In his odd little book called Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, Anthony Burgess concludes his entry on Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means with this glinting fragment of commendation: “Brilliant, brittle, the production of a fine brain and a superior craft.” Spark has drawn this kind of admiring language from Evelyn Waugh, John Updike, Gabriel Josipovici, and Ali Smith. Quite a popular writer in her own time, and in ours still remembered vaguely as having written The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she is also a writer’s writer. Her peers and successors have recognized her humor, her metafictional trickery, and maybe most importantly, they have sensed that for her, as the critic Frank Kermode wrote, “there somehow exists, in advance of composition, a novel, or more usually a novella, which can be scanned, as it were, in a satellite’s view of it, from above.” This is in part a response to the clever and satisfying plotting, and indeed Spark is one of the only writers in the history of literature whose plots are interesting in themselves. It is also that she subordinates so much to what for lack of a better term must be called the concept of each novel; one does not find her restaging scenes from prior novels or settling into what she knows she can do well. The milieu of The Comforters (1957)may overlap with that of The Bachelors (1960), but the plan is utterly different. Across the twenty-two novels, there are many break-ins, much blackmail, deceptions and other shoddy behaviors, a few Catholic converts, apparently supernatural happenings, sometimes explained away and sometimes not, and a great deal to do with radio and overheard voices, but Spark does not rely on these things as on tropes or devices. She exerts a control over her material which is remarkably deft, and, as one might sense with a shiver, remarkably disciplined.
Last year, Spark’s readers were treated to Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, and this year, we are pleased to be offered James Bailey’s Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. Where Wilson’s book narrowed itself to the first forty years of Spark’s life and indulged an interest in the spooky and Gothic aspects of her story, Bailey’s takes us from birth to burial (with speculations about the beyond) and is most interested in reinvention and even rebirth, exemplified by Spark’s many changes of address, several of them international. Bailey, who apparently is at work on his own novel, argues that Spark’s dedication to her fictional art has been underrated because of the impression of ease that one gets from reading her, and relates her decision to leave her son with her parents and live, officially at least, without a romantic partner, to her steely, perhaps rather Scottish determination. Bailey’s is the better of the two biographies, but it misses something important. Spark’s disposition toward her characters, which has been considered in analogy to God and His creatures, or as Spark quipped, to a cat preying on birds, has been called indifferent, or cruel, or even somehow both at the same time. Bailey has it that because there is no “sanctimoniousness” in Spark’s fiction, the divine analogy is suspect, and we should rather think of her novels as experiments on humans as lab rats. He quotes her comment in a profile for the New Yorker that in her notes written for each novel she has “a place for everything that wriggles—human beings, dogs, ice cream.” That word “wriggles” is the key. Spark’s characters do wriggle under her and our observation, and the limitations on free indirect discourse can seem to deprive them the range of independent thinking and feeling that we might wish for them, but frankly, they have a mental life that dogs and ice cream do not. It is to be glimpsed mostly through dialogues done in the pithy style which for Spark must have been intended as an artistic improvement on real life. And this is some gift to her characters. As John Updike noted in a review of The Only Problem, they “are concerned with main things”, such as that titular problem of evil, and “efficient in expressing this concern.” They are decidedly not just rats trapped in a cage, as Bailey’s consideration of Caroline Rose’s freedom in The Comforters will affirm.
The clichés about Spark are all in use here, as in Wilson’s book: slippery, elusive, mercurial, shapeshifting, and so on. In his prologue, Bailey adds to them the notion of the cat with many lives, on his way to a subtly apologetic summation of the book to follow: “Instead of a whole, definitive story, then, we have a number of short, partial ones.” Indeed, a “series of flickering sparks.” He will actually be giving a satisfying account of Spark’s life (though he accelerates somewhat through the last couple decades), but the upshot and upside of his conception for the biography is that most chapters will begin with a dramatic reconstruction, done in the present tense, of a probable scene. For instance, Chapter 3, “The Wife”, narrating her trip from Edinburgh to Southern Rhodesia where she will meet her fiancé Sydney Oswald Spark, starts by giving us the texture and taste of her seasickness: “It had all been so much fun until the vomiting. Thick, regurgitated clumps of the previous night’s main course, a cassolette of sheep tongues, decorating the shared bathroom. The foul aftertaste of the starter of sardines in olive oil.” The chapter-opening vignettes are quite effective in the way they take in the detailed surfaces of Spark’s surroundings, often putting her in motion from one stage in life to another, fortunately without presuming to know all that much of her inner state. Sometimes they evoke, deliberately or not but with a strange charm, the tour-guide or the TV documentary: “At the Beaux-Arts apartment complex on East 44th Street, Manhattan, you can leave the world behind;” “Set atop the Gianicolo Hill, in close proximity to the Vatican, the Salvator Mundi hospital stands at a peaceful remove from the noise and bustle of the city…” Spark is often shown in retreat, needing change, a room with a view, and privacy, whether for work, recuperation, or both.
Bailey’s ability to imagine Spark’s life from moment to moment is his strength, greater than his ability to interpret her work, or the general quality of his writing. He tells us that her novels are “deceptively violent,” which imprecisely means something like more violent than people have realized, and tries to commit its own deception in suggesting that something rather obvious had to be detected by a special scrutiny. Like the question of authorial “cruelty” or “malevolence,” the definition of “violence” is a more than pedantic matter which some of Spark’s professional readers would do well to reconsider. The literary biographer must if not exactly compete then at least contend with the authorial standards of the subject, so as to avoid looking mediocre in comparison. A lesser artist can I think be treated in conventional journalistic prose, but Spark deserves better from her biographers than to be described as a “high-flying literary sensation” who “plays fast and loose with style and genre.” She would not use “apocryphal” to mean “mistaken,” or endorse Bailey’s claim that in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the real-life model’s “aestheticism” had “had license to run wild, before curdling into something deranged and dictatorial.” Miss Brodie’s charm and manipulation owe something to one of Spark’s colleagues in British wartime radio propaganda, perhaps, and this colleague was compared by their boss Sefton Delmer to Circe, but it is hard to join Bailey in seeing Miss Brodie, as if by the transitive property, as “the Circe of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls.”
Spark’s fiction has strong, flinty features, yet it is difficult to see, even in her debut The Comforters, from whom they were inherited. In the beginning, she liked the Border ballads compiled by Walter Scott, and later in London, she wrote about and edited Mary Shelley and the Brontës. As editor of the Poetry Review, she fought something of a campaign to get her colleagues and readers to recognize literary modernism. In her clipped narration and preference for dialogue we see early Waugh, and, prompted by a story in this biography, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and later she became interested in Alain Robbe-Grillet. But in her novels there are coruscating sequences of invention that can only be called Sparkian. If there is any suggestion in such a description of Promethean fire and an ambivalence about artmaking, this is appropriate considering that some of Spark’s fictional monsters, for instances Miss Jean Brodie and the devilish Dougal Douglas in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, have a role within their restricted setting somewhat like that of the novelist. Miss Brodie is a teacher and a manipulator, who thinks she is the Calvinist God to her favored students, and Dougal Douglas is a younger and more physically involved troublemaker, but both are authors of a kind. In a much later novel, Reality and Dreams, Spark offers another stand-in for the author, English film director Tom Richards, who contemplates the relationship between body and spirit, and tells stories about W.H. Auden surely sourced from Spark’s memories. For his most ambitious work, he needs to sit in and direct and shoot from a crane, to “know from above.” Elevation is something of a theme in Bailey’s biography, which gives us the images of Spark up on the sixteenth floor of the Beaux-Arts building in midtown, then in her big piece of a Roman palazzo with its view of the Castel Sant’Angelo. She was never a recluse but she did remove herself some distance, and so does Tom in order to shoot what he calls “The Colossal.” The crane is not for everyone, and in fact is very dangerous, but Tom loves what others call his “expensive toy.” The art of the novel too is a technology, a very tricky one that the novelist must love. It might be lonely up there, but sometimes you have to find such a view to do justice to the scene. The danger, of course, is in playing God, but creatures must strive upwards in order to create.
