Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography [Paperback]

(This refers to the original paperback edition published in England.)

I first read this book some years ago and picked it off the shelf again recently when I was desperate for something to read on a journey. It wasn't at all what I remembered. The first half of the autobiography is cool, almost affectless. The author seems to be slightly bored with the first part of her life, laying down the vital facts with the air of someone who has had to consult old daybooks and letters to find out what happened. Even her recollections of the teacher who inspired Miss Jean Brodie come across as perfunctory.

It is only with her marriage to "S.O.S.," her husband Mr. Spark, that the tale takes wing. Now we are finally in Muriel Spark territory, where every other person is mad or obsessive, and nothing is what it originally seems. Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Oswald Spark move to Rhodesia, where Mr. Spark is quickly revealed as a hopeless manic-depressive. There is a child, Robin, but he is quickly posted off to Spark's parents in Edinburgh, while Mr. Spark enters the services and is hospitalized as a madman. Muriel stays in Southern Africa till the last years of WW2, then lands in London, where she stays in a Kensington boarding house for 'girls of slender means' and quickly lands a plum job with the intelligence services. According to Spark, she got this job because she happened to be carrying a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Post-war, Spark found employment with a high-toned jewelers' magazine, then edited something called "Poetry Review," a wretched little rag that published poetry by amateurs who accompanied their submissions with cheques for twenty-five pounds, made out personally to the editor. The petty conspiracies of this little episode were later embellished into the novel, "Loitering with Intent." Then Spark set herself up as a freelance writer, teamed with yet another marginal weirdo by the name of Derek Stanford, and lived the bed-sit life for another decade, till her stories and novels lifted her into the outer energy-shell of literary fame. This memoir ends in the late 1950s, by which time Spark has attained fame as a rising young novelist (nearly 40), a Catholic convert, and favored pet of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

No doubt about it: Muriel Spark put her art into her fiction, and didn't have much left over for her autobiography. Reading this for a second time, I was impressed by the flatness of so much of the prose, and her incapacity for personal revelation. But was it really an incapacity, or just a refusal to indulge in creativity through a literary form she doesn't much enjoy? She twice refers to a revealing quote from John Masefield, something on the order of, "to an artist, all experience is useful." Useful, that is, in art.

But if you're not going for art, and simply relating the raw vitals of your life--with occasional asides about how this or that experience was the background for this or that novel--can you produce an autobiography on the same level as your novels? Obviously not. And for Muriel Spark, a professional and dedicated novelist to her fingertips, any notion of a revealing autobiography must have been preposterious.

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