Muriel Spark and the Whole "Art Monster" Thing

On "difficult" yet fabulous women writers

Muriel Spark was a bold, iconoclastic writer and woman. Yet who talks about her anymore? I haven’t been able to find anyone of my acquaintance who has read her. Have you? (Let us know in the chat! I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

Muriel Spark from The Guardian

I’ve recently become a little obsessed with Spark after discovering a whole shelf full of her books at Armchair Books in Edinburgh and realizing that she was a native daughter of this city I’ve come to adore. I started with her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, and her classic novel Miss Jane Brodie, both of which fascinated me for their portrayal of Edinburgh and women’s lives in the 1930s. Now I’ve moved on to Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark: The Biography, which I picked up at another amazing used bookstore down the street, Edinburgh Books. What I’m discovering, though, is that Spark is not nearly as well known as she deserves to be.  

Spark’s Literary Reputation

Muriel Spark was often described as one of Britian’s greatest living writers, and after Graham Greene’s death in 1991, her biographer writes, she held the title of “greatest.” She was, I imagine, a kind of Tessa Hadley of her day, a darling (for a while) of the New Yorker, which devoted an entire issue to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Or a kind of Maggie O’Farrell, considering how prolific and consistently acclaimed a novelist she was. (Spark published twenty-two novels between 1957 and 2004, two years before her death.)

But am I right that Spark’s name is not nearly as well known as the other (male) giants of her era? Charles McGrath wrote in his New York Times review of the Stannard biography (the only biography of Spark, by the way):

Muriel Spark used to be lumped all the time with Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. They were the three greatest British writers of their era, it was said. . . [But by the time of her death in 2006], her reputation had already begun to sink faster than theirs.

Why? Her literary reputation was colossal. The Scottish Daily Mail makes a compelling case for her significance: she accomplished that rarity of having one of her character’s become a household name (Miss Brodie), she was “lionized” in the literary world and praised by a slew of famous writers, and when she was writing her autobiography, it was so sought after that Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis offered her $100,000 for its publication by Doubleday. (Spark declined.)

From Wikipedia

So Why Is She No Longer Celebrated?

Spark was, to sum it up in one word: “difficult.” Not as a writer, although she certainly challenged the reader in ways that can make reading her uncomfortable. Stannard describes how “disturbing” her work can be in its “amorality.” “The barbarism of human behavior intrigued her as the varieties of cancer might a surgeon,” he says. Dwight Garner deliciously described her novels as “sinister, comic and ruthlessly slim, a jar that holds a scorpion.” Spark was not unlike Flannery O’Connor in this, portraying psychotics as neutrally as she would an innocent child. But then, I’m not sure there are any innocent children in Spark’s and O’Connor’s universes. (They were both Catholic, it so happens, and Original Sin was at the heart of their world views.)

No, it’s not that she’s a difficult writer. When critics say Spark was “difficult,” they mean as a woman. An article in the Scottish Review of Books states blatantly that her literary reputation suffered because she was “a difficult woman and a bad mother,” two strikes that can doom a woman writer. (See, for instance, the reviews of Joan Mellen’s 1994 biography of Kay Boyle, whose literary reputation has never recovered from that hatchet job.) The Scottish Daily Mail article mentioned above indicates Spark was often referred to as “difficult”: “a drama queen, a diva and even a monster—unbearably precious and capable of extraordinary hatred.” Garner put it this way: “Muriel Spark was a complicated and sometimes savage character.”

Spark was certainly multi-layered, a complex woman who asserted herself in most unladylike ways. She dared to call out fatuousness wherever she saw it and grew bored with men who couldn’t handle her greater success and fame. And perhaps most importantly, she did not live her life as a woman of the twentieth century was expected to. In other words, she did not depend on men or take care of them. That alone makes her suspect.

From The Times

Spark’s Life Choices

As I read about lives of women writers and artists, I am always curious about the romantic choices they made and how they structured their lives so as to be able to create. I know from my two decades of research in nineteenth-century American women writers, that questions surrounding marriage, motherhood, and domesticity all played a huge part in women’s ability to imagine themselves as writers, let alone to actually find time and energy to write. That hasn’t really changed much. It was true for women throughout the twentieth century and it remains so. (There is ample evidence of this in the poet Maggie Smith’s recent memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful.)

Spark was not the surname she was born with. She married a Sydney Oswald Spark when she was nineteen, having gotten engaged and followed him to South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He was a teacher and thirteen years older than her, making him rather “interesting,” she later wrote, as she “generally found ‘older men.’” Like so many women before and since, she looked to a man for adventure and education. He was her ticket out of Edinburgh and into the world. But perhaps it was his promise that she would have no cooking or housework to do and plenty of time to write (thanks to servants) that sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, she found both colonial Africa and her new husband intolerable. S.O.S., as she came to call him, turned out to suffer from mental illness. He was argumentative, unpredictable, and violent. She came to fear for her life. After a friend was killed by her husband, she was determined to escape. It took many years to get a divorce, and she was able to escape Africa as well. But she also had a son, and since it was now wartime and children were not allowed to be transported, she had fled alone. Little Robin was left at a convent boarding school and fetched after the war. He went to live in Edinburgh, with Muriel’s parents, who essentially raised him.

Muriel Spark with her son, Robin, from The Daily Mail

History is generally not kind to women who abandon their offspring. Spark supported Robin and her parents for the rest of their lives, although her son’s resentments and her inability to be the kind of mother he wanted her to be led to unresolvable friction between them. She finally cut him out of her will and left him nothing of her estate upon her death. That all went instead to a woman named Penelope Jardine. Now here is where things get interesting.

Spark had led an independent life in London and New York, with the occasional male lover, but she was simply not interested in romantic attachments. After that disastrous marriage, who could blame her? But beyond that, her writing simply came above all else. And what man of the 1940s, 50s, or 60s could begin to take a backseat to a woman’s career, particularly one as all-consuming as authorship?

Jardine (l) and Spark (r) from The Guardian

Then in 1968 in Rome, Spark met Jardine, an artist, and asked if she would work for her. The result was a thirty-year friendship under the same roof in a converted church in Tuscany. Both always insisted the relationship was purely platonic. But what is clear is that Jardine fulfilled the functions typically performed by a male writer’s wife. She oversaw the running of the household and managed her literary career, typing and carefully proofreading her work. In the words of Charles McGrath, “it seems [Spark] had finally found that the secret to her fulfillment was not a man but a loyal, uncomplaining wife.” (Note McGrath’s tone here. A man with a dutiful wife is lucky, a woman with a devoted friend who plays handmaiden to her art is, once again, suspect.)

Was Spark an Art Monster?

Perhaps not surprisingly, given these irregularities in her life and personality, one will find poking around online a frequent use of the word “monster” to describe her. I’ve already included one example. Another comes from McGrath:

Like a lot of great writers, Spark was actually a bit of a monster — a charming, appealing monster but a monster all the same, willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of her work. . . . As we would say today, she was very high maintenance. She behaved, in short, like any number of male writers, including ones much less talented than she, but as a woman so ruthlessly and coldheartedly in pursuit of her art she was a little ahead of her time.

In other words, Spark was a woman who dared to be an “art monster.” (It used to be that an “art monster” was someone like McGrath describes above, although the term has also become associated more recently with greater misdeeds, such as sexual assault. That’s not what I’m talking about here.)

Male art monsters still tend to get a pass. But a “difficult woman” who puts her art above the people in her life does not. Such women are admittedly rare. Jenny Offill’s woman writer protagonist in her novel Department of Speculation declares:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Offill’s unnamed protagonist did get married and had a kid and finds that being an “art monster” under those conditions is utterly impossible. Yet, Spark is a woman who made it possible by distancing herself from her son and the men in her life who became too demanding.

I wonder, can we let a woman writer be difficult, demanding, reliant on the invisible labor of others, even “coldhearted”? Can we read her novels and celebrate her achievements without judging her personality and life choices? Do we condemn her more harshly than her male peers, who were notoriously neglectful of their children and other relations?

History is not remembering Spark particularly kindly, but I have found myself actually quite intrigued by her. I can feel that my obsession is only just beginning. I ordered two collections of her stories that came in the mail today. I have about 200 more pages of the biography to go. And I have Alan Taylor’s memoir Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark cued up on my e-reader.

Do you have thoughts about Spark, art monsters, and/or women writers? I’d love to hear any and all of them!!

Until next time,

Anne