Writing to Muriel Spark after reading her 1960 novel The Bachelors, Evelyn Waugh asks her, “How do you do it?”
He is “dazzled” to see that she has written each of her first five novels to a distinct plan. Still only a few years into her career as a published novelist, Spark is obviously a significant talent. A latish starter, thirty-nine when she published her first novel, The Comforters, Spark is to deliver twenty-two more. Her life has been rather dramatic, in a way that has perhaps firmed her grip on her pen: however varied the plots, the signature will always be clear. In a review of The Only Problem for the New Yorker in 1984, John Updike writes:
“We are never out of touch, in a Spark novel, with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of image and epigram, the cunning tautness of suspense, the beautifully firm modulations from passage to passage, the blunt yet dignified dialogues all remind us of the author, the superintending intelligent mind”.
If he made it sound as if Spark were playing God, he was implying what many critics have preferred to baldly state. The Comforters, whose title alludes to the Book of Job—returned to in The Only Problem—had set up an analogy between Catholic conversion and the intimation, received by its heroine Caroline Rose, that she is a character in a novel written by some unseen author. If composition is something like Providence, Spark is something like God. Within her novelistic creations as within Creation, people, whom she gives rather thin representations as characters, have choices, including terribly important ones. Being only human, they cannot see the larger design, so farcical comedy follows, and Spark sometimes extends her authorial, omniscient advantage through prolepsis, as when telling us, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, who will betray the title character long before we expect to learn.
If composition is something like Providence, Spark is something like God.
Death, sometimes violent and comic, is often predestined and previewed in Spark’s fiction, and the reflexive cliché has then been to call her “cruel” in her treatment of her characters. This term is used in the course of praising her, but one is still tempted to make a defense of the author by asking where these characters were when she laid the earth’s foundation. She created them, and she sustains them. They undertake intelligent questioning in their “dignified dialogues”, however rarely they may find the answers, and they have their own will, sometimes too much of it. Muriel has the divine spark, and she has given it to her people. How did she learn to use her gift?
Frances Wilson’s biography, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel (2025) is mostly concerned with this question, the formation of the artist. As Wilson explains in her preface, she is interested not in the “grande dame of her last forty years but the young divorcee whose arrival in post-war London sent feathers flying and started all the hares”. So Wilson ends her main account in the early sixties, with the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the New Yorker. There follows a long afterword which runs through the remaining forty plus years, beginning with Spark’s move to New York. And, in homage to Spark’s nonchronological games, Wilson has used those of her later novels which involve her experiences from the forties and fifties to assist in her narration, for instance by treating Fleur Talbot in Loitering with Intent as an “alter ego”, and the fictional Compound in The Hothouse by the East River to illustrate Spark’s war work in propaganda as the basis of .
In other respects, this is a conventional biography, one that begins with the birth of Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, to Barney, a Scottish Jewish engineer, and Cissy, an English piano teacher. It follows her through school days and a little training in commercial correspondence, to her marriage at nineteen to one Sydney Oswald Spark (the surname an anglicized Lithuanian patronymic). She departs with him for Southern Rhodesia, where he will teach. Two years later, with a child Robin now born, divorce proceedings begin. Sydney has turned out to be mentally unwell and violent, and Muriel moves to England while arranging a convent school for Robin, settling in London late in the War. She does propaganda work in Milton Bryan, then returns to London and commends Robin to his grandparents in Edinburgh. She publishes some poems and edits the Poetry Review, has relationships with writers Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford—the latter a co-editor for an anthology on Wordsworth and co-author of Spark’s first book, Child of Light, about Mary Shelley. She is baptized as an Anglican and converts to Catholicism. In 1957, she has a spell of hallucinations under the influence of the weight loss drug Dexedrine, which provides material for The Comforters, a first novel quickly followed by Robinson, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
In 1957, she has a spell of hallucinations under the influence of the weight loss drug Dexedrine which provides material for The Comforters.
Wilson looks for dualities, both peaceful, as was Spark’s half-Jewish, half-Gentile nature in which she was “at ease”, and conflicted, as was her relationship with Derek Stanford, in which she had to be “double-minded” with a man who next to her was mediocre. Contributing to Spark’s interest in split selves, Wilson argues, was Edinburgh’s atmosphere. It mixed the rational and the gothic, and brought up stories like that of Deacon Brodie, a cabinetmaker moonlighting as a burglar, which inspired the doubling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Wilson has examined a story Spark told in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, about an alleged doppelganger of Spark’s at school in Edinburgh named Nita McEwan. She would dramatically reappear as a murder victim at a boarding house all the way over in Southern Rhodesia. But Wilson has concluded, based on McEwan’s absence from records, that no such person ever existed. This claim is saved for the final chapter of Wilson’s biography, by which time Nita McEwan can be figured as the fictional woman who had to be killed so that Spark could live, as the original of whom Spark was then the ghost, and even as an anagram of “Twin Menace”. Spooky, but then again, a little too cute to be credible.
Nita McEwan can be figured as the fictional woman who had to be killed so that Spark could live. Spooky, but then again, a little too cute to be credible.
Spark wrote of Mary Shelley that to see the whole woman “we must witness the conflict”, and Wilson would have us believe that this goes for Spark too. There were dramatic decisions, including the one to leave Sydney Spark and avoid becoming Nita McEwan, but neither Curriculum Vitae nor Electric Spark give a sense of how Spark felt then, how she would have handled her conflicting instincts. The Catholic conversion too is not a chronicle of tears and prostrations; there is an oblique treatment in a poem called ‘Flower into Animal’, but Spark elsewhere wrote that when she was asked about it, she could only say that “the answer is both too easy and too difficult”. Wilson has to conclude early in the book that Spark’s “art was precision, and because emotions are imprecise, she excluded them from her art”. Indeed “they are also excluded because Muriel did not understand emotions, especially her own”. There are a few of these almost reckless statements in Electric Spark, some of which are provocative in a good way, some less useful.
Wilson has to conclude early in the book that Spark’s “art was precision, and because emotions are imprecise, she excluded them from her art”.
Whether she knew her feelings or not, Spark had ambitions which did not involve fully exploiting them. Reading her fiction, one is told just enough about brief pangs and jolts; there is no passionate recounting or construction of emotional sagas. Her work is impersonal, so that one cannot see clearly how the turmoil one learns of from the biographies has affected the writing. She writes about writers, women who grow up in Edinburgh, and Catholic converts, but never with an urgent need to confess something about this or that experience, instead submitting everything to the rigor of her ideas, her plotting, and her comic sensibility. Her life became her fictional material, but always under her spell: the level of control in her work is unusual, even a little unnerving.
Her work is impersonal, in that one cannot see clearly how the turmoil one learns of from the biographies has affected the writing.
Wilson looks for an order dictating the entire career: in the afterword she posits that Spark followed a plan in starting The Comforters with a morning scene and ending her last novel, The Finishing School, with evening turning to night. Then two paragraphs later it must be mentioned that Spark was working on another novel when she died, so that won’t do. The real order is to be found within each novel. Spark usually wrote with a title already in mind and an ending worked out, and in the case of The Finishing School, the final line was written ahead in the notes. Wilson gives us an anecdote from one of Spark’s editors: over breakfast at the home of John Bayley and Iris Murdoch she announced that she had finished her novel overnight, and when asked how, she tapped her head and said, “It’s all in there”.
Leo Robson’s review, in Bookforum, of both this biography and a collection of Spark’s letters begins by running through instances in which writers were baffled by her, from Gabriel Josipovici to Renata Adler, to Updike, to Waugh with his “How do you do it?”. These are testimonies to what one already suspects, that the only word expansive enough to do justice to Spark’s work is genius.
That the only word expansive enough to do justice to Spark’s work is genius.
When reading the surreal opening of Reality and Dreams, or the courtroom concatenation of The Bachelors, or any part of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one senses the design’s intricacy and equipoise with a thrill, or perhaps, if a writer, with a grimace and a shake of the head. Spark told Frank Kermode, a champion of hers who helpfully straddled the border of academia and public writing, that “the best thing is to be conscious of everything that one writes”, a simple principle, and a nice riposte to a lot of silly talk by silly writers about the creative process. Intense concentration, to go with extraordinary talent. Here is Caroline Rose in The Comforters , whom I should like to see as an analogue to her creator at the desk, packing her bag and muttering to herself:
“Shoe there. Books here. The comb-bag in that corner. Blouses flat on the bed. Fold the arms. Like that. Then fold again. This way, that way. Hot-water bottle. Nothing rattling. Crucifix wedged in cotton wool. Catholic Truth Society pamphlet to read in the train. I am doing what I am doing”.
