1/3/2024 0 Comments Spark peopleIt would take more than two years for mother and son to be reunited, but they would never live together again. In 1939, with World War II already underway, Muriel Spark, who had already sent a couple of stories to literary magazines, separated de facto from her husband, left her then four-year-old child in a convent of Catholic nuns in the city of Gwelo and embarked on a long and dangerous journey back to her city of birth, Edinburgh. It was only the last chapter of a painful misunderstanding that had begun much earlier, in a time (the late 1930s) and a place (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) so far away that they seem to belong to a different life, to some other novel. But for those who knew the author’s life and that of her family well, it was no surprise. The press picked up on that fact and gave it a good deal of coverage because a son disinherited in favor of a companion of the same sex-Jardine is still the executor of all her work-always has an intriguing, old-fashioned melodramatic component. When she died in 2006, the writer made it clear in her will that none of her property would go to Robin, who was still alive and a painter in Edinburgh. That’s the good thing about wives, they don’t get paid. There is no record of Jardine receiving a salary for all these jobs. Muriel always sat in the front passenger seat and would fetch little minibar bottles of cognac from the glove compartment. Whether they slept together or not, Jardine performed with almost Nabokovian mastery-Vera’s, of course-the role of the writer’s wife, diligently managing a portfolio of household and administrative tasks ranging from talking to agents to overseeing translation contracts, confirming or declining attendance at literary festivals, booking airline tickets and driving the old BMW when the two of them went on trips around Europe. Theirs was, they said, simply a satisfying domestic arrangement. Spark had always had men as lovers (and a husband) and they, Penelope and Muriel, always denied that theirs was a romantic relationship or a sort of Boston marriage, a sotto voce lesbian arrangement like those of yesteryear. When you take care of young children, as anyone who has done so knows, you live in a state of perpetual assault. The hyper-prolific author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, who wrote more than 20 novels and as many titles of poetry, essays, memoirs and biographies, lived for the last 30 years of her life, when she had already achieved success and money, with a secretary and companion, Penelope Jardine, in an old church converted into a house in the village of Oliveto, in Tuscany. In the history of recent literature, the author who came closest to having such an efficient arrangement was Muriel Spark at the end of her life. John Le Carré’s wife typed his novels and while doing so edited and shaped them. Nothing frees up the time and mental space needed to devote to filling pages like living with someone who will take care of everything mundane, including the small detail of bringing home money to put food on the table, as Mercedes Barcha did when Gabriel García Márquez left journalism to focus on his novels.įrom Patricia Llosa, who was so good at packing Mario Vargas Llosa’ bags, to Vera Nabokov, paradigm of the proofreader/editor/coach/administrator/agent who even licked the stamps of Vladimir’s letters, there is a wide catalog of diligent literary consorts. The best way to lead a writer’s life is time-tested and amply documented throughout history: marry a writer’s wife.
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