Home fires still burning

A WEEK or so ago, a fax groaned constipatedly through my machine.The handwriting - long, slopping and enviably legible - wasinstantly familiar as that of Dame Muriel Spark. Attached was aphotocopy of an article in a guidebook to the ancient Etruscan townof Orvieto, which we had visited a few days earlier with hercompanion, the painter and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Its prose wasmatchless, an attempt to capture Orvieto's dramatic situationperched on top of a volcano over 1,000 feet above the undulatingUmbrian countryside. "There are many islands that are not surroundedby the sea," wrote the book's author in a Byronic fit of late 20thcentury romanticism. "These are islands where fog rises like wavesfrom the land at the first hints of dawn. Cristal [sic] vapors [sic]waft and whisper illusions. Faint hills can be seen in an array ofthe chiaroscuros of the soul, covered with trees bearing ripeolives, hills that have remained untouched by the game of thedecades."

Dame Muriel loved the absurdity of "the chiaroscuros of the soul"and "the game of the decades" and she chuckled as she repeated them,no doubt mentally squirrelling them away in her memory until theyare disinterred and recycled in a novel or a play or a poem.Scribbled at the side of the fax was a note from Jardine sayingsimply: "Muriel's book is finished!"

When I had left them at the station in Arezzo where they haddropped me, Spark reckoned she was on the home straight, with abouta quarter of her 21st novel still to go. "It's the easy part," shesaid blithely, "a tying up of loose ends." The novel, ostensiblyabout the infamous Lord Lucan, who in 1974 murdered his children'snanny in the mistaken belief that she was their mother and who hasnever been seen since, is due out later this year.

Meanwhile Spark is already thinking ahead to myriad otherprojects. She has a play on the stocks and poems in her pocket.Jardine is compiling a book of her assorted pieces and there is apossibility of another collection of short stories. The New Yorker,where The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was excerpted in 1961, hasinvited her to be a guest of honour at its 75th anniversarycelebrations in May. She may even write a sequel of sorts to herautobiography, Curriculum Vitae, which appeared in 1992 and whichends in 1957 with the publication of The Comforters, her debutnovel. It was, she recalled, a time to celebrate, the early reviews,including an effusive one by Evelyn Waugh, indicating that here wasa new writer of considerable promise. Although aware that all toooften fine first novels are followed up by duds, Spark, then nearly40, was nevertheless determined to savour the moment and "went onher way rejoicing".

It is an upbeat ending to a book which does not shirk fromdetailing life's vicissitudes. If she writes a sequel, she says, itwill concentrate more on the many people she has encountered in thesubsequent decades, from the Harolds Acton and Macmillan, to WHAuden and Queen Frederica of Greece, Gore Vidal and Graham Greenewho, famously, helped her out when times were hard and who from timeto time sent her a case of wine "to take the chill off coldcharity". Even at the age of 81, and after half a century as apublished writer, she won't rest on her laurels. "I have had somesuccess, I suppose," she says, "but I can't stop working. I can'tafford to."

There are few days when she does not sit at her desk in herTuscan eyrie. She still writes by hand and Jardine does the typingup, as she has done since they met in Rome at the end of theSixties. While they live in the boondocks, they are far from out oftouch. They watch television news avidly, read newspapersconstantly, and Spark looks forward to embracing the internet andsplashing out on a laptop. Jardine, who knows that it will be shewho will have to navigate their way through the labyrinth ofcyberspace, grimaces at the thought.

To the outsider, life in Tuscany, with its seductive images ofsilvery olives and rambling vines, seems idyllic. To an extent, itis. But it is also hard, physical labour. Spark and Jardine havebeen living in their old rectory for some 20 years, renovatingconstantly, wrestling with the perennial demands of the ruralcalendar, man's insensitive imperative to "improve" and Italy'sinsatiable appetite for bureaucracy.

Two decades ago, the fertile Val di Chiana, where they live inthe shadow of the hill town of Civitella, was not part of what hassince become known as Chiantishire. It was the preserve of thecontadini, who farmed the land and made a living of sorts. I imagineit as akin to the Pentlands in the late 19th century, when RLSwandered the hills at will far from the roar of the motorway and thedisfigurement of the monstrous pylons. Now, the dirt roads aretarmac-surfaced and new houses spring up all the time, most of themout of reach of the pockets of the people who grew up in the area.

Even since I first visited the area, ten years ago, there hasbeen a conspicuous change. The occasion was the publication ofSymposium, the first Muriel Spark novel since The Prime to be set,at least partly, in Scotland. This has led some dolts -including,astonishingly, the novelist Robin Jenkins - to deny herScottishness, an accusation perhaps all exiles have to face at sometime. Yet the years of Spark's formation were spent entirely inScotland and only the dullest ear and dimmest wit can fail to deducewhere she comes from. "I am an Edinburgh girl, always have been,always will be," she told me recently. "You can't take that away andyou can't put it in." The accent is still there in her voice and inher prose, an unmistakable intonation, a peculiar cast of mind and astate of being. As David Daiches wrote of RLS, she is a "compulsiveexile and lover of home". If ever she were to leave Tuscany, itwould be to return to Edinburgh, but she won't contemplate it now onaccount of the weather. And who can blame her? As Stevenson said -global warming notwithstanding - the Scottish capital pays cruellyfor its situation with the vilest climate on earth.

Symposium is echt Spark; word spare, spritely, mischievous anddeep as Loch Ness. It is also sui generis. The prose reads likepoetry and every page is composed like a Chopin nocturne. Madness,mind alteration, which has always intrigued Spark, lies at the rootof the novel. The unstable hero is Magnus Murchie, who is allowedout of a Perthshire "bin" at weekends to play guru to his family."Here in Scotland," he says, "people are more capable ofperpetrating good or evil than anywhere else. I don't know why, butso it is." Of such sentiments are the blackest of comediesconstructed.

Spark and Jardine turned up at the Continentale Hotel in Arezzowhere our interview took place. Dusk was rapidly falling and thephotographer, who had driven over from London, had only a fewminutes to capture Spark in the piazza before the light turned. Shewore a dress of gaily autumnal hue with a silk scarf and string ofpearls. Her hair was red, as is mine. She asked where I got it cut."Alfie's", I said, naming the barber nearest to The Scotsman'sformer offices. Did I do anything to it? she asked, meaning did Iuse dye? I answered - truthfully - that I did not. "Neither do I,"she said, as if trumping me with a royal flush.

She was very glamorous and young in spirit, as she is stillalthough, over the past few years, she has endured tremendous painafter a variety of botched hip operations. But after being virtuallyunable to walk she now gets about pretty well, much to her delightand surprise. By chance as much as by design, I suspect, she hadmanaged to convey an impression of being aloof. In fact, she hadsimply taken the precaution of keeping other people at arm's lengthso as to get on with her writing. She talked about making ametaphorical contra fiore, a fire set to put out forest fires. Herlife, it seemed to me then, as it does today, was comprised ofraising and lowering drawbridges. When the clamour from the outsidebecame too insistent her reaction was to raise the bridge and keepthe world at bay. It was a mark of the seriousness with which shetook her vocation.

"An expatriate shifts uncomfortably," wrote Alasdair Reid, theWhithorn-born poet whom Spark knew when they both had offices at theNew Yorker, "because he still retains, at the back of his mind, theawareness that he has a true country, more real to him than anyother he happens to have selected." It is a curious condition; tobe, yet not to be. Expatriate, exile, foreigner - they are allsubtly different states of being, all suggestive of differentmotivations. Spark talks of "spiritual and political exile" but"escape" is what her career is really about. It is a condition shewas born into. Although she writes in Curriculum Vitae of thevitality of her childhood years and of her schooling at JamesGillespie's under the tutelage of Miss Christina Kay, whom shemetamorphosed into Jean Brodie, by the time she was 18 she longed toleave Edinburgh and see what lay beyond. Marriage assisted herpassage to South Africa and although it proved disastrous it alsoopened her eyes. When her husband turned violent, she says, "Iescaped for dear life." However, she retained her husband's name.Camberg, her maiden name, she has said, was good, but comparativelyflat. "Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and of fun."

So she made her escape again, arriving in London with the warstill raging. Leaving her son in Edinburgh, she opened herself tothe "experience" of the Blitz and the black-out. Little in her lifehas not found its way into her books. London offered her an entreeinto literary circles but once she had tasted success and seen howeasy it was to become seduced by it, she opted out and headed forNew York. The same applied there: when Brodie took Broadway bystorm, she realised how diverted she might become from her life'swork. Her response was to escape again, this time to Rome, havingbecome a Catholic in 1954. "It was a great relief to go somewherewhere nobody knew a thing about me," she once said, "to be just asignora in society." She has always known how to protect herself.Thus when Rome threatened to engulf her she left it, too,unsentimentally cutting loose, although she kept on her apartmentuntil a few years ago.

Looking out on a starry night across Tuscany, listening to owlshoot and dogs yelp, it could be a scene from One Hundred and OneDalmatians. It feels isolated, but not as much as it must have whenSpark and Jardine arrived two decades ago. In the past year therehave been unwelcome headlines and journalists snooping round, firstwhen Spark's son insisted erroneously that she was Jewish, then whenshe raised a fuss over the poisoning of her dogs and cats by thehunters who stalk the nearby woods in search of anything feathery orfurry. Were she inclined, she could be running Italy's AninalLiberation Front. But, sympathetic as she is, and intemperate in herdenunciation of the barbarians, she does not want anything todistract her from her work. Writing is her purpose in life, openingdoors and windows on the mind, as she puts it, even if it meansbolting the doors, leaving the phone off the hook and closing theshutters. Like Lord Lucan, her inclination is to disappear butthankfully not, in her case at least, without trace.