Muriel Spark’s novels are gemstones, their complications condensed into a hardness that eviscerates. They are deceptively slight (most run under 200 pages) and difficult, words that could describe their petite-statured author, who was as much of a puzzle-mystery as her creations. Writing a biography about her presents a challenge, one that Frances Wilson meets in her sly, unsentimental Electric Spark, which manages to hew closely to its subject’s spirit.
Born in Edinburgh to mostly Jewish parents, Spark was married at 18 and divorced by 26. Before she published her first novel, she’d abandoned her son in southern Africa, generated fake news to the Nazis, and was editor of London’s Poetry Review.
The book covers the story of Spark’s early years, but refracts them through her later works and selves, thus echoing the structure of Spark’s own novels, especially the semi-autobiographical Loitering with Intent. Such organisation allows for some unsettling moments. Take Spark’s attempts to reunite with her son Robin in the second World War. “[E]verything later went wrong,” Wilson foreshadows. When young Robin moves into his grandparents’ house, Wilson notes, “As it was, Robin arrived at 160 Bruntsfield Place in September 1945 and left it when he died on 6 August 2016.”
Wilson triumphs in animating the bonkers world that inspired Spark’s fiction – equal parts daffy and disturbing, packed with demented grandmothers and pompous poets. Spark’s wartime boss spent hours gathering content about Nazi orgies where “the lingerie of prostitutes was made from choir robes”. Her Poetry Review successor declared himself king of “the fantasy micro-kingdom Redonda” and held court in Soho pubs.
There’s more sinister madness: Spark’s ex-husband suffered from psychosis, and Spark’s capacity to see through human nature made her paranoid. Like her character Jean Brodie, she is a “creator of fictions obsessed with betrayal”. She also hears “voices”, a possible result of Dexedrine, formerly used as a diet pill.
[ In her own words: Muriel Spark at 100Opens in new window ]
However, Spark’s trademark is comedy, and so it is with screwball strokes that Wilson chronicles a nervous breakdown that involves the writer TS Eliot. Spark thinks Eliot is sending her coded messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, and suspects him of other nefarious doings. “Eliot was posing as their window cleaner … Eliot had broken into her [Spark’s] flat to steal her food …”
For a writer who found laughter in the blackest corners, is there any more fitting tribute?
