smelling salts - spelled out.

Yet all that is all fake news, says French. Wallis might have been good at holding her drink, but that’s about it. She’s an abused woman fleeing a violent husband. She has an independent streak, and finds happiness in Peking, where she gets a sense of style, is taken in by rich friends and becomes more confidently cosmopolitan.

“The subtitle of your book is ‘China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson’,” said journalist Isabel Hilton (another China expert), chairing the event. “A big claim. Are you sure you can stand it up?” Sure he can.

And so to the making of another grande dame forced to flee an abusive husband. Dan Gunn has spent the last seven years editing the first volume of Muriel Spark’s letters, from 1944 to 1963, and is hard at work on the second, which takes the story up to her death in 2006.

But it’s the first volume, he emphasised, where Spark changes the most: from unknown poet to acclaimed writer, where she has the only true love affair in her life (though it ended in betrayal and bitterness), where she suffered real hardship, a miscarriage and attempted rape, had a serious breakdown and two conversions (first to Anglicanism, then Catholicism).

Asked why the project had taken so long, Gunn pointed out reasonably enough that working with 40 different archives (half public, half private) took time and, considering that editing Samuel Beckett’s letters took him a quarter of a century, “deciphering the most difficult handwriting in the 20th century in five languages”, the Spark letters were a comparative doddle.

The hour sped by for two main reasons. The first was the way in which Gunn communicated the joys of following a trail of writer’s letters rather than writing a biography. Instead of telling a linear story arcing towards success, he said, the letters make clear how contingent the whole process is: how much depends on the luck of finding the right publisher at the right time and having supportive patrons and friends – how easily, in other words, everything could go wrong.

The second reason was Spark herself, and the delight in seeing her try out her writing wings.

I went along later to comedian Mark Watson’s sparsely-attended event later on, hoping for laughs, but not for a second did he come close to just one letter Muriel Spark wrote (20 January 1955: look it up) in which she describes a talkative neighbour with a verve only the truly comic writers - Victoria Wood, say, or Alan Bennett - could match.

David Robinson

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