Muriel Spark: The Biography [Hardcover]

Muriel Spark wrote with the spareness and thrift for which Scots are celebrated, and she never wrote the same book twice. 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' is widely acclaimed in Britain, where it can tap into the national fondness for schoolday reminiscence. Her rather more adult 'A Far Cry from Kensington' caught on big in France, whereas 'The Finishing School' - often nearly on the edge of flip - was a huge bestseller in Italy. Other novels of hers can be highly disturbing, such as 'The Driver's Seat', which follows a woman taking a path which leads to her own rape and murder. 'The Abbess of Crewe' is dazzling, and its relocation of Nixon's Watergate in a nunnery is a massively amusing exposure of the endemic narcissism and the embrace of celebrity that have become the stock-in-trade of contemporary politicians, enamoured of the sound of their own phrases, but with none of the brillance of Spark's appalling Abbess. This variety begs an obvious question - does Muriel Spark's own life story provide the thread to join up her very varied works?

Martin Stannard had unequaled access to Muriel Spark's huge hoard of private papers, and also to Muriel Spark herself in the last decade of her life: this book is a thoughtful and highly readable presentation based on that knowledge. He brings out vividly - and far more vividly than Muriel Spark did in her terse autobiography 'Curriculum Vitae' - how hard times and poverty dominated the first forty or so years of her life. Her childhood in Edinburgh was far from posh or grand, her married life in Africa was dogged with trouble and distress, and for much of her early writing years in London she was over-worked and under-nourished, on the margins and barely surviving. Stannard chronicles very sharply how all this changed and changed extravagantly once luck brought her recognition, and with recognition fortune as well as fame. He's interviewed the remaining toffs and jet-setters with whom she hung out - not literary folk, indeed not at all in any usual sense of the word 'folk', but creatures of strange and crumbling grandeur, who peopled a world where she dined with cardinals and self-styled countesses. And he chronicles then, and again with affection and sharpness, how she moved out away from that bizarre glamour, to settle in a house she shared in Tuscany with the little-known sculptor and painter Penelope Jardine. He's revealing too about how these last years were blighted with chronic illnesses, and how she maintained her stoical brightness throughout these bad times, just as she'd done earlier in other tough times.

What's particularly good is that he at once suggests how her novels could be read 'biographically' - and all the while is firm and clear that this in no way 'explains' their wide and varied appeal. Instead, he implies, it seems she wrote more in spite of circumstances than because of them, producing brilliant (and quite often poetic and tender) inventions on the page, as if life alone couldn't fully satisfy her appetite for living.

He's frank and unsentimental too in making it abundantly evident how uncomfortable motherhood was for Muriel Spark, far more dutiful than joyful. She was in her prime during the last decades before reliable contraception became generally available to women, and it's easy enough to deduce that for her once was enough, that fertility was a risk and a danger. She was a woman who liked the company of men, and part of her solution was that she frequented and enjoyed the company of gay men, of whom she assembled an extraordinary gallery, and of whose amply varied qualities Martin Stannard provides many vignettes. Indeed it could be said she repaid generously the friendships she enjoyed, through the constancy with which her novels uphold the exuberance and variety that have characterised gay men's lives.

Missing from this biography, though, is her connection to her fellow-writers. These often seem unexpected. Doris Lessing, for example, included an affectionate piece about her friend Muriel in her essay collection 'Time Bites'; Angus Wilson attended some of the dinner-parties of her grand years (and Martin Stannard records how she went to him for advice on which medics to consult). But these literary relations are touched in only very lightly, as if they can be left for the future to figure out. What's predominant here is lived life - illnesses, quarrels, nomadism and finances take precedence over interpretation of books or listings of sources.

Much is celebrated, especially the wit and optimism of Muriel Spark herself, the qualities that kept her moving on even in apparently unpromising situations. If you're looking for answers, they simply aren't here; instead there's more food for thought, more and more, and constant delight in the range of her likes and dislikes, her sympathies and her bitternesses. For example, it was news to me that she'd owned racehorses, and had even bought one from the Queen; on such fascinating details, I wished the biography would dwell longer, and please tell me how well her horses ran? It was quite a surprise too to learn she could ever take pleasure in telephones; in her novels, the telephone is more usually demonic, its very presence a signal there's threat and blackmail in the offing. Part of the intelligence of this book is that it knows there's differences between life and art.

The different scenes she moved in and moved through are wonderfully etched - Africa in the war years, seedy post-war London, hustle-town New York, and then a Rome fantastical even beyond Fellini's wildest imaginings. Her early days in Edinburgh are pictured with social density, whereas her own account had skimmed over them more lightly. Her late years in Tuscany are portrayed as those of someone living life on her own terms, and forcefully so. The outcome is a fascinating map of a life, with all its vitalism and energy, and thankfully free of the will to judge and explain or wrap it up and dispose of it in neat little boxes. This way, her life becomes as interesting as her novels were and are.

This is a life with much interesting detail, yet I can't help thinking that Martin Stannard likes Muriel Spark just a little bit too much to be writing her biography. For example, whenever he has a choice between interpreting her actions badly or well, he chooses well. (One example: when Spark was sacked from the Poetry Society job she held in 1948, Stannard reports, she spent all night "secretly typing" out the subscriber list, as she planned to start her own rival magazine. Now surely that should be "stealing" the subscriber list??)

Much more central to Spark's life is the continuing problem of how to interpret the huge gap between her and her son Robin. I must admit that I quickly felt quite irritated with Stannard who constantly reiterated how much Spark wanted to have her son living with her, yet it wasn't possible. I think Spark made a choice to leave him, and descriptions by visitors who saw her with her son at the time make it clear that he was badly-behaved towards her - probably in anger, understanding this very choice. An eight-year-old boy transplanted from Africa to live with his mum, who finds himself living instead in Edinburgh while she works in London... I don't know. I found this story perplexing and intriguing and I wanted to know more. But Stannard is discrete and doesn't go there (for example as far as I can tell from the acknowledgments he didn't even speak to her son! Who is still alive) instead providing us with pages on the internal wranglings politics of the late 1940s Poetry Society, which I think is probably a niche interest at best.

The book is nonetheless very absorbing, and I have to say that any fan of Muriel Spark's peculiar fiction should enjoy it. And, like many literary biographies, I'm sure it'll be read by people who have only ever tackled 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', and hopefully it will encourage them to read a few more of her books. She was the most extraordinary writer, and I hope that Stannard's book will contribute to making her achievement better appreciated. And the things I found out from it I really relish, such as the fact that she almost became a prose writer by accident, entering (and winning) an Observer short story competition at a point where she desperately needed the £250 prize money. Her breakdown, mid-1950s, is done well, too, when she begins to imagine that TS Eliot is writing her threatening stalkerish messages. I have a few caveats, as I've made clear, but while I hold out for the gruesome warts-n-all book, this is a fantastic waiting companion.

The name of Muriel Spark will evoke for most people thoughts of her most best known and well loved novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a character so memorably brought to life on film by Maggie Smith. But most of her other 21 novels remain in relative obscurity today, which is odd for such a previously celebrated and talented writer.

This new biography by Martin Stannard helps to throw some light on the elusive author, and was written with her blessing and help, although would undoubtedly have suffered more from her desperate need to tightly control her privacy and public image if she had not died whilst it was being written. This is a very sympathetic telling of her story, and does in places feel a little too subjective for its own good because of this.

Her early story is fascinating. She comes from a relatively poor but stable and happy family in Edinburgh, and makes an early disastrous marriage to a man who takes her to Africa and turns out to be mentally very unstable and very unsuitable. After having her son, Robin, she manages to break away from her husband, but at the expense of leaving her son behind. When he finally does come to live in Edinburgh, he does not settle with his mother, by now a committed but penniless writer doggedly pursuing her craft, but with her parents. The reasons for this are somewhat glossed over here by Stannard. What seem like basic child abandonment and selfishness on Spark's part are portrayed as reasonable and normal behaviour for a struggling young writer. Later in her life she tells one interviewer that her mother just seemed to take Robin from her, and to take over. She certainly didn't put up much resistance, and her resulting relationship with her son is inevitably very strained at best throughout her life. At one point she says of him `He has never done anything for me except for being one big bore.' This culminates in her disinheriting him totally in her will, due we are told to a disagreement over their Jewish heritage, which Spark is not as keen as her son to own and embrace.

This selfishness as a mother aside, her early story is told well and her other human relationships reveal a fear of closeness and opening up to others that perhaps leads to her spending her whole life basically on her own, with a series of transitory relationships, most of which seem to be platonic. One very interesting part of her make up is her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s. Her religion becomes a theme running through many of her novels, although it does not really seem to effect her life in a very practical way. Spark does not feel the need to attend Mass on a regular basis, and even then allegedly always leaves before the sermon, not wanting to be told what to think by anyone. She does not really relate to the Catholic Church as it changes and modernises after the 1962 second Vatican Council, which opened up the Church and tried to make it more accessible to its worshippers.

She lives for her writing, and is prepared to sacrifice and suffer personal hardship to make it as a writer. But it is her relationships with others that reveal so much about her. She is always falling out irrevocably with friends, lovers, agents and publishers. It certainly seems that she was a very difficult woman to get on with or get close to. She guarded her public image fiercely, and loved the dramatic and theatrical gesture whenever the opportunity presented itself. `I like purple patches in my life. I like drama, but not in my writing. I think it is bad manners to inflict emotional involvement on the reader...' But she does have many close relationships, mainly via letters in the written medium she was most comfortable with, with famous poets and authors such as Auden, and Greene.

She comes across through these pages as a brilliant, intelligent, but insecure, unhappy, and vain woman. The detail of her later life are not as interesting as the early part of the biography, as Stannard just seems to relate an endless stream of trips abroad, meetings and illnesses. But essentially this is an interesting read, and should tempt readers to explore more of her works than they already know, if not persuade them of the essential goodness of Spark herself as a human being. Do good writers need to sacrifice themselves for their art? On this evidence it would certainly seem that Muriel Spark did so.