Review: Muriel Spark: The Biography - The Jewish Chronicle

By Martin Stannard
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

For almost half a century, from 1957 to 1902, the novels of Muriel Spark lit up the lives of those of us who loved her work. Combining, like Stravinsky and Picasso, the profoundly serious and the exquisitely light, instant accessibility and constant formal inventiveness, she was indeed a rare bird in the sky of late-20th century culture.

She was born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918. Her father’s family had emigrated from Kovno and, though there were plenty of Jews in Edinburgh, few were working class, so that Muriel and her older brother felt doubly isolated. Leaving school at 16 to earn her living, she married at 19 — probably to escape her parents and Edinburgh — a much older man, Sydney Spark, also the son of Jewish immigrants, and followed him out to Rhodesia.

A son, Robin, was born in 1938, but Sydney Spark turned out to be mentally unstable, and, fearing for her safety and her son’s, she sought a divorce, but was trapped by the war in Africa. Eventually, leaving Robin in boarding school, she managed to get back to Britain, where she found a job in the black propaganda unit of the Foreign Office. The war over, Robin returned, but so did Sydney.

Neither parent being willing or able to look after him, Robin was brought up by Muriel’s parents. She, meanwhile, was in London, embarked on a literary career and a series of unhappy romances.

Her breakthrough came in 1951 when she won the Observer Short Story competition. She became a Catholic in 1952 and, two years later, had a breakdown. She fought it by writing it out in the form of a novel, The Comforters (she had been reading Job with passion), published by Macmillan in 1957.

She never looked back. Over the next decade, she published a novel a year, each greeted with enthusiasm by critics and the public at large. In 1962, she moved to New York, shedding friends and lovers in the process, and, in 1965, to Rome. By now she was rich and famous, mingling with Rome’s glamorous elite, still producing brilliant work at an extraordinary rate, still alone and footloose. This changed when in 1974 she moved to Tuscany to share a house with the artist Penelope Jardine and remained there, still productive, still an inveterate traveller, till her death in 2004.

In her last years, she was engaged in an unholy row with her son over whether she had lied when she claimed to be half-Jewish, through her father. Her mother too was Jewish, Robin claimed, and he had the evidence to prove it. This drove her to paroxysms of irrational anger.

Guilt no doubt played a part, but she had always had a horror of being “taken over”, had always been quick to accuse friends, lovers, publishers and agents of falsifying the facts and wanting to get a piece of her.

Some of this was clearly the product of deep insecurity, some of the laudable desire to make her way as a single woman and carve out a space to do what was the most important thing in her life, write.

There was something unpleasant about the way the papers picked up on this quarrel and the way Catholics, Scots and Jews all tried to claim her. Unpleasant and reminiscent of her novels, particularly Territorial Rights, where a man loved by two women is hacked in half by them after his death, since they cannot agree who should “own” the corpse.

Martin Stannard has written an odd biography. He has worked hard to produce a reliable and accurate account of the life, and he often writes well, but his touch is as uncertain when he deals with things Jewish (he keeps talking of “lapsed Jews”) as when he deals with literary matters (when in doubt he throws in the unhelpful word “postmodern”).

Above all, he is never able to convey the exhilaration which many obviously felt in her company, and which all her books exude, the sense that life is a wonderful gift which we must embrace wholeheartedly, no matter how difficult it is.

“I go on my way rejoicing”, the heroine of her autobiographical novel, Loitering With Intent, concludes. There is precious little rejoicing in this biography. For that, return to the novels.