Art and life …

… Muriel Spark: the author as dictator - Telegraph. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

How did Spark arrive at such an unsettlingly settled world view? Her biography holds some clues. As diligently recounted in Martin Stannard’s 2009 Life, she was brought up between worlds. Born Muriel Camberg, her father was Jewish and her mother Presbyterian. Even after becoming a Catholic, she continued to call herself a Gentile-Jewess. (The Mandelbaum Gate, her longest if not her most successful novel, explores her dual religious heritage.) At the age of 19, she married Sydney Oswald Spark, who was 13 years her senior, and sailed with him to Southern Rhodesia. He turned out to be violently unstable and, soon after the birth of her son Robin in 1938, she separated from him. Her fears of what might have happened had she stayed, surface in her harrowing story “Bang-Bang You’re Dead”. Desperate to leave Africa, she undertook the dangerous wartime journey back to Britain. (She left Robin behind; their relationship never recovered.) At a labour exchange in London, the woman interviewing her noticed she was reading a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett; she recommended her to Foreign Intelligence, where she stayed for the rest for the war.