“Sparklet” has gone with her sparkle
Carl Muller
WRITING: Hers was a vivid imagination mind. Her books were tightly
plotted, most disturbing at times and extremely quirky. I wouldn’t call
them true-to-life, but they did carry in them the spark of life.
Dame Muriel Spark died this year, aged 88. She published her first
novel, The Comforters in 1957, and Graham Greene was so impressed that
he gave her a monthly allowance so that she could concentrate in her
writing. He also sent her crates of red win on condition that she would
never thank him or pray for him. They never met!
Muriel Spark was perhaps Scotland’s most important modern novelist.
Born in Edinburgh of a Jewish father and a Presbyterian mother, she was
encouraged, when a schoolgirl to write poetry by her teacher, Miss
Christina Kay. Spark was dazzled by the unconventional Miss Kay.
Flowers
She began to churn out numerous poems, won a prestigious poetry prize
and thought of Miss Kay as “a character in search of an author.” So it
was that Miss Kay became the model of Spark’s most famous novel, The
Prime of Miss Jane Brodie -the story of a romantic Edinburgh
schoolteacher.
Dame Muriel was outrageously unstoppable. She married a teacher,
Sydney Oswald Spark, accompanied him to Rhodesia, hated the country, and
was plunged in despair when her husband went mad and became violent. He
had to be confined in an asylum. As she said: “I barely knew him, but I
was attracted to him because he always brought me flowers. My motto now
is: Beware men bearing flowers!”
Returning to London, she edited the Poetry Review for the London
Poetry Society, but her sparkle combined with her memorable insults soon
cost her, her job. She called the members of the Poetry Society “a bunch
of abnormals” and told the press: “They will do anything to get
published. Those that weren’t queer, wanted to sleep with me. They
thought they were poets and that there should be free love or something.
I’ve never known anything like it!”
She said of Marie Stopes: “I used to think it a pity that her mother,
rather than she, had not thought of birth control!”
When Virginia Woolf died, Spark recalled her as “a spoilt brat” and
added: “All right, she committed suicide, but she didn’t have to take
her dog with her!”
Witty novels
Spark’s witty novels were strongly coloured by her Catholicism. She
gave us Robinson in 1958 - about a wrecked plane and a hermit. Many of
her books became instant classics - Memento Mori about old people
plagued by phone calls reminding them of death; The Ballad of Peckam Rye
about a London factory turned upside down by a Satanic Dougal Douglas;
The Bachelors, and her most famous, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - a
teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. This was turned into a
play as well as an Oscar-winning film.
In 1963, Spark moved to New York, adding Normal Mailer, John Updike
and W.H. Auden to her social circle. She wrote The Girls of Slender
Means, The Mandelbaum Gate (which won the James Tait Black award) and
The Public Image while in New York.
She then went to Rome, then to Tuscany. In 1997, she was awarded the
David Cohen award for lifetime achievement in Literature. She blew the
entire 30,000 Sterling Pounds prize money on an Alfa Romeo car! In every
elegant social and literary circle, she was the “Sparklet” and it became
quite “spark-like” just to read her work. She wrote her last novel, The
Finishing School in 2004.
It’s hard to think that she is no more. I, for one, wish her a
brighter world somewhere - where she will shine and also tell God
exactly what she thinks of him - for that was her way!
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