BOOKS

Fitful sparks and old flames

James Michie

CURRICULUM VITAE by Muriel Spark Constable, £14.95, pp.213

I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eye-witnesses . I resolved . .. to write an autobiography which would help to explain to myself and others: Who am I?

These arresting sentences from Muriel Spark's Introduction to her account of the first 39 years of her life raise expectations. Is one of our best novelists, a brilliant observer of human oddities, going to reveal all, to let the cat out of the bag? I won- dered. No, this is not that kind of book. The most startling revelation (for she looks far younger) is her ripe and long-concealed age. When a cat does emerge it is more often a Cheshire than the sort that makes the fur fly. The fact is that strict adherence to the truth (if there is such a thing) is not an important ingredient of a good autobiography, and that serious novelists, especially seriously comic ones, don't make the most entertaining guides to themselves — witness A Sort of Life, that guarded autobiography by Mrs Spark's early patron, Graham Greene: their real self- explorations are conducted subterraneanly, in their fiction.

Muriel Camberg was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of a Scottish Jew and a moth- er with the rare old English name of Uezell, and Edinburgh is the scene of more than half this book, until, at the age of 19, she sails for South Africa, on the way to Southern Rhodesia, engaged to Sydney Oswald Spark, to whom she was disastrous- ly married for two years and by whom she had a son. Why the author married him and what Mr Spark was like are sparely explained: 'I thought him interesting, as I generally found "older" men', and 'The poor man had mental problems, not obvious at the time.'

I found the Edinburgh section dis- appointingly flat. One hundred and fifty words are devoted to telling us how a cup of tea was made in the 1920s — pretty much as one makes it now if one doesn't use a tea-bag. A paragraph beginning Another person I never met except through hearsay, dead as she was long before I was born, was Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the women's rights movement in those days, is unlikely to engage the attention unless hearsay anecdotes follow. Above these flat- lands rise three hillocks of interest: her account of James Gillespie's School, which she attended at 11, and her portrait of Miss Kay, the model for Miss Jean Brodie, who In that subfusc, Presbyterian city exhorted her pupils: 'Why make a wet day more dreary than it is? We should wear bright coats, and carry blue umbrellas, or green'; a long and loving description of her grand- mother and her eccentric, many-layered clothes and underclothes; and her memo- ries of being an assistant in Small's depart- ment store:

I would overhear some of the most affected and absurd scraps of conversation between the clients and the sales-women.

(I wish she could have reproduced them.)

I often thought that I would like to write an amusing book called The Department Store.

(I hope she does.) The almost seven years spent in South- ern Rhodesia were not happy ones, which is no doubt why Mrs Spark covers them in 20 pages. Devoid of racial prejudice and snobbery, she found herself in a compla- cent and uncongenial colonial society. The birth of her son, the disordered, revolver- flourishing behaviour of Mr Spark, the arrangements for divorce are briskly dealt with, and the business of motherhood gets few mentions. Depressing periods are diffi- cult to remember; these pages give the impression of time lived through rather than vividly experienced. Retaining her husband's name (`Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and fun,' she remarks characteristically), in 1944 she sailed for England in a troopship. A nice observation shows that she is getting back into form: Dark trousers, said the typewritten instruc- tions, were advisable lest the boat should be torpedoed, because sharks tended to over- look dark clothes.

From now on the life quickens and the fun flourishes. The moment the author reaches London and the spartan, dotty, unexpected world of The Girls of Slender Means she seems relieved of her mission to `explain' herself and free to revel in the queernesses her novels so marvellously deal in Her two main jobs were working for MI6, under Sefton Delmer, 'in the dark field of Black Propaganda', and trying to be an effective General Secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of their Review in the face of Byzantine obstruction and counter-plotting. 'In no other job have I ever had to deal with such utterly abnormal people.' And here is a cat that can scratch:

She [Marie Stopes] was absolutely opposed to my idea of poetry. Up to his death three years earlier she had been living with Lord Alfred Douglas . . . an arrangement which I imagine would satisfy any woman's craving for birth control.

Clearly Muriel Spark had a talent for catholic friendship (there are pleasant sketches of two quite unrelated friends, Christmas Humphreys, the Buddhist judge, and Princess (later Queen) Frederika of Greece. Equally clearly, when it came to men she tended to be, in the words of an eye-witness, 'a bad picker'. At one point she confides obscurely:

From my experience of life I believe my personal motto should be: 'Beware of men bearing flowers.'

One of her worst choices was Derek Stanford, her friend and literary partner of the Fifties. Did he have bottomless credit at a florist's? At any rate he eventually published lots of wicked lies about Mrs Spark, which she lists and refutes with icy exactitude:

He claims that my grandmother had gypsy blood .. . He writes that I was suckled till 1 was two years old ... He says that I was in love with T S Eliot . . .

These are indeed grave allegations, and, not surprisingly, we are told that this poor man also had mental problems.

Her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954, through the influence of Newman's writing, is described rather more succinctly than he described his own — in less than 200 words. For someone with a Jewish background to become a Christian is unusual enough for the reader to feel badly shortchanged here.

Curriculum Vitae is full of worthwhile gleams, funny and serious. Whenever Mrs Spark touches on her first love, poetry, the page lights up, as in her description of John Masefield reciting his poems: He read as he might have read someone else's work, and that is a very difficult thing for a poet to do.

But the illumination is fitful, and scant light is shed on the original question posed: Who am I? In the final sentence Mrs Spark, borrowing Newman's phrase, 'goes on her way rejoicing', as quirky and elusive as ever, leaving 'the truth', if not 'the facts', teasingly beyond our reach.