BOOK REVIEW / Genteel dumpling turned plucky swan: Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark, Constable pounds 14.95

MURIEL SPARK has written an account of her early life which finishes when the Fifties do, with the flowering of her prime and of her literary reputation. 'I have said it now, this being the place.' The 'it' refers to distortions in a memoir by a betraying former boyfriend, Derek Stanford, and the place is a book where the record can be put right, a record obscured by the statements of jealous interlopers. She puts it right by looking at class photographs, receiving letters from childhood friends, and focusing on those details in which a good God is said to reside.

She writes in her Introduction about an inhabitant of Rome: 'Lady Berkeley (Molly) whom I would sometimes visit in her flat in the Palazzo Borghese. Molly lived in style. When I asked her about the past . . . she would send her butler for her book of family memoirs to check the facts. I thought it an excellent idea.' For a moment there, you think you are being told to send for your butler if you want to write your autobiography - as in that expression of the French fin de siecle about 'living' being best left to the servants. This piece of Old Edinburgh sprightliness or roguishness, with its trust in family memoirs, tells you twice what the friend's name is - which is the kind of thing that happens more than once in the book that follows. 'Strait-laced' is explained as an adjective derived from 'the tight-laced stays' that women used to wear.

Curriculum Vitae falls into three parts. The story of Spark's childhood and adolescence by the Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh is the most agreeable of these. It is followed by a disastrous marriage to a disturbed man. She speaks of herself as a writer keenly attentive to people's funny ways, and as a woman whose early men were always wildly mischosen. This man took her off to what is now Zimbabwe, where she had a child, and where, according to one of her unreliables, Stanford again, he shot her in the leg. In the final section she is in London, at the Poetry Society.

The Edinburgh narrative unveils a kindly female world of old-fashioned habits, of books, jams, scones, hems and human idiosyncrasy. It is all very sweetly done, or almost all. Of a burly gym-teacher she writes: 'One of her pupils remembers how excellent she was as a Scottish folk dancer, participating in public performances in Princes Street Gardens.' None of Jean Brodie's pupils would have inspired such a queue of p's.

There's a chance here to check on the places and personnel fictionalised in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The school where Miss Brodie teaches is a portrayal of James Gillespie's, whose 'endowment allowed for parents like my own, of high aspirations and slender means', to pay reduced fees. 'Means' was to prove a favourite word of Spark's, in her transfer from Bruntsfield Links to various exotic places. Robert Garioch complains, in a poem, of one of the city's Merchant Company schools, charitably endowed like Gillespie's for the education of the poor, that it should charge such fees and take such pains 'to be genteel': but Gillespie's may have been less aspiring, and more considerate of those of slender means. Muriel Spark identifies the original of Miss Jean Brodie in Miss Christina Kay.

It is a marvellous novel, which lends lustre to this biographical supplement. In the language of the theology she refused to accept, you could say that it is the book which she was destined to write. Miss Kay is commemorated in it, with many of her traits intact: the mastery of her class, the Fascist sympathies, the art worship, the dark complexion, the moustache. What, then, are the differences?

'The sexual significance of everything', which so diverts the girls in the novel, does not stop short at Miss Brodie, who is awarded a slain fiance and two latter-day involvements: a 'sex affair' with the singing teacher and a 'love affair' with the art teacher. The memoir notes that 'dishy Arthur Couling' taught art at Gillespie's - before going on to teach it to me, I might add, at another Edinburgh school: I remember a haystack of his, hanging from its nail at the Royal Scottish Academy, and I am glad to know that this sometimes grumpy old fellow was the object of Muriel Spark's affections, and of Jean Brodie's. Of all such involvements, however, Miss Kay appears to have been innocent.

Unlike Miss Brodie, moreover, Miss Kay was a devout Protestant. The Reformed religion was largely withheld from a novel in which history and geography might have conspired to locate it, and sex and Catholicism rushed in to fill the vacuum. Having betrayed her mentor and been awarded a sex affair with the art teacher, Sandy of the narrow little eyes is pent behind bars in the narrow cell of a nunnery. Sandy's betrayal is likely to be, for some readers of the novel, an idiosyncrasy, and an enigma. More in the manner of the Calvinist God, who hath done whatsoever He hath pleased, than in the manner of most novels, the betrayal seems arbitrary. Muriel Spark must have willed it that way, but her readers may well have wondered what she meant by it.

She has often been interested in betrayal, and Sandy's may have given expression to a highly- charged sense of departure from the Edinburgh of her Scottish and Jewish forbears. Job-seeking, and Scottish-looking, in Edinburgh, she firmly presented herself as the possessor of a Jewish name, Camberg, and she was moved by some of the observances of the faith. But Stanford's memoir, Inside the Forties, speaks of her, not implausibly, as having placed a distance between herself and Jewishness. Like Walter Scott, with his own ambivalence on the subject, she was later to be plagued by a Jewish businessman - in New York, when Stanford got round to selling the letters she had sent him. Spark's buoyant novel requires an effort of interpretation - an effort which her memoir does not make. It says less than the novel does, for instance, about why the name Brodie was adopted. The memoir mentions an American family friend of that name, while Miss Brodie herself claims descent from the famous 18th-century burglar and double-liver, Deacon Brodie. This is one of the sinister meanings which she attracts and which make her betrayable.

Muriel Spark went to work in London, around 1947, as secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review. The Poetry Society of its Portman Square days was every bit as quarrelsome as it has been reported to be since. It belonged to a twilit zone of snobs, toffs, backbiters, lechers, ghostly fathers and ghastly poets, tasters of this religion and of that. Lloyd's-like, it had Names to conjure with - names such as the Chevalier Galloway Kyle and Dom Ambrose Agnius. Modernist writers were viewed by older members with a fascinated aversion. For others, Eliot and Evelyn Waugh were the big fish which glided by the edges of this pool. Spark strove to open the magazine to new approaches, and an opposition group, with Marie Stopes as its termagant leader, shrieked and caballed against her, blaming her for being divorced. Muriel Spark sees the joke, but risks including herself in the comedy. Two friends of this time are complained of, and contrasted: Derek Stanford was 'as different from the macho Howard Sergeant as could be imagined. Derek came from a respectable ordinary-class family.'

Ten years later, having won an Observer short-

story competition, suffered a breakdown, and published her novel The Comforters (which contains, by coincidence, a version of Waugh's Prufrock hallucinations of the same period), Muriel Spark was on the road to fame. Waugh wrote 'to say that now I was becoming established I should move to a good address'. 'Wise' of Waugh, she thinks, to offer such advice. But she preferred to pig it out in Camberwell.

Stanford's book, with its vein of mischief and condescension, deals with her progress to fame. One of her 'beaux', he relates, was a Scottish laird, with a castle, who held that the Duke of Edinburgh was rather like 'a manservant of good appearance'. 'Another of her convictions was that her hands . . . were too small to allow her to make the bed. Practice and ingenuity, it seemed, had triumphed over this incapacity.' He also tells us that she lost a tooth defending her honour at the Poetry Society. But there is fondness in his book, too - for the plucky, dishy striver, for the 'dumpling' who had become a swan.

It's a pity that Muriel Spark should have produced a book about her young days which steers discussion towards its settling of hashes, and the bathos of its ordinary-class family and good address. But it wouldn't do to be solemn about it. The odd thing is that, having entered the world of her early comedies in the course of her corrective attentions to the past, she is as solemn about it as she is. No doubt there will always be something odd about the comedian who suffers, and, in doing so, fails to see some of her own jokes.-

(Photograph omitted)