On Muriel Spark: " A Poet and A Dreamer"

MURIEL SPARK 1918-2006

‘Scottish by formation’, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century has died, aged 88, writing till the last. Excerpts from article by Alan Taylor, Literary Editor, The Sunday Herald, Scotland UK , April 16 2006.

EVEN as a young girl in Edinburgh at James Gillespie’s High School – the prototype of Marcia Blaine’s in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark was known as “a poet and a dreamer.” Her poems appeared in clusters in the school magazine and she won city-wide prizes for her essays. Her fellow pupils knew her as a storyteller and her teachers, such as Christina Kay, on whom she was later to model Miss Brodie, were aware of her burgeoning talent.

It was another Catholic writer, Evelyn Waugh, who marked her arrival on the literary scene, lavishly praising her debut novel The Comforters. Her publisher took her to lunch to celebrate, after which, she recalled in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, she “went on her way rejoicing”. It was a phrase she used regularly and which, I believe, summed up her attitude to life. Once, attending a party at her house in Tuscany, I asked her how I might be of help. “Pour champagne ceaselessly,” she instructed.

In the course of making a BBC documentary about her life and work, I asked her to sum up her achievement. “I have opened doors and windows in the mind,” she said. She wrote 24 novels, several short stories and three well-received biographies in her long career but will be best remembered for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. She said she found it “useful” to be an expatriate. “Being at an angle I find a help,” she once told reporters. “It means one has a different perspective, a new angle of absurdity.”

Spark was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993 and in 1978 was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the many awards she received throughout her career was the David Cohen Literature Prize for lifetime achievement in 1997 and the Bram Stoker prize in 1987 for her biography of Mary Shelley. Her last novel, The Finishing School, was published in 2004.