Going up the winding road by which a writer assumes himself as such is a fascinating undertaking, a confirmation riddled with premonitory flashes and accidental vicissitudes. Perhaps that is the reason why Muriel Spark (1918-2006) decided to dedicate her autobiography to the early and initiatory 39 years of her long life, those that precede the stamping of her name on The voices (1957), the first of his twenty-two celebrated novels. Faithful to the Anglo-Saxon adherence to the facts, Spark rigorously exposes in Curriculum Vitae all those fantastic turns of youth that later fed his imaginative fiction.
Born into a modest Jewish family in Edinburgh, Spark received quick vocational signals already at school, when she was considered a poet among the student body. A decisive influence in that formation was the teacher Christina Kay, fifty-year-old scholar and rebel who would deserve the eminent character of The fullness of Miss Brodie (1961), the most famous novel by the Scottish author.
Eager for the world shortly following graduating, Spark sailed for Rhodesia –now Zimbabwe– to marry her fiancé Sydney Oswald Spark, whose acronym SOS would prove to be a bad omen. The exotic sojourn in the African continent lasted a sacrificed seven years, in which Spark divorced her violent and disturbed husband and resumed his single existence with her son, her Robin; at least SOS bequeathed her the sparkling last name with which the writer became known.
Back in London, Spark experiences another fabulous ups and downs when he lands a job with the Foreign Office intelligence service infiltrating anti-Nazi propaganda on German soil. Both that incognito experience and the period in Africa will be material for his narrations, as well as his subsequent conversion to Catholicism and wandering at work and on the brink of poverty by publishing houses and literary newsrooms.
First a poet and then a short story writer, Spark –who never stopped considering himself the first– finally launched into the novel with The voices, spurred on by a promising commission from Macmillan. The book, which has just been published in Spanish somewhat synchronously, received praise from Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, thus cementing the beginning of a fruitful career.
The protagonist is Caroline Rose, a young budding writer recently converted to Catholicism who perceives strange voices along with the noise of a typewriter: it is nothing less than the narrating voice, which reveals to Caroline that she is an invention. Metaliterary mischief allows Spark to exorcise a bad biographical moment – when the consumption of Dexedrine to suppress hunger caused him visions – and at the same time slip the manifesto of a jokingly aware narrative of his artifice.
The irony, the lightness and the generic game – in the background the family intrigue of a diamond smuggling in breadcrumbs is cooking – are evidence of a meditated style and a devout faith in the art of the novel, that which conceives life as a setting for the invention.
- Curriculum vitae Muriel Spark. The Equilateral Beast. 308 pages. $4,000.
- The voices. Muriel Spark. Blackie Books. 264 pages. $4,999.
