In her prime

Handling feelings with rubber gloves: the odd life of Muriel Spark

An abandoned son, scorned lovers and dazzling, manipulative prose

Jul 10, 2025 03:12 PM

Writing off her losses

Electric Spark. By Frances Wilson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 432 pages; $35. Bloomsbury Circus; £25

HOW DO YOU write a book? For Muriel Spark the process was simple. First, the novelist said, “I write the title, and then I write my name.” Then, she explained, “I write ‘Chapter One’ and then I write on.” Spark’s account of her method was clear, straightforward—and total nonsense.

So how did she write a book? The actual answer was with great difficulty. Spark’s books were slim but her archives are capacious: the box files extend to 195 feet, or 60 metres, “equivalent in height to an airport control tower”. Remove “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” and the 20 other novels she produced and you will still be left with at least 194 feet of letters, cast-offs and notes. The idea that all this material was turned out effortlessly was rubbish, as Spark well knew: “It has always”, she wrote, “been my intention to practise the arts of pretence and counterfeit on the reader.”

This was particularly true, it turns out, when it came to her own life. Biographers, it is often said, “add a new terror to death”. For Spark—the subject of two biographies while she was alive, both of which she loathed—they added a new terror to life, too. She attempted to control her story by writing it herself but that was largely a failure: Spark could write a book only once she knew “how it is going to end”. That, for autobiography, is rather tricky.

Biography, then—which Frances Wilson attempts in this beautifully written book—is the closest readers can get to Spark, which is to say: not that close at all. “What chance”, as Julian Barnes, a novelist, has put it, “would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself?” Spark’s craft—and craftiness—are clear from the beginning, not least because her habit of not throwing anything away created such a whopper of an archive. If her books, writes Ms Wilson, are “‘minor’ surrealist masterworks” then her archive is “a major realist masterwork”.

Some things are clear: Spark begins life, dully, in Edinburgh, attending a prim school that would inspire “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and writing the sort of earnest poetry that involves the word “’Tis”. Then things perk up: she marries a “Mr Spark”, moves to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and starts to meet people with names such as “Princess Marie Bonaparte” and “Leigh Francis Howell Wynne Sackville de Montmorency Vaughan Henry”. Sparkian things happen to her. A cousin is put in an orphanage. Mr Spark turns out to be a lunatic and tries to jump out of a window. A colleague turns out to be a spy. Almost everyone seems to have affairs. Absolutely everyone seems to have arguments about modernist poetry.

Later, Spark would write a short story in which she imagines that, as a baby, she was like a human radio receiver “able to tune in from her cot in Edinburgh to scenes…from around the globe”. She certainly seems to have been tuned in to the literary moment. Anyone who is anyone in English 20th-century letters has a walk-on part here: Evelyn Waugh calls her a saint; W.H. Auden is awed by her; Graham Greene sends her cheques and bottles of wine.

What she does not seem to be is very tuned in to her emotions. A jilted lover once, somewhat spitefully, wrote that Spark was chilly, and approached “human feeling…only with rubber gloves”. It was cruel—and true. Her life is characterised by the same strange, stark abruptness as her prose. She decides to end an affair with a man because “One day I woke up and decided that I didn’t like him.”

Her iciest moment was her decision to leave her son. A lot has been written about the different parenting standards to which men and women are held. Rightly: this inequality can be seen in everything from literary lives to the English language itself (consider the different meanings of the verbs “to mother” someone and “to father” them). Yet Spark’s description of leaving her son is, even by her standards, brittle. When he is five, she flees Southern Rhodesia, depositing her son in a convent school and abandoning his nanny. “We were sad to leave each other,” Spark wrote. She was referring, Ms Wilson wryly notes, not to the boy but to the nanny.

It is a typically Sparkian moment: elegant, abrupt, emotionally odd. Some writers become an adjective: Dickensian, Orwellian, Joycean. “Sparkian” has not entered common parlance but, by the time you finish this brilliant book, you think it probably should. For, even after 400 pages, Spark herself remains elusive. ■