THE VITAL SPARK
The centenary of one of Scotland’s greatest writers provides the perfect opportunity to celebrate her genius and explore her relatively unread work
Remembering the creative genius of Muriel Spark 100 years after her birth
In the 1920s, when she was a pupil at James Gillespie’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark was known as a ‘poet and dreamer’. Who awarded her this garland, it is uncertain, but the best guess is that it was her revered teacher, Miss Christina Kay, whose influence on those in her charge was remarkable. It was Miss Kay – that ‘character in search of an author’ as Muriel described her – who would provide the inspiration for Miss Jean Brodie. She made the girls who trooped into her classroom feel special, instilling in them the belief that there was nothing in life they could not achieve if they put their minds to it. For her, the essence of education was not what was thrust upon young learners, but what could be drawn out of them. This was something Muriel never forgot and she was eager to pass it on to others.
Often, when I visited her in the house in which she spent much of the last three decades of her life – a rambling, 14th-century rectory deep in the Tuscan countryside – she would talk with unbridled affection of her upbringing. The years she spent at Gillespie’s were critical to her idea of herself as an artist. It was there, she recalled, that her ambition to become a writer first took root and that her special talent was recognised. She won prizes, had many of her poems published in the school magazine, and was taken to theatres, concert halls and poetry readings by the ever-generous Miss Kay. As Muriel noted in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, she felt she had virtually no choice but to become a writer.
This year, being the centenary of Spark’s birth, provides an opportunity to celebrate her genius and explore her evergreen oeuvre. Of course, people know of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, often because of the Oscar-winning movie starring Maggie Smith, but much of the rest of her work remains unread, not least in Scotland. Why this should be so has long bemused the legions of us who are her fans. It may simply be because she did not live here. Out of sight and largely out of mind, Muriel was often labelled an English writer to her intense irritation.
As she never tired of saying, not only was she Scottish by birth, she was Scottish by formation. To the end of her long life – she died aged 88 in 2006 – she spoke with a marked Morningside accent and always referred to Edinburgh, the city where she could ‘never hope to be understood’, as
‘She felt she had virtually no choice but to become a writer’
her home. She was born on 1 February 1918, as the carnage of the First World War was coming to an end. The Cambergs lived in a flat in Bruntsfield, overlooking the links across which Muriel walked to school and in summer played golf. Her father, Bertie, was an engineer while her mother, Cissy, was a housewife, albeit an unconventional one.
It was Cissy who told Muriel that if she never learned to do certain things, such as how to iron clothes or peel potatoes, she would never be asked to do them. Muriel took this to heart and avoided many of the chores the rest of us accept as our lot. She was a great reader and haunted the local well-stocked public libraries, supplementing her quota of books by borrowing the tickets of her parents and her brother.
As a family, they were not poor but neither were they well-off. Though Muriel was academ- ically able and could have gone to university, it appears this wasn’t an option. Instead, she found a job as assistant to the owner of Small’s department store on Princes Street, which allowed her to indulge her love of fashion.
When she was 19, she met a man more than a decade older than her called Sydney Oswald Spark, who was about to leave Scotland for a teaching post in Rhodesia. He proposed marriage and Muriel, keen to travel and see the world, impetuously accepted. In the summer of 1937, she set sail for Africa where the couple were married and soon had a son, Robin.
But what ought to have been a joyful period turned into a nightmare when her husband began to show signs of erratic, violent behaviour. Divorce quickly followed and eventually, in the midst of the Second World War, Muriel returned to Britain. She could, she supposed,
have reverted to her family name but she stuck with Spark because it seemed perfectly to suit her personality, as indeed it did.
Living in a blitzed London, Muriel began to make her way as a writer. She wrote poems and produced studies of writers she admired, such as the Brontës, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein and John Masefield. In 1951, a short story,
The Seraph and the Zambesi, which drew on her experience of Africa, won a prestigious short story award. Having never previously regarded herself as a writer of fiction, Muriel now realised this may be her métier after all.
Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957, and was rapturously received by English novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn
Waugh. Others, including Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means followed at the rate of around one per year, enhancing her reputation as a writer.
Muriel was that rare creature – a popular and critical success. The New Yorker magazine, which published the whole of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in a single issue, gave her an office and a contract. For a while she lived in Manhattan but when she found life there too distracting she moved to Rome. Like Jean Brodie, Muriel – a convert to Catholicism – felt a special affinity with Italy and its art and history. But Rome, too, eventually palled and she made her final move to Tuscany where her companion, the painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine, had bought a property in dire need of renovation.
It was in this rather remote and beautiful spot that I got to know Muriel well. Then in her 70s, she was content and in the cramped kitchen, we would talk for hours over a glass or two of wine. From her study window she looked out over a landscape like those painted hundreds of years earlier by Piero della Francesca – hillsides covered by regiments of vines and gnarled olive trees and dusty, narrow roads bordered by rustic walls.
There was usually a novel or a story in the pipeline and she always had a poem ‘on the go’. Her 22nd and final novel was aptly-titled The Finishing School. In it, one of the characters is writing a story about Mary, Queen of Scots. Muriel Spark, who was arguably the greatest Scottish writer since Robert Louis Stevenson, may have lived far from the place she called home, but Scotland was rarely out of her thoughts.
‘ Muriel was that rare creature – a popular and critical success’