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The Guardian
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson review – the mercurial Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life. She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years ('a hatchet job; full of insults', she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn't hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool. It's Wilson's belief that Spark was playing a cat and mouse game with the future, packing her novels with clues and cryptic mementoes from her own past. Rather than the conventional cradle to grave, Wilson's focus here is on the first 39 years of Spark's life, culminating in the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, in 1957: 'the years of turbulence, when everything was piled on'. This doesn't mean that later masterpieces like A Far Cry from Kensington or Loitering With Intent are ignored, but rather mined for evidence of their real-life antecedents. Time slips and shuttles, fittingly for a writer who was such a master of prolepsis, those devastating little glimpses into the future that make novels like The Driver's Seat and The Girls of Slender Means so uncanny. A formidable student, whose first poem was anthologised at the age of 12, Camberg didn't go to university. Her parents – ordinary class, in her estimation – were too poor, and so instead she took a precis-writing course and a position in a school, where she learned shorthand in lieu of pay. Her next job was as a secretary, this time for hard cash, which she spent on the jazz dances at which she met her future husband, Sydney Oswald Spark, known as Ossie. 'I thought him interesting,' she said, and: 'I didn't know that a girl could break away and get herself a flat.' It wasn't a happy marriage. Ossie had failed to mention that he was subject to violent paranoia, under psychiatric care, and no longer employable as a teacher in Britain due to his erratic behaviour. In 1937, the couple married in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe. By Christmas she was pregnant and trapped amid the stultifying, amoral racism of the settlers. 'He was camouflaged in the colony,' Wilson writes of Ossie, 'in the sense that his illness, which took the form of berserk and violent outbursts, was indistinguishable from the berserk and violent outbursts of those settlers who didn't suffer from Ossie's condition.' After he tried to shoot Muriel, she escaped with her two-year-old son Robin and his nanny. The war meant it took her five years to get home. She left Robin in a Catholic boarding school, and fled via Cape Town. Though she eventually managed to get Robin to Edinburgh, where he was raised by her parents, she would never live with him again. This is considered one of the Great Crimes of Muriel, along with the supposed fact that she concealed her identity as a Jew. It was Robin, victim of the first, who was her accuser in the second. In adulthood he converted to Orthodoxy, and announced to the world that Spark's mother was not a Gentile but a Jewish convert (her father was Jewish, a fact she hadn't concealed). Nonsense, retorted Spark, salting the wound by saying of her only child: 'He's never done anything for me except for being one big bore.' But her cruelty conceals the desperate attempts she made in London to find herself a job and a new husband, so that she could get custody and provide a home for her young son. The law, in its wisdom, had granted custody to a violent man in psychiatric care rather than the woman who fled from him. Brilliant, beautiful and disinclined to conceal her talent or ambition, Spark was much desired and much despised in London. After working in black propaganda during the war, she became general secretary of the Poetry Society and soon after editor of its journal, the Poetry Review. The society was an internecine and antiquated establishment that she attempted to drag into the 20th century. This was not a success. Her close encounter with irrationality and malevolence, which later provided satirical material for Loitering With Intent, left her isolated and determined to make her own way as a writer. Before the novels began, Spark underwent one last enormous transformation. In the early 1950s, she suffered a breakdown, precipitated by her use of Dexedrine as a diet pill, and converted to Catholicism. From now on God was in charge, even if her faith was distinctly unconventional. She believed in angels and liked miracles, but was pro-choice, didn't go to confession, and tended to skip the tedium of the sermon, arriving just in time for the eucharist. It's interesting that Wilson describes Spark as being unable to grasp that misogyny was her real enemy, the disguised combatant behind many of her episodes of paranoia. She certainly saw it in her books. It's hard to think of a more knowing account of male violence against women than her short story The Portobello Road, with its beyond-the-grave narrator, murdered in a haystack. I suspect the real reason Spark didn't participate in the struggles of feminism was that she believed the earthly world would always be divided into the powerful and the powerless, and that her task was to record the struggle. Laughter was her weapon, a purifying absurdity – a 'derisive undermining of what was wrong,' as she once put it. Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves, you feel her thinking, the pompous and the cruel, the self-serving and self-deceiving. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Juxtaposition, compression, elision: Spark knew what to leave out, and it is these odd gaps that make her novels feel so much larger than they are, so spookily resonant and sly. To read them is to be inducted into a code, to move between the lines, to grasp both the stock phrase and the terrible unsaid that lurks behind it. Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark's approach. Her own life is in there, for sure, but distilled into its purest form, which is to say a human comedy, where dark forces seem to triumph, unaware that they are being skewered by a sharp and all-seeing eye. Olivia Laing's new novel, The Silver Book, will be published in November. Electric Spark: the Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is published by Bloomsbury (£25). 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Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson: Spy, Secretary, Superstar: The Prime of Miss Muriel Spark
Electric Spark: The Enigma Of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury £25, 432pp) In the summer of 1953, Muriel Spark – not yet the famous novelist behind The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – was en route from London to the Edinburgh Festival, rattling with amphetamines. She was reviewing a new play by T.S. Eliot, who praised the ensuing article as 'one of the two or three most intelligent reviews' he read. But a year later, Spark was gripped by drug-induced psychosis, believing that Eliot was sending her cryptic messages, disguising himself as her window cleaner and stealing her food. Prescribed Largactil, she quickly recovered, yet an interest in code-cracking and deceit would always colour her imagination. In the dreary world of post-war British fiction, still a boys' club fixated on realism, be it Kingsley Amis's campus satire Lucky Jim or the kitchen-sink drama of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Spark's sleek brand of experimental struck like lightning. Her 1957 debut The Comforters portrays a woman who hears in her head the text of the very book we're reading. Her 1961 smash hit The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie tells us right away that the maverick teacher of the title (played on screen by Maggie Smith) will be betrayed by her pupils. The first line of 1970's The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favourite of her 22 novels, introduces us to a woman in search of her future murderer – two decades before Martin Amis cemented enfant terrible status with the same idea in London Fields. Enigmatic yet crisp and concise, crackling with twists, each of Spark's 22 novels was written in one go without her needing to revise them – or so she told a BBC interviewer later in life. Frances Wilson casts an admiring yet sceptical eye over that and other claims in this new biography, exploring the mind behind the books. Born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish factory worker and Presbyterian mother in 1918, the author worked as a secretary before leaving Edinburgh for Southern Rhodesia. She had married Sydney Spark, a troubled teacher she met at a dance at 19. He had found a post there after his worrying antics, such as firing a starting pistol in the classroom, had deterred employers at home. Seven years later, Spark walked out on Africa and her husband – as well as their young son, Robin. At a job centre in London she was recruited for undercover work with the Foreign Office, where she helped flood Nazi Germany with propaganda from a clandestine HQ in Bedfordshire. Wilson speculates that it wasn't Spark's first rodeo – she might have been a spy in Bulawayo, identifying enemy aliens among settlers. An abiding interest in secret communication tipped her into madness once she embarked on literary life in London, where she encountered strife from the start. Appointed editor of the magazine Poetry Review in the 1940s, she championed edgier poets such as Eliot and W.H. Auden. 'I started publishing modern poems rather than Christmas card-type poems,' she said in an interview in 2000. But she rubbed long-time contributors the wrong way. 'They would do anything to get published. Those that weren't queer wanted to sleep with me. They thought they were poets and there should be free love or something.' When Spark entered a story competition in The Observer – 'as one might enter for a crossword puzzle,' she said – she won first prize. It poured oil on the jealousy of her on-off lover Derek Stanford, a jobbing writer and sometime collaborator who betrayed her by selling her letters and writing rumour-filled books about her. Spark was 'a magnet for mediocrities', says Wilson, describing alarming encounters in her rackety Grub Street life. Where an earlier biographer referred to Spark's failed seduction by the forgotten experimental novelist Rayner Heppenstall – a BBC producer who was pals with George Orwell – Wilson instead calls it 'attempted rape'. By the Sixties, Spark was a superstar, London in the rear-view mirror. In Manhattan she was given an office with a view of Times Square by the editor of The New Yorker. In 1966 she upped sticks again, to Italy. In Rome she lived in a Renaissance-era apartment so grand she couldn't see the ceiling; in Tuscany, she settled down with Penelope Jardine, an art student she met while getting her hair done. With Jardine as her gatekeeper and companion, peace broke out – at least until Spark received a proposal from biographer Martin Stannard. Spark had praised his biography of Evelyn Waugh in a review for this paper in 1992. When Stannard sent her a card to say thanks, she replied that she wished she herself would have a biographer as good. Stannard seized the moment and put himself forward, though not without trepidation: how would an academic with the dress sense of Norman Wisdom (as he put it) measure up to a woman so chic? The ensuing years were an ordeal for both parties. Spark had sought redress for the tittle-tattle peddled in the books that her former lover Derek Stanford had written about her. But that wish led her to thwart the very biographer she appointed, controlling his work through lengthening bouts of failing health. One of Spark's friends recalls sitting with her at her kitchen table as she read aloud scornfully from Stannard's 1,200-page manuscript, which had been submitted for her approval as per their agreement. Every detail was questioned: her mental breakdown was, she said, actually 'a physical breakdown which inspired a form of dyslexia'. The book, rewritten four times, was eventually published after Spark died in 2006 – essentially in its original form, Stannard tells Wilson. Wilson's own biography avoids a cradle-to-grave approach, opting for a dynamic and dizzying weave of early struggles and future success. She reports that in 1961 a magazine polled leading novelists about whether they wanted to make a political, moral, spiritual or intellectual impact ('Certainly not,' said 007 author Ian Fleming). Spark replied: 'In all four fields I would like more readers to see things as I do.' Wilson calls her the 'most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape'. Hard not to agree.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The secret wartime life of Muriel Spark
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.'
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson review: 'illuminating and enjoyable'
Muriel Spark pictured in 1960 | Getty Images Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Almost 50 years ago I wrote a small book about Muriel Spark for a small Edinburgh Press. It was a study of her novels, and she liked, or at least quite liked it, partly because there was almost nothing of a biographical nature - she had a high sense of her right to privacy. Later, we became friendly. I met her when she came to Edinburgh with her friend Penelope Jardine, and she invited me to visit them at their Italian home, an invitation I never took up. Much later she selected a biographer, Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had found good, but the relationship wasn't happy and she disliked his book. Now, 20 years after her death, there is a new, rich and well researched biography by Frances Wilson. Muriel Spark pictured in 1960 | Getty Images It is intelligent and for the most part both illuminating and enjoyable, although I don't suppose Spark would have liked it either. Though the novels are discussed, a few in detail, many are more or less ignored, only those drawing more immediately on her life getting extensive treatment. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The story of her childhood and youth in Edinburgh will be well known to Scotsman readers. It was the city that formed her and she wrote her novels in an Edinburgh tone of voice. She never lived in the city after her early and unhappy marriage, which took her to what was then Rhodesia, yet you still heard the Edinburgh tone. She said she wrote her novels on the "nevertheless" principle: that may be so; nevertheless it may not. The marriage broke up and in 1944 she returned to Britain, leaving her four year-old son Robin in a convent. She retrieved him after the war and took him to Edinburgh to be brought up by her parents. She supported his care, from her meagre earnings, but they were never close and in her late years there was a very public quarrel when Robin was angered by her insistence that she wasn't entirely Jewish. Wilson discusses this sad business fairly and at length. Muriel Spark in 1983 | Getty Images In London, Spark worked first in a department of the Foreign Office which dealt with counter-espionage. Wilson says she was actively engaged in this herself, but, since she worked there for only the last months of the war, I have my doubts. What is certain, however, is that spies of one sort or another feature repreatedly in her novels. The subject fascinated her. She had a magpie's eye for possibilities. For some years she collaborated with her lover Derek Stanford on biographies and criticism. They talked of marriage, but fell out. Then she wrote her first novel, The Comforters, highly praised by Evelyn Waugh. She was on her way. Others followed in quick succession, notably The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, though my own favourite of these early books is Memento Mori. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Wilson pays a lot of attention to the split with Stanford and the memoirs he wrote which infuriated Spark. I never knew Stanford, though for some years we shared fiction reviewing duties in the Scotsman. Robert Nye, our lead reviewer, said he was "a nice old thing." Spark's success was remarkable. Rather like Byron, she rose in the morning and found herself famous.
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
‘I secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately'
In 1995, Dame Muriel Spark, then one of Britain's most distinguished living writers, was interviewed for a BBC documentary. During filming, the show's editor commented that 'her biographer must be the most depressed man in England'. Three years earlier, Spark had personally anointed Martin Stannard as the writer of what she intended to be the authorised version of her life, presenting him with the vast archive of documentation – spanning 50 years and 50 metres – gathered at her home in Arezzo. 'Treat me as if I were dead,' she instructed him. Stannard understood this to mean that he should proceed as a traditional historian; by the time his hag-ridden book was published 17 years later he had learned his mistake. The construction of biography assumes a certain orderliness in its subjects, the author's task being to summarise, arrange and analyse the facts of their existence; but Spark had never been much interested in doing anything so ordinary as living. Hers was not so much a life as a plot, and Stannard, unwittingly, was written into it. Frances Wilson is a ferociously clever writer, and with Spark as her subject she needs to be. Taking Spark's feud with Stannard as its catalyst, her biography of 'the loneliest and most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape' grapples with the process by which Muriel Spark created her greatest work of art, 'Muriel Spark'; a writer who in a (discarded) author's note on her most celebrated novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) declared: 'It has always been my intention to practise the arts of pretence and counterfeit on the reader.
