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New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The ghost of Muriel Spark
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe '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] Related
Scotsman
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas review: 'a delightful novel'
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... Given how crazy much of the world today seems, it's strange that there seem to be fewer light-hearted comic novelists than was the case 60 or 70 years ago. Happily, a few dare to lift their head over the parapet. One is Olga Wojtas. Her short, elegant novels feature the Morningside librarian Shona McMonagle, the now middle-aged former prefect at Miss Blaine's School for Girls, first brought to wider notice by an earlier alumna Miss Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Miss Blaine and Shona spend some of their time removing and concealing copies of this scandalous novel and in deploring its promotion by Miss Spark's biographer Alan Taylor, himself once a librarian and therefore a man who should have known better. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is by the way and when we first come on Shona she is reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and finding it deplorably dull. She learned high standards at Miss Blaine's School for Girls. She has reason for her low opinion of Crusoe, for she herself is an accomplished and remarkable traveller, whose adventures are very much livelier than poor Crusoe's, for Miss Blaine dispatches her not only to distant lands but to times past. With commendable restraint, Wojtas dismisses the remarkable achievement in a brief, off-hand manner. Splendid and very welcome; no tedious pseudo-science. Her last excursion into the past took her to early Renaissance Venice, and a dangerous time she had there. Happily her excursions last for only a week, perhaps as long as the Morningside Library will spare her, and this time she is whisked to an island in the Baltic, where at first she encounters ship-wrecked mariners lurking in caves. They know nothing of the settlement across the hills but are in terror of a monster out for their blood. Even Shona's good Morningside sense can't persuade them that monsters are mythical creatures. At least one of the shipmates has been murdered. It must have been the monster's work and fear confines them to their separate caves. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad On the other side of the island Shona finds a settlement of indigenous people, one of them a striking and commanding woman who has a surprising knowledge of aspects of Scottish history. Shona communicates easily with the locals – as indeed with the ship-wrecked sailors – because she has a remarkable knowledge of varieties of Scandinavian, Danish and German dialects, evidence no doubt of the high quality of her education. Still, she doesn't get everything right. She thinks for instance that the woman who calls herself a detective may actually be the murderer of the shipwrecked sailor. The settlement is very agreeable, though the teabags are made with sheep's wool. There is an agreeable lady choirmaster, a charming girl who keeps a craft shop, a surly farmer and the councillor, a dim bureaucrat drawn, I like to think, from Edinburgh life. Olga Wojtas | Lisa Ferguson for The Scotsman It is all charming and often amusing, but Wojtas never forgets that the novel tells a story. Some authors of comic novels have often forgotten this and their novels are the feebler for it. Elements of the plot may be silly, as some are here, but the plot is needed to keep things moving; and Wojtas understands its importance. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It's a delightful novel and a cunning piece of craftsmanship, a novel to make you smile and – remarkably today – laugh out loud. The tone is so light and assured I found myself thinking of the great black and-white Ealing comedies – The Lavender Hill Mob and, appropriately for Wojtas's theme, A Passport to Pimlico. She brings off her fantasy in such a natural way it doesn't seem fantastic at all. Actually, there are times when the light-footed prose and well controlled imagination recall the early novels of Muriel Spark herself. Perhaps when Miss Blaine wasn't about, her favourite prefect surreptitiously delighted in the early Spark novels such as Memento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. She may even have smuggled a copy of Miss Brodie's scandalous Prime of Miss Jean Brodie into her bedroom. Be that as it may, her prose often echoes Spark's. High praise of course. This book is delightful fun anyway, and considerably more lively than Robinson Crusoe.
South China Morning Post
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet Toby Stephens, late Downton Abbey star Maggie Smith's actor son
Maggie Smith with her younger son, fellow thespian Toby Stephens. Celebrity children Last year, the world lost Dame Maggie Smith and we're yet to recover from the heartbreak. But now, the storied actress' younger son, Toby, 55, whom she shared with her ex-husband, actor Sir Robert Stephens, is revealing more details about her final moments. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Toby expressed his regret about not being with his mother when she took her last breath at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, in September. 'The last two years of her life had been a decline: she would get worse, then she would get better, then she would get worse,' he recalled. 'So I said, 'Look, I've got this film,' and before I could even ask her, she said, 'Go do it. God, you don't want to hang round here, I'm fine.'' Maggie Smith celebrates winning her best-actress Oscar (for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) with husband Robert Stephens and friends in 1970. Photo: TNS The film was Taratoa Stappard's Marama , a Māori gothic horror movie set in the 1800s, reports Variety. But a day before the project wrapped, the beloved Harry Potter actress died. Her elder son, Chris Larkin, was by her side. 'I was so sad not to be with him, I found that very difficult,' Stephens told The Sunday Times. Who is Toby Stephens, who gave up alcohol to turn his life around and who says he feels 'incredibly lucky'? Toby Stephens is an actor Toby Stephens as Poseidon in the 2023 Disney+ TV series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Photo: IMDb Stephens' parents never pushed him towards acting. In fact, they questioned him about his motivation for wanting to work in the industry. Still, he studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda), says the Daily Mail, graduating in 1991. Three years later he played the lead in a production of Coriolanus by the Royal Shakespeare Company. After breaking into the film industry he became the youngest Bond villain, starring as Gustav Graves opposite Pierce Brosnan's 007 in Die Another Day (2002). His extensive resume also includes a stint as Mr Rochester in the 2006 TV adaptation of Jane Eyre , the evil Prince John in 2009 BBC series Robin Hood and appearances in Netflix's One Day and Lost in Space . He was subjected to nepo baby allegations Toby Stephens as Damian Cray in Amazon TV series Alex Rider. Photo: IMDb
