Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, was published when I was 18. I read it almost immediately and was entranced. It was clever, odd, mysterious, very funny, wholly individual. Like so many of my generation I have been her constant and devoted reader.
She started at the top and remained there. One of the first to admire and draw attention to her work was Evelyn Waugh. In a letter to her he wrote, very perceptively: “Most novelists find there is one kind of book they can write and go on doing it with variations until death. You seem to have an inexhaustible source.” So, indeed, she did.
Muriel was in her late thirties when that first novel came out. Others followed in rapid succession. It was as if a dam had broken and a talent long repressed had been allowed to flow freely. I was at Cambridge then. How greedily and with what joy we gobbled them up. They were the kind of novels from which you delighted to read passages aloud to your friends, to share the jokes. Did we then realise she was also a stern moralist? Probably not. But she was. “You never get all you want in life,” says a character in The Bachelors.
In those days she was a cult novelist and we were happy to be members of the cult. The success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie changed all of that, made her an international success. The most Scottish of her books, this story of a charismatic Edinburgh schoolmistress and the little girls whom she tries to mould became a play and film. It caught the essence of a particular Edinburgh.
“My whole education, in and out of school,” she once wrote, “seemed to pivot around the word ‘nevertheless’ . . . My teachers used it a great deal. All grades of society constructed sentences bridged by ‘nevertheless’ . . . I can see the lips of tough elderly women in musquash coats taking tea at MacVittie’s, enunciating this word of final justification . . . I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea . . . It was on the nevertheless principle that I turned Catholic . . .”
It is a key passage to understanding Muriel Spark. When, in the late 1970s, I wrote a short critical study of her novels, the idea of “nevertheless” ran through the text.
To the end, although self-exiled from Edinburgh, the city where she could not possibly live as an adult, she nevertheless, again, always seemed to me to belong there. It was not difficult to imagine her taking tea in Jenner’s or in the old North British hotel, delivering judgment. She wrote of the city’s “informed air . . . its haughty and remote anarchism”.
In the 1960s she lived in some style, in New York and then Rome. Her novels likewise escaped the dark closes of Edinburgh and the bed-sitter wastelands of Kensington and Earls Court in London. Usually short, often dark, still incomparably witty, her subject was increasingly the monstrous irresponsibility of the rich. She juggled with time to reveal the ineluctable working of consequence. For there was in her always, beneath the fun and the glitter, a grim sense — Calvinist? Jewish? — that you are what you make of yourself, that character is destiny.
When I came to write that little book I concentrated wholly on the work. That was prudent. Her personal life was private and she guarded it fiercely. When an old friend, sometime lover and literary collaborator, Derek Stanford, wrote revealingly in his memoirs about their time together, her fury and resentment were fierce. Years later she had her revenge, depicting him with savage contempt in A Far Cry from Kensington. If this seemed disproportionate, his offence was, to her, unforgivable.
So it was with some trepidation that I sent her a copy of my book. Fortunately she approved, thereafter gave me constant encouragement. I met her soon after at a little dinner given in her honour at the Garrick Club in London. There was nothing of the grande dame in her manner, no insistence on being the cynosure of attention. On the contrary, she seemed modest and friendly. Yet one suspected that it would be very easy to cross an invisible boundary into forbidden territory.
Thereafter we met occasionally when she came to Scotland. To my regret now I never took up the invitation, given more than once, to visit her in Italy. We corresponded from time to time. She gave me a short story to publish when I was editing a literary magazine in Edinburgh and did not remark on the meagreness of the fee I was able to offer. I continued to review her novels and sent her books of my own if I thought — or hoped — they might interest her. She was punctilious in expressing thanks and kind enough to say she liked them. When, somewhat to my embarrassment, my publishers sent her one of my novels in the hope of getting a quote that could be put on the jacket, she gave them the most generous puff I have ever had. I like to think she meant it, but it may have just been good manners. Her manners were very good, in an old-fashioned Edinburgh style.
I knew her for almost 30 years, but I realise I never really knew the woman as distinct from the author. I was going to write that scores of people must have known her much better. But I wonder if this was so. I rather suspect that nobody, in her later life anyway, knew her well except the sculptor Penelope Jardine, the friend with whom she shared a house in Tuscany for the last quarter-century.
Despite her exile, Spark considered herself always to be a Scot and her Edinburgh upbringing remained central to her habit of thought and way of writing. She retained an affection for the city of her youth and happy memories of it.
Light-hearted, witty, yet profoundly serious, her books puzzled as many as they delighted. How could a novel be as sparkling as a glass of champagne and yet deal with the ultimate questions of human existence? But that’s what she offered.
Beneath the frivolity of manner and the jokes, there was granite. And what can be more Scottish than that? Ultimately her view of life and human nature was stern, cold, unforgiving. Nevertheless, how she delighted in the glittering surface, too. What fun she had with all evidence of folly and vanity. What deep pleasure she has given for so long to so many. There was no writer quite like her.
