The Divine Spark is much admired on Substack, as one would expect. One of the first things I read on here was a wonderful essay about her by
- although I admit that I was amazed by a quotation in it from the New York Times, which stated that at the time of Muriel Spark’s death, aged 88, in 2006, her ‘reputation had already begun to sink’.Really? Really?
For a moment I fantasized about a forced mass reading of The Driver’s Seat (for me the greatest of her novels) and a public mea culpa: yes, we were wrong, get that reputation back up there, now! Then I remembered a passage in Loitering with Intent, written in the voice of the young novelist Fleur Talbot, a version of Muriel at the start of her career:
I had known for a long time that success could not be my profession in life, nor failure a calling for that matter. They were by-products.
And this unforced, robust sense of self-worth seems to me the perfect response to the silly vagaries of literary fashion.
Although I can quite see something inimical to our fearful, uncertain age in Muriel’s boldly assured vision, which like cubism is apparently skewed in its extreme clarity. The supreme example is The Driver’s Seat (1970): the tale of a female murderee, in which everything is both wholly unexplained and clear as rain water. It is a work of such impeccable genius that I can only ask of it the ultimate fan’s question: ‘How has she done this?’ And, at the same time, it is disturbing and terrifying and downright weird, if one chooses not to see it through the Muriel prism. Which was apparent from very early on, in her biography of Mary Shelley, published in 1951 (the year in which she earned £31 from her writing; even allowing for inflation, not great. Her first novel was published six years later). In an apparent throwaway - actually nothing of the kind - she suggested that Mary would have been easier to live with had she been ‘tipsy’ a bit more often. As I say: not very modern.
But that word tipsy - both precise and approximate; referring both to the intake of alcohol and to a kind of general human loosening - is pure Muriel Spark. Nobody else can revivify a familiar term with quite such buoyancy. Similarly: ‘I dearly love a turn of events’, says Fleur in Loitering with Intent (1981), when she is confronted with evidence of her lover’s casual infidelity. Cold - odd - unfeeling… I can well imagine such a reaction to this line (it is quite usual to see Muriel described as cold and odd); I remember the first time I read it, the slightly hilarious thrill of it, the sense of being shocked into an excitingly unfamiliar position.
Yet this is a question of language, as much as anything; of what Muriel herself called the sixth sense, which she identified in her autobiography as a ‘literary’ sense. And when language is used in such a way, as it were to direct the traffic of one’s sensibility, to show what is important and what is not, it seems to me the outward signifier of an illuminating sanity.
This is the quality that draws me back repeatedly to Muriel Spark. For all that she was a practising Catholic (this too permeates her books), a writer who perceived the metaphysical in earthbound realities, who dealt in what might be called a beautiful irrationality, something in her remains fundamentally ‘practical, staunch, rational and broad-minded’: the words that she uses to describe Mary Shelley, and that also conjure her own eminently sane Edinburgh upbringing.
Some small boys were playing football, and the ball came flying straight towards me. I kicked it with a chance grace, which, if I had studied the affair and tried hard, I could never have done. Away into the air it went, and landed in the small boy’s waiting hands. The boy grinned. And so, having entered the fullness of my years, from there by the grace of God I go on my way rejoicing.
That little passage, magical and rooted, is from Loitering with Intent. Then there are these lines, from The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), that sly masterpiece in which the devil comes to seduce the susceptible souls of south-east London. in which she writes of ‘the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.’ The infinity of imagination, rendered with a kind of shrewd economy, plus a dash of the demotic - only Muriel can do that. And this blend - or paradox - that she creates is enigmatic in the extreme.
It is also wonderfully liberating. It makes one read differently, in a way that is truly alive because there is no telling what might come next. Even when I am not entirely sure what she is saying - The Girls of Slender Means (1963) always slides around, unanchored, in my mind - I know that she knows exactly what she means, and moreover that she doesn’t much mind if other people do not. They can still come along for the literary ride. The care with which she uses words goes alongside an attitude that feels gloriously carefree, profoundly light, blissfully confident; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start the day than a double espresso.
He gave me a number and I repeated it slowly enough to make out that I was writing it down, which I wasn’t.
That, from A Far Cry from Kensington, has done me no end of good on a couple of occasions.
There is, of course, far more to Muriel Spark than I have covered here…. and I shall write more, later, I hope. But in this piece I wanted to celebrate her, the sheer enlivening pleasure that she offers, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Far Cry, a late novel published in 1988, thus utterly secure in its deliciously simple tone, its firm principles, its solidity around which darts the mysterious spiritual element, like a firefly in a pub. It is voiced by the divine Mrs Hawkins, a war widow of 28 (the book is set mostly in 1954), who at the start of the story induces a sense of comfort in those around her, not least because she is ‘massive in size’, with a ‘Rubens quality of flesh, eyes, skin’. This is her own description: essential to her magnificence is her ability to face facts. Later she will, as she puts it, decide to be thin, but ‘in the year 1954 I was comfortable in my fatness, known as a ‘wonderful woman’ although I had never done anything wonderful at all.’
Mrs Hawkins is a great giver of advice. She works in publishing (that world brilliantly sketched; I particularly love the firm in which all the editorial staff have been employed for some terrible, pity-inducing problem that makes it impossible for authors to argue with them). She advises an old military type, who wishes to compile his memoirs, that the way in which to get the book done is to acquire a cat, who will provide a calming influence as he writes (Muriel herself was a great dog lover). She offers the advice that turns her, throughout the course of the book, into a slim woman - ‘You eat and drink the same as always, only half’ - and describes how to achieve the will power that is necessary for successful dieting:
You should think of will-power as something that never exists in the present tense, only in the future and the past. At one moment you have decided to do or refrain from an action and the next moment you have already done or refrained; it is the only way to deal with will-power.
Then there is this, which genuinely transformed my feelings of torment about perpetual sleeplessness.
Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can.
Who need self-help, when there is Mrs Hawkins?
Lifelong Spark fan here. She is deliciously unexpected and yet her characters always act believably within their environment and for Spark environment is crucial. For me it seems that she turns the wayward thoughts anyone of us might have into actions that her created individuals carry out. The rest is consequence. I agree that The Driver's Seat is spectacularly good.
Great choice of quotes - willpower, not taking down a phone number etc. Thank you. LOVE Spark. Must get back to her.