BIOGRAPHY: Muriel Spark: The BiographyBy Martin Stannard Weidenfeld Nicolson, 627pp. £25
THERE WERE MANY Muriel Sparks. First there was Muriel Camberg, born in 1918, daughter of a half-Jewish Scottish family. Then there was Muriel Spark, wife of a mentally unstable older man from whom she separated after a time in what was then (in the mid-1940s) southern Rhodesia, where she gave birth to their son, Robin, with whom in turn she had an often fraught relationship. There was the alluringly attractive secretary in war-ravaged London, then the youngish Roman Catholic convert who, by the late 1950s, was making a name for herself as a fascinatingly fresh novelist and short story writer. Her writing life would span 50 years and produce 22 novels, 44 short stories, plays, collected poems, television, radio and film scripts, and a mass of magnificent travel and literary writing (crying out for collection and publication). Muriel Spark-Camberg was a cat-woman who had to fight her corner, and if you were not in her corner you could be mauled for loitering there.
As Martin Stannard's Muriel Spark: The Biographydescribes it in all its incremental detail (and the occasional lapse – it was the UVF that bombed Dublin, not the IRA), Spark's life was that of a woman who had to protect every gain in popular and critical recognition she made in a patriarchal world patronisingly complacent about her successes but also often niggardly in defence of her artistic and intellectual achievements and, crucially, of her hard-won independence from any literary "scene" or group. The image that emerges of this attractively complicated, cosmopolitan Scottish writer, by turns vulnerable and feisty, whose "experience of growing up in a family of diverse origins was integral to her vision of the world" and who enjoyed her life (of friends, good food and wine, clothes, art galleries and unpretentiously helping out those who needed help), is of a challengingly astute and provocative maker of fiction. She was contradictory, tense and driven to distraction at times by the demands of her writing rather than by the business of being a writer (a role and pose she played better than most, knowing that it was precisely that, a game, playing).
Of one thing Spark was utterly protective: privacy. “Privacy,” writes Stannard, “became an obsession.”
At the root of this hatred of the “personality game” lay other propositions. Her private life was the stimulus for her art, and she refused to squander her raw material to slake the public thirst for “colour pieces”. Her art was external to herself, a transfiguration of the personal. She wanted her past to remain a mystery until she chose imaginatively to re-enter it. This was holy territory, as was her domestic space, and its protection led to further accusations of snootiness. Ultimately, it contributed to her leaving Britain.
Also, Spark’s sense of commitment to her writing could be misunderstood or even overlooked by loved ones, such as her mother, Cissy: “They had no idea, none of them, what it meant to be an artist, a writer. They didn’t appreciate that side of my work: the artistic process. No idea whatsoever.”
According to Stannard, fame, the other side of the coin, “provided money but it had no reality, generating only a vacuous form of self-esteem. It did nothing but obstruct creative work, was bad for the soul. But she needed it. She needed to learn how to manage it. Above all, she decided, she needed to get away.”
These contradictions produced some of the last half-century's greatest fictions, such as The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Territorial Rights (1979), A Far Cry From Kensington (1988), and her elusive yet methodical autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992).
Spark's celebrity saw her jetting between her variously changing places of habitation, "a cuckoo perching in others' nests, a go-away bird always ready to take flight", in London, New York, Rome and, ultimately, Tuscany, where she was to reside in the studio home of her artist friend, Penelope Jardine, for the last 30 years of her long and productive life. She saw friends come and go, alliances made and unmade, dalliances form and derail in all manner of fights and cultural settings. She got to know the New Yorkerset with the wondrous William Maxwell, was part of the dolce vitaRoman and expatriate moment in the late 1960s, and travelled constantly throughout her homeland of Europe, north, south, east and west.
Her success as a writer of literary fiction is a lesson in itself, as the critical intelligence which produced a series of (co-)editions and/or studies of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, John Masefield and Cardinal Newman was restlessly thinking about the nature of truth and the matter of art. As one of the great critics of our time, Frank Kermode, put it, “no one has thought so brilliantly, so idiosyncratically about the relation of truth to lies, of life to fiction” as Muriel Spark.
Despite the rare carping reviews she faced in England, such as Lorna Sage’s uncharacteristically pinched view that Spark “has contrived an alarmingly smart reputation for herself . . . back in 1960 she must have seemed one of the ruck of aspiring English writers, without any special brilliance or definition . . . There was critical acclaim, certainly, but nothing out of the ordinary or un-English.” This Scottish writer was “certainly” out of the ordinary and her work, internationally recognised by fellow writers such as John Updike, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, soars “scatheless” (one of her own words) above the wreckage of human affairs which she seemed fated, as a brisk and passionate woman, to be drawn to. As she said, art gave pleasure, “that element of pleasure which restores the proportions of the human spirit” and is “the opposite and enemy of boredom and pain”. Her “hatred of provincialism, prurience, nationalism; the satire of vanity leavened by the spirit of mockery” was down to one thing: “I have inside me a laughter demon without which I would die.”
Muriel Spark: The Biographyreads like an authorised version of the truth about Muriel Spark, but who Muriel Camberg truly was is another story. In his abundant researches, Prof Stannard alerts today's reader to just how real and perfected this great writer's achievement was:
no writer was more sensitive to the thrilling mystery of consciousness, to the intersection of the supernatural with the natural, red in tooth and claw. And across that gap, between hope and despair, sparks the electricity of faith and of mystery; “mystery” in the religious sense, and “mystique” in the Proustian sense of the strange sacramental aura of otherwise perfectly ordinary things and words.
In a culture consumed by the specious claims of celebrity and self-exposure, merely to read these words of passing insight returns us to the incontestable reason for literature and to the undaunted success of Miss Muriel Spark.
Gerald Dawe's Country Music: Uncollected Poems 1974-1989and The World as Province: Selected Prose 1980-2008will appear later this year. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin