Frances Wilson: Electric Spark - The Enigma of Muriel Spark review - the matter of fact

How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.

Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.

In 1992, hoping to counter the “strange and erroneous” accounts of her life put about by her sinister ex-lover and sometime collaborator Derek Stanford, Spark published a memoir entitled Curriculum Vitae and authorised a biography by Martin Stannard. She asked Stannard for a plain account of the facts, then handed over a hoard of documents. He delivered his first draft nine years later, and despite its fidelity to the primary material, Spark declared it a “hatchet job; full of insults”. “Lies are like fleas”, she lamented, “sucking the blood of the intellect”. This attempt to squash them had proven futile.

Reflecting on the disaster, Stannard concluded that Spark wanted the truth as she understood it: a more flattering account. Wilson suggests that she was after something far stranger. While she was a meticulous record-keeper, Spark believed that “facts strung together present the truth only where simple people and events are involved”. Fact alone could communicate little of her spirit. To capture the fullness and flux of truth, her biographer would have to employ a little art.

And so, Electric Spark begins with the ending, setting down Spark’s attitudes to posterity, and echoing Mary Stuart’s “En ma fin gît mon commencement” (“in my end is my beginning”). Wilson weighs the challenge before her and introduces the spooky notion that she will have to answer to Muriel herself. From here, Electric Spark returns to Muriel’s birth in 1918, and proceeds episodically. Each chapter is dedicated to a different phase of her history, an approach that is especially well-suited to a subject who, as Wilson notes on page one, “seems in every image to be played by a different actress”. We follow Spark through her childhood in Edinburgh, her unhappy marriage, the early days of her career in London, and her conversion to Catholicism. The chapters are organised into four sections, each named after a different Mary (Mary Stuart, Marie Stopes, Mary Shelley, and Mary Stranger), who together mirror the four Marys attendant on Mary Queen of Scots. In this way, Wilson retains the chronology of traditional biography, but gestures towards more complex organising principles: the fragile boundaries between fact and fiction, Spark’s preponderance of doppelgängers, and her belief that the passage of time is an illusion. Immediately, we understand that what follows will be stranger than fiction.

Spark said that she had been careful not to make her own life-writing novelistic. In the revised edition of her life of Mary Shelley, she wrote that she dislikes biographies replete with invented "reality". But, as Wilson notes, Child of Light is, in fact, “very novelistic” and contains the seeds of Spark’s own techniques as a novelist: her command of voice and her less-than-faithful approach to chronology. Perhaps, then, Spark meant that she disliked biography that was too like other people’s novels. Her own are so precise that the sparest details gesture towards fully realised characters and settings. Wasn’t it possible to write a biography which stuck to the facts, but dealt with them so artfully that the subject’s soul crept in?

Spark was, by temperament, less interested in truth than Truth: the eternity lurking in the instant, the logic of the universe and, later, the designing hand which reveals itself in glimmers, patterns, and coincidences. Her fiction is taut with this absent presence. The miraculous and the mundane live side by side. In Memento Mori, elderly characters seem to receive telephone calls from Death. In The Comforters, the narrator can hear the typewriter that produces her thoughts. In a fantastically strange short story, "The Seraph and the Zambezi", a real (and rather smug) angel crashes a nativity play. Spark recognised that there is as much force in the things that could have happened, as in the things that did happen. She described herself as a transmitter, and over the course of her life she tuned in and out of a polyphonic realm accessible only to children, artists, and those gripped by paranoia.

Wilson charts the development of these ideas across Muriel’s life, and a particularly enjoyable chapter is dedicated to her time at Milton Bryan in 1944. Working for the Political Warfare Executive, Spark “became obsessed with codes, secret messages and the circulation of fiction posing as facts”. She learned to talk on a scrambled telephone and witnessed the propagandist’s blended use of the plausible and absurd. Electric Spark places this work on a continuum with Muriel’s ideas about art and religion, and her methods as a novelist. This world of covert messages would later re-emerge during a period of Dexedrine-induced psychosis. As she recovered, Spark used her ill-health as material for The Comforters, which was published only six months before Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Both writers were alarmed by the similarities.

Recognising the strangeness of her story, Spark reworked it, and set her future biographer a puzzle. Solving it would require someone canny; someone who has a sense of the repetitions that shaped Spark’s life, and a reverence for the forces behind them; someone who, like Spark, has “X-ray eyes” and a talent for mischief. “I have followed as best I can the instructions she placed for posterity”, Wilson writes, and it seems that in Electric Spark, Muriel has realised the biography she had in mind. Focusing on her first thirty-nine years, up to the publication of her sixth novel, Wilson alludes to Spark’s own life-writing: for the first half of her life, she was gathering experience, and in the second half she transformed it, alchemically, into her novels. Her life, like her biographies, was half scrupulous recollection and half razor-sharp art.

Electric Spark’s structure is so elegant that it is difficult to describe. Each layer is shot through with the coincidences that Spark felt defined her life. Wilson has suspended her disbelief and written Spark’s history as if she really were a magnet for relevant experience. We feel the co-existence of the past, present and future in each moment, and the distinction between life and art is dissolved, as it was so often in Spark’s work. People become characters in books, unscrupulous biographers make use of fiction, and the plot of a novel starts to unfold in reality. Wilson’s triumph is to accept the idea that while the life inspired the work, the work created the life. Electric Spark is playful and sympathetic but does not sink into sentimentality. It proceeds with attention to Spark’s darker qualities and a profound understanding of her art. Fleet and complex, Muriel trips through its pages, and it is not difficult to believe she guided Wilson’s hand.

• Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury, £25)
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