“As a Catholic, Muriel believed in an afterlife,” Alan Taylor acknowledges in his splendid Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark. “But even someone with her fertile imagination could not picture what it might actually be like. . . . She had often longed to go there, she said, as if it were Azerbaijan or Zhangzhou, so that she could come back and write a book about it. Heaven interested her but only as it might a thrill-seeking tourist. Long-term residency did not appeal.”
Now that she is there, presumably her opinion has changed. It’s pleasing to think of Spark under the larches of paradise, enjoying the state of the blessed yet somehow (let us imagine) aware of the festivities, publications, and innumerable other events marking the centennial of her birth on February 1, 1918 in Edinburgh, Scotland. She would not be abashed at the scale of this rolling celebration; she was confident of the lasting value of her work. Late last year, in addition to Taylor’s book, the first volumes in the Muriel Spark Centenary Editions appeared; all 22 of her novels will be published in hardback with new introductions. (The very first volume, The Comforters, features an intro by Allan Massie, a novelist and critic I greatly admire; his roughly 10 pages are loaded with a practitioner’s insights into the craft of fiction along with telling observations on Spark in particular.)
I think that over the years I have read all (or almost all) the books on Spark published in English—biographical, critical, etc., including collections of academic essays (some of which, as it happens, are excellent). Appointment in Arezzo is the best of the lot, hands-down. For her longtime readers, it will be ambrosia, but it would also be a good gift for a friend who has never tried Spark. Taylor, cofounder and editor of the Scottish Review of Books, has given us what Hugh Kenner called a “mimetic homage,” in a style cunningly suitable to its subject: a memoir that’s concise, elliptical, often very funny, affectionate but never gushing. (Spark hated gush.) And it’s a well-made book, too, lovely to hold, with some excellent photos. I do wish it had an index.
Taylor first met Spark in July 1990 in Arezzo, Italy, about 15 kilometers from San Giovanni, the country house where Spark lived with her companion, the sculptor and painter Penelope (Penny) Jardine, who joined them for that dinner in Arezzo. He had come to interview Spark. Some while after that congenial meeting, Taylor received a letter from Jardine, asking if he and his wife and children might want to house-sit at San Giovanni while Spark and Jardine were traveling. Thus began a lasting friendship.
Taylor’s book combines memories of his time over the years with Spark and Jardine interwoven with what adds up to a biographical sketch of the long arc of Spark’s life, supplemented by well-chosen quotations from her work. (I love the epigraph to Chapter 4, taken from The Abbess of Crewe, Spark’s Watergate novel: “A scenario is a garble. A bad one is a bungle. They need not be plausible, only hypnotic, like all good art.”) In part, Taylor wants to provide a corrective to Martin Stannard’s massive biography, a project that Spark gave her blessing to early on but then changed her mind about. Some of her criticisms had merit, but finally the problem was that she didn’t want someone else taking possession of her life and recounting it, however scrupulous his intentions (a sentiment I can certainly sympathize with).
I thought of that squabble over the biography while reading Taylor’s account of Spark’s indignation over the memoirs John Bayley published while his wife Iris Murdoch was still alive, with their detailed accounts of Murdoch in the grip of dementia. Taylor quotes from a letter Spark sent soon after Murdoch’s death to their mutual friend Doris Lessing: “It was a good thing that Iris was spared further suffering. For some reason . . . John Bayley gives me the creeps. He once said to me, ‘You’re a dear little thing but you don’t really believe all that rubbish about the Church, do you?’ (As if I’d say it if I didn’t.) I hated that ‘dear little thing’—f**k him.”
When I last wrote about Muriel Spark in these pages, it was for the issue of April 16, 2001. I was reviewing Aiding and Abetting, which turned out to be her next-to-last novel. You don’t see it mentioned alongside Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Loitering with Intent, say, but it’s in the same class. If you haven’t yet read it, there’s no time like the present. And there are, remember, 21 novels in addition to that, not to mention her stories, her poems, her essays, her one volume of autobiography, and more: cause for celebration and thanks in this centennial year.
John Wilson edited Books & Culture from its founding in 1995 until its closure in 2016.
