Grand dame.

Talking with Muriel Spark 

BF: In your new collection of stories, Open to the Public, the title story (which concerns a famous writer exploiting his daughter) has a very melancholy undercurrent as regards writing and fame and reputation.

I tell you, what I think is sad is that so many elderly writers, especially men, get to be terribly selfish. They get their family into a state where they must do that and they must do this and nothing must be touched and it's rather a burden on the family. I've just been reading a biography, a new life of Simenon. He was a wonderful writer and extremely prolific and one couldn't expect more of him because he was so good. But still he had this family buzzing round him and watching his moods and arranging for his needs and his - I don't know, his pipes, his walks, his routine, and it was always his, his, his.

BF: So you're not like that.

(Laughs) I wouldn't get away with it, I don't think.

BF: Throughout your work, but particularly in the stories, there are many murders, many ghosts, many crimes. How is It that you came to be attracted to those elements?

I haven't really thought about it much, but I should imagine that like many things I do in writing, the main thing is life and death. To get a dramatic effect, very often a murder or something drastic has to take place.

BF: Your ghosts are very articulate.

I'm glad of that. I've always tried to make the supernatural into part of natural history. In my first short story, "The Seraph and the Zambese," there's an angel, a seraph, that gives off heat. When it goes near water, it gives off steam, as if it were part of natural history.

BF: Recently, when you won the David Cohen British Literature Prize for lifetime achievement, David Lodge commented that you employed all the strategies that we now call postmodern but that you did It forty years ago.

Yes, that's true. I was well aware of being an experimentalist. Before writing a novel, I had to write a novel about what is a novel. I know every novel should be constructed well, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but the beginning doesn't necessarily begin at the beginning, the middle might occur at any moment and the end need not be at the end of the book. Then I did The Ballad of Peckham Rye, in which I never once mentioned how people feel or think, just what they do and say, and this gives an extraordinary effect. Then I wanted to change the idea of suspense. I realized that suspense is best conveyed when you break it right away: tell the reader, perhaps on page three or four, what is going to happen, and then they will want to know how or why it happened even more.

BF: When you first began writing, were you reading any other experimentalists who influenced you?

No, I wasn't, but later I became very impressed by Robbe-Grillet, I was very impressed by a novel by Gide, The Counterfeiters, and then I read a great deal of very good prose by Max Beerbohm. I loved his tone. And for prose, just the pure pleasure of the prose, I used to read Cardinal Newman's sermons.

BF: You converted to Catholicism In your thirties, but it almost feels as If you must have had a Catholic sensibility even before you converted, It seems so deep in you.

Yes, I think you're right. I think that I was naturally Catholic and so I took to it easily.

BF: But so often In your work terrible, terrible things happen to people. How does faith fit into that?

Well, it calls for even more faith. I think faith is called for not when things are evident but when they are not evident.

BF: I know that the artist Penelope Jardine has been a great friend to you for a long time -

Oh, for a long time. Nearly thirty years. I live in her house [in Italy], you know.

BF: I wondered If she read your work and offered comments and If so, what kind of critic she is for you.

She didn't know my work very well when I first met her, but over the years she's come to know it very well, because she first of all types it out - she's an artist, but she devotes a lot of her time to my work, too. She's a great friend and she is very amusing. So that is worth much more to me than any other sort of assistance, you know?

BF: So she doesn't offer criticism.

Oh, yes, she does. She often says, "Look this shouldn't be," or "Are you sure about that?" She puts a question mark in the margin and then I consider that seriously.

BF: You've had one of the most glittering careers In literature. Have you ever doubted yourself?

I can't say I did. I haven't got a difficult talent. I sit down and write and I very seldom revise.

BF: You published your first novel, The Comforters, at thirty-nine. In the years before you published that book, did you know would be a novelist?

No, I didn't. The reason why I didn't write a novel before was economic. I had to make a living by day to day writing, journalism, literary journalism, and what I could pick up here and there in the way of quick writing. And then I came across a publisher who said he would give me money to write a novel.

BF: And as you proceeded through The Comforters, did you immediately have a sense of recognition?

Yes. I realized how I could go on and what I wanted to do. It was quite exciting, actually.