An “Intellectual Monster…” Why Muriel Spark Never Married

High in the Tuscan hills, a light grilling is underway. “Sexually, probably, I could be faithful,” seventy-two-year-old Spark is in the middle of explaining, “though that’s not the point.” It is 1990, and Spark, sitting neatly in an armchair in the lounge of Arezzo’s Hotel Continentale, has just been asked for the umpteenth time why it is that she remains unmarried. This afternoon’s interrogator is Lynn Barber, whose reputation for hatchet jobs has led her to be known as “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” “Mrs Spark will answer your questions gamely, politely,” Barber will later report of her “daffy” subject, “but with her mind clearly elsewhere.”

Article continues after advertisement

But now Spark snaps into focus. Setting down her drink, she leans forward in her chair. She smooths her blouse, and straightens the feather quill brooch pinned to the lapel of her jacket. She is ready to make herself clear.

“The point is,” Spark continues, that if she were married, she “couldn’t concentrate on the job” of writing novels: “I’m too interested in my writing: I couldn’t work at a marriage.” There was an additional complication. “My experience of men,” she says, “is that they resent it if you are successful—and I never had the slightest intention of not being as successful as I could be.” As Barber continues to probe, Spark spells out her difficulty with marriage in the plainest terms possible. “All I say is, you’re only half a person if you’ve got to go along with someone else.”

She pauses, glancing over at the third party in the room. By her side sits her companion, Penelope Jardine, dressed comparatively informally in a loose-fitting shirt, trousers and a pair of scuffed espadrilles. Looking back at Barber, Spark commences some light back-pedaling. “I mean, I can share—I do share with Penelope to a certain extent—but marriage is a different thing, a kind of obligation of being with them for a lifetime.”

If being married would have reduced Spark to “half a person,” her not being married has made her a freakishly excessive figure.

The discussion of Spark’s unmarried status is followed by another familiar topic: “Was she a good mother?” By now, Robin is in his early fifties and still living in Edinburgh. In recent years, he has taken up painting, and lately started selling his work. “Oh, I think I was a good mother,” Spark replies, “but I’m sure my son wouldn’t think so.” Why? “I had to work, so my mother really took the role of mother for him. I’m not extremely maternal, but I think of him always—still do.” It is exactly the kind of succinct, cautiously honest answer that Spark had spent the past twenty-odd years providing.

When the interview is published, it is paired with a less than flattering portrait of the artist. In an accompanying cartoon, Spark is caricatured as a sulking giant, tottering above the Tuscan countryside in a pair of high heels. On her enormous face, she wears a look of world-weary cynicism mixed with melancholy. She carries an umbrella, but it may as well be a paper parasol from a cocktail glass, given the sheer scale of her vast, solemn head. In the background, in the doorway of a crumbling stone building, stands a tiny, faceless figure, her arms held neatly behind her back. It is Jardine, dutifully keeping the house in order before the writing monster stomps back to her desk.

The implication is clear. If being married would have reduced Spark to “half a person,” her not being married has made her a freakishly excessive figure. Unmoored from the family unit, and inflated by success and ambition, she is left to roam the rainy hills like a beast that has exiled itself from conventional society. “Maybe I’ve got a hysterically panicky, gloomy view of marriage,” Spark concedes to Barber. Judging by the facial expression given to her caricature, the illustrator agrees.

Perhaps nothing about Barber’s article, nor the caricature printed alongside it, came as much of a surprise to Spark. She had, by this point, faced innumerable questions about the absence of a man in her life, the exact nature of her friendship with Jardine, and her relationship with Robin. She knew what the world thought of women like her, who prioritize their artistic and intellectual development over marriage, men and motherhood. She had known this, in fact, years before she herself became an object of public scrutiny. It is all there in the work she fought so fiercely to create, right from the beginning. “Am I a woman,” wonders the unmarried writer, Sybil Greeves, on the final page of “Bang-Bang You’re Dead,” the short story Spark first drafted in 1958, “or an intellectual monster?” Sybil, who spent her younger years beleaguered by the presence of her double, that emblem of feminine conformity named Désirée, never manages to perceive herself as anything but abnormal by comparison. “I’m rather a frigid freak, I suppose,” she tells herself.

What is an “intellectual monster,” exactly? I turn the phrase over in my mind, and find myself picturing cloven-hooved brogues, and horn-rimmed spectacles that sprout, well, horns. Yet in Spark’s short story, and indeed in Spark’s own story, the creature cuts an altogether more unassuming figure. She—for it is always a she—is monstrous simply because she cannot, or will not, conform to what is expected of her. She is freakish because she lives somewhere beyond the “or” of Sybil’s question, stalking some selfish hinterland where her time and thoughts are hers alone. Her presence is heralded not by the sounds of howls, roars or clanking chains, but by the shutting of the door to her study, the scrape of her chair as it is pulled towards her desk, and the clanking of her type-writer keys.

Monsters of various shapes and sizes creep across the pages of Spark’s novels, plays and short stories. We meet no shortage of murderers, fraudsters, fascists, ghouls, charlatans, sadists and blackmailers. Yet it is the intellectual monster—a woman whose greatest sin is to prioritize her writing above all else—to whom Spark devotes most of her ink. Just think of Caroline Rose in The Comforters, who leaves her loved ones behind to write the novel being dictated to her by the phantom typist in her head. “You misrepresent all of us,” grumbles her fiancé, after seeing himself depicted in the finished work. Then there is Loitering with Intent’s Fleur Talbot, who describes recovering the stolen manuscript of her novel, Warrender Chase, in terms more befitting of a dramatic romantic reunion. “My Warrender Chase, my novel,” Fleur sighs: “my foolscap pages with the first chapters I had once torn up and then stuck together; my Warrender Chase, mine. I hugged it. I kissed it.” As far as Fleur is concerned, nothing and nobody else compares to the stack of paper in her hands.

Imagine attempting to hold a conversation with these characters. Their minds, to return to Barber’s assessment of Spark, would likely seem “elsewhere.” They may strike you as “daffy” and distant. Like their author, they have more pressing matters to which they must attend. Their eyes might glaze over, or fixate on some small detail that can be pocketed for future interpolation. For what is “loitering with intent,” if not a description of the artist’s gimlet-eyed presence in the world? Fleur and Caroline put innumerable noses out of joint on their paths to creative and intellectual fulfillment; lovers become dejected, friendships are left to go cold, and each woman’s devotion to her work is viewed with resentment and suspicion. At various points throughout both novels, the protagonists find themselves isolated and afraid. The hinterland, they learn, can be a deeply lonely place.

And yet it is all worth it, in the end. Fleur and Caroline each derive a profound satisfaction from their vocation; it is no coincidence that the final pages of both books include the word “rejoicing.” “You must understand,” insists Fleur, “that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.”

How closely this mirrors Spark’s own stance. In a 1983 interview, when the subject of her unmarried status was raised once more (regardless of her religion, she evidently had the patience of a saint), she made no bones about where her priorities lay:

I have a calling. Writing is a thing I have to do. Not many men will suffer for that and people do come before books, so it’s best not to have people in your life—I’m willing to subordinate an enormous amount for my work. They say sacrifice, but sacrifice for a pleasure makes it more pleasurable. If you took away the writer from me, I believe I would not exist at all.

It could never have been otherwise, she tells us time and again. There is nothing to regret or resent, and she is certainly not in need of our sympathy. Where her earlier creation, Sybil, is tortured by reminders of the life she did not live, Spark remained resolute. Nothing can be said to be lost, she believed, when so much more has been gained. If her choices make her monstrous, cold, frigid or freakish in the eyes of others, then so be it.

Spark’s most compelling portrait of the intellectual monster is not to be found in any of her novels or short stories, however. On October 1, 1962, her first and only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, opened at the New Arts Theatre in Westminster, London. It was, in no uncertain terms, an almighty flop, which closed after a handful of performances and a shrug of critical bafflement. Yet its script and staging afforded Spark the space to pick apart Sybil’s nagging question. This, Spark later reflected, was unequivocally a “woman’s play,” concerned with “the problems of being intellectual and not being married” and “being married and intellectual, and then what you do with your intellect.” It is a funny, furious racket of a production, which puts its subject—one that would go on to define its author’s public perception—center stage.

Doctors of Philosophy is set in the living room of Charlie Delfont, a feted economist, and his wife, Catherine, a former scholar of Assyrian paleography who has sacrificed her career for marriage and motherhood. Visiting their London home is Catherine’s cousin, Dr. Leonora Chase, a successful academic and a fellow of an Oxford college. The women had been close friends while studying for their doctorates some years earlier, but Catherine has since grown resentful of Leonora’s career, and dismissive of women whose scholarly ambitions come before marital subservience. “I like to please men,” she announces proudly to her cousin, before her eyes narrow and her voice sharpens: “Do you think it pleases a man when he looks into a woman’s eyes and sees a reflection of the British Museum Reading Room?”

The task of Spark is much like that of her on-stage stand-in; in her play, she works away at the dull surface of the everyday, until it gleams giddily with new possibilities.

In the company of Charlie and Catherine, Leonora ceases to feel like herself. Exhausted, she retires early to bed, only to sleepwalk into the living room a few hours later. In her somnambulant state, she begs Charlie to impregnate her “before it’s too late.” For the Delfonts, who use a tape-recorder to capture this desperate plea, Leonora’s words serve as irrefutable proof that an academic career has failed to compensate for the absence of a husband and child. Life without either, the pair determine, has left Leonora morose, maladjusted and desperate to claw her way back to the road not taken. Keeping up appearances proves tricky, however; Catherine later confesses to Leonora that it is she who has long been dissatisfied with her role as Charlie’s “charming wife.” “Can you imagine what it has felt like,” she asks her cousin, “as a scholar, to be the mere chattel of another scholar for all these years?”

The stage is set; now comes its demolition. Waiting in the wings is the Delfonts’ “daily help,” a housekeeper tellingly named Mrs. S, played by the comedic actor, Hazel Hughes. With a smile and a wink, Spark places her authorial surrogate within a long theatrical tradition of the knowing yet peripheral servant, from the sagacious butlers of Wildean social comedies, to then recent examples such as Miss Bennett in Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest from 1958, and Crestwell from Noël Coward’s 1951 play, Relative Values. As she goes about her work, Mrs. S shakes and dismantles the various fixtures and fittings of the Delfonts’ living room. In the process, she reveals the oppressive reality that so troubles Catherine and Leonora to be a flimsy construction, ripe for tearing down.

Before long, the living room is reduced to a bare stage, upon which only a couple of pulleys and switches are visible. “Are you interested in the nature of reality, Leonora,” coos Mrs. S from the empty space, “or are you too frightened?” Leonora’s reply is swift and decisive. “I’m interested,” she declares.

From her new vantage point, Leonora is able to determine the part she has come to play for the benefit of her hosts. Confronting Charlie and Catherine (whose surname is surely a sly reference to the theatrical impresario, Lord Bernard Delfont), she accuses them of tricking her into inhabiting a “dramatic role” against which they can measure their own contentment. “I have occupied the role in which you’ve cast me,” she snarls, outraged: “I’ve instinctively played the role in your minds of Leonora the barren virgin.” The only thing left to do is act out.

From this point on, the play has farcical fun with dialogue and set pieces pertaining to dramatic roles and drastic epiphanies. When Leonora is told that “scholars are not realists,” for instance, she “reaches out and gives the wall a push,” before retaliating that “realism,” in fact, “is very flimsy.” Catherine, meanwhile, finds her old ideals of wifely servitude “blown to hell.” Inspired by Leonora’s anarchic display, she ends up kissing the boyfriend of her grown-up daughter, the sensation of which she describes repeatedly as “thrilling.” That boyfriend, by the way, is also named Charlie. In fact, all men in the play (the original title of which was Charlie Is My Darling) share this name. Collectively, they form a hulking, amorphous blob of dullness and conformity. Leonora and Catherine must make a break for it, one “flimsy” stage wall at a time.

Leonora will eventually ask Mrs. S whether she, too, is “interested in the nature of reality.” “Very,” Mrs. S replies, while rubbing a dust cloth over the exposed stage contraptions. “I’m trying to give it a polish, as you can see.” The task of Spark is much like that of her on-stage stand-in; in her play, she works away at the dull surface of the everyday, until it gleams giddily with new possibilities.

There was nothing giddy about Doctors of Philosophy’s reviews, though. Tom Stoppard took issue with “Miss Spark’s assaults on the technical canons of stagecraft,” before dismissing the production as “a thoroughly entertaining failure.” Kenneth Tynan, meanwhile, called the play “one of the most baffling” he had “ever witnessed”: “No doubt it has a shape and even, perhaps, a purpose; let me discreetly say that they are not evident and may never be.” “Still, it’s cheerful,” offered Philip Hope-Wallace in the Guardian, following a similarly bemused write-up. Perhaps Spark could still find something to smirk at, as she flicked through each disappointing notice; as in her play, the male onlookers had been left startled and perplexed.

Spark kept these reviews, just as she kept virtually everything else, in her vast personal archive. There, nestled among the press clippings, is a telegram from Doris Lessing, sent to reach her on Doctors of Philosophy’s opening night. The telegram’s design is joyful and vivid, featuring illustrations of tiny hands tossing multi-colored hats and flowers into the air in a gesture of congratulation. Its message is just as ebullient. The play, Lessing writes, ought to be a tremendous success and run forever. A tip of the hat, from one intellectual monster to another.

__________________________________