Muriel Spark experienced time in two ways. There was, as she described it, “clock time”, or chronological events. And then there was the airier, non-linear sort of time. Spark, a Scottish-born writer of short, frequently surreal and acerbically funny novels, wrote approvingly of Proust, that he “regarded Time subjectively, and realised that the whole of eternity is a present ‘now’”.
As Frances Wilson writes in Electric Spark, from the early 1950s onwards, Spark no longer lived inside everyday “clock time”. Wilson’s biography reflects this temporal tricksiness, using foreshadowing and “prolepsis” (or earlier anticipation of future events — I had to look that up) while still, thankfully, putting the chapters in conventional chronological order.
Wilson, a critic and writer who has previously written biographies of DH Lawrence and Thomas De Quincey, covers Spark’s life only until the age of 39. This is explicitly an origin story about the making of a novelist. The book begins in Edinburgh, where Muriel Camberg (born 1918) grew up, and where Spark’s most famous book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is set. It ends, more or less, with publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Wilson’s style is so original and engaging that many readers will hope that the second part of Spark’s life, covering her life as a famous author until her death at 88 in 2006, will form a future volume.
While her work has never gone out of fashion, Spark’s spooky, cynical outlook is a particularly good fit for this volatile political era, when increasing numbers of people are turning to religion, astrology and other unseen realms, in a bid either to make sense of “clock time” or transcend it. In a sign of Spark’s current literary appeal, Wilson’s biography will be followed next year by another, Like a Cat Loves a Bird by James Bailey, which was recently the subject of a bidding war.
Spark’s life, as we meet it here, appears to have had no “down time” at all. She married young and went to live in Africa with her unstable husband, Ossie; they had a son, Robin, who was mainly brought up by Muriel’s mother in Edinburgh. (Spark’s lack of maternal relationship with her son is intriguing, but not a focus of this book.) She got divorced, was probably a spy for a while, and returned to England for war work in a unit dedicated to deceiving Germans with black propaganda, via radio shows and counterfeit newspaper articles (“truth with believable lies”). All this by her mid-twenties.
There is much, much more in these 350 pages, mostly covering her professional and personal life in London in the 1940s and 1950s. The book, though, is always going headlong towards Spark’s conversion to Catholicism in 1954, which freed her creatively to become a novelist and allowed her to decouple from clock time. “She liked the saints, angels, miracles and mysteries, and the fact that, for Catholics, ‘anything can happen to anyone’,” writes Wilson.
Here are a few of the scores of tempting and extraordinary morsels in Electric Spark: Muriel was steeped in the Edinburgh myths of her childhood, and in the Border Ballads, those strange tales of murder, witchcraft and doppelgängers; she became fixated on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots; she believed in angels; she “cast a spell on a manuscript before putting it in the post”. And she was blackmailed: her former lover Derek Stanford stole 70 letters, including love letters, from her house and sold them to an American rare-book dealer, who “invited” her buy them back for $1,500 in 1963. Spark refused to pay up.
Electric Spark is dense throughout with facts, links and Wilson’s own analysis as she tries to unpick the “enigma” of Muriel Spark. Such rich sourcing reflects the access that the author has had to Spark’s voluminous personal archives, “organised in box files . . . equivalent in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool”. Wilson says that, in contrast, Spark’s entire literary output, including all her novels, stories, biographies and editions of the letters of Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Cardinal Newman, takes up “a mere two feet on my bookshelves”. The result of this blend of existing sources and fresh archival finds is an unputdownable and “electric” perspective on the extraordinary talent and life events that together forged Spark’s fiction.
One theme that runs throughout this book: terrible men. “Most of the men in Muriel’s social circle felt towards her a similar combination of desire and hate,” Wilson says. And being successful meant that “Muriel did not experience the slow drip of soft misogyny as she proved herself, again and again, the superior of her male contemporaries; she stood beneath its iron-hard rain”. Wilson gets angry on Spark’s (and the reader’s) behalf, but one of the many mysteries about the author’s life is why such an exceptional woman chose, in her twenties and thirties, “as her lovers and friends men of bottomless mediocrity”. In the 1960s, Spark left them behind and moved to New York, then Italy.
Revenge came via the “stone-cold alter egos of her fiction”. The jealous and thieving Stanford, for example, appears in A Far Cry From Kensington (1988), parodied as the talentless writer Hector Bartlett, “the pisseur de copie”.
Spark’s life generated a rich seam of puzzles, blackmail, the supernatural, books within books, spies, grievances and betrayal that she later used in her fiction. (Judas-like, Sandy Stranger betrays the beloved teacher Jean Brodie, and, later, Sandy becomes a nun.) Electric Spark is similarly eclectic in its sui generis approach to biography. It’s a fabulous achievement, in more than one sense.
The novelist’s own (deliberately dull, in Wilson’s account) autobiography was called Curriculum Vitae. Spark then spent years trying to prevent a previously authorised biography by Martin Stannard from being published (it came out in 2009, after her death). But she also, very deliberately, left a “major realist masterwork”, in the form of her extensive archives, for posterity, in the shape of Wilson, Bailey, and all who follow them, to sift through and parse.
So Spark knew this stuff was coming. She probably foresaw it. And now Wilson, literally, has the receipts.
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson Bloomsbury £25, 432 pages
Isabel Berwick is the FT’s Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
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