MURIEL SPARK has a secure place in the pantheon of 20th-century writers: several of her books are masterpieces. One thinks of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Far Cry from Kensington, Memento Mori, and The Girls of Slender Means. In addition, she produced a few duds, and before The Comforters, her first novel, published in 1957, her early years were spent in undistinguished hackwork, now forgotten, namely her poems, her biographies, and works such as an edition of Newman’s letters, often produced in tandem with her lover Derek Stanford. If the early Spark is unread, Stanford’s work is buried in oblivion. He is remembered only as the man Spark loved, then hated, lampooned, and never forgave. He was the great loathing of her life.
To say that Muriel was a bad picker, as Frances Wilson admits, is only half the story. Though not rewarded with literary success, her years of hackwork did provide her with the raw material for her later works. The Helena Club where she lived after the War became the May of Teck Club, as is well known, and Stanford, who wrote about her, not very accurately, after their relationship ended, became her obsession, the pisseur de copie of A Far Cry from Kensington. Stanford was a hack, but she made him immortal. But for her obsessive hatred, no one would know his name today.
That is the real enigma of Spark: emotionally reticent in her great novels, but driven in life by an overpowering hatred of a man whom she should simply have forgotten. As with Stanford, so with Martin Stannard, who was commissioned to write her authorised biography, and then frustrated at every turn by Spark herself. She wrote about herself, but was adamant that no one else should.
AlamyMuriel Spark in her prime
Wilson concentrates on the first half of Spark’s life, when she was poor and struggling, and. indeed. when her mind was, for a period, unbalanced. The story has been told before, by Stannard, and by Spark. Regarding her conversion to Catholicism, which preceded her success as a novelist, this is one subject on which one would like to hear more. She was received into the Church by a distinguished Benedictine monk, Fr Ambrose Agius, who, in this account, remains just a name; and she spent six months receiving (free, I bet) Jungian psychoanalysis from Fr Frank O’Malley, another well-known London priest. Years ago, I asked “Pop” O’Malley about her, but he gave nothing away. What a pity!
But Wilson gives us no details, either. She lived as a guest of the Carmelites in Kent for months, but we are told nothing of their interaction with her. Her Catholicism remains opaque. Did she even go to mass, and, if so, where? She was clearly keen on Newman, but did it go further than that? This book does not tell us. Spark remains an enigma, despite Wilson’s efforts to decode her.
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Roman Catholic priest and moral theologian.
Electric Spark: The enigma of Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury £25
(978-1-5266-6303-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50