A drama queen. Difficult. A diva. But did Muriel Spark deserve her wretched reputation?
A close friend sets the record straight on life of the world’s most famous Scotswoman...
DAME Muriel Spark was, before her death in April 2006, generally thought the greatest living British novelist – and certainly the world’s most famous Scotswoman.
Her stature cannot be understated. In her most famous tale, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – inspired by Spark’s vivid memories of her days at Edinburgh’s James Gillespie’s High School – she created one of the very few characters in post-war fiction to become a household name.
Muriel Spark’s admirers included Tennessee Williams, WH Auden, John Updike and Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh and Gore Vidal. She was lionised in London, adored in New York and moved effortlessly in elegant palazzopants café society either side of the Atlantic.
When, in 1990, word spread of her imminent autobiography, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, no less, pursued Spark with a $100,000 offer from Doubleday publishers for the rights. And failed…
Yet this brilliant, sparkling personality has been long traduced as ‘difficult’. A drama queen, a diva and even a monster – unbearably precious and capable of extraordinary hatred.
There is no doubt that her hard-won celebrity, and its spoils – she adored fine tailoring, soft furs, fast cars and smart parties – came at real human cost.
‘Spark loved being famous,’ declared Glenys Roberts in 2009. ‘She bought herself flashy jewels and designer clothes every time a new book came out. She even bought a racehorse from the Queen. But though no one, including the great writer Graham Greene, doubted her talent, Spark herself was difficult to love. As her fame took off, she fell out with everyone: her agent, publisher, lovers, friends and family…’
She was certainly restless and not an easy woman. She fled to New York in the early Sixties when she grew too famous for London; fled in turn to Italy when she grew too famous for America – and generally, as someone darkly commented, ‘went through people like pieces of Kleenex’.
But that is not the whole picture, certainly not a fair one – and a new book by Alan Taylor detailing his close friendship with Dame Muriel, over many years, is both an important corrective and a tightly written memoir that is warm, sincere but never cloying.
Clever and spirited, Spark was not inclined to suffer fools gladly – which was awkward, as she moved in circles that abounded in them.
She was, too, of humble background. Born in an upstairs tenement flat in Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield Place on February 1, 1918, Muriel Camberg was the daughter of a Jewish factory worker and his London-reared, Episcopalian and kindly if slightly squiffy wife, who occasionally took in lodgers to make ends meet.
From an early age, Muriel loved books. By the age of ten she was writing maniacally and took avidly to James Gillespie’s, where her ability was fast identified and nurtured.
The school magazine published five of her poems when she was still but 12 years old. She kept in affectionate touch with Gillespie’s – since 1973, a co-educational comprehensive – for the rest of her life.
‘Literary composition to her was not merely a profession,’ writes her biographer Martin Stannard. ‘It was a compulsion. She would have done it had she been starving. She did it for years when she was nearly starving…’
Spark was undoubtedly university material, but her parents could not afford it and certainly did not encourage it. She instead undertook a brief secretarial course, secured a job at a Princes Street department store, and then made a brief and disastrous marriage.
Her husband bore her off for a new life in Southern Rhodesia. But Sidney Oswald Spark was violent, unstable and nuts. A manic-depressive, he was not averse to beating Muriel and, on one dreadful occasion, even shot her in the foot.
Boldly, considering the mores of the time, she rapidly discarded (and subsequently divorced) her husband, while shrewdly retaining his zippy surname.
But, with the Second World War now raging, she found herself stranded for some years in Africa as her baby son, Robin, was reared by her parents in Edinburgh.
She finally made it to London, where she pumped out darkly funny antiNazi propaganda for the secret state, ended up in charge of the Poetry Society’s journal – from which she was malevolently sacked, as she greatly preferred to publish the best modern verse, rather than dreich sonnets from the society’s most selfimportant bores – and fell in love with Derek Stanford.
HE was ambitious, cunning and – as events would prove – unscrupulous. In Spark’s life, as Taylor justly puts it, he occupied ‘the unenviable role of cad and betrayer’. They met in 1947 and soon collaborated on various non-fiction projects – such as a life of Mary Shelley – but the relationship spun out of control, partly as in the early Fifties Spark went through a period of spiritual crisis, only finally resolved when she converted in 1954 to Roman Catholicism.
The end of a physical relationship – Spark took her faith seriously – was bad enough, but what bugged Stanford still more was that she was manifestly the more able. In 1951, she won The Observer’s short story competition (beating many established authors) and the cash prize of £250.
It was her breakthrough: she was now the talk of the town and made a pleasant living from short fiction until the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. That, and a rapid succession of others – four in just two years – made her wealthy. But it was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) that made her famous.
The book caught the public imagination. It was adapted for the stage and proved a hit in both London and Broadway. In 1969, with a young Maggie Smith in the part, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie became one of the decade’s most enduring films; 11 years later (and with Geraldine McEwan) it was a network television success for STV.
Muriel Spark had made it. She had long and far eclipsed the mediocre Stanford – and he avenged himself in the vilest manner.
He sold papers he had pinched from her – as well as all her love letters – to two American universities. As if that were not bad enough, in 1962 he wrote the sententious Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study, and did her over yet again in a 1977 volume of memoirs.
Thick with, as Taylor put it, ‘errors of fact and wild imaginative flights’, Stanford’s descriptions of her and their relationship hurt her profoundly. Many of the falsehoods he retailed are repeated uncritically to this day.
SPARK had always kept her papers. After this treachery, she documented her life maniacally. Not as much as an invoice or a train ticket was ever thrown away and her vast archive is now in the National Library of Scotland. It was not ego; it was selfpreservation. After Stanford, she was determined that honest scholars would one day give accurate account of her.
But the scars went deep. Spark would never remarry and seems never again to have had a serious relationship with a man; in any event, in her social and professional round, the mass of attractive men were usually married or gay.
A pity, as the impact of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie seemed, almost overnight, to transform her physically. Hitherto plump, even dowdy, she now splendidly reinvented herself as a svelte socialite and, into her sixties, was a strikingly beautiful woman. But she never shed her quizzical Edinburgh accent.
Spark was not an early riser and was rarely at her desk before 11am. First, she would devise a title, and write it down. Then she would add, ‘A Novel by Muriel Spark’, and ‘Chapter One’ beneath that, and would thus begin, writing on every other line of 72-page Bothwell Spiral notebooks from James Thin’s book and stationery shop in Edinburgh. (When Thin’s went bust, in 2002, she bought all its remaining stock.)
She was a tight, terse author; a typical novel needed seven notebooks. Her black, very fine ballpoint pens she ordered from Harrods and, to Muriel, they were sacred objects. ‘Nobody else is allowed to touch one,’ she said. ‘If anyone just picks one up to write a number, I throw it away in case it affects my writing. I count them every day, and worship them…’
A Spark novel is typically set in a small, enclosed and faintly suffocating community – a nursing home, a hostel for young ladies and, in one of her funniest books, The Abbess of Crewe, a convent.
That was a peerless 1974 parody of the Watergate scandal; her penultimate tale, Aiding and Abetting (2000) drew heavily on the Lord Lucan mystery.
There is a real air of danger in a Spark novel. Her characters, as one obituary put it, ‘bicker, part and come together; unnerving nuns, subtly threatening servants, the malevolent and nearly mad walk on and off the stage; casual violence, ritual suicides, macabre martyrdoms and summary dispatches take place, and there are anonymous letters, blackmail and lunatic telephone calls, all recounted with a detached and apparently simple irony’.
The traditional Borders ballads – which she adored – are an obvious influence; the very dry humour that stalked her Edinburgh school another. Spark had an extraordinary ability to describe an entire relationship in but
a handful of words. ‘He gave me a number and I repeated it slowly enough to make out I was writing it down, which I wasn’t…’
And, in company, her gift for the devastating one-liner rivalled Dorothy Parker’s. ‘I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control,’ she cracked of Marie Stopes. And Virginia Wolfe was ‘a spoilt brat. All right, she committed suicide, but she didn’t have to take the dog with her.’
She liked to treat herself with a lovely new piece of jewellery when a book was finished – but Spark was also (and Taylor gives many examples) a very generous woman who supported her Edinburgh relatives for decades and often surprised friends with thoughtful gifts.
In the late Seventies, to her own surprise as much as anyone else’s, she found companionship and happiness with a rather younger woman, Penelope Jardine, a gifted sculptor who knew just how to manage a house and support a working author.
They settled in Jardine’s remote but characterful house at Oliveto, near Arezzo in Tuscany. Spark’s one domestic duty was to bring her companion a cup of tea every morning: the capable Jardine handled everything else. ‘People will think we’re lesbians!’ Spark would gurgle – but it was a friendship, not a relationship.
There was one new trial, beyond growing old age and infirmity – a sustained and extraordinary vendetta by her own son.
Spark and Robin were largely strangers. She had seen little of him and, as Taylor details, Robin had even ordered her out of the Edinburgh flat as her father lay dying.
There were other horrid incidents but, when Robin – an indifferent artist – converted to his ancestral Judaism, he grew obsessed with proving that his mother was Jewish too, and waged an increasingly nasty campaign in the Scottish press.
In vain did Muriel Spark protest – correctly – that, in Jewish law, she could not possibly be Jewish as her mother was not Jewish – though, as she dryly added, such nuances would have counted for little with the Nazis.
She, the artist, was comfortable with such ambiguity. Thrawn and rigid, Robin was not, and his untiring campaign drove her to heights of frustration.
‘Nobody is saying you are not a Jew, or that I have no Jewish origins,’ she stormed. ‘You can be whatever you like… But there’s no use writing to me with all that pompous bureaucratic religiosity as if you were John Knox in drag.’ There was no happy ending and, after still further outrages, she finally cut Robin out of her will.
So charges of self-loathing antiSemitism became another stick to beat her with – on top of the untiring accusations of being arrogant, self-important, of ‘stubbing out friendships like cigarettes’.
THE fundamental problem – and which surprisingly few ever grasp – was that Muriel Spark was not a conscious celebrity. She was a writer, a fanatical writer who needed space and solitude and, in order to have it, was unhesitatingly rude if people disrespected her boundaries.
‘After I became a success, people would ring up and ask me out,’ she once sighed. ‘I’d say, “But I’m writing.” And they’d say, “I see. You’re too grand for us now.” And I’d say, “Actually, I’ve always been too grand for you.”’
Once, unwisely, over dinner, someone bored on about Aldous Huxley and finally blurted: ‘I believe he was an admirer of yours, Muriel, wasn’t he?’
There was a long, fraught silence. Spark stared. ‘And why wouldn’t he be?’
Appointment in Arezzo, by Alan Taylor, Polygon Books, Edinburgh. Hardback, £12.99.