Few among Muriel Spark’s circle of friends would have disputed the judgment of Storm Jameson when recommending Spark to the publisher Blanche Knopf in 1963: ‘I warn you, or remind you, that you are taking on a tartar. She has worn out two Macmillan directors already.’ Even tartars are forgiven, however, when they exhibit a touch of genius. ‘On the credit side, she is a good writer.’
Spark was a good writer of letters, too. They were often a joy to receive, as this fascinating first volume of her correspondence shows. (Jameson to Knopf is quoted in an editor’s note.) On the very day on which she was due for ‘a consideration’ at Knopf in New York, she told Alan Maclean of Macmillan that she and others had toasted his health the night before on learning of some unspecified triumph: ‘Vive Alan! All here who know you, and they are many & many, are delighted. I have laid so many claims to your acquaintanceship that I’ve half-forgotten myself whether you discovered me or I discovered you.’
The mild sting in the tail to the editor who had taken on her first novel, The Comforters, in 1956 – Maclean was one of the ‘worn out’ directors referred to by Jameson – is a leftover from the full-strength jab sent his way two years earlier: ‘I am tired of your ridiculous lies, your broken promises, your complete waste of my time in discussions’, and much more in the same vein, to him and to various colleagues.
By the time of ‘Vive Alan!’, Spark was under the care of a different editor, Robert Yeatman. He was surely advised of the risk of questioning the slightest thing in her writing but he let his guard slip when reading the manuscript of The Girls of Slender Means, due out later in 1963. ‘Either you are off your nut or I am,’ he was told in respect of his ‘mouldy query’ on p.108 of the manuscript. ‘It is grammatically O.K. It’s exactly what I intend, and the style is my own. I’m sorry if you don’t like it; but actually I couldn’t care less, because I made up my mind at the age of nine not to care less about criticisms of style.’ Her agent John Smith had been told ‘why I can’t touch your queries, but evidently he has failed to convey my intention’. Smith’s duties came to an end soon after. Yeatman went on enduring the good-cop, bad-cop routine until at least the close of the present volume. At this point, Macmillan had published nine books of her fiction in six years, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Ballad of Peckham Rye.
‘Don’t get cured entirely, as glowing health is bad for poetry’
The most notorious target of Spark’s wrath is Derek Stanford, an otherwise forgotten poet and critic on whom she has bestowed a perverse immortality. There are more letters to Stanford here than anyone else, largely dating from the period 1948-58. The pair were lovers. They collaborated on several projects through those years, involving Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and John Henry Newman. For a while Spark was eager for him to marry her, as she had once had hopes for another poet, Howard Sergeant.
The early letters to Stanford paint a pleasant picture of two late starters (both born in 1918) trying to make a way in postwar literary London. At times Spark wrote to him every day, in tones playful and passionate. ‘My Darling Derek, I can’t begin my day’s work until I tell you how greatly I love you.’ She pronounced herself fulfilled, and he was ‘identified with fulfilment’.
After their drawn-out separation, Stanford continued as a man of all work on the literary foothills, while Spark ascended to the peak. When their careers collided again in 1963, it was not an occasion of love and fulfilment. Stanford had written a short book about her – the first. It drew from Spark, increasingly resident in midtown Manhattan hotels (she also occupied an office at the New Yorker), a letter to the TLS in which she complained that the author of this ‘biographical and critical’ study had neglected to consult its subject. There was no legal obligation on his part to do so. She would certainly have tried to put him off, and might have threatened an injunction, as she did in later cases. Stanford went on to commit what to her was an unpardonable sin, selling her letters, including love letters, to a dealer in manuscripts, who then offered to sell them back to Spark herself. Many are included in this book.
The Letters of Muriel Spark is edited with exemplary attention to detail by Dan Gunn. There are delightful touches throughout. ‘Don’t get cured entirely,’ she tells a friend who has been unwell, ‘as glowing health is bad for poetry.’ She was writing on the August Bank Holiday, 1950. ‘The very name Bank holiday sounds so grim… Why can’t we have a holiday for Counting the Grass, or a Lie-abed Day?’ Readers have the pleasure of seeing her arrive at the opening words of one of her first short stories, ‘The Portobello Road’, in 1955: ‘One day in my young youth, at high summer, lolling with my lovely companions against a haystack, I found a needle.’
If only all tartars could pull off something like that. The sentence, which is virtually unchanged in the published version, is contained in a letter to Stanford, her ‘Own Dear Boy’, whose name occurs now only in connection with his perfidy. His fictional depiction as Hector Bartlett in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) is merciless. Is it possible that Spark, who converted to Catholicism in 1954, failed to absorb one of Christianity’s central tenets? It’s time to release Stanford from whatever chamber of literary Limbo confines him and allow him to rest in peace. The rest of us can look forward to the next volume of letters.
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