\n<\/p>\n
The novelist<\/span> Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus\u2013level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium. Interested in \u201cthe fun and funny aspects of being a teacher\u201d? Read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie\u2014also good for learning how to be a highly inappropriate teacher, if you want to know that too.<\/p>\n Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n View More<\/p>\n Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer\u2014indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in 1954, at age 36, and joined the cohort of renowned literary Catholic converts such as T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. The most consistent influence on her work is the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She began reading it as a girl in her Presbyterian school and kept rereading it throughout her life, less for \u201creligious consolation,\u201d she writes in her essay \u201cThe Books I Re-Read and Why,\u201d than \u201cfor sheer enjoyment of the literature.\u201d She was particularly drawn to the Book of Job, an anguished outcry against the seeming randomness of evil. And yet her tone throughout her work is so acidly droll, her touch so light and sly, that we could read most of her 22 novels and 41 short stories and never quite process that their central concern is God.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because she communicates her theology largely through form rather than content. She rarely discusses; she prefers to sculpt. With a steely command of omniscience, selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices, Spark re-creates in the relationship between author and reader the sadomasochistic partnership between the Almighty and his hopelessly wayward flock\u2014or, to put it another way, between his absolute truth and our partial understanding. In other words, she plays God.<\/p>\n Not necessarily a nice God, either. In the Book of Job, the Almighty is mercilessly capricious, condemning Job to bitter suffering in a wager with Satan. This God\u2019s ends are not our ends. Nor are Spark\u2019s. A Creator who acts according to his will on his own unknowable schedule darkens her bright, chipper prose like a skull in a still life. \u201cRemember you must die,\u201d the anonymous callers in Memento Mori (1959) say to their shocked elderly victims before hanging up. Frightening as these prank calls are, their recipients refuse to take the message seriously, because surely the whole thing is just a macabre practical joke. One feature of Spark\u2019s comic genius is her ability to come up with screwball storylines that recapitulate our hapless drift toward final judgment. The collision between God\u2019s lofty vantage point and human shortsightedness yields absurdist disaster.<\/p>\n In Electric <\/span><\/em><\/span>Spark<\/em>: <\/span>The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Frances Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject. Her account is a corrective to Martin Stannard\u2019s 2009 authorized Muriel Spark: The Biography, a sober, balanced, and plodding opus, though still the definitive biography. Stannard\u2019s problem was that Spark had trained as a secretary and filed everything away, no matter how trivial. (Another way of saying this is that she hoarded.) When she died, her archives consisted of 195 linear feet of \u201cletters, proofs, receipts, memos, agendas, minutes, newspaper cuttings, diaries and manuscripts,\u201d Wilson writes. Spark had given Stannard exclusive access to it all. The mass of material seems to have crushed his spirit. Almost as soon as she chose him, she regretted it, and Wilson imagines her torturing Stannard the way the ghost of a murdered woman toys with her murderer in Spark\u2019s short story \u201cThe Portobello Road.\u201d<\/p>\n Wilson, by contrast, feels free to focus on the parts of Spark\u2019s life that informed her art\u2014and luckily for us, these are plentiful, both because Spark liked to rework her own experiences and acquaintances for her fiction, and because her life tended toward the fantastical in ways that served her writing. Wilson borrows Spark\u2019s own mystical whimsy about the relationship between her life and her work, which was that her fiction somehow preceded her experiences. \u201cIf she wrote about a burglary,\u201d Wilson says, \u201cher own house would then be broken into; if she wrote about manuscripts being stolen from a bedroom or a cache of love letters being used as blackmail, this would likewise be her fate.\u201d<\/p>\n Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel<\/p>\n By Frances Wilson<\/p>\n This was true. Her house was burgled a decade after she wrote about similar burglaries in her novel Symposium (1990). Blackmail featured in her first novel, The Comforters (1957), and in Memento Mori; in 1963, she was blackmailed by a rare-book dealer in possession of her love letters. You\u2019d think Spark took dictation from a far-seeing God. Indeed, that\u2019s more or less the subject of The Comforters. A young woman hears voices narrating her exact movements, or else predicting the near future, accompanied by the sound of typing. Everyone presumes she\u2019s going mad, but what the voices say is either true or about to come true. Who controls the narrative? That\u2019s Spark\u2019s big question. Whether to trust or resist those who attempt to control it is the follow-up question.<\/p>\n A lot of untrustworthy people tried to take charge of Spark over the course of her adult life, most of them men. Her childhood, however, was happy and relatively free of such power struggles. Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in 1918 to a Jewish father, Barney, and a mother, Cissy, who had some Jewish heritage, she was raised on a haphazard mix of gods and rituals. Her mother, more eclectic than observant, Wilson writes,<\/p>\n put seven candles in the window on the Sabbath, went to synagogue on Yom Kippur (in order, Muriel said, to show off her hat collection), celebrated Passover, kept an image of Christ in her locket, a Buddha on a lotus leaf in the living room, served hot cross buns at Easter, mince pies at Christmas and pork all year round.<\/p>\n The family lived modestly on a street in central Edinburgh that was full of delights for a curious child. In her building were a painter, a singer, a sweetshop, and a jeweler, and outside was a communal garden to play in. The Cambergs\u2014Muriel had an older brother\u2014gave over one of two bedrooms in their small apartment to lodgers, then to Barney\u2019s sister and later Cissy\u2019s mother, a former suffragette (indomitable, witty, and \u201castonishingly ugly,\u201d Spark later wrote). Muriel adored them both. Her father, an engineer, was genial and funny, and friends were always dropping by. Spark\u2019s mother mocked them behind their back; Spark once called Cissy, not disapprovingly, \u201ca complete hypocrite.\u201d The child internalized her mother\u2019s satirical edge as well as the neighborhood \u201cmaxims, idioms, accents, aphorisms, rhythms and catchphrases,\u201d Wilson writes. Her ears had memories, was how Spark put it.<\/p>\n When she was 11 and a student at James Gillespie\u2019s High School for Girls, Spark came under the spell of Miss Kay, a pedagogical grande dame who exposed her to Italian art and Romantic poetry and trained her in poetic meter. By the time Spark was 12, she had published accomplished poems in her high-school magazine and in an anthology of poetry by Edinburgh high-school students. Miss Kay, Wilson says, \u201cboth was and was not the model for Miss Jean Brodie,\u201d Spark\u2019s most notorious character. They shared \u201cmannerisms and speech patterns\u201d; both overpraised their prot\u00e9g\u00e9s as the \u201ccr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me.\u201d But Miss Kay was much nicer. Miss Brodie is partial to Nazis and Italian fascists and maneuvers her girls into position to act as her advocates and surrogates\u2014which is not always in their interest. \u201cBy the time they were sixteen,\u201d Spark writes with characteristic mordancy, \u201cthey remained unmistakably Brodie, and were all famous in the school, which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking.\u201d<\/p>\n Spark\u2019s marriage at 19, in 1937, drove home to her that the world was not inclined to let women take charge of their own destiny. Oswald Spark, a teacher who courted her for a year, had accepted a job in Rhodesia and asked Spark to follow him. He\u2019d support her, he said, and she could keep writing poetry. She consented. Their wedding night was \u201can awful mess,\u201d Spark said later, \u201ca botch-up,\u201d and marital relations did not continue for long. But she got pregnant and nearly died of septicemia after giving birth to a son, Robin, toward whom she was never able to muster as much maternal solicitude as he longed for. Oswald turned out to have a \u201csevere nervous disorder,\u201d in Spark\u2019s words, and after two years, she left him. Colonial society horrified her, especially the way white people talked about black people as if they weren\u2019t human, but war had broken out and she only managed to make her escape in 1944, resorting to a troopship that had to navigate through enemy waters. She was forced to leave Robin behind; it took her 10 years to win back custody.<\/p>\n Wilson frames <\/span>the next phase of Spark\u2019s life as a key to the fiction that was still a decade away, and she\u2019s not exaggerating its importance. When Spark arrived in London in 1944, she got a job as a secretary for the head of a clandestine project overseen by the British Foreign Office. In fact, she may already have been doing undercover work. Wilson hypothesizes that she spied for the British colonial government during her last year in Rhodesia, possibly trying to uncover enemy aliens among the settlers. Wilson cites no direct evidence but rather a curious gap in the record of what she was up to, or even where she lived.<\/p>\n Spark\u2019s new boss was a wildly imaginative and very demanding foreign correspondent of Falstaffian proportions named Sefton Delmer. His outfit, the Political Warfare Executive, conducted psyops from a secret compound north of London. The PWE\u2019s mission was \u201cthe successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy\u201d; it produced disinformation in German that was published in a counterfeit newspaper, sent in the form of forged letters and fake secret messages, and broadcast over the radio. An anti-Semitic Nazi talk-show host who ranted drunkenly about corruption and sexual depravity among the party elite from his illegal outpost in the fatherland, for instance, was in reality a German writer of detective fiction employed by Delmer in England.<\/p>\n Working for Delmer may have been the best training a future novelist could get. He was fanatical about verisimilitude: All the details in the team\u2019s fabrications had to ring true. He hired people from every profession. In addition to writers, he enlisted farmers, psychologists, actors, even cabaret singers, some of them German Jewish refugees knowledgeable about German life. Plus the military fed Delmer the latest intelligence. He was \u201comniscient,\u201d Wilson writes, and scary; he liked to play mind games with his own people as well as the Germans.<\/p>\n Spark\u2019s immersion in \u201ca world of method and intrigue,\u201d as she put it, taught her about the slipperiness of truth. For the rest of her life, she would be obsessed with\u2014indeed, paranoid about\u2014\u201ccodes, secret messages and the circulation of fictions posing as fact,\u201d Wilson writes. Several of Spark\u2019s novels feature shady characters spying on one another and hatching whisper campaigns against a defiant but naive heroine. She later was the target of a plot herself. During Spark\u2019s brief tenure in 1947 as the editor hired to update The Poetry Review, a stodgy publication overseen by an elderly poetry society, a board member scheming to oust her pried into her life and threatened to use her divorce against her. Spark put this experience to use in more than one novel, most notably Loitering With Intent (1981), probably her funniest. The Poetry Society becomes the Autobiographical Association, whose ridiculous members write their memoirs under the supervision of the director, a snooty character clearly conniving to use their confessions for some sort of skulduggery.<\/p>\n Then there was Spark\u2019s nervous breakdown in January 1954. Always worried about her weight, an anxiety shared by some of her heroines, she had been taking Dexedrine to control her eating. During the ensuing psychotic interlude, she fixated on T. S. Eliot, whose most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, had a character named Muriel. Convinced that Eliot, whom she had never met, had sneaked encrypted declarations of love for her into the script, she spent months obsessively trying to decode them. This wasn\u2019t easy. At one point, Wilson writes, \u201cEliot\u2019s words started jumping around and cavorting, reshaping themselves in anagrams and crosswords.\u201d<\/p>\n A doctor <\/span>weaned Spark from Dexedrine and put her on antipsychotic medication, and she briefly went into therapy with a Jungian psychologist. But Roman Catholicism restored order to her disorderly mind, Spark said. It made her \u201csee life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings.\u201d She put herself in the hands of God, who sees and hears all\u2014God being a preferable eavesdropper and spy to ex-boyfriends and boards of directors. Piety did not make her dogmatic or conservative. She neither went to confession nor renounced abortion, contraception, or divorce, and she embraced doubt.<\/p>\n Spark\u2019s turn to religion coincided with her turn to fiction, which was not an accident. Catholicism allowed her to find her voice as a writer. While editing a volume of the letters of Cardinal John Henry Newman, she had read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which details the steps of his conversion to Catholicism and inspired her to begin to take her own. The qualities in his reflections that attracted her\u2014simplicity, concision, a refusal to accept easy answers\u2014double as a good description of the style she was developing.<\/p>\n Catholicism itself had aesthetic appeal. She was drawn to its living magic\u2014its \u201csaints, angels, miracles, and mysteries,\u201d Wilson writes. \u201cShe also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension and rearrangement of time and space.\u201d For believers, those staples of faith had an immediacy and a proximity to the everyday that Spark may have felt was best embodied in fiction. From the start, in her very first (and prize-winning) short story, \u201cThe Seraph and the Zambezi\u201d (1951)\u2014still one of her best\u2014she effaced the distinction between naturalism and the supernatural. During a Christmas pageant held by a gas-station owner in his rickety garage near Rhodesia\u2019s Zambezi River, a six-winged creature appears onstage and proceeds to kick everyone else off it. It\u2019s a seraph, straight out of the Book of Isaiah. \u201cThis is my show,\u201d the owner, Cramer, tells it.<\/p>\n \u201cSince when?\u201d the Seraph said.<\/p>\n \u201cRight from the start,\u201d Cramer breathed at him.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it\u2019s been mine from the Beginning,\u201d said the Seraph, \u201cand the Beginning began first.\u201d<\/p>\n Why Catholicism and not, say, Scottish Presbyterianism, the country\u2019s Calvinist-inflected denomination of her youth, or her father\u2019s Judaism? Spark\u2019s love of high style surely rebelled against the austerity of Protestantism, both in worship and creed. (As a writer, however, she made heavy use of the doctrine of predestination, disposing of characters summarily and parodying herself in the figure of Miss Jean Brodie. \u201cShe thinks she is Providence,\u201d a disenchanted student reflects. \u201cShe thinks she is the God of Calvin.\u201d)<\/p>\n Spark was even more conflicted about Judaism. In The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), a chatty, muddled autobiographical novel, she describes her protagonist going back and forth between her chilly Christian relatives and her warmer Jewish ones and belonging among neither. To one side of the family, she was faintly pitiable because she was half Jewish; the other was kinder, but she felt her lack of Jewish knowledge excluded her from their cozy home rituals. Spark always had the Bible, though, and read it \u201cwith a sense that it was specially mine,\u201d as she put it. She thought God had given a good answer when Moses had asked his name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Was she \u201ca Gentile\u201d or was she \u201ca Jewess\u201d? \u201cBoth and neither. What am I? I am what I am,\u201d she writes in her essay \u201cNote on My Story \u2018The Gentile Jewesses.\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n Spark\u2019s range as a novelist was impressive\u2014one work might adopt the guise of a murder mystery, the next of a ghost story\u2014but she had a signature rhetorical move: prolepsis. The scholar Clare Bucknell came up with a Spark-worthy term for it: the \u201cauto-spoiler.\u201d In a throwaway remark toward the beginning of a story, the narrator gives away the end. We learn in Chapter 3 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) that one of the Brodie set will betray her to the school\u2019s administration, which is desperate for an excuse to get rid of her. In The Driver\u2019s Seat (1970), Spark\u2019s most surreal novel and also her favorite, we are told, also in the third chapter, that the tourist disembarking in a Southern European city will have been murdered by the next morning.<\/p>\n By revealing the fate of her characters, Spark frees us from the grip of curiosity about what\u2019s going to happen and forces us to study why. Who made it happen? What does it mean? Does providence foreordain or do characters have a say? Is everything a conspiracy or does accident play a role? Spark\u2019s convictions let her interrogate God\u2019s designs without despairing that there are none. As a child, Spark had found God to be \u201ca charming and witty character\u201d with \u201ca lot of conflicting sides to his nature,\u201d as she wrote. The worry that crops up in her fiction is that he\u2019ll turn out to be a rogue operator like her old boss Delmer.<\/p>\n But Spark also admired the God of Job because he was \u201cnot the God of love,\u201d Wilson writes. He was the braggart God who boasted to Job that\u2014in Spark\u2019s words\u2014\u201cI made this and I created that, and I can crush and I can blast and I can blow. And who are you to ask questions?\u201d A devoted ironist is the answer: Spark reserved the right not only to ask questions but to admit amusement and dismay into her faith. Anyone can worship a God who doesn\u2019t trim himself to the size of the human imagination\u2014that\u2019s what God is for, to make sure that we don\u2019t mistake our petty schemes for anything other than half-baked. But it takes a Spark to be fond of a God who chest-thumps and is otherwise outlandish\u2014a God who, she writes, \u201cbasks unashamed in his own glory, and in his anger is positively blasphemous.\u201d Because who are we to say how God should behave?<\/p>\n This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline \u201cThe Judgments of Muriel Spark.\u201d<\/p>\n \u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus\u2013level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium. Interested in \u201cthe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[8696,8697,1690],"class_list":{"0":"post-15108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-judgments","9":"tag-muriel","10":"tag-spark"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Explore the September 2025 Issue<\/h2>\n