Converted Energy

How do you tell the singular life story of someone who divided the London literary scene as a young poetry editor, wrote her own brilliant poems, served as muse to several sad literary men, resurrected Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and went on to write fascinating, unsettling, sometimes even spooky novels? In the case of Frances Wilson’s new biography of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, you don’t—at least not fully.

Her four-hundred-page book is more of a Künstlerroman than a full biography—an account of the experiences that gave birth to the successful artist, with only glimpses of that later success. Wilson describes the rise of the eventually celebrated and always mysterious writer who, in the cryptic assessment of W. H. Auden, knew “exactly what she is doing.” Spark was a madwoman, a terribly absent mother, a divorcée lost in the British colonies of Africa, possibly a spy during World War II, and, in her conversion to Catholicism and ambivalence about her Jewish roots, a spiritual conundrum.

Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918 to Sarah Elizabeth Maud and Bernard Camberg. Bernard was the Scottish son of Orthodox Jews who arrived in Edinburgh from Kovno; Sarah was the daughter of a half-Jewish Englishwoman. In an autobiographical short story published in The New Yorker in 1963, Spark described the strange approach of her maternal grandmother, Adelaide, to her own Judaism:

When my grandmother came to live with us I said to her one day,

“Are you a Gentile, Grandmother, or are you a Jewess?” I was wondering how she would be buried, according to what religion, when her time came to die.

“I am a Gentile Jewess,” she said.

Adelaide’s description of herself as a “Gentile Jewess” helped her granddaughter define herself (or refuse to do so)—she insisted on her non-Jewishness in strictly Jewish terms. Spark also wrote that Adelaide boasted of her “Jewish blood because it made her so clever.” She certainly inherited her grandmother’s cleverness, but the Jewishness itself was, at least according to Spark, already vestigial, expressed in few half-remembered rituals: Spark’s mother, Sarah, apparently lit candles on Friday night and bowed to the new moon every month.

Spark told the story of her life from childhood to the publication of her first novel in a characteristically short and artful “volume of autobiography,” Curriculum Vitae. In Electric Spark,Wilson traces a similar arc while drawing heavily from Spark’s later writings to fill in the gaps. Save for a Passover Seder here and there and the casual mention of her father’s family, Spark maintains in her memoir that her upbringing was mostly secular, and Wilson takes her at her word.

At age nineteen, a somewhat manic Muriel married Sydney Oswald Spark, nicknamed Ossie, an even more unstable schoolteacher who took an assignment in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and moved them abroad. “If,” Wilson says, “the one thing [Muriel] got from her marriage was a name that suited her style, she would not be the first to have wed for that reason.” In Curriculum Vitae, Spark took a similarly cynical view of her marriage:

I was attracted to a man who brought me bunches of flowers when I had flu. I also liked the idea that I wouldn’t have any housework to do “out there” in Africa, and that I would be free to pursue my writing.

Ossie was also Jewish, but there was no record of whether they were observant at all. (In those years, Southern Rhodesia was about 5.5 percent Jewish.)

Her time in Southern Rhodesia was dismal. Ossie was fragile, even unhinged—he once threatened to put a bullet through Muriel’s leg—and the town of Fort Victoria was marked by stark racial discrimination and violence, eventually inspiring Spark to write short stories set in Southeast Africa, including “Bang Bang You Are Dead.” By the end of the year, Ossie’s mental health had deteriorated to the point of institutionalization, and Spark was pregnant with her first and only child, Robin, whom she gave birth to in Bulawayo.

In 1942, Spark obtained a divorce and left her son in a Dominican boarding school with “some very good Catholic nuns” while she plotted her way back to England. Despite a wartime travel ban, she got a magistrate’s permit to study literature in Cape Town through “a ruse” and spent a year taking odd jobs and enjoying the company of Marie Bonaparte, the exiled princess of Greece and the first of many aristocratic friends. In 1944, she boarded a troop ship to England, leaving her son behind, though she eventually managed to get him to Edinburgh to live with her parents. “Believe it or not,” Spark writes in Curriculum Vitae, “I chose London rather than peaceful Edinburgh because I wanted to ‘experience’ the war. This, my incredible ambition, was amply fulfilled on my first night in the blacked-out city.”

It is extraordinary that, for a woman of Jewish descent, there is no mention of the Holocaust in either Spark’s autobiography or her later writings. This is made even stranger by the fact that she took a job working in Milton Bryan, a secret compound that was devoted to creating and disseminating anti-Nazi propaganda. There, she reported to Sefton Delmer, a Berlin-born Australian—a British subject and patriot—of “Falstaffian girth and Rabelaisian humour” who had been working for the German Service of the BBC. Under Delmer, Spark helped create “black propaganda,” or German fake news, with the objective of weakening German morale. Wilson, in a speculative yet brilliant passage, wonders whether Spark’s work in intelligence began before the wartime and whether it might help explain her success in leaving Southern Rhodesia when it was under a strict travel ban:

Spark was gathering intelligence long before she wrote novels about people who gather intelligence, or became afraid that people were gathering intelligence about her. . . . Maybe Spark was also a government spy? “In Africa you lead a double life,” Spark told Alan Taylor, which may have had a double meaning. Maybe she approached, or was approached by, the Security and Intelligence Bureau in Bulawayo (known as XB) to identify enemy aliens among the settlers? It would not be unlikely, and might explain her obsession with spying and being spied on.

Spark’s literary self-invention took place in the years that succeeded the war. After working as an editor for thePoetry Review, she wrote a biography of Emily Brontë and one of Mary Shelley that helped reintroduce the relatively forgotten Frankenstein to readers. She also edited Letters of John Henry Newman. All of these she coauthored with her then-boyfriend Derek Stanford, a bisexual poet who lived with his parents in the London suburb of Hounslow.

Then, in the dog days of summer in 1953, while high on the Dexedrine she took to lose weight, Spark went to the Edinburgh Festival, where she wrote to Stanford, “I can’t grasp what is actually happening in the present tense.” She attended T. S. Eliot’s new play The Confidential Clerk in a delusional state, believing that the play’s characters were really“Abel, Moses, Samuel and St Matthew” and that everything they said in English meant something different in Ancient Greek. She imagined that Eliot, in the guise of a window washer, had sent her an encrypted message calling her a “Dirty Yid,” even though she had never met the poet.

Returning to London, she continued to work on several projects, but she also imagined that she was being followed and became engrossed in the book of Job, writing in pictograms as if with kabbalistic intent.Finally, a month after her psychotic break, she was accepted into a Carmelite establishment, where she converted to Catholicism. This was the basis of her first novel, The Comforters, about a convert to Catholicism who hears a “typing ghost” voice from her typewriter that instructs her what to write. The novel, only the first of her many works to trade in ghost stories, rocketed Spark to worldwide literary fame. Penelope Fitzgerald once remarked, “It wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic . . . that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do,” and this was certainly Spark’s position.

But the truth seems more complicated and less romantic. In 1981, Spark’s estranged son, Robin, disputed her account of her upbringing and Jewish identity. Adelaide, he argued, was fully Jewish. His grandmother Sarah had converted to Judaism, and his Uncle Philip had a bar mitzvah. Moreover, his grandparents were raising him as a Jew in Edinburgh while his mother was becoming a Catholic in London. The recently published The Letters of Muriel Spark: Volume 1: 1944–1963 supports these claims, at least in part. Spark writes to Stanford that Robin “is going to a camp in Sussexwith his Jewish youth Club” and that “to my parents’ satisfaction had decided to be a Jew.” Spark responded furiously to Robin’s revelations:

“You aren’t a young girl and you aren’t a child,” she told Robin. “If you don’t like FACTS you still have to accept them . . . Nobody is saying you are not a Jew or that I have no Jewish origins . . . But there is no use writing to me with all that pompous religiosity as if you were John Knox in Drag.”

A few years later, the scholar Bryan Cheyette visited the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society and dared to ask whether treating Spark as a strictly Catholic writer wasn’t doing a disservice to our understanding of her fiction. In an article for the Times Literary Supplement, Cheyette recounted that Robin had a bar mitzvah, which his mother paid for, and was a member of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation. Spark was livid, talked of suing, and was able to halt the production of Cheyette’s book, in which he discussed her Jewishness.

In the span of a few days, Cheyette “went from being a confident professor of English Literature to someone whose critical opinions were to be second-guessed by a host of shadowy readers.” This was not the first time Spark had killed a book that asked uncomfortable questions about her life. The line quoted about Cheyette’s ordeal was written by Martin Stannard, who had briefly been Spark’s commissioned biographer before his research failed to coincide with the great novelist’s sense of herself, and she fired him. There are moments in Electric Spark when it feels like Wilson, who treads lightly around these issues, is afraid of being fired by Spark’s ghost.

The only time Spark delved into her Jewish origins was in one of her less remarkable novels. The Mandelbaum Gate, published in 1965 after the great success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is the story of Barbara Vaughan, a Catholic convert and Jewish on her mother’s side, who goes to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage in the hopes of visiting her fiancé, an archeologist working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. She spends most of the novel avoiding crossing into Jordan through the Mandelbaum Gate, a checkpoint between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of the city in pre-1967 Jerusalem. First, she argues that she is waiting for news from the Vatican to confirm that her fiancé’s first marriage has been annulled. Then she convinces herself that, as a half-Jew, it is too dangerous to go to Jordan, where she might be accused of being a spy. As she frets and procrastinates, the Eichmann trials, which she visits, are going on. This has all the makings of one of Spark’s smart, elliptical novels, but it is longer and more self-serious than her previous work and lacks her characteristic speed and humor. Before and after, Spark was an artist of omission, but The Mandelbaum Gate never stops explaining itself. Spark herself called it her “magnum opium.”

According to Wilson, who discusses the novel even though it was written after his biography ostensibly ends, Spark wrote The Mandelbaum Gate after she was sent by the Observer to report on the Eichmann trial and flubbed the assignment. Speaking to her editor at The New Yorker, she said she was so disturbed she was “literally unable to speak” about the trials, and she told The Economist that “I found it absolutely horrifying to see, as Hannah Arendt said, ‘the banality of evil.’ . . . That’s what was so shocking, that he was a little bad man, not a big bad man.”

Spark used the novel to project her own ambivalent self onto a highly charged political stage. In Jerusalem, Barbara insists she is Catholic, even with her “Jewish blood.” Yet in the eyes of Israelis and Arabs, she is Jewish. When traveling through the Judean hills to Galilee, a tour guide rejects her conversion:

“My father died also in a ditch. Shot by the S.S. Why have you made yourself a Catholic to deny your Jewish blood?”

“I don’t deny it. I’ve just been telling you about it.”

“You are brought up as a Gentile or a Jew?”

“Neither. No religion.”

“And your mother’s relations and your father’s relations—what religion?”

Barbara felt displaced; she felt her personal identity beginning to escape like smoke from among her bones.

Later in the discussion, Barbara thinks, cheekily, about the words of the Israeli tour guide and recalls the words that God told Moses in the Sinai: “Who am I? She felt she had known who she was till this moment. She said, ‘I am who I am.’” Yet this wonderful irreducibility stands at odds with what people make of her, the politics of the time, and her own history in Israel. Later in the novel, Barbara crosses into Jordan and contracts scarlet fever. In a brothel where she is convalescing, a woman goes on an antisemitic rant, reminding Barbara that her identity is always at stake, even when concealed.

Spark converted at a time in which Catholicism had long been attractive to many writers—Evelyn Waugh converted in 1930, Graham Greene in 1926, while Eliot and Auden were having their own spiritual reawakening. Converts appear in her writing almost as much as writers and editors do, but The Comforters stands out. It’s the novel that directly propelled her to fame—ten years after it was published, she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire before eventually becoming Dame Spark in 1993.The book followsCaroline Rose, a cerebral intellectual working on a theory of novels who has just forsaken her lover, Laurence (heavily based on Stanford), and converted to Catholicism.

Like Spark, Caroline’s “an odd sort of Catholic—very little heart for it, all mind.” The Comforters of the novel’s title are Caroline’s useless friends, who, like Job’s companions, neither understand her troubles nor provide any true comfort. According to Spark, they represent the “futility of friendship in times of trouble.”The Comforters is, along with Curriculum Vitae and arguably Electric Spark, part of Spark’s successful self-mythologization as a writer. Without her Catholic dilemma, she suggests, there would be no writer. In her preface, Wilson writes that Spark “is no longer here . . . but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page of this book, her control of my hand.” If there is a lesson she might have picked up from Spark’s life and work, it is that one should resist that control and always distrust the stories that people tell of themselves, especially if they are writers.