Twin Menace

Muriel Spark opens her autobiography with a warning: “The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that well-meaning scholars tend to repeat each other. Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect.” Like Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which seems to have been her model, Curriculum Vitae begins with a discussion of the nature of truth before proceeding to the events of her life; and like Newman, Spark claims to have brought the receipts: “I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses.” Uncharacteristically—indeed with perhaps only one very interesting exception—Spark seems to have played it straight. Perhaps this is why at the time the book was considered a bit of a letdown. Readers expected something more in line with her fiction—chronological tricks, perspectival ambiguity, seemingly odd narrative decisions, alluring descriptions. “In my case,” Spark writes, perhaps anticipating this criticism, “the truth is often less flattering, less romantic, but often more interesting than the false story.”

It has been fifteen years since Martin Stannard published his doorstopper, Muriel Spark: The Biography, a model of dutiful scholarship to which some critics have responded in language remarkably similar to that which greeted the appearance of Spark’s memoir. Is it possible that Spark was right about her own life? Two new books allow readers to decide for themselves.

The first of these is Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel. Notice the absence of the words “biography” or even “life.” This has become something of a trend in what we are still forced to call “life-writing,” but here, I would argue, the choice is appropriate, for Wilson has not written anything like a straightforward “life,” but a kind of hybrid of biography, literary criticism, and appreciation largely concentrated on more or less the same period covered in Curriculum Vitae, from Spark’s birth in 1918 to the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The second book is the first of two projected volumes of Spark’s selected letters, this one covering the years 1944 to 1963, brilliantly edited by Dan Gunn.

Electric Spark was published in Britain in June, and the letters appeared in August. I read Wilson first and Gunn later, but in hindsight I wish the order had been reversed. Gunn has done a masterly job in his selection and in his notes. His introduction is a model statement of editorial intent, in which he explains his decision to reproduce only complete letters in the main body of the text, however interesting various ellipsis-laden fragments might have been to some readers. This choice he justifies with reference to Spark’s own editorial practice. As she put it while describing an early project, “I would not like to suppress the passage in Rose Macaulay’s letter, as the suppression of letters and parts of letters is a kind of falsehood and a great nuisance to impartial scholars.” There is something fitting about experiencing Spark this way, bogged down in day-to-day banality and poverty until she is suddenly set aflame by her own incandescent personality.

The work of selection cannot have been easy. Gunn tells us that Spark’s own letters number about four thousand, with about twice as many extant ones addressed to her (an interesting ratio). The correspondence is scattered across twenty-odd university and other library archives. Here Gunn is clearly indebted to Stannard, but his selections include some items that Stannard either had not seen or simply chose not to make use of. Spark’s correspondence with the playwright John Van Druten is evidence of Gunn’s extraordinary industry. Van Druten is only briefly mentioned by Stannard—and ignored entirely by Frances Wilson—but theirs is a fascinating exchange between two artists, with an intimacy (cut short by Van Druten’s untimely death in December 1957) that appears almost nowhere else in her letters.

It was well known in Spark’s lifetime that she did not like to be interviewed, or otherwise interrupted once she had begun writing a new book. In the late Fifties and early Sixties the letters have their fair share of holes, empty months and threadbare seasons. Spark was working. Yet she was not a recluse. She loved parties, especially those with enviable guest lists, and she liked going on trips and meeting new people. But publicity she did not care for. “There’s nothing I can tell the public about my life that can clarify my books,” Spark once told Harding Lemay, her editor at Knopf, when he asked her for publicity material. “It’s rather the books that clarify my life.” Spark said lots of things like this in interviews over the years, always playing one of a loveable series of campy characters. In the early Sixties she made her debut on the B.B.C., talking about the Brontës in a graveyard. Here she seems like a young spinster who knows how to cast spells. In the following years, she was stylish and funny and younger somehow, and she continued to look—and to act—younger than most women her age for years afterward before she settled into what I think of as her “Dame Muriel” persona: a witty, powerful, cutting, aloof empress dowager of letters. It is sometimes difficult to determine whether comments like the one made to Lemay are content-rich statements, or Spark begging off what she considered annoying requests.

Nevertheless, these lines, which Wilson quotes in her preface, provide a sort of rationale for Electric Spark. Spark’s novels can certainly be used to clarify aspects of their author’s life. Wilson’s narrative closely follows the pattern of events established by Spark in her autobiography and mostly corroborated by Stannard, with dimension and flair added by her comments about the fiction when it appears to have been inspired by a biographical event. Spark wrote twenty-two novels, twelve of which fit neatly into Wilson’s chronological parameters. Wilson gives extra attention to Loitering with Intent, a book about writing a book—interesting, no doubt, to Wilson as she was also writing a book. All this is very much in the spirit of Spark, who in her biography of Mary Shelley drew heavily upon the notes her subject had compiled for her husband’s posthumous Poetical Works. Spark did love a literary game of ring-around-the-rosy. Of course—and I am certain Wilson would agree—one should be careful about the type of game you play with Muriel: Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Electric Spark has yet another layer, a structural conceit. Wilson separates the first half of Spark’s life into four sections of two chapters each and chooses to name each of her four sections after a “Mary.” Why? Because Muriel Spark had an affinity for Mary, Queen of Scots, and Mary, Queen of Scots had four ladies-in-waiting all named Mary. Let’s see if I can put it succinctly. Muriel, not a Mary, but like a Mary (the queen one), had four influential Marys in her life, one of which is the historical figure Mary Stuart, who had her own four Marys, which really makes her one of five Marys, but this is not the case for Muriel, who has four Marys . . . Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. There are so many problems with this means of organizing Spark’s life that I am worried I will overshoot my word count. To start, Wilson does not do a good job of convincing us that Muriel was hugely interested in the mother of James VI and I. Spark never wrote anything about her for publication, though she did consider writing a surrealist play about her in the late Forties. Wilson never mentions Spark’s personal library; if it contained, say, dozens of books on the subject we might at least be convinced that there was something here. All that Wilson tells the reader is that Queen Mary was probably the first Catholic whom Muriel knew about, and that in Spark’s personal archive, which weighs several tons, there is a critique of Queen Mary’s poetry (it’s not clear whether this was Spark’s own work or a saved scrap of something she had read) and a review of Schiller’s play. Wilson also quotes Alan Taylor, author of Edinburgh: The Autobiography, telling Spark at the Edinburgh International Festival, “You seem to have had Mary, Queen of Scots tracking you all your life in one way or another.” Isn’t it nice when you go to one of these types of talks and the presenters stay on topic?

There is only one mention of Mary, Queen of Scots in Gunn’s edition of the letters. In 1953, Spark wrote to John Davy, science editor of the Observer, seeking a commission to cover the Edinburgh International Festival (yes, the same festival at which Spark would later be celebrated). “The places of pilgrimage, such as Mary Q. of Scots’ apartments at Holyrood,” she said, “would be pleasant to write about. . . . The men who act as guides are a joy, very Scottish, very severe.” While double-checking Gunn’s index to see whether I had forgotten anything, I was startled to see an entry for “Queen Mary” in a later year. I briefly panicked. What did I miss? Flipping to the relevant page, I remembered that when Spark traveled to the United States in 1963 it was on R.M.S. Queen Mary.

Somehow it gets worse. Even if Spark had only a passing interest in Mary, Queen of Scots, it would still be possible to connect the two women if their biographies had something in common—some striking thematic parallels or shared interests, say. Here is the list of similarities that Wilson offers:

Both women loved clothes, jewels and dancing, both were what Spark called “bad pickers” of men, both left their sons in Scotland when they fled in England, both were poets, plotters, Catholics, code makers and victims of jealousy. And both had four Marys.

Mary was once the most common name in the English-speaking world. Similarly common, it seems to me, are women who love clothing, jewels, and dancing. It would be extraordinary if both Spark and Mary, Queen of Scots were nudists, relinquished their riches, or were paraplegic. Loads of women pick the wrong man. Muriel left her son in Rhodesia first; maybe Queen Mary would have left her son a second time if she had not been imprisoned (an experience not shared by Spark). Spark was a poet, but known as a novelist; Mary Stuart wrote some poetry, but so did every cultivated lady of her age. All women are plotters and code-makers. Be especially careful of those who pretend they are not. Just about anyone in the history of the Anglo­sphere has four or more Marys in his or her biography.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the four Marys, given their mistress’s end, did not do a good job. They were failures. If one is even slightly superstitious, the advice would be to keep their incompetence tucked away in history, not draw them out. Yet Wilson is determined to make her conceit work.

There are other problems with this book. In fact, my concerns began as soon as I saw the copy on the back of the dust jacket, which reads, “Francis Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, the most consummate artist of the twentieth century.” I don’t know who the most consummate artist of the twentieth century is. Stravinsky? Picasso? If we scale it down to just writers, I’d go to cuffs for James Joyce. What I do know is that if you asked a billion people, it would be unlikely for Spark to be mentioned by a single one. Of course I know that Wilson did not write this sentence; some marketing assistant did (whoever you are). What Wilson actually writes is “From the opening sentence of The Comforters Spark knew where she was going, and she arrived there in the closing line of The Finishing School. . . . I see her as a consummate artist.” Obviously this is much more reasonable—but is it true?

Between her baptism as an Anglo-Catholic in 1952 and reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1954, Muriel Spark had a mental breakdown. This experience, which she refers to as “an illness” in her autobiography, was part of her inspiration in writing her first novel, The Comforters. Unlike her protagonist Caroline Rose, who hears voices, Spark saw letters and words re-arrange themselves on the page. She became obsessed with T. S. Eliot, or, as Wilson writes, “it was rather Eliot whom she imagined to be in love with her; it was he after all, who was sending her messages.” The cause of this illness was a combination of poisoning from Dexedrine (little yellow diet pills) and malnutrition—and likely Spark’s own propensity to depression. However, Spark wanted to be well. With the help of her old lover and literary collaborator Derek Stanford; new Catholic friends, including a generous endowment from Graham Greene; and the care of a Dr. Lieber, who insisted upon a more nutritious diet and eventually prescribed Largactil, a new drug, she did. I have always believed that Spark was able to become a prolific novelist because she replaced her inclination to inane pattern-making with the more solid reality of belief in a universe created by God. This is something for which there is evidence in all twenty-two of her novels, not just twelve. Spark had a disciplined mind. Psychosis taught her the difference between what is real and what we, as creative persons, can make real. After reading Electric Spark, I found myself wondering whether Wilson agrees.

Wilson of course knows that Spark started writing a twenty-third novel. If God had granted her another five years, she might have written two more, or three. While certain themes and motifs recur in Spark’s work, the idea of her as a quasi-omniscient creator who intuited what the beginning, middle, and end of her novel writing career would look like beggars belief. In her letters she is always working out new ideas. “What do you think?” is a common refrain. “They say my new novel is all right, but nothing like the last one,” she writes to John Van Druten. “But the fact is, I don’t ever want to write a book which is ‘like the last one.’” I would argue that Spark did not write books that, as Wilson writes, “should be seen as volumes in a novel sequence, or cells in a honeycomb,” and I am also suspicious of Wilson’s assertion that “her life contained so many coincidences and strange events that I have needed to allow, in Electric Spark, for a willing suspension of disbelief.” Too often patterns that Wilson sees are of her own devising. She believes she is looking through a magnifying glass; instead she mistakes her own reflection in the mirror.

Spark spent her early adulthood in Rhodesia. From this period no letters survive. There she married and divorced Ossie Spark and gave birth to her son, Robin. Because it was not possible to transport a child during World War II, Spark left Robin in the care of a convent school and made her way back to England. There she secured a somewhat prestigious post doing “secret work” as a duty secretary for the Foreign Office under Sefton Delmer at Milton Bryan. Spark wrote in her autobiography that she got the job because the recruiter was impressed that she was reading Ivy Compton-Burnett. Wilson believes that this story is not the whole truth. Compton-Burnett is a sign, a code, a morsel left for those willing to read between the lines: “Was Muriel Spark a spy?” Wilson theorizes that Spark was perhaps approached by the Intelligence Bureau in Bulawayo to inform on fellow settlers. “It would not be unlikely, and might explain her obsession with spying and being spied on herself,” she speculates. Could this be true? On the one hand it seems like just about every British subject at large during the Second World War was a spy. On the other, where is the evidence? Spies and being spied upon are common tropes in post-war fiction. Wilson suggests that if Spark had been a spy, it might explain “her cool detachment from Ossie and Robin.” The opposite is almost certainly true. If Spark had had a secret purpose, it would have been much easier for her to endure the part of wife and mother.

Stannard, in his standard and admittedly dry-toast sort of way, suggests a more convincing origin for Spark’s spy theme: “Those terrifying hallucinations in 1954 had dramatised persecution mania in the form of a conviction that people were spying on, threatening her. To the end she was obsessive about anyone attempting to ‘pry’ into her private papers.” Of course, speculation is an ordinary part of writing biography. But (as a gruff old parish priest would put it) “intentions matter.” The addition of the spy narrative furthers Wilson’s own themes of doubles, twins, secrets, and blackmail. The Rhodesia period was obviously one of suffering for Spark. The most obvious reading of it is that she was not playing the great game; she was insignificant, in a bad marriage, unable to bond properly with her child. This is wonderfully captured in her short stories set in Africa, where we almost suffer with her, confused in the dry dusty wind and hot sun.

Wilson, though, is at her worst when writing about Spark and religion. This is true every time the subject comes up. “On 1 May 1954,” she writes, “dosed on Largactil, Muriel was received into the Roman Catholic Church,” as if it were a choice that could only be made under the influence of anti-psychotics. It is also almost certainly untrue. Largactil was not manufactured for international sale until 1953. By December 1953 it was being tested in England, where it was administered to inpatients at a psychiatric hospital. The ensuing study did not come out until April 1954. Only one of the case studies involves a young female patient—not Spark’s age, alas, though I did pause to consider that there does appear to be enough of a hole in the letters from September 1953 to January 1954 to allow for the possibility of a hospital stint. Of course, Stannard never mentions an inpatient stay in his discussion of Spark’s illness. Nor does Spark mention or hint at such an experience later on in any of the letters reproduced by Gunn. A much simpler explanation is that Spark did not take Largactil until 1955, the year after her conversion. This is in keeping with a letter she writes to Derek Stanford on May 7, 1955: “I got the Curse a week early, due to this Largactyl I think.” (The “Curse” was one of Spark’s endless euphemisms for her menstrual period.) This phrasing suggests to me that she had only recently begun taking the drug. Wilson has clearly seen this exchange. She quotes Spark as having written that “I don’t feel my inward sufferings so acutely—‘my sorrow, my sorrow’ as I used to call it,” and her note refers to the letter correctly. But she follows it with this sentence: “By 25 April 1954 the hallucinations had stopped, but she felt as ill as she had done in Edinburgh.” Is this a mistake, or did Wilson intentionally misrepresent the timeline to take a potshot at the Catholic Church?

It gets worse from here. Two pages after introducing Spark’s conversion, Wilson tells us that her subject was

in favour of abortion, contraception, and divorce; she never went to confession, she loathed other Catholics including Pope John Paul II, whom she called “first a Pole, second a Pope, and only third a Christian,” she held on to the Presbyterian investment in predestination, and because sermons, unless given by Newman, were boring (“I regard it as a mortal sin to listen to sermons”), she turned up for the Eucharist at the end of Mass.

For these many lines of text there are only two citations: a Newsweek article in which Spark made those cracks about poor John Paul II (language which would not have been out of place in a radical traditionalist pamphlet) and an interview with John Mortimer in which she declares herself allergic to sermons (another common view among Catholics, especially before the 1960s). “Never” is a strong and ill-advised word. Spark certainly went to confession during and after the period with which Wilson is mostly concerned, perhaps even often. Here she is in 1963 writing to her publisher Alan Maclean from New York: “I must tell you now about last time I went to Confession—I mentioned casually that I was an Englishwoman (to give the priest the pikcher) and he said there was no need to confess it as it wasn’t my fault.” I also wonder whether Wilson misunderstood Stannard, who wrote this paragraph about Don Gualtiero, Spark’s parish priest in Italy during the last years of her life:

Don Gualtiero did not see Muriel frequently yet he felt close to her through their theological conversations. He regarded her as highly emotional, spiritual. She rarely attended church, usually only at Easter, when she would be driven the short distance from the house and enter through the sacristy side entrance, take communion and then disappear. She never confessed: a “strange” Catholic, a convert who inhabited her own particular world and lived her religion “personally.”

This reflection is about the very end of Spark’s life, when she was dealing with debilitating pain. What’s worse is that Stannard ends his paragraph by writing, “Was this true? [Her friend Penelope] Jardine thought not. It was, she believed, a sentimental account by someone who had not known Muriel well.”

As for Spark’s support for abortion rights, to my knowledge she never publicly wrote in favor of abortion, contraception, or divorce, nor did she comment on these issues publicly. I am not pointing this out in the hope of turning Spark into some kind of conservative culture warrior; it would not be surprising if later, after the period covered by Wilson’s book, she had rejected Humanae vitae, for example. But where is the evidence? In Gunn’s selection of letters, we see her write half-jokingly about the rhythm method during her time with Derek Stanford, where we again see her referring creatively to her time of the month (“I have my miscarriage to-day and am doing better than ever. Wish we could take the usual advantage of it”). Apart from discussions with her lover of their own sexual habits, which do not seem to have involved contraception, the only relevant material of which I am aware is a letter to her friend Shirley Hazzard, asking whether characters in the short story “A Place in the Country” have “used birth control . . . and what kind if so, and whether she was deserted at some point in the month when she would be afflicted by a terror that the birth-control had not worked. . . . Forgive these crude reflections.” This may have been her roundabout way of seeking medical advice; but it certainly isn’t an endorsement, uncritical or otherwise. In any case, it’s important to acknowledge that these topics—especially abortion—weren’t live political issues during Spark’s early career, nor was support or opposition to them part of a person’s self-conception in the way they are today. It is true that Spark was divorced (so was Evelyn Waugh!), but as Stannard discusses at some length, a civil marriage between two non-Catholics could be dissolved in the eyes of the Church—at one time an important consideration to Spark, who hoped to marry again. In his edition Gunn produces a letter from June 1953 (a year before her reception into the Church) written to Spark’s friend Frank Sheed, the lay theologian and co-founder of the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, in which she asks him about the possibility of having her marriage annulled.

One thing Wilson might have pointed to is the B.B.C. documentary Elusive Spark, made in 1996, for which Spark gave an exclusive interview. In this program the writer Neville Braybrooke says of her days as an editor at the Poetry Review, when she became involved with the author and birth control advocate Marie Stopes: “Muriel did approve of all that Marie Stopes had done, you know, in the cause of women, by introducing birth control and so on, but she realized when she met her that they both disliked each other intensely.” Braybrooke, of course, is talking about a period in Spark’s life before she entered the Church. I for one would have no trouble believing that Spark, like millions of other Catholics during the 1960s, hoped that the Church would backpedal on the pill, but surely it is on Wilson, who has presumably seen the relevant material, to cite a letter or find something to corroborate all these sweeping, decontextualized statements. (I look forward to Gunn’s second volume of letters.)

What Wilson does not seem to understand is how essentially recognizable and ordinary her subject’s Catholic faith was. As Spark herself put it in a B.B.C. interview in the Sixties, “I am still a Catholic because I can’t believe in anything else. I’d often like to, but I can’t.” Spark converted and died in the Church, confessing her sins and receiving the last rites from a hospital bed. In the late Fifties she frequently went on retreat; she even considered taking the veil, and it would be absurd if she never went to confession. In Stannard’s biography we learn that she did not seek absolution from her parish priest in rural Italy, but Catholics often avoid confessing to priests they know well. Wilson might not know this, but surely she can likely have intuited that Catholics often despise their co-religionists (though we shouldn’t, of course), including John Paul II, who was not in fact universally admired.

One could go on. Wilson tells us that Spark was buried on “Easter Saturday,” a full week later than her actual burial on Holy Saturday, two days after her death on Holy Thursday. Still, her strangest assertion is the claim about “Presbyterian . . . predestination.” Was it just the possibility of alliteration and the dictates of prose rhythm? Wilson has many elegant and lovely sentences. She is, in fact, a brilliant writer, with an almost flawless ear, but what we write is important too. Her claims about Spark’s religious views demand scrutiny precisely because she is committed to Spark. If a biographer claimed on the basis of no evidence that Milton became Eastern Orthodox or that John Donne supported universal suffrage, scholars would push back. To suggest that Spark’s life does not warrant similar treatment is, in effect, to say that she was radically less important than Wilson (or I) find her.

Last trip on the Mary-go-round, I promise. The aforementioned Marie Stopes is one of Spark’s four Marys. The two women hated each other. It’s hard to imagine a person more loathsome than Stopes. She was a staunch eugenicist. How staunch? She disinherited her son for marrying a woman who wore glasses. Wilson makes much of their “rude” correspondence with each other, a phone call, a few letters: “From Marie Stopes she learned to impersonate the English upper-class matron.” Somehow I think even without her, Spark would have found her way. The writing on Stopes is very good and very funny. But once again Wilson chooses to cut corners, giving us a series of more or less stand-alone vignettes instead of incorporating character sketches into the narrative itself: “Taking direction from Muriel herself, who wrote character lists for her novels, what follows are profiles of her four principal foes in the Poetry Society’s inner sanctum.” Character lists? Presumably Muriel also made and kept shopping lists, valentines, birthday cards, to say nothing of invoices; would it make sense to introduce each of her books in the form of museum pamphlets or financial statements?

Wilson is correct to say that “Martin Stannard does not tell the full story because he is part of that story.” Spark chose Stannard as her biographer and gave him generous terms. I think most people, looking at the facts quickly, would suspect she chose Stannard because she wanted the same treatment as Evelyn Waugh, whose life he had written previously. “So much misinformation has been put out about me. I’m sure you’ll try to get the record straight,” Spark said to Stannard at their first meeting. “Treat me as though I were dead.” For ten years they corresponded; a friendship bloomed; and then, as it often did in Spark’s relationships, it wilted and died. She did not like Stannard’s first draft. It was “a hatchet job; full of insults,” and she did everything she could to delay its publication. “The problem that underlay the difficulties Muriel and I encountered,” Standard said, “was one familiar to life-writing: the nature of ‘truth.’”

There are two kinds of biographers. The first kind includes both those who love or deeply respect their subjects and those who hate them; for this type of biographer, one’s own feelings, theories, precious ideas mean nothing in comparison to their allegiance to the truth and the story they are bound to tell. They don’t arrive at a conceit and shove whatever they find into it. When the facts change, their minds do too. Then there is the other kind of biographer, for whom the subject is a means, a vehicle for feelings, theories, precious ideas. Spark thought she wanted a biographer of the first kind, but what she really wanted was the second, though instead of Stannard’s imposing his own ideas, feelings, and theories on the material, he was supposed to have made use of hers. How frustrating it must have been for the octogenarian when Stannard did not play her game her way.

Now Spark has the second kind of biographer. Who knows if Wilson’s is a book she would have liked or hated? It is, however, a book she started. “Spark,” Wilson writes of Stannard, “was sending a dog after a fox, in the certain knowledge that he would lose the scent.” That fox was Nita McEwen, a girl who, according to Spark, had grown up in the same Edinburgh neighborhood as she had. She also claimed that the two resembled each other physically. When living in southern Rhodesia, Sparks tells us, she ran into Nita McEwen again: “One night, Nita was shot dead by her husband, who then shot himself. I heard two girl’s screams followed by a shot and then another shot. That was the factual origin of my short story ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead.’”

This was a cryptic little joke. “No record of Nita McEwen’s birth, marriage, death, or attendance at James Gillespie’s [Spark’s school] has yet been discovered,” Wilson writes. “If the letters start jumping around and cavorting, rearranging themselves into anagram, Nita McEwen becomes Twin Menace.”

It is a fantastic find, a glittering jewel. Wilson makes much of it: “Nita McEwen is murdered so that Muriel Spark can be born.” She uses it to make one last push for the four Marys thing: “She found twins in her four Marys.” All I could think was poor Martin Stannard. For ten years of his prime did he toil in the archives of that dame. I am sure he would agree that, twin or nay, Muriel is the real menace.