She had been in ill health in Italy for some time. Nevertheless, the loss of Muriel Spark caught me off guard. She wrote twenty-one novels, and the best known and most celebrated The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is not even her best. Mind you, the movie of the novel gave Maggie Smith (another Dame) the chance to act the part of a crazy middle-aged woman, which is what she has always done best.
I have long been fascinated by Spark–as much as an example of what it means to be a woman and an artist in the mid-20th century, as anything else. She married young, divorced young, and raised a son as a single mother, while churning out those twenty-one novels. She was divorced, working and raising a son alone, when those were not things women did. Graham Greene was an admirer of her early work–no surprise, since they share a certain sensibility–and he helped her out when she was poor as a church mouse. She was a convert to Catholicism, and like most converts of any stripe, slightly obsessed (I speak from experience). Like Greene, her characters were as liable to think about moral questions (good vs. evil) as they were to drink a cup of coffee or read a newspaper.
If I only read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I probably would have stopped there. It’s a good enough novel, but not my cup of tea. But in my 20’s, I went on a Spark bender, reading a number of her works in close succession. I started with The Girls of Slender Means, which is set in London just at the end of WWII. The Girls live in a women’s residence, which I think attracted me because at the time, I lived in one too (a women’s hotel: remember Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari in drag in “Bosom Buddies”?) In the 90’s, when I lived in one, of course, it was a hangover from another time, when young ladies who worked too far from their parents to live at home, did not have their own apartments. These places still exist, and can be a great place to crash for a few months when you move to a new city, like New York. They’re also quite archaic and funny, and always home to a few odd older women (not unlike those in the May of Teck Club in the novel).
So there I was in a women’s residence reading about the Girls in their 1945 version of the same. A kind of palimpsest, no? The novel was layered with narrative upon narrative, voice upon voice, another palimpsest. David Lodge once said something to the effect that Muriel Spark has employed all of the techniques associated with postmodernism–she just did so forty years ago (and he said this 10 or 15 years ago). I think this experimentation was often overlooked by critics.
Then I moved on to Loitering With Intent and my personal favorite A Far Cry from Kensington, in which the main character lives in a rooming house, works for an editor, and loses an enormous amount of weight by “eating half” of anything she would have eaten before. That in itself is a clever enough idea but takes an enormous amount of focus and will-power, and obsessiveness. And Spark’s characters are so often obsessed. Muriel Spark knew something about people. The idiosyncratic craziness inside each and every one of us, just waiting to surface.
Spark returned from South Africa to London, and then lived in New York and the Rome and Tuscany, but she always wrote in long-hand on a particular brand of bound, lined notebooks, shipped to her from a stationer’s in her native Edinburgh. She was as obsessive as some of her characters, but I mean it in a good way. The English language has lost one of its best living writers. RIP, Dame Muriel Spark.