Lives in Writing (7 page)

There were, however, enough readers in the 1960s impressed by the wit, sharp observation and refreshing novelty of Spark’s narrative style to make her into a literary star quite quickly, especially in America.
The New Yorker
dedicated nearly a whole issue of the magazine to a slightly shortened version of
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, only the second time it had conferred such an honour. Nevertheless (a key word in Spark’s own vocabulary, one she heard often in childhood from the lips of scrupulous Scottish matrons) there was nearly always a significant mutter of dissent and dissatisfaction audible in the general buzz of approbation that greeted each new work, and it grew in volume as she became more and more uncompromisingly experimental in form and content. Reviewing
The Only Problem
in 1984, Frank Kermode described her as ‘our best novelist’ but added: ‘Although she is admired and giggled at, I doubt if this estimate is widely shared. This may be because virtuosos, especially cold ones, aren’t thought serious enough. Another reason is that although we have a special niche for certain religious novels, Mrs Spark’s kind of religion seems bafflingly idiosyncratic.’ Martin Stannard quotes this shrewd observation and his meticulous biography helps us to fill out and understand its implications.

The history of this work is itself of interest. In 1992 Muriel Spark wrote an approving review of the second volume of Stannard’s biography of Evelyn Waugh and when he thanked her for it, she replied that she hoped she would be fortunate enough to find as sympathetic a biographer one day. Stannard tentatively offered his own services, and she invited him to visit her in Tuscany to discuss this ‘interesting idea’. Soon he was invited to write an authorised biography. No professional (or professorial) biographer could have resisted the opportunity, and he seized it, while wondering why a writer known for fiercely guarding her privacy should allow a total stranger to investigate her life without conditions. He was guaranteed independence, made free of a huge archive of her papers, and exhorted to ‘write about me as though I were dead’. Spark had just finished writing
Curriculum Vitae
, a memoir of her early life up to the publication of her first novel, and Stannard surmised that she resented the expenditure of time and energy required by this task, and decided to let someone else continue it while she got on with her creative work.

Writing a biography of a living person is always a tricky undertaking, and Muriel Spark was no exception. She had been prompted to write
Curriculum Vitae
to correct what she regarded as misrepresentations of herself in an unauthorised biography by Derek Stanford, her lover and literary collaborator in the years before she became famous, and, as Stannard would soon discover, she was notorious for making imperious demands of her publishers, and frequently threatening to sue others for publishing false reports about her. The pile of documents made accessible to Stannard proved to contain nothing that was personally revealing, and indeed seemed more like a wall designed to conceal her private life. It was unlikely that such a volatile and controlling personality would maintain the promised hands-off stance towards her biography, and so it proved. Although Stannard has maintained a discreet silence on the subject, it is well known that when Spark read his finished manuscript she declared that it was ‘unfair’ to her, and withheld permission to publish it, a ban that was maintained for some time by her literary executor after her death in 2006. How the dispute was resolved we do not know, but this long-delayed book displays no trace of the frustration its author endured: its account of Muriel Spark impresses one as both sympathetic and accurate.

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in February 1918, the final year of the most terrible war the world had ever known, a circumstance she exploited in a brilliant magic-realist story ‘The First Year of My Life’, in which the preternaturally perceptive infant narrator comments caustically but silently on the folly and evil of the adult world in which she finds herself. Muriel’s father Bernard ‘Barney’ Camberg was a Jew, her mother Sarah (‘Cissy’) was according to her daughter half-Jewish, with a Christian mother, though the ambiguity of this lineage was to prove a source of much trouble in Muriel’s later years. There is, however, no reason to doubt her assertion that family life was not noticeably Jewish in matters of diet and ritual observances, that they rarely attended synagogue, and that its general ethos was liberal and secular. Socially they were at the top end of the working class, Barney being a skilled factory worker, and Cissy the offspring of small shopkeepers in Watford in the south of England. She seems to have been an amiable but rather lazy woman who, Stannard startlingly reveals, consumed a bottle of Madeira every day. That fact shows they were not poor, but their accommodation was limited: when Cissie’s widowed mother came to live with them Muriel had to give up her bedroom and slept for five years on a sofa in the kitchen. It is hard to imagine a modern teenager putting up with this for five days, but Spark claimed that she suffered no sense of deprivation. She found her grandmother an object of intense interest and helped uncomplainingly to care for her after she suffered a stroke and became bedridden and demented – experience which later bore fruit in
Memento Mori.

Neither of Muriel’s parents, Stannard observes, ‘had the faintest interest in literature’ and nor did her elder brother, Philip, who became an engineer. Her own interest was stimulated and fed primarily through education at the James Gillespie School which she attended from the age of five to seventeen. It was there that she fell into the hands of a teacher called Miss Kay, or, as she later wrote, ‘it might be said that she fell into my hands’ for Miss Kay was the model for Miss Brodie, whose ‘dazzling non-sequiturs’ she would later adapt as a compositional device. She also developed a fruitful friendship with a fellow pupil, Frances Niven, with whom she shared a passionate interest in reading and writing poetry, and made her debut in print at the age of twelve with five poems in an anthology called
The Door of Youth
. The following year, 1932, she entered a competition open to all Edinburgh schools for a poem on Sir Walter Scott, the centenary of whose death was then being celebrated, and won first prize.

It wasn’t just her family’s limited means that prevented this obviously gifted girl from proceeding to university, for there were scholarships that might have been found for the purpose: Muriel herself had no great urge to do so. She sensed, probably correctly, that the academic study of literature would prevent her from exploring it in her own idiosyncratic way, and was anxious to make herself employable in the economically depressed 1930s. So she enrolled in business-oriented college courses in shorthand typing and précis-writing which stood her in good stead in the years to come, bringing her a variety of jobs that were not always rewarding in themselves but provided invaluable material for fiction (and no doubt helped to form her lucid, economical prose style). Three more years of formal education might have saved her from a disastrous marriage, but even that brought her experience she was able to turn to positive account in fiction. As the narrator of
Loitering with Intent
, Fleur Talbot, says: ‘everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.’

The sexual liaisons and intrigues among the teachers and pupils which drive the plot of
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, were, as Spark admitted, a fictional addition to the reality of her schooldays. Edinburgh in the 1930s was an intensely puritanical society, and premarital sex was simply not an option for a respectable young woman. ‘I never slept with anyone before I got married, because no-one anyway ever asked me,’ she told Stannard. ‘You didn’t. There wouldn’t have been anywhere to go. I wasn’t in that way of life.’ But she had boyfriends, and to the surprise of her friends and the dismay of her father she accepted at the age of nineteen a proposal of marriage from one of them, Sydney Oswald Spark, who was thirteen years older than herself and whom none of them liked or trusted. Why? He had an MA in Mathematics from Edinburgh University which may have impressed her, and she evidently enjoyed being the object of his infatuation, but if sex was a motive it was probably driven more by curiosity than desire on her part. (She told an interviewer in 1974 that she had rushed into marriage because it was then ‘the only way to get sex’.) That ‘Ossie’ as she called him (or later, ‘S.O.S.’) was a non-practising Jew perhaps made him seem a compatible spouse, given her own tenuous sense of Jewish identity; and he offered her an opportunity to see something of the great world, for he intended to go to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on a three-year teaching contract. He did not tell her, however, that he had been unable to hold down a teaching job in Scotland and had been seeing a psychiatrist.

Ossie preceded Muriel to Africa, and they were married there in September 1937. The wedding night was inauspicious – ‘An awful mess. Awful. Such a botch-up,’ she commented years later – but she was soon pregnant, and soon aware too of her husband’s unstable character. She responded to the beauty of the African landscape, and the friendliness of the natives, but the arrogance and philistinism of white colonial society oppressed her, and combined with the increasingly threatening behaviour of her husband to precipitate a depression after her son Robin was born. Before long the Sparks were effectively separated. (Coincidentally another future novelist of distinction, Doris Lessing, was going through similar experience a few hundred miles away, but they were unknown to each other.) By the time the Second World War broke out Muriel was determined to return to the UK where she hoped to arrange for a divorce with custody of her child, and, after leaving Robin in the care of a Catholic convent school and moving to South Africa, she eventually arrived in a war-worn London in March 1944 and joyfully embraced its dangers and austerities (see
The Girls of Slender Means
). Her familiarity with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett sufficiently impressed an interviewer at the Foreign Office to land her a fascinating job in Sefton Delmer’s ‘Black Propaganda’ department, confusing the German population with radio broadcasts that cunningly mixed truth with invention (see
The Hothouse by the East River
).

When the war ended she sent for Robin, but to her surprise and dismay he arrived accompanied by Ossie, who was not disposed to be co-operative about a divorce. He had resumed Jewish orthodoxy and was inculcating this in Robin to make the child bond with him rather than Muriel, while Robin, one may surmise, already had reason to feel that his mother had deserted him in infancy. Her solution to this imbroglio was to leave Robin in Edinburgh in the care of her mother, and go to London to start a literary career. It was, judged by normal maternal standards, a selfish decision, but it was selfishness for art’s sake. She was convinced that she was born to be a writer and throughout her life allowed nothing to stand in the way of that vocation. For a long time she pursued it as a poet, supporting herself in a variety of low-paid jobs associated with publishing and editing, and by producing literary biographies and anthologies, mostly in collaboration with Derek Stanford whom she met through the Poetry Society. This was then a haven for old-fashioned and mediocre versifiers, with some of whom she had flirtations and affairs, and with others feuds when she became the society’s secretary and the editor of its magazine.

She was in some danger of languishing in this genteel end of Grub Street indefinitely, with no more than a sheaf of rejection slips to show for her poems, when in December 1950 she won a competition for a short story on a Christmas theme sponsored by the
Observer
newspaper which attracted nearly 7,000 entries. Her story, ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, described an angel gatecrashing a rather tawdry nativity play in Rhodesia in a manner both vivid and matter-of-fact, which Stannard plausibly suggests was the first example of magic realism in British writing. It seems to have been also the first piece of prose fiction Spark wrote for publication, and yet it instantly demonstrated that
this
– not verse – was the medium in which she could fulfil her artistic ambitions. ‘The whole tone of the narrative’, Stannard justly observes, ‘is suddenly lighter than that of the poetry, rippling with crisp, implicit mockery.’ She never was, and never would be, a great poet in verse, but her novels and novellas are essentially poetic in style and structure.

This success was her first taste of fame, but she did not consolidate it rapidly or easily, for reasons to do with her troubled state of body and soul at the time. Stannard is particularly illuminating on this phase of her life, when she was moving towards Christian faith, first in the Anglican and finally in the Roman Catholic Church, conducting an on-off sexual relationship with the much less gifted Stanford, and trying to write her first novel, while keeping solvent, and her name in the public eye, with literary journalism. She wrote a review of T.S. Eliot’s play
The Confidential Clerk
which astonished the author with its insight, and his praise encouraged her to begin a critical study of Eliot’s work, but she was overdosing on Dexadrine in order to suppress appetite and work longer hours, which had the effect of making her temporarily deranged and convinced that Eliot’s writing was full of coded threatening messages to herself. All these experiences entered into her first novel, including the struggle to write it.
The Comforters
is about a young woman recently converted to Roman Catholicism who is having a nervous breakdown which takes the form of hearing an authorial voice tapping out on a phantom typewriter a prejudicial description of her thoughts in the novelistic third person. We would learn to call this ‘metafiction’.

The Comforters
was greatly admired when it was published in 1957, especially by Evelyn Waugh, who was struck by its similarities to
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
which he was currently writing. Graham Greene, who had already been impressed by some unpublished stories he had been shown by Stanford, and was generously giving Spark financial help, added his praise. These were the two most distinguished living English novelists at the time, and both Catholic converts. Muriel Spark ‘completed a grand triumvirate of Catholic-convert novelists’, Stannard declares at the outset of his book, but the Catholicism expressed in her fiction is very different from Waugh’s unquestioning orthodoxy or Greene’s obsession with sin and salvation – much more playful, speculative, and unsympathetic to typical Catholic piety. The dogmatic certainties on which the ‘Catholic Novel’ was based were, however, soon to be called into question by the Second Vatican Council and the emergence of a much more pluralistic Church than the one she originally joined, so her increasingly idiosyncratic Catholicism caused less of a stir than it might otherwise have done. She openly criticised the papacy, for instance, did not attend mass regularly, and always avoided the sermon when she did. Her attraction to the Faith was basically metaphysical: she liked the idea of a transcendental order of truth against which to measure human vanity and folly, and was fascinated by the similarities and differences between the omniscience of God, the fictive omniscience of novelists, and the dangerous pretensions to omniscience of human beings like Miss Brodie.
Sub specie aeternitatis
human life was not tragic or pathetic, but comic or absurd. ‘I think it’s bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader – much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short,’ she told an interviewer in her deceptively insouciant style. This is what Kermode meant by the ‘cold’ quality of her work. In real life it could be disconcerting: he recalls that she could not see why a party he planned to give in New York in her honour should be cancelled because President Kennedy had been assassinated the day before, since ‘he was only dead because God wanted him’. She was not, however, indifferent to the problem of reconciling the evil and suffering in the world with the idea of God – indeed she considered it ‘the only problem’ in theology. But, drawing on her Jewish heritage, she approached it through the Old Testament rather than the New, especially the book of Job, where God himself in her view becomes an absurd character.