Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, by Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury, 408 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1526668030
At one point early in Muriel Spark’s novel of 1981, Loitering with Intent, her protagonist and alter ego Fleur Talbot is brought to a standstill in the middle of a populous London pathway by a joyous perception which comes at her out of the blue. ‘How wonderful it feels,’ she acknowledges to herself, ‘to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.’
Muriel Spark was an artist and a woman in the twentieth century, author of twenty-two enticing full-length works of fiction, of short-story collections, poetry collections, plays for stage and radio, two critical biographies, and an autobiography undertaken ‘to put the record straight’. The last objective was achieved somewhat at the expense of the usual Sparkian sedately subversive, strikingly elliptical style. The straightforward approach evinced in this project does not altogether suit Spark’s particular cast of mind, her addiction to narrative fun and games played out with a sinister undertone, or constructed around a supernatural conceit. However, the book (Curriculum Vitae, 1992) supplies an engaging account of the author’s early life in Edinburgh (though perhaps not quite as engaging as the wonderful story ‘The First Year of my Life’). Muriel Camberg, as Spark then was, was born in 1918 and grew up in a fairly genteel world of domestic relations and neighbours, with gas lighting, ragmen’s cries in the street, knitted silk dresses, tea at five o’clock, an abundance of books including A Child’s Garden of Verses and Nelson’s Infant Primer, and a James Gillespie’s School devoid of any inkling of its future fictional incarnation as Marcia Blaine’s. Curriculum Vitae is the place in which the Jean Brodie prototype is definitively identified – though Muriel Spark’s form mistress, Miss Christina Kay, has had some startling traits and mannerisms imposed on top of her admirable qualities as a teacher and mentor.
Curriculum Vitae takes us up to the publication of Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Before she reached this stage in life with its good omens for future literary celebrity, she’d had to contend with a good many vicissitudes, uncertainties, upheavals and horrors. At the age of nineteen, Muriel Camberg blithely hitched herself to a man whom she’d met at a dance, Sydney Oswald Spark, with even his initials – SOS – failing to sound a proper warning note in her ears. He was a teacher of mathematics and, she thought, an ‘interesting’ personality. She joined him in Southern Rhodesia, gave birth to a son, Robin, and found herself living with a husband who was prone to severe psychotic episodes. In other words, he was off his head. From this predicament, she effected the first in a series of enterprising departures. ‘I escaped for dear life,’ as she has it in Curriculum Vitae.
Her autobiography reveals as much of Spark’s early life as she wanted the public to know. At least a third of it is impelled by pique. Putting the record straight, for the author, is a matter of correcting all the lies, errors, mistaken assumptions and bits of sheer nonsense bandied about by people who believed themselves to be familiar with Spark and her story during one or other of her past existences. The principal offender here is her one-time lover, friend and literary collaborator Derek Stanford, who not only sold the letters she’d written to him in the 1940s and ’50s but brought out a critical and biographical study to which she took great exception. It was published in 1963. Some years later, he did it again. Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 came out in 1977 and did nothing to appease the affronted subject of Stanford’s choicest reminiscences. ‘Derek Stanford’s main fault as a critic was his inaccuracy,’ she stated severely. Inaccuracy, indeed, was anathema to her. But that was not the sum of Stanford’s literary infelicities. Reading specimens of his unfortunate prose style – ‘I became aware of the attractive little person confronting me’; ‘One could surmise a red-hot temper waiting to flash out if occasion demanded’ – I am at a loss to understand how the two could ever have worked together on a book, any book. Recalling an image of Spark wearing a green two-piece New Look outfit, Stanford tells us that she resembled ‘an Edwardian belle of the hunting field’. The phrase that springs to the mind of any Spark aficionado is the damning pisseur de copie, pisser of prose, applied by Mrs Hawkins to the odious Hector Bartlett in the 1988 novel A Far Cry from Kensington.
The name Bartlett, incidentally, is borrowed from an American bane of Spark, a Miss Alice Hunt Bartlett who sent excruciating contributions to the Poetry Society’s journal, plus cheques to cover publication costs, while Spark was editor there, during a brief and stormy period in her life. Having arrived back from Africa in 1944 and gone straight to London (after a short visit to her parents), she experienced the Blitz at first hand, moved into lodgings at Lancaster Gate in the Helena Club ‘for Ladies of Good Family and Modest Means’, and promptly found a job with Sefton Delmer’s Black Propaganda Unit based at Milton Bryan near Woburn. It was known as the Compound, and it gets a showing in The Hothouse by the East River (1973). Indeed, with her marriage over, and her son deposited with her parents in Edinburgh, Spark was free to make the most of whatever experiences came her way – and all of them proved wonderfully fruitful in terms of future Sparkian plot devices and ingredients.
Though she enjoyed working at the Compound – and has credited Sefton Delmer with initiating her into ‘a world of method and intrigue’, thereby enabling her to view the art of fiction as ‘very like the practice of deception’ – Muriel Spark left her job at Milton Bryan after only four months and returned to the May of Teck – sorry, the Helena Club. Then came various kinds of secretarial work, and, in 1947, the stint as editor of the Poetry Review, which caused her so much agitation. Having to fend off the sexual advances of elderly poetry enthusiasts was only a part of it. There were strange scenes about the premises involving the brandishing of umbrellas and anonymous letters, on top of a general state of unpleasantness. Worst of all for the new broom was her failure to overthrow the Georgian, bumbling tone of the publication. Among Spark’s few supporters at the time were poets John Heath-Stubbs, who told her later: ‘You were too avant-garde for them’, and Howard Sergeant, with whom she soon began an affair. Chief among her bugbears and opponents at the Poetry Society was Dr Marie Stopes, of whom Spark wrote in her autobiography: ‘… I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth-control.’ (Nevertheless, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she lists among the progressive tendencies of energetic, mid-century Edinburgh spinsters their proselytising attitude towards ‘the inventions of Marie Stopes’ – separating the achievement from the personality.)
The affair with Howard Sergeant did not flourish. ‘… I have been a bad picker in life so far as men are concerned’, Spark admitted, proceeding to further demonstrate the truth of this assertion by involving herself, professionally and emotionally, with the aforementioned Derek Stanford, whom she described as amusing, hypochondriac, short, bald, eccentric and living with his parents in Hounslow. They collaborated on a number of studies, a Tribute to Wordsworth (1950), for example, a life of Emily Bronte (1953), and a Letters of John Henry Newman (1957). They also slept together in various narrow beds in Muriel’s digs in South and West Kensington, even while Stanford continued to maintain a base in Hounslow. That is, they slept together until Spark’s conversion, first to Anglo-Catholicism and then to the full-blown version, put a stop to sex. The pair remained on cordial terms, however, for the next five years or so. (The consensus among critics and biographers is that Spark in later life was too hard on Stanford, lumping him together with men who, she claimed, were jealous of her success, and writing off all his services and acts of kindness towards her during her times of distress.)
The fraught and disturbing events of Muriel Spark’s life between 1949 and 1955 (say) have been well covered, by herself and others. Though she secured piecemeal employment as a secretary and editorial assistant, her income was never sufficient to avoid near poverty. She was a divorced woman when it wasn’t altogether socially acceptable to be so, separated from her son Robin (the relationship never recovered), overworked, mentally disturbed to the point of having hallucinations (she thought TS Eliot was sending her hostile messages encoded in the programme notes to an early production of The Confidential Clerk), physically unwell, malnourished and beset by literary and spiritual anxieties. A boost came with her story ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, which – famously – won first prize in an Observer Christmas story competition in 1951, and bolstered her resolve to become a writer. Though she was still envisaging a literary career in terms of poetry rather than fiction, she went about, subconsciously or not, accumulating material for her future works. The Poetry Society, for example, is made over as the Autobiographical Association, run by the awful Sir Quentin Oliver, in Loitering with Intent; blackmailing Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, with her unbridled bosom is a blatant revenge on Marie Stopes; and the unsettling Hothouse by the East River harks back, with style and audacity, to the world of wartime secrets at Milton Bryan. And so on. Even at the worst of times, Spark conceded later, ‘I had the power of knowing it would be amusing to look back upon.’
All the above information, and much more, is contained in Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark – a biographical study which is not intended to supplant or rival the comprehensive biography by Martin Stannard (2009). Instead, it adds up to an original and exhilarating approach to the life and fictions of Muriel Spark – in particular, the earlier part of her life and the first six or seven novels, though without omitting later events and works from the overall picture. In her preface, Wilson describes the genesis, and the reception by its subject, of the Stannard biography (which she admires). It nearly became a literary fatality; and in the event, it didn’t get into print until three years after Muriel Spark’s death in 2006.
Having invited Martin Stannard to write her life story, Spark did not take kindly to the finished manuscript when it was presented to her. She called it ‘a hatchet job, full of insults’: an extraordinary verdict on a book that now reads as conscientious, insightful and thoroughly attuned to Muriel Spark’s remarkable powers in different spheres of life, along with her vagaries. Both Stannard and Wilson are struck by Spark’s capacity for reinventing herself, her chameleon-like changes of form and face to suit the requirements of the moment. You might connect this to the shape-shifting element occurring in many of the Border ballads which remained a strong feature of her mental landscape.
One ballad that stayed in her mind was ‘The Queen’s Maries’ (the four ladies-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots); and, taking a cue from this, Frances Wilson has arranged her study into four parts, each with a bearing on a particular phase in the making of Muriel Spark. The Scots queen herself presides over the earliest, Edinburgh years (1918-37), when the future novelist was shaped and nourished by a Scottish-Jewish mode of apprehending the world around her. A compound of dryness and high morale, with an edge of eccentricity, it’s exemplified, of course, in Miss Jean Brodie with her Edinburgh niceties – ‘Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar’ – her singular teaching methods and her ‘crème-de-la-crème’ school coterie. When Fleur Talbot muses, in Loitering with Intent, ‘I was aware of a demon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they really were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more’, it’s hard not to see this tendency working in the transformation of Miss Kay into Miss Brodie.
The second Mary, or Marie, in Frances Wilson’s book is Marie Stopes, around whom are gathered all the spites and setbacks, the quarrels, privations and calumnies endured by Muriel Spark in the postwar period. Existing on an appalling diet, and over-reliant on the drug Dexedrine, she only began to emerge, chrysalis-like, from the accumulated ills besieging her when she took the plunge and entered the Catholic church as a full-blown convert. There were other notable conversions at the time among literary figures such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh (both supporters of Spark); but it still seems a bit bewildering that someone whose heritage was at least half-Jewish and partly Anglican with a spot of Scottish Presbyterianism thrown in, should opt so strongly for what you might call an alien form of religious belief. But perhaps the Catholic church, with its rituals, order and systematic structuring, provided for Muriel Spark a platform from which to let loose with her metaphysical mischief-making, her comic chicanery of every variety and her demonic stratagems. Besides, she always felt free to pick and choose among the tenets of the Catholic faith.
Reading between the lines of Electric Spark (just as readers of Spark are advised to do with her disturbing and often hilarious narratives), you will find the author captivated, intrigued and exasperated by her subject. Frances Wilson is adept at communicating her special take on Spark’s outstanding career, and her attributes, to the reader, who is also primed (by the novelist herself) to relish the elusiveness of the Spark persona. Enigma is the word. As we’ve seen, Spark cannot be pinned down, any more than the doings of her characters are adapted to any normal pattern of behaviour. They inhabit a world in which shadows fall the wrong way, ominous disembodied voices come through on the telephone, and Peckham Rye is the site of devilish goings-on; in which an unstoppable death wish is dressed up in garish clothing, or a convent full of nuns becomes a microcosm of worldly venality. Reality and dreams are intermingled to devastating effect. Well, as Spark put it herself when taxed with a high-handed assumption of extraterrestrial forces at work in her fictions, ‘Ghosts exist, and we are haunted.’
At the start of 1950, Muriel Spark got down to the planning and writing of her first full-length book. Child of Light (1951) is a biography of Mary Shelley – and the Frankenstein author, the free and independent literary woman (whose similarities with aspects of Spark are not overlooked) is the third ‘Mary’ in Electric Spark’s defining quartet. The fourth, ‘Mary Stranger’, is a stand-in for Spark herself, a pseudonym briefly adopted by her; and also the subject of an unwritten novel playfully envisaged by Derek Stanford in one of his ironical moods. At the same time, it returns us to Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with her juvenile deviousness, inventive skills and inexplicable religious conversion, as well as harking back to Mary Stuart calling herself ‘a stranger’ during her trial. All kinds of connections, illuminations, creative deviations and original perceptions are at the heart of Electric Spark, which continues on its way rejoicing at the multifaceted, endlessly fascinating character of its subject. The author picks up the clues, the cryptic disclosures and disguised autobiographical content contained in the witty and ingenious output of Muriel Spark. At the same time, the current study invites into its vicinity a whole range of writers, poets and critics and novelists, from John Buchan, IA Richards and WH Auden to Elizabeth Bowen and Brigid Brophy, whose works and deeds are cited for purposes of comment and comparison.
Prominent among them is Louis MacNeice, who seems to have acted as something of a touchstone or talisman for Spark (though the two never actually met). A crucial moment in the evolution of the novelist occurred during the Blitz on London, when – as every reader of Spark will know – she spent a night at ‘The House of the Famous Poet’ (the title of a story she subsequently wrote about the fortuitous happening). She was brought to MacNeice’s house in St John’s Wood by an au pair she’d met on a train, during a night of intensive bombing in the city. MacNeice and his family were away somewhere else – and once she discovered whose house it was, Spark was overwhelmed by the sense that an epiphany had been vouchsafed to her. ‘I felt I had truly entered the world of literature,’ she explained. ‘It had symbolically materialized; it was real.’ In fact it would take thirteen years before she became a published novelist herself; she wasn’t particularly influenced by MacNeice’s poetry, and had no wish for any closer contact with him. It’s a curious episode which we have to take at face value, down to the telephone call she made to an agent from MacNeice’s study, claiming to have the manuscript of a novel she had written (this was not true), and proposing to send it off. (What can she have been thinking?) What is also strange is the fact that no mention is made, by Spark herself or others, of Louis MacNeice’s Northern Irish origin, which might have drawn a parallel with Spark’s own Edinburgh upbringing … But if it took an abstract, and at the same time a practical encounter with a literary aesthetic to set Spark the novelist going we have to be grateful for it.
Frances Wilson, with astuteness and elan, delves as deeply as possible into the different times, the changes of outlook and circumstance and the great achievement of Muriel Spark, with a careful eye on all the luck, the strength of purpose and exceptional talent she required to follow her destiny. Spark’s literary icons – Newman, the Book of Job, Benvenuto Cellini – indicated a way forward (if not an example to follow in matters of style), as she went about exercising with complete authority the ‘light and heartless hand’ – ‘which is my way when I have to give a perfectly serious account of things’.
1/10/2025
Patricia Craig’s most recent book was Kilclief & Other Essays. It was published by Irish Pages and was reviewed by Eve Patten in the September 2021 issue of the Dublin Review of Books. http://drb.ie/articles/rounding-up-the-strays/
