On hearing that Muriel Spark had died, the first thing it seemed imperative to do, after being surprised by a surge of grief (even though it was a great age, and hardly a wasted life) was scrabble through cupboards to find a relic: a very poor-quality tape of Spark speaking at the Edinburgh book festival in 2004, her last public appearance in her home city.
Spark had seemed delighted by her role as part entertainment, part object of devotion. Le tout Edinburgh had queued for her, the returning genius. (She had not lived in in her home town for any period since travelling to Rhodesia to marry in 1937, though her notebooks were still stockpiled from a long-since closed stationer's in Chambers Street.) Most of the audience looked and sounded as if they were from a Spark novel. It was delicious.
At 86, she was on acrobatic form. The reason for searching out the tape was a wish to hear that wonderful Edinburgh voice. Its precision and and arch gentility played beautifully against her viperish turn of phrase. Frail and losing mobility, but nonetheless quite a presence, she tossed out witticisms with the largesse of a true grande dame. She did not mess around with false modesty.
Of the film adaptation of The Driver's Seat, which starred Elizabeth Taylor as Lise, a girl with a death wish, she said: "It's my favourite book, because it is well made. But there was no way in which Elizabeth Taylor could look as if she wanted to die ... She looked as if she wanted to drink." The age-old reader's question, "Where do you get your inspiration," she batted away mischievously: "I like to see an empty notebook. It's very inspiring to me."
Do you never feel you're shortchanging people with your short novels? she was asked. "Yes, I do. There's nothing I can do about it. I feel I should give them something more to take home for their money." Like a Bleak House, or a War and Peace? "Well, something a bit better ..."
Of her characters: "Some authors say that their characters take on a life of their own. I don't have that experience. I keep tracks on everything in rather a tyrannical way. I feel they belong to me until the last word is written." Indeed, she thought nothing of cruelly dispatching people in half a sentence: there was no doubt who was boss.
That day she was wry about her most famous work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. "I do feel that my other books are overlooked a great deal, thanks very much to Maggie Smith. A lot of people think Maggie Smith wrote the book. I do like people to read my other work as well."
Recently, that has not always been easy. Not everything stayed in print. The Comforters, her first novel, and an experimental tour de force, required careful searches in second-hand bookshops until Penguin reissued it last year. Most of my 18 or so volumes were painstakingly acquired through the used-book networks, each a minor victory and a treasure. An icy wind cuts through some books, enough to take your breath away (The Driver's Seat I thought a cruel story). Others, such as Loitering With Intent, bounce with fun and wit. The Girls of Slender Means has extraordinary charm, though the steel is never far away. A Far Cry From Kensington, apart from anything, contains wonderful advice on how to write a novel: "You are writing a letter to a friend ... Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you ... Remember not to think of the reading public; it will put you off."
Reading Spark is a cumulative pleasure. The obsessions - with the Book of Job, for instance - reappear, like leitmotifs. Some books are better than other books, but constantly to be admired is their cut-glass exactitude; an economy of expression that matches their intellectual rigour. These are lean books with not an ounce of fat on the bones.
At the start of her volume of autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Spark describes the bread and the butter of her childhood, summoning up "warm, round bappy rolls with a powdering of flour" and the fresh butter prepared by "a pink-and-white complexioned girl with her hair in a cap and wearing a sparkling white overall".
Spark's bread and butter was her writing. That meant that even after The Finishing School, with its valedictory title, was published in 2004, "I just got lonely without a novel on the desk. So I started another," as she told the Edinburgh audience. (It was to be about Mary Queen of Scots.) In Curriculum Vitae, she describes the pink-and-white complexioned girl working "swiftly and neatly" and "like a sculptor with his clay"; it is a performance that is "beautiful and clever". It seems odd to think of a world where Spark is not working like this, deftly making something beautiful and clever, each morning at her desk at 7. It was typical of her wit to hint at her own mortality in The Finishing School by quoting Hazel from Sky News Weather: "As we go through the evening and into the night."
