Muriel Spark, RIP.(Notes & Comments: May 2006)(Obituary)

It was on Easter Saturday that we heard the sad news that the Scottish poet and novelist Muriel Spark had died, age 88, in Florence (her adopted home many years). We thought, "How suitable that it should have been on Good Friday." As a Catholic convert, Spark would doubtless have appreciated the coincidence of dying on the most solemn day in the liturgical calendar. As a novelist with an eye for the eldritch realities that everywhere impinge upon the quotidian expanse of our lives, she would also have savored the awesome mystery operating behind the usual stuff of hospitals, doctors, and sick beds.

Awesomeness inhabiting the everyday was at the center of Spark's concerns as a writer. In a review of the reissue of London Labour and the London Poor in 1968, W.H. Auden remarked that Henry Mayhew's sprawling portrait of Victorian London street life--brimming with such vivid specimens as Jack Black, Rat-Killer to Her Majesty--led him to revise his understanding of Dickens. Far from being a "fantastic creator of over-life-size characters," Auden concluded, Dickens was in fact "much more of a 'realist' than he is generally taken for."

It is the same with Muriel Spark. In her work, what first seems like caricature often passes, on closer reading, as unvarnished reportage. Generally, the reports are unsettling. Perhaps, deep down, "the facts" of the case express a species of caricature; and perhaps, on reflection, one realizes this. Spark's trick was to coax us into musing that, if one were to go deeper still, then maybe ... The presentiment often terminates ha an ellipsis, a feeling of uneasiness, anxiety. Not for nothing is the imperative "Memento Mori"--Remember that you shall die--the title of one of her best-known and most accomplished books. In that sober tale, all the characters are aged and more than a few are senile. "Being over seventy," one of them observes, "is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield." By the end of the novel, the battlefield is wiped clear, and the reader is given a brief recap of the characters' particular fates: "Lettie Colston ... comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia; Charmian Colston, uremia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration; Tempest Sidebottome, carcinoma of the cervix," etc., etc.

The grimly comic cultivation of such reminders was a Sparkian trademark. Doubtless, its origin was partly in religion, specifically in Catholicism, the faith to which Spark converted in 1954. Our life on earth is a pilgrimage, a prolegomenon, and one mustn't forget it: This basic conviction figures prominently, though undogmatically, in all Spark's work, infusing it with the ambition of allegory. But the vertiginous effect of her fiction is not simply a coefficient of faith. It is also the product of a literary gift, a sensibility.

Many of the settings, events, and characters that populate Spark's fiction had antecedents, more or less distant, in her life: a charismatic school teacher, an ailing grandmother, a club for women in war-time London, a friend ...