Thursday 26 April 2012

Curriculum Vitae - Muriel Spark's autobiography

Another Spark review from me - three books reviewed in one day, gosh!  Although this one I actually read during Muriel Spark Reading Week, and I'm writing about it down in Somerset - where the book group my Mum runs have all been reading Muriel Spark.  I joined in their lovely lunch, chatting about Spark - everyone enjoyed reading her, although one lady (who had read The Abbess of Crewe, apparently one of Spark's weirder novels) was rather bemused.  I'm hoping Mum will write some reviews of the Spark novels she's read this week... hint hint...!

Once I've read a lot of an author's novels, I like to look into their life a bit.  (You can do the same, very quickly, with Katherine's piece.)  I prefer doing it that way around - so that I have formed my own opinions from the books, and can use biographical information to augment my interest, rather than act as a starting point.  Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark was looming in one corner of my room, but it's enormous, so I went to the horse's mouth - Spark's 'fragments of an autobiography', Curriculum Vitae (1992).

I had been curious to discover quite how Spark would write an autobiography, since her novels so often eschew normal narrative structures and the reliable narrator.  Not that her narrators are particularly unreliable - just the question of reliability seems to be rather sidelined.  Well, in Curriculum Vitae she is very concerned with reliability (I've typed that so often it doesn't feel like a real [reliable] word any more...) and refuses to trust her own memory: 'I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses'.  But there are definitely signs of Spark-the-novelist in the structuring of the autobiography.  Her usual trick of playing around with time makes an appearance, but it's the enticingly disjointed beginning which made me realise Spark-the-autobiographer was no real distance from Spark-the-novelist.  She starts by writing about bread, under its own little subheading.  And then butter.  And so on.  It's an interesting way to structure a childhood, but I don't think any other method would suit this most unconventional of novelists.

Spark grew up in beautiful Edinburgh, amongst family and neighbours who were fairly poorly-off, but with many strict manners and customs - although her own parents seem to have been pretty fun.  I can't summarise Spark's many details about this upbringing, but it demonstrates how incredibly observant she was from an early age - and who knows what she left out, because she couldn't find corroborating evidence?  There are definite signs of the latent novelist in Spark:
I was fascinated from the earliest age I can remember by how people arranged themselves.  I can't remember a time when I was not a people-watcher, a behaviourist.
A while later, whilst completing her education at Heriot Watt College, she notes:
I was particularly interested in precis-writing, and took a course in that.  I loved economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning.
There, I think, you have the two keystones of Spark's novelistic power.  She is endlessly perceptive, and always concise.

In the early section of the autobiography, the part which was of most interest to me (and might well be to others) was on Miss Christina Kay ('that character in search of an author') whose teaching inspired Spark, and helped inspire her most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie.  Of course they are not the same - Spark is too good a writer to lift people straight from life, even if that were possible - but they shared a love of educating girls, of Mussolini, and art.  Spark shows how she used Christina Kay, and where she invented.  Indeed, Spark often finishes an anecdote by mentioning which short story or novel the event helped influence.  The following excerpt is an example of this, but also of the way Spark writes her autobiography with the same unusual, out-of-kilter twists she presents so often in her novels:
Just round the corner in Viewforth lived Nita McEwen, who resembled me very much.  She was already in her first year at James Gillespie's School when I saw her with her parents, walking between them, holding their hands.  I was doing the same thing.  I was not yet at school.  It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, when children used to walk with their parents.  My mother remarked how like me the little girl was; one of her parents must have said the same to her.  I looked round at the child and saw she was looking round at me.  Either her likeness to me or something else made me feel strange.  I didn't yet know she was called Nita.  Later, at school, although Nita was in a higher class and we never played together, our physical resemblance was often remarked upon.  Her hair was slightly redder than mine.  Years later, when I was twenty-one, I was to meet Nita McEwen in a boarding house in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  There, our likeness to each other was greatly remarked on.  One night, Nita was shot dead by her husband, who then shot himself.  I heard two girl's screams followed by a shot, then another shot.  That was the factual origin of my short story 'Bang-Bang You're Dead'.
Perhaps I should elaborate on the self-confessed disastrous marriage which led to her life in (then) Rhodesia; her cunning escape back to Britain during World War Two; her hilarious account of working for the Poetry Society (which helped inspire Loitering With Intent); the various dramatic and often calamitous personal and professional relationships Spark had... but I want you to read Curriculum Vitae yourself, so I shan't.

Spark finishes this autobiography at about the time her first novel, The Comforters, was published.  She talks of a second volume, and it is such a shame that this volume never appeared - I would love to see her take on literary circles and the trappings of fame - but what Spark has written is wonderful enough.  Curriculum Vitae has all the energy and unusual qualities of a Spark novel, with the added joy of acting as a centre from which all her other works are spokes.  Once you've read three or four (or so) Spark novels, I recommend you hunt this down and see her bizarre take on real life - it's further evidence of her claim (I believe) to being one of the 20th century's greatest writers, and certainly one of its most original.

23 comments:

  1. Lovely to see we were having some of the same thoughts independently. I can confirm The Abbess of Crewe is one of her odder books...

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    1. Yes, when I read your review I was surprised by what similar thoughts we'd had! Well, we can't both be wrong, can we? ;)

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  2. Oh, I can't wait to read this. Muriel Spark is fascinating. And, as you said, she was an original thinker and writer. Thanks so much for your review. This week has been a lot of fun and a real learning experience.

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    1. It has, hasn't it? Great fun!
      I really admire a writer who can be so original, from her earliest work onwards.

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  3. Thank you very much for this post. So informative.

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  4. I'm going to have to hunt this down, sounds like one of the more interesting author autobiographies out there!

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    1. It definitely is - and, like everything else Spark wrote, very economical. It's only about 200pp.

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  5. I was just starting to wander about Spark's life and autobiography, so thank you for this! It's funny, I just posted about the painting Job and his Wife by Georges de la Tour, which plays a central part in The Only Problem (not that it 'does' anything, it just hangs in the museum of Epinal)- Spark is very perceptive, and yet she describes the figure of Job as a young man, which he clearly isn't. Those kind of shifts happen a lot when writers describe paintings in their novels :-)http://leenhuet.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/het-enige-probleem/

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    1. I did go and look up the painting when I read the book - not what I expected, from Spark's writing, at all!

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    2. It's a breathtaking painting, but Sparks description is a bit hasty - still, I like her notion that the painter represented Job and his wife as a very loving couple: in the Book of Job love between them seems to have cooled a little, owing to all the disasters. Well, who could blame them? I'm reading the book of Job now, and I can imagine how it struck Sparks imagination: great dialogue, incredible disaster - just the ticket.

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  6. That should have been 'to wonder about', sorry!

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  7. The Abbess of Crewe, Symposium, Reality & Dreams - a meander on http://apthomas.wordpress.com/
    AKA Our Vicar's Wife
    What fun!

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  8. Oh, she is a rather interesting person, isn't she? I'll put this on the list as well.
    Thanks for your review

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    1. I never doubted she would be an extraordinary person, and she was! And she writes about the links between her life and her novels really well.

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  9. Great review. This sounds interesting! She had a fascinating life - I've read Martin Stannard's biography, but I'd love to get this perspective from Spark herself.

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    1. Thanks Dan! I must get the Stannard biog off the shelf sometime.

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  10. I'd like to read this alongside the biography that was recently published. This autobiography is known for being slyly elusive and for all the things it doesn't say. It would be interesting to compare the two!

    And my contribution to the week is here:
    http://litlove.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/muriel-spark-week/

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    1. Oh, is it known for that? I should have been better prepared! Although I did rather expect this sort of off-kilter autobiog from Spark.

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  11. The book sounds fascinating - thanks for the review!

    Oddly enough, Martin Stannard is one of my daughter's tutors at University and she referred to him as "the guy who wrote the biography of Muriel Spark that she hated" - I wonder if that's true?!

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    1. I believe it wasn't allowed to be published in her life... not sure!

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