Muriel Spark / The Biography by Martin Stannard

The driver's seat

Review: Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard 
Alex Clark delves into an exhaustive biography of the unsentimental, satirical Muriel Spark

Alex Clark

Saturday 15 August 2009

"I

like purple passages in my life," Muriel Spark once told an interviewer. "I like drama. But not in my writing. I think it's bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader - much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short." Although Spark was not averse to playing cat and mouse with those who sought to encapsulate either her or her work in a neat paragraph or two, this self-summary is telling. One may counter that there is plenty of drama in her novels, from corrupt nuns to fatal conflagrations, from mysterious charismatics to outright deceivers, but they all work on the principle of control and distance, on the absence or subversion of emotion in the most overwrought of circumstances. What, though, of her life?

Martin Stannard's exhaustively researched biography, a decade in the writing and encouraged by its subject before her death in 2006, does not shy away from the purple passages, but steers a careful course to ensure that full-blown melodrama is avoided. Amid the multiple flights, bust-ups, triumphs and disasters that stud Spark's life, he emphasises her need to find space, quiet and isolation - her "island" - in which to write. Work was everything; the rest was part of a pageant that was amusing for as long as it didn't distract.

Space and quiet were not commodities readily available in her early years. Born Muriel Camberg in 1918, the daughter of a Jewish mechanical engineer and his gregarious gentile wife, she grew up in a shabby-genteel flat in Edinburgh that brimmed with lodgers, stray family members and passers-by. At Gillespie's school she encountered an inspirational teacher who became the model for the fearsome Jean Brodie and who really did refer to her charges as the "crème de la crème", learning from her, in Stannard's words, "a nascent scepticism about all systems of power and their potential for corrupting free will".

The process of separating herself from her upbringing had begun, provoking the first of many self-exiles. In 1937, when she was 19, she left Scotland for Southern Rhodesia with a maths teacher, Sydney Oswald Spark, marrying him shortly after. Their wedding night, Spark said later, was "such a botch-up". By the time their son, Robin, was born, one year later, Ossie was already in severe mental breakdown. It was time to escape again.

That escape took some years to effect, and was achieved only by leaving Robin behind, but eventually Muriel arrived in the more convivial milieu of mid-40s London. Stannard conjures the febrile atmosphere of the capital and the energising effect it had on his subject, who found herself engaged in Foreign Office propaganda campaigns, dining in hotels with married men and entering the literary world by becoming the general secretary of the Poetry Society. This period, which provided her with two serious lovers, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford, and was to end in a vicious power struggle ("You have always had a strange complex about your 'importance'," said one of her opponents at the Poetry Society), confirmed Spark in her own mind as a writer. Stannard gives us Spark's transformation from marginal littérateur to driven, prolific novelist in a detailed, thoughtful fashion, and it is not to his detriment that there remains something of a mystery. There was a mental collapse, fuelled by diet pills, during which she believed that TS Eliot was sending her coded messages through his work; a further distancing from son and family; a final break from Stanford; and her entry into the Catholic church. In a Carmelite priory in Kent in 1957, she wrote her first novel, The Comforters; four more were to follow by the end of 1960.

Spark's spiritual crisis gave her a framework in which to ponder the themes that beset her mind and her work: predestination and free will, the disappearance of an anthropomorphic God and the presence of evil. She aimed for compression and obliqueness. There was, after all, no need for an excess of "emotional involvement", either for the reader or for the writer who, having created her characters, had the same responsibilities as God. The appropriate mode for all this was satiric, comical, playful; not the deadening hand of traditional realism.

Her admirers, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, VS Naipaul and John Updike among them, agreed. Another transformation - into world-famous writer with her own office at the New Yorker (which first published The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), a string of escorts, diamond rings and even a racehorse - was on the horizon. Stannard details her near-constant wrangles with her publishers with extraordinary patience; one appreciates her talent for hard bargaining without, perhaps, being given chapter and verse over her royalty statements. But if Spark's biographer can appear disconcertingly accepting of some rather self-aggrandising behaviour, he is more compelling on the novels themselves - the vast mental strain of her attempt to confront the fracture between Christianity and Judaism in The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), for example, and the experimentalism of later works such as The Driver's Seat (1970) and The Hothouse by the East River (1973) - and on her determination to keep moving, from New York apartment-hotel to Roman palazzo, from friendship to friendship. Her correspondence of the 1960s, he writes, "suggests her expectation of betrayal, as though she were eager to detect it in order to relieve herself of the burden of intimacy".

Spark was unsentimental about betrayal; it was, she felt, unrealistic to expect loyalty, which didn't stop her outbreaks of fury (often described rather euphemistically by Stannard as "irritation"). Late in her life she found a measure of tranquillity with Penelope Jardine, the companion who acted as secretary, major-domo and confidante, although probably not, despite frequent surmise, as her lover. The novels - including the wonderfully semi-autobiographical A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) and Aiding and Abetting (2000) - did not stop coming. The latter, a jeu d'esprit that juxtaposed a revived Lord Lucan with a fake stigmatic psychoanalyst, was a brilliant éxposé of the lies we are prepared to tell ourselves in order to survive, of the deceptive texture of everyday life. As one of the characters in her play Doctors of Philosophy noted, "reality is very alarming at first and then it becomes interesting".

• This article was amended on 17 August 2009. 

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