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Death, Lies and Lipstick: A conversation with Muriel Spark, July 1999


Durrant's is an old-fashioned London hotel.

The waiters, you feel sure, could offer opinions on the Matabele Revolts, and the maids come fitted with crisp pleated bonnets (the kind my mother wore when she entered service in 1933) to signify their status. The lounge is gentleman's clubbish (only with fewer spills on the sofa) and the pictures on the walls are naturalistic, art-as-comfort oils. It looks like a set and, for the purposes of this newspaper, is. Durrant's is a literary hotel. Literary sorts, for their sins, get put in it.

Muriel Spark is certainly a literary sort. Eighty-one last February, she remains one of the most highly-honoured and respected authors in Scotland and England. She has come from her home in Italy with her companion and helpmate, Penelope, to receive an honorary degree from Oxford - her seventh to date. She arrives at the appointed place in Durrant's precisely fifteen minutes after six, impeccably turned out, five foot one and not small at all. She is, one may say, a presence.

The carefully-chosen dress for dining out later is floor-length, almost sombre; her face, however, isn't. Pastel-coloured eyeshadow and a little liner: powder, pink lipstick. She must get ragingly bored with folk telling her she doesn't look her age - she knows. For smalltalk, then, while the photographer conflates his zoom, I tell her I've read somewhere you can have lipstick tattooed on. "Ooh no, I wouldn't like that," she says, aghast. "What if you get fed-up with the colour?" Ah. Thinking long-term. When the sound-technician, a vivid beauty in dreadlocks, edges past with our tape-recorder, she can contain herself no longer. "I have to ask", she says,"but how do you do your hair?" She's almost coy. "Mine isn't dyed, you know. It really isn't." And she lifts a russet curl to prove it. Pictures pop into my head: one of the author as teenager, loosening her hair ("curlers would be unseemly at a death-bed") before going in to hear her grandmother's death-rattle; another of Mrs Fiedke admiring the eminently stainable clothing of the doomed Lise in The Driver's Seat. In life and in her fiction, Muriel Spark notices the female. More. You can see it in the sidelong glances when we talk about men. She likes women.

At the same time it could not be said Dame Muriel is just one of the girls. Life in the distant heights of Tuscany, a driven sense of purpose, a preoccupation with the Book of Job - how long a list need be made? Most of all, there's the frightening literary reputation - novels pared to the bone, worm-holed with wit, demanding and chilly. "The essence of her Art", warns Malcolm Bradbury, seemingly unaware of the sex-role expectation behind the remark, "is its hardness." Meet her in the flesh, however, and you are forcefully reminded that Muriel Spark - and the work she produces - glories in paradox. That her settings and characters are often drawn from the solid detail of Spark's own life is an open business. All the same, the texture of many of the protagonists of her books (January Marlow, Fleur Talbot, Jean Brodie, Lettie Colston) is so present on meeting their author, it's hard to avoid a feeling of surreality.
"I don't see what else you can draw on for fiction but your life," she says not many minutes into our conversation, "not only your own life but what you've learned or read from other people's lives. It's one's own experience after all, don't you think?"

Some of that experience was detailed in Spark's autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992): the Jewish/Presbyterian beginnings as Muriel Camberg (which, according to Alan Massie, gives her writing its Old Testament/Calvinist tone); bread, butter and James Gillespie's School for Girls (teacher Miss Kay would become Miss Brodie); leaving Edinburgh for Rhodesia and marriage, aged nineteen, to Sydney Oswald Spark; the birth of her son in 1938; the return to London, alone, in 1944 to work for the Foreign Office (telling lies to demoralise the enemy); her stormy editorship of the Poetry Review, poverty, conversion to Catholicism, and the publication of her first novel just before her fortieth birthday. It stops then, she says, because "everybody knew what I was doing after that. I was writing novels."
"I checked it like a biography," she says. "I researched it. I remember my childhood very strongly ... but when I was writing, I was afraid I was making mistakes. What I did was if I didn't have written evidence, letters things like that, I got verbal evidence. I gave it to my brother. He remembered everything that I said, and more besides. I had support for practically everything."
I confess to being astonished. In Curriculum Vitae itself, the mention of "archives of letters ... a personal defense... The silent, objective evidence of truth should I ever need it," seemed astonishing too. What sort of mind seeks out "evidence" as appropriate for the "memory lane" part of one's own past? A constitutionally private person? Someone whose sincerity has, at some crucial time, been doubted? Someone who finds falsehood unbearably threatening? Someone for whom emotional truth is a potential pitfall, or with a deep faith in One Way?
"Do lies worry you?" I ask. She seems a little puzzled by the question. I try, "Do lies interest you?" instead.
"They outrage me", she offers. Then something clicks. "Yes, lies do interest me because fiction is lies. Fiction is lies. And in order to do this you have got to have a very good sense of what is the truth. You can't do the art of deception, of deceiving people so they suspend disbelief, without having that sense very strongly indeed... Of course there is a certain truth that emerges from a novel, but you've got to know the difference between fiction and truth before you can write the novel at all. A lot of people don't - a lot of novelists don't - and what you get then is a mess....people run away with the idea that what they are writing is the truth." She puts her gaze on full-beam. "You must be all the time aware it's not."

Spark's first novel, The Comforters, knows it in spades. It's a book about writing a book, about the nature of reality and truth, about disembodied voices, death, psychosis and grace set in Queen's Gate, London. Caroline Rose, the book's heroine, is "on the Jewish side". She is a student of the Book of Job, has been in Africa, and is seeking God. Further, she is writing a book about novels and begins to suffer from delusions and aural hallucinations which suggest she is not writing, but being written as a character in someone else's book. That's the fiction. In reality, a few years prior to writing this book, Spark herself had been writing a book about TS Eliot, was penniless, suffering from anorexia, insomnia and depression and living chiefly on Dexedrine and coffee. When the delusions and aural hallucinations began in earnest, her priest helped her to a rest-home and some amateur therapy. Her conversion fused Life and Art, found her true subject-matter, her uncanny ability to "transfigure the commonplace". This is me and not me, the voice in the book seems to say. I'm making this all up to tell you the truth. Literary London, the decision-makers in these things, had been reading Kingsley Amis and John Braine, then there she was, with her terrifying clarity of vision: lies, death, and "the providence of God", a bolt from the blue.

"I think its very difficult to put my work in any genre and under any label - very very difficult," she admits. "It bothers people."

Of course, the presence of the Infinite in the everyday, terse delivery and crowding epiphanies are part of Scottish writing's traditions, but Literary London, less well-read in these matters, were confounded. Since, the conmen and blackmailers (The Bachelors, Not to Disturb, The Public Image, Memento Mori);compulsive liars (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Driver's Seat); self-dramatists (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means); directors of film, actresses (Dreams and Reality); image-merchants (The Public Image), persistent fantasists (The Hothouse by the East River) fakers (The Takeover) and, of course, writers (The Comforters, Memento Mori, Loitering with Intent, The Only Problem, A Far Cry from Kensington) have stuck to her guns; all embroiled in plots of their own hatching within the plots of Mrs Spark. Clever is too perfunctory a word, consistent too broad. It's driven, glittering stiff, the greatest rewards of which are to be found by simply keeping up. Speak to their author now, however, and she would almost have you believe it just fell out that way.
"I write as a Scot and I write as a Catholic," she says. "I don't even have to think about it. That's there like your freckles you know." Not much later she says something I've read her say before, in an interview from 1970: " It just comes natural to me. I just construct it as I go along. It's a built-in sense."

Talking about her own astuteness bores her. When asked what moved her to write Memento Mori, a book peopled with characters in their eighties, in 1959 when she was forty-one, she says simply: "I used to go and see my mother and her old friends who were in their 80s - they were in hospital dying and everything. I nursed my own grandmother too as a child. So I did know a bit about old age...my mother had a lot of friends who were much older than her - you know how it is in Edinburgh. It wasn't difficult."
But isn't she concerned that her work will be labeled "autobiographical" in a more simplistic sense than that which was intended? She shrugs. "I can't say I really care as long as they enjoy the books. My one aim, especially with Loitering with Intent, was to give pleasure....and give experience. All artists should give experience and should show people how to get experience - to open windows and doors. If you don't do that you've failed. I'm sure of that."

You'll wait a long while, however, for her to give experience of some things: how to escape a psychotic husband, how to live in direst Africa with a small child and little support, how to give your child to the care of its grandparents far away while you struggle for a living in London. Clearly, some experiences are one's own. At only one point in our conversation do I dare broach any of these matters. "There's a photograph of Bluebell the cat in Curriculum Vitae'" I say, "but none of your husband." And the face that lit like a starlet's at the mention of the pet freeze-frames before a contained flurry of words, an assertion of definite distance to both Spark and the memory of what his illness dished out some sixty years ago. The words "manic-depressive paranoid," when she speaks them, make her shudder. "I think I should have reacted more strongly at the time," she says eventually. "Been tougher."

It's there in the autobiography too: if he had not been an object of pity, I would have been much more tough. At some stage, you feel she has considered Horace Walpole's famous epithet - The World is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel - and taken a tip. Opting for comedy, albeit deadly serious comedy, saves your sanity. It's hard to fault the logic. In the fifties, when Muriel was a young woman with little to shore her up in the world save a belief in her own talent, feeling couldn't have seemed much cop. It had no intellectual appeal, earned one no standing and, for women especially, must have seemed terminally trapping. In her fiction (Bang Bang You're Dead, The Driver's Seat, The Girls of Slender Means) feeling, at least where it means attachment to men, is the undoing of women; in life, Spark, as she says herself, was a "bad picker". Many female literary achievers - as evidenced by Tilly Olsen's superb study Silences and a pair of open eyes - are. In some ways, disastrous marriage to a pathological truth-twister could only have confirmed the necessity for harder thinking as the most reliable way to a functioning future. While Penelope Mortimer (also born in 1918) coped with the man-induced chaos in her life by (heroically) adapting to chaos: Spark (also heroically) spurred herself into practical distance. Into "toughness". Sitting opposite her, here in Durrant's Hotel, it occurs this could not have been - perhaps is not still - an easy option. Maybe it was the only one. Even the apparently lighter, brighter books have floorboards riven with cracks, showing darker things beneath. To keep one's footing in such a world, a tough mindset is essential. Nothing to do with "hardness", Mr Bradbury, nothing at all.

"Did you see the television version of Memento Mori?" she asks suddenly. "I hope not. A horror man...a producer (may he rest in peace because I would give him no peace myself) twisted the end to make it absolutely sentimental, the very opposite of what I meant. There's this rather interesting Jean Taylor - she'd been the maid to the successful novelist and she was very independent in mind and wouldn't take charity to go into a home and wanted to stay on in the old peoples ward. And does he have her say? "The tables have turned," or something. "The tables have turned." As if she was a disgruntled cook...or some terribly bolshy comedy character which was not my way of thinking at all. It's so banal, d'you see?"

Banal rhymed with anal. I do see. I do. Since "that rather interesting Jean Taylor" has been brought up, I quote her.
'"How nerve-racking it is to be growing old!" Jean says. "How much better to be old!" Well then. Is it true?
"That is true," she says, brighter immediately. "I'm now 81 and I think the happiest years started between 60 and 70. Apart from illness and pain with my back and a few things like that, I am much happier now. For one thing, I know how to handle life. Up till the time I was 60 I was never very capable of saying no, of really saying this is the way I do it and being absolutely firm." She smiles broadly. "Now I do."
"You're more confident?"
"Oh, much more confident. I used to be sold the idea that what I was writing was some little cult and people wouldn't buy the things. Publishers used to go on that way until I just got rid of them."
"How?"
"I got new publishers."
She's sitting forward now on the edge of the burgundy-plush, bubbly. She can tell we're moving towards her most immediate enthusiasm - what's happening in the here and now. She's quite right. We are. She's writing a novel, a play, a poem and a short story for starters.
"The poem is about losing your eyesight - it fades and you see. It's not that you lose eyesight but you see new things. What's the paper round the curtain? you think, and its's really the space between the curtain and the window... Instead of seeing a photograph you see an impressionist painting".
"You knew that!" I squeak. I'm bubbly now too. "It happens in Memento Mori! Dame Lettie thought she saw a spider and it was a feather."
"That's it! Now...I'm also writing a story called 111 years without a chauffeur ... based on old photographs which is my experience right now and..."

Penelope, who has been sitting quiet in the corner this while, comes forward to show us both the time. A dinner companion is waiting somewhere, a gang of residents, intent on early-evening sherry, are probably preparing to storm their lounge in an effort to win it back. She's not done, though. The impeachment trial of President Clinton ("The Americans are Puritans still") rears its head; the Russians as military tacticians ("I wouldn't have been able to foresee that the Russians would move into that airport. Penny, why didn't I see that?"); Edinburgh weather, the notion of global news.

"Then I've been so fascinated by the war in Kosovo that I've been neglecting everything else. I just goggle...It's like a cheap, violent, pornographic novel. A whole colony of ethnic Albanian women can't go back because they have no where to go. Their houses burned down, they've got children, the men have either disappeared or been killed...they've got nothing, nothing at all, not even an education... It makes you think that woman have been victims in this war more than any other people."

Lies, providence, reality and dreams. And women, what happens to women. She's certainly not done. The author who from the first was prepared to eschew whatever "the great novel" was supposed to be, who threw over notions of purity of style and the rather masculine cult of Big = Important ("Mrs Tolstoy, you know"; "Keep them very short") is still in control of her marbles and keen to play them. If it were not so fanciful, you might be tempted to see her as one of her own characters: one of the ones who endure, who observe, who do not lose their grip. Whose feeling is of a different order. And who wear lipstick.

Before leaving, she inscribes my copy of Memento Mori in handwriting exactly like my mother's was - the same country's teaching, same era, showing through. What she wishes me is luck; what the book wishes me is its leitmotif. Remember you must die. Then she goes on her way, talking about the North Sea, light, land. Rejoicing, one hopes. Rejoicing.