Other literary forms

Muriel Spark was known primarily for her novels and short fiction, but her body of work also includes nonfiction, children’s literature, poetry, film adaptations, and radio plays. She began her career writing news articles as a press agent. Later she expanded her range to include works of poetry and literary criticism, contributing poems, articles, and reviews to magazines and newspapers, occasionally using the pseudonym Evelyn Cavallo. Spark published her first short story in 1951 and in 1954 began writing novels, her best known being The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).

Achievements

Muriel Spark’s honors and awards include the Prix Italia (1962) for her radio play adaptation of her novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960); the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award (1965) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1966), for The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); Commander, Order of the British Empire (1967); the Booker McConnell Prize nomination (1981) for Loitering with Intent (1981); the Scottish Book of the Year Award (1987) for The Stories of Muriel Spark; Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1988); the Ingersoll T. S. Eliot Award (1992); Dame, Order of the British Empire (1993); Honorary Fellowship, Royal Society of Edinburgh (1995); the David Cohen British Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement (1997); Arts Council of Scotland Spring Book Prize (1997) for Reality and Dreams (1996); and honorary citizenship, Arezzo commune, Italy (2005).

Biography

Muriel Sarah Camberg was born and educated in Edinburgh, Scotland, the daughter of Bernard and Sarah Elizabeth Camberg. In 1937, Spark went to live in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). During her stay in Africa she married S. O. Spark but was divorced a short time later. The couple had one child, a son named Robin.

After spending several years in Africa, Spark returned to England in 1944. During the war years she wrote news articles for the political intelligence department of the British government. Afterward she held various posts in the publishing field, including a position as founder of the short-lived literary magazine The Forum. Spark began producing serious works of literary criticism and poetry in the early 1950’s, and Hand and Flower Press published her first volume of poetry in 1952. At the same time she was involved in editing and researching critical and biographical works on several nineteenth-century literary figures, including William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Emily Brontë.

Spark received considerable attention when her initial attempt at fiction, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” won top honors in a contest in 1951. She was encouraged to expand the scope of her fiction in 1954 when her publisher, Macmillan, persuaded her to write a full-length novel. The result was The Comforters (1957), which examines theological issues and reflects a religious struggle that she had undergone.

Although Spark maintained that her father was Jewish while her mother was Presbyterian, her son Robin and several residents of Edinburgh later insisted that both parents were Jewish. In any case, Spark practiced the Anglican faith until her interest in the writings of John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century Catholic theologian, convinced her to convert to Catholicism in 1954. Her personal search for spiritual belief would be reflected not only in The Comforters but also in many of her subsequent stories and novels.

Spark described her early life and the beginnings of her writing career in her autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992), a volume that led to a bitter public feud with her son. She lived in Italy from the late 1960’s until her death in Florence on April 13, 2006.

Analysis

Muriel Spark was an adept storyteller with a narrative voice that was often distant or aloof. Her tales are psychologically compelling because she was reluctant to reveal all that her characters think and feel; in consequence, readers are forced to evaluate the stories, think about issues from a different perspective, and try to fill in the gaps. Critics regard Spark’s novels as her strongest genre, but her short stories are also well constructed and intriguing. Published over more than four decades, her collections reprint many of the same stories, with new ones added to each new edition.

Spark’s tales are generally set in England, British Africa, and mainland Europe. Her works reflect a sense of moral truth, which some critics view as the influence of her conversion to Catholicism in 1954. Her narrative is rarely wordy. The story line relies on the impressions and dialogue of the characters or narrator to convey the plot. Spark made frequent use of first-person narrative, but none of her voices “tells all.” One of the distinguishing elements of her style was her penchant for leaving gaps that her readers must fill for themselves.

“The Seraph and the Zambesi”

Spark’s first short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” won an award in a Christmas contest sponsored by The Observer in 1951. In characteristic Spark style, this story does not mince words but focuses on action and sparse dialogue. Set in Africa at Christmastime, it describes the events surrounding preparations for a Christmas pageant. Besides sweltering temperatures, curious natives, and preoccupied performers, the presentation is “hindered” by the presence of a heavenly Seraph, complete with six wings and a heat-producing glow. The writer of the nativity play is incensed when this real angel appears. He expresses rage rather than awe and destroys the stage in his attempts to banish the Seraph. Though Spark refuses to offer a moral at the close of “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” the story resembles a parable, illustrating the egocentrism of human beings, especially “artists.” The narrative also serves as a metaphor for the definition of genuine “art.”

A related story dealing with art and creativity is entitled “The Playhouse Called Remarkable.” Published several years after “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” it features a character named Moon Biglow. Moon confesses to the narrator that he is really a native of the moon who migrated to Earth on the “Downfall of [the] Uprise” sometime in the distant past. His primary mission was to save Earth’s residents from suffocating aesthetic boredom. It seems human beings had no form of recreation other than that of gathering in groups to chant “Tum tum ya” each evening. The moon migrants organize the “playhouse called Remarkable” to offer alternative entertainment and also to give earthlings a creative outlet for their imaginations.

“The Pawnbroker’s Wife”

Often Spark’s short fiction depicts varied types of female personalities. These stories, narrated in first person and set in Africa, tell little about the narrators themselves but focus on the manipulative power of the central female characters. The narrator of “The Pawnbroker’s Wife” relates the story of Mrs. Jan Cloote, who is never identified by her first name. Her pawnbroker husband has disappeared, and Mrs. Cloote carries on the business herself but denies the slightly sordid reputation of her vocation by claiming that she is only the pawnbroker’s wife. Thus, in her name and her speech, she tries to separate her actions from her image. Such “distancing” allows Mrs. Cloote freedom in refusing to accept responsibility for her conduct, no matter how cruel or petty, as she performs the duties of a pawnbroker. Ironically, she is far more successful at the business than her husband had been. She uses a show of politeness to remain corrupt without having to admit fault or make concessions. She breaks her promises to customers and sells the pawned items of her friends at the first opportunity. Mrs. Cloote’s poor taste, grasping manipulation, and innocent pretense give her character an insidious cast. However, the narrator who reveals these facts refuses to pass judgment regarding Mrs. Cloote’s morality. That matter is left to the reader.

“The Curtain Blown by the Breeze”

In a similar story, Sonia Van der Merwe, the female protagonist of “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze,” gains power over her domain in the absence of her husband. Mr. Van der Merwe, who lives in the remote territory of Fort Beit, is imprisoned for fatally shooting a young native boy who was a peeping Tom. While her husband’s conviction and imprisonment might have prompted a feeling of tragedy, the opposite occurs. Sonia finds that she has considerable financial resources at her disposal with her husband gone. Like Mrs. Cloote, Sonia takes charge, encouraged by the female British medical workers serving in the colony. She soon learns to use her feminine wiles to access power and control in Fort Beit. The male workers seek her attention, captivated by her “eccentric grandeur.” Much to the chagrin of the British women who helped to create the “new Sonia,” she gains influence over even government officials. However, just as the English nurse narrating the story can never truly decide what she wants, the same applies to Sonia. At the close of the story, Mr. Van der Merwe returns from prison unexpectedly. When he discovers his wife Sonia in the company of another man, he shoots them both. Thus, Sonia and her image are quickly eliminated. In her stories, Spark explores the roles of greedily ambitious females, the irony of their plight, and their cloaks of politeness.

Spark also deals with themes of childhood or adolescent memories in her short fiction. She may contrast the innocent but terrifyingly real fears of children with the more serious cruelty of adults, or she may reverse the irony and explore the cruelty of “devilish” children who are shielded by a guise of adult politeness. For example, “The Twins” describes two seemingly polite children who exercise some invisible but insidious control over their parents and other adults who enter their household.

“The Portobello Road” and “Bang-Bang You’re Dead”

“The Portobello Road” and “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” juxtapose the childhood memories of two girls with their lives as “grown-ups.” These stories explore the serious ramifications of situations in which childish conceptions or antagonisms are transferred into adulthood. Both stories are examples of Spark’s ability to create unique narrative forms. “The Portobello Road” is narrated by Needle, a girl whose childhood nickname was given to her because she found a needle in a haystack. When the story opens, Needle is dead and her ghostly voice chronicles the events that led to her murder—when she becomes the “Needle” who is murdered and buried in a haystack by a childhood friend.

“Bang-Bang You’re Dead” connects the present and the past in a complex narrative using a series of flashbacks. In the present, represented in the story’s opening scene, Sybil’s friends gather to view four reels of eighteen-year-old films from Sybil’s past years spent in Africa. As the group views the “silent movies,” the third-person narrative reveals Sybil’s memories—not those seen by the spectators of the film but as Sybil remembers them. As each reel ends, Sybil’s mental narrative is interrupted by the surface chatter of her friends, who are impressed by the appearance of the people and exotic scenes revealed in the film. At the conclusion of the final reel, the reader finds, through Sybil’s mental recollections, that two murders were committed shortly after the scenes were recorded on film. As the acquaintances agree to view the last reel again because it is their “favorite,” Sybil remains stoically unmoved by the memories of the tragedy. Her indifference and objectivity regarding the memories of her deceased friends reveal a chilling aspect of her personality. Coldly intellectual and detached, Sybil remains unmoved by the recorded memories, even though she was largely responsible for the murders.

“The Go-Away Bird” and “The First Year of My Life”

“The Go-Away Bird” is one of the longest of Spark’s stories. It is also about a woman and murder. Daphne, the central female figure, is reared in a British colony in Africa. Caught between two cultures, those of the Dutch Afrikaaners and the English colonists, Daphne searches for her identity—for a world in which she can not only belong but also find safety. Set in Africa and England during World War II, “The Go-Away Bird” presents characters who reflect diverse backgrounds, personalities, motivations, and societies. Daphne’s struggles and her relationship with the African Go-Away Bird illustrate the individual’s difficulty in trying to fulfill his or her need for love and identity within diverse cultural and social structures.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, “The First Year of My Life” does not struggle with maturing in society but presents the first-person commentary of an infant, born during World War I. The adults who care for the baby treat the child as an “innocent infant,” unaware of the newborn’s ability to grasp the tragedy of war. Such diversity in narrative voice, subject, and style is a trademark of Spark. As a writer, she avoids classification and is unafraid of experimentation.

Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories

Spark’s collection Open to the Public reprints the contents of The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985) and adds ten new works. One of the earlier stories, “The Fathers’ Daughters,” centers on a thirty-year-old intellectual named Ben who pursues the daughters of famous writers in order to meet the authors themselves. When the young, beautiful Carmelita is unable to gain an audience for Ben with her father, a successful novelist, Ben abandons her to marry Dora, the forty-six-year-old daughter of an aged author whose popularity has faded. Spark creates an ironic situation in which the characters use one another for their own purposes. Ben wants to write essays based on another author’s work, Dora’s father craves an audience for his forgotten books, and Dora needs someone to provide income for their impoverished household.

The story “Open to the Public” is a sequel to “The Fathers’ Daughters” and presents Ben and Dora five years later. Dora’s father dies, but Ben’s promotion of the father’s works restores the family’s fortune. However, the dead man’s memory is not enough to sustain the relationship; the couple separate. Their plans to open the writer’s house and personal documents to the public are abandoned when both Ben and Dora realize that museums “have no heart.” In a humorous turn, they burn the father’s archives instead. The story demonstrates the hopelessness of trying to maintain perpetual fame and the futility of attempting to build one’s future on another’s achievements.

In a story with similar elements, “The Executor,” the protagonist Susan, who is a middle-aged spinster like Dora, must dispose of her uncle’s literary estate. She sells his papers to a university foundation but retains an unfinished manuscript, which she hopes to complete and publish as her own. However, her plans are thwarted when her uncle’s ghost returns to write warning messages to her. Thus Susan, like the women in “The Fathers’ Daughters,” must abandon her schemes of finding success vicariously and learn to build her own future.

The remaining additions in the Open to the Public collection are stylized and brief. Some plots turn on a single ironic twist, as in “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” whose narrator finds her own body “lying strangled on the floor.” Other stories feature the troubling imposition of the supernatural into the natural world. For example, a shady specter haunts the staff and patients of a medical clinic in “The Pearly Shadow.” The specter finally disappears when doctors begin dispensing sedatives to his “stressed-out” victims. “Going Up and Coming Down” is a poetic vignette about a man and woman who ride to work in the same elevator every day. Once the two actually meet, their speculations about each other disappear in the face of “plain real facts.”

All the Stories

The last collection published during the author’s lifetime, All the Stories, adds a brief foreword and four stories to Open to the Public. One of the latter, “The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life,” is a whimsical ghost story that few readers will find memorable. The others, however, are worthy additions to Spark’s oeuvre, and while they do nothing to broaden her fictional world, they display her customary wit and economy of means.

As is the case in several of her works, “The Snobs” is narrated by a writer who sounds much like Spark herself. Visiting friends at a château that they have inherited in France, she is surprised when a couple she had known decades before are brought to the château by its new owner, who has discovered them hopelessly lost nearby. All too soon the couple reveal themselves as snobbish nuisances who believe that they should be invited to stay the night, and it is left to the narrator to invent a subterfuge—that the château’s owner is merely the cook—in order to eject them from the premises.

“Christmas Fugue” describes a young woman’s somewhat lackadaisical search for identity, first in England and then in Australia. Finding her new home and her new friends increasingly empty, she decides to fly back to England on Christmas Day. She enjoys a romantic afternoon aboard the plane with a pilot during a long layover in Thailand, and the two agree to live together. When she reaches England and finds herself surrounded by her family, however, her experience aboard the plane begins to seem—like so much else in her life—unreal. She realizes that she does not have the pilot’s address, and when she calls the airline, she discovers that there was no pilot matching his description on the flight. Did the liaison really occur, or did she only imagine it? Spark leaves it for the reader to decide.

An exercise in nostalgia leavened with irony, “A Hundred and Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur” is the most substantial of the new stories and again features a writer as narrator. In this case, the writer is assisting her biographer (as Spark initially would assist her biographer Martin Stannard) in research but is puzzled to find that many of her photographs are missing. In the process, she recalls an old friend, an ersatz baron named Damian de Dogherty. Charming and attractive, he was an amateur genealogist and was particularly good at “discovering” noble ancestors for his many friends. Much later the narrator discovers that the late baron had stolen her photographs and altered them to look like portraits of his own aristocratic ancestors. Unexpectedly, the narrator admits to loving the doctored photographs, which she has run across in a bookshop and purchased. As readers learn from Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography (2010), de Dogherty was modeled on Spark’s close friend “Baron” Brian de Breffny.

All the Stories showcases Spark’s mastery of the short-story form. Her plots expose human foibles with an ironic, mysterious, or sarcastic tone. She was adept at illustrating the slightly macabre or deceitful nature of human actions. Her characters may be subtly malevolent or sinisterly civilized, but evil is punished and hypocrisy is exposed in her comic tales.

Bibliography