Muriel Spark and the Doppelgänger that Wasn’t

Through her work at the Poetry Society, Spark met the two most important men of her romantic life, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Sergeant was tall, dashing, and married, and their labored affair involved exchanging many long and needy letters—the only record, according to Wilson, that Spark had any sense of “romantic love.” Stanford was much his opposite, “short, bald and mustachioed,” and, for many years, Spark’s intellectual co-conspirator. Both affairs ended in acrimony. Like Evelyn Waugh, one of her literary idols (Wilson reports that The Loved One is “the only novel Muriel wished she had written herself”), Spark had a mental breakdown and converted to Catholicism. Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957 when she was 39 years old.

Wilson gives some of the novels more weight than others. The Comforters gets its own chapter, and A Far Cry From Kensington, Spark’s most autobiographical novel and one of her best, deserves the attention Wilson gives it. Spark liked having a character latch onto a phrase and repeat it, like Margaret in Symposium who sincerely and performatively expresses concern for “les autres” (“one has to think of les autres”), or Jane in The Girls of Slender Means referring to publishing as “the world of books,” or even Jean Brodie stressing to her pupils that she has entered her “prime.” (Spark’s narrators share this trait: In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the narrator relentlessly notes that Rose, one of the pupils, is “famous for sex.”) Spark took the device to its terminal point in Kensington, in which the protagonist Mrs. Hawkins (a Spark avatar) can’t stop calling the villainous hack writer (the Stanford stand-in) a “pisseur de copie.” The phrase is repeated 37 times, Wilson notes, a joke worn so well it becomes something else entirely—an incantation to ward off a demon of mediocrity.

Spark’s best novels have more of her in them, and in her very best books—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, and A Far Cry From Kensington—she casts the shards of herself into multiple characters, various and opposed. In Jean Brodie, Spark is Sandy, the teacher’s acolyte and betrayer, and later, a writer and nun; but Spark is also Mary, the “silent lump” who takes all the blame and later dies in a fire; and Spark is of course Jean Brodie herself, an iconoclast of customized Christian faith, a single woman who pursues love affairs but isn’t wife material. In The Girls of Slender Means, Spark is Jane, the chubby publishing assistant who eats chocolate to power her “brain work,” and Nicholas, a poet who converts to Catholicism and is killed on a mission in Haiti. In Kensington, Spark is Mrs. Hawkins, a young, overweight widow who lives in a rooming house and works as an editor; and Emma Loy, a brilliant author with a mysterious attachment to Hector Bartlett, the talent vampire. Their falling out prompts Hector to smear Emma in his memoir—much as Stanford did to Spark.