World-Beating Buster-Upper

You can learn​ a lot about a person from the way they react to the death of a pet. The norm: uncontrollable sobbing, then mythologising its wonders and uniqueness. Perhaps after a few weeks you begin to hear its ghostly paws behind you. Then, after a decent interval, you get another one, not a replacement of the irreplaceable, of course, but to fill the void.

Muriel Spark loved her cat Bluebell, but Bluebell developed multiple infections, and in September 1958 had to be put down. Spark wrote a reassuringly normal letter about it all to her former lover Derek Stanford: ‘I was terribly upset but at the same time relieved she was out of her suffering … I keep seeing her little smoky shape insinuating itself amongst my papers. I can’t but think there is a form of perpetuity for the spirits of such animals as have become a part of the human heart, as Bluebell was.’ She also wrote to her Catholic friend Dina Barnsley in a more worldly vein: ‘I thought it unbecoming a Catholic in my position to spend a pound a week on a cat (or in any position; unless the cat was a pedigree investment).’ She goes on to describe Bluebell’s last mortal twitchings. Then: ‘I gave Bluebell a last gentle stroke & the vet’s assistant lifted her up by her four legs (upside down) and put her in a bag. This bag had once held my hats.’ She concludes: ‘Please keep this letter as I may want to refer to it some time for a story.’

As she put it in her autobiography, drily entitled Curriculum Vitae (1992), ‘most of the memorable experiences of my life I have celebrated, or used for a background in a short story or novel.’ Usually she added a twist of irony, and sometimes of revenge, but the characteristic flavour of her writing was that of a Catholic ironist, for whom the terrible and the laughable are all but impossible to disentangle, and all might be viewed (or might not be) from the perspective of eternity, over which God might or might not be chuckling. As she put it, ‘I do so intensely feel the pain of being human that perhaps I am inclined to “laugh it off” in my work too much.’

Spark was born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh, which she described as ‘this city of Calvinism, high teas and loveless alliances’. It was on ‘the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday’ (i.e. 1 February 1918). The Cambergs were Jewish. After a schooling very much in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie vein, Muriel made the disastrous decision (she was only nineteen) to marry Sydney Oswald Spark, who was thirteen years older than her and had a precarious job teaching at a school in the ultra-colonial-sounding Fort Victoria (now Masvingo) in what was then Rhodesia. Sydney’s initials, S.O.S., should have been a warning sign, though his surname suited her character well. Expat life in Rhodesia was snobby and steamy and Sydney turned out to be nuts. ‘He got more and more violent,’ and Muriel decided to divorce him. None of her letters from the period before 1944 survives. In her new biography, Frances Wilson speculates that Spark briefly worked as a spy in South Africa, though the evidence for this is slim. She and Sydney had a son, Robin, whom Spark decided to leave behind (he was safe from his father in a convent school) while she risked escaping from her violent and unstable husband in 1944 on a troopship, which weaved through the U-boats on its journey to Liverpool.

Back in England she lived in lodging houses in London and supported herself with a series of secretarial jobs. These provided many of the distinctive settings and concerns of her later fiction. In 1944, after signing the Official Secrets Act, she was employed by the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan, which pumped out ‘detailed truth with believable lies’, and was intended (like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from the other side) to rot enemy morale. She was there for less than six months, but it sensitised her to the fine line between fiction, conspiracy and falsehood which she treads so expertly in many of her novels. Her allegory of Watergate set in a fictional Benedictine convent, The Abbess of Crewe (1974), with its microphones hidden in trees and atmosphere of more or less justifiable paranoia, harked back to her time at Milton Bryan, and her period there became a past that literally haunts the heroine of The Hothouse by the East River (1973).

Spark then entered what Jane Wright, the ample heroine of The Girls of Slender Means (1963), calls ‘the world of books’. She worked for dodgy publishers who ripped her off and exploited her efficiency, and for the Poetry Society, some of whose male fogeyish neo-Georgian members drooled over or pawed at her, while others (including the terrifying Marie Stopes) were suspicious both of her unorthodox marital history and of her admiration for ‘modern’ aberrations from their decorous poetic ideals, such as that notorious radical T.S. Eliot. Spark had a bust-up with them and remained throughout her life a world-beating buster-upper.

Her relationship with Stanford began in the early 1950s and together they wrote several critical books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite suppressant. (In those days you could buy it over the counter.) This, combined with overwork and undereating, led to a period of outright psychosis in early 1954. During this episode she thought that T.S. Eliot had encoded secret messages specifically for her, in Greek (of course), in his play The Confidential Clerk. She also believed (rather less plausibly) that Eliot was pretending to be her window cleaner in order to spy on her. Meanwhile she had first converted to high Anglicanism and then (after reading a lot of Cardinal Newman) in May 1954 she was received into the Catholic Church. During a period of retreat and recovery at a cottage attached to a Carmelite priory in Kent she began work on her first novel, which is about a Catholic convert who stops sleeping with her lover and hears the novel in which she is living being typed out from the beyond. The Comforters (as it was eventually named, after the miserable sods who ‘comfort’ Job) laid the foundation for Spark’s success. Its plot sits on that Sparky boundary between madness and conspiracy and religious transcendence and comedy – a zone that Spark was able to make fully her own over the next three decades because she had lived in it herself. She wrote to Alan and Dina Barnsley in 1956 that ‘figuratively speaking, there is a great conspiracy going on against me, but actually speaking I cannot at all believe it, not at all at all. It is a terrible thing to be incapable of really believing in one’s paranoiac feelings.’

Her conversion and her delusional episode, combined with her literary success, put a strain on her relationships. She decided she could not continue sleeping with Stanford unless they married, which would require him to convert, which he would not do. As Wilson says, ‘Muriel divided the world into angels and demons, and before he became a demon, Stanford was her seraph.’

Stanford’s main crime against Spark was the crime of biography, or of making her life public in a form she did not like. In 1962 he sold seventy of her letters – intimate letters about love, and religious and mental anguish – to a bookseller whose very name, Lew D. Feldman (lewd fell man, like the fell fiend), was an insult to someone like Spark who had a lifelong interest in anagrams and wordplay. She joked after the sale (again laughing off the pain of life) that ‘some old professor is probably drivelling over them at the moment.’ (I do like ‘drivelling over’, since we old professors do of course drool salaciously as we write our drivel.) She also believed that Stanford stole notebooks containing her early poems while she was ill. But the relationship was already over by 1958, when Stanford told Spark’s family about her breakdown, which she had concealed from them. As she put it in one of her iciest letters, ‘you may care to reflect on the embarrassment caused me by your revealing to my parents that I had had a nervous breakdown.’

Spark’s public statements about Stanford were even more chilly, and you wouldn’t know from them that she had ever written to him saying ‘everything in my heart is sweetness for you,’ or had addressed him as ‘Dear sweet Popple’. She described him in a letter to the TLS in 1963 as someone ‘with whom I formerly collaborated in some critical works’. In Curriculum Vitae she presents him as being ‘very keen to set up a literary partnership with me’, and as someone ‘wildly and almost constitutionally inaccurate’ who ‘endured, in fact, a nervous breakdown at the time of my first success’. Meanwhile, in her fiction, she generated portraits of the Evil Stanford which are fuelled by hurt, rage and denial that she ever loved him (though she knew she had done so). Under the fictional equivalent of a false moustache and wig, the short and bald Stanford became the portly overbearing blackmailer and user of black magic Hector Bartlett, who’s repeatedly described by the heroine of A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) as a pisseur de copie. Stanford also underpins the narrator’s bisexual bad novelist boyfriend in Loitering with Intent (1981), whose prose is described like this: ‘He never reached the point until it was undetectably lost in a web of multisyllabic words and images trowelled on like cement.’ That mixture of metaphors is not typical of Spark’s disciplined style, but its sloppy mess of mortar and sticky web is not an unfair evocation of Stanford’s way of writing.

Biographers (including sensitive ones like Wilson) generally adopt Spark’s view of Stanford as a creep and traitor. But he was a standard issue 1950s literary critical milksop and would-be poet, whose love of language outstripped his skill in using it by several furlongs. He lived with his mother, and was often ill, particularly after Spark dumped him for the Catholic Church. He did kind things as well as bad things, and he did swallow a lot of shit from Spark, including being told to have his head examined by a Jungian priest called Father O’Malley who ‘knows of cases with your symptoms and so might even be able to advise you’, which is not a very nice way of saying: ‘All your illnesses are in your damaged little head, darling.’ During Spark’s breakdown Stanford wrote tactfully to Eliot on her behalf asking if he had indeed encoded allusions to her in his play. Eliot replied with characteristic dryness: ‘If there is any code concealed in The Confidential Clerk, I shall be interested to know what it is.’ That helped Spark to recover. Stanford also encouraged Graham Greene to support her during her recuperation.

Wilson says ‘Stanford began to hate her’ when she won an Observer prize for ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’ in 1951, but their letters don’t bear that out. After Spark’s conversion their correspondence carried on with lots of pet names and comic rhymes. Spark continued to sign herself ‘Mollie Moonflower’, ‘Lotus Lolliepop’ and ‘Tessa Toothy’, and her letters playfully re-create the pain of living with that combination of profundity and dryness that is her greatest skill as a novelist. As late as October 1957 she was saying of Stanford: ‘I will not hear a word against him … how many men of Derek’s persuasion would be content with a relationship without sex?’

Spark seems not quite jokingly to have thought of herself as writing the world into existence. In Loitering with Intent, her most overtly autobiographical novel, a writer finds that the world keeps re-enacting the novel she has written. That includes the villain of the piece dying unexpectedly in a car crash. As the heroine, Fleur Talbot, says, ‘Sometimes I don’t actually meet a character I have created in a novel until some time after the novel has been written and published.’ Fleur works as a secretary to the Autobiographical Association (which is an occasion for Spark to take fictional revenge on the misfits and molesters of the Poetry Society), and spices up the boring autobiographies of its members with ‘my own bits of invented patchwork to cheer things up’. These then turn out to be true. Spark wanted to be the inventor of the world while knowing that she was its creature, which gave her a good – and perhaps, from the viewpoint of those around her, excessive – supply of the egoism that all writers need. She could shut out the world when it interfered with what she wanted to do, and from time to time appears to have doubted that other minds existed, or suspected that if they did they were probably made up by her. Fleur quotes a passage from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua in which he says his early religious feeling made him ‘rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. Spark’s heroine loves the passage, but also feels ‘a revulsion against an awful madness I then discerned in it’. That awful madness within the love of God, and the correspondingly awful madness that potentially arises from the belief a writer needs to have in the truth of their own creations, was the beating heart of Spark’s fiction.

Electric Spark, like Spark’s autobiography, ends with the publication of The Comforters in 1957. That makes sense, because most of Spark’s best writing was rooted in her life before 1960, and she continued to draw on those early experiences until the end of her career. Time was in any case a dimension through which she wandered freely. In her fiction she often anticipates the deaths or eventual careers of her characters with throwaway glances into the future. Wilson artfully does the same by flashing forward through her biography, so that you often see Spark’s future in the instant. In 1953, while trying to cover the Edinburgh Festival for the Observer, Spark wrote: ‘The “here and now” as it is lived by most intelligent people bewilders me. I can’t grasp what is actually happening in the present tense.’ Later she said: ‘The poetic-logical order of things is not always compatible with their chronological order, it seems to me.’

In the early 1960s Spark’s fiction drew on her life in Edinburgh (notably in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), her conversion (The Mandelbaum Gate) and her experiences in lodging houses and publishing houses immediately after the war (The Girls of Slender Means). In the 1980s she looked back to those experiences from a greater and more ironical distance in Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington. Some of her novels from the in-between period of the 1970s don’t quite generate the depth charges of doubt and uncertainty about what is real that rumble under her best work, and that’s partly because they don’t look back to her earlier life. The antics over Italian land law and lawlessness in The Takeover (1976), which Spark wrote after moving to Italy with the companion of her later life, Penelope Jardine, never quite elevate the absurdity and self-importance of the wealthy into a plot that unites (as her best novels do) conspiracy, belief and betrayal. The murderous Venice of Territorial Rights (1979) feels a bit too much like she had been watching Don’t Look Now (1973) and wanted to do a murder mystery in a gothic mode. Her best short stories (several of which are about women who are murdered) tend to be rooted in her terrible marriage and misery in Rhodesia. The best of her novels from the 1970s is The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Spark’s own favourite – in which a young woman sets out to get murdered and wears a flamboyant dress so that plenty of people notice her in the moments before her death. It was in part an experiment in the nouveau roman, but it became more than that because, despite its emotionally detached style, it drew on Spark’s own decision to risk everything and marry a violent man.

The other reason Wilson does well to focus on the period leading up to The Comforters is that Spark’s later success didn’t make her a nicer person. She came to hate the biography which she authorised Martin Stannard to produce in 1992. She was unhappy with it in part because Stannard conscientiously described episodes in which Spark was perfectly and assuredly horrid to publishers and former friends. In 1962, when she was toiling away at both The Girls of Slender Means (my own favourite) and, at the same time, her most ambitious novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, the unfortunate Alan and Dina Barnsley, with whom she had stayed in Kent and corresponded cheerfully, dared to turn up for an unexpected visit. They were sent away with something larger and heavier than a flea in their ear. Alan wrote afterwards to say that the friendship was over. Spark replied:

Your farewell letter leaves me dry-eyed and the sickly dishonesty of your accusations – so far as I can decipher your impolite handwriting with a magnifying glass – affects me only as do all sickly things.

My last postcard to Dina should have made my present position quite clear. Obviously it did not – unless one is to suppose you are as inconsiderate as you appear to be. I prefer to suppose that you are too obtuse to take in a civilly-worded plea, but needs must have it drummed in. (If I may say so, it is a flaw in your excellent writings that you assume in your readers a mental resistance to points which are not drummed in.)

Every writer​ needs a bastard within, otherwise they would never make time to write. Usually the bastard is allowed to shout at maximum volume in their correspondence. There are writers who regard their letters, their addressees and even themselves as works of fiction, and (contrary to the pious lie that writers of fiction are delicate souls quaveringly sensitive to those around them) that means they can write letters which read as though there isn’t a real human being at the receiving end of them. Spark’s final parenthesis, which says that Barnsley’s ‘excellent’ novels are heavy-handed (he wrote under the pseudonym Gabriel Fielding, since he was distantly related to Henry Fielding), is an unnecessary ‘and the horse you came in on’ tacked onto the ‘fuck you’ of the earlier part of the letter. Spark never kissed and made up with the Barnsleys.

She was a professional in all things, including falling out. In her early showdown with the grandees of the Poetry Society she declared: ‘Whilst we are on this subject I would mention that you have not in the past shown the respect which is due to me.’ At that point, when she was being pushed around by bullies, it feels good to cheer her on. But by the 1960s her publishers and agents, several of whom thought that they invented or owned or at least assisted Spark, were told in no uncertain terms that this was not the case. They might get coos of charm and delight at advances and invitations to lunch and professions of friendship. But they also had to endure blasts of toxic fury. She was more than grateful to Alan Maclean (brother of the double agent Donald Maclean) for signing her on at Macmillan. Then she came to believe that Macmillan did not take her books seriously. She let Maclean have it: ‘My dear Alan, I wonder if you can tell me – and perhaps you will have to ask yourself – what it is about me that makes you tell me lies, or at least mislead one with evasions?’ (She was fond of the rhetorical question as an implement of torture.) The letter goes on: ‘Is it because you want, basically, to vex and upset me? … Why do you foster my work with one hand & blight it with another?’

After displaying such expertise at the ignoble art of tormenting a publisher, Spark then wrote to her former agent Paul Scott (of The Jewel in the Crown fame) in delight that her hissy fit had got Macmillan to send round the big boys in their Daimlers who offered her a retainer of a thousand pounds a year: ‘Let me know how funny you think this is.’ Robert Yeatman (who took over as Spark’s editor at Macmillan) once dared to query the phrasing of a single sentence in The Girls of Slender Means and was told: ‘It’s exactly what I intend, and the style is my own. I’m sorry if you don’t like it; but actually I couldn’t care less, because I made up my mind at the age of nine not to care less about criticisms of style.’ She goes on to say (with her tongue perhaps not quite far enough in her cheek) that she had ‘hands down’ won prizes for writing at school and had bound copies of Walter Scott’s novels to prove it. So there. Wilson says her high-handed letters to publishers ‘read at times like an ingénue playing an archduchess in repertory theatre’, which is a good line, but too kind.

Spark had, however, lived through being patronised by self-important and second-rate literary men, several of whom (though not Maclean or Yeatman) were also sexual predators. She had to fight off the advances of Rayner Heppenstall, who commissioned radio plays for the BBC. Spark described a lunch with him during which she ‘had to literally struggle for my honour’. Her vehement assertions of the seriousness of her writing were understandable responses to the milieu in which she operated, and to her need to support herself, her parents and her son, who since 1945 had been living with his grandparents in Edinburgh. But part of her believed that she wrote the world, and when the world suggested that maybe she didn’t write all of it, she could accuse it of disloyalty, or threaten to sue, or accuse it of ‘cramping and stifling my vital development as a writer’, or say, self-importantly: ‘I need a home publisher who thinks of my stuff importantly.’ She gave the chalk-striped chaps at Macmillan hell, and was always more comfortable with her American publishers, several of whom were women, and who kept her sweet by offering her places to stay and work in New York, as well as big advances.

Her sugary letters to Shirley Hazzard in the early 1960s (‘Enyway I can’t talkers to any other friend as I can talkers to you’) aren’t enough to offset the acidity on display elsewhere. Readers will have to wait until Volume 2 of the letters for Spark’s inevitable falling out with Hazzard, but many will feel that one volume is enough. Dan Gunn (apart from a shocking misidentification of an allusion to the great 17th-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor) does an excellent job of annotating the earlier letters (though some of the best are extracted and quoted only in footnotes) and no doubt will be equally meticulous in the second volume, as Spark flames her way through more publishers and former friends during the 1970s and beyond. But by 1963 she had arrived. She was rich enough to buy green and blue Hermès suede gloves in Paris. She was also suave enough to conceal beneath those gloves (most of the time at least) the knuckle-duster with which she had established herself as a Famous Author.