SPARK, Muriel (Sarah)

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Nationality: British. Born: Muriel Sarah Camberg, Edinburgh, 1918. Education: James Gillespie's School for Girls and Heriot Watt College, both Edinburgh. Family: Married S.O. Spark in 1937 (dissolved by 1943); one son. Career: Worked in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office during World War II. General secretary of the Poetry Society, and editor of the Poetry Review, London, 1947–49. Awards: The Observer story prize, 1951; Italia prize, for radio drama, 1962; James Tait Black memorial prize, for fiction, 1966; F.N.A.C. prize (France), 1987; Bram Stoker award, 1988; Royal Bank of Scotland-Saltire Society award, 1988; T.S. Eliot award, Ingersoll Foundation, 1992; David Cohen British Literature prize, 1997; Gold Pen award, 1998. C.Litt.: Royal Society of Literature, 1991. D.Litt.: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, 1971; University of Edinburgh, 1989; University of Aberdeen, 1995; University of St. Andrews, 1998. Honorary degrees: University of Heriot Watt, 1995; University of Oxford, 1999. Honorary fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1963, and Royal Society of Edinburgh; honorary member, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1978. D.B.E. (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire). Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1996. Agent: David Higham Associates Ltd., 5–8 Lower John Street, Golden Square, London W1R 4HA, England.

Publications

Poetry

Out of a Book (as Muriel Camberg). Leith, Midlothian, Millarand Burden, 1933.

The Fanfarlo and Other Verse. Aldington, Kent, Hand and Flower Press, 1952.

Collected Poems I. London, Macmillan, 1967; New York, Knopf, 1968.

Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems. London, Granada, 1982.

Plays

Doctors of Philosophy (produced London, 1962). London, Macmillan, 1963; New York, Knopf, 1966.

Radio Plays: The Party Through the Wall, 1957; The Interview, 1958;The Dry River Bed, 1959; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960; Danger Zone, 1961.

Novels

The Comforters. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1957.

Robinson. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1958.

Memento Mori. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1959.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London, Macmillan, and Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1960.

The Bachelors. London, Macmillan, 1960; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1961.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London, Macmillan, 1961; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962.

The Girls of Slender Means. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1963.

The Mandelbaum Gate. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1965.

The Public Image. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1968.

The Driver's Seat. London, Macmillan, and New York, Knopf, 1970.

Not to Disturb. London, Macmillan, 1971; New York, Viking Press, 1972.

The Hothouse by the Fast River. London, Macmillan, and New York, Viking Press, 1973.

The Abbess of Crewe. London, Macmillan, and New York, Viking Press, 1974.

The Takeover. London, Macmillan, and New York, Viking Press, 1976.

Territorial Rights. London, Macmillan, and New York, Coward McCann, 1979.

Loitering with Intent. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Coward McCann, 1981.

The Only Problem. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Coward McCann, 1984.

A Far Cry from Kensington. London, Constable, and Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Symposium. London, Constable, and Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Reality and Dreams. London, Constable, 1996; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Short Stories

The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. London, Macmillan, 1958;Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1960.

Voices at Play (includes the radio plays The Party Through the Wall, The Interview, The Dry River Bed, The Danger Zone). London, Macmillan, 1961; Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1962.

Collected Stories I. London, Macmillan, 1967; New York, Knopf, 1968.

Bang-Bang You're Dead and Other Stories. London, Granada, 1982.

The Stories of Muriel Spark. New York, Dutton, 1985; London, Bodley Head, 1987.

The Collected Stories. London, Penguin, 1994.

Open to the Public, New & Collected Stories. New York, New Directions, 1997.

Other

Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. London, Tower Bridge, 1951; revised edition, as Mary Shelley, New York, Dutton, 1987; London, Constable, 1988.

Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, with Derek Stanford. London, Owen, 1953; New York, British Book Centre, 1960.

John Masefield. London, Nevill, 1953; revised edition, London, Hutchinson, 1992.

The Very Fine Clock (for children). New York, Knopf, 1968; London, Macmillan, 1969.

Curriculum Vitae. London, Constable, 1992; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

The French Window and The Small Telephone (for children). London, Colophon Press, 1993.

The Essence of the Brontës. London, Peter Owen Ltd., 1993.

Editor, A Selection of Poems, by Emily Brontë. London, Grey Walls Press, 1952.

Editor, The Brontë Letters. London, Nevill, 1954; as The Letters of the Brontës: A Selection, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.

Editor, with Derek Stanford, Letters of John Henry Newman. London, Owen, 1957.

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Bibliography: Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark: A Bibliography by Thomas T. Tominaga and Wilma Schneidermeyer, Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1976.

Critical Studies: Muriel Spark by Karl Malkoff, New York, Columbia University Press, 1968; Muriel Spark by Patricia Stubbs, London, Longman, 1973; Muriel Spark by Peter Kemp, London, Elek, 1974, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1975; Muriel Spark by Alan Massie, Edinburgh, Ramsay Head Press, 1979; The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark by Ruth Whittaker, London, Macmillan, 1982; Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism by Judy Little, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1983; Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision edited by Alan Bold, London, Vision Press, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1984, and Muriel Spark by Bold, London, Methuen, 1986; Muriel Spark by Velma B. Richmond, New York, Ungar, 1984; Muriel Spark by Norman Page, London, Macmillan, 1990; "The Ancestral Laughter of the Streets: Humor in Muriel Spark's Earlier Works" by Regina Barreca, in her New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, Philadelphia, Gordon and Breach, 1992; The Women of Muriel Spark by Judy Sproxton, London, Constable, 1992; Critical Essays on Muriel Spark, New York, Hall, and Toronto, Macmillan, 1992; "The First Half of Muriel Spark" by Roger Kimball, in New Criterion (New York), 11(8), April 1993; "The Deliberate Cunning of Muriel Spark" in The Scottish Novel since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams, edited by Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993; "Muriel Spark and the Oxymoronic Vision" by Joseph Hynes, in Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, New York, St Martin's Press, 1993; "'We All Have Something to Hide': Muriel Spark, Autobiography, and the Influence of Newman on the Career of a Novlist" by Leon Litvack, in Durham University Journal (New Elvet, Durham), 86(55), July 1994; "Muriel Spark and Gothic" by Christopher MacLachlan, in Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, edited by Susanne Hagemann, Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1996; "Portraits of the Artists As Young Defiers: James Joyce and Muriel Spark" by Sharon Felton, in Tennessee Philological Bulletin (Chattanooga, Tennessee), 33, 1996; "The Remarkable Fictions of Muriel Spark" by Gerard Carruthers, in A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1997; "The End of History: Cultural Change According to Muriel Spark" by Rod Mengham, in his An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, Cambridge, England, Polity, 1999.

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"What's good enough for Archimedes / Ought to be good enough for me" ("Elementary")—Muriel Spark's verse mocks the inadequacy of scientific definition and rejoices in "an odd capacity for vision." Though "Against the Transcendentalists" elevates "poets" over "visionaries" and hopes "… that if Byzantium / Should appear in Kensington / The city will fit the size / Of the perimeter of my eyes / And of the span of my hand," the poem paradoxically celebrates the miracle these limits create—"The flesh made word." And the Kensington that obsesses a number of other poems is "Kensington of dreadful night" ("The Pearl-Miners"), where the persona invokes "latent Christ" ("Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard"). Sometimes the miraculous becomes merely the talking steel chairs of familiar satire on human interchangeability with artifacts ("A Visit"). Conversely, the elegant colloquialism of "Fruitless Fable," a chronicle of Mr. Chiddicott's sudden enslavement by his "perfected tea-machine," raises the poem from mock-heroic moral fable ("Alas, the transience of bliss—") to genuine fantasy. Occasionally fantasy dramatizes obsession with "… my other / who sounds my superstition like a bagpipe" ("Intermittence") or with "… the momentary name I gave / To a slight stir in a fictitious grave" ("Evelyn Cavallo").

Spark's most ambitious fusion of obsession with fantasy creates the "tremorous metropolis" of "The Ballad of the Fanfarlo," a hallucinatory "settlement of fever" in which vocal traffic lights and ether bowls seem as ordinary or extraordinary as everything else. This nightmare continuation of Baudelaire's prose satire traces the quest of the romantic poet Samuel Cramer for his alter ego, Manuela de Monteverde, and the dancer Fanfarlo but significantly changes the tone of the original. Baudelaire's Cramer ultimately edits a socialist journal and presumably no longer signs Manuela's name to "quelques folies romantiques," while Spark's hero, either true to his early vision or atoning for his defection, is willing to endure the horrors of "No-Man's Sanatorium" in his quest. Despite a generous epigraph from Baudelaire, the poem's atmosphere and stanza form suggest "The Ancient Mariner" and, at times, "Sir Patrick Spens" as filtered through Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode": "The new moon like a pair of surgical forceps / With the old moon in her jaws." Only in such passages, when Spark defines romantic art through parody, does the poem achieve the simultaneous re-creation and mockery of Baudelaire toward which it aims.

Cramer is funnier in a brief appearance as a visiting journalist in "The Nativity" when he replies to rumors of mysterious happenings at the inn: "No good to me if it's local." "The Nativity," Spark's longest religious poem, precariously blends faith and fantasy in a portrait of bizarre wise men: "You with the nose on top of your head, smell out / The principalities of heaven for all of us." Riddling wit defines the limits of religious mystery in shorter works—"Conundrum," "Holy Water Rondel," and "Faith and Works" ("We are the truest saint alive / As near as two and two make five"). Even an apparently secular exercise like "The Rout," which, in the manner of Marianne Moore, fuses a news article about a battle between bees and wasps in a village church with a dispatch from Cromwell, reinforced by quotations from Lawrence and The Pocket Book of British Insects: The Honey Bee, produces not only the eloquent parody of "the murder of innumerable bees" but also an elegant questioning of man's relation to the rest of creation. Like Spark's seemingly casual treatment of religion, the moralizing is always implicit, offhand. However complex her tone, Spark's forms are generally traditional. The more controlled the verse, the more the strictness of the pattern causes a concentration in theme that becomes incantatory, as in "Edinburgh Villanelle":

These eyes that saw saturnine
Waters no provident whim made wine
Fail to infuriate the dull
Heart of Midlothian, never mine

—Burton Kendle