How Muriel Spark became a late bloomer

Electric Spark by Francis Wilson

Congratulations to Naomi Kanakia for such a well-deserved, positive write-up in the New Yorker! You can read it here.

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Most books end disappointingly. Not Muriel Spark’s. She always started with the ending, so that every piece of the puzzle makes the finale ring with excitement and often terror. Her novels are impeccably planned. Their climaxes are surprising but providential. So assured is Spark of the trajectory of her story that she can break it up with flash-forwards and this only increases the suspense. The ending of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is given away on the sixth page, but no-one has ever stopped reading at that point. As soon as we reach those carefully planned conclusions, we can turn back to the start again, to see the magic of her time loops.

The end was important to Spark for religious, as well as aesthetic, reasons. Unlike the plot of a novel, we know how our lives will end. Spark started writing fiction after she converted to Catholicism; her endings are not just entertainments, they are moral statements. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, and The Driver’s Seat are directly about death. Murder haunts The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Loitering With Intent, one of her best novels, opens in a graveyard. Memento Mori is about the inability of secular people to face the fact of death. She wrote a biography of Emily Brontë, a novelist and poet obsessed with death, and one about Mary Shelley who courted the poet Percy Shelley over her mother’s grave. Death and the dead were essential to Spark and often brought her novels to life.

For a biographer, though, death creates a dilemma. How to avoid the predictable march from birth, through middle age, to the end? Frances Wilson’s new book, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, matches the strange power of its subject and ends with a beginning. Wilson has not tried to write a traditional biography. She queries whether Electric Spark is a biography at all. She narrates the period up to the publication of Spark’s first novel, The Comforters.

Electric Spark is another carefully planned loop: the Preface and Afterword both deal with Spark’s first (rather disappointing) biographer, Martin Stannard. He faced intolerable difficulty in trying to work out what was true and what was fiction about Spark’s life. Electric Spark tries to unblur the line that Spark so carefully disguised between facts and fictions.

Spark is an elusive, strange, and often erratic subject. She experienced mental breakdowns and mystic moments; she lived in poverty and riches; she was kindly and tormenting; she was a clever child who became a grand and supercilious old woman; she was funny, but she was as sharp as a knife; she loved people and was charitable, but she seems not to have loved her son. Wilson does not make large judgements. So many modern biographers want to fit their subjects to a theme. Wilson, in words Spark used of Mary Shelley, wants to witness the conflict. Towards the end, Wilson writes “she had perfected the art of concealing several big books inside one small volume.” Something similar is true of Electric Spark, which feels like it contains far more than its three hundred and fifty pages.

Modern biography began with the formal innovations and stylistic compressions of modernism (Lytton Strachey, A.J.A. Symons, Jim Ede) and shifted in the 1960s to the Victorian bulk of the new liberals (Michael Holroyd, Richard Holmes). Electric Spark has the best of both these traditions. Loving scholarship creates an apology for her subject, while the structure mirrors important aspects of Spark’s life and narrative techniques.

There was a third tradition. Women novelists always seemed to be able to write with both compression and scholarship, vividness and accuracy. In this tradition are masterpieces such as Elizabeth Jenkins on Jane Austen, Sylvia Townsend Warner on T.H. White, Penelope Fitzgerald on The Knox Brothers, and, of course, Muriel Spark on Emily Brontë and Mary Shelley. (Claire Tomalin, surely, owes as much to these writers as she does to any other influence.) Wilson seems influenced by these writers, and all for the good. Her prose is elegant and her narrative is compelling.

Electric Spark is the result of much archive work and careful control of detail. Wilson has flair, but also poise and panache and steel and wit. Like Selina Hastings, she has the ability to organise information compulsively. She is not so exhaustive as to be exhausting,—who now wants to read three volumes about John Betjeman or Bernard Shaw, let alone five about Henry James?,—nor so inventive as to miss the point, as Craig Brown did when he turned Princess Margaret into a clever little cartoon. (Anne Glenconner and A.N. Wilson have since shown poor old Princess M. was a much nicer, more complicated person than Brown knew.)

Electric Spark is one of the biographies I have most enjoyed in recent years. Again and again as I read it, I was reminded of Samuel Johnson’s dictum: “If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” Wilson is, in many ways, the very model of a major modern biographer. She balances all the biographical arts. She deftly handles the remarkably odd material of Spark’s life and career.

Spark wrote cryptographic fiction. She worked as a code-breaker during the war, and was once convinced, during a period of semi-madness, that T.S. Eliot’s poems contained a code she had to decipher. Page 46 of her draft of A Far Cry from Kensington is a blank page crossed through with a diagonal line. Her notes for that novel contain this fragment: “The blank page, the blank notebooks. I can tell you what I like and keep back what I like. You may read between the lines, there is nothing to stop you.”

She also wrote mystical fiction. She believed in a sixth, literary, sense, which some writers and critics have and some do not. During a disrupted train journey in 1944, she was invited by an au pair to stay in her employer’s unoccupied house. This employer turned out to be the poet Louis MacNiece. Spark later turned the story into her “origin myth”. She haunted the house, smelling the pencils, absorbing whatever inspiration she could.

MacNiece was a giant to Spark. As a young poet, and poetry editor, she read him and his generation compulsively. Of that night she said, “I felt like I had entered the world of literature.” She called an agent, telling them “I am calling from the house of Louis MacNiece.” They agreed to take her new book. She had no book. Her first prose work came out seven years later, when she was thirty-two. Her first novel would take another four years.

The events of Electric Spark end when Muriel is thirty-nine and The Comforters has been written. (Wilson examines later novels—The Driver’s Seat, The Girls of Slender Means and several others along the way.) This is a study of a late bloomer, the story of how it took Muriel Spark so long to become a novelist. How remarkable to think that when she was a poetry editor in the early 1950s and that no-one, including herself, knew of her comic talents.

The second turning point came in 1951, when she won an Observer short story competition. But the most important turn was the turn to God. In 1952 and 1953 she was attending St. Augustine’s in Kensington, an Anglo-Catholic church. She had been researching the Brontës since 1949 and when she was asked to follow-up her Emily biography with one about Anne, she instead read thirteen volumes of Cardinal Newman’s letters, journals, and sermons. Newman’s sermons from the 1820s, 30s, and 40s gave her the answers she hadn’t found anywhere else. In 1845 his life broke in half when he went to the Roman church. So did hers. Her relationship with her lover Derek Stanford, a petty, griping, conventional man who seems to have done her little good, ended. She entered into Time Eternal. She became, like Emily Brontë, forever fascinating, forever mysterious.

In 1954, psychosis set in. This was when she became convinced that there were coded messages in Eliot’s poetry. She had separated from Stanford, and was spiritually gorged, while living on potatoes and baked beans. She also had Dexedrine poisoning, an amphetamine then available over-the-counter. Like Evelyn Waugh writing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold after mixing sleeping draught with large whiskies for several weeks, Spark made her way to writing novels via a self-medicated breakdown. In her mania she made a close study of the Book of Job, which became foundational to her fiction. In the background of her misery was a former spouse in an asylum and a son she rarely saw.

God freed Spark to write. “Once she had the security of God, Muriel stopped caring about style, and once she stopped caring about style she found her style in a stylised carelessness.” She was not, however, a conventional Catholic, just as she was not a conventional novelist.

She was in favour of abortion, contraception and divorce; she never went to confession, she loathed other Catholics including Pope John Paul II, whom she called ‘first a Pole, second a Pope and only third a Christian’, she held on to the Presbyterian investment in predestination, and because sermons, unless given by Newman, were boring (‘I regard it as a mortal sin to listen to sermons’), she turned up for the eucharist only at the end of Mass. She liked the saints, angels, miracles and mysteries, and the fact that for Catholics ‘anything can happen to anyone.’ She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension and rearrangement of time and space, which is also what she liked in a poem and so recreated in her fiction.

Despite this wealth of knowledge, it remains hard to say exactly why Muriel Spark became a late bloomer. She didn’t pay much attention to motives in her novels. Wilson remarks that when God sees everything, there is no need for repression. The unconscious is curiously both ever present and ever absent in her work. And so she remains elusive.

Spark once said, “facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved.” Spark was not simple, and nor are her novels. Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.

Wilson has done what she set out to do: not to solve the mystery of this curious case, but to show us the enigma more clearly. Muriel Spark didn’t want to be solved like a simple puzzle. She probably never will be. That makes her and her novels all the more fascinating.