Defining Scotland's Muriel Spark

My husband reserved seats for Martin Stannard’s lecture on Dame Muriel Spark, and so one dark November evening I toddled around to Edinburgh’s National Library of Scotland to hear it. Muriel Spark is my favourite Scottish author. She is also one of my favourite Catholic novelists, the third of a trio including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

The Edinburgh-born Spark is, perhaps, best known today for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. As a successful woman artist, she suffered from constant attempts of others to define her. Most painfully, perhaps, her son Robin’s angry insistence that she was ethnically a “full Jew,” not a “half Jew” as she had written in her autobiography, left Muriel open to accusations of anti-Semitism and added to rumours that she had been a bad mother to him.  

I had a sticky moment in an Edinburgh gallery last year when I described Spark to a painter as a “Catholic writer”: “I thought she was Jewish,” said the painter icily, and I remembered that Robin Spark is an Edinburgh painter and that Edinburgh is a deceptively small town. Earlier, when explaining why her firm was rejecting an early draft of my Seraphic Singles, a Catholic acquisitions editor decried Spark, whom I had offered as an example of a successful single woman, for her “treatment of her son.” Thus, I do not wonder that the notoriously private Spark at last sought out a biographer to set the record straight.

Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography was released in 2009 to an avid public. Spark had first contacted her biographer-to-be in 1992 and had died in 2006. She had admired Stannard’s biography of Waugh, appreciating his attention to Waugh’s actual work. While offering Stannard complete freedom, she clearly expected him to write extensively about her books, which he has done. Reviews of Muriel Spark were positive, although one reviewer complained that, given Spark’s lifelong squabbles with her publishers over figures, Stannard ought to have detailed what those figures were.  

I was curious to know what Stannard had made of Spark’s Catholicism and, indeed, what Catholicism had meant to Spark. Waugh was a pious but irritable man who was horrified by the liturgical innovations of the 1960s. Greene loathed being defined as a “Catholic writer” and thought John Paul II outrageously reactionary. Spark was a woman who came to Catholicism by a circuitous route and charmed interviewers with her startling opinions on religion:

“I joined the Church of England,” she said in 1984, “but I soon saw through that: it was so bounded by the British Empire. Then I became an Anglo-Catholic and went to a church in Queen’s Gate all tricked out fit to dazzle the Pope. The vicar there preached this ridiculous sermon in which he said, ‘I am the Catholic authority in Queen’s Gate!’ I couldn’t take that so I rang a (Roman Catholic) priest in Ealing. I go to church now but I leave before the sermon. I regard it as a mortal sin to listen to sermons.”  

In 1974 Spark had told an interviewer that Paul VI and John XXIII were “a disaster,” and yet later she expressed herself pleased with Vatican II. Meanwhile, she was no stranger to traditional devotions. In 1962 she had asked to be taken by her New York host to see Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, and Stannard tells the story with comic yet respectful aplomb:

“‘Muriel,’ (the host) said, ‘I think she’s dead.’ ‘Of course she’s dead,’ came the reply, ‘but I believe she’s been stuffed and one can view her.’ He found a telephone and rang the archdiocese. The saint was to be found at the tip of Manhattan Island. So they jumped into a cab and went. ... Muriel was excited, as indeed was he. She took out her rosary and prayed. The place hummed with high school kids, priests and nuns. One nun was quietly crying. It was, for both Cork and Muriel, a moving experience. Leaving the place, she seemed to glow. ‘You’ll see now,’ she said as they returned to the cab, ‘something wonderful will happen because it always does when you visit a saint.’ ”

This pious delight may seem at odds with Spark’s sharply intellectual work, for her perennial themes are human evil and the problem — “The Only Problem” — of a loving God who allows suffering. Cardinal John Henry Newman was an early influence, and she took to heart his observation that “We are all implicated in some vast primordial catastrophe.”

“The concept of original sin,” writes Stannard, “coloured her whole view of life, had released her from depression into a relish for human absurdity. But while this detachment allowed her the space to become a great comic artist of the macabre, it had also separated her from the comfort of sentimental intimacies.”     

Sentimental she was not, but as Stannard’s lecture made clear, she could be kind, treating him and his family with great courtesy when they met.  Spark’s Catholicism was one that sacrificed many comforts, like self-deluded maternal affection, to an acute appraisal of what was true. Spark would not be bullied into submission; she was adamantine.