Interview: Muriel Galloway, author

They are my own secret rules but they arise from deep conviction. They cannot be formulated, they are as sincere and indescribable as are the primary colours; they are not of a science, but of an art.

The voice of Lucy, “The Fortune Teller”, Muriel Spark

I met Mrs Spark for the first time in specious surroundings. The place was a television studio where a pilot chat show in the guise of a dinner party hosted by the comedienne Ruby Wax was about to be filmed. I was first to arrive, and nervous. Jeremy Hardy and Dr Jonathan Miller were next, and Mrs Spark, five foot one and not small at all, joined us to make the full quartet. Our job was to chat and “be natural” whilst poking rocket leaves about with our forks, all the while ignoring the cameras and crew as they lurked and tiptoed under quasi-intimate low lighting. Everything was odd. Ms Wax looked unsettled, Dr Miller began to assume the manner of someone suffering from status anxiety and Mr Hardy was, despite his best attempts, too frequently sidelined to bring us together. Only Mrs Spark, her hair subtly curled, was unruffled. She looked coolmaxed. Even amused.

Maybe that’s what years and reputation do for you, I thought; maybe she’s senior enough and fêted enough not to give much of a toss. The more I watched, however, the more I realised that that wasn’t it. Dame Muriel was comfortable, not bored. The work I knew and loved came to mind as I focussed on her expression, her mannerisms: all those tales fraught with tripwires and trapdoors, spies, eavesdroppers and voices offstage; those inexplicably discomfited atmospheres in which banalities and non sequiturs filled in for conversation. And I got it. The great writer, a watcher since childhood, was enjoying watching us struggle to be normal. In terms of her literary preoccupations, this was terra entirely cognita. She was, almost, at home.

If writing came naturally to Muriel Spark – and she insists it did – so did her material. She specialises in paradox, danger, assumption, the Great Unseen. In her stories and novels, even in her biographies of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë, the air crawls with treachery and half-truths. Characters pilfer, conceal and betray. Wrong ends of sticks poke out at you from thickets and something, somewhere, is on the prowl, keen to shiver your spine as it walks across your grave. Is it a monster, bad luck or simple comeuppance? Is it the residue of God’s relentless wrath against the unfortunate Job? That, dear reader, is up to you. Reading Muriel Spark’s stories demands a little reading between their lines. Furthermore, though much has been made of her Catholic conversion (most of it useful as a herring in a box of fireworks), no ecclesiastical empathy or insight is required to love her keen eye for human frailty or her near-Calvinist scepticism – even from those who tell you to question everything. “Beware of writers,” she asserts. “Beware of me.”

Muriel Camberg was born in 1918 in Edinburgh, the daughter of Jewish and English Anglican parents. Her background was, in her own words, “humble” – it sounds nicer than “working class” in the douce Scottish capital – and her relatives were “plain”. Isolated, curious, Muriel found much entertainment in her mother’s English idioms, and an early preoccupation with listening and detecting nuance honed what would become her fine ear for dialogue in later life. To add further spice, the gentile Jewess enjoyed a sound Presbyterian education at James Gillespie’s School and read the bloody, crow-picked Scots–English Border ballads – one of the cornerstones of Scottish literature – for pleasure. After a brief secretarial course at Heriot-Watt College, she dispensed with formal education altogether as “dull”. After a few years of office work, she turned refugee by marrying Oswald Spark (as much for his tickets to Rhodesia as anything else) and shipping off to Africa, where things went from bad to potentially fatal. Her near-miraculous escape after Mr Spark threatened to shoot her brought her home, thankful and in desperate need of a living wage. Handing over her baby to the grandparents in Bruntsfield allowed her to hare off to the safety of the biggest city on offer, where concealment was not only possible but easy. In London, and in poverty, she let poetry, the hallucinogenic side-effects of Dexedrine and the Catholic Church provide both her break and her fresh, new start with quite literal blessings.

Keeping her husband’s name as a souvenir and a metaphor, Mrs Spark began her writing life in earnest in her early thirties. Her first novel, The Comforters – a book about writing a book, a talking typewriter, delusion and overcoming crisis – set it on course. Memento Mori covers these events as though consigning them to a bonfire before swiftly moving on: ‘I only made it about those days because after that, everybody knew what I was doing. I was writing.’

She was writing a lot. In London, New York and Italy, while constantly moving to avoid “enemies”, crowds and constricting cliques, she produced twenty-two novels, a sheaf of poems, one play and two brace of stories in a non-stop career that lasted four and a half decades. In all of her work her voice is unmistakable: flexible, shrewd, crackling with life. That voice could have been pared back as the years went by, but she started as she meant to go on, and refused to settle into any one tradition. Her work takes what it needs from crime stories, ghost stories, parody, camp and kitchen-sink realism and weaves it all together in a way that is both clipped and freewheeling, saturnine and light, allusive, direct, playful, serious and straight to the point. Even in the slighter pieces of word-play (now and then she opts for simply amusing herself), fewer words are always more. “I sometimes think,” she confessed, “that a novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem. The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value.”

Concision matters because human life is short and, indeed, only part of the picture. Wonder, pity, cruelty, the eternal (for which one need not read a religious meaning, but the sweep of history that was there before us and will be there after we are gone) and the frankly ludicrous must be made room for too (as in a Breughel painting), and no one dimension can dominate the alleged meaning of the story. She has ground to cover, Mrs Spark. Her pace, perforce, must be fleet.

Now, mixing these insights is not to everyone’s taste. Malcolm Bradbury is on record as reading Mrs Spark’s essence as “hardness”. Others – mostly chaps – sum her up as “steely”, “aloof”, “brusque” “capricious” and “queer”. I mention such commentary only because it astonishes me. How can they not see her playfulness, the shapeliness of her language, the luxury of her best aphorisms? Why deny the arch, even flirtatious, tone she adopts at her wittiest, or the catch in the heart when a character’s vulnerability is peeled, helpless as a clam, from its carapace? “My work is not easy to classify,” she used to confide in conversation, not just one-to-one but with whole audiences. “It bothers people. Makes them nettlesome.”

Could it be the case, as she suggests, that her detractors feel forced to squash her entire oeuvre into one mean adjective precisely because of her diversity? Is that knowing, deeply womanly tone cheek by jowl with a resistance to conventional surrender what “bothers” them most? Maybe, keen on single-trajectory arousal, they feel snubbed? Who knows? I am as certain as I can be that this resistance to classification is not coquetry or anything like. It is something much more useful.

Her two biographies, do not forget, researched writers who experienced critical censure much focussed on their sex: Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, had variously been called a “mere sponge who absorbed the ideas of the great men who surrounded her”, a cypher of her talented husband and a hysteric, while Emily Brontë hid behind a male pseudonym (as did her sisters) to avoid the double dismissal of her work as not only tragically girly but also unwomanly in her immodest desire to parade it shamelessly before the public. The literary London in which Mrs Spark earned a pittance as a poetry magazine editor was not wildly supportive, made up as it was of a rather self-regarding and heavily male in-crowd (she had unhappy affairs with more than one member of it) quick to classify female aspirants to their number as neurotics, bluestockings (unfeminine, unprepossessing and sex-starved in one) or scribblers of something inconsequential called “women’s books”. That Mrs Spark’s literary intuition picked resistance to classification as its hallmark seems an astute subconscious choice and no surprise. What makes one prickle with delight is how seductively she accomplishes it; how naturally, in the disguise of character, she is able to assume aplomb.

As for subject matter, what surer to stand on than one’s own two feet? “She had all these years of really great experience,” says her fan, the crime-writer Ian Rankin, “from wartime London, Edinburgh, breakdowns, Africa, her Jewish heritage, marriages going bad – and it’s all there, laid out on the page for people to explore, book by book.”

It’s also not there, of course. This writing is not autobiographical reportage or police-report detail. Instead, it uses her small place in the scheme of things as a conduit, and attends to the transformations of Art. “I don’t see what else you can draw on for fiction but your life,” she said. “Not only your own life but what you’ve learned or grasped about other people’s. It’s one’s own experience after all. What else can it be? All writers do this.” Of course they do. It’s just that some have more bother acknowledging it than others. As befits a writer with a clear understanding of her own mortality, Mrs Spark grasps her own life and those of her characters with the same hands. Often, in a wonderful gesture of self-implication, her narrator is “I”. Far from being “harsh” or “aloof”, Mrs S is there too, at the heart of the crowd, as both observer and observed.

Though much of Muriel Spark’s fame rests in her novels (The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Memento Mori, Loitering with Intent and The Driver’s Seat are my list of stand-outs), the lady herself felt happier with her shorter work: the bigger picture in fewer words. You may recognise some themes. Five are set in Africa, a country where the near-tangible, menacing pervasiveness of heat can turn milk and men’s minds with equal ease. Colonial life is full of drink, careless social divisions and latent sexual violence. In this jungle, the unexpected is guaranteed. “The blacks look happy enough,” says one complacent onlooker in “Bang-Bang You’re Dead” ‘“Did you have any trouble with them in those days?” “No,” said Sybil. “Only with the whites.”’ World-weary Sybil knows more than she says.

“The Go-Away Bird”, a more traditionally structured tale, weaves signs and portents, misreadings and an ominous sense of growing tension towards its ghastly end. Mrs Van der Merwe (“A Curtain Blown by the Wind”) can change her surroundings and even her expectations, but not her dreadful, almost pre-destined, vulnerability. Most of us, Spark implies, see what we want to see and what we want to see is not necessarily what’s there.

Ghosts are everywhere, some on buses or in office-blocks, some (the catching kind) in doctors’ surgeries, and others wave innocuous hellos on the Portobello Road. Angels and demons (further explorations of the plausible Edinburgh time-and-motion demon from the novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye) drift back and forth carrying fags and parcels; they manifest as cranky uncles and irritable, drug-wary cooks. Do not be surprised if you laugh even as death surrounds you – some tales (like “The Executor”, which makes fun of golf, fishing, the moral high ground and the Edinburgh stereotype), provoke it all too well.

You will encounter protagonists who have been corrupted, sucked dry of purpose and wired to the moon. Some are from the moon. Mrs Spark, famously Catholic and somewhat nervous, has fun even with the religious and the “highly strung”. “Come Along Marjorie”, a glimpse of life in a religious retreat, details the (first person) author and other “neurotics” with such relentless plain-speaking, I smiled all the way through. Till the end of course. “The Black Madonna” carries everything a stage further into near-unsayable black farce. Bugger hushed reverence: Mrs Spark speaks as she finds. A master blender of the lightest lights with dreadful dark, Spark went her own way for over 40 years, and that dogged originality is what I hope you enjoy most. Remember we are dust, by all means. But look out for the primary colours. Rejoice. Take in the Art.

l “Muriel Spark’s Complete Short Stories, introduced by Janice Galloway, will be published as part of the Canongate Canons this week, priced £12. Galloway will discuss the collection at the Canongate Festival Shop, 20 Queensferry Street, on 25 August at 5:30pm