The ghost of Muriel Spark

New Statesman​

11-06-2025

Muriel Spark's memoir, Curriculum Vitae, published in the spring of 1992, concludes in 1957 with the appearance of her first novel, The Comforters. The memoir looked back to her beginnings; by the time of its publication Spark was, aged 74, thinking about endings and how best to control her own. She therefore invited Martin Stannard to write her biography.
Spark made an art of beginnings and endings. We see it in The Girls of Slender Means, which begins and ends with the line 'long ago in 1945', and in her use of flash-forwards, so that the manner of a character's death is revealed at the start. The schoolgirl Mary McGregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 'who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame… at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fire'. Lise in The Driver's Seat, who selects a stranger to murder her, will be 'found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.'
The Driver's Seat might be seen as the blueprint for the game Spark set in motion with Stannard, whom she handpicked after reviewing the second volume of his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Stannard, Spark wrote, was 'a literary critic and a scrupulous scholar', who understood the relationship between a writer's life and his work. When she first invited to him to her home, Stannard assumed it was to interview him for the job, but Spark had decided already that this stranger was the man she wanted.
Because she was a hoarder who had thrown away nothing on paper for 40 years, there was little research for Stannard to do: the facts of Spark's life were organised into box files equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777. Her vast archive, now divided between the National Library of Scotland and the McFarlin Library in the University of Tulsa, was her legal defence. 'The silent, objective evidence of truth' would 'stand by me', she wrote in Curriculum Vitae, 'should I ever need it'.
Before she became a novelist, Spark had been a biographer herself and the omniscient narrators of her novels were born from writing biography, because the biographer sees both the beginning and the end. Her first full-length book, published in 1951, was a life of Mary Shelley called Child of Light. 'Mary Shelley was born in 1797 and died in 1851,' Spark wrote. 'However variously the whole story is interpreted, no one can take these facts away.'
Muriel Spark, who shared the initials of both Mary Shelley and Martin Stannard, was born in Edinburgh on 2 February 1918, the day and month on which Mary Shelley died. Aged 19, after a first-class education at the school on which she modelled Marcia Blaine in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark sailed to Southern Rhodesia to marry a schoolteacher who suffered, she soon discovered, from a severe mental illness. By the time her son, Robin, was born, the marriage was over. Leaving Robin in a convent in Gwelo, Spark returned to England in 1944 and worked, for the duration of the war, in black propaganda. She then, for 18 months, ran the Poetry Society, after which she set herself up as a biographer and critic. Until the end of the Fifties she lived from hand to mouth in bedsits, pitching ideas to publishers who then went bust. She wrote The Comforters soon after she converted to Catholicism in 1954, an event which coincided with a mental breakdown brought on by an excess of diet pills. Spark's fame was instant: by the 1960s her years of hardship were over. Twenty-one further novels, each flawless, appeared on a regular basis.
The biographer's task, Spark believed, was to summarise the facts. Biography is, after all, the art of summary and summary was the art in which Spark excelled: her novels, short stories and poetry, biographies of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë, critical study of John Masefield, editions of the letters of Cardinal Newman, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, selection of Emily Brontë's poems and Wordsworth criticism measure two feet on the shelf. Each of Spark's brief books grew out of a mountain of paperwork, firming up the plot, pinning down the characters, lacing it all together with the elegance of a sonnet.
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'Treat me as though I were dead,' Spark told Stannard. This did not mean don't let me get in the way of your research, but assume I'll be ghost writing my own biography. Ghosts are everywhere in Spark's fiction, where they terrorise the living. Needle, the narrator of 'The Portobello Road', is smothered to death in a haystack and then haunts her murderer. In 'The Executor', which Spark considered, alongside 'The Portobello Road', her most satisfactory story, a famous Scottish novelist, living in an isolated house in the Pentland Hills, asks his niece and executor to sort his lifetime of papers into box files, which she does with impressive efficiency. 'There's little for me to do now, Susan, but die,' he says with a sly smile. Shortly afterwards he does die and Susan sells the archive to a foundation, withholding the 12 notebooks which contain his unfinished final novel 'The Witch of the Pentlands', about the trapping and trial of a witch. Why not write the ending herself, Susan wonders? But when she opens the 12th notebook, whose pages had previously been blank, there is a message in her uncle's handwriting: 'Well, Susan, how do you feel about finishing my novel? Aren't you a greedy little snoot, holding back my unfinished work, when you know the Foundation paid for the lot?' His concluding chapter, Susan discovers – where the witch out-foxes her persecutors – had been secretly written before his death and deposited earlier with the Foundation.
Stannard went about his task as he understood it: interpreting the documents, conducting interviews and putting together a portrait of his subject. Nine years later, in 2002, he delivered his first draft to Spark. It was what she called 'a hatchet job; full of insults', 1,200 pages of 'slander' and 'defamation' which she was sending to a libel lawyer. She did not recognise the humourless woman described; she had been turned into a fictional figure. Determined to prevent publication, she did what she could to spoil the book and hold up its progress. The biographer and his subject were yoked in a danse macabre of pursuer and pursued, the plight of each resided in the other. Her distress, Spark's friends say, effectively killed her, and when she died aged 88 in 2006, Stannard, now into the 14th year of his impossible task, was at work on the third draft. Muriel Spark: The Biography, which received stellar reviews when it finally appeared in 2009, is indeed the work of a literary critic and scrupulous scholar.
'What Spark wanted,' Stannard reflected, was 'to write the book herself.' So why didn't she write the book herself? Even he didn't know the answer. 'Why this intensely private person should have invited someone to write her biography remains mysterious,' Stannard says in his preface. But Spark had written the book herself several times: not as the story of her life, but as the story of her relationship with her biographer.
In The Ballad of Peckham Rye, published in 1960, Dougal Douglas, the horned stranger who creates havoc in south London, is ghosting the autobiography of the retired actress Maria Cheeseman, but she doesn't recognise herself: 'That last bit you wrote,' Miss Cheeseman complains, 'it isn't ME.' The book is meant to be factual, but Dougal keeps adding fictional details: she was born in Streatham, for example, and not Peckham. 'There's the law of libel to be considered,' Dougal explains. 'A lot of your early associates in Streatham are still alive. If you want to write the true story of your life you can't place it in Streatham.' Despairing of his subject's interference, Dougal throws down the gauntlet. 'I thought it was a work of art you wanted me to write… If you only want to write a straight autobiography you should have got a straight ghost. I'm crooked.'
Spark was crooked too, and biography and autobiography are crooked arts. Curriculum Vitae, like all CVs, is built on evasions, and biographies, as Spark well knew, are more than Wikipedia entries. She was a richly imaginative biographer herself, with trenchant views on the genre. In an article about Charlotte Brontë, Spark argued that 'biographical writing which adheres relentlessly to fact' distorts the subject, 'because facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved, and the only people and events worth reading about are complex'. Mary Shelley was both a complex and a conflicted character, and 'if we are to see the whole woman', Spark insisted, 'we must witness the conflict'. This is similarly the case with Spark, who left instructions throughout her work for her biographer to follow.
In Child of Light, which contained the first full-length study of Frankenstein, Spark saw in the scientist and his creature the model for the biographer and his subject. Like Boswell and Johnson, they are linked for eternity. 'There are two central figures – or rather two in one,' she explained in a brilliant analysis of Mary Shelley's first novel, because the Monster and his creator are bound together: 'Frankenstein's plight resides in the Monster, and the Monster's in Frankenstein.' So 'engrossed' are the couple, 'one with the other', that they are no longer individuals but 'facets of the same personality'. When the book became a film, it was unclear, for example, which of them was called Frankenstein.
A further reflection on biography can be seen in The Comforters, where Caroline Rose, a writer and Catholic convert recovering, as Spark was, from a breakdown, believes that her thoughts are being recorded by a ghost at an invisible typewriter. 'I have the feeling that someone is writing the story of our lives,' she tells her boyfriend. 'Whoever he is, he haunts me. The author records everything that's important about us.' Increasingly terrified, Caroline insists that, 'I won't be involved in this fictional plot if I can help it. In fact, I'd like to spoil it. If I had my way I'd hold up the action of the novel. It's a duty.'
While Spark's first book described the writing of her own biography, her first novel described the horror of being trapped in a book. From the very beginning, she foresaw the end.
Frances Wilson's 'Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark' is published by Bloomsbury Circus
[See also: English literature's last stand]
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