The secret wartime life of Muriel Spark

Telegraph

2 days ago

On May 7 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, Muriel Spark, a 26-year-old Scottish divorcee, signed the Official Secrets Act and began work as a duty secretary in the newsroom of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) on the edge of the Woburn Abbey estate, in Milton Bryan, Bedfordshire. Having felt since childhood that she was 'destined' to be an artist, Spark was on course to becoming a poet. But what she learnt about the art of deception during her four months at the PWE would turn her into Britain's most startlingly original post-war novelist, and inspire her best known creation, Miss Jean Brodie.
Spark was recruited by Sefton Delmer, a man of Falstaffian girth and Rabelaisian humour. Delmer's remit was to deceive the enemy through counterfeit German newspaper articles and radio shows, a skill at which he excelled. (He had previously been foreign correspondent at the Daily Express.)
'If we could blacken these men in the eyes of the German public,' Delmer wrote in his memoir of the Nazi officials, and paint them as 'venal and slothful' individuals who demanded everything of the German people while making no sacrifices themselves, 'we would have struck a mortal blow at the vital nerve of Germany's war morale'. His work was known at the time as 'black propaganda' – Spark described it 'truth with believable lies'. We'd now call it 'fake news'.
Delmer's stories, designed to appeal to the 'inner pig-dog', were built on real-life details he found in the classified pages of the German press, and used hundreds of names and addresses he'd filed away for future use. Should he need 'an engine driver living in the district of Kassel, or a greengrocer's shop in Berlin's Hansa district', he simply consulted his index box.
He invented characters for his radio shows, and wrote their scripts, the most successful being 'Der Chef', a foulmouthed anti-Semite who railed for an hour every day against the whoring, holidaying and ­partying Nazi elite who were letting the country down. Played by a ­German literary agent called Peter Seckelmann (reading Delmer's script), Der Chef was dramatically 'assassinated' by the Gestapo live on air. The bullets were fired, harmlessly, by Delmer.
Spark, who shared Delmer's office and worked from 4 pm until midnight, became what she called a 'fly on the wall' in 'a world of method and intrigue'. She witnessed the preparation for the radio shows, heard Delmer's suggestions for new material, and saw his pleasure when his stories – such as faeces being used in the production of German margarine – were repeated as fact by the POWs housed in Woburn village. Because the POW quarters were bugged, Delmer was able to listen into their conversations and embellish his inventions. Every night, as Spark's shift was coming to an end, he would be putting together a fake daily newspaper called Nachrichten, which was scattered over enemy lines. Spark experienced the war as a script by Sefton Delmer.
Delmer read the minds of the enemy and played to their fears. Always one step ahead, he lived, as he put it, in the future tense, and appeared omniscient because ­everyone – the army, the air force, the navy, the underground resistance workers – pooled their ­intelligence with him. He also, by a stroke of good fortune, had the use of a teleprinter left behind by a ­former German news agency, which connected to Goebbels's transmitter in Germany.
With a high-pitched screech, the Hellschreiber, as the teleprinter was called, hammered out, like a fax machine, vertical columns of freshly breaking news over a roll of ticker tape; Delmer then used these, as Spark explained, 'to put over the poison in our news ­bulletins without it sounding like enemy propaganda'.
One of Spark's jobs was to operate a green 'scrambler' telephone on Delmer's desk. Having taken a call, she would press the 'Secret' button, so that what was exchanged between the anonymous British parties was unintelligible to enemy interceptors. The narrator of her 1973 novel about the PWE, The Hothouse by the East River, describes how 'the connection is heavily jammed with jangling caterwauls to protect the conversation against eavesdropping; this harrowing noise all but prevents the speakers from hearing each other, but once the knack is mastered it is easy to hear the voice at the other end'.
Taking notes, through those jangling caterwauls, of the bombings and safe return of aircraft, Spark passed them on to Delmer, who quickly turned the information into a news story for broadcast on German radio. 'And into the bargain might be slipped [a] completely false comment about how regrettable it was that the Luftwaffe... had now to face penalties for failing to down the Allied planes.'
Following the war, between 1947 and 1948, Spark edited the Poetry Review, after which she scraped a living as a critic and biographer – that is, until 1954, when she ­suffered a breakdown during which she became convinced that T S Eliot was sending her coded messages. She started writing fiction after her recovery in 1957, a full 13 years after leaving the hothouse of Milton Bryan.
But the blend of satire, surrealism, paranoia and cool authorial control which we now describe as 'Sparkian' was born during her time in the PWE. No-one captured war and post-war neurosis as well as Spark: her 22 novels teem with blackmailers, spies, intruders and frauds; while her complex narrative style, as the critic Christopher Ricks put it, was that of a 'private detective spying on his own characters'.
It was Delmer who had shown Spark what a box of tricks a novel could be. Like him, Spark was the puppet master of her invented worlds: her creations, she insisted, had no life beyond what she allowed them. Her plots, like ­Delmer's, came from 'the glossies, and the newspapers, and the film mags', and her fictions were woven around the 'authenticity' of facts.
Delmer's manipulations are also recalled in the games of Miss Jean Brodie, who controlled her own alternative reality, taking 'her ­leisure over the unfolding of her plans, most of her joy deriving from the preparation'. Sandy Stranger, watching her charismatic teacher rework old stories for new scen­arios, is 'divided between her ­admiration for the technique and the pressing need to prove Miss Brodie guilty of misconduct'.
Spark was Delmer's top student but she, like Sandy, betrayed her teacher's trust. While inspired by Delmer's methods, Spark also denounced his work in her fiction. In 1988's A Far Cry from ­Kensington, a forged newspaper article leads to the tragic suicide of the Polish dressmaker, Wanda Podolak; in The Abbess of Crewe (1974), where the trees of the ­convent are bugged, Sister Alexandra is advised in her campaign to be elected abbess to 'appeal to their lower instincts'.
And in Spark's first novel, The Comforters, a fictional­isation of her breakdown and outpouring of her Milton Bryan experience, Caroline Rose is driven to nervous collapse by the tapping of a Hellschreiber-esque typewriter recording her every thought. She is being turned, Caroline believes, into a fictional character. 'I refuse to have my thoughts and actions controlled by some unknown, possibly sinister being... I won't be involved in this fictional plot if I can help it.'
Published in 1957, The Comforters assured Spark's fame and her following novels would appear with the regularity of planes in a landing pattern. Her years of poverty were over, and she moved briefly to New York in the 1960s before settling in Italy where she died, aged 88, in 2006. Spark had written about her experience of the war in her 1992 memoir, Curriculum Vitae, but for full appreciation of just how much Delmer influenced her literary imagination, readers have to turn to Spark's own writing manifesto.
Given as a lecture in 1970, 'The Desegregation of Art' is Spark's clearest tribute to the PWE. Fiction, she explained, 'like the practice of deception', should be built on cunning, satire, and ridicule. 'Does this sound as if I thought of the purpose of art as propaganda? Perhaps it does sound so, and perhaps I do.'