Parul Sehgal, What Muriel saw
Article paru le 8 avril 2014 sur le site du New Yorker
"To her readers, Dame Muriel Spark arrived aptly named and like a bolt from the blue in 1957, with her first novel, “The Comforters,” published when she was thirty-nine. She went on to produce at least a book a year with a facility that even she found bemusing. Writing novels was so easy, she said, “I was in some doubt about its value.” Rumor has it her drafts were pristine—no strike-throughs, scant revisions. It was as if she were taking dictation, faithfully transcribing those rawboned stories of blackmail and betrayal in her schoolgirl script. When she died, in 2006, she left twenty-two novels, poems, plays, biographies, essays, and a memoir—a body of work singular in its violence, formal inventiveness, and scorching opening lines. “He looked as if he would murder me and he did,” one story begins.
But her reputation has never been secure. Once considered a peer to Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Spark is now regarded as a bit of a curiosity, the chronicler of kinky nuns and schoolgirl intrigue, exemplar of the “dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish” women’s writing that Norman Mailer derided. But lightning, in this case, strikes twice. Several of her books are realising in America. We have a chance to reconsider the prime of Ms. Muriel Spark (...)
Spark was fascinated by suffering—and even tried writing a critical study of the Book of Job—but it was an active, robust kind of suffering that she liked, whereby hunger whetted one’s wits. Her women are not enamored of their anxiety, of their moods and wounds. If they’re poor and powerless, it’s in the way of a junkyard dog, with a restless, scavenging instinct, a loyalty to no one and breathtaking cunning. Spark simply seemed to find no romance in female abjection, the fashion for which Susan Sontag describes in “Illness as Metaphor.” “Sadness made one ‘interesting,’ ” Sontag writes. “The melancholy creature was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart.” It was “the ideal look for women.” Compare that to these most Sparkian of sentiments: “He actually raped her, she was amazed”; “Filthy luck. I’m preggers. Come to the wedding.” Or, from Spark’s own description of her brief marriage to the much older and very violent Sydney Oswald Spark (she called him S.O.S.), who went insane: “He became a borderline case, and I didn’t like what I found on either side of the border.” (...)"
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