Muriel Spark, the Double Agent

When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One of her symptoms was an obsession with cryptograms, anagrams, hallucinated translations, and what she described as “involuntary word-game[s],” which she believed, at the time, to be secret messages sent to her by the poet T. S. Eliot. (According to a boyfriend, she once thought Eliot, a venerated sexagenarian whom she had never met, was breaking into her house to steal her food.) Even after she recovered from her delusions, she maintained a fascination with the private meanings of seemingly innocent words, the buried layers of language that could be dug up with attention’s shovel. Wilson, like any good biographer, follows her subject’s lead. “If the letters start jumping around and cavorting, rearing themselves in anagram,” she writes, “Nita McEwen becomes Twin Menace.”

This grand reveal, which transmutes McEwen from fact into embellishment, doesn’t undermine Spark’s mythology so much as solidify it. For Wilson, Spark’s signal quality was her belief that reality was encoded with hidden meaning, which far surpassed, as she described her own extensive archive, “the silent, objective evidence of truth.” This belief manifested in her writing, but also in her faith. It’s no coincidence that Spark’s “brief but extremely intense word-game experience” lasted from January 22 to April 25, 1954, and that nine days later, still medicated with the antipsychotic drug Largactil, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Her first novel, “The Comforters,” was then finished by late 1955, when she was nearly thirty-eight years old. It concerns a recent Catholic convert, Caroline Rose, who starts hallucinating the sounds of a typewriter, which she discovers is transcribing her own thoughts, writing her into existence as a character in someone else’s novel.

“The Comforters” is titled after the “miserable comforters” in the Book of Job, false friends who try to find reason in Job’s suffering by assuring him he must have some unconfessed sin. When Job, who is on a dunghill, oozing pus, after the death of his entire family, accuses God of needless cruelty, God appears in the form of a whirlwind, chastising Job for expecting something as measly as fairness from the Creator of the Universe. In “The Comforters,” the whirlwind is the whirr and clack of a typewriter, inserting the divine into the mundane technology of mid-century life. Like the Book of Job, the novel presents a dialogue between a devout believer (Caroline Rose) and an unseeable, droll, and at times harshly vindictive creator (Muriel Spark). Caroline’s wish for control over the plot of her life is answered in kind: when she tries to upend the logic of the book’s genre, a rollicking whodunnit, the author-creator promptly crashes the car she’s in, breaks her leg, and abandons her for a subplot.

But as always with matters of faith, it is sometimes unclear who is creating whom. When Caroline is in the hospital, she turns “her mind to the art of the novel, wondering and cogitating, those long hours, and exerting an undue, unreckoned, influence on the narrative from which she is supposed to be absent for a time.” Then the “tap-tick-click” of the typing voice repeats the same sentence verbatim, the narrative split neatly in two.

In writing “The Comforters,” Spark embraced a trinity—paranoid fantasy, spiritual faith, and literary fiction—that would change every single thing about her life. For her, all three became profound only through their metatextuality: the way language relates to itself. Catholicism was Spark’s permission slip to become a novelist, to devote her life to things that weren’t verifiably “true” but which still, nevertheless, existed. While unconventional in her doctrine—she always supported abortion, contraception, and divorce, and avoided confession, sermons, and most other Catholics—it was important to her that “anything can happen to anyone,” which is rule one of Sparkian narrative. Bread can become flesh, and so on. In Wilson’s words, “she liked the saints, angels, miracles, and mysteries . . . . She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension, and rearrangement of time and space, which is also what she liked in a poem and so recreated in her fiction.”