New Review

Here is a recent review for Horizon Review, issue 4. Am currently busy working on a new project for the Royal College of Art in London - and will report back soon. This issue of Horizon is jam-packed with excellent prose, poems and essays - well worth a look.

http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/04/index.htm

"Vicious When Cornered"
by Jaki McCarrick

Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009). ISBN: 9780297815921. £25.00

Martin Stannard initially considered calling his account of Muriel Spark’s life, The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, structured as it is around the nine major places in which she lived — Edinburgh, Southern Rhodesia, Milton Bryan, Kensington, Aylesford, Camberwell, New York, Rome and Tuscany. It is a good indication of how much place defined his subject’s work and of her life-long sense of exile — which she did not lament, but rather, like Joyce, thought of as a calling.

Stannard’s twenty-chapter biography documents the life of a writer who, after the death of Graham Greene in 1991, was often referred to as ‘the greatest living British writer.’ Each pertinent detail of Spark’s journey, from her birth in Edinburgh in 1918 to her death in Tuscany in 2006, is painstakingly regarded and expounded upon. All of her twenty-two novels, from The Comforters (1957) to The Finishing School (2006), are given clear and penetrating appraisal, their tropes and metaphors seen through the lens of Spark’s metaphysical preoccupations, her interest in the concept of transfiguration (how the ordinary becomes strange, the strange ordinary), issues of identity, of power and control, of the public vs. the private self.

It is undoubtedly a definitive work. Stannard’s studies on Spark’s novels constitute important literary scholarship, not least because he perceptively traces the source of inspiration and the development of each from events in Spark’s own life. For instance, we learn that the impetus for The Driver’s Seat (1970) originates in a newspaper report Spark read about a woman who had been complicit in her own rape; that it was Spark’s epiphanic visit to Israel in 1960 which gave rise to the The Mandelbaum Gate (1964). The novels are assiduously assessed, and how each was critically received at the time is also reported. Stannard also makes justifiable claims for his subject as an important innovator. For instance, in Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, Caroline Rose, the main protagonist, is not aware that she is herself a character in a novel. Only later does the reader understand that Caroline is a novelist writing a novel about a novelist. A clear-cut example of metafiction, such formal experimentation occurs in most of Spark’s novels and short stories.

In terms of the supporting cast in this rags-to-riches saga, Spark’s early years in South Africa with an unstable husband, Sydney ‘Solly’ Spark, are delicately explored. Stannard considers this early period to have scarred his subject, and to have made her unable to trust people for many years afterwards. Her years in London working for the Poetry Society and as editor for the Poetry Review, are also engagingly narrated: we see how an aspiring and idealistic young writer is horrified to learn that the world of letters she has come to embrace is as precarious as the damaged marriage she has left behind (Spark was fired from her editorship). Stannard provides detailed accounts of Spark’s relationships, with the dubious Derek Stannard and already-married Howard Sergeant, of her feelings of betrayal when the former stole and later sold her letters. Spark eventually found stability and peace in the Tuscany home of her friend, artist Penelope Jardine. Jardine emerges from this biography as one of the most stalwart and genuine figures in Spark’s life, who seems to have selflessly supplied the nurture and understanding the writer required to live and produce her work.

Spark herself proceeds from Stannard’s book as an ambitious but strangely innocent creature, vicious when cornered; who had a long literary apprenticeship, but was also tenacious, despite numerous lack-lustre reviews for her late novels (though she had many champions, too in A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch and Frank Kermode). She was also chameleon-like, able to adjust herself to the mores and challenges of each of the nine places in which she lived — as long as she did not feel betrayed or shafted by the people she worked with (publishers, editors and agents). Of all her nine lives, those spent in Camberwell and Tuscany seem to have been the most productive and fulfilling, the two places in which she apparently let loose the real Muriel Spark.

However, just as Spark’s life was governed by what she herself referred to as “the nevertheless principle”, so too with Stannard’s account of her life. In what is otherwise an exemplary work, there is a general sense here of trying to please — not the reader, but Muriel Spark. Despite Spark’s request of “no favour, no flattery, no veto”, Stannard seems nonetheless either overly enthralled by his subject (who was still alive for much of this biography’s composition), or steered by her — which is probably the case, as Stannard has admitted to his subject going through the text with him “line by line”. And this has created an infirmity in the work, which at times threatens to undermine the book’s rigorous scholarship.

The problem begins with Stannard’s choice of address: Muriel instead of Spark. This is fine in itself, but here augurs a clammy mixture of reverence and over-familiarity, which arrives first with Stannard’s numerous references to Spark’s looks, her dresses, her wardrobe, her weight. Then there is the tendency to agree with his subject’s stance on most matters, rather than stating the facts and allowing the reader to decide. This is most irksome with regards to the much-publicised animosity between Spark and her son, Robin. Upon her return from Africa, Spark had deposited her only child with her mother, Cissy, to be raised in Edinburgh. Years later, when Robin disputed his mother’s claim to being half-Jewish (and not fully Jewish), Spark excommunicated him from her life and removed his name from her will. When Spark befriended the Edinburgh lawyer, Lionel Daiches, the friendship eventually floundered not least because Daiches did not approve of Spark’s treatment of her estranged son. Stannard writes of this: “It seemed outrageous to Daiches (as usual wildly overstating the case) that a son should have to make an appointment to see his mother.” In such deeply personal matters, the reader can easily be left to draw his/her own conclusions. Instead we are (as in many other instances in the book) coaxed towards Spark’s point of view. Spark’s traces are detectable wherever any contentious point is discussed, steering the reader’s sympathy her way. To this reader there seemed no reason at all for Stannard (or Spark) to explain or attempt to justify the position she took on her own motherhood, or similar matters.

Had this been the biography of a major male literary figure, I doubt if so much attention would have been paid to the cracks in the subject’s domestic backdrop. Perhaps Spark’s own much quoted dictum of “never explain, never apologise” might have been the more appropriate course to follow here. Having said that, Stannard’s accommodating stance in the work is also often entirely appropriate, especially, for instance, when attempting to understand how, as a young impoverished writer, Spark had managed to survive the attention of those who did not respect her ambitions: “from all sides there had come echoes of doubt, particularly from men, who thought she took herself too seriously.”
Rather little attention is paid here to Spark’s poetry (there is some critical analysis in the chapter on ‘Kensington’). And as Spark considered herself first and foremost a poet, this is unfortunate. (This reviewer had read Spark’s poems prior to her fiction.) Nonetheless, the attention to her personal and domestic life, perhaps at the expense of a closer examination of her poetry and short stories, does make fascinating reading — if in a car crash kind of way.

Overall, the work is a brilliant achievement, flawed primarily because Stannard is not wholly detached from his subject (either because over a decade this may have been an impossible task, or because Spark herself was trickily ‘overseeing’ the text). Yet it is hard to criticise him for this, as Spark herself was obviously such a persuasive and enigmatic figure. Aside from Stannard’s lack of dissent, for his excellent scholarly appraisal of Spark’s novels and for his bringing together his subject’s remarkable treatises on the novel, this biography will, as many other reviewers have predicted, undoubtedly become a standard text. Any aspiring or apprentice novelist will find here a veritable treasure-trove of Sparkian insights, such as: “every fantastic image is real”, or “the best way to write a novel is to imagine you are writing to a friend.” In the late 1960s Spark also became deeply influenced by Robbe-Grillet’s ideas on the noveaux romans and her thoughts here are worth noting (and must account for the slimness of her novels): “no thoughts or feelings. You’re just observing, that’s all. A sighter.”
Stannard himself has a taut, economical writing style, which makes this a highly readable work. Though there is one inaccuracy in his depiction of the background to the year 1974 (in which Spark begins to imagine the shape of her novel, The Abbess of Crewe), when he states that an IRA bomb killed twenty-three people in Dublin. This was, in fact, claimed by the UVF.