Evelyn Waugh was long dead when Martin Stannard wrote his Life. Aged seventy-five, Muriel Spark commissioned Stannard to do the same for her. She then proceeded to wrangle with him, pettifogging and scornful, until she died aged eighty-eight. The biography that he published after her death, from which Spark had withdrawn “authorized” status, is thorough, admiring and gently propulsive. Stannard doesn’t seem disenchanted; I suspect he was never enchanted. His voice is inscrutably mild. In his preface, he wonders: “what should I call her in the book?”
“Dame Muriel” would be formal and correct but sounded inappropriately frosty. “Spark” would be the normal address. But as we had been writing to each other for ten years on first-name terms, this seemed rude. At the risk of appearing over-familiar, I decided to describe her simply as “Muriel.” This does not signify that she counted me as a friend.
In Electric Spark, her capacious and penetrating study of Spark’s life, work and psyche, Frances Wilson favours “Muriel”, though, “When I discuss her writing, I call her Spark”. Where Stannard stepped back, Wilson opens her third eye: “[Spark] is no longer here to score through my sentences, but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, her control of my hand”.
Necromancy aside, I’ll call Wilson Wilson. That she writes at times with an alarming zeal is part of her book’s interest and pleasure. There are writers on Spark who take on the cherishing tone of Mr Collins talking about Lady Catherine de Bourgh; Wilson, when roused, can sound like Mrs Danvers extolling Rebecca. Take this haughty, am-I-bothered? moment: Wilson notes how, reviewing The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Spark’s longest (and most long-winded) novel, Alfred Kazin called it “lifeless, cold, just worked up. It doesn’t exist at all as a work of art. It is just very intelligent” – “which”, Wilson sniffs, “is precisely the effect she was aiming towards”. It is tickling, too, when she claims to find messages from Spark in her archive finds, as if a trail had been laid by the writer for those with eyes to see it. One clue is encoded in the bit of paper Spark reused to make notes: “[She] will have needed to search deep into her files to find that particular letter”, Wilson writes.
In her undernourished late thirties, Spark suffered a Dexedrine-accelerated breakdown, one feature of which was that she saw secret messages in T. S. Eliot’s play The Confidential Clerk (1953). She called this an “involuntary word-game”: the letters seemed to lift off the page and rearrange themselves. Was Wilson similarly touched while working on this book? You might wonder during the detailed dissections of the plots of novels and stories, or when we are encouraged to notice how many people in Spark’s life had the initials “MS”, or told that an acquaintance of Spark’s was “the first of the two sexologists called Marie who would make an impact on Muriel”.
Electric Spark covers in detail Spark’s first forty years: the Edinburgh tenement girlhood of the then Muriel Camberg, born in 1918 to a Jewish father and Anglican mother; her marriage in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1937, to the older and unstable Sidney Oswald Spark; her wartime escape from that marriage and return to England in 1944 on a troop ship, leaving her son, Samuel (known as Sonny, later called Robin) behind. Wilson elucidates a brief but crucial period when Spark worked as a “duty secretary” in the buzzing “newsroom” of the master black propagandist Sefton Delmer, a “laboratory of unreason” whose programme of phoney – and outlandish – German radio broadcasts was designed to demoralize and disturb the enemy.
Next came the hard, lean London literary years: writing poems and short stories, biographies and criticism; her unhappy tenure as the director of the Poetry Society. The breakdown preceded her conversion to Catholicism, which was soon followed by her artistic apotheosis, the crucible moment; on retreat in a Carmelite priory in Kent, she wrote her first novel, The Comforters (1957).
Sounding out the heterogeneous scenes through which Spark moved, Wilson tunes in to the matter that can work on a mind. First the family lexicon, the old saws and non sequiturs; the atmosphere of the parlour. “It was from [her mother] Cissy that Spark learned to discuss her characters in a tone that implied scandal, when a scandal did not exist. There was a good deal of merciless laughter in the Camberg home, and no prospect of privacy.”
In Delmer’s office, the intelligence she received by way of the “scrambler telephone” was put to cunning use: that made an impression. Then there were the books she read. Wilson surveys the openings of the first batch of Penguin paperbacks (available from 1935 on railway platforms in a vending machine called a Penguincubator). Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) was a touchstone. Proust and Wordsworth informed a new conception of time and memory.
Allowing for prolepses and dilations, we see Spark to the end of her life, by which time her conflict with Stannard comes to seem like a reckoning, a Passion even. Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe (1974) had echoes of the Watergate scandal. It was, notoriously, the cover-up that brought Richard Nixon down, and Spark’s determination to “set the record straight” about her life was an idée fixe that similarly misfired. Why bring Stannard in? It looked like fate: the link with Waugh, who had been a crucial early supporter. Wilson plunges a hand into the Scrabble tile bag again: Stannard’s name was phonetically similar to that of Spark’s old boyfriend, the poet Derek Stanford, a man she had last seen forty years previously, but who had become indelible: she called him “my bête noire”.
They had been an inseparable couple in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a “double act”. She enlisted him to collaborate on editions of John Henry Newman’s letters and studies of Wordsworth and Emily Brontë. Her long letters to him are full of complacent and bustling affection. Later, when she was famous, he sold those letters. That was shabby, but in Wilson’s account he hardly reads as threatening, only annoying or embarrassing (a bête grise?). He was a hypochondriac, a rotten writer and a bit of a sad case. He lived with his mother. He made things up. He was bald; a waggling moustache in a colourful waistcoat. He was also instrumental in Spark’s writing life: he wrote around and organized a “plight fund” for her when she was ill. Waugh, Graham Greene and others contributed so that she could rest and recover. One flashpoint with Stannard was that he couldn’t, he found, make Stanford “the villain of the piece”.
The antiheroine of one of Spark’s best novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), is admired for an “economy of method” in her arrangement of the figures in her life to fulfil her ends. I wonder if that wasn’t what was at play in Spark’s outsized conception of Stanford: he may have been adequate to the occasion, a serviceable contempt-object. She cast him in her novels several times, notably as Hector Bartlett, the “pisseur de copie” in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Wilson says he is also “the subject of her last novel”, The Finishing School (2004).
Of course, Spark had already – and not long previously – taken a run at record-straightening in Curriculum Vitae: A volume of autobiography (1992). Considering this odd book, Wilson as hierophant cedes to Wilson the shrewd judge of Spark’s capacities. Noting the “purple” prose of her opening, and the insistent accumulation of inconsequential detail along with notable gaps, “(t)he sense of being played increases”, she writes. Wilson places the book in a line of reveal-to-conceal literary memoirs, noting: “the paradox of Muriel’s character is its combination of legalistic precision and artfulness”. Translate those tendencies into prose and you have something unpleasant and rebarbative. More than “played”, I felt faced down. The writing is high-handed, with an answer for everything.
Stanford entered Spark’s life when she was taken on at the Poetry Society at the age of twenty-nine. The board thought she’d be nice to look at and pliable; she had her own ideas, and particularly for the house magazine, the Poetry Review. She wanted to raise standards by paying contributors rather than charging them. In her debut editorial, she asked: “Cannot we cease railing at the Moderns?” The answer was a predictable no. Wilson hangs a set of grisly portraits of the self important creeps who will accrue in these literary oubliettes. Here are figures from an Ealing comedy, with the odd Nazi sympathizer thrown in. The halitosis rises off the page. Spark was “tactful until my face ached of it”, but their resentment grew; soon enough, the poets moved against her, with Marie Stopes – known then as a birth control campaigner – at their head. Stopes’s lyrical bona fides are well represented by these lines addressed to a former lover:
Keith, Keith, Keith, sheeny wood pigeons are calling.
Keith, Keith, Keith, sweet rain drops are calling and falling …
Spark’s exchanges with Stopes are not edifying, but they, too, imprint: “Her letter to Marie Stopes, the earliest of Spark’s many rude letters, mimics Stopes’s own rudeness … from [her] she learned to impersonate the English upper-class matron”. “Rude letters” sounds quite fun – but Spark’s aren’t fun. Writing to cut off friends, or to take issue with a journalist she felt had traduced Stanford, later to rail at her editor and her publisher, Macmillan, her style is grandiose and incontinent. She scoffs and crows. Being misrepresented was insupportable. Misrepresenting others was fine. (Not until Meghan Sussex – another MS – has anyone been so insistent on “her” truth.) Having been forced out at the Poetry Society, Spark forged signatures on a letter objecting to her resignation – including that of her married lover, the poet Howard Sergeant. She likes, Spark says elsewhere, “to force the issues”. She might have been firmly in the right (she wasn’t always); in all cases, there is the feeling of hissing energy looking for an object. Her outrage, in the act of expression, seems to feed on itself. If a point is conceded, she finds another hair to split, by return of post. This is mau-mauing, with politesse. If she was being strategic (I don’t know if she was), it worked. Macmillan offered to buy her a house after one outburst.
Dan Gunn, the editor of The Letters of Muriel Spark: Volume 1, calls her “susceptible to slights”. Happily for her, the people with whom this bestselling author had business dealings were more sanguine. Why might that have been? According to Gunn: “It is indeed remarkable that she managed to stay on such friendly terms with virtually all her editors and agents: despite her recriminations and occasional verbal assaults, it was her charisma and charm that carried the day”.
I don’t know what the second volume of letters will bring, but there is an absence of charm here. In these difficult years, we see her relentlessly writing for results: she wants to borrow books, to get feedback on her poems, to pitch books, to pitch talks to the BBC. She wanted Sergeant to leave his wife. “To smooth the path of the divorce”, Wilson writes, “she suggested he cease contact with his daughter for six months, which he refused to do.” Her relationship with Stanford is an interesting strand: their cosiness, later her sarcasm. Her come-hither performance in trying to entice him to marry her – entice is the word – is grisly. As with her hectoring, you want it to stop: “you would have to propose to me three times before you were accepted, if at all. It is my due, as a bonny girl, and I deserve no less”.
In her Poetry Society-era letters, Spark talks twice of the “charged effect” she values in poems. In her early novels, she generated an air of insinuation. Characters scheme alone or in pairs; they air suspicions about others or fantasize about them. In the wary public-house conflabs in The Bachelors (1960), the title characters earnestly try to work out what is happening to them. Do they want to get married? The tone can be offhand, nudging sinister. The elegant diction starts to jab. This is Miss Brodie walking “with her head up, up”. Spark’s second novel, Robinson (1958), Wilson writes, was “an allegory whose meanings were too private to be accessible to the general reader”. Well, perhaps, but we can hardly mind that.
Spark was an extraordinary creative force, a spitting comet. She was experimental, committed; for what it’s worth, productive. Wilson’s descriptions of the workbooks in her archives reveal how writing was always an absorbing puzzle to her, while the Letters show how she turns her guns on anyone whose actions might disrupt the time and peace she needs to work. Hers was not, she writes, “a spare-time hobby”. Wilson brings out the imaginative worlds and belief systems, Catholic and other, that lie behind the novels. She is alert to textual echoes over decades. Like a character in one of Spark’s novels, she hears the noises off.
In a piece for the TLS reviewing a centenary edition of Spark’s novels (July 29, 2018), Margaret Drabble described “a discomfort, an uncertainty, about her intentions” and commented, on one of Spark’s many arch statements about her writing: “The layers of defensive irony and displacement here are almost impenetrable, as they are meant to be”. Wilson’s line is that Spark was “always disingenuous about her novels”. There are readers who like that kind of thing. Others might find it a lot of pointless mystification, or more than that, a sort of music-hall wink: “you would have to propose to me three times” redux.
In the best books from her middle years – The Public Image (1968), The Driver’s Seat (1970), The Hothouse by the East River (1973) – Spark employs destabilizing devices to powerful effect. The machinery of the novel is on full display, to show the contemporary, fallen world as a corrupt farce. “My nouveau roman phase”, Spark said once. The worst of her later work indulges the coy, mystifying tendency. In Symposium (1990) and The Finishing School, it can feel as if private meanings have been replaced by private games. The tight schemes and looming mystery are gone. Instead, there are outlandish potted histories, characters proposed and disposed of in a line or two, unfunny jokes and fourth-wall twitching. Spark seems to guard a mean sense of plausible deniability: she’s only having fun.
For Wilson – again, allowing for no deviation – all of the novels are one. “From the opening sentence of The Comforters Spark knew where she was going, and she arrived there in the closing line of The Finishing School”. This is fanciful. Claustrophobic, too. Powers can fade. A sensibility can be distorted. Moments like this are where you might want to demur from Wilson’s vaunting vision.
In A Far Cry from Kensington, Mrs Hawkins, a successful writer looking back on her postwar experiences, recalls the advice she used to give, as an editorial assistant, to budding novelists:
“You are writing a letter to a friend,” was the sort of thing I used to say. “And this is a dear and close friend, real – or better – invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you. Now, you are not writing about the relationship between your friend and yourself; you take that for granted. You are only confiding an experience that you think only he will enjoy reading. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers. Before starting the letter rehearse in your mind what you are going to tell; something interesting, your story. But don’t rehearse too much, the story will develop as you go along, especially if you write to a special friend, man or woman, to make them smile or laugh or cry, or anything you like so long as you know it will interest. Remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off.”
This is suggestive. To enchant can mean to delight, but also to mesmerize, to control. The passage has a hypnotist’s cadence. The last line breaks the spell. It seems, too, designed to elicit knowing laughter. Again there is Spark’s unblinking self-belief, and again that suspicion of her fingers crossed behind her back. Or, as the Abbess of Crewe says in the novel named for her: “Scenarios … need not be plausible, only hypnotic, like all good art”. She is one of the worldliest among the many fake or parody artists in Spark’s world, but it’s an extraordinary assertion all the same.
In 1967, after a stint in New York, Spark moved to Rome, and six years later into a villa bought by her secretary and friend Penelope Jardine in Oliveto, Tuscany. They lived there together for the final thirty years of her life. Spark wrote and Jardine organized, first her library, then her archive. She did the driving and the cooking. “I’d know where things were. One way or another, you just find yourself doing it”, Jardine said in a rather desolate interview in the Guardian in 2014. In Oliveto, they would receive journalists from weekend newspaper supplements, who would record Spark’s sometimes enigmatic, sometimes Podsnappish pronouncements. Wilson counts “75 rare interviews”. In the Guardian in 2000, when Spark was eighty-two, Emma Brockes channelled her own Mr Collins:
[Spark] punctuates her spoken word as exactly as her written. There is a full stop at the end of each statement that she indicates by staring into space and tuning out … she is at her finest when under siege. For the last three years, she has maintained a high-profile dispute with her son, Robin, in which she has referred to him as a “lousy” artist, consumed by “jealousy and resentment”. There may be some teasing in this, not of Robin, but of the pious observers to whom displays of “bad motherhood” are kindling for moral outrage.
People do what they can with what they have. In Wilson’s reckoning, Spark transferred an “economy of method” to the emotional zone: why feel things, if there wasn’t any point? This is a decision she traces to Spark’s studies of Wordsworth’s life:
Was Muriel, who similarly abandoned a child in order to become a great artist, unconsciously pursued by the Eumenides? Can a person be haunted if they are not conscious of being haunted? The way to avoid being haunted in the first place, she was starting to realise, was not by the repression of remorse but the erasure of it altogether, along with the unconscious in general.
In his own, different way, Robin husbanded his resources. At the age of six, when Spark returned to England, leaving him in a convent school in Southern Rhodesia – there was no way to get him out of the country during wartime – he was, Wilson writes, “smaller than average, emotionally and educationally ‘backward’, and needed to go to a special school. It was now that he changed his name from Sonny, so he could have the same name as his friend”. After the war ended, he was brought back to Edinburgh and left in the care of Spark’s parents, where he was, she insisted, “safe and happy”. And she, after all, “had a living to earn”.
In The Comforters, the heroine’s ex-boyfriend, Laurence Manders, is a sneak and a “sleuth”, but for all that he can sniff out “something mysterious going on”, he cannot, his grandmother says, “put two and two together – not so’s to make four”. Spark wrote twenty-two novels. The achievement, Wilson shows, was underpinned by complex and loaded equations. “Her art was precision, and because emotions are imprecise she excluded them from her art. But they are also excluded because Muriel did not understand emotions, especially her own.”
This all feels right: the sad, blinkered logic, the estranged intelligence; more to the point than the glitter of the almost-truths. Why did she marry Sidney Spark? Wilson calls it destiny: “The name Muriel means sparkle. That, Miss Brodie would say, is its root. Sparkle Spark: nomen omen”. I had to check this. You might poetically infer “sparkle”, from the old Irish muir (sea) and gial (shining).
Frances Wilson’s receptive approach pays off throughout her book, and strikingly in a bravura final chapter that mixes deft scholarship and spookiness. The author lights on a code-breaking coup, which I shan’t give away. It could be the key to all Spark mythologies. It might just be another private amusement. Spark, she tells us, “kept her schoolgirl giggle”.
Gwendoline Riley’s most recent novel, The Palm House, will be published next year.
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