Flea Swatting

“Lies,’ wrote Muriel Spark by way of overture to her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, “are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect.” The truth, as Muriel was at pains to point out, was “often more interesting than the false story”. “The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements,” she said, “is that well-meaning scholars tend to repeat each other.”

In Muriel’s case, chief among the lie-spreaders was her former lover and literary collaborator, Derek Stanford. Cashing in on her fame following the success in 1961 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, he wrote Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study (1963) and Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 (1977), in which there are more falsehoods than midgies in summer in Skye.

As anyone who has tried to disprove a lie knows, attempting to set the record straight is enervating, frustrating and time-consuming. Muriel did what she could in Curriculum Vitae and hoped to do more with the appointment of Martin Stannard as her biographer. Theirs, alas, was not a happy relationship and the resultant book, Muriel Spark: The Biography (2009), added considerably to the pain its subject - then in her twilight years - was already suffering physically. Apart from anything else, as anyone who has an ear to hear can tell, Stannard’s prose is to literature what the Eurovision Song Contest is to music.

With Muriel in her study in Tuscany

Frances Wilson is the latest ‘scholar’ to embrace Muriel. The “seeds” of her newly published book, Electric Spark, she says in its preface, “were planted” on the publication of Stannard’s. “The biography she [Muriel] had in mind,” writes Wilson, in her trademark hyperbolic, fling-into-the-blender-and-hope-for-the-best style, “was an historical document, as plain as a news report, and because she had thrown away ‘nothing on paper’ for nearly fifty years, there was little further research for Stannard to do: her Cinderella story was organised into box files equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777.”

I had high hopes for Electric Spark and readily agreed to review it for the Literary Review. I also agreed to introduce Frances Wilson (at least one of whose previous books, an eccentric biography of DH Lawrence, I rated) at an event in an Edinburgh bookshop. The first hint that all might not be to my liking came with the title and sub-title: Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark. In my mind’s eye, I could see Muriel, the mistress of concision, blue pencil in hand, putting a dash through the double use of ‘Spark’. The word ‘enigma’ was likewise perplexing. “The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark,” runs Electric Spark’s blurb, “is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books.” Is it, was she, were they? I scratched my head and dived in.

Soon, however, I was in search of my own blue pencil, which I used to underline innumerable factual errors (several on one page alone), harebrained conclusions, imaginative assumptions, unignorable repetitions, sentences that run like a tap with no stop, unsubstantiated speculation and recycled anecdotes that date back to the bad old days of Stanford and Stannard. Such was my dismay, I told the Literary Review that I could not in good faith review Electric Spark without seeing a finished copy. This was relayed to its publisher, Bloomsbury, who in turn asked if I would be willing to share my misgivings with it them and their author.

As seasoned reviewers will appreciate, this is not a common occurrence. But high on co-operative spirit, I agreed, and over a weekend compiled a long - but not comprehensive - list of queries. I know now, having studied a published copy of Electric Spark, that some of my concerns were addressed. But not all by any means were. Here’s one example that affects me personally. Wilson - taking her lead from Stannard - quotes me saying that in my book, Appointment in Arezzo, I wrote that Muriel was “immaculate: morally, sartorially, and in her work; continuously charming and generous, blameless, motherly, untouchable”. This irked not only because I did not say it or anything like it but because it is so maladroitly written.

I relayed this to Bloomsbury who, by way of reparation, kept the erroneous quote but acknowledged in a buried footnote that the words “‘blameless, motherly, untouchable’ were not used by Alan Taylor”. There was no mention, though, of the other words I did not use. Meanwhile - stick with it! - a lazy and ill-informed reviewer for the Observer, Rachel Cooke, an English journalist, repeated all of Stannard’s words in a review of Electric Spark and ascribed them to me. At least the Observer has had the grace to amend the review online and issue a retraction in the print edition of the paper.

Thus lies hop like fleas from one source to another, misleading the reading public, piling error upon error, and - deliberate repetition! - “sucking the blood of the intellect”. This is not the place forensically to examine the countless failings of Electric Spark but a few cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. For example, Wilson writes that when, in what was then Rhodesia Muriel’s marriage to her violent husband splintered, Muriel sent their son Robin to a Catholic convent school. This school, which Wilson has not identified, is described as a “torture chamber”. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; no one knows. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can enlighten us. What we do know is that Muriel managed to send Robin to what she believed was a good school despite the fact that custody of him had been given to her estranged and mentally ill husband.

There are many similar instances of wild speculation in Electric Spark, all of which have gone unremarked by reviewers such as Ms Cooke. For these unquestioning, back-slapping ‘critics’, the mot de jour is “brilliant”. Katherine Rundell is quoted on the book’s cover: “Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back.” I think this is meant as a compliment.

Meanwhile, no reviewer I’ve seen has bothered to interrogate Wilson’s claim that, in Curriculum Vitae, Muriel invented a girl she knew at school in Edinburgh called Nita McEwen because, bizarrely, she “hated” writing her memoir. According to Muriel, Nita looked very like her to the extent that they might have been mistaken for twins. Later, in Rhodesia, Muriel and Nita were to meet again. There Nita was murdered by her husband in the same hotel in which Muriel was staying. But was there a real Nita? Wilson suggests there was not but declines to give chapter and verse as to how she has gone about trying to prove a negative.

She does, though, tell us that if you rearrange the letters in Nita McEwen you may come up with Twin Menace. “Twins were menacing, whatever form they took in Spark’s experience as a writer,” explains Wilson, adding in her inimitable, brain-numbing manner: “She had twinned herself with Stanford, who then traded on her name; and she found twins in her four Marys: the poet and code maker Mary Stuart, spouse of a violent husband, mother of an only son, victim of numerous plots; the litigious and terrifying Marie Stopes, divorcee, compiler of a colossal archive and mother of an only son, who, under the nom de plume of Mary Carmichael, was the ‘unknown girl’ of A Room of One’s Own; the unrecognised genius Mary Shelley, wife of a madman, subject of blackmail, mother of an only son, living by her pen and betrayed by her friends; and Mary Stranger, another girl who loved to be unknown.” Make of all that what you will!