A Spark Of Suffering

Parul Seghal considers Scottish novelist Muriel Spark’s distinctive take on human misfortune:

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.” …

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.” Spark is being glib, of course, but in that glibness is a kind of laconic dignity and an instinct for privacy.