The radio interview I recorded with Dame Muriel Spark at her Tuscan home two years ago almost never made it on to tape because a dog outside could not be silenced. We waited for the preferred BBC background quiet during what seemed like an hour of growling, but were forced to proceed with the hound baying through the window.
”Poor thing,” said Spark. ”It’s howling for love.” The phrase seemed very Sparkian, an example offered in casual conversation of the elegantly macabre sentences that fill novels such as Memento Mori, The Comforters, Do Not Disturb and The Only Problem: investigations of fate and mania which were, perhaps, more typical of her sensibility and stylistic interests than The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the strongly autobiographical story of Edinburgh schoolgirls under the sway of a strange teacher, which would always be the novel most connected with her.
Even in her late 80s, hips recently replaced and eyesight fading, a yapping mongrel triggered — or, rather, sparked — the name she kept from a brief, unhappy marriage that perfectly suited her waspish energy as a writer. And, as often happened in a Spark story, the small detail hinted at a larger, darker story. There had recently been a spate of dog-poisonings in her part of Italy and so it was not impossible that we were hearing a death howl.
She had a twinkling relish for the unpleasant, which informed the sardonically omniscient tone of her fiction and led some readers to find her work cold and judgemental. But this trait came from a fascination with the role dark chance can play in life, an instinct confirmed by her conversion, in 1954, to Roman Catholicism, a religion in which good and bad luck are sanctified as divine planning.
One of the innovations of her fiction was a kind of narrative predestination, in which the fate of a character would be disclosed early on, often in a casual bracket. Editors would tell her that this reduced the tension, but Spark appreciated that the interest of the reader in fact increases as a shadow falls across the character.
Some time before the interview, a lightning storm had brought down a wall in Spark’s quarters and she enjoyed the drama of her escape from this potential ending, sidestepping fate or, as it would more likely have been in her fiction and her mind, God.
The obituaries on BBC referred to Spark as a ”British novelist”. Neither adjective nor noun, though, is really right. She was, at heart, a poet — and was more Scottish than British, but more European than either, living almost half her life in Italy.
Her time in Rome and then in Tuscany was a kind of exile, driven partly by taxation, but also creating distance between herself and two men with whom she had painful relationships: her only son, Robin, and a former lover, Derek Stanford, who she felt had betrayed her by trying to sell private letters.
Spark’s final years were spent with a female friend, the artist Penelope Jardine. There was some London gossip about this (presumably heard by the radio producer who asked me to discuss her contradictions as a ”gay Catholic”) and her London publisher had made me swear not to ask. But, in the end, it was the novelist who put the story straight: ”We’re not lesbians, you know.” — Â