I think of the title, then I go around telling everyone
I'm going to write a book by that name.
And then one day I write the title,
I put, "By Muriel Spark" under it,
I turn the page and write "Chapter One" and then I write
the first sentence and then I go on from there.
Really, that's how it is.
Muriel Spark was a unique voice in 20th-century literature.
By the time of her death in 2006,
she had published 22 novels as well as poetry, essays and biography.
Her pen was unerringly sharp,
observant, funny, often uncomfortably true.
Her writing is unmistakable.
I'm drawn to her daring,
not only in her fiction but in the way that she conducted her life.
She transformed herself from schoolgirl poet to celebrated woman
of letters. It was a journey of perpetual reinvention and escape,
from colonial Africa to wartime London.
From the heart of literary New York to elegant 1960s Rome.
There was no-one quite like her.
In this, her centenary year,
Muriel Spark is being celebrated in the city of her birth,
but how well do we really know her?
I want to piece together the story of her life through her writing,
her personal papers and a wealth of BBC archive
that spans more than 40 years.
Contemporary writers will add their voice to the story.
And I'll travel to Italy...
Oh, hello.
..to meet the woman Muriel lived with for 30 years.
She has agreed to speak for the first time on camera
to share her insights into the Muriel she knew.
Muriel Sarah Camberg was born in Edinburgh
on the 1st of February 1918.
The world was on the brink of change.
The First World War was almost over, women were about to get the vote.
Muriel's father was a Jewish Scot and her mother was English.
The Cambergs lived in a flat in Bruntsfield Place.
My mother never stopped talking
and telling me stories of her girlhood.
My father was very amusing.
He would sing and dance.
They were as good as they possibly could afford to be.
From the family home,
it's just a short walk to the place where Muriel's writing talent
was first recognised.
In the 1930s,
this building was home to James Gillespie's School for Girls,
where the middle class of Edinburgh sent their daughters for a genteel
grammar school education.
Muriel was cherished here as a poet and dreamer and she later said that
these were the most formative years of her life.
It was here at the age of 11 that Muriel Spark was to meet the woman
who would have a profound effect on her life.
Her teacher, Miss Christina Kay, was the prototype of Miss Jean Brodie.
Muriel said at the time, "She entered my imagination immediately."
Regard the Mona Lisa.
She's older than the rocks on which she sits.
Whom did I say to regard, Clara?
The Mona Lisa, Miss Brodie.
That is correct.
Clara has artistic tendencies.
Although Miss Kay entered her imagination immediately,
Muriel would publish five novels before she created the iconic figure
of Miss Jean Brodie.
Muriel reflected in her autobiography...
"In a sense, Miss Kay was nothing like Miss Brodie.
"If she could have met Miss Brodie, Miss Kay would have put
"the fictional character firmly in her place.
"And yet no pupil of Miss Kay's has failed to recognise her,
"with joy and great nostalgia,
"in the shape of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."
How accurate was that a picture of an Edinburgh that you knew?
Well, as Edinburgh, it was as accurate as I could remember,
touched up for fiction.
My school was... It really was happier.
It wouldn't have made a good novel.
Edinburgh in the 1920s was a very grey place, I imagine.
It was a very grey place in the 1950s, so it must have been
very, very grey in the 1920s.
She used to say of the film of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie that
the biggest problem was it made Edinburgh look too bright.
Anyone who expects Jean Brodie to be a gentle account of an Edinburgh
girlhood will find a surprising amount of darkness.
When she writes her characters,
there's no such thing as someone who's just delightful
all the way through.
When I first read Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie,
I thought I was supposed to like her because she was the heroine and I
was very confused in that she was so sharp and unpleasant.
There was a lot of stuff that was really quite questionable.
This is a large formation of Il Duce's Fascisti.
They are following him in noble destiny.
I myself mingled with such a crowd.
I wore my silk dress with red poppies,
which is right for my colouring.
She's kind of a charismatic teacher,
she's completely delusional,
which is beautifully, gradually released.
And she's trying to create girls in her image,
and even slightly sort of pimping one of them.
I mean, she's a terrible, terrible woman
but she is much beloved by these very impressionable young women.
But it's a portrait of somebody going morally and intellectually
completely wrong.
I read The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie when I was 17, a schoolgirl myself.
It's about a teacher whose educative faculty is so seductive...
..that it makes the people who are under her wing...
..bloom.
And then, as you're reading through it,
you realise that the attractions and the seductions
which are working in this book,
which are the attractions of exclusion and inclusion...
Because the Brodie set is absolutely a set and then you've got the one
member of the Brodie set who's not really a member of the set,
Mary Macgregor, who's sort of on the outside
so that the set can be a set.
So as you're reading it, you're 17, and suddenly...
..the workings of your own social mode, society, are revealed to you,
just in the classroom.
So that all your seductions that you've ever felt towards a belief,
a person, an authority system,
come into play in a novel which is so fast and light and funny...
..and attractive.
"It is well when in difficulties to say never a word,
"neither black nor white.
"Speech is silver...
"..but silence is golden.
"Mary, are you listening?
"What was I saying?
"Mary Macgregor, lumpy with merely two eyes,
"a mouth and a nose like a snowman,
"who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who,
"at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured...
"..'Golden?'
"What did I say was golden?
"Mary cast her eyes around her and up above.
"Sandy whispered, 'The falling leaves.'
" 'The falling leaves,' said Mary.
" 'Plainly,' said Miss Brodie, 'you were not listening.
" 'If only you small girls would listen to me,
" 'I would make of you the creme de la creme.' "
Here was a young writer writing in a way that was very dry,
very kind of mordant and cruel, in a way,
which didn't seem to fit the persona of the author at all.
And you see that throughout her work and it's something I think that she
maybe inhabited naturally or
realised it worked and continued with it.
She's an extraordinary writer in the sense that the 22 novels she wrote
all seem filtered through this particular literary tone of voice.
Short sentences, very pithy...
..very dark. Cruel things are funny.
Good people get punished.
For the first 18 years of Muriel Spark's life,
Edinburgh was her world and it stayed with her.
Edinburgh is a kind of character in my mind.
Much more than any other city.
It has a peculiar stamp...
..and a set of morals, a set of ideas...
..all its own.
It's very puritanical, or was.
I don't know if it still is,
but when I hear an Edinburgh accent, I get...
..I get a whiff of the morals that go with it.
I knew that sooner or later I would have to go, because most people did,
you know?
I didn't see where I would fit in in Edinburgh at all.
Besides, I wanted to travel.
"By 1937, some of my friends were getting engaged and married.
"I longed to leave Edinburgh and see the world.
"Perhaps that is why I got engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark.
"I had met him at a dance.
"I don't know exactly why I married this man rather than any of
"the younger boyfriends who took me to dances.
"It was a disastrous choice."
Well, in those days, it was the only way you could have a life.
Young girls in my position could never have any sex.
It just was unthinkable.
I never met a man who would have gone to bed with me.
Nice girls didn't do that sort of thing.
I wanted a nice life of my own, plenty of sex, plenty of fun.
But I didn't get it, actually.
It was a mistake.
In Sidney Oswald Spark,
she saw an intelligent man who was 13 years her senior.
He had been offered a teaching job in Southern Rhodesia.
Muriel was tempted by the promise that she would not have to do any
housework in Africa and would have plenty of time to write.
And so, at the age of 19, Muriel set off to join him.
"It was the 13th of August 1937 when,
"alone for the first time in my life,
"I sailed on the Windsor Castle to Cape Town,
"the first lap of my journey."
Muriel Camberg would be no more.
She was full of hope for her new life as Mrs Muriel Spark.
Muriel Spark always said that she felt Scottish by formation
but it was in Africa where she learned to cope with life.
I think it must have been really difficult for Muriel Spark to move
to Africa aged 19, 20.
I mean, I was born in Africa and grew up there,
so I was completely at home in the country.
It was more familiar to me than Edinburgh or anywhere else.
Whereas Muriel Spark coming from Edinburgh to what was then Rhodesia,
it must have been a profound shock for her.
Barely two months after they were married,
Muriel found out she was pregnant.
"When I was expecting a baby,
"my husband suggested very earnestly that I have an abortion.
"He was beginning to feel uneasy and unstable.
"I refused."
Her son Robin was born on the 9th of July 1938.
Muriel was just 20 years old, 8,000 miles from home,
and no-one really to support her.
She'd married a man whom she barely knew, who had a long history
of mental illness and who could not control his moods, nor his temper.
Muriel's life here became increasingly precarious.
Her husband just could not hold on to a job and at first she did
everything she could to support him.
She brought him here to the Victoria Falls,
thinking it would lift his spirits.
Instead, it had a profound effect on her.
Somewhere down the river does the hush
Become a sibilance that hints a sigh
A murmur, mounting as the currents rush
Faster, and while the murmur is a cry
The cry becomes a shout the shout a thunder
Until the whole Zambesi waters pour
Into the earth's side agitating under
Infinite spray mists pounding the world's floor
Wrapped in this liquid turmoil who can say
Which is the mighty echo
Which the spray?
"I knew my married life was over.
"Strangely, the experience of the Victoria Falls gave me courage
"to endure the difficult years to come.
"The Falls became to me a symbol of spiritual strength."
There is just such a feeling of power and energy and life.
You can understand why Muriel came to the Falls - her husband's unwell,
uncommunicative, belligerent,
she thinks this will make a difference to him and she comes here
and thinks, "I'm going to leave our marriage."
There's something about this
that gives her a kind of spiritual uplifting and...
..gives her actually a lot of confidence.
The Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River were an inspiration
for Muriel Spark long after she left Africa and she drew on the river
for this wonderful short story, The Seraph And The Zambesi.
In the winter of 1951,
the Observer newspaper held a short story competition with a cash prize
of £250.
For Muriel Spark, a struggling and still unknown writer,
it was a turning point.
I wrote it in three days.
I'd finished it on a Saturday.
I had to go and borrow... I went and borrowed some typing paper,
which I didn't have.
I borrowed some from a shop.
I said, "Haven't you any typing paper?
"Just... All I want is, you know, five pages."
So he gave me them.
And did you expect to win?
I should have been more surprised than I was,
because I knew it was good quality, you know.
But I didn't think I'd win, because it was so unusual.
It was for that very reason that it did win, of course.
It's slightly supernatural, slightly surreal.
You don't know whether it's
some sort of hallucination or whether there's
some revelation going on but it's a very striking story and I'm not
surprised that she won.
Of all the periods of Muriel Spark's long and varied life,
the decade leading up to the publication of this story
is the hardest for me to get to grips with.
Muriel had resolved to leave her husband but did she foresee
the chain of events that would lead to another,
more difficult separation?
Exactly two years after Muriel and Oswald were married,
war broke out and all civilian transport to Britain ended.
Her husband joined the Army,
Muriel spent the next few years moving from city to city,
always taking Robin with her, looking after Robin,
writing poetry and taking the odd office job.
But when the divorce came through,
custody of Robin was granted to his father.
Muriel placed their child in a boarding school in Gwelo
where she knew at least he'd be safe.
She went to South Africa and, from there,
got a place on a troop ship bound for Britain.
Many of Muriel Spark's papers are now kept
in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Goodness me. God.
Gwelo, 16/12, 1943.
"Dear Mrs Spark, Sonny is very well."
Sonny was the name they had for Robin.
"And he is growing fast and looking cheerful.
"Best wishes for Christmas and New Year."
And this is so interesting that she's kept this.
She's kept this, she kept this all her life...
..because this was an incredibly important event in Muriel's life,
leaving Robin behind.
Muriel arrived in London in the spring of 1944,
in the final months of the Second World War.
She found work in a semi-covert department in the Foreign Office
run by a journalist called Sefton Delmer.
He produced a fake radio station to broadcast rumour and misinformation
to the German public.
It's been said that she was a secretary but I don't think she was
just a secretary. Was she a code-breaker?
I don't think she was a code-breaker.
I never saw her do a crossword puzzle, for example.
But she would be the ideal person to come up with stories that would have
a sort of doublethink aspect to them.
Well, I think that working in any secret department of the state
must have some effect on your life
and possibly your art if you were a writer.
You just need to think of Graham Greene and John Le Carre who were
also spooks, as Muriel Spark,
I suppose, could call herself a spook of sorts.
My feeling is that if she had done anything more...
..audacious or contributing to the war effort,
we would have heard about it.
In fact, the closest we get to this experience in her fiction
is in the novel The Hothouse By The East River.
"What they are engaged with in this particular compound is known
"as black propaganda and psychological warfare.
"The compound is reputed to be the most intelligent outfit of the war.
"The source from which these reputations have arisen
"may never be found."
When Muriel Spark first came to London in the spring of 1944,
she stayed here in 82 Lancaster Gate,
a home for ladies from good families of modest means who were obliged
to pursue an occupation in London.
The Helena Club became the May of Teck Club in her novel,
The Girls Of Slender Means.
"The May of Teck Club exists for the pecuniary convenience and social
"protection of ladies of slender means below the age of 30 years
"who were obliged to reside apart from their families in order
"to follow an occupation in London.
"As they realised themselves in varying degrees,
"few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious,
"more movingly lovely and, as it might happen,
"more savage than the girls of slender means.
She's very polite, she's very douce.
She's very Edinburgh, she's very drawing-room,
very ladylike but it is this...
..ladylike as a scalpel.
Underneath it, there's always this little glitter.
She is looking inside people immediately.
She is not fooled by anybody.
Which sounds very judgmental and it's not really judgmental.
It's just, people are a mess, people are internally contradictory,
people lie to themselves, never mind to other people.
People are deluded about who they really are, which is just true.
But it's quite an unusual viewpoint.
When the war ended,
Muriel was able to bring her son Robin to Scotland to stay with her
parents in Edinburgh while she struggled to make her way
in literary London.
Her luck seemed to be turning when, in 1947, she was appointed
general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of its magazine,
The Poetry Review.
I was amazed at the struggle for power within a thing called
the Poetry Society. You know,
it was rather like politics or something I'd read about in the
Roman Empire. I'd never experienced such a cut-throat affair.
Muriel held her ground in a series of battles including one with the
birth control pioneer, Marie Stopes.
I forget what got her down in the first place.
Maybe I turned down one of her poems.
And...
..she wanted to know why I'd got a divorce.
I told her to mind her own business.
She of all people, she had birth control clinics all over the place,
she was the advanced woman of her time.
I wrote in my autobiography, I used to wish that her mother had thought
of birth control first.
By the early 1950s, Muriel had put her sharp mind to better purpose.
She earned her living writing literary reviews and biographies.
Not yet a novelist,
her writing style in these first published works already has
a distinctively Sparkian tone.
this is still evident
in the earliest filmed record of Muriel Spark,
a 1961 BBC film about Emily Bronte.
I don't think that Emily herself ever had a love affair or thought of
marriage. None of the Bronte records suggest it and there aren't
any legends. But she was a passionate woman.
All her passion and all the intensity of emotion that was in her
nature went into her writings and all her imaginative work.
And she was content just to be a spinster of this parish.
Although living alone,
Muriel's own life wasn't quite that of a spinster.
I think the area of Muriel Spark's early life that most intrigues me
is this relationship and love affair she had with this man called
Derek Stanford who was a kind of jobbing hack writer, basically,
and everything one reads about Stanford seems to indicate he was
a completely undistinguished person.
And I cannot see why the beautiful and incandescent Muriel Spark
should have been attracted to him.
Um, a lot of women...
..prefer the rascals of life...
..to the good men and maybe that's it,
but I know I'm a very bad picker.
Did you feel betrayed by the men that you loved?
Sometimes I was betrayed, not only feel.
I was really betrayed.
In later years, when Spark was a successful writer,
Derek Stanford sold her love letters and published his own inaccurate
and unflattering portrait of her life.
But she had started to keep her own meticulous records.
"Almost every letter I have received, every note I have made,
"every cheque book, every book of accounts, every appointments book,
"lists of names and addresses, accountants, lawyers,
"turf accountants, all and everything,
"I have conserved in a vast archive."
The reason why she kept everything was to be able to point to evidence
to say, "Look, you say this happened,
"but actually this is what happened.
"You say I was in such and such a place on a certain date but, no,
"this shows I wasn't. I was in another place."
So, she became obsessed with...
..being able to correct lies.
One of the documents in the archive points to another reason why she
might have wanted to keep everything.
"The manager, Ministry of National Insurance, 21st of May 1954.
"I would like to appeal against the decision of the National Insurance
"officer in disallowing my claim
"for national health benefit for the period
"20th of January to 3rd of April 1954.
"Briefly, the trouble was that I began to imagine secret codes in
"everything I read and so lost a grip on reality."
"The reason why I failed to claim within the prescribed period
"was that my illness was a mental breakdown,
"the nature of which prevented me from grasping a great many
"objective facts."
Objective facts.
And when she writes Curriculum Vitae, she comes back to that again.
She said, "One thing I've always known about my well-ordered archive
"was that it would stand by me, the silent objective evidence
"of truth should I ever need it."
Now, the objective truth in here...
..was that Muriel had a mental breakdown.
In order to stave off hunger,
Muriel had been taking an appetite suppressant.
It caused her to hallucinate.
Words on the page rearranged themselves.
She thought that TS Eliot was communicating with her in code.
Spark used this experience to conceive her first novel.
Naturally, you can't construct a novel while you're having a nervous
breakdown or while it's on,
but as soon as I was well enough, and cured...
..I wrote this novel which described more or less my experiences
except my experience had been that words were jumbled up
on the page to read, whereas that you couldn't do in a novel.
I don't see how technically you could get round that...
..easily.
So I made it into the protagonist of the novel hearing voices.
" 'What on earth are they up to at this time of night?'
"Caroline wondered. Then it began again.
"Tap-tappity-tap, the typewriter.
"And again, the voices.
"Caroline ran out onto the landing,
"for it seemed quite certain that the sound came from that direction.
"No-one was there. The chanting reached her as soon as she returned
"to her room with these words exactly.
" 'What on earth are they up to at this time of night?'
"Caroline wondered."
The very notion that a bunch of people who in a novel imagine that
they are living a very ordinary life...
One of them can suddenly hear the construction of her own fiction
happening round her in the very dingy Kensington room in which she
is working on a book about the form in the modern novel.
It's a brilliant game of the spirit, jeu d'esprit.
It's a brilliant joke.
And she wrote The Comforters at exactly the same time as, you know,
all the angry young men were doing their Rooms At The Top
and kitchen sink drama was the...
..the mode of the time.
A writer like Spark looks at that,
knows that realism is only real if you know that a novel in your hand
is a novel. It's just an extraordinary originality.
Well, with a novel,
you have to first of all make up your mind who...
..is writing the book, because every novel has a hidden narrator,
not necessarily...
..the person of the author.
At the same time that her characters are coming to terms with the fact
that they have an author,
Muriel Spark was grappling with the idea of her own maker.
In parallel with becoming a novelist,
Muriel Spark became a Roman Catholic.
I didn't have a fixed religion as a child.
It was a neither 100% Jewish home or Anglican of my mother's
or Presbyterian of my school.
It was... Although my parents were very religious,
insofar as they all believed in God,
they both believed in God and my family believed in God.
And, um...
..this seemed to be the natural thing.
I tried to become an Anglican and I found I didn't believe a word of it.
And then I was reading Cardinal Newman...
..and so I just drifted into it like that.
Yes, you drifted, but you were seeking something as well?
Yes. You positively went out to find a religion? Yes.
Largely, I'm still a Catholic
because I can't believe anything else.
I'd often like to, but I can't.
Do you find it a satisfying religion for you now?
No, but I can't believe anything else.
Perhaps the truth isn't satisfying.
In her novels, she often hones in on that gap between truth and faith.
In A Far Cry From Kensington,
the characters have been drawn into belief in a miracle cure
known as the Box.
"It was generally established that while the Box had no scientific
"basis for its diagnostic claims,
"the practitioners and their followers
"might be perfectly sincere.
"I dare say that from the point of view of a visitor from outer space,
"the Box is no more ridiculous than a Catholic catechism or the mass."
God is the constant character in all her fiction.
He might not be always the main character
but I think God is always there,
because from Muriel's point of view,
God IS always there and she couldn't have written the books she did
without believing that.
But did she ever talk to you about that belief in God?
Yes, she did.
And it was a complicated business because she was always...
..testing her own beliefs.
She was always asking herself, "Am I right, is this what I think?"
PHONE RINGS
Is that Mr Godfrey Colston? It is.
Remember, you must die.
You're making a mistake. Dame Lettie isn't here.
Or perhaps you want to talk to my wife?
There's no mistake. The message is for you, Mr Colston.
Memento Mori, literally, "Remember you too must die",
is a book where you take a small group of characters,
a closed world...
It's a group of elderly people, very few of the characters are under 70.
There's a mysterious voice on the phone telling them to remember that
they must die.
On the face of it, it seems like a straightforward mystery but,
of course, being Spark, it becomes something very different from that.
Each character gets the same telephone message.
They interpret the words differently,
depending on their faith.
PHONE RINGS
Mrs Charmian Colston?
Yes, this is Charmian Colston.
Are you a reporter?
No.
Then, how may I help you?
Remember you must die.
Thank you.
At my age, there are many things I don't remember,
but that is not one of them.
Goodbye.
I probably will never read that book again because I'm too now old
and it's just scary. It's basically a big sign that says,
"Your body will collapse,
"your mind will go to wet biscuit and then you'll die.
"If you're lucky, you'll die soon."
She understands that life is brief.
And she's always hardest on the people who have not got over that,
who have not grasped that.
Her own life was changing rapidly.
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie was a huge publishing success.
It would become a hit Broadway play and later an Oscar-winning film.
Muriel Spark had immortalised her Edinburgh in print
but she was no longer at home in the city of her birth.
Muriel came back in April of 1962 to Edinburgh and stayed here
at the North British Hotel, as it was called then.
She came back for a very sad reason.
She came back because her father was dying.
She sat by the telephone and she waited for a call
to go and visit him.
"In those days, I experienced an inpouring of love for the place
"of my birth, which I am aware was psychologically connected
"with my love for my father and with the exiled sensation
"of occupying a hotel room which was
"really meant for strangers.
"My frequent visits to Edinburgh for a few weeks at a time throughout
"the years have been the visits of an exile in heart and mind.
"It is a place where I could not hope to be understood.
"Nevertheless, it is the place where I was first understood."
PHONE RINGS
The call did come at four o'clock in the morning to tell Muriel
that her father had died.
She was 44 years old, exactly at the midpoint in her own life.
She had published six novels and had 16 more to come.
The next chapter would start
with another move and another reinvention,
this time to New York.
She had established a relationship with the New Yorker magazine.
The New Yorker offered me an office to work in,
so all I needed to have were a couple of rooms in a hotel,
a sort of service flat.
And I went every morning to the office.
From her window, she could see the Time Life sign
on the Rockefeller Centre.
"When it says Time, I write.
"When it says Life, I want to go out."
Nobody knew about the seedy bedsits and the horrible love affair with
a literary hack and she was able to present herself as a, you know,
very glamorous, well-dressed, sophisticated...
..successful writer.
And I suspect the room kind of swirled around her.
Yet even the bright lights and bustle of New York City failed to
hold Muriel for long and she began seeking out another more European
way of life - this time in the Eternal City, Rome.
The photographs of Muriel Spark taken in her Rome years show a woman
transformed. She's 52 in this photo.
If anything, she looks more youthful than she did at 25.
I think people who reinvent themselves in general
are escaping something,
whether it's their past or whether it's the sense of themselves
or whether it's a sense of being unhappy with the baggage
that they've been given as
an individual from their family or their upbringing and education.
And so I see Muriel Spark as falling into that category,
somebody who had been handed a sort of classic Scottish Jewish Edinburgh
persona with all the expectations that arrived thereby
and had decided, "I'm not going to follow that road.
"I'm going to be entirely different." And so I think
as the forking paths appeared before her,
whether it was wartime London or New York or Italy,
she chose them.
But I think it's a flight from...
..the self or a flight from the past that makes people do that.
I'm fascinated by this period in Muriel's life
and what Rome meant to her.
Agnes Crawford is a city guide who can show me the hidden places
of Muriel Spark's Rome.
This ancient city contains many secrets.
So, if we look out here,
we can see the windows with closed shutters which the porter of the
building informs us was the salon
which formed part of Muriel's apartment.
Those two windows there?
That's right, with the closed shutters under the crenulations.
And it was the largest room of her grand apartment which she decided
not to even attempt to furnish.
She inhabited a small corner of it, she said,
and it was large enough that,
you know, she would host great parties. And undoubtedly,
while she was here, her social circle changes.
The Public Image is published and that leads to her nomination for
the first Booker Prize and it's here that she is filmed for an interview
for the BBC.
Is there something about the new film world of Rome and the old
stones of Rome that attracted you?
I think that the history of Rome has always been like that.
Rome is ancient enough
to be a good setting for a very modern and very transitory set.
HE SPEAKS ITALIAN
In the novel she had written,
the husband of a famous film star orchestrates his suicide in the
catacombs in the place of martyrdom.
It seemed to me the sort of place where a vindictive type of suicide
would take place because there had been cruelty here.
The place gives me the creeps, which I kind of like.
I think Rome is undoubtedly very rich, not only in life but in death.
You know, a building like this has seen it all.
Rome has seen it all and Romans have seen it all and very rarely are they
to be particularly perturbed.
And if you combine that sort of ancient...
..depth of history with the sort of constant presence that characterised
the sort of Dolce Vita period of celebrity in the city,
famous people were to be found absolutely everywhere.
And this dawning age of celebrity was given the Spark treatment
in her novel, The Public Image.
"These sunny glossies of Italy beamingly scandalised the just
"and the unjust alike.
"Churning up the splendour of their wickedness weekly,
"the range of emotions was as grand as grand opera but no subtler."
Rome was a rich source of inspiration for Muriel,
but also a distraction.
When her writing needed focus,
she escaped to this exclusive private hospital
in the hills above Rome.
Being genuinely ill was not a requirement for admission.
The cloistered environment had provided anonymity and refuge
to Popes and film stars alike.
Muriel completed three of her novels here, including The Driver's Seat,
later made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor.
"A small crowd has gathered, waiting for embarkation.
"Lise surveys her fellow passengers, one by one, very carefully,
"but not in a manner to provoke their attention.
"She moves and mingles
"as if with dreamy feet and legs but quite plainly
"from her eyes, her mind is not dreamy as she absorbs each face,
"each dress, each suit of clothes which will accompany her
"on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
"She will be found tomorrow morning, dead from multiple stab wounds,
"her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's
"necktie in the grounds of an empty villa in a park of the foreign city
"to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14."
I do still remember quite vividly that moment of shock when you
discover at the beginning of chapter three that she's going be murdered
and that's just like, you know, "What?"
How are we going to get from here to there? And it is one of those very
Sparkian moments where the world just tips on its axis and the things
to the place you thought they might lead.
You know, the first couple of chapters you think she's going to go
off and somehow this odd woman is going to find love or something.
You should know better really, reading Muriel Spark.
I don't think anyone could know if she knew herself what she
was looking for until she found it.
But always groping in a certain direction,
she was looking for her killer.
Then you read on...
..looking at every character you encounter
through a very different lens, is this going to be the one?
Is this going to be the one?
She's looking for a particular person, but is it actually going to
be somebody completely different who does her in? Where are we going?
What I did there was one of these flash-forwards,
because I think that's far more subtle than ordinary suspense,
to just give away the ending and the reader is then really involved to
see how it happened.
This BBC interview is its own flash-forward, of course.
Muriel is 78.
She is being filmed at the house in Tuscany where she lived for the last
30 years of her life.
She moved on from Rhodesia, she moved on from London,
she moved on from New York, she moved on from Rome.
Who, who knew Muriel in all those early years, would have ever have
thought that she'd spend say the last 30 years of her life living in
a remote rural place in the middle of the Italian countryside?
Because Muriel kept absolutely everything,
in the files at the National Library of Scotland,
we can trace the first appearance of a figure who would bring sanctuary
and stability to her restless life.
"Monday the 15th of January 1968,
"2pm to 6pm, four hours at 1,700 lire.
"Tuesday 16th Jan, three hours, four and a half hours,
"total, 28,050 lire."
Signed, Penelope Jardine.
This was the start of a relationship that lasted the next 40 years.
It's a simple invoice for some secretarial work.
Who knew this was the start of a lifelong friendship?
Of all the people who ever had a chance to know the real
Muriel Spark - and I wish I'd been one of them -
Penelope Jardine is perhaps the person who got to know her best.
Penelope. How are you? I'm very well. How are you?
Nice to meet you.
I'll show you the bell.
The famous bell for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner here.
It was in my studio in Rome and when Muriel was working upstairs,
I would ring the bell and say, "Lunch is ready."
And she would come.
Without disturbing her, so to speak, was the idea.
BELL RINGS
In the summer of 1975, while working on her 14th novel,
Muriel felt that now familiar need for escape and peace to work.
Penelope Jardine,
an artist who'd worked as Muriel's secretary in Rome,
was now living in a converted church in Tuscany.
Muriel was writing her book The Takeover that summer and it was
getting hotter and hotter and she had someone to stay and it was very
distracting and one thing and another and she got a block,
she couldn't write any more.
And so I was ringing her up about something
and she said, "Can I come up?"
Or I said, "Would you like to come up?" I don't know which way.
And she said, "Oh, that's an idea.
"Come and fetch me." Oh, come and fetch her?
She couldn't drive.
And so I went and picked her up and she stayed ever since.
And that was it.
She found it was useful, I think...
..to have a companion that she could talk to or somebody who understood
what she did, who could drive a car and cook an egg.
So, was that...? She was totally devoted to her work.
That was all that really mattered.
Everything else had to fit in and fit around.
So, she had an extraordinary work ethic.
She used to tell people in interviews that she would write
in the morning or she'd get up early
or she'd do two hours.
It's completely untrue. She never did any of those things.
She would think for a year probably about a book and then it would be
written in a few weeks.
She took... She had to have the title, and she wrote the book
from the title, I think, in a way.
She had often the ending.
She would type up a little piece of paper with just the ending.
The last sentence. Before she started? Yes.
And then there'd be a few more notes on the way.
Amazing, it was.
Most extraordinary.
Usually, I write on these notebooks.
These are exercise books the same as I used as a child.
They are from James Thin of South Bridge, Edinburgh,
and I send for them and they send me a dozen at a time.
And...
..I begin at the beginning.
I write my name...
..on the first page.
I write my name and then I write...
I write the title, then I write my name, then I turn over,
I write the title of the book,
I write "Chapter One" and then I write on.
And when it's... I leave a space so I can make alterations as I go along
but I don't revise it afterwards.
And then it goes to the typist and she types it and I revise that and
that's the book. That's finished.
And she never corrected anything hardly ever.
But you were typing these up. And did you do corrections?
Oh, no, of course I didn't correct.
I wouldn't have dared correct it.
No. What do you mean?
What I mean is, did, for example...
Would there be a comma out of place or a full stop out of place?
Oh, no, no, no.
Anyway, I wouldn't have been allowed to say, "Put a comma there."
Because every comma meant something.
It meant a breath of...
It was all rhythm.
Muriel liked to spend hot evenings in August, like we have now, being
driven somewhere, like up to the hills and she'd be thinking
of her book the whole time.
Penelope, I cannot get over these, how neat they all are.
This is like a piece of artwork.
Most of Muriel's vast archive has been packed and sent to
the National Library of Scotland.
It falls to Penelope to deal with the rest.
All the poems of Muriel Spark.
Podcast via the New Yorker.
So you are still cataloguing?
Lots of dead ends.
Memento Mori with Maggie Smith, collections on television.
Brodie: The Musical.
Which never happened.
Somebody says,
"Have we got a translation of that in that language?"
I can't even read them. But you know where it is though?
They're in Chinese.
And is all this uncatalogued?
Most of this over here is just pending.
Will there ever be anything that was never published?
Because even when Muriel was working on her last book...
It was only five pages or something.
But that was never published? No.
Do you have it? Yes, I can't remember where I've put it.
I have it somewhere, tucked away. Do you? Yeah.
It's called Destiny.
Some things have been here waiting since about 2008.
I haven't answered them yet.
They answer themselves after a while.
Eventually, it goes away. Yes.
The hats, would you like to see the hats?
I'd love to see Muriel's hats. Come and see the hats.
But I love that, cos it's got... So basically it's got...
This goes at the back and then the veil goes over the front.
It looks great on you.
Would you like to keep it for your next wedding?
"Guess what, I've got Muriel's hat on!"
This is part of this vast archive.
Oh, yes. I can't wait to get rid of it.
Does it feel sometimes,
does it actually feel sometimes like a weight?
I don't want it to be a kind of...
What do you call it? Memory lane stuff, this house.
It is slightly already.
And as you... As things go to the National Library,
does that feel like a weight has been lifted?
Wonderful, yes. Yes, it does.
But I suppose in a way, you are the keeper of the flame?
Uh-huh. I feel like blowing it out, sometimes.
Do go away.
You know, because it is quite a burden, in a way.
To have to think, "What am I going to do with that?"
Yes. What am I going to do with this hat?
What am I going to do with it?
Do you think that each of you felt that the relationship that you two
had was the most important in your lives?
Oh, no, I shouldn't think so.
I don't think so, no.
But you were so close for so many years?
Yes, it was kind of fairly constant.
I suppose. I think our whole relationship
was one of sort of freedom, in a way.
She was free and I was free but we both had this creative side that had
to be...understood.
That idea of freedom I think is a very interesting one.
Yes, well, you have to have...
..with anybody, I think.
I mean, I have to ask this because it's a matter of record and people
always put this exactly the wrong way, so if I just ask you this,
was it a relationship that was more than a deep friendship?
No, it was not.
I know what you're asking me.
No.
It was just, we had a...
..good understanding, I think.
There were lots of sides of her I didn't really know at all.
I don't think you ever know everybody.
Anybody, actually.
I had persuaded her to come to Edinburgh to appear at the
International Book Festival because I thought time was running out.
She was 86 and I was worried that she might...
..not last or be well enough to come again.
It was a very emotional day.
You know, tickets were much sought-after.
They sold out within minutes of being put on sale.
She'd said to me that she was going to read from a new short story,
and a poem or whatever.
And I said, "No, no, no.
"No, you can't do that."
And she said, "Well, why not?"
I said, "Well, they've come to hear Jean Brodie.
"They have to hear you say it, they have to hear the words."
And she read it.
It was incredible.
"I have frequently told you and the holidays just past have convinced me
"that my prime has truly begun.
"One's prime is elusive.
"You little girls when you grow up must be on the alert to recognise
"your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.
"You must then live it to the full."
MUSIC: Beat The Rap by Werner Tautz