AS SHE lay on the divan in her flat in Queen’s Gate, Caroline Rose suddenly heard the sound of a typewriter. Tap-tappity-tap.
It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.
Caroline, on another plane of existence, was Muriel Spark. She was trying to scrape a living by writing in London in the mid-1950s, divorced, with a small son. Coffee and diet pills kept her going, but also gave her hallucinations. Because “if you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly”, she had converted in 1954 from vague Christianity to Roman Catholicism. In her first published novel, “The Comforters” (1957), she was both Caroline and God, or fate, or that ubiquitous typewriter, tapping out behind the wall page after page of Caroline’s life.
God loomed large in Ms Spark’s dark, biting, witty novels. In the early years of her career it was the vogue for Catholic converts to be obsessed with Him, sin, and themselves. But unlike Evelyn Waugh, who warmly praised her, or Graham Greene, who kept her going with a monthly allowance and cases of wine, Ms Spark preferred to leave aside the heavier, guilt-ridden aspects of the faith. Her newly-made Catholics were comic and somewhat tentative. They did not agonise much. But, like her, they were perplexed that a divine Creator should allow evil in the world, and especially intrigued by the permutations of free will and fate.
Fate had taken Ms Spark to Africa in 1937, to a miserable marriage from which she escaped six years later. But Africa also gave her the material for a short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi”, with which she won the Observer’s Christmas short story competition in 1951. After this, gradually, she became famous. She wrote 23 novels, mostly daring, usually surprising and impossible, as she proudly said, to classify. Anything, it seemed, might inspire a burst of that needle-sharp pen, from Watergate (“The Abbess of Crewe”, 1974) to the disappearance of Lord Lucan (“Aiding and Abetting”, 2000). Her works were short, tight and beautifully constructed, hinting perhaps at the poet she would slightly have preferred to be.
Dabblings on the dark side held a particular fascination. “The Ballad of Peckham Rye” (1960) satirised Satanism in south London, while “The Bachelors” (1960) anatomised spiritualism in Victoria. (“The Interior Spiral ... That’s a make of mattress, isn’t it?”) Her light touch still managed to carry maximum disapproval. A phrase, too, could pin down more or less anything she spotted. “The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house.” “She yawned with her mouth all over her face.” Bathos was a speciality: “Human nature is apt to fail in spite of regular prayer and deep breathing”.
By birth and childhood formation Ms Spark was a Scottish writer, and always acknowledged it. Like freckles, as she said, her Scottishness could never be lost, though in her later Italian exile she revelled at being European. She wrote of Edinburgh
with a child’s intensity: the “amazingly terrible” smells of the Old Town, the sight of the unemployed fighting, spitting and cursing, but also the way it might become “a floating city when the light was a special pearly white”.
Her own neighbourhood, Bruntsfield, was middle-class, and her parents Jewish-Episcopalian. But she became gradually aware of the Calvinism around her, symbolised by the frightening blackened stone of the city’s churches. The God of Calvin, as she wrote in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, her small autobiographical masterpiece of Edinburgh public-school life, “sees the beginning and the end”.
As a writer, she could see it too. In “Brodie”, which became both a play and a film, she ran dizzyingly forwards and backwards in time, revealing how her characters would turn out or how they would die. There was, it seemed, quite a streak of Ms Spark in the scatty, romantic Miss Brodie: “Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first.” But Ms Spark painted herself as Sandy Stranger, a clever, ugly girl with “small, almost non-existent” eyes. Sandy was the sly onlooker and chief teller of the tale, aswell as the puller of the strings. It was she, naturally, who betrayed Miss Brodie to the authorities and ended her teaching career. And Sandy, after one torrid affair and one acclaimed book on psychology, became an enclosed nun, Sister Helena of the Transfiguration.
Nunnishness, it might be thought, figured little in Ms Spark’s real life. Instead there was fame, many prizes (though she missed out on the Booker, the biggest British fiction award), sleek clothes, and a fortune that drove her abroad to escape the taxman. Yet she lived for 27 years in a converted 13th-century church in Tuscany, happily eschewing the literary whirl, writing longhand in spiral-bound notebooks that were sent to her from Edinburgh. And she died in the Easter season, the best time for Catholics, in a way that might almost have been planned. Tap-tappity-tap.