Dame Muriel Spark, 1918-2006
TORRANCE, KELLY JANE
Dame Muriel Spark, 1918-2006 The novelist of identity. by KELLY JANE TORRANCE Muriel Spark died April 13 in Tuscany, her home for the last 30 years. The Scottish novelist lived to the ripe old...
...Her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, shows the dangerous consequences of the schoolteacher's attempts to mold the identity of others...
...It was a strange book for a woman of 40, just three years into her career as a novelist, to write...
...In this wildly funny black comedy, a group of elderly Londoners starts receiving anonymous phone calls with a very odd reproach: "Remember you must die...
...Even at her death, commentators still insist on slapping their own labels onto Spark...
...It's no use trying to categorize her or her work...
...She soon discovers that the noise is the work of a writer who has had the impertinence to make Caroline a character in her novel...
...Indeed, one of the themes of Spark's oeuvre is how inadequately we know even ourselves, let alone others...
...The Comforters tells the story of Caroline Rose, a recent convert to Catholicism who cannot get the sound of typing out of her head...
...But unlike many postmodern writers, Spark knew her first task was to tell an entertaining story...
...So was she a Catholic writer...
...Much of her work evidences an obsession with the Book of Job—particularly her first novel, The Comforters, which even gets its title from the Old Testament story...
...Was she a Jewish writer...
...She spent her marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark, undertaken at 19, miserably in Rhodesia...
...Spark may turn out to be the 20th century's quintessential novelist...
...Her work is tight and controlled, with an uncanny grasp of character...
...But she was always tight-lipped about the nature of her beliefs...
...Spark declared that her conversion gave her a voice and something "original to say...
...Many of her books are metafictional studies of what it means to be a writer...
...The world has lost a singular voice with the death of Dame Muriel...
...Her short, sharp novels are like those of no one else...
...Out of the ordinary entanglements such as that were just the stuff of Muriel Spark's life and work...
...It was the subject of one of her most accomplished novels, Memento Mori (1959...
...But her family wasn't particularly observant, and she converted to the Church of Rome in her thirties...
...Reuters reported in an obituary that she "has lived with artist Penelope Jardine for 30 years...
...Her books don't explore specific questions of faith the way, say, Greene's do...
...day, and the darkest deeds deliciously droll, Spark was in a class of her own...
...She was born in Edinburgh in 1918, to a Jewish engineer and an English Anglican mother...
...Her novels are autobiographical, but she guarded her privacy fiercely, moving to Italy for its seclusion...
...That's strictly true, but the insinuation that they were lovers is not...
...Each senior's reaction to the baffling calls—are they from some mysterious stranger, or from God Himself?—is different, revealing some fundamental aspect of character...
...They changed notions of what the novel could be about...
...I don't propagate the Catholic faith, but in a funny sort of way, my books couldn't be written by anyone except a Catholic," she told the Telegraph in 1997...
...The man who gave her the name she made famous turned out to be mentally unbalanced...
...The Scottish novelist lived to the ripe old age of 88...
...But she seems to have been a bad judge of it in real life...
...The works that followed were often just as startling-ly original...
...How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the 20th century," rejoices Fleur Talbot in Spark's roman à clef, Loitering with Intent...
...It was the century, after all, in which identity— whether racial, religious, political, or otherwise—was paramount, from Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia, from affirmative action politics to the clash of civilizations...
...Both the woman and her talent are impossible to label...
...But two unmarried women sharing a home and a close friendship is a story more complicated to explain...
...Some of the boyfriends that followed her divorce didn't prove much better...
...And how wonderful for us that we had the artist and woman Muriel Spark explore the century's central preoccupation...
...Of the genesis of the story— which was based on her own hallucinations due to malnutrition and appetitesuppression pills—Spark explained, "Before writing a novel, I had to write a novel about what is a novel...
...Evelyn Waugh publicly praised her books, and Graham Greene's generosity allowed her to begin writing fulltime...
...but in her ability to make the absurd seem everyKelly Jane Torrance is fiction editor of Doublethink, arts and culture editor of Brainwash, and books columnist for The American Enterprise Online...
...But she had been thinking about death for years...
...Spark laughed at the "impertinence" of journalists who implied the two had a romantic relationship...
...Her works have something of the biting wit of the former and the intellectual Catholicism of the latter...
...Her website on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com...
...But then just about every book Muriel Spark wrote was peculiar...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 31
