Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography by Muriel Spark, Carcanet Press Ltd, £8.99
Nothing can beat hearing it from the horse's mouth. Especially if the animal in question is the novelist they called 'the Sparklet'. So it's great, after learning about all the goings on behind the scenes from Martin Stannard's biography last year, to return front-of-house for the full performance: Muriel's Spark's early life as imagined by Spark herself.
Her autobiography, first published in 1992, has all the reverberating vigour of one of Miss Jean Brodie's aphorisms. While veracity might not be Spark's guiding light here, she certainly gives the impression of not wanting to fall into the deceitful traps of the memoirist. A series of images of childhood are delivered as just that: fleeting, almost unconnected impressions of the past. She is told that her paternal grandmother read the Bible all day and had hair so long she could sit on it, and so she pictures her 'doing both at the same time'.
Her vignettes appear to be randomly selected, but in fact reveal Spark as an energetic, insecure artist, unable to suffer gladly those she had labelled 'fool'. Even her husband, Sydney, from who she took her fortuitous surname, is held at arm's length like a dubious specimen: 'If my husband had not been an object of pity, I would have been much tougher.' Rather like the Edinburgh schoolmistress who first made Spark writing famous in 1961, she knows that poise and authorial tone are more than just literary style; they are central to any story. Without an attitude, a narrative means nothing. And it's hard for the reader not to conclude, as Spark did about the teacher who first inspired her to write, that 'her dazzling non-sequiturs filled [the] heart with joy.'
Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark (Carcanet, £8.99)
What happens?
Spark's autobiography takes the writer from her childhood in interwar Edinburgh to the eve of the publication of her first success. Along the way we meet the model for Miss Jean Brodie, Spark's mentally troubled husband and short-lived marriage, and her controversial stewardship of the Poetry Society.
Any Good?
It's a marvellous, waspish piece of life-writing which measure out its revelations very carefully. Really, it's a book about the formation and the protection of talent, a tougher call for a woman in this period than for a male artist. Curriculam Vitae is also funny, and one marvels at the cool control with which Spark recounts unpleasant events in her life.
In her own words
'One enraged reader who joined the campaign of harassment against me was Dr Marie Stopes, the famous birth control expert - on that account to be much admired. She was absolutely opposed to my idea of poetry... General meetings [of the Poetry Society] would often be led by Marie Stopes literally shaking her fist and making inflammatory comments. I think she was demented at this stage of her life. I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.'
Who hasn't thrilled to the all-female worlds of Miss Jean Brodie's creme de la creme and the May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means?Evocative depictions of Spark's school days and her post-war life at the Helena Club outline the alchemical transformation of life into fiction.
As a novelist Muriel Spark produced a body of work that is as notable for its intellectual vigour as for its clarity and wit.  Like a formidable favourite aunt, doling out treats but ready to crush sloppy thinking or moral sliding, her autobiography does not disappoint.  Her vigour is exemplified by her own extensive documentary archives and considerable research.  In a sense she has treated her own life as she would a biography of another person, but adds to this recalled emotion.  The story moves from her Edinbugh childhood (Jean Brodie at al.), to her early success in the 1950s, via an unfortunate marriage and Rhodesia, and the parallels with her fiction are amazing.
The reprinting of Spark's autobiography, which charts the writer's life from her childhood in Edinburgh, through to her disastrous marriage in Kenya, the birth of her son and working days in publishing in London, comes with a new introduction by poet Elaine Feinstein, who didn't know Spark well, but who understands this 'sly, tantalising account of her life'.
Tantalising is the perfect word: Spark doesn't detail the difficulties of her marriage, a spur of the moment decision made by a young woman anxious for adventure, beyond telling us her husband suffered from some form of mental illness. But there's a real trauma in what she doesn't say, and while the abandoning of her baby son to her parents care when she returned to the UK may look heartless to us now, it may be that she wasn't in a financial state to look after him or a fit emotional state either. I loved this autobiography for all that it didn't say, as much as for what it did.
First published in 1992 and reissued after the publication, earlier this year, of Martin Stannard's definitive biography, Spark's account of her youth - the work ends in 1954 - is as tantalisingly evasive and full of contradictions as any of her novels. Written to 'put the record straight', and to correct the 'lies' that the author alleges to have been told about her, it in fact obscures as much as it appears to clarify.
Acts that might be regarded as questionable - the abandonment of her young son, Robin, for example, whom Spark left behind in Edinburgh to be brought up by her parents while she pursued her career in London- are glossed over. Relationships that must have been important at the time are briskly dismissed. Of her husband, Sydney Spark, whom she accompanied to Africa at the age of 19 and divorced two years later, on the grounds of his mental instability, she remarks coolly: 'If my husband had not been an object of pity, I would have been much tougher (with him).' Of a lover, Derek Stanford, who was also her literary collaborator, she alleges: 'He resented my success as a novelist', and goes on to imply that the nervous breakdown Stanford later suffered was brought on by the publication of her first book.
There are many other such instances of the Sparkian fondness for settling scores, some of which come across as decidedly comic. A spat with Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, over Spark's stewardship of the Poetry Society during the late 1940s, is described with vituperative relish - Spark acidly remarking that it was a pity that Dr Stopes's mother had not been the one to practise birth control.
Enjoyable, too, is the book's account of postwar literary London, when Spark was struggling to establish herself as a poet - but even this is marred by a self-congratulatory tone. Every scrap of praise Spark received during this period is recorded, as if the author herself needed to hear it repeated. Perhaps the act of will involved in transforming herself from the plump young matron in early photographs to the icily elegant diva of her later years, required this kind of constant self-affirmation. Whatever the truth of this, Spark's supremely confident literary persona appears to have masked a deep insecurity.
Discussing why she kept her married name despite enduring just two disastrous years in Africa with her husband and his 'mental problems', the former Miss Muriel Camberg explains: 'Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and of fun'. This volume of autobiography, originally published in 1992, is not short on the former: the food, shops and family of her Edinburgh childhood are recorded with still-life clarity while her experiences of colonial Africa and war work in 'black propaganda' are fascinating. The 'fun', however, is tightly laced, coming through in depictions of Christina Kay, the model for Miss Jean Brodie, or her trouncing of an anti-semitic mother superior. There's also a score-settling portrait of an ex-lover and a 'wildly and almost constitutionally inaccurate' critic. 'We often laughed at others in our house', writes Spark, who, before even starting school, had mastered 'the craft of being polite while people were present' only to behave differently when the door shut behind them. No wonder this elegant book gives away so little of Spark's own vulnerabilities.