FROM NYTIMESMURIEL SPARK
The Biography
By Martin Stannard
Illustrated. 627 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Tracing Muriel Spark’s Road From Slender Means to Her Own Prime
By DWIGHT GARNER
In a perfect world, a biography of Muriel Spark (1918-2006) would share some of the qualities of her best novels, among them “Memento Mori,” “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “The Girls of Slender Means.” That is, it would be sinister, comic and ruthlessly slim, a jar that holds a scorpion.
Martin Stannard’s “Muriel Spark: The Biography,” alas, exists in the real world
alas, exists in the real world. Mr. Stannard has delivered instead an ordinary lumpy mattress of a biography, with coils and feathers poking out the sides and a few bedbugs leaping to the floor. Spark rarely wasted a word. Mr. Stannard throws whole armies of them into the breach.
Spark asked Mr. Stannard, a professor of modern literature at the University of Leicester in England, to be her biographer after admiring his two-volume life of Evelyn Waugh, the final book of which was published in 1992.
“Treat me as though I were dead,” she instructed him. He followed that advice, only to have Spark turn on him shortly before her death. Newspapers in London reported that Spark, writing to a friend, called Mr. Stannard’s book “terribly mean and hostile” and told an interviewer it was “very poorly written.”
I’m tempted to acquit Mr. Stannard, a tireless researcher, on the first charge. Muriel Spark was a complicated and sometimes savage character, and he gets that side of her personality across without ostentatiously grinding an ax. Very poorly written? That’s harsh, but not hideously off the mark. “Muriel Spark: The Biography” has shrewd observations and quickening moments, but waiting for them requires Zen-like patience and is a bit soul-killing, like standing in line at the D.M.V.
Here’s one thing Mr. Stannard gets right. He neatly captures how, from her early years as a writer, there was something darkly appealing, even witchy, about Muriel Spark, in terms of both her unearthly talent and her way of being in the world. Her friends noticed “the coincidence of her presence at serious accidents,” he writes. Lightning struck the houses she lived in. She was burgled more than once. For no apparent reason a neighbor once chased her down the block, calling her a “scarlet woman.” The writer Shirley Hazzard, a friend, remembered her as “Muriel with the X-ray eyes” and “believed that somehow things happened, odd things, when she was around.”
This uncanny quality hovers around the margins of Mr. Stannard’s book, and lends some rustling atmosphere to what is already an interesting rags to riches (or, at the least, rags to great acclaim) narrative.
Muriel Spark, née Muriel Sarah Camberg, was born in 1918 in Edinburgh. Her parents were poor (her father worked in a rubber factory), and the family often took in boarders to keep afloat. They could not afford to send their daughter to college.
Spark got out by getting married. Her future husband, Sydney Oswald Spark, was no brilliant catch: he was small, moody, a fidgety math teacher. He was also 32, while she was merely 19.
But he was leaving to teach in Rhodesia, and that seemed exotic. It was. They lived there for more than six years, and had a son, Robin, whom Spark would leave behind when she returned to Edinburgh and then London and divorced her husband. She would never remarry. She had few maternal instincts, and would never be close to her son, either.
In wartime London she landed a job with the British Foreign Office, and then worked for small magazines while beginning to publish poetry, criticism and biographies. She was consistently broke, living on eggs and baked beans and boiling ambition. She might have been speaking of herself when she wrote, in “The Girls of Slender Means” (1963):
“Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.”
A break arrived when she won a Christmas fiction contest sponsored by The Observer newspaper. But still she struggled. In 1954, after some months of popping over-the-counter Dexedrine to stay slim, she was poisoned by it and went mildly insane for a spell. Mr. Stannard writes:
“T. S. Eliot, she insisted, was sending her threatening messages. His play” — “The Confidential Clerk” — “was full of them. Some were in the theater program. Obsessively she began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams and cryptographic experiments.”
Spark was entering middle age before she found real success as a writer, and the books began to pour out of her: “Memento Mori” in 1959; “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” and “The Bachelors,” both in 1960; “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1961; “The Girls of Slender Means” in 1963. “Miss Brodie” she later described as her “milch cow,” the book that finally gave her a measure of security. The novel appeared in The New Yorker, filling nearly an entire issue. It was made into a stage play, film and TV movie.
The years of hard work made Muriel Spark the writer she was, but they also, this book suggests, made her hard. She was litigious, threatening to sue publishers over things like poorly written ad copy. She abandoned friends without a backward glance. The New Yorker writer Ved Mehta observed that “she went through people like pieces of Kleenex.” She was moody and superstitious. If anyone touched a pen she was using, she would throw it away. Her mother had to write to her care of The New Yorker. She did not attend her brother’s funeral.
This book’s portrayal of Spark’s relationship with her only child, Robin, is devastating. As a young man he sometimes spent holidays with strangers; she did not attend his bar mitzvah; she cut him checks for his birthdays. He later accused her of lying about her origins, claiming that she was fully Jewish after she had claimed to be half-Jewish. After that, she referred to him as “one big bore.”
Spark’s longest close relationship was with the artist Penelope Jardine, who sometimes served as her secretary and with whom she lived for more than 30 years. “Many have wondered if Muriel had lesbian tendencies,” Mr. Stannard writes. “So far as she knew, she had none. Lesbians tended to worry her.”
There are nice moments here. Mr. Stannard can pin a personality down with a few words. (Blanche Knopf, the wife of Alfred Knopf, was so thin she was “seemingly held together by jewelry.”) And he is a generally savvy reader of her work. “The terror at the heart of her mature fiction,” he writes, perceptively, is “the horror of being rendered voiceless, anonymous, a prey to the power of strangers.” It’s the kind of fear that finds fertile ground inside a girl of once-slender means.
Too often, though, this biography has a mealy texture. The clichés pile up. Spark’s books “stormed the literary citadels.” She was a “blazing new talent in the literary firmament.” A novel meets “a roar of approval.” She had the “big guns blazing for her.”
Muriel Spark lived long enough to write an online diary for Slate and to be entranced by television coverage of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. She lived long enough, too, to write her son definitively out of her will. Even Mr. Stannard seems beguiled but also mystified by her.
“Find the lady?” he writes. “A difficult proposition when she was in ceaseless movement.”
The Biography
By Martin Stannard
Illustrated. 627 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Tracing Muriel Spark’s Road From Slender Means to Her Own Prime
By DWIGHT GARNER
In a perfect world, a biography of Muriel Spark (1918-2006) would share some of the qualities of her best novels, among them “Memento Mori,” “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “The Girls of Slender Means.” That is, it would be sinister, comic and ruthlessly slim, a jar that holds a scorpion.
Martin Stannard’s “Muriel Spark: The Biography,” alas, exists in the real world
alas, exists in the real world. Mr. Stannard has delivered instead an ordinary lumpy mattress of a biography, with coils and feathers poking out the sides and a few bedbugs leaping to the floor. Spark rarely wasted a word. Mr. Stannard throws whole armies of them into the breach.
Spark asked Mr. Stannard, a professor of modern literature at the University of Leicester in England, to be her biographer after admiring his two-volume life of Evelyn Waugh, the final book of which was published in 1992.
“Treat me as though I were dead,” she instructed him. He followed that advice, only to have Spark turn on him shortly before her death. Newspapers in London reported that Spark, writing to a friend, called Mr. Stannard’s book “terribly mean and hostile” and told an interviewer it was “very poorly written.”
I’m tempted to acquit Mr. Stannard, a tireless researcher, on the first charge. Muriel Spark was a complicated and sometimes savage character, and he gets that side of her personality across without ostentatiously grinding an ax. Very poorly written? That’s harsh, but not hideously off the mark. “Muriel Spark: The Biography” has shrewd observations and quickening moments, but waiting for them requires Zen-like patience and is a bit soul-killing, like standing in line at the D.M.V.
Here’s one thing Mr. Stannard gets right. He neatly captures how, from her early years as a writer, there was something darkly appealing, even witchy, about Muriel Spark, in terms of both her unearthly talent and her way of being in the world. Her friends noticed “the coincidence of her presence at serious accidents,” he writes. Lightning struck the houses she lived in. She was burgled more than once. For no apparent reason a neighbor once chased her down the block, calling her a “scarlet woman.” The writer Shirley Hazzard, a friend, remembered her as “Muriel with the X-ray eyes” and “believed that somehow things happened, odd things, when she was around.”
This uncanny quality hovers around the margins of Mr. Stannard’s book, and lends some rustling atmosphere to what is already an interesting rags to riches (or, at the least, rags to great acclaim) narrative.
Muriel Spark, née Muriel Sarah Camberg, was born in 1918 in Edinburgh. Her parents were poor (her father worked in a rubber factory), and the family often took in boarders to keep afloat. They could not afford to send their daughter to college.
Spark got out by getting married. Her future husband, Sydney Oswald Spark, was no brilliant catch: he was small, moody, a fidgety math teacher. He was also 32, while she was merely 19.
But he was leaving to teach in Rhodesia, and that seemed exotic. It was. They lived there for more than six years, and had a son, Robin, whom Spark would leave behind when she returned to Edinburgh and then London and divorced her husband. She would never remarry. She had few maternal instincts, and would never be close to her son, either.
In wartime London she landed a job with the British Foreign Office, and then worked for small magazines while beginning to publish poetry, criticism and biographies. She was consistently broke, living on eggs and baked beans and boiling ambition. She might have been speaking of herself when she wrote, in “The Girls of Slender Means” (1963):
“Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.”
A break arrived when she won a Christmas fiction contest sponsored by The Observer newspaper. But still she struggled. In 1954, after some months of popping over-the-counter Dexedrine to stay slim, she was poisoned by it and went mildly insane for a spell. Mr. Stannard writes:
“T. S. Eliot, she insisted, was sending her threatening messages. His play” — “The Confidential Clerk” — “was full of them. Some were in the theater program. Obsessively she began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams and cryptographic experiments.”
Spark was entering middle age before she found real success as a writer, and the books began to pour out of her: “Memento Mori” in 1959; “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” and “The Bachelors,” both in 1960; “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1961; “The Girls of Slender Means” in 1963. “Miss Brodie” she later described as her “milch cow,” the book that finally gave her a measure of security. The novel appeared in The New Yorker, filling nearly an entire issue. It was made into a stage play, film and TV movie.
The years of hard work made Muriel Spark the writer she was, but they also, this book suggests, made her hard. She was litigious, threatening to sue publishers over things like poorly written ad copy. She abandoned friends without a backward glance. The New Yorker writer Ved Mehta observed that “she went through people like pieces of Kleenex.” She was moody and superstitious. If anyone touched a pen she was using, she would throw it away. Her mother had to write to her care of The New Yorker. She did not attend her brother’s funeral.
This book’s portrayal of Spark’s relationship with her only child, Robin, is devastating. As a young man he sometimes spent holidays with strangers; she did not attend his bar mitzvah; she cut him checks for his birthdays. He later accused her of lying about her origins, claiming that she was fully Jewish after she had claimed to be half-Jewish. After that, she referred to him as “one big bore.”
Spark’s longest close relationship was with the artist Penelope Jardine, who sometimes served as her secretary and with whom she lived for more than 30 years. “Many have wondered if Muriel had lesbian tendencies,” Mr. Stannard writes. “So far as she knew, she had none. Lesbians tended to worry her.”
There are nice moments here. Mr. Stannard can pin a personality down with a few words. (Blanche Knopf, the wife of Alfred Knopf, was so thin she was “seemingly held together by jewelry.”) And he is a generally savvy reader of her work. “The terror at the heart of her mature fiction,” he writes, perceptively, is “the horror of being rendered voiceless, anonymous, a prey to the power of strangers.” It’s the kind of fear that finds fertile ground inside a girl of once-slender means.
Too often, though, this biography has a mealy texture. The clichés pile up. Spark’s books “stormed the literary citadels.” She was a “blazing new talent in the literary firmament.” A novel meets “a roar of approval.” She had the “big guns blazing for her.”
Muriel Spark lived long enough to write an online diary for Slate and to be entranced by television coverage of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. She lived long enough, too, to write her son definitively out of her will. Even Mr. Stannard seems beguiled but also mystified by her.
“Find the lady?” he writes. “A difficult proposition when she was in ceaseless movement.”
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