Muriel Spark, the Double Agent
One weekend in 1923, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a red-headed little girl named Nita McEwen was on a walk with her parents when she saw her double. The doppelgänger was another child, walking with her own mother. Each girl stared into the mirror of the other, but kept moving. At school the next fall, the double, named Muriel Camberg, appeared in the first grade, a year below Nita, and it turned out that she lived around the corner from Nita, too, although Muriel’s street was slightly nicer. These small differences seemed important, something bitter to cut the sweet, enveloping taste of spookiness.
After school, Nita lost track of her lookalike. She married young, and in her early twenties she and her husband moved to Southern Rhodesia, which had recently been annexed by the British Empire. In late 1939, they were staying in a boarding house near Victoria Falls, where, in a surreal coincidence, their housemates were none other than Muriel Camberg and her new husband, Sidney Oswald Spark. The likeness between the two women remained uncanny, their twinship emphasized by the fact that they had crossed paths again, halfway around the world. One night, Nita’s husband pulled a gun on her in their room. She screamed twice before he shot her and then himself, the sound slicing through the padded rumble of the falls. The next morning, there were more screams: when Muriel came down to the sitting room, everyone thought she was Nita’s ghost, risen from the dead.
This event occurred eighteen years before that ghost would begin writing novels, twenty-two in total between 1957 and 2004, each sly, glinting volume contributing to the becoming of Dame Muriel Spark, genius of our time. The two interchangeable women; a transient shelter; the foreboding coincidence; the beautiful place where everyone is a delusional intruder; a sudden demise, brutal and intimate yet also inexplicable and bizarre; the ensuing supernatural confusion—it has all the fixings of a perfect Muriel Spark plot. In fact, Spark wrote in her autobiography, “Curriculum Vitae,” that McEwen’s murder was “the factual origin of my short story ‘Bang-Bang You’re Dead,’ ” which describes a woman, Sybil Greeves, who unexpectedly reconnects with her childhood double, Desiree Coleman, in an unnamed African colony. After much sexual triangulation, Desiree is shot by a man who believes her to be Sybil, before he shoots himself. As he bleeds out, he sees the real Sibyl approaching, and realizes, just before dying, that he’s killed the wrong girl.
The story, from 1982, is a Sparkian classic: macabre, witty, with a slapstick ending drained of any goofiness. But McEwen’s death also marked a turning point in Spark’s personal life: her counterpart’s murder was the push she needed to recognize the danger within her own marriage. Sidney, who owned a gun and had frequent violent outbursts, was swiftly becoming “a borderline case, and I didn’t like what I found on either side of the border,” Spark wrote. Never one to ignore an omen, Spark deserted her husband for London. The cost: her five-year-old son, whom she left behind. He never lived with her again.
This is a persuasive account of why the woman named Muriel Camberg, who went to the colonies as a wife-to-be, came back as Muriel Spark, writer-to-be. But, then, much of Spark’s life seemed to materialize explicitly for the purpose of being narrated later. She believed herself to be a “magnet for experience, the sort of experience that you need, just for that novel.” For all their oddness, many of her books can be linked directly to actual events: “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” is inspired by an outlandish teacher at a school she attended in Edinburgh; “The Girls of Slender Means,” by living in a women’s boarding house during the Second World War; “Loitering with Intent,” by editing the Poetry Review with a cast of old-fashioned literary eccentrics. McEwen is just one example of Spark pulling from her unusual life to create her extraordinary fiction.
But is it true? Is Nita McEwen real? It’s a question, it seems, no one had thought to ask before now. In “Curriculum Vitae,” Spark opens with the assertion that she includes “nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses; I have not relied on my memory alone, vivid though it is.” Across that book and various interviews, Spark always presented McEwen’s death as unadulterated fact. That it might not be is the primary revelation of Frances Wilson’s new biography, “Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel,” a densely packed, intellectually radiant, and deeply enjoyable work of life-writing. Apologies for the spoiler, but Spark, who always sneaked the ending of a story into its beginning, would probably approve.
Of course, a non-existence is challenging to confirm. Wilson must conjure knowledge from lacunae: “No record of Nita McEwen’s birth, marriage, death, or attendance at James Gillespie’s”—the school where McEwen, like Spark, ostensibly went—“has yet been discovered.” There appears to have been no coverage of a “shooting of a young woman by her husband, who then shot himself” in Rhodesian newspapers, which typically covered such events in detail. Spark kept infamously meticulous records—nothing about McEwen there. Could she have changed McEwen’s name, to protect the dead? It wouldn’t be like Spark, who usually burned bridges with relish. But Wilson believes McEwen’s name is an important clue.
When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One of her symptoms was an obsession with cryptograms, anagrams, hallucinated translations, and what she described as “involuntary word-game[s],” which she believed, at the time, to be secret messages sent to her by the poet T. S. Eliot. (According to a boyfriend, she once thought Eliot, a venerated sexagenarian whom she had never met, was breaking into her house to steal her food.) Even after she recovered from her delusions, she maintained a fascination with the private meanings of seemingly innocent words, the buried layers of language that could be dug up with attention’s shovel. Wilson, like any good biographer, follows her subject’s lead. “If the letters start jumping around and cavorting, rearing themselves in anagram,” she writes, “Nita McEwen becomes Twin Menace.”
This grand reveal, which transmutes McEwen from fact into embellishment, doesn’t undermine Spark’s mythology so much as solidify it. For Wilson, Spark’s signal quality was her belief that reality was encoded with hidden meaning, which far surpassed, as she described her own extensive archive, “the silent, objective evidence of truth.” This belief manifested in her writing, but also in her faith. It’s no coincidence that Spark’s “brief but extremely intense word-game experience” lasted from January 22 to April 25, 1954, and that nine days later, still medicated with the antipsychotic drug Largactil, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Her first novel, “The Comforters,” was then finished by late 1955, when she was nearly thirty-eight years old. It concerns a recent Catholic convert, Caroline Rose, who starts hallucinating the sounds of a typewriter, which she discovers is transcribing her own thoughts, writing her into existence as a character in someone else’s novel.
“The Comforters” is titled after the “miserable comforters” in the Book of Job, false friends who try to find reason in Job’s suffering by assuring him he must have some unconfessed sin. When Job, who is on a dunghill, oozing pus, after the death of his entire family, accuses God of needless cruelty, God appears in the form of a whirlwind, chastising Job for expecting something as measly as fairness from the Creator of the Universe. In “The Comforters,” the whirlwind is the whirr and clack of a typewriter, inserting the divine into the mundane technology of mid-century life. Like the Book of Job, the novel presents a dialogue between a devout believer (Caroline Rose) and an unseeable, droll, and at times harshly vindictive creator (Muriel Spark). Caroline’s wish for control over the plot of her life is answered in kind: when she tries to upend the logic of the book’s genre, a rollicking whodunnit, the author-creator promptly crashes the car she’s in, breaks her leg, and abandons her for a subplot.
But as always with matters of faith, it is sometimes unclear who is creating whom. When Caroline is in the hospital, she turns “her mind to the art of the novel, wondering and cogitating, those long hours, and exerting an undue, unreckoned, influence on the narrative from which she is supposed to be absent for a time.” Then the “tap-tick-click” of the typing voice repeats the same sentence verbatim, the narrative split neatly in two.
In writing “The Comforters,” Spark embraced a trinity—paranoid fantasy, spiritual faith, and literary fiction—that would change every single thing about her life. For her, all three became profound only through their metatextuality: the way language relates to itself. Catholicism was Spark’s permission slip to become a novelist, to devote her life to things that weren’t verifiably “true” but which still, nevertheless, existed. While unconventional in her doctrine—she always supported abortion, contraception, and divorce, and avoided confession, sermons, and most other Catholics—it was important to her that “anything can happen to anyone,” which is rule one of Sparkian narrative. Bread can become flesh, and so on. In Wilson’s words, “she liked the saints, angels, miracles, and mysteries . . . . She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension, and rearrangement of time and space, which is also what she liked in a poem and so recreated in her fiction.”
Rule No. 2: Every book contains many books inside it. (Or, as in “The Comforters,” outside it.) Messages, and messages about those messages, are everywhere. This hermeneutic can start to feel contagious; my notes for this piece are full of potential anagrams, some of which (“Nita McEwen also ANEMIC NEWT!”) are less than impressive. Others I’m pretty proud of: Desiree Coleman, McEwen’s fictional counterpart in “Bang-Bang You’re Dead,” is an anagram for Oracled Enemies. This links perfectly to Desiree’s double in the story, Sybil, whose name is the ancient Greek term for a female oracle. Spark’s paranoid reading, in the midst of her breakdown, often revolved around ancient Greek; after seeing Eliot’s play “The Confidential Clerk,” she wondered, Wilson writes, whether “everything said by the characters in English meant something different in Ancient Greek,” and she even got a boyfriend to write to Eliot to ask whether there were “Greek encryptions” in his work. Eliot responded, jovially, “If there is any code concealed, I shall be interested to know what it is.”
If Spark believed Eliot was leaving secret messages for her, who were Spark’s secret messages meant to reach? It’s an understatement to say that Wilson had her work cut out for her; Spark anticipated her future biographers with both anxious concern and a trickster’s glee. The first attempt at a definitive account of her life, “Muriel Spark: The Biography,” by Martin Stannard, published three years after Spark’s death in 2006, was an unmitigated disaster—from Spark’s perspective, at least. After handpicking Stannard, giving him complete access to her archive, and permission to “treat me as though I were dead,” Spark then entirely rejected Stannard’s work and did everything in her power to prevent it from being released. Wilson does not aim to revise or correct Stannard’s more conventional, straightforward biography. Instead, she sidles up to Spark, as if not to startle her. She views Spark’s novels as “cells in a honeycomb,” where they “rehearse, repeat, and anticipate each other,” and focusses on the thirty-nine years that preceded Spark’s first book “in the order they took place, while allowing for a certain amount of prolepsis because this is how Spark also experienced things.”
In other words, Wilson is not afraid to jumble time lines or notice where fact and fiction overlap and merge into a third kind of truth. She accepts Spark’s particular world view as a prerequisite for understanding her writing, and she often presents her literary analysis in list form, piling up quotations from Spark’s various novels as if they were all from the same book. In fact, Wilson radically proposes that Spark’s œuvre can be read as one single novel: “From the first sentence of ‘The Comforters’ Spark knew where she was going, and she arrived there in the last sentence of ‘The Finishing School’: her twenty-two novels cover the ‘time-space’ of a day.” One of the best things about Wilson’s approach is that, amid her sturdy analysis, she’s also enjoying the game, in cahoots with the ghost of her subject. (For instance, the book is dedicated to “Clair Wills, Claudia FitzHerbert, and”—you guessed it—“Nita McEwen.”)
What does it mean for a biographer to become a code-breaker? If anything, it aligns Wilson with Spark herself. In the nineteen-forties, during the Second World War, Spark worked as a secretary for the Political Warfare Executive, a clandestine government unit which turned out an endless stream of propaganda for the Allied forces. Under the perfectionistic leadership of Sefton Delmer, the unit produced daily fake-news stories, radio broadcasts, underground leaflets, and even forged letters to the families of dead German soldiers. Spark, at her desk from 4 P.M. to midnight, witnessed a factory of “truth with believable lies”; Delmer made his inventions seem credible by pulling from a vast library of German names, addresses, and miscellaneous details, which he had clipped from the classified section of local newspapers or gathered from a bugged prisoner-of-war camp nearby. Forty-three years after her time in the unit, Spark echoed her former boss’s methods in an interview: “Supposing I said the fifteenth of August, 1952, it was raining, well I do look it up to see if it was raining at that spot on that day . . . And then within that realistic framework I can do what I like with the unreal.”
Having seen how the sausage was made, and how vulnerable our minds are to suggestion, it makes sense that Spark was particularly fearful of losing the plot and of being plotted against. Many of her novels revolve around blackmail or betrayal, in addition to inner moral frailty and susceptibility to manipulation. Often, the interior world of Spark’s protagonists is murky or obscured entirely; dialogue and behavior are how we get to know them, as if the reader is listening in on a tapped line or watching from a window. In “The Desegregation of Art,” a manifesto-like lecture, Spark called for “a more deliberate cunning” in literature, eschewing sentimentality which, she said, gives readers the false satisfaction that their “moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by emotions they have been induced to feel.” It is not that Spark hopes to trick her readers, exactly. It’s more that by offering us omniscient witness to all the ways human beings trick others and themselves, Spark hopes that we might allow more organic paradox to flourish.
Of course, there is nothing more paradoxical than writing an autobiography expressly for the purpose of “setting the record straight,” and then inserting a fictional woman and her fictional murder within its pages. Wilson wonders whether Spark was simply bored while writing “Curriculum Vitae,” and so turned “facts and dates into fun and games,” or whether she herself has failed to find an explanation for Spark’s preoccupation with doubles—a gap in her C.V., so to speak—and so invented one. If we take Spark at her word, though, she was not trying to falsify something but to make her own character ring true in the only way she knew how. Instead of articulating her past emotional state, and risking irresponsible sentimentality, Spark created Nita McEwen: the embodiment of a real fear, of a parallel universe where Muriel Spark was killed at twenty-one, by her unstable husband, never to write a sentence.
And it’s possible the scene describes something else: the psychic effects of being a mother cruelly separated from her child, of remaining alive after an essential part of herself had died. Shortly before Spark departed for England, her son was put in a convent school, in what is now Zimbabwe. Spark planned for him to live with his grandparents, in Edinburgh, but this wasn’t possible until two years later, after the war ended. Alone at only five years old, Spark’s child, originally called Sonny, renamed himself Robin, after a friend. An opposite act of doubling—not a twin menace but a longed-for brother, a glimmer of family, a new life. It’s no coincidence that Spark’s second novel, narrated by a mother who is stranded on an island with two other plane-crash survivors, is titled “Robinson.” Robinson Crusoe, of course, but also “Robin, son.” In the opening paragraph, the narrator says she barely remembers the island. She would think she had imagined it, if she did not have the proof of her sisters, who “always look at me, I think, as one returned from the dead.” ♦