It is Muriel Spark’s universe and I just live in it. Certainly, her droll eye and irrepressible spirits have been a comfort to me these past few years, as the culture around me seemed to collapse into obsessive interiority and neurotic display. Just like their originator, many of Spark’s chatty, noticing characters have no interest in navel-gazing and little self-doubt. To spend time with them is relaxing and amusing, no matter what chicanery they witness or have embarked upon themselves. And I’m sure she would have slyly enjoyed the rise of occult ideologies, and the hypocrisies of the new moralisers; the pomposity of those jostling for power in reaction; and the enclaves of conspiracy theorists, some of whose muttered suspicions may well turn out to be right.
On the other hand, it’s a racing certainty Spark would have hated Frances Wilson’s new biography of her, Electric Spark, out this week. The novelist just about tolerated being a pawn in God’s divine plan, but flatly refused to do it for anyone else. When an envious former lover tried to capture her essence in various pedestrian literary memoirs, she was sufficiently irritated to write a rather evasive autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, eclipsing his lies with some artful concoctions and half-truths of her own. And having commissioned biographer Martin Stannard in her early 70s, instructing him to “Treat me as though I was dead”, she spent the rest of her life furiously battling with him about his vision of her. Even Wilson sensed a ghostly presence pulling the strings: “She 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.”
“There’s nothing I can tell the public about my life that can clarify my books… It’s rather the books that clarify my life”. As Spark’s famous pedagogue Miss Jean Brodie might have told you, the author was fond of the literary device known as antimetabole – a form of chiasmus – in which word order is satisfyingly, symmetrically reversed. And Wilson takes Spark at her word here, mining several of the novels and short stories for clues about the person. The result is illuminating and diverting, though in the end the subject remains satisfyingly elusive.
Spark loved mythmaking about herself. One such myth – which might also have been true – was that she was a lightning rod for coincidences and supernatural happenings, or as she put it, a “magnet for experience”. The world around her would arrange itself so as to provide material for the stories. Sometimes it even seemed that her stories made the world conform to them later. And certainly, the first half of life for this working-class “Gentile Jewess” from Edinburgh was interspersed with the kind of improbable incident that in her fiction would sometimes feel terribly contrived.
Waiting for a boat out of wartime Cape Town after fleeing an unhappy marriage, she meets Freud’s famous analysand, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who charges her with carrying a message to Freud’s daughter Anna. Looking for a job at the Employment Bureau in Ladbroke Grove, the recruiter spots the Ivy Compton-Burnett novel she is carrying, and sends her off to be a secretary at the unit in charge of war propaganda. There, she watches boss Sefton Delmer make up fake radio shows and devise complex legends to undermine Nazi morale, all the while profitably learning about the possibility of messages within messages, hidden “between the lines”.
On a train back to London, anticipating the night’s bombing raids, she accepts the invitation of a young au pair to shelter at her employer’s house. That employer turns out to be Louis MacNeice. She creeps around the absent poet’s house like a burglar, opening drawers and venerating objects, then calls a literary agent on his telephone. Next stop on the journey to becoming a proper writer, she edits the Poetry Review, attracts the disapproval of the antediluvian committee with her modernising, and gets into an escalating war of rude letters with eugenicist birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes. Each of these events will reappear in fictional permutations when she begins writing novels at the age of 37, having switched from poetry and biographical criticism.
At times during this formative period, Spark sounds like the helpless character in Nabokov’s story “Symbols and Signs”, who suffers from “referential mania” and who imagines that “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence”. (Of course, in a sense, this character is right.) One of her wartime jobs had been to listen to the scrambler telephone, “heavily jammed with jangling caterwauls” and decipher information through the white noise. She takes this habit with her into peacetime, and it is still a bit unclear who is at the other end. Her paranoid phase culminates in a Dexedrine-induced nervous breakdown, during which life becomes too fast and chaotic for her to integrate it properly into a story. She goes to see a play by T.S. Eliot, and though she has never met him, finds it bristling with coded messages written especially for her. As the psychosis advances, she warns friends that the author of The Wasteland is now posing as a window cleaner in order to steal their private papers.
At the same time, she is converting to Catholicism, which eventually saves her; for it allows her “to see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings”. Rather than simply ventriloquising others, “nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now” – though you might say she simply opted for ventriloquising God instead. The novels are full of messages from beyond – characters haunted by the sound of a typewriter; mysterious phone calls; anonymous letters; disembodied voices – with Spark always playfully blurring roles of deity and author. Her “ears had memories”, she said; and along with the Border ballads, Mary Stuart, the Brontës, and John Henry Newman, another obsession was Mary Shelley. A bit like Shelley’s famous doctor, from now on she would be suturing together bits of reality, then vitalising the whole with the presence of something uncanny or macabre. Even in her most beloved comic work, there is icy betrayal. You end up siding – marginally – with the fascist over the nun.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Spark’s conversion, beautifully drawn out by Wilson in her book, is her changing attitude to the unconscious. As a poet and critic, she had dutifully tried to uncover it, but as a novelist she did her best to get rid of it altogether. Creating order out of chaos, she hoarded every paper and piece of correspondence, meticulously archiving them; these were all the “facts” about her to be found. “Piece by piece Spark cordoned off the parts over which she had no control until she had turned herself inside out; everything that had been cellared became, she hoped, externalised as the vast cloud of unknowing which was the religious experience”, writes Wilson in an insightful passage.
In getting bored of psychological explanations, Spark seems well ahead of her time, more in step with the contemporary shift towards traditional forms of Christian worship. The psychoanalysts tried to stuff God into the box of the human mind. But all you ended up with was mystical, mystifying psychology, so you might as well just let Him out again. And so Spark did, furnishing a compellingly idiosyncratic fictional world with ghosts, devils, and angels mingling seamlessly with living mortals for good or ill. Not for her the metaphysics of fellow Edinburgh native David Hume, for whom moral judgements were transitory human projections onto real things. For Spark, “good” and “evil” picked out aspects as real as the weather, and she sometimes defined artistry by the ability to perceive them where others could not. “No artist has lived who has not experienced and then recognized something, at first too incredibly evil as to seem real, then so undoubtedly real as to be undoubtedly true”, she has protagonist Fleur say in Loitering With Intent.
“For Spark, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ picked out aspects as real as the weather, and she sometimes defined artistry by the ability to perceive them where others could not.”
Spark admired God for all the miracles and transubstantiation but could take or leave the other stuff. She never went to confession, avoided sermons like the plague, and arrived at Mass only in time for the Eucharist. Her version of God seemed somewhat built in her own image; which is to say, playful, inscrutable, and emotionally disassociated to a near-psychopathic degree. In the brilliant short story that launched her career, “The Seraph and the Zambesi” – in which a colonial children’s ballet recital gets wrecked by the presence of a six-winged, incandescently hot seraph – she ends with another antimetabole: “we watched him ride the Zambesi away from us among the rocks that look like crocodiles and the crocodiles that look like rocks”. For God observing his creations, perhaps rocks are just as interesting as crocodiles and vice versa.
Spark was certainly interested in people; but as she got more famous, it was mostly for the practical support they could lend to her career, or the fictional content she could wring out of them. Other humans became the backdrop to her narcissism, which is also to say, her creative intensity and proper regard for herself as a great artist. Also like God, perhaps, she was a terror for pinioning people for hours when she felt like a chat, “‘electrocuting them down the telephone”, as one recipient put it.
Thankfully, Electric Spark isn’t one of those books that tries to uncover the monster behind the typewriter; not even when it discusses her abandonment of her son, or casually includes the detail in passing of “the death – by neglect – of Bluebell her cat”. Though she is capable of warm and generous portraits – Jean Brodie, Milly the housekeeper in A Far Cry From Kensington, Solly in Loitering With Intent – I love her because of her detachment not in spite of it; and it seems that Wilson might do too. Writing about the Eliot play that sent her temporarily doolally, Spark reminds the reader that a comedy is “a representation of life in which the Will of God is demonstrated to prevail” whereas in a tragedy “the will of man is demonstrated to prevail”. With Muriel in charge of the storyline, life can still be gloriously interesting and funny, despite the villains and mediocrities sent every day to try us.
