This biography does fullest justice to the maddest stories imaginable

BIOGRAPHY
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson
Bloomsbury, $44.99

It’s extraordinary the magnetism of Muriel Spark and the extent to which her work has such an extraordinary power of definition, even when it seems in its ravishing way minor and whole aspects of her life seem eccentric to the point of derangement. But this is the woman to whom the New Yorker devoted an entire issue which contained the text of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, subsequently made into a film starring Dame Maggie Smith and widely regarded as the greatest novella of the mid-20th century.

Frances Wilson has written about Thomas De Quincey and D.H. Lawrence and the Titanic. Now she has written about Spark with a brilliant recreative justice to the brilliant shot of lightning that illuminates everything Spark did, but also the formal brilliance of the work and the way it remained – in ways that are at once wacko and regally impressive – the imprint of a personality that was both magnificent and alarming.

Think of the titles of those books: The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington, Loitering with Intent and Memento Mori.

Wilson, who has a captivating analytical mind and an exceptional narrative power that goes along with it, tells the stories of how Spark ran the Poetry Society and the weird chaps (sometimes military gents) she had to fight again and again to gain control. If you’re going to read one work of criticism or critical biography this year read her: she’s some kind of genius.

And she does the fullest justice to the maddest stories imaginable. At one point in the 1950s, Spark is not only sleeping with a fellow called Stanford, she’s sharing a journal with him – one that juxtaposes her cut-glass intensities with his smokey bombast. Then she becomes religious, embracing first Anglo then Roman Catholicism, and she is insistent that if they’re to keep up the sex he had better take on God. He won’t, but Spark (who has written a book about the Book of Job, The Only Question) does with great tolling bells on, while Stanford is possessive about her work.

Together, they edit Cardinal Newman’s wonderful sermons. Meanwhile, Spark, who is heavily into dexedrine – and who is at work on a life of Mary Shelley – gets it into her head that she is receiving secret coded messages from T.S. Eliot (who has just written The Confidential Clerk and was impressed by her review).

Spark’s work goes from strength to strength even where it contains worlds within worlds as well as re-arranging the traditional hierarchies of leading men. There are devils and then there is Spark’s strange double act with Evelyn Waugh’s weird breakdown work The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which is full of parallel derangements to her own but which he celebrates with a generous blurb. It’s also the case that Graham Greene, who admired that uncanny panoramic coldness in Spark’s work and her command of the drama of introspection and self-annihilation, kept her alive with monthly cheques.

Wilson is full of brilliant apercus. She describes Spark as “the loneliest and the most singular figure on the twentieth century landscape” and declares that she “never understood how to be famous” which made her “such an innocent person”. She also says that Spark “created the taste for which she was admired”. Is this in fact always true? Wilson risks her arm with a thematic summary which blends into formal delineation: “It is impossible for any human being to understand another. This was the point of her fiction, whose characters have no inner lives or intelligible motivation. To love to be unknown.”

Wilson is arguably a bit melodramatic about this. The Driver’s Seat is all about a woman who seeks and finds her murderer. Wilson says that no bond is more infernal than that of the biographer and their subject.

It’s fascinating to read of Spark’s intense, companionable friendship with Penelope Jardine. The analysis of the Lord Lucan book Aiding and Abetting is brilliant even though Spark was scarifyingly unfair to her biographer Martin Stannard. You do feel – and the effect creates a shiver – that Wilson is giving you the lowdown on this very grand but also moving master of creating fiction.

If Spark was for the most part a miniaturist, she was diamond bright and with such a cutting edge.

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