BRITAIN: While best-known for 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', Spark's prolific career spanned more than 50 years, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
Even before the death of Sir VS Pritchett in 1997, Dame Muriel Spark had become the closest the British literary establishment came to having a living national institution.
While popular in his lifetime, Charles Dickens had to die before his work was fully celebrated. Spark, who died last Friday aged 88, was different. She not only left Britain and settled in Italy more than 30 years ago, she suffered no agonies about her art and her life never overshadowed her work.
She was born Muriel Camberg to a Scots-Jewish father and an English Church of England mother in Edinburgh, as she writes in The First Year of My Life, "on the first day of the second month of the last year of the first World War". For all the liveliness and ability to conjure 1950s London in a sentence, she never wasted a word and was about as deliberate as a stylist can be while always appearing deceptively relaxed.
Revered by a wide range of writers, she had a knack of balancing the eccentric and the sophisticated with slick, punchy timing, quick-fire dialogue and a natural feel for the perverse.
Though never achieving the genius of Waugh, she did possess curtly comic flair in abundance and - unlike another fellow convert to Catholicism, Graham Greene - she neither mythologised her decision nor took to soul-searching. It was the appeal of having a specific tradition, not despair, that attracted her to Catholicism in 1954, about 10 years after the end of her first marriage which had begun in elopement to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
Ego was not central to her work - which draws on violence in its various manifestations without being directly violent - because she was far more interested in the concept of subversion: hence Jean Brodie as the consummate intelligent maverick who is also an eccentric romantic. Spark's subversive streak never left her and was brilliantly in evidence in her most recent novel, The Finishing School, published in 2004, which now becomes the most vibrant of swan songs.
In it, Rowland Mahler, failed writer, runs a finishing school in Switzerland. He teaches creative writing. The first page alone, in which Mahler spouts his daft notions of writing, is wickedly funny in its own right - as well as being classically funny in the Spark style. For all its energy and humour, it, as with so many of her books, carries a darker message - that of jealousy, frustrated ambitions and artistic delusions.
In September 2000, then 82, she published Aiding and Abetting, based on the brutal killing of a young nanny by Lord Lucan in 1974. Spark described the book which generated debate, as a "story based on hypothesis" and considered it more about class than about the earl's crime. Her rage was directed at the British press and the public whose collective reaction appeared to suggest that at least it was "only" the nanny who died, and not, as intended, Lucan's wife.
Spark believed in authorial distance, and the enduring value of nuance and moral fable. Her narratives tend to zig-zag, facts are introduced as if randomly but then are elaborated upon.
She once told me in an interview - which seemed more like an enjoyable afternoon spent with a newly discovered, unexpectedly benign great-aunt - that when she turned to writing her briskly candid memoir, Curriculum Vitae (1992), "I researched it as carefully as if I were someone else. I did not allow myself to rely on memory." The steel was always there - Spark was simply good at concealing it. Not surprisingly she also wrote, early in her writing career, two good biographies: Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley (1951); and one about one-time British poet laureate, John Masefield (1953).
Over the course of a professional career spanning more than 50 years, which began when she famously won a short story competition in the Observer, she spent most of her time consistently famous thanks to the success of one of her earliest and most disturbing novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) which was followed by a stage version in 1965 and, four years later, a film starring Maggie Smith.
It was first published in the New Yorker and although she never came to resent its success, she did harbour some good-natured regrets, admitting to me, "I do think my other books should have had more of a chance." They will.
Outstanding stories such as Bang Bang You're Dead and The Go-Away Bird, both set in Africa, as was her Observer winner, The Seraph and the Zambesi, and novels such as her debut The Comforters (1957); her study of death and ageing, Memento Mori (1959); The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960); The Girls of Slender Means (1963); Loitering with Intent (1981) (in which she drew on what she had learnt about literary egos during her two years editing The Poetry Review); and the excellent A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), all consolidate her instinct for evoking the essential atmosphere of a place - whether it be Edinburgh or London, Africa or Italy.
Confidence and practical intelligence first made her a writer; her humour, shrewdness and natural risk-taking sustained her.