The writer’s break.

Leo Robson on Muriel Spark

V. S. Pritchett, in a passage Wilson quotes in a different connection, claimed that the life of every writer contains a break, where “he splits off from the people who surround him and he discovers the necessity of talking to himself and not them.” There’s often a second break, after the artist has severed themselves from a formative environment, of being severed from the initial sources of their power, whether by success or publication, or having used up a fund of material. It calls for some kind of redoubling. Iris Murdoch, having, like Spark, followed a run of mostly sharp and impudent early novels with something more traditional (The Red and the Green),began to write more expansively, in an effort—successful, in the case of A Word Child, The Sea, The Sea,and The Philosopher’s Pupil—to introduce more contingency into her symbolic, shapely plots. Another contemporary, Penelope Fitzgerald, admittedly an unusual case in that she wrote mainly in her sixties and seventies, produced four novels that derived from personal experience—running a bookshop, living on a barge, teaching in a stage school, working at the BBC—before turning to historical subjects, culminating in The Blue Flower, a novel about the Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, which Kermode praised for its interrogation of “the hopes and defeats of Romanticism” and “the relation between inspiration and common life.”

Leo Robson’s long essay in Bookforum, ostensibly a review of the Wilson biography and the new volume of Spark’s letters, is the best thing that has appeared about Spark during all the recent reviews. Must read.