Muriel Spark led an implausible life. Born into straitened circumstances in Edinburgh as the First World War came to an end, she shone at school before moving to one of the least glamorous corners of the empire, Southern Rhodesia, and marrying unwisely at 19. The trials of family living were exacerbated then relieved by the Second World War. By May 1944, she had divorced her husband, abandoned her son, made the perilous sea voyage back to the UK and taken up employment at the Political Warfare Executive, which produced propaganda for the Allies.
In postwar London, she tried and failed to find both love and a steady income as a poet and woman of letters. The strain drove her to a breakdown. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954, committed herself to novel-writing shortly thereafter and, once The Comforters appeared to critical acclaim in 1957—followed within four years by Robinson, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—she found herself cast as a whimsical, elegantly forbidding and supremely intelligent literary celebrity. It was a role that suited her well.
For the rest of her life, her primary residences were in New York and Italy; she seldom returned to Edinburgh after the death of her father in 1962. But, as she came to recognise, her home city was vital to her sense of self: “To have a great primitive black crag rising up in the middle of populated streets of commerce, stately squares and winding closes, is like the statement of an unmitigated fact preceded by ‘nevertheless’.” That “nevertheless” (a Morningside tic that Spark enjoyed rendering as “niverthelace”) was of the utmost importance to her as a woman and a writer: “I believe myself to be fairly indoctrinated by the habit of thought which calls for this word. In fact, I approve of the ceremonious accumulation of weather forecasts and barometer readings that pronounce for a fine day, before letting rip on the statement ‘nevertheless, it’s raining’. I find that much of my composition is based on the nevertheless idea. I act upon it. It was on the nevertheless principle that I turned Catholic.”
Gothic-Romantic but neoclassical, provincial but a capital city, and ordered but proudly anarchic—her Edinburgh was at ease with its incoherence, and it followed that although its people may have been, as she put it in connection with Robert Louis Stevenson, “sane, eccentric, or plain mad”, they were entirely themselves. Crucially, this meant that “they were not neurotic”, and that they stood in sharp contrast to the belletristic Londoners among whom the Spark of the late 1940s and early 1950s sought for a while to make her way. It isn’t hard to see a willingness to embrace dualities that cannot hope to be resolved as the mainspring of Spark’s fiction, dependent as it is on a series of collisions between the lucid exactitude of her prose and the uncanny, even mystical-supernatural, characteristics of her subject matter.
Frances Wilson is the author of three previous literary biographies, most recently of DH Lawrence. Her new book, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, takes as its subject “the young divorcée whose arrival in postwar London sent feathers flying”, and seeks to explain how she became the author of The Comforters and its rapidly completed successor novels. There are several obstacles to writing such a book. Spark herself published an autobiography considering these years, Curriculum Vitae, and gave them fictional treatment in several of her novels—chiefly, though by no means exclusively, The Girls of Slender Means, Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington. Moreover, Spark has received the full attentions of a biographer, Martin Stannard, whose relevant chapters are a masterclass in quietly detailed perspicuity.
Although Stannard was Spark’s chosen biographer, she was somewhere between dissatisfied and dismayed by the account of her life that he produced. Muriel Spark: The Biography would not see publication until 2009, three years after Spark’s death. Wilson is always respectful towards Stannard, but suggests that he “does not tell the full story because he is part of that story”. It would be fairer to say that Stannard does not tell the full story because his version of it comes to a halt six years before the same could be said of Spark, but you can see Wilson’s point. Then again, as Stannard does an impeccable job with the 39 or so years that led up to the publication of The Comforters, it is unclear how his silence on the final portion of Spark’s earthly span, and on his own unhappy place within it, puts Wilson in a position to do something new or substantively different with the young divorcée.
Certainly, Wilson is less wedded to hard-and-fast evidence than Stannard—and, just as certainly, this has advantages. For instance, working from intuition or an unmentioned source, Wilson wonders if the reason for the 18-month gap in the record of Spark’s time in colonial Africa is that she was doing clandestine work for the intelligence branch of the British South Africa Police, seeking out infiltrators and enemy aliens after the outbreak of war. I don’t suppose the relevant records survive, but this fits, “and might explain her obsession with spying and being spied on herself”.
Was Spark doing clandestine work for the intelligence branch of the British South Africa Police?
As speculations of this kind might suggest, Wilson largely keeps her distance from the historical reconstructions that are the biographer’s stock-in-trade. Instead, she unapologetically uses the fiction—specifically, the novels written in and about the long 1950s—to narrate the life. Some of this might be down to a disinclination to follow in Stannard’s wake. Some of it might be down to permissions: the first volume of Spark’s correspondence, edited by Dan Gunn, will be published by Virago later in the year, and I imagine that there are restrictions on what can be quoted ahead of time. Even so, Electric Spark does not feel like a book whose original goals have been thwarted or transformed. Throughout, Wilson writes towards a vision of Spark as a being all-but-invulnerable to the what, where and when of everyday existence—or, rather, a vision in which the what, where and when of everyday existence were things from which Spark needed to win her freedom to become the artist, and the woman, that were her truest selves.
That Spark’s novels violate the conventions of orderly chronological progression is uncontroversial. To take just one example, think of the way in which Mary Macgregor, Miss Brodie’s least favourite charge, is introduced: “lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire”. Spark enjoys more than the pleasures of exquisitely offhand cruelty. She plays with the omniscience of a creator who knows the past, present and future of her characters just as surely as the Christian God, situated in the eternal present of heaven, sees all that is and has been and all that will come to pass.
Spark also got a kick out of teasing her readers with the notion that she was a prophetess or bard—not only clairvoyant but able to discern the secret harmonies around which events are, and will continue to be, arranged. Wilson takes this Spark seriously: she “suffered from foresight” such that her novels and the real-life experiences on which they draw, and that they sometimes predict, become indistinguishable. By 1963, Wilson tells us, “the operation of time, in Muriel’s world, had long ceased to be chronological”. She knew that it was her “destiny” to become a writer at just six, and everything that happened to her afterwards did so to that preordained end. This includes her calamitous marriage, furnishing as it did the young Muriel Camberg with a strong writer’s name: it was because her husband “was called Spark that Muriel was destined to marry him”.
In Curriculum Vitae, Spark describes a doppelganger. Although Nita McEwen was a year or so older than Spark, these two Edinburgh girls were all but identical. Some time later, the two of them—independently, astonishingly—found themselves staying in the same Rhodesian boarding house. One night, Nita was murdered by her unstable husband, who then turned the gun on himself. Spark heard the shots, and the fear that she might meet a similar fate led to separation, divorce and a perilous journey back to the UK. The topic was one that Spark sometimes revisited in interviews.
The biggest revelation of Electric Spark is that Nita McEwen seems never to have existed outside the imaginations of Spark and her readers. Was Spark merely livening up the, to her, dull task of the autobiographer? Possibly. Wilson notes that the name is an anagram of “Twin Menace”. But Wilson prefers the theory that “Nita McEwen is murdered so that Muriel Spark can be born. It is because of Nita McEwen’s murder that Muriel summons the courage to leave her marriage, leave her child, leave the Colony and come to London to become a famous novelist.” Note Wilson’s present tense. As neither chronology nor conventional causality matter to an artist whose truest identities exist out-of-time, then Nita’s death also does duty for Spark’s absolute need to free herself from the mediocre males of her 1950s and for her attempts to discharge her responsibilities to her son (who, on returning from Africa after the war, would be raised by her parents) by sending money, even when she had painfully little of it herself. For Spark to exist as she would from The Comforters onwards, sacrifices had to be made; Nita McEwen is one of the three women to whom Electric Spark is dedicated.
Wilson’s determination to capture Spark in all her complexity is refreshing
This approach to literary life-writing has more than nerve to recommend it: we are never allowed to lose sight of why Spark actually matters amid the paraphernalia of the biographical doorstopper, and Wilson’s determination to capture Spark in all her complexity, without prurience or censoriousness, is refreshing. But there is much to give pause. Take Wilson’s emphatic-euphoric style—her insistence on throwing everything at the wall as hard as she can in the knowledge that at least some of it will stick. In the service of a writer like Spark, this feels less like a distraction than an impediment.
Tastes, though, will differ: for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. A greater problem is that, in using the novels as she does and in extending the prerogatives of the novelist both to Spark’s self-narrations and to her own narrations of Spark’s life, Wilson misses something crucial.
Put to one side the fact that fictional representations of autobiographical events are always a trick mirror. The animating conceit of Spark’s fiction is that the novelist is free to do whatever she likes to her creations. In Spark’s case, this includes extending her characters—like the Creature in Frankenstein (Spark’s first book, published in 1951, was a critical life of Mary Shelley)—the freedom to resist. That’s why so many of them are writers or novelists, attempting to assert their own creative autonomy but failing because their fictions are mere shadows of the truth that is existence within Spark’s novelistic designs. Spark’s novels are themselves assertions of creative autonomy, of course. But because, after her conversion, she took her creator to be bound by goodness, mercy and forgiveness, her fictions were anything but a form of fighting back. They were instead typically idiosyncratic acts of piety; ones that took as their subject the human inability to generate more than a shadow of providential order, and that trusted God to get the joke.
This deep seriousness, this playful confidence born of hard-won humility, this sense that an all-seeing, all-knowing Spark could never be more than an artfully sly absurdity—this is what Electric Spark misses. Nevertheless, it is an interesting book, made more so by its steadfast refusal to put safety first.
