Muriel Spark

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30302, 30 November 1963, Page 3

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark. A Biography 4 Critical Study. By Derek Stanford. Centaur Press. 184 pp.

In recent years Muriel Spark has become well known as a writer of brilliant, satirical novels. She has also written poetry, short stories, (her first published story, entitled “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” won the "Observer” short story competition in 1951), radio plays and literary criticism. At the age of 45 she is now in her prime, and it could be argued that a serious study of her life and work at this stage is a little premature. Mr Stanford, however, does not claim to have written a biographyin the full sense of a lifestory, and his account of her work is more in the nature of a guide than an assessment. The book is roughly divided into two parts, the first containing a personal recollection of Miss Spark, the remainder being a study of her work. Mr Stanford first met Miss Spark in 1947. shortly after she had become secretary of the Poetry Society, and editor of its magazine "Poetry Review.” He had expected a "dragon in bombazine.’’ but was agreeably surprised to find a petite and attractive young woman, whose manner and appearance suggested a mingling of the “smart girl-about-town, the wondering unsure child, and the dedicated poet.” Through her influence, the Poetry Society, hitherto soberly conventional and Georgian in outlook, began to foster new talent, and its headquarters in Portman Square became the meeting place of a large number of young and promising poets. Indeed, Mr Stanford was to discover that the calling of poetry was "one fixed point in her nature which seemed on other scores, uncommitted." Later, Catholicism was to become another focal point in her life and writing. “Hers is a cool art," writes Mr Stanford of Miss Spark's work as a novelist. Unlike Graham Greene she does not identify herself imaginatively with the suffering of sinners, but approaches sin and pain through the medium of satire and irony. Throughout her work, in fact. Mr Stanford sees a classical concern with balance and restraint. A sin-

cere Christian, she satirises mercilessly in her novels the excessive enthusiasms of the devout: the parading of outw'ard pieties and the herdlike tendency towards “togetherness’ - which she satirised in the grotesque Mrs Hogg, a character of her first novel. “The Comforters.” Again, in her play "The Danger Zone." she pokes fun at both sensual licence and religious abnegation as ways of life

As a poet. Miss Spark’s concern with a "life-size art" makes her a confirmed enemy of Romantic excess. In this she is in harmony with the so-called “new-line" poets— John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin among others, though Mr Stanford does not specifically link her with the neo-classical movement. He analyses several long poems from Miss Spark’s only published volume of poems, “The Fanfarlo,” in which aspects of Romanticism are satirised. In a poem entitled “Againist the Transcenderitalists," in which she associates —debatably—the vague in art with Romanticism. she asks:

The Glory of Man each man will glorify But God? In “The Fanfarlo,” the title poem of tire collection, the inflated egoism of the Byronic hero is rejected as a sickness of the spirit, leading to hostility between men and inevitable destruction: — And I suppose. so long as I remember What good's a God's ege ■ view of anyone to anyone Man and destroy him forever.

Although Miss Spark seems to be turning increasingly to the writing of fiction, ’ Mr Stanford considers that essentially, in both style and imagination, she is a poet, and a fine one who has perhaps been unduly neglected. Her poems have a sharp edge of wit and remarkable verbal dexterity. Yet it is not poetry which stirs the emotions. "The English have forgotten how to sing.” Hugh Mpcdiarmid nas said, and it is strong lyrical passion which one finds wanting in Miss Spark s poems and in much of the cool, life-size poetry of the neo-classical poets with whom she has affinities. Mr Stanford, as readers of his earlier study of Dylan Thomas will recall, is a per-

ceptive critic, and his present study is valuable in providing signposts to the art of a prominent novelist and poet about whom little has so far been written.