Spark, Muriel (1918—)

Prominent English novelist and a convert to Roman Catholicism whose works focus on moral conflicts and religious belief. Born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1, 1918, in Edinburgh, Scotland; daughter of Bernard (Barney) Camberg (a Jewish mechanical engineer) and Sarah (Cissy) Uezzell Camberg; attended James Gillespie's School for Girls, 1924–36; attended Heriot-Watt College, 1936; married Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.), in 1937 (divorced 1942); lives with Penelope Jardine (a sculptor); children: one son, Robin Spark.

Moved to Rhodesia (1937); returned to England (1944); became secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of Poetry Review (1947); founded her own magazine, Forum (1949); received prize for her short story "The Seraph and the Zambesi" (1951); baptized into Anglican Church (1953); received into Roman Catholic Church (1954); lived in Israel (1961); lived in New York (1962–66); moved to Rome (1966); awarded Order of the British Empire (1967); moved to rural Tuscany (1985); gave first television interview (1996).

Major works:

(poetry) The Fanfarlo and Other Verse (1952); (novels) The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959), The Bachelors (1960), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Territorial Rights (1979), Loitering with Intent (1981), The Only Problem (1984), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), Symposium (1990), Reality and Dreams (1997), Aiding and Abetting (2001); (nonfiction) Mary Shelley (1986), Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography (1992).

Muriel Spark is a major English writer who first appeared on the London literary scene in the early 1950s. Although she started her career as a poet, around the age of 40 she turned the bulk of her energies to a series of complex and highly regarded novels. Starting in 1957, she produced seven novels in seven years, and her prodigious output has now reached a total of 20 novels along with children's books, short stories, and biographies. Spark's writing mixes elements of melodrama, the macabre, and satire. A central theme in her writing, however, has been her view of life as a Roman Catholic in the modern world, reflecting her adult conversion to the Catholic faith. Writes Dorothea Walker : "She sees Roman Catholicism, the religion she came to embrace, as underlying all truth and as the revealer of that truth." Her practice of taking novelists as her heroines in several books has given Spark the chance to explore the process of writing and the relationship between illusion and reality.

Spark's complex style set her apart from many of her contemporaries and confounded critics' efforts to characterize her work readily. Thus, Joseph Hynes has referred to her "penchant for loose ends and unresolved mysteries." Alan Bold has insisted that, while "her books do not ignore world events," nonetheless "Spark is never merely topical, for her novels are haunted by the specter of theological eternity." The richness of her body of work, including her interest in communities of women, has also opened the way for examination from new angles such as Judy Sproxton 's recent effort to consider Spark from a feminist perspective. Noting that "Spark is not a feminist in the sense that she asserts specific rights for women," Sproxton sees her as a writer who has devoted substantial energy into an effort to examine women's character. She has, according to Sproxton, "depicted women in a search for a dignity and possession of mind which … vindicates a woman's spiritual integrity."

Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, Scotland, on February 1, 1918. Her religious background was mixed: her father Bernard Camberg was a Jew from Scotland, and her mother Sarah Uezzel Camberg was an English Presbyterian. As Spark later recalled, neither parent was particularly interested in religious affairs, but she was to make up for that with a consuming interest in her own spiritual life. Some critics trace the theme of moral responsibility in her work to Spark's awareness of her Jewish-Scottish heritage, augmented by her fervent Catholicism following her conversion in 1954.

In her recent autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Spark recalled her life to 1957 with an abundance of details about her childhood and schooling, including her early interest in literature. She wrote poetry starting at the age of nine and spent her free time between the ages of ten and sixteen in the local public library. Although she came from a family "of high aspirations and slender means," the young girl had the advantage of an education at one of Scotland's stellar institutions of learning, James Gillespie's School for Girls, which she attended from 1924 to 1936. She later described herself as the school's poet and dreamer and fondly recalled the intellectual encouragement and freedom she found there. After completing school, she took business courses at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh and held a variety of jobs: teacher at a local private school, private tutor, and secretary in a department store.

"I longed to leave Edinburgh and see the world," Spark wrote in her autobiography; this restlessness strongly influenced her decision to marry a young schoolteacher, Sydney Spark, whom she had met at a dance. In August 1937, she left for South Africa to meet her husband-to-be in Rhodesia, where he had begun to work on a three-year teaching contract. They married in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, on September 3, 1937. She came to regret this as "a disastrous choice" when she became acquainted with Sydney's hidden mental problems. Only years later did she learn that another distinguished writer-to-be, Doris Lessing , lived in Southern Rhodesia at the same time. The adult Spark lamented the fact that in her loneliness as

a 19-year-old newlywed in a remote country, she had no chance to meet such a likely intellectual companion.

Becoming pregnant, Spark rejected her husband's suggestion that she undergo an abortion. After a difficult delivery, she gave birth to her only child, a son whom she named Robin, on July 9, 1938. The outbreak of war and her husband's enlistment brought Spark some respite from his belligerent personality, but she soon instituted divorce proceedings.

Spark became involved with a young RAF officer, Arthur Foggo, in the period after her divorce. When he was killed during a sea voyage, she found herself deeply depressed and decided to return to Britain, arriving there in early 1944. Her young son followed a few months later. Spark worked for the final portion of the wartime period in the political intelligence branch of the British Foreign Office. There she helped write broadcasts designed to undermine morale in Nazi Germany. Living in a residence for women, the Helena Club, she picked up background for her 1963 novel The Girls of Slender Means.

After the war, she took a job on a magazine connected with the jewelry trade but soon entered the London literary world as an editor and freelance writer. In 1947, Spark became a secretary at the Poetry Society and found herself editing the Society's magazine, Poetry Review. For a brief time in 1949 she had her own poetry magazine, Forum.

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I don't claim my novels are true … I claim that they are fiction, out of which a kind of truth emerges.

—Muriel Spark

By the early 1950s, Spark was active as a literary critic. Much of her work, including a study of Emily Brontë and an edition of Mary Shelley 's letters, was done in collaboration with Derek Stanford. A milestone in her career came in 1951 when her short story "The Seraph and the Zambesi" won an important literary contest. In 1954, she received strong encouragement, including financial support, from Macmillan, the London publisher, to try her hand at a novel. The result was The Comforters. Published when she was almost 40 years old, this work by an unknown novelist received an enthusiastic response from such members of the London critical establishment as Evelyn Waugh. From that time on, Spark abandoned poetry to concentrate her formidable talents on the writing of novels.

Spark wrote The Comforters during a period of intense emotional strain connected to her search for a religious identity. In 1953, she had been received into the Anglican Church, but within less than a year, largely under the influence of the writings of John Cardinal Newman, she went on to become a Roman Catholic. Although the spiritual and intellectual comfort of the Catholic Church proved to be a decisive attraction for her, Spark found herself disturbed by the personalities of many of the individual Catholics she encountered. As she put it in an interview given in 1961, "Good God, I used to think, if I become Catholic, will I grow like them?" Both psychotherapy and the relief she obtained following her decision to become a Catholic gave her enough emotional support to let her move on with her career. Converts to Catholicism were to play a major role in the casts of her novels.

The Comforters contained a complex plot with such melodramatic elements as an elderly woman who engages in diamond smuggling. Nonetheless, the work's main elements reflect the intense religious concerns within Spark's mind, elements that set the tone for much of her later writing. It is, in part, the story of a Catholic convert who finds her life dominated by hallucinatory voices that she hears. She herself is writing a novel, while the voices that come to her seem to be dictating a novel and making her a character in it. Such problems of identifying reality through the use of the human mind as well as the complexities of writing a novel were themes to which Spark would return in Loitering with Intent.

The Catholic characters in The Comforters are presented in an unfavorable light and, as Dorothea Walker notes, her portrait of one of them, Mrs. Hogg, is "one of the most savage of any of the Catholics in her work." Walker speculates that as a newly converted Catholic Spark had little tolerance for coreligionists who did not share her own zeal and idealism.

Spark's second novel, Robinson, appeared in 1958, and, like The Comforters, it contained a heroine who was a Catholic convert. Robinson did not enjoy the acclaim of its predecessor, but Spark soon produced a new major success the following year with the publication of Memento Mori. Once again she presented an eccentric take on the traditional novel. Her characters are elderly men and women, each of whom receives at least one mysterious telephone call reminding them of their impending demise. Spark explores the way in which these very different individuals, some inside a nursing home, others still living independently, respond to this jarring message. She drew much of her information about the elderly from a personal friend, Teresa Walshe , who worked as a nurse caring for geriatric patients. Despite the apparently macabre subject, the novel's tone reflected the author's admiration for the courage, resilience, and humor of the elderly characters she described.

The best known, most accessible, and commercially the most successful of Spark's works was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Alan Bold finds this "arguably her masterpiece." Appearing in 1961, it was subsequently transformed into a stage play and then a movie. In the words of Norman Page, it first seems "to belong to farce or comedy of manners," but it soon moves on to become "a theological drama with tragic overtones." The story focuses on a flamboyant, charismatic teacher at a school for girls in Spark's native Edinburgh. Spark clearly drew upon her own experiences at James Gillespie's School in the 1920s and 1930s. In her autobiography, she identified one of her memorable teachers there, Christina Kay , as the individual who "bore within her the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie."

Although religion plays a significant role in the novel—as it does in all of Spark's works—the plot has no suggestion of supernatural voices. Instead, it shows how one of Miss Brodie's students, drawn to her and then offended enough to betray her, uses Brodie's pro-fascist ideas to bring about the teacher's dismissal. In what might be seen as an act of repentance, the young girl goes on to become a nun. The book manages to make Miss Brodie, despite her odious political ideas, into a complex and largely sympathetic figure. She offers unlimited personal inspiration to her young charges and imaginatively undermines the sterile school routine. Told from numerous points in time, the book is also notable for its success in ignoring the shape of normal chronology.

Spark's next major success came in 1965 with the appearance of The Mandelbaum Gate. She had lived in Israel for several months during 1961 to gather material for this novel. It was an emotional moment in Israel's history as the country conducted the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the Holocaust. Set in the Middle East, this latest literary endeavor gave Spark an opportunity to write about Jews, Arabs, and expatriate Englishmen in a contemporary setting. The first of her works to deal with a politically charged contemporary topic, The Mandelbaum Gate also reflected Spark's personal background and concerns. Her heroine, Barbara Vaughan, like Spark herself, came from a mixed English Protestant and Jewish background and had converted to Roman Catholicism.

The longest and most conventional of her works, The Mandelbaum Gate seemed to refute her 1963 statement that she was "writing minor novels deliberately, and not major novels," since she had no desire to become a "Mrs. Tolstoy." A compulsively rapid writer—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie according to Alan Bold was completed in eight weeks—Spark required a full two years to produce this lengthy book.

The title of Spark's novel symbolized the split in the Middle East, since the Mandelbaum Gate separated Israel's portion of Jerusalem from that held by Jordan. The gate allowed Spark to explore the absurdity of political hatred. It also reflected Barbara Vaughan's multiple identities: in order to visit Christian shrines in Jordan, she was compelled to hide her Jewish background from the authorities at the Jordanian border. When her Jewish identity was revealed, Vaughan found her safety jeopardized until acquaintances in the British consulate and the Arab community aided her clandestine return to Israel.

In 1967, Spark's literary achievements received official recognition when she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. By then she had relocated permanently to Italy where she now set a number of her works. Spark herself split her time between Rome and a villa in Tuscany. Her career continued with the regular appearance of major works such as The Abbess of Crewe in 1974. Here Spark, drawing on the events of the Watergate scandal, turned her religious interests in a new direction as she examined how a community of nuns went about choosing a new leader.

Ruth Whittaker has noted that this book "transcends the realistic comparison [with the Watergate scandal] and becomes a timeless parable about power and corruption." Nonetheless, here Spark engages in a wicked brand of parody. The election of the convent's new leader is corrupted by listening devices and other forms of political trickery. Reflecting the attempt by supporters of President Richard Nixon to bug the opposition's political headquarters, the book recounts how nuns raid a candidate's sewing basket to find politically useful information.

The hypocrisy of the entire community of supposedly pious nuns can be seen by the fact that the convent owns expensive real estate in London as well as grim slum property in Chicago. One widely traveled nun embodies the personality and interests of American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Abbess of Crewe was sufficiently accessible to a broad audience to be made into the film Nasty Habits, starring Glenda Jackson , in 1977.

Loitering with Intent, published in 1981, saw Spark return to a theme of The Comforters: the relationship between creativity and reality in the experiences of a novelist. Once again, writes Page, Spark has produced "a novel about the novel." The heroine, Fleur Talbot, is a novelist who is supporting herself by editing autobiographical manuscripts collected by an evil-minded aristocrat, Sir Quentin Oliver. The manuscripts are supposed to be kept secret but Oliver uses the material in them to blackmail and manipulate the individuals who have written these accounts. Reality and fiction come to imitate each other when the heroine ends the life of her novel's hero in an automobile accident; she then discovers that Oliver has died in similar fashion.

In 1985, Spark and her longtime friend, the sculptor Penelope Jardine , moved permanently to Tuscany. There, they set up housekeeping in a restored 14th-century church near the city of Arezzo. In 1986, Spark produced a revised version of her biography of Mary Shelley, originally written in 1951; meanwhile, she went on producing fiction. Three new novels appeared in less than a decade: A Far Cry from Kensington in 1988; Symposium in 1990; and Reality and Dreams in 1997. While the last two received only mixed reviews, Spark's reputation remains solid. For Alan Bold, "She is one of the most subtle stylists of her time, a master … of the paradox, a literary illusionist of enormous agility." As Walker noted, "In intricacy of plot, wit of dialogue, and inventiveness of character, Muriel Spark remains a gifted novelist who shows in each novel an innate originality." Norman Page has expressed an equal enthusiasm: "A Muriel Spark novel contrives to be simultaneously unmistakable and unpredictable."

In 1992, Spark produced an autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, tracing her life down to early 1957. Her avowed purpose was to set the record straight in the face of stories about her that seemed too favorable. True to her gritty determination to pursue truth, she took pains to note that in giving "a picture of my formation as a creative writer," she was refuting stories that showed her, falsely, in too favorable a light. In 2001, at age 83, Spark was earning strong reviews for her 21st novel, Aiding and Abetting, a work of fiction based on the disappearance of the 7th earl of Lucan in 1974, after he allegedly murdered the family nanny while mistaking her for his wife. Wrote Paul Gray, she "has lost none of her skill and verve in portraying flamboyantly wicked people behaving according to 'a morality devoid of ethics or civil law.'"

sources:

Bold, Alan. Muriel Spark. London: Methuen, 1986.

Gray, Paul. "A Game of Rat and Louse," in Time. March 12, 2001.

Hosmer, Robert E., Jr. "Writing with Intent: The Artistry of Muriel Spark," in Commonweal. Vol. 116, no. 8. April 21, 1989, pp. 233–241.

Hynes, Joseph. The Art of the Real: Muriel Spark's Novels. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988.

Page, Norman. Muriel Spark. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Macmillan, 1990.

Schiff, Stephen. "Muriel Spark between the Lines: Cultural Pursuits," in The New Yorker. Vol. 69, no. 14. May 24, 1993, pp. 36–43.

Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Sproxton, Judy. The Women of Muriel Spark. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Wakeman, John. World Authors, 1950–1970. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1975.

Walker, Dorothea. Muriel Spark. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988.

Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1982.

suggested reading:

Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. London: Vision Press, 1984.

Hynes, Joseph, ed. Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. NY: G.K. Hall, 1992.

Kemp, Peter. Muriel Spark. NY: Harper and Row, 1975.

Stanford, Derek. Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Centaur Press, 1963.

related media:

Nasty Habits (92 min. British film), starring Glenda Jackson, Melina Mercouri , Geraldine Page , Sandy Dennis , Anne Jackson , Anne Meara , Edith Evans , and Susan Penhaligon , directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, produced by Bowden/Brut, 1977.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (a comedy in two acts), adapted by Jay Presson Allen ; opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway on January 16, 1968, starring Zoe Caldwell , directed by Michael Langham, and produced by Robert Whitehead (the play opened in London with Vanessa Redgrave in the lead).

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (116 min. British film), screenplay by Jay Presson Allen; starring Maggie Smith (who won an Oscar for Best Actress in the role of Brodie), Celia Johnson , Pamela Franklin , and Robert Stephens, produced by Fox, 1969.

Neil M. Heyman , Professor of History, San Diego State University, San Diego, California