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...She wrote on every other line of ruled spring-spine exercise
books, 72 pages long, which she had used since her schooldays in Edinburgh - on
average, seven such books would make a novel. In 1990 she told Lynn Barber that
she would only write three more novels, since her Edinburgh stationers had gone
out of business and there were only twenty exercise books left...

...In 1954 Muriel Spark suffered a physical and mental collapse
brought on by undernourishment (and, perhaps, slimming pills). She became
convinced that TS Eliot was raiding her larder and sending her coded messages by
way of the plot synopses on Faber book-jackets...

...Within a year of her illness she was converted to
Catholicis <...> Like everything else in her life, Muriel Spark's religion was
something she practised on her own terms. She once claimed never to go to Mass
and regarded it as a mortal sin to listen to sermons. She was virulently
anticlerical, vociferously opposed the Pope's teaching on birth control, and
objected to prayers telling God what he is like, "as if God didn't know". She
did not want to go to Heaven "if it means sitting looking at the Virgin Mary
standing on a cloud forever", though she was a keen admirer of the Holy
Ghost...

...To the end of her life, dark and dramatic things continued to
happen to her. During the 1990s, five of her dogs were poisoned, probably by
Italian truffle hunters...

Dame Muriel Spark

(Filed: 17/04/2006)

Dame Muriel Spark, who died on Thursday aged 88, was one of the
most elegant and incisive of British novelists, famous for her astringent,
vigorous prose and for the sinister and disorientating quality of her plots.

Sparkian characters bicker, part and come together; unnerving
nuns, subtly threatening servants, the malevolent and nearly mad walk on and off
the stage; casual violence, ritual suicides, macabre martyrdoms and summary
dispatches take place, and there are anonymous letters, blackmail and lunatic
telephone calls, all recounted with a detached and apparently simple irony.

Muriel Spark saw her novels as long prose poems, and drew
inspiration from the Border ballads of her native Scotland which she had loved
as a child. Her poetry lay in rhythm and cadence, the use of ritual and motif,
and concision of expression best shown in her ability to convey an entire
relationship in a few words: "He gave me a number and I repeated it slowly
enough to make out I was writing it down, which I wasn't."

Muriel Spark constantly toyed with her readers' expectations,
whimsically jerking them about like a cat teasing a mouse: at the end of
Hothouse, she revealed that all the protagonists had been dead since the opening
page.

She constantly surprised with alarming, caustic but highly comic
non sequiturs: "I have a great desire to make people smile - not laugh, but
smile. Laughter is too aggressive. People bare their teeth."

She was a supremely confident, uncompromising, even defiant
writer and always refused to edit her own style to suit publishers' tastes. She
spoke and lived as she wrote; dramatically, uncompromisingly and full-bloodedly.
She found dramatic potential in everything and she drew heavily on personal
experience of life, death, madness and religion.

She was a mistress of the acerbic or quixotic one liner, always
uttered with deliberate and steely composure. "I used to think it a pity that
her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control," she said of Marie
Stopes. "A spoilt brat," was her verdict on Virginia Woolf. "All right, she
committed suicide, but she didn't have to take the dog with her."

When she submitted her autobiography for publication in America,
an editor condemned it as "so full of calculated madness" that they could not
publish. Spark's reaction was swift and typical: "I said 'she has dedicated her
menopause to me'. I left it at that."

Muriel Spark's best-known creation was Miss Jean Brodie, the
Edinburgh schoolteacher who annihilates her enemies with her sharp tongue, and
there was something of the passionate schoolmistress about Muriel Spark herself.
She could not abide woolliness of thought or expression.

Spark's reverence for accuracy was evident in Curriculum Vitae
(1992), the first volume of her autobiography, in which she rather ambitiously
announced she had "determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by
documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses". But despite this stringency, Spark had
a great love of ornament and - like Miss Brodie - a penchant for the whimsical
and romantic.

She bought a piece of jewellery whenever she finished a book. The
Mandelbaum Gate was celebrated with a Hungarian necklace in diamonds and pearls;
The Public Image with earrings and a ring in diamonds and emeralds; Memento Mori
with an enormous double-diamond ring; The Bachelors with a Cartier watch; and
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with a cameo (for the novel), a blue enamelled
bracelet set with diamonds (for the play) and a turquoise and diamond ring,
necklace and brooch (for the film).

Spark's delight in rich symbols and rituals drew her to the Roman
Catholic faith, to which she converted in 1954. But she remained imbued with the
Calvinistic rigours of Edinburgh, where she was brought up.

Her working methods were both strict and ritualistic. The first
step in writing a novel would be to devise a title. This she would write down;
beneath it she would write "A Novel by Muriel Spark", and "Chapter One" beneath
that. She would then embark on the story, reciting the title to herself as she
went.

She wrote on every other line of ruled spring-spine exercise
books, 72 pages long, which she had used since her schooldays in Edinburgh - on
average, seven such books would make a novel. In 1990 she told Lynn Barber that
she would only write three more novels, since her Edinburgh stationers had gone
out of business and there were only twenty exercise books left.

She used black, very fine ballpoint pens, ordered from Harrods
and treated as sacramental objects. "Nobody else is allowed to touch one," she
said. "If anyone just picks one up to write a number, I throw it away in case it
affects my writing. I count them every day, and worship them."

In A Far Cry From Kensington, she dispensed advice on writing a
novel: "You are writing to a friend," she said. "Write privately, not publicly,
without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never
going to be published… Don't rehearse too much, the story will develop as you go
along… Remember not to think of the reading public. It will put you off."

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg on February 1 1918 in the
Morningside district of Edinburgh. Her father, who was Jewish, was an engineer
in a rubber factory; her mother, who came from Watford, was the daughter of an
occasional spiritualist and suffragette.

To the mortification of young Muriel her mother dressed with just
the showiness that the citizens of Edinburgh expected of Englishwomen: instead
of tweed she wore fox-trimmed coats; her stockings were made of peach-coloured
rayon or silk rather than grey lisle-thread; and she wore powder and paint. Yet
she was of a warm disposition and won friends easily - on family day-trips she
habitually gave out all the sandwiches she had prepared to fellow
passengers.

"Cissy" and "Barney" ran a lively household, with many visitors.
He would sing popular songs and ballads, while she - a former music teacher -
accompanied him on the pianoforte. They loved to dance.

"We often laughed at others in our house," Muriel Spark recalled,
"and I picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and
laughing later." From her mother - who used to sip Gilbey's port wine throughout
the day - she also learned the advantages of domestic incompetence. When on one
occasion later on in life she tried to make a bed she broke her ribs and
resolved never to attempt the operation again.

Young Muriel was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls,
where, at 11, she fell under the spell of Miss Christina Kay, a mustachioed
admirer of Mussolini, upon whom she later based Jean Brodie. With "dazzling
non-sequiturs" and great ardour, Miss Kay taught her girls, her "crème de la
crème" (the phrase was hers), art and art history, linguistics, arithmetic,
astronomy, astrology, spelling, grammar and scripture.

"I would like," Miss Kay told her class, "to see a grey coat and
skirt for the spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. Citron means lemon, it is
yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue. One would wear a citron beret in Paris
with a grey suit." She took Muriel to hear John Masefield read, and to see
Pavlova dance.

Even as a child, Muriel Spark's confidence in her own talent was
formidable: "After the age of 12," she wrote in her memoirs, "I didn't involve
my parents in school fees." This was because she was already a star pupil. Five
of her poems had already been accepted for publication and at 14 she won first
prize in a poetry competition to commemorate the death of Sir Walter Scott. Yet
she was also a great admirer of the direct, unpretentious "language of commerce"
and soon after leaving Gillespie's enrolled on a course in precis-writing at
Heriot-Watt College and took instruction in typing and shorthand at the Hill
School, Edinburgh. She then worked as a clerk at William Small & Sons, a
women's department store on Princes Street.

In 1937 she became engaged to be married to Sydney Oswald Spark,
a 32-year-old teacher she had met at a dance. They married later that year in
Southern Rhodesia, where he had secured a teaching job; she wanted to travel the
world, and he had assured her that she would have to do no housework.

"I don't know exactly why I married SOS, as we called him.
Anyway, I was attracted to a man who brought me bunches of flowers when I had
'flu." Her personal motto from then on was: "Beware of men bearing flowers."

She loathed Rhodesia: "The whole place was very shabby," she
said, "and I didn't like the people at all. The black or the white." But the
dark and macabre was never far away: on one occasion an old school friend to
whom she bore a striking resemblance was shot dead by her husband in a boarding
house nearby. Muriel Spark entered the sitting room the next day and was
perceived, amid much screaming, to be the ghost of the dead woman.

Worse still, SOS grew manic and violent and would wave a gun at
her - "My husband had an unbalanced family and his sister had to go into a loony
bin because she attempted to murder my mother. And then I realised I had been
taken in. But by that time I was expecting a baby." Nevertheless, she managed to
win Rhodesia's poetry competition two years running.

A son, Robin, was born at Bulawayo in July 1938, but by the time
the Second World War broke out in 1939 the marriage had collapsed and shortly
afterwards her husband was consigned to a mental institution. With great
difficulty, Muriel Spark made her way back to Britain in 1944 on a troop ship.
She left her son Robin in the care of some Catholic nuns - the trip was deemed
too dangerous for him.

Soon after arriving in London, Muriel Spark got her first job as
a writer of fiction, at the Political Intelligence department of the Foreign
Office. With the help of disaffected German PoWs, Spark's unit broadcast to
Germany from a station in Woburn Abbey, feeding the enemy disinformation. One
story they put about was that Hitler's trousers had been burnt off in the bomb
attempt on his life.

After the war she began writing in earnest, for a jewellery trade
magazine called Argentor, a political magazine called European Affairs and,
after winning a number of its competitions, from 1947 to 1949 she ran the Poetry
Society and its journal, the Poetry Review.

Muriel Spark's spell at the Poetry Review gained her a reputation
as a stylish editor, but she caused an uproar by refusing to publish the hoarier
poems submitted by members and instead paying for work by younger poets of the
avant-garde.

Two years into the job "Sparklet", as she became known, had made
enough enemies to be dismissed from the post after suffering a stream of
assaults from lecherous board members and disappointed poets: "They would do
anything to get published. Those that weren't queer wanted to sleep with me.
They thought they were poets and that there should be free love or something.
I've never known anything like it."

Just before she left Poetry Review, Spark crossed swords with
Marie Stopes: "I met her at one of our meetings and knew she disliked me
intensely on sight. I was young and pretty and she had totally succumbed to the
law of gravity without attempting to do a thing about it. She was demented at
this stage of her life."

Despite her own marital history, Marie Stopes persisted, in "the
good name of the Society", to pursue allegations that Muriel Spark's husband had
divorced her. Muriel wrote to her: "My private affairs are no concern of yours
and your malicious interest in them seems to me to be most unwholesome. You have
no right whatsoever to make enquiries about me. Your attitude fills me with
contempt."

Muriel Spark had enormous vitality and great appeal to the
opposite sex, but never allowed herself to be swayed by sentiment.

In 1951 she won an Observer short story competition with The
Seraph and the Zambezi, a masterpiece of magic realism based on her time in
Africa; David Astor, the editor, was so impressed that he turned up on her
doorstep bearing a copy of the newspaper at 2am on the day it was published.

Her first two full-length books, both well-received, were
critical studies of Mary Shelley (1951) and Emily Bronte (1953). In 1952 she
published a volume of poetry, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse.

In 1954 Muriel Spark suffered a physical and mental collapse
brought on by undernourishment (and, perhaps, slimming pills). She became
convinced that TS Eliot was raiding her larder and sending her coded messages by
way of the plot synopses on Faber book-jackets.

Within a year of her illness she was converted not only to
Catholicism but also to novel-writing (which she had hitherto thought "a lazy
way of writing poetry"), thanks to a commission from Macmillan. She based her
debut novel, The Comforters (1957), on her hallucinatory experiences. Evelyn
Waugh, who had just written his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, on a
similar theme, pronounced Spark's story much better than his.

Waugh was not the only writer to admire the young Muriel Spark.
Graham Greene offered to be her patron, paying her £20 a month. They never met:
"He said he didn't want to meet me. And, above all, he said he didn't want me to
pray for him". This was probably just as well since Muriel Spark did not share
Greene's brand of Catholicism: "I felt more free than him. He loved to be in
sin… He wanted to be married and unfaithful. He was courting his own guilt and
censure. To my mind that was very schoolboyish."

Like everything else in her life, Muriel Spark's religion was
something she practised on her own terms. She once claimed never to go to Mass
and regarded it as a mortal sin to listen to sermons. She was virulently
anticlerical, vociferously opposed the Pope's teaching on birth control, and
objected to prayers telling God what he is like, "as if God didn't know". She
did not want to go to Heaven "if it means sitting looking at the Virgin Mary
standing on a cloud forever", though she was a keen admirer of the Holy
Ghost.

Her reasons for converting were a mystery to some of her
co-religionists but it seemed she found a deep seductive force in the strong
narrative, seductive ritual, repetitive motifs and theatrical traditions of
Catholicism. Moreover it provided her with a strong moral framework: "It's the
only religion I view as rational," she once said. "It helps you get rid of all
the other problems in your life… You deal with the past better, and with the
future, because you are taking moral responsibility. There really is such a
thing as beauty of morals."

The Comforters was the first of a brisk six novels in four years;
the others were Robinson (1958), Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye
(1960), The Bachelors (1960) and, triumphantly, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961). She also edited Cardinal Newman's letters in 1957.

But she felt oppressed by the intrusions of the public and of her
mother - "an alcoholic, always falling and breaking her leg" - and in 1963 left
for New York. William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, introduced her to WH
Auden, Norman Mailer and John Updike. According to friends who knew her then,
the frantic tight-permed frump of the London years was transformed into a
svelte, glittering creature, bejewelled and elegantly dressed in designer
clothes.

While in America she wrote The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The
Mandelbaum Gate (1965), which won the James Tait Black memorial prize, and The
Public Image (1968); but when The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie opened on Broadway
she again felt beleaguered by publicity: "New York was beginning to decay," she
said. "It was becoming dangerous, dirty." She left New York for Rome in
1967.

Here she threw herself into a new social scene, entertaining
Roman nobles and the likes of Anthony Burgess and Gore Vidal in her apartment,
which boasted a huge room that in the 16th century had housed the library of
Cardinal Orsini. So lively was her social life that when she wanted to finish a
novel she would ask a doctor friend to sign her in to the Salvator Mundi
hospital.

In 1968 she met Penelope Jardine, a painter and sculptor, and
during the 1980s moved to Tuscany to share Penelope Jardine's crumbling
converted presbytery in San Giovanni in Olivetto, near Arezzo.

In Italy, Spark wrote two books of short stories, Bang-bang
You're Dead and Other Stories (1982) and The Stories of Muriel Spark (1987); two
children's stories, The French Window and The Small Telephone (1993); a volume
of poetry, Going Up to Sotheby's (1982); a miscellany, The Essence of the
Brontes (1993); a novella, Aiding and Abetting (2000), in which two men claiming
to be Lord Lucan consult a therapist; and 12 novels - The Driver's Seat (1970),
Not to Disturb (1971), The Hothouse by the East River (1973), The Abbess of
Crewe (1974), The Takeover (1976), Territorial Rights (1979), Loitering with
Intent (1981), The Only Problem (1984), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
Symposium (1990), Reality and Dreams (1996) and The Finishing School (2004).

In 1997 she won the David Cohen Literature Prize for a lifetime's
achievement. She was pleased that the money, £30,000, would enable her to buy a
new car. She also received £10,000 for the cause of her choice: she gave the
money to James Gillespie's High School.

Muriel Spark never lost her reputation for falling out with
friends and associates, rifts which she tended to blame on their jealousy of her
success: "After I became a success, people would ring up and ask me out. I'd
say, 'But I'm writing'. And they'd say, 'I see. You're too grand for us now.'
And I'd say, 'Actually, I've always been too grand for you.' "

She fell out with her publisher Alan Maclean at Macmillan. Later
Maclean told an a American journalist that Muriel Spark was "really quite batty"
and that "when she did crosswords, she believed that the answers to the clues
were messages mocking her… that I was one of them, 'them' being the people who
were planning the clues."

In 1998 a furious public row broke out between Muriel Spark and
her son Robin over claims in Muriel Spark's memoirs that her mother was not
Jewish. Robin, who had been brought up by Muriel Spark's parents and had become
an orthodox Jew, angrily disputed her claims, which would have meant he was not
Jewish according to orthodox law.

Muriel Spark showed scant sympathy for her son and accused him of
seeking publicity to further his career as an artist.

To the end of her life, dark and dramatic things continued to
happen to her. During the 1990s, five of her dogs were poisoned, probably by
Italian truffle hunters.

Muriel Spark was appointed DBE in 1993.

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