In 1995, Dame Muriel Spark, then one of Britain’s most distinguished living writers, was interviewed for a BBC documentary. During filming, the show’s editor commented that ‘her biographer must be the most depressed man in England’. Three years earlier, Spark had personally anointed Martin Stannard as the writer of what she intended to be the authorised version of her life, presenting him with the vast archive of documentation – spanning 50 years and 50 metres – gathered at her home in Arezzo. ‘Treat me as if I were dead,’ she instructed him.
Stannard understood this to mean that he should proceed as a traditional historian; by the time his hag-ridden book was published 17 years later he had learned his mistake. The construction of biography assumes a certain orderliness in its subjects, the author’s task being to summarise, arrange and analyse the facts of their existence; but Spark had never been much interested in doing anything so ordinary as living. Hers was not so much a life as a plot, and Stannard, unwittingly, was written into it.
Frances Wilson is a ferociously clever writer, and with Spark as her subject she needs to be. Taking Spark’s feud with Stannard as its catalyst, her biography of ‘the loneliest and most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape’ grapples with the process by which Muriel Spark created her greatest work of art, ‘Muriel Spark’; a writer who in a (discarded) author’s note on her most celebrated novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) declared: ‘It has always been my intention to practise the arts of pretence and counterfeit on the reader.
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