Muriel Spark had superpowers. Even as a child she was aware of “a definite ‘something beyond myself,’” an “access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels,” including a sixth “literary” sense possessed only by certain readers and critics. Her own sixth sense can be seen in her biographies of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë, and in her 22 novels, which are best read chronologically because they anticipate one another and form a perfect whole. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), for example, begins at an open window in the early morning, and nearly 50 years later, The Finishing School (2004), Spark’s appropriately named final novel, concludes at another open window, “as we go through the evening and into the night.”
In her second novel, Robinson (1958), Spark referred to herself as “Muriel the Marvel with her X-Ray Eyes.” “Everything that happened to Muriel,” said Barbara Epler, Spark’s favorite editor, “had been foreseen,” usually in the books themselves. After writing about Mary Shelley being blackmailed over a cache of love letters, Spark was also blackmailed over a cache of love letters; after writing about a couple being struck by lightning, Spark was also struck by lightning.
“Somehow things happened, odd things, when Muriel was around,” said her friend Shirley Hazzard, who feared her. Evelyn Waugh told his children that she was a saint because her prayers always worked, and Frank Kermode thought she had the evil eye. Had she lived in an earlier century, said Bernard Levin, she would have been burned as a witch. Spark lived in a dimension she called “Timespace” (as opposed to Einstein’s space-time), which she re-created in her super-slender novels, in which the end is revealed at the start.
We learn, for example, that Lise in The Driver’s Seat (1970) will be “found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.”
When I was writing Electric Spark, my biography of Spark, I crossed into Timespace, too, a place where anything happens. Spark described herself as a magnet for the experiences she needed when she was writing a novel, and for three years I was caught in her force field.
In my previous biographies, I tried to inhabit the consciousness of the person I was writing about, but with Spark it was the other way round: she was inhabiting me, controlling my hand. Sometimes this made my job easier, as when I was wondering how to write about her son, Robin, about whom I knew nothing, and received that same day a letter from a friend of Robin’s, offering his help; or when I sat down to explore the Spark family tree and opened an e-mail from a Canadian genealogist offering vital information. The examples are legion, as are those where her magnetism became a curse, such as when I wrote about her being burgled and was then burgled myself, or when I wrote about her needing a tooth removed and instantly suffered a ghastly infection, which meant that I had to have a tooth removed, too.
I should have foreseen her involvement, because Spark, whose own foresight extended to the control of her afterlife, wrote a good deal about authors’ ghosts. Her last published poem, which was called “Authors’ Ghosts,” begins,
I think that authors’ ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.
In one of her best stories, “The Executor,” a famous Scottish author dies, leaving behind an unfinished novel called The Witch of the Pentlands, about the trapping and trial of a witch. Why not write the ending herself, Susan, the novelist’s niece and executor, thinks. But when she opens the author’s notebook, he has left a note for her: “Well, Susan, how do you feel about finishing my novel? Aren’t you a greedy little snoot.”
I am a less skeptical person now that I have lived in close proximity to Spark’s sorcery, and I believe in things that I did not believe in before. Never before have I needed, when completing a biography, to release my subject’s spirit, but when Electric Spark was published, I returned to the Scottish Highlands to ceremonially let her go.
“For some people,” wrote Hilary Mantel, who imbibed much of Muriel’s mischief, “being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do.” Spark, the necromancer of the modern novel, was one of those people.
Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist, and the author of six works of nonfiction, including How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, and Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence
