THE LIFE PRIMES
Scotland celebrates novelist’s centenary with exhibition and TV documentary charting her beginnings as an aspiring writer and how she became literary legend behind some iconic books
RADIO and television schedules. Bookshops. Even the main staircase of the National Library of Scotland. Muriel Spark is currently over all of them like a rash.
It’s almost as if, 100 years after the author’s birth, her homeland is making up for ignoring her.
There is certainly a lot of catching up to do. For years Spark, who died in 2006, fell off the list of Scottish greats, overshadowed by Lewis Grassic Gibbon before her and Irvine Welsh afterwards.
But 2018 is shaping up to be the year that puts her in her rightful place. For her many admirers, it can’t come too soon.
Scottish publishers Polygon have reissued new versions of all her novels. At Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on January 31, Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin will join Nicola Sturgeon in a celebration of Spark’s work.
The capital-born author is also a favourite with Ali Smith, Janice Galloway, Val McDermid and AL Kennedy, who appear in a BBC Scotland documentary, The Many Primes of Muriel Spark.
The Rebus author has been a cheerleader for Spark since he was a student. Rankin was three years into a PhD about her work when his first novel was published.
He reckons that, if Spark had stayed at home rather than living in London, New York and Italy, she would have a bigger footprint.
At the launch of the National Library’s Spark exhibition he said: “Scotland has been bad at recognising writers and artists who leave. There is the Scott monument but not the Robert Louis Stevenson monument.
“Scott stayed and Stevenson left. Muriel Spark left.
“Many writers have had to leave to find themselves and to find their true vocation as a writer.”
Spark was born in Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield. Her Jewish father Bernard was an engineer. Her mother was a Presbyterian and raised Muriel in her faith.
They sent her to James Gillespie’s High School for girls. There, her talent was recognised and cherished, her writing was published in the magazine and she was dubbed the school’s “poet and dreamer”.
One teacher, Miss Christina Kay, was the model for Spark’s most famous fictional creation. Miss Kay was not like Miss Jean Brodie but every one of Spark’s contemporaries who read the book recognised her. Spark said her beloved teacher “had it in her to be the character I invented”.
Aged 19, she married Sydney Oswald Spark, who was 32. When they met at a dance in Edinburgh, he had just secured a teaching job in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She agreed to go with him.
In The Many Primes of Muriel Spark, there is speculation he tempted her to Africa with the promise she would not have to do housework.
In an archive interview, Spark said: “I wanted a nice life of my own, plenty of sex and plenty of fun. I didn’t get it. It was a mistake.”
She had her son Robin when she was 20. Before he was born, Sydney, who had a long history of mental health problems, dark moods and a terrible temper, suggested she have an abortion. As war tore through Europe, Spark was stuck in Rhodesia, estranged from her husband. She took four-year-old Robin to a convent. Finally, in 1945, she got him home to Scotland on a troop ship to live with her parents. They brought him up. By this point, Spark was based in London. She became editor of the Poetry Society magazine, where she encountered plotting and skullduggery more like the end of the Roman empire. In 1951, she won the Observer’s short story contest. The next year, her first poetry collection was published. By 1954, she had started her first novel, The Comforters. It was published in 1957 to huge acclaim. Six others followed in quick succession, ending with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961
It was published in the prestigious New Yorker magazine Within five years, Vanessa Redgrave starred in the stage version. Maggie Smith took the role in the 1969 film.
On the back of Miss Jean Brodie’s success, Spark moved to New York. She had an office at The New Yorker and attended glittering parties with the great writers of the time. Two more novels, The Girls of Slender Mea and The Mandelbaum Gate, cam out of this period.
In 1967, she moved to Rome and set up home in an apartment she didn’t even attempt to furnish.
When she needed to finish a book, she decamped to a “hospital more like a spa hotel – in the hills. It was in Rome she produced what she considered to be her finest work – The Driver’s Seat, which became a film starring Elizabeth Taylor.
The Abbess of Crewe, also a film starring Glenda Jackson, was satire on the Watergate scandal that brought down president Richard Nixon in the 70s.
After 12 years in Rome, she astounded everyone by moving to
a converted church in the Tuscan countryside. She spent the last 30 years of her life there, with her friend Penelope Jardine.
In the documentary, Jardine tells Kirsty Wark: “She had writer’s block. She asked if she could come and stay.”
Spark never left. She continued writing. Her 22nd novel, The Finishing School, was published in 2004.
Jardine has five pages of a novel Spark began before she died “tucked away somewhere”.
Most of her papers are now held by the National Library of Scotland, and form the basis of their exhibition. But Jardine still has a roomful of more recent stuff sitting in Tuscany.
When Wark asks if she is the keeper of the flame, she nods and replies: “Sometimes I feel like blowing it out.” ● The Many Primes of Muriel Spark, BBC2 Scotland, Wednesday, 9pm.