Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to an indulgent Scottish Jewish father whom she adored, Barney Camberg, and an English mother from an Anglican family, Cissy Uezzell, whose garrulousness and fondness for both pretty clothes and sweetly potent Madeira wine, of which she downed an impressive bottle a day (“my tonic”), left her watchful daughter unbeguiled. Cissy’s tiny and opinionated mother, Adelaide, shared the family’s modest apartment for six enlivening years. She provided a model for—among a splendid gang of subversive grandes dames—Lady Edwina Oliver in Loitering with Intent (1981), one of Spark’s wittiest and most autobiographical novels.
Educated at Gillespie’s, the Edinburgh day school to which she later sent her son, Samuel Robin, Muriel was singled out by a warmhearted and art-loving teacher. Christina Kay’s naive attachment to Fascist Italy formed a significant strand in her recreation as the high-spirited Jean Brodie in her brilliant pupil’s sixth and best-known work of fiction, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). The future novelist was crowned “Queen of Poetry” at Gillespie’s, where, according to Frances Wilson’s artful and multifaceted portrait, Electric Spark, “Muriel was revered by staff and pupils alike.” Martin Stannard, her widely praised and long-suffering first biographer, took a dimmer view, commenting that Spark’s schoolgirl poems, while admirably controlled, were “modest,” “sentimental,” and “certainly not precocious like Evelyn Waugh’s schoolboy writings.” (Waugh, an early admirer of Spark’s novels, was the subject of a two-volume biography by Stannard.)
Muriel was nineteen and still living at home in 1936 when she met Sydney Oswald Spark, a thirty-two-year-old math teacher, at a local dance hall. A troubled man, his initials later earned him the nickname SOS. Hungry for travel and unaware of his history of mental disturbance—a habit of firing pistols during classes for deaf pupils had impeded his progress in Scottish schools—Muriel agreed to follow him to Southern Rhodesia, where the couple were married the following year.
Wilson, notable for the boldness, quicksilver intelligence, and originality of her interpretations of writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Thomas de Quincey, and Dorothy Wordsworth, sees “Ossie” Spark’s surname as having “destined” Muriel to marry him. “The name ‘Muriel’ means ‘sparkle,’” she asserts in a graceful reworking of its origin in the Gaelic muirgheal, meaning “bright sea.” “That, Miss Brodie would say, is its root. Sparkle Spark: nomen omen.”
So there we are. Sparkling Miss Camberg was fated to wed the man whose name so closely mirrored her own. It was this electrifying sense of destiny, Wilson suggests, that continued to attract Muriel to people whose initials reflected her own. Mary Stuart had come into the future novelist’s life when she was still in thrall to the charismatic Christina Kay, who wove romantic tales around Scotland’s Catholic queen, beheaded in 1587 at forty-four. Queen Mary had four devoted ladies-in-waiting. Wilson identifies Spark’s own four satellites as Marie Stopes (whom Spark detested, with good reason), Mary Shelley (about whom she wrote, for once in her life, with more feeling than art), Mary Stranger (a nom de plume adopted by Spark for four unpublished poems), and Mary Stuart herself, singled out for a kinship that Wilson believes goes far beyond a set of shared initials:
Both women loved clothes, jewels and dancing, both were what Spark called “bad pickers” of men, both left their sons in Scotland when they fled to England, both were poets, plotters, Catholics, code makers and victims of jealousy. And both had four Marys.
A daring speculation proceeds to Wilson’s suggestion that Stannard was “destined” to become Spark’s appointed biographer by virtue of his name. (“There were his initials for a start.”) But this is Wilson speaking, not her subject, and it’s unclear how safely such an imaginative approach can be sustained. My own insignificant and sole encounter with the aging Dame Muriel took place on bended knee while she reclined, small and impeccably dressed, on a velvet couch at a party in her honor. (She suffered serious back pain following a botched operation in 1992.) Should I assume that the accident of our shared initials has led to the writing of this review? Was Stannard, described by Wilson as “an iron filing” to Spark’s “magnet for experiences,” really attracted and then “yoked” to his subject by a similar coincidence?
Seemingly, yes. Wilson takes a serious view of a witty article Spark wrote for The New Yorker in 1975 about an imagined return to the first day of her life. In it the novelist noted a random handful of events that took place that day and suggested that her own scarcely formed mind, already a magnet for everything it needed, good and bad, had registered them all. While Stannard notes that Spark always ridiculed the idea that her psychic powers reached beyond the luminous and controlling vision of a novelist, Wilson sees the New Yorker essay as exemplifying her habit of making fun of what she most cared about. In fact, she was always conscious of “something beyond myself,” Wilson notes. That quotation comes from a passage about religion in Curriculum Vitae (1992), the memoir in which Spark also airily laid claim to “an access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels.”
In Wilson’s shimmering interpretation of Spark, she was a writer who delighted in the art of deception, and codes were always of prime importance to her work. Ossie Spark’s teaching had apparently first attracted her because it involved using sign language for deaf children; shorthand provided another cipher for her lightning-quick mind to crack. Wilson more convincingly suggests that in Africa a lonely wife with time on her hands could have been recruited to work for wartime intelligence, using codes in a way that would have made Spark a perfect fit for the job she took on shortly after her return alone to bomb-strafed London in 1944. Interviewed at a genteel employment office, the non-German-speaking Spark was offered a job as a secretary at the country headquarters of the Political Warfare Executive under the British propaganda chief Sefton Delmer, from which he and his team disseminated misleading newspapers and radio shows to Germany. While there, Wilson says, “deep inside the mirror world of black propaganda, [Muriel] had her brain removed, rewired and replaced,” an experience that she later imposed on Elsa Hazlett (already dead when the novel begins) in her only New York–based book, The Hothouse by the East River (1973). Delmer, disappointingly, omitted mention of his remarkable secretary in Black Boomerang (1962), a detailed record of his wartime work on which Wilson draws for one of her most fascinating chapters.
Wilson sees Spark’s two archives, one in Tulsa, the other in Edinburgh, as “her master plot,” the ultimate code, created with an ingenuity that only the most insightful of interpreters can crack. She has scoured their substantial folders of letters (almost none survive from before Spark’s return from Africa in 1944). She has examined the diaries (which prove to be disappointingly impersonal), the drafts, the manuscripts, the newspaper clippings (minutely preserved by an egomaniac who cherished even the smallest mention of herself), and the more bafflingly copious boxes of receipts (from which Stannard learned that Spark ordered her ballpoint pens from Harrods and her pantyhose from Bergdorf Goodman). But Wilson, a stalwart sleuth in her quest for revelations and connections, has also been shrewd enough to look for what was not preserved.
The six and a half years that Spark spent in Africa are among the least recorded parts of her life. And it’s here, in one of the most impressive sections of an endlessly inquiring and provocative book, that Wilson appears to have come up with her major scoop, which she flags in a dedication to Clair Wills (a frequent writer for these pages), Claudia FitzHerbert (an author and literary editor), and Nita McEwen.
Nita who?
Between 1951 and 1961 Spark wrote a handful of short stories based on her impressions of Rhodesia. One of them, “Bang-Bang You’re Dead,” is what seems to be the lightly fictionalized account of a shocking event that she later described in the notoriously unreliable Curriculum Vitae. Nita McEwen, a former schoolmate and physical near twin to Spark, had apparently shown up at the hotel near Victoria Falls where Spark, already intending to leave her husband because of his psychiatric problems (and perhaps his uninhibited colonialism), was staying with her young son and a nanny. Nita was shot that night by her deranged husband. Her death marked the culmination of Spark’s decision to file for divorce and return to England. Toward the end of her life, she claimed that people who saw her at the hotel on the day after the shooting mistook her for Nita’s ghost.
Searching the records at Gillespie’s, where no Nita McEwen appears among the school’s alumni, and in Rhodesia’s wartime newspapers—murdered wives seem to have been a regular feature in the country’s white community—Wilson found nothing. She concludes dramatically—and perhaps correctly—that Nita McEwen was a fiction. Killing an imaginary twin freed Spark to start a new life and embark upon a literary career. It’s an intriguing proposition, modestly supported by Wilson’s discovery that Nita McEwen’s name produces the anagram Twin Menace. Wilson’s further suggestion that Spark was merely enlivening a task that bored her—the writing of Curriculum Vitae—feels more possible than plausible. Why, in a book that was so noisily assertive about its concern with truth telling, would Spark risk the introduction of such a detectable falsehood?1
Back in London as a child-free divorcée in 1944 (her son, arriving with his father in September 1945, was settled with her Edinburgh-based parents), Spark took up residence at the genteelly raffish, all-female Helena Club, in a fictionalized version of which she set one of her best-loved and most elegantly structured novels, The Girls of Slender Means (1963). She was still living there in 1947 when she became general secretary to the Poetry Society and editor of its dowdy magazine, The Poetry Review. Dominated by tweedy misogynists who viewed their attractive young recruit as easy prey, this complacent little world was shaken to its core by Spark’s refusal to be seduced, except on her own terms, and her determination to drag the magazine out of its Georgian stupor and to publish poems by W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and T.S. Eliot. While falling short of that pinnacle (her pages included Michael Hamburger, Laurie Lee, and Kathleen Raine), Spark ensured that her employment would be brief when she announced her intention in a bold first editorial that offered a rousing defense of “the Moderns.”
Wilson, “taking direction” from Spark’s habit of writing character lists for her novels, is at her high-spirited best in creating a grisly gallery of The Poetry Review’s former editors and contributors, presented with all of Spark’s malice and wit in a section that goes well with The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume 1: 1944–1963, superbly edited and annotated by Dan Gunn. Responding to the petty complaints and outrageous demands of the talent-free men whose titanic egos make her own appear almost small, Spark achieved a combination of flattery and steeliness that commands applause. Accused by William Kean Seymour, a thwarted rival for her editorial position, of writing “arrogant nonsense,” she struck back with a sharp warning to desist from his false statements or “take the consequences.” Wilson, quoting from letters published in Curriculum Vitae, takes particular delight in charting Spark’s ferocious combat with and defeat of one of her “four Marys.” Marie Stopes, a campaigner for birth control (for married women) and an advocate of eugenics, was also a dreadful poet—and a leading figure in the Poetry Society:
Marie Stopes hated Mrs. Spark on sight because she was young and lovely while Stopes herself—aged sixty-seven but hoping to pass as twenty-six—had allowed her body, as Spark put it, “to succumb to the laws of gravity,” by which she meant that Stopes (famously) did not wear a bra.
Spark’s brief service at the Poetry Society and The Poetry Review marked the resumption of a romantic life. While she was not an especially good selector or keeper of beaux, Wilson’s account of her as a magnet for “men whose bottomless mediocrity suggests that she did not know any other kind” seems uncharitable. Howard Sergeant ran a good small poetry magazine, Outposts. (Its list of contributors included Charles Causley, Douglas Dunn, and Peter Reading.) It was not Sergeant’s mediocrity so much as his refusal to leave his wife and young daughter to marry Spark—he eventually married someone else—that turned her against him. (In Curriculum Vitae, Spark allowed that her lover of eighteen months was a beautiful dancer who was said by certain unidentified “independent readers” to have written her some “quite good” love poems.)
Spark’s relationship with Derek Stanford, the writer with whom she shared Sergeant’s poems and to whom she transferred her affections, was far more complex. Ridiculed and vilified in her novel A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) as Hector Bartlett, pisseur de copie (the insulting phrase for a literary hack that Spark coined and repeats, Wilson tells us, thirty-eight times), the passive and bisexual Stanford was briefly her lover. More importantly, he was a loyal enabler and frequent collaborator during the critical period in which Spark found her voice as a novelist after converting to Catholicism. Short, balding, and emotionally fragile (he lived mostly at home with his parents until he eventually married in his forties), Stanford was intelligent, well connected, and industrious. A devoted companion who recognized Spark’s brilliance, he did all in his power to help release it.
It helped that the superficially unlikely couple shared literary tastes and were both prepared to work, Wilson says, “very, very hard” to achieve their mutual ambitions. Over a period of seven years, their joint enterprises included a centennial tribute to Wordsworth (1950), a selection of Mary Shelley’s letters (1953), a critical biography of Emily Brontë (1953), and—reflecting Spark’s conversion to Catholicism—an edition of Cardinal Newman’s letters (1957). Independently during those same years, Spark produced numerous articles and reviews, a handful of superlative short stories, a selection of poems by Emily Brontë (1952) and of letters by the three Brontë sisters (1954), an uncompleted study of T.S. Eliot, and another of John Masefield (1953). While these have mostly vanished from public view, Spark also found time to write a life of Mary Shelley, whose story the code-seeking Wilson sees as “expressly laid out, like a message, for [Spark] to find.” It’s clear why Stannard, urged by the unforgiving Spark to present the pious, frail, and aging Stanford as a villain (for selling 179 letters, with her approval, and for publishing a characteristically well-meaning but error-filled book about her without it), found the task of castigating him impossible. As does Frances Wilson.2
Throughout the couple’s long period of happy and productive involvement, despite their being forbidden intimacy after 1953 because of Spark’s contemplated conversion to Catholicism (a topic Wilson disappointingly regards, like Spark’s unhappy marriage, as too “mysterious” and “difficult” a subject for analysis), Stanford remained unfailingly loyal and supportive. When Spark suffered a psychotic breakdown in 1954 after taking weight-reducing drugs and became convinced that T.S. Eliot was sending her secret messages in his play The Confidential Clerk (of which she wrote a review in 1953 that Eliot considered magnificent), Stanford encouraged him to write and reassure her. Appealing to Graham Greene as a fellow Catholic convert, Stanford persuaded him to contribute a modest monthly allowance to the aspiring writer. When the adoring Spark told Stanford that he was her superior (“When we exchange ideas, I fall short of you”), he resisted the flattery. Among his papers, Wilson lit upon his sad but lucid observation that Spark’s occasional “hallucination” of their twinship was all the stranger, “because in a number of ways we utterly failed to understand each other.”
There’s no denying the peculiarity of their relationship. While never ceasing to admire her work—a temporarily bedridden Stanford told Spark that her deliciously funny third novel, Memento Mori (1959), had made him laugh until his stitches ached—her devoted ally withdrew in 1958 before, like Howard Sergeant, marrying a less demanding woman. It’s hard to blame either man for taking flight: Stannard, writing from firsthand experience, reported on the precarious balance in Spark’s personality between “the nun and the tigress.”
The Stanford–Spark partnership was still intact in 1955 when Spark began writing The Comforters (1957). (Gunn’s edition of Spark’s correspondence includes letters from 1955 that address Stanford, through whom she had now acquired a promising young literary agent, John Smith, as “Bonny Pet,” “sweet Derek,” and “Dearest Boy.”) Completed in five months, the novel focuses on Laurence Manders’s attempts to deal with a diamond-smuggling granny (Louisa Jepp is the first of Spark’s splendidly recalcitrant old ladies) and his girlfriend Caroline Rose’s consciousness of a distant typewriter that is creating the life she leads within the book.
Wilson’s flair for spotting coincidences pays off handsomely in the chapter on The Comforters, with which she formally concludes her study of a writer in the making. (A thirty-page afterword surveys and parses the later years of fame, paranoia, riches, and capricious affections—the writer Ved Mehta described Spark as going through friendships “like pieces of Kleenex”—with Wilson’s characteristic brio.) Waugh, having suffered a drug-induced breakdown similar to Spark’s, was both enthralled by her accounts of mysterious voices in The Comforters and briefly concerned that he might be thought to have written it. Sent a proof by one of Spark’s new Catholic friends, he added his endorsement to the handsome tribute that Stanford had already secured from Greene. Reviewing the book, Waugh mentioned its closeness in subject matter to a novel he had just finished, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), before giving Spark generous credit for “how much better she had accomplished it.”
Wilson’s afterword opens in 1962, when Spark moved from London to an elegant corner suite in one of two Beaux-Arts towers on East 44th Street in New York City. She was also provided with a room (formerly inhabited by A.J. Liebling, a columnist whose deliciously acerbic wit may have influenced her style) in the capacious offices of The New Yorker, next to the cubbyhole occupied by Mehta. It takes Wilson just one sentence to bridge the five years between Spark’s meeting with Penelope Jardine in 1968 and moving into her house in Italy in 1973. The rapid tempo slows only when we reach Spark’s intriguing choice of Martin Stannard, the second volume of whose biography of Waugh she had praised in 1992, to chronicle her life.
Wilson is both respectful and courteous about the travails endured by Stannard, whose 2009 biography of Spark she described in The Telegraph as “gripping” and “about as satisfying as a literary biography can be.” High praise indeed; nevertheless (to borrow Spark’s favorite word), Wilson now describes Stannard’s biography as having “seeded” the idea for her own more intuitive tribute to a remarkable writer.
A defense of her approach as the one that cracks Spark’s codes to expose the secret of her inspiration requires Wilson to whittle away the reader’s confidence in Stannard’s more conventional book. She starts by suggesting that Spark, when first inviting Stannard to “get the record straight,” already knew that she was sending “a dog after a fox, in the certain knowledge that he would lose the scent.” The fact that Spark owned a set of Henry James’s fiction leads Wilson to surmise that the devious old lady, while urging Stannard to explore the relationship between her writing and her life, had already cast him as the narrator of James’s “The Figure in the Carpet,” doomed never to discover the secret hidden within the novels of a celebrated writer. Stannard’s fate was sealed, in Wilson’s view, by Spark’s encounter with The Silent Woman (1993), Janet Malcolm’s dramatic presentation of biographers as partners in crime with their readers: peepers through keyholes and riflers of drawers. From then on, Spark perceived Stannard as a threat.
The final blow is punchily delivered to a fine biographer when Wilson reveals that Waugh’s late grandson Alexander privately wondered whether Stannard was recommended to Spark—a novelist whom Waugh eventually thought had become “overbearingly conceited”—as an act of “pure mischief…. I can imagine him [Evelyn] now with that wicked glint in his eye assuring her that Stannard was exactly the man she needed.” It’s perhaps relevant to note here that Waugh never met Spark and that his grandson’s observation to Wilson was speculative.
With Stannard relegated to the doorstep, Wilson trips into the house of fiction and begins the final process of decoding. A clue to where we are headed is given in the afterword’s opening line, a maxim embroidered by Mary Queen of Scots during her imprisonment (“En ma Fin gît mon Commencement”), followed by an echo from Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” a favorite work of Spark’s that forms the third part of Four Quartets, a meditation on cyclic time: “In my beginning is my end.”
The Finishing School (2004) is the last (and far from the best) of Spark’s completed novels. Set in Geneva (enabling a link to Spark’s interpretation of Shelley’s Frankenstein to emerge from Wilson’s analysis of the text), the book ends with the same-sex marriage of a troubled older writer, Rowland, and Chris, the seventeen-year-old student whose prodigious literary talent he envies. The young man’s novel in progress is about Mary Queen of Scots. Wilson, connecting it to a play about Mary that Spark began writing in 1944 and noting that The Comforters begins at daybreak while The Finishing School concludes at night, discovers a purposeful arc of connection:
“In my end is my beginning,” Mary Stuart embroidered in her prison, which line T.S. Eliot turned into “In my beginning is my end.” From the first sentence of The Comforters Spark knew where she was going, and she arrived there in the last sentence of The Finishing School: her twenty-two novels cover the “time-space” of a day.
But the short novel has more to yield. Attacking the smooth surface of The Finishing School with the vigor of a cavern seeker, Wilson notes that a visiting historian’s lecture on Mary Stuart concludes that the secret of the queen’s tragic history is “jealousy, green jealousy.” Here, Wilson tells us, lies the hidden source of Spark’s inspiration. Stanford was necessary to Spark because she was able to feed upon his jealousy and use it in her work. “Envy and jealousy corrode and destroy,” Wilson writes, “but without them Spark could not write: this is her secret.”
Everything connects in this absorbing exploration of a writer to whom Wilson feels an undisguised kinship. There’s no doubt about who is being described in her final, dramatic account of “intruders in the house of the famous poet [who] can rifle through her letters, pry through her papers, touch her notes, hear her voice start up, radioactive, from the page and draw from her manuscripts their magic.” Nor should a hasty reader overlook the acknowledgments, in which Wilson proclaims that she herself, like Spark, is “a magnet for the experiences I need.”
Electric Spark is a glittering achievement, but its world of foreseen connections and magnetic attractions should not detract from Martin Stannard’s less fanciful biography or cause Spark’s readers to neglect Dan Gunn’s quiet reminder that her towering reputation was built, during the six years in which she wrote her first five novels, “through a combination of inspiration, desperation, and sheer hard work.”
English (US) · 