The Judgments of Muriel Spark

The Atlantic

2 days ago

The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus– level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium. Interested in 'the fun and funny aspects of being a teacher'? Read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie —also good for learning how to be a highly inappropriate teacher, if you want to know that too.
Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer—indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in 1954, at age 36, and joined the cohort of renowned literary Catholic converts such as T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. The most consistent influence on her work is the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She began reading it as a girl in her Presbyterian school and kept rereading it throughout her life, less for 'religious consolation,' she writes in her essay 'The Books I Re-Read and Why,' than 'for sheer enjoyment of the literature.' She was particularly drawn to the Book of Job, an anguished outcry against the seeming randomness of evil. And yet her tone throughout her work is so acidly droll, her touch so light and sly, that we could read most of her 22 novels and 41 short stories and never quite process that their central concern is God.
That's because she communicates her theology largely through form rather than content. She rarely discusses; she prefers to sculpt. With a steely command of omniscience, selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices, Spark re-creates in the relationship between author and reader the sadomasochistic partnership between the Almighty and his hopelessly wayward flock—or, to put it another way, between his absolute truth and our partial understanding. In other words, she plays God.
Not necessarily a nice God, either. In the Book of Job, the Almighty is mercilessly capricious, condemning Job to bitter suffering in a wager with Satan. This God's ends are not our ends. Nor are Spark's. A Creator who acts according to his will on his own unknowable schedule darkens her bright, chipper prose like a skull in a still life. 'Remember you must die,' the anonymous callers in Memento Mori (1959) say to their shocked elderly victims before hanging up. Frightening as these prank calls are, their recipients refuse to take the message seriously, because surely the whole thing is just a macabre practical joke. One feature of Spark's comic genius is her ability to come up with screwball storylines that recapitulate our hapless drift toward final judgment. The collision between God's lofty vantage point and human shortsightedness yields absurdist disaster.
In Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Frances Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject. Her account is a corrective to Martin Stannard's 2009 authorized Muriel Spark: The Biography, a sober, balanced, and plodding opus, though still the definitive biography. Stannard's problem was that Spark had trained as a secretary and filed everything away, no matter how trivial. (Another way of saying this is that she hoarded.) When she died, her archives consisted of 195 linear feet of 'letters, proofs, receipts, memos, agendas, minutes, newspaper cuttings, diaries and manuscripts,' Wilson writes. Spark had given Stannard exclusive access to it all. The mass of material seems to have crushed his spirit. Almost as soon as she chose him, she regretted it, and Wilson imagines her torturing Stannard the way the ghost of a murdered woman toys with her murderer in Spark's short story 'The Portobello Road.'
From the September 2010 issue: The 20th century's most wickedly funny novelist
Wilson, by contrast, feels free to focus on the parts of Spark's life that informed her art—and luckily for us, these are plentiful, both because Spark liked to rework her own experiences and acquaintances for her fiction, and because her life tended toward the fantastical in ways that served her writing. Wilson borrows Spark's own mystical whimsy about the relationship between her life and her work, which was that her fiction somehow preceded her experiences. 'If she wrote about a burglary,' Wilson says, 'her own house would then be broken into; if she wrote about manuscripts being stolen from a bedroom or a cache of love letters being used as blackmail, this would likewise be her fate.'
This was true. Her house was burgled a decade after she wrote about similar burglaries in her novel Symposium (1990). Blackmail featured in her first novel, The Comforters (1957), and in Memento Mori; in 1963, she was blackmailed by a rare-book dealer in possession of her love letters. You'd think Spark took dictation from a far-seeing God. Indeed, that's more or less the subject of The Comforters. A young woman hears voices narrating her exact movements, or else predicting the near future, accompanied by the sound of typing. Everyone presumes she's going mad, but what the voices say is either true or about to come true. Who controls the narrative? That's Spark's big question. Whether to trust or resist those who attempt to control it is the follow-up question.
A lot of untrustworthy people tried to take charge of Spark over the course of her adult life, most of them men. Her childhood, however, was happy and relatively free of such power struggles. Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in 1918 to a Jewish father, Barney, and a mother, Cissy, who had some Jewish heritage, she was raised on a haphazard mix of gods and rituals. Her mother, more eclectic than observant, Wilson writes,
put seven candles in the window on the Sabbath, went to synagogue on Yom Kippur (in order, Muriel said, to show off her hat collection), celebrated Passover, kept an image of Christ in her locket, a Buddha on a lotus leaf in the living room, served hot cross buns at Easter, mince pies at Christmas and pork all year round.
The family lived modestly on a street in central Edinburgh that was full of delights for a curious child. In her building were a painter, a singer, a sweetshop, and a jeweler, and outside was a communal garden to play in. The Cambergs—Muriel had an older brother—gave over one of two bedrooms in their small apartment to lodgers, then to Barney's sister and later Cissy's mother, a former suffragette (indomitable, witty, and 'astonishingly ugly,' Spark later wrote). Muriel adored them both. Her father, an engineer, was genial and funny, and friends were always dropping by. Spark's mother mocked them behind their back; Spark once called Cissy, not disapprovingly, 'a complete hypocrite.' The child internalized her mother's satirical edge as well as the neighborhood 'maxims, idioms, accents, aphorisms, rhythms and catchphrases,' Wilson writes. Her ears had memories, was how Spark put it.
When she was 11 and a student at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, Spark came under the spell of Miss Kay, a pedagogical grande dame who exposed her to Italian art and Romantic poetry and trained her in poetic meter. By the time Spark was 12, she had published accomplished poems in her high-school magazine and in an anthology of poetry by Edinburgh high-school students. Miss Kay, Wilson says, 'both was and was not the model for Miss Jean Brodie,' Spark's most notorious character. They shared 'mannerisms and speech patterns'; both overpraised their protégés as the 'crème de la crème.' But Miss Kay was much nicer. Miss Brodie is partial to Nazis and Italian fascists and maneuvers her girls into position to act as her advocates and surrogates—which is not always in their interest. 'By the time they were sixteen,' Spark writes with characteristic mordancy, 'they remained unmistakably Brodie, and were all famous in the school, which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking.'
Spark's marriage at 19, in 1937, drove home to her that the world was not inclined to let women take charge of their own destiny. Oswald Spark, a teacher who courted her for a year, had accepted a job in Rhodesia and asked Spark to follow him. He'd support her, he said, and she could keep writing poetry. She consented. Their wedding night was 'an awful mess,' Spark said later, 'a botch-up,' and marital relations did not continue for long. But she got pregnant and nearly died of septicemia after giving birth to a son, Robin, toward whom she was never able to muster as much maternal solicitude as he longed for. Oswald turned out to have a 'severe nervous disorder,' in Spark's words, and after two years, she left him. Colonial society horrified her, especially the way white people talked about black people as if they weren't human, but war had broken out and she only managed to make her escape in 1944, resorting to a troopship that had to navigate through enemy waters. She was forced to leave Robin behind; it took her 10 years to win back custody.
Wilson frames the next phase of Spark's life as a key to the fiction that was still a decade away, and she's not exaggerating its importance. When Spark arrived in London in 1944, she got a job as a secretary for the head of a clandestine project overseen by the British Foreign Office. In fact, she may already have been doing undercover work. Wilson hypothesizes that she spied for the British colonial government during her last year in Rhodesia, possibly trying to uncover enemy aliens among the settlers. Wilson cites no direct evidence but rather a curious gap in the record of what she was up to, or even where she lived.
Spark's new boss was a wildly imaginative and very demanding foreign correspondent of Falstaffian proportions named Sefton Delmer. His outfit, the Political Warfare Executive, conducted psyops from a secret compound north of London. The PWE's mission was 'the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy'; it produced disinformation in German that was published in a counterfeit newspaper, sent in the form of forged letters and fake secret messages, and broadcast over the radio. An anti-Semitic Nazi talk-show host who ranted drunkenly about corruption and sexual depravity among the party elite from his illegal outpost in the fatherland, for instance, was in reality a German writer of detective fiction employed by Delmer in England.
From the February 2001 issue: Dame Muriel's surreal meditation on belief
Working for Delmer may have been the best training a future novelist could get. He was fanatical about verisimilitude: All the details in the team's fabrications had to ring true. He hired people from every profession. In addition to writers, he enlisted farmers, psychologists, actors, even cabaret singers, some of them German Jewish refugees knowledgeable about German life. Plus the military fed Delmer the latest intelligence. He was 'omniscient,' Wilson writes, and scary; he liked to play mind games with his own people as well as the Germans.
Spark's immersion in 'a world of method and intrigue,' as she put it, taught her about the slipperiness of truth. For the rest of her life, she would be obsessed with—indeed, paranoid about—'codes, secret messages and the circulation of fictions posing as fact,' Wilson writes. Several of Spark's novels feature shady characters spying on one another and hatching whisper campaigns against a defiant but naive heroine. She later was the target of a plot herself. During Spark's brief tenure in 1947 as the editor hired to update The Poetry Review, a stodgy publication overseen by an elderly poetry society, a board member scheming to oust her pried into her life and threatened to use her divorce against her. Spark put this experience to use in more than one novel, most notably Loitering With Intent (1981), probably her funniest. The Poetry Society becomes the Autobiographical Association, whose ridiculous members write their memoirs under the supervision of the director, a snooty character clearly conniving to use their confessions for some sort of skulduggery.
Then there was Spark's nervous breakdown in January 1954. Always worried about her weight, an anxiety shared by some of her heroines, she had been taking Dexedrine to control her eating. During the ensuing psychotic interlude, she fixated on T. S. Eliot, whose most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, had a character named Muriel. Convinced that Eliot, whom she had never met, had sneaked encrypted declarations of love for her into the script, she spent months obsessively trying to decode them. This wasn't easy. At one point, Wilson writes, 'Eliot's words started jumping around and cavorting, reshaping themselves in anagrams and crosswords.'
A doctor weaned Spark from Dexedrine and put her on antipsychotic medication, and she briefly went into therapy with a Jungian psychologist. But Roman Catholicism restored order to her disorderly mind, Spark said. It made her 'see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings.' She put herself in the hands of God, who sees and hears all—God being a preferable eavesdropper and spy to ex-boyfriends and boards of directors. Piety did not make her dogmatic or conservative. She neither went to confession nor renounced abortion, contraception, or divorce, and she embraced doubt.
From the November 1965 issue: Muriel Sparks's poem 'Note by the Wayside'
Spark's turn to religion coincided with her turn to fiction, which was not an accident. Catholicism allowed her to find her voice as a writer. While editing a volume of the letters of Cardinal John Henry Newman, she had read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which details the steps of his conversion to Catholicism and inspired her to begin to take her own. The qualities in his reflections that attracted her—simplicity, concision, a refusal to accept easy answers—double as a good description of the style she was developing.
Catholicism itself had aesthetic appeal. She was drawn to its living magic—its 'saints, angels, miracles, and mysteries,' Wilson writes. 'She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension and rearrangement of time and space.' For believers, those staples of faith had an immediacy and a proximity to the everyday that Spark may have felt was best embodied in fiction. From the start, in her very first (and prize-winning) short story, 'The Seraph and the Zambezi' (1951)—still one of her best—she effaced the distinction between naturalism and the supernatural. During a Christmas pageant held by a gas-station owner in his rickety garage near Rhodesia's Zambezi River, a six-winged creature appears onstage and proceeds to kick everyone else off it. It's a seraph, straight out of the Book of Isaiah. 'This is my show,' the owner, Cramer, tells it.
'Since when?' the Seraph said.
'Right from the start,' Cramer breathed at him.
'Well, it's been mine from the Beginning,' said the Seraph, 'and the Beginning began first.'
Why Catholicism and not, say, Scottish Presbyterianism, the country's Calvinist-inflected denomination of her youth, or her father's Judaism? Spark's love of high style surely rebelled against the austerity of Protestantism, both in worship and creed. (As a writer, however, she made heavy use of the doctrine of predestination, disposing of characters summarily and parodying herself in the figure of Miss Jean Brodie. 'She thinks she is Providence,' a disenchanted student reflects. 'She thinks she is the God of Calvin.')
Spark was even more conflicted about Judaism. In The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), a chatty, muddled autobiographical novel, she describes her protagonist going back and forth between her chilly Christian relatives and her warmer Jewish ones and belonging among neither. To one side of the family, she was faintly pitiable because she was half Jewish; the other was kinder, but she felt her lack of Jewish knowledge excluded her from their cozy home rituals. Spark always had the Bible, though, and read it 'with a sense that it was specially mine,' as she put it. She thought God had given a good answer when Moses had asked his name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Was she 'a Gentile' or was she 'a Jewess'? 'Both and neither. What am I? I am what I am,' she writes in her essay 'Note on My Story 'The Gentile Jewesses.' '
Spark's range as a novelist was impressive—one work might adopt the guise of a murder mystery, the next of a ghost story—but she had a signature rhetorical move: prolepsis. The scholar Clare Bucknell came up with a Spark-worthy term for it: the 'auto-spoiler.' In a throwaway remark toward the beginning of a story, the narrator gives away the end. We learn in Chapter 3 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) that one of the Brodie set will betray her to the school's administration, which is desperate for an excuse to get rid of her. In The Driver's Seat (1970), Spark's most surreal novel and also her favorite, we are told, also in the third chapter, that the tourist disembarking in a Southern European city will have been murdered by the next morning.
By revealing the fate of her characters, Spark frees us from the grip of curiosity about what's going to happen and forces us to study why. Who made it happen? What does it mean? Does providence foreordain or do characters have a say? Is everything a conspiracy or does accident play a role? Spark's convictions let her interrogate God's designs without despairing that there are none. As a child, Spark had found God to be 'a charming and witty character' with 'a lot of conflicting sides to his nature,' as she wrote. The worry that crops up in her fiction is that he'll turn out to be a rogue operator like her old boss Delmer.
But Spark also admired the God of Job because he was 'not the God of love,' Wilson writes. He was the braggart God who boasted to Job that—in Spark's words—'I made this and I created that, and I can crush and I can blast and I can blow. And who are you to ask questions?' A devoted ironist is the answer: Spark reserved the right not only to ask questions but to admit amusement and dismay into her faith. Anyone can worship a God who doesn't trim himself to the size of the human imagination—that's what God is for, to make sure that we don't mistake our petty schemes for anything other than half-baked. But it takes a Spark to be fond of a God who chest-thumps and is otherwise outlandish—a God who, she writes, 'basks unashamed in his own glory, and in his anger is positively blasphemous.' Because who are we to say how God should behave?