Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.
She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years (“a hatchet job; full of insults”, she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn’t hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool.
It’s Wilson’s belief that Spark was playing a cat and mouse game with the future, packing her novels with clues and cryptic mementoes from her own past. Rather than the conventional cradle to grave, Wilson’s focus here is on the first 39 years of Spark’s life, culminating in the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters,in 1957: “the years of turbulence, when everything was piled on”. This doesn’t mean that later masterpieces like A Far Cry from Kensington or Loitering With Intent are ignored, but rather mined for evidence of their real-life antecedents. Time slips and shuttles, fittingly for a writer who was such a master of prolepsis, those devastating little glimpses into the future that make novels like The Driver’s Seat and The Girls of Slender Means so uncanny.
A formidable student, whose first poem was anthologised at the age of 12, Camberg didn’t go to university. Her parents – ordinary class, in her estimation – were too poor, and so instead she took a precis-writing course and a position in a school, where she learned shorthand in lieu of pay. Her next job was as a secretary, this time for hard cash, which she spent on the jazz dances at which she met her future husband, Sydney Oswald Spark, known as Ossie. “I thought him interesting,” she said, and: “I didn’t know that a girl could break away and get herself a flat.”
It wasn’t a happy marriage. Ossie had failed to mention that he was subject to violent paranoia, under psychiatric care, and no longer employable as a teacher in Britain due to his erratic behaviour. In 1937, the couple married in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe. By Christmas she was pregnant and trapped amid the stultifying, amoral racism of the settlers. “He was camouflaged in the colony,” Wilson writes of Ossie, “in the sense that his illness, which took the form of berserk and violent outbursts, was indistinguishable from the berserk and violent outbursts of those settlers who didn’t suffer from Ossie’s condition.” After he tried to shoot Muriel, she escaped with her two-year-old son Robin and his nanny.
The war meant it took her five years to get home. She left Robin in a Catholic boarding school, and fled via Cape Town. Though she eventually managed to get Robin to Edinburgh, where he was raised by her parents, she would never live with him again. This is considered one of the Great Crimes of Muriel, along with the supposed fact that she concealed her identity as a Jew. It was Robin, victim of the first, who was her accuser in the second. In adulthood he converted to Orthodoxy, and announced to the world that Spark’s mother was not a Gentile but a Jewish convert (her father was Jewish, a fact she hadn’t concealed). Nonsense, retorted Spark, salting the wound by saying of her only child: “He’s never done anything for me except for being one big bore.” But her cruelty conceals the desperate attempts she made in London to find herself a job and a new husband, so that she could get custody and provide a home for her young son. The law, in its wisdom, had granted custody to a violent man in psychiatric care rather than the woman who fled from him.
Brilliant, beautiful and disinclined to conceal her talent or ambition, Spark was much desired and much despised in London. After working in black propaganda during the war, she became general secretary of the Poetry Society and soon after editor of its journal, the Poetry Review. The society was an internecine and antiquated establishment that she attempted to drag into the 20th century. This was not a success. Her close encounter with irrationality and malevolence, which later provided satirical material for Loitering With Intent, left her isolated and determined to make her own way as a writer.
Before the novels began, Spark underwent one last enormous transformation. In the early 1950s, she suffered a breakdown, precipitated by her use of Dexedrine as a diet pill, and converted to Catholicism. From now on God was in charge, even if her faith was distinctly unconventional. She believed in angels and liked miracles, but was pro-choice, didn’t go to confession, and tended to skip the tedium of the sermon, arriving just in time for the eucharist.
It’s interesting that Wilson describes Spark as being unable to grasp that misogyny was her real enemy, the disguised combatant behind many of her episodes of paranoia. She certainly saw it in her books. It’s hard to think of a more knowing account of male violence against women than her short story The Portobello Road, with its beyond-the-grave narrator, murdered in a haystack. I suspect the real reason Spark didn’t participate in the struggles of feminism was that she believed the earthly world would always be divided into the powerful and the powerless, and that her task was to record the struggle. Laughter was her weapon, a purifying absurdity – a “derisive undermining of what was wrong,” as she once put it. Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves, you feel her thinking, the pompous and the cruel, the self-serving and self-deceiving.
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Juxtaposition, compression, elision: Spark knew what to leave out, and it is these odd gaps that make her novels feel so much larger than they are, so spookily resonant and sly. To read them is to be inducted into a code, to move between the lines, to grasp both the stock phrase and the terrible unsaid that lurks behind it. Pleasurable and interesting as this biography is, it feels as if it misses the point of the impersonal in Spark’s approach. Her own life is in there, for sure, but distilled into its purest form, which is to say a human comedy, where dark forces seem to triumph, unaware that they are being skewered by a sharp and all-seeing eye.
Olivia Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, will be published in November. Electric Spark: the Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.