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I was Muriel Spark’s publisher at Constable for ten years.
I had learnt from Alan Maclean, the publishing director (not just ‘an editor’, as Wilson refers to him) at Macmillan, that Spark (1918-2006) had fallen out with his publishing house. I learnt, too, that she’d moved to the Bodley Head, where her editor James Michie, she later told me, never answered her messages or phone calls and where her sales had declined alarmingly.
I was already publishing some of Spark’s short stories in Winter’s Tales, an annual collection I edited. Nevertheless, it was with great trepidation that I went to Italy to meet her to lure her onto my list. She described herself as ‘Lucrezia Borgia in trousers’.
But I was lucky. I was the only publisher Muriel never fell out with or dismissed.
In the last sentence of Frances Wilson’s preface, she says that while ‘Muriel Spark is no longer here to score through my sentences’, that does not mean ‘I have not felt, on every page of this book, the control of her hand’.
This sounds like the first sentence of a Muriel Spark novel. And, indeed, Frances Wilson shows real perception and understanding of her subject – more than can be found in any other critical book published so far.
Wilson’s technique is to offer us a kind of slide show. Vivid accounts of aspects of Spark’s life alternate with probing investigations of influences behind many of her greatest novels. In the process, both are greatly illuminated.
Wilson’s description of the 1930s Edinburgh of Spark’s childhood, with her outstanding teacher Christina Kay later enshrined for the ages as Jean Brodie, is atmospheric and compelling. Although the detail is at times a little oppressive, the pace soon accelerates and we are launched into the world of literary London.
Spark had the capacity to be extraordinarily venomous. In the best of her later novels, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which I published, she took her revenge on her former lover and literary collaborator Derek Stanford. She could not forgive him for having sold her love letters at auction, along with other papers.
In this fictional reworking of their relationship, Stanford memorably becomes the pisseur de copie, the irredeemably second-rate hack who had literary pretensions that could never be fulfilled.
Other victims of her venom included Spark’s son, Robin, with whom she engaged in a public dispute about the issue of Muriel’s Jewishness.
Poor, saintly and endlessly patient Alan Maclean, the publisher who had launched her career as a novelist, was subject to a vitriolic attack in a lengthy memorandum (a legal deposition), itemising his failings.
I have a copy of this document and find myself trembling as I read it. Wilson rightly emphasises the
importance of Muriel Spark’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, but is unable to find any answer to why Spark took this step.
I once asked Spark that question directly. She replied that becoming a Catholic was the one thing that stopped her going mad. I understood this to mean that Catholicism contained her.
She inhabited a place that was of this and other worlds and she was aware of the conjunction of opposites – not least when it came to good and evil.
This conjunction was very real to her. It could not be obliterated and was part of her creative drive and brilliance.
Wilson concludes correctly that describing emotion was not one of Muriel’s gifts as a novelist. In a sense, she was a modern metaphysical, constantly wrestling on the page with intellectual and theological ideas.
We had intended to publicise A Far Cry from Kensington with a discussion of the book on BBC television. Invited to participate with Spark were A J Ayer, A N Wilson and Piers Paul Read.
I went to her hotel in St James’s to collect her and take her to the studio. When I arrived, the hall porter handed me a fax from Muriel, which read, ‘Arrived at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Decided to go home. Do not bother to contact me.’
The wily operator had done a disappearing act and returned to the Tuscan hills.
This episode immediately became a news story after I relayed it to the London Evening Standard, and sales of the new novel rocketed to a level Muriel had not achieved for a long time.
Wilson quotes someone as saying that nothing in Spark’s life happened that was not intended to happen. Wilson captures this aspect of her artistry better than anyone else.
Robin Baird-Smith was Muriel Spark’s publisher
