Curriculum Vitae – Muriel Spark (1992)

This last phase of #ReadingMuriel2018 is a kind of – sweeping up all that is left phase. Those following my original schedule can choose between the final two novels that Spark published, her autobiography Curriculum Vitae or other biographies written about her. I chose her autobiography, because having read so much by Muriel Spark this year, I really wanted to understand a bit about who she was.

I certainly enjoyed Curriculum Vitae, it is a short, though thoroughly readable autobiography, although I can’t say I really got to know Muriel Spark herself – for me she remains rather elusive. Though Muriel the child, is perhaps a little clearer than Muriel the grown woman, the writer, the mother – it is that later Muriel who I founder harder to really envisage. Young Muriel; a child who took simple joy in a bicycle, who loved visiting her grandparents at their shop in Watford.

“It was an exceptional bike. I found I could make up poetry and stories in my head as I whizzed along, ringing my bell to scatter such of the sauntering population, with their little dogs, as were in my way.”

Born to a Jewish father and an English, Presbyterian mother Muriel Spark does paint a touching, colourful portrait of her Edinburgh childhood. Butter came from the Buttercup Dairy Company, bread rolls bought from the baker, fresh and warm from the oven. Through a variety of anecdotes, we see young Muriel grow up in an environment where her mother just doesn’t sound the same as the other mothers. School was James Gillespie’s High school for girls, and here Muriel was to be taught by Miss Christina Kay. This section of Curriculum Vitae concerning Muriel’s childhood and schooldays was my favourite part of the book.

“I fell into Miss Kay’s hands at the age of eleven. It might well be said that she fell into my hands. Little did she know, little did I know, that she bore within her the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie, the main character in my novel, in a play on the West End of London and on Broadway, in a film and a television series.”

Muriel Spark doesn’t ignore the difficult or painful aspects of her life, but neither does she go into great detail – certainly her account is unsentimental which may be a good thing. However, it feels as if she really wasn’t comfortable revealing too much. At just nineteen, Muriel Camberg as she was then, married S.O.S as he was often called, Sydney Oswald Spark, who was thirty-seven. Muriel followed him to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) where she was soon to regret her marriage. Muriel didn’t see herself staying long in Africa, she disliked the attitude of the white community toward the black people who they so clearly looked down on. Her marriage didn’t really last very long, long enough for a son Robin to be born, by which time the war in Europe prevented Muriel returning to England very soon. S.O Spark is presented as having had mental health problems and had tried to persuade his wife to have an abortion. Muriel refused, and their son Robin was born in Bulawayo in 1938.

With her marriage over, Muriel embarked on the lengthy process of obtaining a divorce but decided to keep her husband’s name. In 1944 she was able to get a passage from South Africa to England, but she left Robin behind for the time being. He was still a little boy and it was probably safer that way – there was no knowing if Muriel’s ship would make it home in one piece. Her son arrived some time later – by which time Muriel had settled in London and begun work of some secrecy, with the Foreign Office which brought her into contact with POWs. When Robin arrives, he is installed with Muriel’s parents in Edinburgh where she visits him from time to time. This peculiar arrangement continued, and Robin was effectively brought up by his grandparents, a fact Muriel Spark herself rather glosses over in her autobiography.

Later she begins work as editor for the Poetry Review – an experience she was to use in her novel Loitering with Intent, and it is in this later section of Curriculum Vitae that we see some of Spark’s bite. The people she worked alongside here and knew through the Poetry Society are portrayed as a bunch of petty individuals – the relationships between who got to be rather toxic. There are those who clearly annoyed her, and she uses her book to totally dismiss them.

“Perhaps my most annoying contestant was a banker and amateur literary man of sixty, William Kean Seymour, a born mediocrity. He told me he had himself very much wanted the job of editor and had been disappointed when it came to me. I had occasion to remind him of this in later letters, fortunately salvaged by me.”

She relates a particularly unpleasant exchange by letter with birth control campaigner Dr Marie Stopes, who is not shown here in a very good light. Yet, I couldn’t help but wonder at what Muriel Spark’s treatment of these people was – why did she provoke them quite as much as she seems to have done? Those who come in for a bit of a roasting are the former friends who she finds have sold her letters to an American university. Muriel Spark leaves us in no doubt about what she thinks about those by whom she feels let down and betrayed, though there is just a hint of vitriol in her account.

All in all, I found this a very readable and quite fascinating little book though not as revealing as I had hoped. The book ends with the beginnings of Muriel Spark’s writing success – and I wonder if she had meant to write another volume of autobiography and never quite got around to it.