Muriel Spark (1992 [2009]) Curriculum Vitae.

If you’re like me, you’ll associate Muriel Spark with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I don’t think I’ve read the book. I’ve seen two television versions. Miss Jean Brodie really is a gift to any actress with our Dames playing the lead roles. Muriel Spark reminds us teachers in the James Gillespie’s Girls’ School in 1930s Edinburgh were also actors that had to instruct their audience: ‘the creme de la creme’. Not just be teaching, but by charismatically adding that certain something that fuelled youthful imagination. Miss Jean Brodie, or real life, Miss Christina Kay, did just that. The irony here was the fascist leaning, Mussolini loving, Miss Brodie, who worshipped at the altar of the leader who made the trains run on time, would have seen Muriel Spark whipped off to the death camps. Muriel Spark (nee) Muriel Camberg, her brother Philip and her father, Bernard, were Jewish. Many people who denounced others were spared, so if her mother, a woman who was Christian enough, had done the same, she might have been spared.

Muriel Spark made that long journey to becoming a Roman Catholic. This is in the last third of the book. By this time, the award-winning poet had married a man who was unhinged, jealous and insane. Moved to Southern Rhodesia. An apartheid regime based on the South African model. She tells the story of a man who shot a ‘pickaninny’ boy because he’d looked at his wife breastfeeding. And of a settler, who killed a black cyclist, drove over him, because he wouldn’t give way on the narrow strip of tarmac. Among the group of white wives, this was considered acceptable behaviour in polite society. No surprise that Hitler admired the British Empire’s ability to subjugate such a large group with so few men. She contacted blood poisoning and with no penicillin, it was touch and go whether she’d live. Her husband's insanity  meant she knew she’d have to get home with her son, even though there was a war on.

She settled her son in Edinburgh and went to work in London for MI6. They helped fabricate false accounts of the German war effort. Her middle-class background meant that she found accommodating, but she was also writing poetry and got jobs with some literary magazines.

It gets boring here. A settling of accounts of who said what, which for the general reader (me) is time wasted. We know, of course, Muriel Spark would become a literary giant. She won an Observer short-story writing competition. That gave her access to publishers and commissions for books as yet unwritten and articles published in literary magazines.

Her first book was based on her experience of taking dexidrine (amphetamines) which kept her appetite down. During 1951-52 rationing was still in place. Skipped meals the norm for many mothers so their children could benefit.  

‘I didn’t feel like a novelist,’ she wrote. Her debut novel The Comforters was published in 1957 based on her hallucinatory experiences. She compares it to the dialogue Job had in The Book of Job with his Comforters.

By coincidence Evelyn Waugh also wrote a book the same year about his reaction to different pills which mirrored Spark’s. His endorsement helped legitimise her book. And more important, by association, it got reviews in the right kind of papers. Spark’s trajectory was upwards. But she admitted often debut novels (a testing ground for publishers) were often followed by literary flops. Not in her case, of course. She had plans to write a second part of her biography, which would cover her more successful years. I’m not sure if she wrote it. I’ll give it a miss. Read on.   

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