The Transformation of the Commonplace

Two important books, Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark and Dan Gunn’s first volume of Spark’s letters, have recently appeared. Wilson concentrates on Spark’s early life up to the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957; Gunn takes us to 1963. Wilson is one of our best life-writers, and Gunn is a distinguished editor of letters, having previously produced four volumes of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence. We might expect, then, to be in safe hands, and indeed we are. Often Wilson’s and Gunn’s books have been favorably reviewed together, although some notices have neglected Gunn’s massive scholarship. Much easier to concentrate on Wilson’s vivacious story, entirely sympathetic to Spark’s sardonic treatment of gaslighting men. Each of these books is brilliant in its own way. But lacunae remain.

As Spark’s first biographer, I was interested to see what new information had emerged during the intervening sixteen years. I had myself gathered the majority of the letters, interviewed over forty witnesses, and scoured Muriel’s archives worldwide. I was, in this sense, in a unique position as a reader. But I was also in the uniquely embarrassing position of having had Muriel try to wreck my work. In her later years as grande dame she tended to disown the importance of her early friends. When I presented them as people she had loved, or to whom she had at least warmed for their kindness and support, she responded by canceling nearly all quotation from her letters and mangling the rest of my prose so as to make it unpublishable. All the “corrections” were in the hand of her secretary and companion, Penelope Jardine. My first question, then, when trying to arrive at an agreed text, was to ask Muriel to guarantee that all changes had been dictated by her. (I had a legal agreement with Muriel, not Penelope, guaranteeing my independence, allowing free quotation from published and unpublished material, and stating that, were we unable to agree on a text, nothing in the agreement would allow her to prevent publication.) Muriel swore (via her agent, Bruce Hunter) that, yes, she had dictated everything. Did she object, I then enquired, to my restoring the ruined sentences to literacy? No, Hunter replied, she did not. So, off we went. The agreement allowed six weeks for negotiation. That six weeks became six years, during which the entire thing was rewritten four times. It was only after her death that I was able to salvage much of the original text and to restore my deleted commentary. The final version was, pretty much, and with paraphrase substituting for extensive quotation from the letters, the first version.

What new material, then, do we now have? For the general reader, of course, one might include in this category all of the letters. Although large excerpts from them were included in my original text, my brief quotations and paraphrases could not convey the marvelous sense of their acerbic humor, rage, and passion. Principal among these are the seventy-odd epistles to her lover Derek Stanford. She never forgave him for selling them when he was desperately poor. But, as Gunn says, posterity will be grateful. For here we see that she cared deeply for him; that he did his best to protect her during her nervous breakdown; that, on the advice of her spiritual adviser, she stopped sleeping with him until they could be married in the Church. (He was a deeply religious man but, ultimately, his conscience would not allow him to convert.) These letters, Gunn points out, contradict the image of Stanford that she later publicized to destroy his credentials as someone who had known her intimately. They tell us unequivocally that she had wanted desperately to marry him, as she had her earlier lover, the (married) poet Howard Sergeant; that, although celibacy was a torment to both, Stanford stuck with her for several more years until, finally, he had an affair; that it was he who left her (although it is arguable that he never ceased loving her), not she him.

Gunn has also discovered plenty of new material not available to me: letters to Alan Barnsley (the Catholic novelist Gabriel Fielding) and his wife Dina, to the Catholic poet Iris Birtwistle, to the Catholic publisher Frank Sheed, and additional documents in university archives that I had missed. What I was really hoping for, however, were Muriel’s wartime letters home from Africa, those to Sergeant, to her son Robin, to Colin Methven (the man at the end of the telephone in the Foreign Office when she was duty secretary at Sefton Delmer’s black propaganda outfit in Milton Bryan, and who wined and dined her, and lent her his London flat). She must also have written to her brother, Philip Camberg, in America; to the Jungian priest Father O’Malley, who provided counseling during her breakdown; to her schoolteacher, who corresponded with her about her own breakdown; to many other publishers when she was seeking work; to her female friends in Africa. All this, apparently, has disappeared. There is nothing here before 1944.

Wilson’s book attempts to fill some of these gaps. She doesn’t have the letters to Sergeant (in fact, she surprisingly quotes very few letters at length), but Sergeant’s archive has now been lodged with the University of Hull. I had his diary, courtesy of his second wife, in which there is a telling entry describing his visit with Muriel to her parents’ Edinburgh flat. The latter had been Robin’s surrogate parents since he had returned from Africa after the war, aged six. Clearly Sergeant had found the atmosphere awkward: mother chattering, father hovering awkwardly in the background offering cigarettes but with nothing much to say, Robin nervous. It was Sergeant who had taken time to play with the boy. Muriel, he thought, was uncomfortable in Robin’s company, lacked the “maternal instinct”; was uncomfortable, in fact, with the entire household. The Hull archive fleshes this out with letters to Sergeant from Lionel Monteith, another poet, who acted as go-between when Muriel was being sacked as secretary (i.e., chief executive) of the Poetry Society, and when she and Howard were enduring a rough romantic passage.

These are astonishing. Sergeant had to keep his distance at this point because he was accused of using his influence as the editor of Outposts, an important poetry magazine, to help Muriel, his lover. Monteith’s job, as a friend to both, was to provide moral and practical support to Muriel and to act as a secret channel of communication. He helped her clear her office in Portman Square and, in effect, to steal the Poetry Society records for the period of her tenure. Simultaneously, however, he was advising Sergeant very strongly indeed to disentangle himself from this dangerous egocentric. “Her stock in trade,” he wrote, “is to play upon the decent instincts of others and to exploit them in the fullest way—if necessary to their own detriment. During the time I was with her she told bare-faced lies about relatively unimportant things . . . [perpetrating] her evil machinations and deceitful purposes.”

Wilson’s biggest surprise, however, she keeps for the end. In Muriel’s 1992 autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (which also ends in 1957), she talks of an Edinburgh schoolfriend, Nita McEwen, as a kind of doppelgänger. In their childhood, Muriel says, they were often mistaken for each other. Muriel’s unstable husband, Sidney Oswald Spark, was given to firing off guns in the African hotels they occupied. At one of these hotels, Muriel stated, McEwen coincidentally turned up with her own husband, who shot and killed her. The implication was plain. There but for the grace . . . Another escape, justifying her desertion of S.O.S., as she called her husband. No one, including me, thought to check this story until Wilson sent a colleague to scour the newspapers of Southern Rhodesia. Murders, she says, were always reported. But, drawing a blank, she turns this to her advantage. McEwen was nowhere, not even in the school records. “Did Spark,” she asks, “invent [this] double?” It is a serious charge. And just to add to the mystery, Wilson’s three dedicatees include two friends and, yes, Nita McEwen.

Wilson leaves her question hanging, but it is rhetorical, and fits with Monteith’s accusation: that Muriel was capable of “bare-faced lies” when it suited her. This needs some defense. In the Poetry Society, she was surrounded by those who found her ruthlessly arrogant when it was unfashionable to be a strong, independent woman determined to lead. “When I am in the driver’s seat,” she once remarked, “I drive.” She imitated the compliant female, praising the mediocre, flirting, and smiling through gritted teeth to establish her position and her court of young admirers. The old guard, including Marie Stopes and Field Marshal Wavell, resigned en masse from the governing body, then successfully sought her expulsion. Faced with this opposition, it is no surprise that she fought their mendacious subversion with whatever weapons she had, including some unladylike practices such as counter-lying, forging signatures, lifting the archive, and sending delightfully rude letters. Sergeant and she secretly copied out the subscription lists to use for her magazine Forum, which she edited with Stanford, and which soon failed.

Almost everything failed at this time except her indomitable will to succeed. Under her own name she produced biographies of John Masefield and Mary Shelley and edited the Selected Poems of Emily Brontë and the Brontë Letters. With Stanford as collaborator, she published several other books: on Wordsworth, Mary Shelley’s letters, on Emily Brontë, and John Henry Newman’s letters. It was an impressive body of work, especially for an autodidact. She had quickly turned herself into a considerable expert on nineteenth-century literature. But all this was with shoestring publishers at fifty pounds a shot, scarcely sold, and was rarely reviewed, while in the background her relationship with Stanford was collapsing as her interest in Christian theology gathered pace. Of all these books, the one on Newman, England’s most famous convert, was clearly of the greatest importance to her.

Despite devoting a chapter to Muriel’s “Conversion,” Wilson’s otherwise scintillating account engages only distantly with the religious passion that drove Muriel to Catholicism, preferring instead the idea of her as subversive of its essential teachings. “She was,” we are told, “in favour of abortion, contraception and divorce; she never went to confession”—which is both true and untrue, depending on which period of her life one is discussing. When I first met Muriel in 1992, she spoke of a Tuscan nightclub thronged with lusty Italian youth who regularly died in traffic accidents after leaving the place. Why not, she thought, just offer them beds to sleep off the drink and drugs together? The Church’s opposition to this she found absurd. In a flippant mood, she once told John Mortimer that she considered it a “mortal sin” to listen to sermons. She wasn’t about to confess her sins or take advice from the humble parish priest in Oliveto. In her later years she went irregularly to church and stayed only for Mass. Confession seemed dangerous for one so private, so cautious about opening potential lines of attack. Nevertheless, as she would say, this had not always been so. She must have confessed in order to convert. In 1954, she had entered the Church gratefully as the only haven from madness. When she was dying, she invited that parish priest to the house, presumably to make her peace with God, perhaps even, finally, to confess.

Wilson gives us the facts of this conversion: how Muriel moved from agnosticism to Anglo-Catholicism to her reception into the Catholic Church; how she seriously considered becoming a nun. We have a reliable account of what happened and when. But the why seems missing, despite interesting sidenotes on the visionary experience of Blake and T. S. Eliot. The passion, in both senses of the word, has evaporated. Although this process coincided exactly with her psychological collapse, Muriel later rejected the idea of a mental breakdown. It was, she insisted, a physical breakdown due to overdosing on dexedrine (now known as an amphetamine “upper,” then readily available over the counter as an appetite suppressant). But in 1961 she gave an interview to W. J. Weatherby, published that autumn in Twentieth Century as “My Conversion,” in which she used the word “breakdown” herself and offered a frank account of her condition.

Her mind, she said, had been “crowded with ideas, all teeming in disorder. . . . I think there is a connection between my writing and my conversion.” She added, “I’m quite sure that my conversion gave me something to work on as a satirist. The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart.” Her faith was her safe place. She was not, she added, a “dogmatic” writer, but the “psychic upheaval” of conversion was crucial. Later she refused any quotation from this interview, saying that these were not her words, in effect that the reported interview had never taken place. Why did she do this? It is clear from the letters that the “psychic upheaval” had been in process long before it culminated in drug-induced psychotic hallucinations. Why was she in denial? Losing her grip on the material world, suffering appalling persecution mania, had projected her firmly into the visionary space that allowed her to transform from an obscure poet into one of our major postmodern novelists. How did this new clarity emerge?

Wilson is surely right when she suggests that “like Caroline Rose in The Comforters, Muriel was ‘an odd sort of Catholic—very little heart for it, all mind.’” In this she replicates the cold theology of her admirers Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. (Frank Kermode once described her work as theological rather than religious.) Like Greene, she preferred to be thought of as a Catholic who happened to be a writer rather than as a Catholic writer. None of this grand triumvirate of converts was in the proselytizing business; all suffered breakdown; all tested their faith with honest doubt.

The letters to Stanford now clarify Muriel’s tortured spiritual journey, her sense of weakness as well as of strength, her tenderness for him, hoping to welcome him into the household as her husband and to reclaim their previous “integration.” No sooner had she been received into the Church than she missed his skepticism intensely. She appreciated the theological sympathy of her Catholic friends—June and Neville Braybrooke, Christine Brooke-Rose and Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, Frank Sheed and Iris Birtwistle—but they were all acute intellects. What she, like Caroline Rose, found stifling was the cloying dogmatic agreement of other Catholics, their self-righteousness.

The original title of The Comforters was The Loving of Mrs Hogg. Hogg, a middle-aged cradle Catholic, is presented as physically repulsive, complacent, patronizing of converts, and stupid. The essential difficulty Caroline faces is how to accommodate the requirement of Christian charity with the spiritual ugliness of Hogg. It was an issue that, in various forms, Muriel continued to explore throughout her twenty-two novels. In The Girls of Slender Means, an anarchist poet, Nicholas Farringdon, becomes a priest, martyr, and possible saint after encountering “a vision of evil” in his lover. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sandy Stranger betrays her beloved Brodie, becomes a nun, and writes a treatise on “The Transformation of the Commonplace.” It is that “danger zone” between the comfortable domesticities of daily life and religious practice and the tumultuous unknown beyond that energizes Muriel. Engaging with evil is necessary to understanding God. God alone “knows,” but we cannot know God.

At the center of this was Job. Muriel was researching a book on him for Sheed when she plunged into psychosis. That volume was never completed as a theological work, but in 1984 she published The Only Problem, a novel about Job. The “only problem” was how a benevolent and omniscient God allowed evil when it could so easily have been banished. The only answer is that evil is necessary to define what is good. The Old Testament God, whom Muriel found a ridiculous exemplar of male egocentricity, tests the virtuous Job’s faith with ghastly tortures, demanding that he lie. His “comforters” insist that he must have sinned because God is omniscient. Ultimately this unknowable deity rewards his loyalty by restoring his family, property, and health. But it is an ambiguous reward, as his original family is indeed dead, and his new daughter is called “Box of Eye-Paint.” It is a parable about spiritual steadfastness, which Muriel turns into an unsolvable theological puzzle about the transformations of the material world, its transubstantiations. This is what interested her in Christ: not the sociological teachings about turning the other cheek but His immateriality, His ascension, His living both in real time and time eternal, as she thought all important artists did. Like Blake, she believed in angels. Lies in the material world could be truths in the eternal. She had been brought up in a Jewish/Christian family that periodically attended the synagogue in an Edinburgh plagued by anti-Semitism. “If Hitler had invaded,” she once remarked to me, “I would have been a bar of soap.”

Her intellectual movement was in one sense from the Old to the New Testament, but she felt a stranger, an argumentative, awkward creature in both theologies, describing herself as a “Gentile Jewess,” an exile. As a writer she distinguished between “anagogical” and literal truth. She certainly had faith, but not unthinking faith. The idea of a benevolent God involved discussing the paradoxes of that benevolence. The idea of a punitive God destroyed the Almighty’s credentials. All her villains are punitive. Many of her more likeable characters are sinners in the eyes of the mediocre. Discussing with Stanford her religious transformation, she remarked, “Now that I’ve been a Catholic for some months, I feel a stronger growing need for your type of mind, one of honest doubting; honest doubts are the very life-blood of faith to me.”