In the 1950s and early 1960s, Britain saw a great flourishing of new novelists: William Golding, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, John Fowles and more. One of the more unusual was Muriel Spark. Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, she was that not-too-common figure, a Jewish (rather, half Jewish) Scot. She grew up in that Calvinist city around its fine Walter Scott memorial, became a youthful poet, then fled to Africa and a short-lived marriage. She came back near the war's end and was engaged to work in black propaganda: ideal training for the literary life.
In poor, bomb-blasted, postwar London, it was still possible to lead a bohemian literary existence on near-nothing: writing reviews (and selling the review copies), helping elderly scholars with their research, working on small literary magazines, undertaking commissioned books for small publishers. Spark lived a Grub Street existence, wrote poetry and biographies, and was active in the complicated affairs and bitterly nasty politics of the Poetry Society (poets bite). When, in the early 1950s, she turned her skills to fiction, all this was grist for the mill.
Everyone remembers The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where-recreating her Edinburgh schooldays-she gives a wonderfully ironic portrait of the prissily elegant teacher who wins her girls over with her style and wisdom (nearly over to Hitler, in fact). Other books capture the grim postwar time when, as she wrote in The Girls of Slender Means, "all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions." Others, such as A Far Cry from Kensington, return us to those Grub Street wars and the world of literary hopefuls and impostors, the basis of any useful literary culture, which England then still had.
One key fact in her books was her religious conversion: first to TS Eliot's Anglo-catholicism, then to catholicism. She was received to the faith in 1954 ("one wet afternoon I did it") after taking Jungian therapy. Her conversion was partly presided over by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. So she acquired not just a new interpretation of the world, but a distinct kind of literary tradition. The catholic novel had long been practised in Britain, but it had a quirky renaissance in the work of Greene, with his black catholic existentialism, and Waugh, who once said if he had not been a catholic he would have loved no one-as, indeed, he probably did not.
Spark's fiction gave a new dimension to all this, a kind of black catholic irony. The Girls of Slender Means is an end-of-wartime comedy about arbitrary salvations and damnations. Memento Mori is a joke about age, dying and the remembrance of sins. The Spark tone, cool, and comic, was unmistakable. But perhaps it was the fine line of her writing, its skill and its artistic joy, that mattered most.
Spark's real spiritual home or base camp was Italy, where a good many of her best books are set. From her Roman home came, during the 1960s, a wonderful burst of fiction. Her work became more and more concerned with illusions and realities, fictions and falsehoods. The Public Image, splendidly witty, morally serious too, is about a movie star, but above all it is about the empty post-modern self.
Which brings us to Reality and Dreams (Constable, 1996), Spark's 20th novel, a short crisp book that is typical of her style and manner. Some of Spark's books give us a witty and retrospective history of the years since the war, which are seen mostly as the years of a great emptying-out of reality. Some, like this one, are set in the current world-at a time when, as Tom Richards, the central character, keeps remarking, "The century is getting old, very old." Tom is a 63-year-old English film director, married to a rich American, Claire. He falls off a crane during the shooting of his latest movie, The Hamburger Girl, and breaks his hip. This puts his film at risk, and brings him face to face with his own dreams and realities.
In fact it is time, as one of his daughters, Marigold, says, to see things-life and wealth and love and womanising-under the gaze of eternity. Marigold is one of those figures of vengeance who often shows up in Spark's fiction. She starts out grimly enough, as a moralist, but gradually acquires a more ambiguous and sinister aspect.
Everyone in this book is losing a job, or falling off an economic or social perch, and so feels threatened with a crisis of purpose. Reality and Dreams is a pure Spark novel: strange, disturbing, absolutely confident in its own vision of the world. It is the work of a novelist who said that "psychologists have shown how the world of dream and fantasy bears a direct relation to art," and how the stories of artists have a source in the psyche. The critics have often noted that most of her works deal with characters who are themselves engaged in making fictions, constantly reinventing themselves in roles, or trying to direct the lives of others. The result is often a dance of deceivers. The many "redundant" characters of Reality and Dreams, constantly shifting between roles in film and roles in life, are stylishly manipulated in a deception that is as real as life itself. Muriel Spark has been writing fiction for 40 years, but in no way has she lost touch. Nor has she qualified her divinely-and wickedly-critical view of this post-modernising century, now so old, so very old.
