MURIEL SPARK’S MEMENTOS

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Britain had a great flourishing of new novelists: William Golding, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, and more. One of the more unusual was Muriel Spark. Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, she was that not-too-common figure, a Jewish (rather, half-Jewish) Scot. She grew up in that Calvinist city built around its fine Walter Scott memorial, became a youthful poet, then fled to Africa and a short-lived marriage. She came back near the war’s end and was engaged to work in black propaganda: ideal training for the literary life.

In poor, bomb-blasted, postwar London, it was still possible to lead a bohemian literary existence on nearnothing: writing reviews (and selling the review copies), helping tired elderly scholars with research, working on small literary magazines, undertaking commissioned books for small publishers. Spark lived a Grub Street existence, wrote poetry and various interesting biographies, and was active in the complicated affairs and bitterly nasty politics of the Poetry Society (poets bite). When, in the early 1950s, she turned her skills to fiction, all this was grist for the mill.

Everyone remembers The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where — recreating her Edinburgh schooldays — she gives a stylish, extraordinary, wonderfully ironic portrait of the prissily elegant teacher who wins her girls over by style and wisdom (nearly over to Hitler, in fact). Other books capture the grim postwar time when, as she said in The Girls of Slender Means, “all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.” Others, like A Far Cry from Kensington, return us to those Grub Street wars and the world of literary hopefuls and impostors, the basis of any useful literary culture, which in fact England then still had.

One key fact in her books was her religious conversion: first to T. S. Eliot’s elected faith, Anglo-Catholicism, then to Catholicism. She was received to the faith in 1954 (“one wet afternoon I did it”) after taking Jungian therapy. Her conversion was partly presided over by two eminent writers — Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. So she acquired not just a new interpretation of the world, but a distinct kind of literary tradition. The Catholic novel had long been practiced in Britain, but it had had a strange quirky renaissance in the work of Greene, with his black Catholic existentialism, and Waugh, who once said if he hadn’t been a Catholic he would have loved no one — as, indeed, he probably didn’t.

Spark’s fiction gave a new dimension to all this, a kind of black Catholic irony. The Girls of Slender Means is an end-of-wartime comedy about arbitrary salvations and damnations. Memento Mori is a (metaphysical) joke about age, dying, and the remembrance of sins. The Spark tone, cool and comic, was unmistakable. But perhaps it was the fine line of her writing, its skill and its artistic joy, that mattered most.

Spark’s real spiritual home or base camp was Italy, where a good many of her best books are set. From her Roman home came, during the 1960s, a wonderful burst of fiction. Her work became more and more concerned with illusions and realities, fictions and falsehoods. The Public Image, splendidly witty, morally serious too, is about a movie star, but above all it’s about the empty postmodern self and one convenient way to fill it (pregnancy — though even that becomes just another manipulable element of the public image). Film stars, filmmakers, and other fantasy-creators in our latter-day dolce vita took on increasing fascination, along with those dealing in law and money.

Which brings us to Reality and Dreams, Spark’s twentieth novel, a short crisp book that is typical of her style and manner. Some of Spark’s books give us a witty and retrospective history of the years since the war, which are seen mostly as the years of a great emptying-out of reality. Some, like this one, are set in the current world — at a time when, as Tom Richards, the central character, keeps remarking, “The century is getting old, very old. ” Tom is a 63-year-old English film director, married to an extremely rich American wife, Claire, who falls off a crane during the shooting of his latest movie, The Hamburger Girl. He damages his ribs, breaks his hip, finds himself in a world of nurses and physios, puts his film at risk, and generally comes face to face with his own dreams and realities.

In fact it’s time, as one of his daughters, Marigold, says, to see things — life and wealth and love and womanizing — under the gaze of eternity. Marigold is one of those figures of vengeance and memento mori who often show up in Spark’s fiction. She starts out grimly enough, as a moralist, ” worthy as any man or woman in the works of George Eliot, unlovely, graceless,” but gradually acquires a more ambiguous and sinister aspect. The end of the aging 20th century is a time severely afflicted with downsizing and ” redundancy.” As if symbolically, everyone in this book is losing a job, or falling off an economic or social perch, and so feels threatened with a crisis of purpose, or a sense of unstable reality. Marigold starts a book on this very subject, and, as she says later on, when she reemerges as a dissident hippie, “Few people realize what redundancy can lead to.”

Spark writes: “It was typical of Tom, and in a way part of the mores of that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions, that he made no distinction between divorced members of his family and those still married.” Tom accepts the absurd and the unexpected, and equally the sexual dances and the unexpected combinations and disloyalties of his world. So, in the creation of hers, does Muriel Spark. Infidelity, sexual and otherwise, is a matter of course. Tom’s filming crane, his ideal helicoptered overview, is his attempt to acquire a godlike, directorly role in a divine dream. Yet it’s a dream where there’s no apparent moral law. Life is a black comedy unfolding in a strangely divine universe. It’s improbable, absurd, yet still somehow governed by some hunger for truth, purpose, reality.

Reality and Dreams is a pure Spark novel: strange, disturbing, absolutely confident in its own vision of the world. It’s the work of the novelist who said, right at the beginning of her career, that “psychologists have shown how the world of dream and fantasy bears a direct relation to art,” and the stories of artists have a source in the psyche. The critics have often noted that most of her works deal with characters who are themselves engaged in making fictions, constantly reinventing themselves in roles, or trying to direct the lives of others. The result is often a dance of deceivers. The many “redundant” characters of Reality and Dreams, constantly shifting between roles in film and roles in life, are stylish manipulators in a deception that is as real as life itself. Muriel Spark has been writing fiction for forty years, but in no way has she lost her touch. Nor has she qualified her divinely — and wickedly — critical view of this postmodernizing century, now so old, so very old.

Malcolm Bradbury is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of East Anglia in England. His most recent books are Dangerous Pilgrimages (Viking) and The Atlas of Literature (DeAgostini).