“There is a supernatural process going on under the surface and within the substance of all things,” says a priest in Muriel Spark’s 1965 novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Spark believed herself wired into this process. The novelist was aware from the start of “a definite ‘something beyond myself’”, an “access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels”.
“Somehow things happened, odd things, when Muriel was around,” recalled her friend Shirley Hazzard. “Everything that happened to Muriel,” according to her American editor Barbara Epler, “had been foreseen”, usually in her books themselves. If Spark wrote about blackmail, she too would be blackmailed; if she wrote about a burglary, she would then be burgled. Thirty years after toying with an idea for The Hothouse by the East River (1973), in which electrocution by lightning takes place down a telephone line, lightning struck Spark’s house in Italy, sending a current of electricity through the external wires and burning her upper lip.
Muriel Spark was born in February 1918. In a 1975 essay called The First Year of my Life, she described how she was a “transmitter”, able to tune in from her parents’ tenement flat on the first floor of 160 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh, to scenes and conversations from around the globe. When she was 10 days old, she wrote, Tsar Nicholas II appeared on her frequency. Aged 15 days she received news about the German spring offensive. Speeding through the wavebands, she caught Picasso’s marriage to Olga Khokhlova, and Virginia Woolf yawning. Aged six months, she said, the Romanovs’ execution was broadcast to her live.
Spark lived, she explained, in the future rather than the present tense, which is one reason for her celebrated flash-forwards whereby the narrator tells us, when a character is introduced, how they will die. Mary Macgregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, “at the age of 23 lost her life in a hotel fire”. Spark joked about her foresight but it unnerved her, particularly in relation to her first novel, The Comforters.
In May 1954, when she was a 36-year-old divorcee making a living of sorts as a biographer and critic, Spark converted to Catholicism. The previous year, having broken off with her lover and literary collaborator, Derek Stanford, she moved into a London bedsit. By January 1954 she was having a breakdown, brought on by overwork, spiritual and emotional stress, a baked bean diet and an excess of Dexedrine, an amphetamine she took for weight loss, one of whose side effects was hallucinations.
Spark’s collapse, described by her doctor as “anxiety neurosis”, took the form of a persecution complex about TS Eliot, whom she believed to be sending her hostile messages in the programme notes of his play The Confidential Clerk, and in his blurbs for Faber. Eliot’s words, jumping about on the page, reshaped themselves into anagrams: “lived”, for example, became “devil”. Eliot had also, Spark believed, broken into her flat to raid her larder; he was posing as the window cleaner to her friends the Braybrookes, in order to pry into their papers. Afraid of being followed, she wore dark glasses when she left the house, and spoke sotto voce. Her doctor prescribed the anti-psychotic Largactil, and in October 1954 Spark went to a Carmelite retreat at Allington Castle in Kent, where she turned her experience into her first novel. Her recovery took place as the novel evolved.
In The Comforters the heroine, Caroline Rose, who is recovering from a breakdown brought on while writing a book on the modern novel (“I’m having difficulty with the chapter on realism”), has her thoughts repeated by the tap-tappity-tap of an invisible typewriter and the chanting of voices. “A typewriter and a chorus of voices: What on earth were they up to at this time of night? Caroline wondered. But what worried her were the words they had used, coinciding so exactly with her own thoughts.”
No sooner has Caroline expressed to herself this worry than the typewriter starts tapping and the voices repeat her thought: “What on earth were they up to at this time of night? Caroline wondered. But what worried her were the words they had used, coinciding so exactly with her own thoughts”. A “typing ghost”, Caroline believes, is turning her into a character in a novel.
She wires her former boyfriend, Laurence, saying “Come immediately something mysterious going on”, at the same time as Laurence wires Caroline with the exact same words. The Comforters ends with Caroline writing her first novel in Worcestershire while Laurence snoops through her papers in her London bedsit. Derek Stanford, meanwhile, in one of the uncanny coincidences that characterise her biography, was snooping through Spark’s own papers while she was writing The Comforters in Allington Castle. Removing a cache of manuscripts from the trunk in her London bedsit, he sold them to a dealer.
Spark found her voice as a novelist in a novel about hearing voices, and tuning into “voices in the air” is how, from now on, she described her writing process. One of the reviewers was Evelyn Waugh. “It so happens,” he wrote in the Spectator, “that The Comforters came to me just as I had finished a story on a similar theme.”
Waugh’s story, published six months later, was The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, an account of his own breakdown that took place at the same time as Spark’s. In January 1954, plagued by rheumatic pains and insomnia, Waugh boarded the SS Staffordshire bound for Ceylon. After four days at sea he overheard voices discussing his “persecution mania” and insulting him; during meals, he spoke into the table lamp. Terrified, Waugh disembarked at Port Said but the voices followed him to his Cairo hotel. His letters home, he warned his wife, were being read back to him, word for word, “by the group of psychologists whom I met on the ship … the artful creatures can communicate from many hundreds of miles away”. Back in London the voices continued to repeat in his ear what he had just said. Waugh believed himself possessed, but his condition, his doctor confirmed, was the result of mixing bromide, chloral and crème de menthe.
Two comic novels by two Catholic converts, both about hearing voices, both the result of breakdowns brought on by drug poisoning. The Comforters and Pinfold, like the wires between Laurence and Caroline, appeared to be products of an instantaneous messaging system between Waugh and Spark. How would Spark, still in a fragile state, have understood this coincidence? It was as if The Comforters had been dictated by Waugh, one of the voices in the air. And if Waugh was the typing ghost, then Spark was a character in her own book. But what if Waugh thought she had been snooping about in his study, reading his manuscripts?
Thirty-five years later, in April 1991, Spark wrote to Waugh’s son Auberon: “I feel from something he wrote in his diary that your father’s first reaction on seeing my book was that someone had been prying into his papers. Can this be so?” Auberon, finding no such reference, replied: “I don’t think my father suffered a serious attack of persecution mania on first looking into The Comforters.” But in a letter to Ann Fleming in 1956, Auberon told Spark, Waugh mentioned The Comforters. “I am sure people will think it is by me. Please contradict such assertions.”
Spark’s response to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold can be found in her second novel, Robinson, where a clairvoyant advertises herself as “MURIEL THE MARVEL with her X-ray eyes.”
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £22.50 go toguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.