Curriculum Vitae.

As I was reading the first two chapters of Muriel Spark's extraordinary life story, Curriculum Vitae, I felt gleeful. I was having great, earnest fun inside another person's life. There I was in Edinburgh, happily guided by little Muriel, smelling warm, round, happy rolls with a powdering of flour," waiting with her for the doorbell to ring to see who might visit, and listening raptly as she spun out wonderful sentences like the one about the doorbell: "That ring at the door that I loved so much would bring, in the afternoon, my mother's friends or, on rare occasions, my married aunts." How many writers allow the sentence itself to imitate so effortlessly its own emotional content? First I hear the ring; then I wait to discover who's literally on the other side of the door. And those "married aunts," held at bay by word after word after word, not to mention four commas, become both rare and precious by the time they finally reach me.

Such easy yet artful authority when delivering one's richly remembered childhood suggests that glee and curiosity, anticipation and the sting of disappointment are serious human matters. Gifted writers who can locate the happiness in their youth allow the simplest things: bread, butter, desks, bicycles, to assume a significance that touches everyone. The first chapters of this volume place Spark, whose extended childhood was set in Scotland in the 1920s and '30s, in the company of writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Laye Camara, and Whole Soyinka who insist that it is the experience of the individual child which must be honored. Their insistence is no based on a sentiment evocation of time past, but rather resides in the gradual exposure of the reader to the particular texture and whirr of the stuff that filled the writer's childhood, as if time means nothing.

Muriel Spark sits well in such company because she is a fiction writer who has acquired justifiable international renown whole, at the same time, enlarging the scope of the genre, as well as the possibilities of the written language With nineteen novels, two collections of poetry, five of short stories, one drama, three volumes of criticism, and one book for children to her credit (and here I refer only to book length works), the art of writing has shaped Muriel Spark's entire life.

This volume, covering the first thirty-nine years of that life, is not simply a colorful reminiscence, nor even the tale of a writer's growth over time. Spark had another intention when she undertook this work: "So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known, that I felt it time to put the record straight." This adult goal occupies the latter half of the book in which she straightens the record mostly in a tone of breezy rectitude, while, at times, permitting the reader to hear a sharp rasp of outrage over past injustices. For example, she recounts in detail her serious grievance as the editor of The Poetry Society in London from 1947-49. The American reading public will probably take this account as an example of exotic British behavior: to feel still so upset over such a short tenure in a then-minor institution! Yet Spark's devotion to detailed honesty renders this account poignant, at the very least.

Of greater interest to Americans should be the generosity with which Spark encourages readers to link the particular circumstances or events in her life with those stories or books which subsequently embodied them. Spark's generosity is both graceful and casual, as she points again and again to the generative quality of a particular incident - seeing Victoria Falls for the first time, for instance - and its ultimate expression in a story that a reader can find in the library - in this case "The Serapth and the Zambesi." And most fans will be delighted to discover the protypye of Miss Jean Brodie in the figure of an actual teacher, Miss Christian Kay, who once coast and skin for the Spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. Citron means Lemon it is yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue.

Spark both reveres and practices accuracy, but accurate sharing of information or remembered speech does not constitute openness. Another intention for this volume, stated in the introduction, is ambitious by anyone's measure: "I resolved. . . to write an autobiography which would help to explain, to myself and others: Who am l." If Muriel Spark were meant to be a character with passions and rages and motives and felt needs, and this book were the novel that sought to bring her to life, I'd have to conclude that the author had never permitted her character to live fully on the page. I would wonder who this Muriel Spark was meant to be. Oh yes, the sure, clear voice would race me through the chapters full of hardship (a "disastrous marriage" in Africa to a disturbed and violent man), separation (a motherhood spent apart from her own son), adventure (a stint with British Intelligence during World War II) - this list could go on - but, in vain, I would search for the person who had endured and thrived.

At times I catch a glimpse of her, when, for instance, she launches her chapter on her African marriage with a stoic ode to the conscious repression of "personal sorrows, frights, and horrors." I catch it again when she is being cruelly but truly humorous as she refers to one of her arch-enemies in the Poetry Society, Dr. Marie Stopes. And yet again when she acknowledges her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954 with a refusal to discuss the role of her faith in her life or work.

I realize I run the risk of wanting too much from an already atypically generous writer, but I find Spark's concerted effort to keep her own heart off the pages of her autobiography and my response to that effort both problematic and instructive. I turn once again to her childhood. It seems miraculous and fabulous that she takes me by the hand and leads me to bakeries and dairies and her school, but never for a moment does it occur to me to feel slighted because she doesn't share her button collection. I don't feel bereft of an account of her father's whiskers. Or her first kiss. When she writes of her childhood I am simply thankful that she remembers anything at all. I understand that a child's heart is revealed through enthusiasms and fears, and always through those material things which he or she loves.

As soon as Spark turns to adult life, even without her suggestion that this autobiography might reveal who she is, I embrace a different way of listening. I spontaneously suspect that a selective silence reveals a multitude of qualities: stoicism, reticence, mistrust, even arrogance, and that I have the right to seek her life both in her silence and in her speech. If this standard of mine seems impossibly high, it also feels completely natural, and concerns the arduous responsibility of adulthood. As in the "doorbell" sentence, Spark's art has an uncanny manner of imitating life, for by the time I am pacing through the adult Spark's days with her, I too am nostalgic for her childhood and its lushness, I too want that time when being both ardently loved and supportively liberated from the constraints of love felt natural. Of course, I miss chapter 2 when I'm stranded in chapter 6. She does too. If this were a novel I could say that the second half simply doesn't live up to the dazzling promise of the first. But this is no novel; it's a life.

If in the adult half of this book, there is no effusive and emboldening love story to reveal Spark's heart, it is not for lack of love. Despite the mention of many friends, Spark's silent eloquence suggests that, after parents and son, her main loves are God and work. As for God, Spark will not speak of that dimension of belief, and the other great discipline, her art, lies outside these pages, on the shelves of bookstores and public libraries in book after book after book. To find the adult Muriel Spark, the one who at once dashes through and jots down the early pages of this volume, spouting verse and giggling with her brother, one must simply go to those other shelves. This predicament poses no problem; rather it presents a tantalizing invitation. Muriel Spark would approve.