ELECTRIC SPARK: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, by Frances Wilson
“Remember you must die,” a mysterious voice told nursing-home residents over the phone in Muriel Spark’s second most famous novel, “Memento Mori” (1959).
Message received. But Spark herself will accept no such fate. Her body may have departed this earth almost 20 years ago, but her spirit crackles, like the lightning that fascinated her, throughout Frances Wilson’s new biography.
An energy shot following Martin Stannard’s thick and fibrous “Muriel Spark: The Biography” (2010), which the novelist authorized but denounced before publication, Wilson’s “Electric Spark” is a darting, innovative example of the form — perhaps more Ouija board than book. “She is no longer here to score through my sentences,” Wilson writes, “but that does not mean I have not felt, on every page, her control of my hand.”
Pass the burning sage! Then revisit Spark’s formidable offerings to a culture that relegated her somewhat to the backyard. In fewer than 200 pages, her miniature magnum opus, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961), showcased the most unforgettable teacher in fiction since Mr. Chips, with the signature, sinister lines: “All my pupils are the crème de la crème” and “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.” Maggie Smith won an Oscar for her role in the movie (best supporting should have gone to her bicycle with its picnic basket), and Spark became a literary celebrity of the sort that simply no longer exists.
Fame is flattening and Americans can lump all midcentury British bookish types into a general coziness. “Electric Spark” illuminates a weirder, more wayward writer than I ever grasped as an aspiring member of the Brodie set.
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