The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  She made her name with the character of Miss Jean Brodie, the unconventional and incorrigibly romantic Edinburgh schoolmistress with an admiration for Mussolini and dedication to the crème de la crème of her pupils. A restrained comedy of manners, mocking the old Edinburgh politesse, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It was adapted for the Broadway stage and made into a film in which Maggie Smith took the schoolmistress’s starring role.

  Spark wrote rapidly, rarely revising what she scribbled in the spiral-bound notebooks, which she had sent to her in consignments from the Edinburgh stationers James Thin. She claimed to have dreamt up The Public Image (1968) — about a film star’s struggle with the scandal industry — while asleep: “When I woke up every detail was in my head. I just wrote it all down.” In A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), she dispenses authorial advice. Write as if you are writing to a friend, she suggests. “Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter… as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over and then want more enchanting letters from you… Remember not to think of the reading public. It will put you off.”

  In 1992 Spark published her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, a series of vignettes and flashbacks of a life full of intriguing characters and peculiar subplots. But she detested intrusion into her private life, and the book tells very little about Spark herself. She could be prickly and had a reputation for falling out with friends and associates. A former editor, for example, with whom she once shared the ownership of a racehorse, fell from grace when he described her in an interview as “really quite batty”.

  Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in the genteel Edinburgh suburb of Morningside. Her father, Bernard Camberg, an engineer in a rubber factory, was a Jew whose family had settled in Scotland. Her mother, Sarah Uezzell, was an English Presbyterian from Watford, who was later to take to drink.

  The religious divide in her parents’ marriage was to influence Spark’s imagination considerably. In her only long novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, set in Jerusalem during the trial of Eichmann, a Roman Catholic woman finds herself in peril because of her part-Jewish ancestry. In later life Spark was to become involved in a bitter feud with her son Robin (a painter) about her Jewishness, and the quarrel snowballed in a blizzard of birth and marriage certificates, claims and counterclaims. Spark’s relationship with her son was not improved by her comments about his paintings: “He always wanted me to say they were good but I didn’t think they were”, she said. “Art is important to me and I’m not going to commit perjury.”

  Spark’s native city remained very important to her. Wherever she went in her long life, its puritanical ethos remained with her, and her religious faith came to be symbolised by Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. “To have a great, primitive black crag rising up in the middle of populated streets of commerce, stately squares and winding closes,” she said, “is like a statement preceded by ‘nevertheless’. In the middle of worldly enterprises there is, nevertheless, the inescapable fact of God.”

  At James Gillespie’s School for Girls, a merchant foundation where pupils started classical languages at seven, Spark encountered Miss Christina Kay, the inspirational teacher who was the model for Miss Jean Brodie. “She entered my imagination immediately. I started to write about her even then. Her accounts of her travels were gripping, fantastic,” Spark later wrote in her autobiography. “Her dazzling non-sequiturs filled my heart with joy.”

  And Miss Kay encouraged Spark to write. She had written her first poem at nine — a version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin called The Piper Pied — and, being reared on the Border Ballads, she had a taste for a good yarn. By adolescence she was composing torrid love letters that she signed with fictitious men’s names and hid under the sofa cushions in the hope of shocking her mother.

  On leaving school, she went briefly to a technical college, but in 1936 ran away on a romantic impulse to Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia to marry Sidney Oswald Spark, a schoolteacher more than 12 years her senior. “I don’t quite know why I married SOS,” she later said. “I suppose I was attracted to a man who brought me bunches of flowers when I had ‘flu. But my husband was very much a nut.” He became increasingly quarrelsome and violent, often shooting his revolver at the walls.

  Spark separated from him shortly after her son was born in 1938, and the marriage was later dissolved, although Spark kept the name because “it possessed some ingredient of life and fun”. She was never to marry again, and although there were several subsequent love affairs she was always “a very bad picker of men”, she said. “Maybe I was subconsciously protecting myself as I didn’t really want anything that rivalled my work in attraction,” she said.

  In 1944 she returned to Britain and, depositing her seven-year-old son with her parents, took a room at a London club for “ladies of good families” — later to serve as a model for the boarding house in The Girls of Slender Means — and found work in the Political Intelligence Department at Woburn Abbey, where her creative talents were put to use inventing bogus news items for “black” propaganda broadcasts.

  Once the war was over she found employment with a jewellery trade paper and then as a press agent for businessmen before, in 1947, joining the Poetry Society. A fiercely determined autodidact resolved to make a literary career, she soon became general secretary and editor of Poetry Review, opening it up to young writers, who were paid ten shillings for successful submissions.

  The magazine had previously been little more than a forum for fossilised Georgian poets who paid to be published, and with this revolution the Poetry Society soon found its finances drained, so Spark was ousted. Undeterred, she founded her own magazine, Forum, but it folded after two issues.

  In 1951 Spark won a short story competition in The Observer with The Seraph and the Zambesi, in which a tawdry troupe of travelling actors, staging a Christmas pageant on the banks of an African river, are interrupted by an argumentative angel.

  Encouraged by this small success, she continued to write, scribbling through the nights, while working part-time during the day as an editor in the offices of Peter Owen Publishers. She also reviewed occasionally under the nom de plume Evelyn Cavallo.

  In 1952 she published a collection of poems, The Fanfarlo and Other Verse. She also worked in collaboration with Derek Stanford, who had co-edited the second edition of Forum and was to remain her literary partner until 1957 on a number of publications, including Selected Poems of Emily Brontë (1952), My Best Mary: The Letters of Mary Shelley (1953) and The Brontë Letters (1954). But it was when she came to edit the Letters of John Henry Newman (1957) that she found her life changed. Newman’s writings inspired her, and she decided in 1954 to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, in a process which she later described as “both too easy and too difficult to explain”.

  With conversion came her freedom to write. “Everyone said that I would be so restricted, but in fact the very opposite happened,” Spark said. “I didn’t get my style until I was a Catholic,” she explained, “because you haven’t got to care and you need security for that. That’s the whole secret of style in a way. Its simply not caring too much, it’s caring only a little.” Her fiction was to reflect her religious beliefs in its fierce sense of good and evil. And faith provided a framework for her surreal, even grotesque, inventions as well as her discomfitingly acute awareness of the folly of human life.

  Her first novel, written at the suggestion of her publishers, Macmillan, was intended simply as a way of working out the technique of what she considered at the time an inferior literary form. Aided by a stipend from Graham Greene — given on condition that she didn’t say thank you or pray for him — and by a loan of a cottage in the country, she completed and published The Comforters in 1957. Inspired by dreams resulting from the appetite-suppressing drug she was taking at the time, it describes the spiritual and psychological crisis of a Catholic convert called Carol
ine, who hears a phantom typewriter tapping out her thoughts, writing a third-person novel about her life, even as it happens. It was a daring piece of metafiction, before the term had been coined.

  Hailed by Evelyn Waugh as a masterpiece, The Comforters made her literary reputation. She followed it in 1958 with Robinson, in which another convert, a young widow, finds herself marooned with three men on a desert island.

  Spark had honed her humour to a sharp, unsparing edge by 1959 when she published Memento Mori, in which a group of octogenarians are plagued by an anonymous caller who tells them “remember you must die” and produces ever more absurd reactions. The novel was adapted for the London stage in 1964 and later televised by the BBC in 1978.

  The biting verbal humour of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) — in which the Devil is sent to one of the tattier boroughs of South London — lent itself to a prizewinning radio adaptation, and The Bachelors followed in the same year, about a phoney spiritualist medium. But it was for her 1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that Spark was to be most remembered.

  It was shortly after that success that Spark, now slavishly courted by the London literati, left Britain. “If people know you are famous,” she said, “they quiver in a different way. You don’t get the same natural response.” This was important for a novelist whose ear for dialogue was acute, and who was alert to the jargon and pomposities of speech. She was also fed up with her alcoholic mother, who kept falling down and breaking her bones.

  So Spark left for New York City, procuring an office overlooking Times Square. “I had lots of fun,” she later said, “I bought pretty clothes, went to the hairdresser and travelled a great deal — I think I felt free for the first time.” Friends recall how a tight-permed English frump was transformed within weeks into an elegant New York socialite, breezing through circles that included Norman Mailer, John Updike and W. H. Auden. She also developed an internal sophistication. Being an expatriate helped her writing, she thought. It put her at a slant to society, offering her a different perspective on life — “a new angle of absurdity”.

  In 1967 she was appointed OBE. But by then she was ready for another move. She changed her wardrobe, recoiffed her hair, and set off for Rome where, taken up by a succession of English-speaking monsignors and expats such as Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal and William Weaver, she indulged in a dramatic dolce vita, hosting glamorous parties in a palazzo drawing room that had once been the library of Cardinal Orsini. When she wanted to write she would withdraw, persuading a doctor friend to sign her into a private hospital room where nobody could contact her.

  Novels from this period included The Driver’s Seat (1970) — her own favourite, and technically perhaps the neatest of her novels — in which a young woman seeks out the perfect sex maniac to hack her to death, Not to Disturb (1971), a black farce centering on three enraged aristocrats who, on the brink of committing murder and suicide, lock themselves into a Geneva mansion while their servants lay plans to cash in by writing their memoirs, and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), most commonly described as Watergate in a nunnery.

  By the 1980s, however, Spark had begun to retreat more frequently to the Tuscan countryside, where she eventually moved to a converted 14th-century monastery house set in a garden of olive trees and vines on precipitous slopes above a village. Here, protected from the press by her longstanding companion, Penelope Jardine, a painter and sculptress, she would relax watching the interminable South American soap operas whose tortuous and protracted plots she so enjoyed.

  In later years she was a familiar figure to locals, speeding through the Tuscan lanes in an Alfa Romeo brought from part of the proceeds of the David Cohen Literature Prize, awarded for a lifetime achievement in literature. Part of this prize money she also presented to her old school, the place where Miss Jean Brodie was born.

  Spark’s later novels include Symposium (1990), in which a stylish London dinner party turns dark as the reader learns that one absent guest “is dying, now, as they speak”; Reality and Dreams (1996), in which a film director’s fall from a crane prompts him to reconsider the relationship between art and life; and Aiding and Abetting (2000), which was based on a real London murder case.

  She had continued to write even when slowed down by a long series of hip operations; her last book, The Finishing School, a tense and comic portrayal of a creative writing teacher’s consuming jealousy of his teenage pupil’s talent, was published in 2004.

  Spark was appointed DBE in 1993. She is survived by her son.

  Dame Muriel Spark, DBE, novelist, was born on February 1, 1918. She died on April 13, 2006, aged 88

  DAME ELISABETH SCHWARZKOPF

  * * *

  GERMAN SOPRANO WHOSE PARTNERSHIP WITH HER RECORD-PRODUCER HUSBAND LEFT AN INDELIBLE MARK ON OPERA

  AUGUST 4, 2006

  Radiant was an adjective applied frequently to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf by critics and others. It was used with justification. The word well described the famed and inimitable Schwarzkopf interpretations of certain heroines in Strauss operas, such as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the Countess in Capriccio. It was altogether appropriate to her performance in lieder, with Wolf and Strauss (again) to the fore, to which she turned when she gave up the stage.

  And it was quite right for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf herself, with her mane of hair acting almost like a halo, which remained golden well into old age. She was totally professional in all that she did, right through to her personal appearance. She used to tell the story of her arrival, with her mother, in gloomy, bomb-torn Vienna. They had little or no money, but her mother insisted that their meagre luggage contained one impressive and expensive-looking dress for auditions.

  It was in Vienna that Schwarzkopf came to the ears of Walter Legge, the recording manager of EMI. They met in the Café Mozart in a Harry Lime world, went directly to the Musikverein, where Legge gave her an audition of an inordinate length, which even Herbert von Karajan, who was present, described as cruel. But that started a partnership — with quite substantial involvement from Karajan — on stage and on record which was to last almost 30 years.

  In 1953 Legge married Schwarzkopf and he guided every stage and step of her career. With him she made all her records, apart from song recitals recorded in Germany during the war, many of which remain unsurpassed in their field. When, just before her 75th birthday, Schwarzkopf was asked whether anyone else had acted in the recording studios as her producer she was faintly surprised by the question and replied that she had never considered anyone else, adding: “In any case Walter would never have allowed it.”

  Legge was equally punctilious about her stage appearances. He recognised that the voice was supremely musical, intelligently coloured, capable of conveying extremes of meaning. But it was neither exceptionally large, nor did it have the high notes of the coloratura range. On the one hand Schwarzkopf steered away from heavy parts, such as Beethoven’s Leonore, which she sang only in concert performance, and on the other from parts such as Strauss’s Arabella for which she was physically ideal but which lay a little too high.

  The Legge-Schwarzkopf combination was a redoubtable one, combining a huge breadth of musical knowledge with a total understanding of the practicalities of music-making in theatres, studios and concert halls. Together they gave some notable masterclasses until Legge’s premature death in 1979. Thereafter Elisabeth Schwarzkopf went on telling singers, young and some of them not so young, how to develop their potential. “Think about what you are going to sing before you sing it,” she used to warn, “not when you are halfway through. That’s not just my advice. It was Stanislavsky’s.”

  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born in 1915 in Jarotschin near Posen (now Poznan). Her father was a teacher and classical scholar and the family moved around Silesia before coming to Berlin when she was 17. She studied voice and piano at the Hochschule für Musik, and immediately set her sights on joining the Deutsche Oper. Her first appearance on record was as a member of the chorus of a Zauberflöte made in
Berlin by Sir Thomas Beecham. His technical assistant was a young man called Walter Legge. Neither Schwarzkopf nor Legge could have guessed at the future influence they were to have on one another.

  By the next year her first ambition was achieved. She was engaged by the Deutsche Oper and made her debut in 1938 as a Flowermaiden in Parsifal. During that first season she sang quantities of supporting roles in both opera and operetta, mixing Wagner with Lortzing, before she was cast as the soubrette Zerbinetta in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the early years of the war she joined the National Socialist Party, according to Alan Jefferson’s punctilious but at times contentious biography of her. It caused a considerable stir when it was published in 1996 and certainly did not please its subject. Schwarzkopf appeared in a handful of propaganda films under Goebbels’ banner and sang too in a single performance of Die Fledermaus in Paris in 1941, put on for the benefit of the German occupying forces.

  These moves were purely pragmatic. Schwarzkopf was determined to get to the top and was not inclined to go looking for obstacles. At the Deutsche Oper one or two of the older sopranos were none too pleased with the presence of a young rival who was exceptionally good-looking as well as talented. But she was not content with being a star in wartime Berlin. Encouraged by Karl Böhm, who was considering her as Blonde in a production of Entführung he was planning, she went to Vienna, with that audition dress in her suitcase. There she made her debut in her regular role of Zerbinetta. The Deutsche Oper was abandoned and she threw in her lot with Vienna for such performances as were going in the last months of the war.

  During 1946 Schwarzkopf, in common with other prominent musicians including Furtwängler and Karajan, came under the scrutiny of the Allied Denazification Bureau. But while the process was continuing they were allowed to appear from time to time. On Karajan’s suggestion Legge, who was working for ENSA but looking for future artists for EMI, heard Schwarzkopf in The Barber of Seville. He recognised the talent at once but believed that she should be a lyric soprano — but not before he recorded her singing Johann Strauss’s Frühlingsstimmen, one of the first of their many discs together.