Electric Spark by Frances Wilson: Spy, Secretary, Superstar: The Prime of Miss Muriel Spark

In the summer of 1953, Muriel Spark – not yet the famous novelist behind The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – was en route from London to the Edinburgh Festival, rattling with amphetamines.

She was reviewing a new play by T.S. Eliot, who praised the ensuing article as ‘one of the two or three most intelligent reviews’ he read.

But a year later, Spark was gripped by drug-induced psychosis, believing that Eliot was sending her cryptic messages, disguising himself as her window cleaner and stealing her food.

Prescribed Largactil, she quickly recovered, yet an interest in code-cracking and deceit would always colour her imagination.

In the dreary world of post-war British fiction, still a boys’ club fixated on realism, be it Kingsley Amis’s campus satire Lucky Jim or the kitchen-sink drama of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Spark’s sleek brand of experimental struck like lightning.

Her 1957 debut The Comforters portrays a woman who hears in her head the text of the very book we’re reading.

Her 1961 smash hit The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie tells us right away that the maverick teacher of the title (played on screen by Maggie Smith) will be betrayed by her pupils.

The first line of 1970’s The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favourite of her 22 novels, introduces us to a woman in search of her future murderer – two decades before Martin Amis cemented enfant terrible status with the same idea in London Fields.

Enigmatic yet crisp and concise, crackling with twists, each of Spark’s 22 novels was written in one go without her needing to revise them – or so she told a BBC interviewer later in life.

Frances Wilson casts an admiring yet sceptical eye over that and other claims in this new biography, exploring the mind behind the books.

Born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish factory worker and Presbyterian mother in 1918, the author worked as a secretary before leaving Edinburgh for Southern Rhodesia. She had married Sydney Spark, a troubled teacher she met at a dance at 19. He had found a post there after his worrying antics, such as firing a starting pistol in the classroom, had deterred employers at home.

Seven years later, Spark walked out on Africa and her husband – as well as their young son, Robin.

At a job centre in London she was recruited for undercover work with the Foreign Office, where she helped flood Nazi Germany with propaganda from a clandestine HQ in Bedfordshire.

Wilson speculates that it wasn’t Spark’s first rodeo – she might have been a spy in Bulawayo, identifying enemy aliens among settlers.

An abiding interest in secret communication tipped her into madness once she embarked on literary life in London, where she encountered strife from the start.

Appointed editor of the magazine Poetry Review in the 1940s, she championed edgier poets such as Eliot and W.H. Auden.

‘I started publishing modern poems rather than Christmas card-type poems,’ she said in an interview in 2000.

But she rubbed long-time contributors the wrong way. ‘They would do anything to get published. Those that weren’t queer wanted to sleep with me. They thought they were poets and there should be free love or something.’

When Spark entered a story competition in The Observer – ‘as one might enter for a crossword puzzle,’ she said – she won first prize.

It poured oil on the jealousy of her on-off lover Derek Stanford, a jobbing writer and sometime collaborator who betrayed her by selling her letters and writing rumour-filled books about her.

Spark was ‘a magnet for mediocrities’, says Wilson, describing alarming encounters in her rackety Grub Street life.

Where an earlier biographer referred to Spark’s failed seduction by the forgotten experimental novelist Rayner Heppenstall – a BBC producer who was pals with George Orwell – Wilson instead calls it ‘attempted rape’.

By the Sixties, Spark was a superstar, London in the rear-view mirror. In Manhattan she was given an office with a view of Times Square by the editor of The New Yorker. In 1966 she upped sticks again, to Italy. In Rome she lived in a Renaissance-era apartment so grand she couldn’t see the ceiling; in Tuscany, she settled down with Penelope Jardine, an art student she met while getting her hair done.

With Jardine as her gatekeeper and companion, peace broke out – at least until Spark received a proposal from biographer Martin Stannard.

Spark had praised his biography of Evelyn Waugh in a review for this paper in 1992.

When Stannard sent her a card to say thanks, she replied that she wished she herself would have a biographer as good. Stannard seized the moment and put himself forward, though not without trepidation: how would an academic with the dress sense of Norman Wisdom (as he put it) measure up to a woman so chic?

The ensuing years were an ordeal for both parties.

Spark had sought redress for the tittle-tattle peddled in the books that her former lover Derek Stanford had written about her.

But that wish led her to thwart the very biographer she appointed, controlling his work through lengthening bouts of failing health. One of Spark’s friends recalls sitting with her at her kitchen table as she read aloud scornfully from Stannard’s 1,200-page manuscript, which had been submitted for her approval as per their agreement.

Every detail was questioned: her mental breakdown was, she said, actually ‘a physical breakdown which inspired a form of dyslexia’. The book, rewritten four times, was eventually published after Spark died in 2006 – essentially in its original form, Stannard tells Wilson.

Wilson’s own biography avoids a cradle-to-grave approach, opting for a dynamic and dizzying weave of early struggles and future success. She reports that in 1961 a magazine polled leading novelists about whether they wanted to make a political, moral, spiritual or intellectual impact (‘Certainly not,’ said 007 author Ian Fleming).

Spark replied: ‘In all four fields I would like more readers to see things as I do.’ Wilson calls her the ‘most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape’. Hard not to agree.