Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (108 page)

In his later years Burgess wrote increasingly experimental fiction, notably
Napoleon Symphony
(1974) and
ABBA ABBA
(1977). His most enduring work will, however, be the minimally experimental ‘Enderby’, comic-autobiographical quartet. The third volume,
The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End
(1974), plays brilliantly with Stanley Kubrick’s incorrigibly Jewish revision of the indelibly Catholic
Clockwork Orange
in the 1971 film (for which, to his chagrin, the novelist only got £5,000 in subsidiary rights – but consoling millions in knock-on sales). ‘Clockwork Marmalade,’ Burgess called the film. He liked it, though.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
A. C. Clarke’s ‘third law’

Four things are universally known about Arthur C. Clarke. The first is that he ‘invented’ (slightly more plausibly than H. G. Wells invented time travel) the geostationary satellite. The second is that Clarke, as a guru-commentator seen worldwide on live TV during the 1969 moon landing, bequeathed space exploration much of its vocabulary (e.g. ‘Houston, we have a problem’). Thirdly, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Clarke wrote the story for the film which trail-blazed the Apollo mission –
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). And, running against the grain of that distinguished life achievement, is the radioactive fourth thing. In 1998, on the very eve of receiving a knighthood, the dubbing was postponed when the
Sunday Mirror
‘exposed’ Clarke as a pederast, who, having lived in Sri Lanka for thirty years, had preyed on young boys there. The tabloid headline, over an unflattering photograph, ran: ‘SMIRK OF A PERVERT AND A LIAR’. Clarke categorically denied the allegations, but never sued. As such mud does, it stuck, adhesively, in the popular mind. Say ‘Clarke’ and most people will think ‘One Giant Step for Man’ and ‘but wasn’t there something about little boys?’

Clarke was born into a farming family in Minehead, Somerset. He retained through life the yokel’s West Country burr. He arrived at a bleak time of year (December) and an even bleaker year, 1917, the low point in the Great War. Mine-head’s streets were full of dark-clothed women, and fathers with black armbands. Clarke’s subsequent visions of a millennially distant, conflictless universe, inhabited by glistening star-children can plausibly be traced back to those 1917 casualty lists and weeping widows. His fiction is forever yearning for a future world in which nationhood is transcended and, with it, conflict – or, as his best novel puts it, mankind’s childhood ended and with it all the physical mess of humanity: birth, copulation, death. He saw the future, and it was a sterile intensive care unit for the species. Young Arthur’s interest in the genre in which he would later star (there is, literally, an asteroid honorifically named after him) began with SF pulp left behind as trash by American doughboys, in the First World War. He did well at his grammar school, but there was no prospect of university. It was the Depression. Clarke, already deft with his pen, was enrolled as a clerical grade civil servant in 1936 – a ‘safe’ job.

The world was not safe, however, and on the outbreak of war he joined and trained in radar, specifically ‘Ground Controlled Approach’. It was an unglamorous theatre of war – but vital. The Allies were losing as many aircraft in landing
accidents as from enemy flak. Clarke left the service in 1946 a flight lieutenant. He entered King’s College, London, to do maths and physics, graduating with a first. He was, by now, a stalwart of the British Interplanetary Society and it was under its amateur aegis that he published his pioneering article on ‘Extra- Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?’ – on telecommunication satellites. Clarke was a firm believer in the benefits science fiction writers like himself could bring to science. ‘I’m sure we would not have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne,’ he told a US Congressional committee in 1975. ‘I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.’ His first book,
Prelude to Space
(1951), was dashed off in a couple of weeks in 1947. It was, however, the Dan-Dareish
The Sands of Mars
(1951) which made him well known (Clarke was, as it happened, an adviser to the
Eagle
boys’ comic).

Clarke’s early visions were technotopian: they celebrated ‘the inevitable march of technology to new worlds’. That new world was forecast in Ralph Tubbs’s ‘Dome of Discovery’ at the Festival of Britain. Religion would come later into his doctrinal mix. Clarke was in correspondence with C. S. Lewis in the early 1950s and Lewis’s theology fused in Clarke’s fictional vision with Olaf Stapledon’s billenarian cosmicality and Bernard Shaw’s fond forecast, in
Back to Methuselah
, that one happy day (roll on) the human race would outlive sex and, at last, be able to think straight – just like GBS.
2001
is a world without women, in which star-children are engendered by what? The stars.

Clarke’s sexuality, despite the tabloid battering at the door, remained a locked cupboard. He made a marriage in 1953 which lasted six months. Michael Moorcock recalls: ‘Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I’d go out drinking with his boyfriend.’ If so, it was a bad time to be that way. The ‘Great Purge’, as it was called, was in full flow. Even aristocrats, like Lord Montagu, were not immune. Clarke left England for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1956. Here he could write – networked to the globe, in his later years, by the web. He is the first writer to have thanked a word-processing programme, ‘WordStar’, as his secretarial aid. In the Sri Lankan years he produced his major work, the
Rama
tetralogy (benign extraterrrestrials leave a ground-control approach beacon in space) and his 2001 tetralogy (benign aliens leave a similar beacon on Jupiter). SF is considered inherently unsexy: defending himself against the 1999 tabloid allegations, Clarke confided that since 1962 he had been impotent, an after-effect of polio. One speculates whether this Abelard-like condition enhanced his genius or simply removed the distraction unluckier writers must labour under.

There’s a lot of people think they can take my books and analyse me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer.

At dinner parties in the 1970s one would converse with friends who had read Spark’s famous novel, who had seen the Vanessa Redgrave stage adaptation and the Maggie Smith film adaptation. If they knew anything, they knew
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961). But one could always stop conversation dead by asking – ‘What do we know about Sandy’s family?’ We have virtually no idea about her home life and parents. By contrast we know the whole roll-call of the Marcia Blaine School’s teaching staff: Miss Lockhart, the chemistry mistress, who has enough explosive ‘to blow up this school’; Miss Gaunt of the bony head and horse-blanket skirt; even the comic
tricoteuses,
the sewing misses Ellen and Alison Kerr. And, of course, the ruthless head teacher, Miss Mackay, dedicated to ridding her school of the seditious Miss Jean Brodie. Although
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
is an archetypal Edinburgh novel, the city itself is as faint as tissue paper behind the action. These blanks serve to focus attention on the exquisite machinery of Spark’s narrative. The novel brings as little externality into its workings as a Swiss watch brings Alpine scenery. It is this introversion which fascinates critics like Frank Kermode for whom Spark was a ‘poet novelist’. Her fiction needed scenery (whether Peckham, Jerusalem, or New York’s East River) as little as
Waiting for Godot
needs it. The surname, Sandy Stranger (with its nod to Camus), says a lot. Spark’s technique – her whole career – depends on tactical erasure.

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in ‘the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far’ and brought up in a cramped flat in Edinburgh’s Morningside, an area often mocked by grittier Edinburgh for its faux gentility. Her background was not, however, genteel. She was the second child of an engineer employed by the North British Rubber Company. Barney Camberg was Scottish-Jewish; his wife Cissy was raised Christian and called herself a ‘Gentile Jewess’. Spark investigates the paradox of this ‘non-conforming alliance’ in the character of Barbara Vaughan in
The Mandelbaum Gate
(1965). Edinburgh in the inter-war years was less anti-Semitic than London. None the less Spark recalled a climate of ‘social nervousness’. She was never close to her mother – who comes in for severe treatment in the memoir
Curriculum Vitae
(1992) – her father, or her brother Philip, six years older and very much a ‘Jewish Jew’. In later life, communication with her family would break down for years on end, although in the years of her earning prime she was generous with handouts. She was red-haired (hence ‘Sandy’, in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
) and
sharp-witted, winning a bursary to James Gillespie’s, a small fee-paying day school in nearby Marchmont.

Muriel matriculated in 1934 which qualified her for university entrance if the Cambergs could have afforded it. Instead she took a course in secretarial skills. In 1937, still not twenty, she became engaged to marry Sydney Oswald (‘Solly’) Spark, a lapsed Jew and thirteen years her senior. He had accepted a three-year school-teaching post in Southern Rhodesia. It was an escape from Edinburgh and ‘take a letter, Miss Camberg’ drudgery, but Muriel’s decision was disastrous. Solly teetered constantly on the brink of a nervous breakdown; he was violent and in his mania prone to firing off his pistol around the house. By the time their first child, Robin, arrived in 1938 the marriage was over for her. But not for him. This meant divorce had to be confected on the grounds of her desertion, which in turn undercut her claim to custody of Robin. With the outbreak of war, Spark found herself trapped in southern Africa. She kept body and soul together with office jobs, had the occasional affair, and gathered material later used in stories like ‘The Go-Away Bird’ (an apt description of Muriel Spark, she liked to jest). She managed eventually to get away on a troop ship in 1944, leaving Robin behind. When the boy came back a year later, he was shipped off to Edinburgh to be brought up by her parents. One of her later lovers tartly observed that ‘Robin looks upon Muriel as someone who visits him occasionally and gives him presents.’

On her return to England, Spark was recruited to work in wartime intelligence, specifically ‘black propaganda’. She lived in the Helena Club in Kensington, immortalised as the ‘May of Teck Club’ in
Girls of Slender Means
(1963), established ‘for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of thirty Years’. Since in that novel the Club sits on a ticking unexploded bomb and there is rampant fornication on the roof-top, ‘social protection’ might be thought less than perfect. Perhaps the Helena Club arranged things better. Her mood at this period (1945) was jaunty. Feeling depressed about Blitz-ruined London would have been ‘like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon’. After final victory, Spark took up editorship of the Poetry Society’s
Poetry Review
(1947–9) and became the society’s general secretary. Among much else she learned the important lesson that ‘literary men if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls’. She had a series of affairs with ‘literary men’, one of which, with Derek Stanford, lasted ten years and she well beyond girlhood with her prime in sight. The couple edited several books together. On being dismissed from the
Poetry Review
, on the issue of payment to poets, she set up another journal. It failed, but she was all the while refining her sensibility. ‘Alienation from her family,’ notes Martin Stannard, ‘was now complete.’ They did not, in Brodie’s phrase, ‘have her for life’.

In her mid-thirties Spark turned out a string of thoughtful works of literary criticism: Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë were of particular interest. So, more momentously, was Cardinal Newman. She had been moving towards Rome for some time and converted in 1954. Her resolve, for some time after, to embrace chastity did not help her current love relationship. But her career in fiction was jump-started in 1951 when, against 7,000 rivals, she won the
Observer
Christmas story competition with ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’. Today’s readers recognise it as a mix of post-colonial and magic realism. It is to the credit of the judges, in a period when grim realism ruled, that they recognised its quality. The cash prize was, in the money value of the time, a fortune and she moved to lodgings in Camberwell, under the supervision of a redoubtable Irish Catholic landlady, ‘Tiny’ Lazzari. Spark kept her Camberwell ‘attic’, just down the road from Peckham Rye, long after she could afford better.

Her first novel,
The Comforters
(1957) distributed discreetly in manuscript, won golden opinions from co-religionists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. This middle period of her life coincided with a period of florid madness brought on – Stannard surmises – by a gross overdose of the ‘pep pills’ then freely off prescription as dieting aids. She was as much a junkie as Bill Burroughs. At the height of her derangement, Spark believed T. S. Eliot was sending her coded messages in his plays. He was not, he sagely confirmed. Retreat in a monastery, detox and psychotherapy brought her back to herself.
The Comforters
is a subtle exploration into the poetics of fiction. Is the heroine Caroline the author or the creation of an author she has not yet located? There is a pervading sense of unease. Spark once said that she fondled her characters as a cat fondles birds. Their free will, or lack of it, would be a presiding theme in Spark’s fiction, most elegantly posed in
The Driver’s Seat
(1970) where Lise composes her murder as a novelist might assemble a plot. Frank Kermode is insistent that Spark is not a religious but a theological novelist. She was not a dutiful Catholic, apparently. What is consistent in all the play with theology in her work is the lightness of touch: the faint, but repeated, allusion to ‘strait is the gate’ in
Girls of Slender Means
in the lavatory window that only the slenderest girls can squeeze through; those that can’t are doomed when the bomb goes off. Jean Brodie’s obsession with who betrayed her stresses the necessity of Judas if human redemption is to happen. In
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
(1960) the diabolical Dougal has two bumps on his head – horns are hinted at. Or they could just be bumps on Freud’s ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ principle. In
Memento Mori
(1959), telephone calls, reminding the recipient of death, come from nowhere it seems. God? It was, Spark believed, ‘bad manners’ to be heavy-handed – even when dealing with issues like mortality, salvation, guilt or sin. Leave heavy-handedness to Moses and his tablets.