The only people and events worth reading about,” the brilliant Muriel Spark once wrote, “are complex.”
A warning, perhaps, for anyone brave enough to undertake a biography of Spark herself. The Scottish-born author of 22 novels, and an even greater number of short stories, biographies, essays, poetry, plays and works of criticism, died a literary celebrity in Italy in 2006. Almost 20 years on, her tumultuous life story is as much a part of her legacy as the work it inspired.
It was that afterlife, and her desire to control it, that preoccupied many of Spark’s final years. When she died, she’d been battling for almost a decade to stop the publication of a biography she had herself commissioned. She’d also thrown away “nothing on paper” for nearly half a century, curating a box file archive of personal letters, proofs, newspaper cuttings, receipts, meeting agendas, minutes, diaries and manuscripts that measured the length of an Olympic swimming pool. Spark had known the scholars and writers would come, and she was determined to be ready.
For UK writer and academic Frances Wilson, the opportunity to give fresh life to Spark’s genius – “brave, generous and richly humorous … with a quick white rage whose venom could be terrifying” – must have been irresistible.
Wilson is no newcomer to complex and confounding life stories: her most recent literary biography, Burning Man, on DH Lawrence, won critical praise and the Plutarch Award in 2022. But the seeds of Electric Spark were planted years earlier, when the biography Muriel had commissioned – and then attempted to derail – finally appeared.
Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography was published in 2009, three years after Spark died, and seven years after she’d slammed his first draft as “a hatchet job … full of insults”.
Wilson is kinder: she believes Stannard’s biography is regarded as a scrupulous and balanced account of a writer devoted to her calling. But it does not tell the full story, she says, “because he is part of that story”.
There’s no question about Wilson’s role in Electric Spark. The push and pull between the author and her ghostly subject provide the biography’s “full story” energy. Spark may have been the consummate artist, Wilson writes in her preface, “but there was also something spooky about her.” She believed in angels, cast spells on her manuscripts, and her life was shaped by coincidences and strange events.
“She is no longer here to score through my sentences, but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, the control of her hand.”
Of course, before she found fame as a novelist, Spark was also a literary biographer. Her early and largely unappreciated life stories of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë broke new ground for the form; she believed writers lived in their imaginations, so their work was critical to interpreting their life stories. Wilson, appropriately, takes the same approach, turning her puzzle-solving lens on Spark’s creative output. “She laid, and found, plots everywhere … I have followed, as best I can, the instructions she planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, archives and 75 ‘rare’ interviews she gave.”
The focus of this biography, though, is not the literary grande dame of Spark’s later life but her tumultuous first 39 years, culminating in her 1957 debut novel, The Comforters. It draws on her first six novels, her lesser-known biographical and critical studies, as well as her 1992 autobiography Curriculum Vitae (“which I read between the lines”) to explore “how Muriel Spark became Muriel Spark, and why it took her so long”.
The result is an intense but fascinating unravelling. It begins with Spark’s half-Jewish childhood in an Edinburgh tenement, then her youthful, ill-fated marriage and mystery years in Southern Rhodesia. Her son from that marriage, Robin, would be sent to Muriel’s parents in Edinburgh (an estrangement that would remain permanent) while Spark, “the young divorcee whose arrival in post-war London sent feathers flying”, worked on developing her clear literary talent. Her ambitions, however, were increasingly stymied by a poor choice of romantic and professional company. Betrayals, real and perceived, would contribute to her mental health struggles, religious conversion to Catholicism and eventual relocation to the United States then Italy.
Her life, with its riddles, doubles and mesmerists, reads like a ballad.
It was all fuel for the writing that would come. Spark was a “comfortless” writer, Wilson says, who rarely wrote about family life or marriage. The Edinburgh schooldays that were her happiest would be animated in the characters and setting of her classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Curriculum Vitae became a response to the “lies” told in the earlier biography of her written by Derek Stanford, her one-time lover and professional collaborator. And those who had wronged her, like the stuffy Stanford, would later find themselves caricatured in novels such as A Far Cry from Kensington, or in one of the many others that would eventually make Spark famous.
Electric Spark is Wilson’s tribute to that one-of-a-kind heroine. She applauds Spark’s ability to lace together “with the elegance of a sonnet” characters and narratives from her mountains of research – a description that could equally apply to Wilson’s own scholarly and literary flair.
Her admiration of Spark’s against-the-odds bravery is never in doubt – “her life, with its riddles, doubles and mesmerists, reads like a ballad” – and she’s generous, blunt and often funny about her subject’s foibles. On Spark’s ability to judge character, for example: “Until the 1960s, when she began a new life in New York and Italy, Spark chose as her lovers and friends men whose bottomless mediocrity suggests she did not know any other kind existed.”
But what would Spark think? In her last published poem, 2004’s Authors’ Ghosts, she suggests dead writers return at night to tamper with their books: “Where / did this ending come from? / I quite recall another”.
With Electric Spark unlikely to be the final word on this enigmatic writer, that ghostly door remains ajar.
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury, $50 hb), is out now.
