Interview: Dame Muriel Spark

The vital spark

The Sunday Times, October 17 2004

As the collected poems of Scotland’s greatest living writer are published, Dame Muriel talks to Kenny Farquharson about her failed marriage, estrangement from her son and why people call her icy

Dame Muriel Spark is talking about her health, describing an operation she underwent at a Zurich clinic to improve her fading eyesight. Unlike some elderly people, she recounts her hospital experiences without a shred of self-pity, revelling in the gory details.

“They take your eyes out and hook these lenses on to them. It’s all carried out under local anaesthetic,” she explains with obvious relish. “You can still see, but it’s similar to when there is interference on the television.”

The operation is something to be discussed without flinching, no leeway given to her two pet hates of “soppiness” and “sentimentality”.

We are meant to be discussing her new collection of poems — in 50 years of writing she has always regarded herself primarily as a poet. But the new volume barely gets a mention in an afternoon of frank conversation about life’s fundamentals. There is some cursory small talk about hospitals, Edinburgh, mutual friends and then, wallop: it’s all sex, death, heaven, hell and gruesome family feuds.

Spark is perched on a sofa in her Tuscan hideaway — a converted farmhouse next to a 13th-century church, set among olive groves on a hillside half an hour from Arezzo. The 86-year-old is dressed in a black pinstripe trouser suit and fiddles constantly with her walking stick and spectacles — a massive, round and tinted pair of the type seen in old photographs of Liz Taylor or Jackie Onassis.

Tea, polenta cake and then large measures of Johnny Walker are served by Penelope Jardine, a sculptor and general’s daughter who answered a job advert to be Spark’s assistant more than 20 years ago and has been her constant companion ever since.

Sex crops up when I ask Spark to name her favourite sins. “To commit or to write about?” she asks.

Envy and jealousy have been her favourite subjects for a while, she says. “Because they are the ones nobody seems to enjoy. People who are envious or jealous seem to be in a perpetual state of suffering and anguish.

“As for the sins I enjoy, long ago sex was a very nice thing.” There is a twinkle in her eye. “Actually, I never did take up the Graham Greene line that sex was a sin. It is only if you are giving someone else problems — if you have an affair and you are hurting someone else. That’s quite wrong and you should try not to do it. But I never thought of sex as a sin per se, and nothing could persuade me otherwise.”

Spark has always believed this, even when it defied everything her native Edinburgh stood for when she was growing up between the wars. The city’s Presbyterian propriety and Calvinist self-denial combined to outlaw libidinousness as an affront to polite society. And no offence was deemed more serious.

Spark adores Edinburgh, lovingly describing its former grace as a bourgeois city par excellence. “Princes Street was so sedate,” she says. “Like something out of Jane Austen, with nobody running, no bright colours and lovely window dressing.” Although she has not lived in Scotland for 65 years, the Jean Brodie accent is intact and sharpens when talk turns to her birthplace.

Edinburgh’s reserve and good manners “had great charm”, she insists, but it came at a price. “It was partly the times — nice young girls didn’t do this and didn’t do that, and nice young men didn’t do this and the next thing. But Edinburgh was particularly puritanical — more so than, say, Glasgow which was supposed to be a wicked place when I was growing up.

“I don’t think I would have got married if I could have had sex in any other way. I was a young girl and I wanted to have a sex life. And I had a disastrous marriage.”

She wed her husband Sydney Spark at the age of 19 and moved with him to what was then Rhodesia. He turned out to be violent, psychotic and spent long periods in mental institutions.

“If I could have had a nice affair . . .” Her voice trails off, as if she has been hijacked by a stray thought of what might have been. “But there was no way. Nobody tried to seduce me ever as a girl. I had plenty of young men around me, but nobody suggested I went to bed with them. It would have been unheard of. My father! My mother! Oh God!

“I just thought that was what life was like. I didn’t know that a girl could break away and get herself a flat. I had no idea. I didn’t know what prostitution was. It was largely ignorance and upbringing.”

I tell her that when I walk my children to school on the edge of Edinburgh’s New Town we pass a brothel. “Really?” she asks, her eyes bright with mischief. “What are they like?” Lamely I confess I have never been inside. She looks disappointed.

Spark’s reputation as Scotland’s — perhaps Britain’s — greatest living novelist rests on her ruthlessness as a writer, her peerless ability to pare her characters down to expose their flaws, urges and base instincts. Some writers claim their fictional characters have lives of their own. Spark’s dance to her cruel whim.

I mention that in reading about her life and work I was struck by how often a certain word was used to describe her. That word was “icy”. Spark positively basks in this news, delighted at the thought. One recent article, I continue, talked about “the icicle in her heart”. Does she recognise herself in this description?

“I do know that when I’m writing I’m very detached,” she concedes. “I cultivate that detachment, I don’t like to be involved too much. I don’t like the effect. Maybe they’re right, maybe it is icy. I have a cold attitude to my characters. And I don’t prepare readers for something terrible. I just bring it out. I prefer shock treatment.”

A thought occurs to her.

“I tell you, a lot of criticism of that nature is based on the fact that they think a woman should be warmer than a male writer. If a woman were to write like Stephen King they’d probably say: ‘How cruel!’ Maybe women are warmer as a rule. But I don’t admit to that criticism.”

Spark knows the question of iciness is being directed at her as a person as much as her as a writer, an example of what she describes as “not literary criticism, just criticism”.

She may not like it, but it is a subject that cannot be avoided.

“A lot of what people say about me is completely unfounded, untrue,” she says. “Sometimes my old friends seem to think I’ve left them behind and behaved badly because I haven’t kept up with them, but largely I’ve kept up with people if they keep up with me. There’s nothing I can do about it.” She pauses. “There’s nothing I can do about my son.”

Ah, her son. Robin Spark was born in 1938 and saw little of his mother while he was growing up. Abandoned at boarding school in Africa when she returned to Britain, he was then sent to Edinburgh to be brought up by Spark’s parents while she moved to London to work and write.

Mother and son have long been estranged, partly because he believes she has besmirched his father’s memory and partly because of his attitude to Spark’s conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in 1954. The son remains a devout Jew.

Spark sighs at the thought of her son. But her tone is one of faint irritation and resignation rather than gnawing regret. “There is little I can say. He’s 66 and with a man of that age there is nothing I can do. There’s nothing he wants me to do either.”

Does she have any regrets about that part of her life? “I can’t regret having my son,” she says, “because he’s obviously my son.” An interesting reply, because I meant whether she regretted giving her son to her parents to raise.

“I didn’t make a good marriage, I made an awful mess. My husband was quite mad and was in lunatic bins most of his life, when he wasn’t in the hands of the police. He was very violent.

“My son thinks I should hush this up for his sake, and that might be true if I was not in the public eye and in public life. You can’t hush things up if you are like me — I have got to be truthful about me, my life and my marriage. I can see it annoys him terribly. But if I don’t put the record straight other people get it all wrong.”

Spark knows she will always be best known for her 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made famous by Maggie Smith’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1969 film. At an appearance at this year’s Edinburgh book festival the audience was treated to Spark reading an excerpt, and cooed with pleasure when she uttered the words “la crème de la crème” in that splendidly tortured Morningside accent.

Another passage was the one where Miss Brodie exhorts her girls to be sure to recognise their prime and to live it to the full. Did Spark recognise hers and take Miss Brodie’s advice?

“Yes,” she says with certainty, “when I started writing books. I realised I had a talent for it, a gift, and I flowered from the age of about 35. I kept that up for about 30 years. It was a gathering together of all I wanted to do, a ripeness.”

Almost as an aside she adds: “I was very glad then that I hadn’t got married again. I was so happy to be free, to do what I wanted.”

She could not have done it as a married woman? “I don’t think so,” she replies in a tone that is closer to “certainly not”. Why? “It’s a matter of to what you owe the most attention, and in marriage you do owe a certain amount of attention to your spouse.

“I think a man can do it because women are more self-effacing. Men are more demanding. Men don’t like women who flourish beyond what they are doing, and I might have done that.”

Again her tone makes it clear she would certainly have done that. “I was quite happy to be free.”

This week Spark is due to fly back to Zurich for a further eye operation to tweak her built-in lenses. “What I feel most frustrating about age is restriction of movement. I’ve had a series of operations — some of which were good and some were bad — which left me unable to move around too much. But I’ve stabilised my eyesight and I’ve done everything I can to keep myself going. Mentally I don’t feel any different — my memory is more or less all right.”

Does she have concerns about losing her intellectual sharpness? “Yes, I find it distressing. I’m rather glad I’ve used my mind all my life. I want to keep my brain going as long as possible.”

Spark was friends with Iris Murdoch, whose descent into Alzheimer’s was chronicled in a book by her husband John Bayley and made into a film, Iris, much to Spark’s disapproval. Does the kind of end Murdoch had to endure hold any particular fears?

“Well, she had a disease,” she replies. “That was most unfortunate. It was a gene. I wouldn’t like it. She was much younger than me — she was in her seventies.

“But Doris Lessing, who is about the same age as I am — perhaps a year younger — is just as bright as ever.”

Spark’s eyes are her main concern. Even now she needs a strong light by which to read and sometimes has to ask Jardine to read to her. She works two or three hours at a time instead of the six she used to put in, writing her prose longhand in old notebooks.

The next novel is about Mary Queen of Scots, her husband Lord Darnley and her secretary David Rizzio. Love. Jealousy. Power. Betrayal. Murder. Perfect Spark territory. The eyesight may be fading but the vision remains the same.

All The Poems, by Muriel Spark, is published by Carcanet on October 24