Muriel Spark, author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (post 2): Would psychological symptoms in her first novel be due primarily to pills or poetry?

In my post on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I said I would try to better understand Muriel Spark by reading her first novel, The Comforters, and some biography. I have not seen her first novel yet, but I have seen her autobiography.

“So I continued my [T. S.] Eliot studies. But in 1954 [the year before she finished writing The Comforters]…foolishly, I had been taking dexedrine as an appetite suppressant, so that I would feel less hungry. It was a mad idea…one night the letters of the words I was reading became confused. They formed anagrams and crosswords…I knew they were hallucinations. But I didn’t connect them with the dexedrine” (1, p. 204).

Also around that time, she saw a connection between writing novels and being a poet. “All my hallucinatory experiences, looking back on them, seemed to integrate with this idea. I always tell students of my work, and interviewers, that I think of myself as predominantly a poet…I could see that to create a character who suffered from verbal illusions on the printed page would be clumsy. So I made my main character ‘hear’ a typewriter with voices composing the novel itself. This novel, The Comforters… (1, pp. 206-207).

The above makes it unclear whether pills or poetry was the predominant influence for any psychological symptoms that she attributed to her character in The Comforters. What had Muriel Spark been like before she had ever taken diet pills?

Earlier in her life, “There were times when, listening to lovely music on the radio, looking at a fine picture in the Scottish National Gallery, reading or writing a poem, I was aware of a definite ‘something beyond myself’. This sensation especially took hold of me when I was writing; I was convinced that sometimes I had access to knowledge that I couldn’t possibly have gained through normal channels — knowledge of things I hadn’t heard of, seen, been taught. I know that such phenomena can possibly be explained rationally in a variety of ways. When I was young, though, the confidence that arose from my sense of receiving ‘given’ knowledge and ideas constituted my religion. But I never associated this religious mental activity with psychic powers, all claims for which I considered to be entirely phoney” (1, p. 115).

In short, her poetic mind came first.

1. Muriel Spark. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993.