‘We are all a little mad in one or other particular’. The presentation of madness in the novels of Muriel Spark

Spark’s breakdown

Muriel Spark had a psychotic breakdown when she was a young woman. In late January 1954, she began insisting that T.S. Eliot was sending her threatening messages. She believed that his London play and accompanying theatre programme were full of them. Obsessively, she began to seek these messages out and covered sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams and cryptographic experiments (Stannard, 2009: 151). In Curriculum Vitae, she described the experience:

… in 1954 shortly after my reception into the Church of Rome something strange occurred. Something strange was not surprising, because, foolishly, I had been taking Dexedrine as an appetite suppressant, so that I would feel less hungry. It was a mad idea.

As I worked on the Eliot book one night the letters of the words I was reading became confused. They formed anagrams and crosswords. In a way, as long as this sensation lasted, I knew they were hallucinations. But I didn’t connect them with the Dexedrine. It is difficult to convey how absolutely fascinating that involuntary word-game was. I thought at first there was a code built into Eliot’s work and tried to decipher it. Next, I seemed to realize that this word-game went through other books by other authors. It appeared that they were phonetics of Greek, and were extracts from the Greek dramatists. (Spark, 1992a: 204–5)

Here Spark identifies the amphetamine Dexedrine as responsible for her symptoms. This type of medication can cause a paranoid psychosis with hallucinations. In another account she states: ‘I began to have hallucinations. I’d get the letters of words all mixed up. If I saw “lived”, I’d read it as “devil”.’ (Mortimer, 2014: 223). In yet another account she recalls: ‘I had had an experience, a visual experience of – I’m not sure if it’s what they call dyslexia – words jumping together … the words got jumbled up on the page’ (Hosmer, 2014: 238).

Spark recollected: ‘It was due to overwork and insufficient rest; I am a literary critic and had been working very hard on a book’ (Stannard, 2009: 153). In these versions, Spark is suggesting psychological and physical explanations for her psychosis. But in another account, she emphasized the religious aspect of her breakdown. In a letter to Alison Foster, her former English teacher, who was also having a nervous collapse, she referred to her own ‘recent religious crisis and its solution’ (Stannard, 2009: 152). The solution, as Spark saw it, was Roman Catholicism.

In ‘My conversion’, she again stressed the religious element, but also alluded to her problems in trying to write:

Anyway, I decided at last to become a Catholic, by which time I really became very ill … I was going about, but I was ready for a breakdown. I think it was the religious upheaval and the fact I had been trying to write and couldn’t manage it. I was living in very poor circumstances and I was a bit undernourished as well. I suppose it all combined to give me a breakdown. I had a feeling while I was undergoing this real emotional suffering that it was all part of the conversion. But I don’t know. It may have been an erroneous feeling. (Spark, 1992b: 25)

Carruthers (2010: 75) points to the ‘characteristic Sparkian element of dubiety’ in that her experiences are open to conflicting interpretations. They could be interpreted in a religious light, but they could also be seen, more prosaically, in terms of stress. Spark herself leaves the question open and does not provide a definitive answer. In many of the portrayals of madness in her novels, she was deliberately ambiguous as to whether she was depicting supernatural or clinical phenomena.

Spark (1992a: 205) explains how she recovered: ‘This experience lasted from 25 January to 22 April 1954. I saw Dr Leiber, a general practitioner in Wimpole Street … As soon as I stopped taking Dexedrine the delusions of the word game stopped.’ The doctor also prescribed Chlorpromazine, an anti-psychotic medicine which had only recently been introduced (Stannard, 2009: 154). However, Spark revealed that, although her symptoms disappeared, she still felt ill. She sought out a different kind of therapy. She writes:

I found a friend in Father Frank O’Malley, a kind of lay-psychologist and Jungian. He didn’t think I needed to go for psychiatric treatment … I took refuge first at Aylesford in Kent at the Carmelite monastery, and next at nearby Allington Castle… a Carmelite stronghold of tertiary nuns. (Spark, 1992a: 205)

Spark seems to have found Father O’Malley’s approach helpful, though how receptive she was to Jungian theory is hard to determine. Carruthers (2010: 75) suggests that she would have been attracted to Jung’s notion of creating harmony between the inner individual and the outer world. Spark believed that there had been a calamitous division in the human mind between the sacred and the profane, the natural and the supernatural. Jung wrote extensively about religion and was certainly more sympathetic to it than Freud, who notoriously saw belief in God as evidence of mental pathology.

However, Spark was critical of Jung. In an essay reviewing his book, Answer to Job, she commented that Jung treated ‘God’ as a psychic concept, rather than as a theological subject (Spark, 2014a). Jung had contended that we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are one and the same thing or separate entities. Spark found this far too ‘anthropomorphic’. She felt that Jung’s ‘empiricist’ approach did not allow him to deal with the supernatural, which for Spark was ‘objective reality’.

Spark empathized with Job’s dilemma. The Book of Job was important to her and she identified with this biblical character. Prior to her breakdown, she had been working on a book about Job (Bold, 1986: 115). He, too, was threatened by a form of breakdown which he resisted. According to Stannard (2009: 167), Job ‘spoke her darkest fears: of failing to fulfil her vocation (artistic and spiritual), of sliding into resentment, of finding in exile not the exhilaration of freedom but isolation and irrelevance’. Indeed the title of Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957) refers to the Book of Job and to the ‘comforters’ who are in dialogue with Job throughout his ordeal. The central character in the novel mentions the Book of Job. Spark (1984) was to return to Job in her later novel, The Only Problem.

The Comforters (1957)

Spark wrote her first novel to understand her breakdown, but also to understand how to write a novel. In the book, she downplayed the physical factors which contributed to her breakdown: her tiredness, loss of weight and ingestion of Dexedrine. But she also modified her story for artistic purposes. She considered how she should depict her hallucinations:

All my hallucinatory experiences, looking back on them, seemed to integrate with this idea … I think of myself as predominantly a poet.

From the aspect of method, I could see that to create a character who suffered from verbal illusions on the printed page would be clumsy. So I made my character ‘hear’ a typewriter with voices composing the novel itself. (Spark, 1992a: 206)

The novel relates how Caroline Rose, a young Catholic convert, suffers a mental breakdown. She is a literary critic who is writing a thesis on the Novel and is now writing a novel herself. Caroline suffers delusions and appears to herself as a character in the novel we are reading. A typewriter taps in her head, speaking the narrative of her life, predicting it. Spark used her first novel to examine the nature of fiction and, in particular, the role of the author. Was the author an omniscient narrator? Did the characters take on a life of their own or were they entirely controlled by their creator? What was the relation of fiction to reality?

Memento Mori (1959)

In Spark’s third novel she examines ageing and death, but the question of madness hangs in the background. A group of elderly people each start receiving anonymous phone calls, telling them: ‘Remember you must die’. One of the recipients of the calls, Dame Lettie, worries that if she tells the police they will think she is mad. Her brother thinks the caller is a ‘maniac’. Dame Lettie visits Miss Jean Taylor, who is resident in the Maud Long, a ward for elderly patients. Dame Lettie thinks Miss Taylor might be ‘dotty’ and ‘wandering in her mind’ (Spark, 1959: 37), though the latter has a firmer grasp of reality than the Dame. Miss Taylor tells her: ‘Being seventy is like being engaged in a war’ (p. 37). Dame Lettie thinks this is evidence of mental derangement.

Dame Lettie consults Miss Taylor about the phone calls, and says ‘there is a dangerous lunatic at large’ (p. 38). Miss Taylor tells her that she should obey the phone instruction. The Dame thinks she is ‘wandering again’. In this novel, Spark is demonstrating that people need to face up to the fact that we are all going to die. So the supposedly ‘mad’ person, Miss Taylor is speaking a truth that the supposedly sane Dame Lottie cannot countenance.

Towards the end of the novel, Miss Taylor tells the Dame that the caller is Death. The Dame thinks she has ‘taken leave of her senses’ and she goes to tell the nurse on the ward that ‘Miss Taylor was off her head and should be watched’ (p. 175). Although Spark is ambiguous about the identity of the caller, there is the strong suggestion that the caller is, indeed, Death. ‘Mad’ Miss Taylor is voicing this unwelcome truth. Ironically, Dame Lettie becomes insane. Spark (p. 175) writes: ‘the mad Dame would go round the houses, poking into all the cupboards and corners’. Spark has set up a paradoxical situation where the character suspected of being mad turns out to be saner than her accuser.

One of the characters is Dr Alex Warner, ‘a gerontologist’ (p. 58). He is studying Old Age and has made card indexes of all his subjects. He has been examining the inmates of ‘St Aubrey’s Home for mental cases’. He advises: ‘Senility is somewhat different from insanity’ (p. 167). As regards the spate of anonymous phone calls, he considers this is ‘mass-hysteria’. Unfortunately his card system is destroyed in a house fire. Is Spark suggesting that his research is futile?

Dr Warner makes notes on another character, Charmiane, a novelist who, in typical Sparkian manner, states: ‘the art of fiction is very like the practice of deception’ (p. 187). She is considered to be ‘muddled’ following a stroke. However, she is more alert and perceptive than she first appears. She stands up to her new domestic help, Miss Pettigrew, who is cruel to her and thinks Charmiane is a ‘mad-woman’ (p. 80). In standing up to Miss Pettigrew, Charmiane’s mental faculties improve, much to the alarm of her help. Like Miss Taylor, she is patronized and considered mentally enfeebled by the apparently sane characters, but in fact is more perceptive than they are.

Towards the end of the novel we meet a character who is definitely mad. This is Matt O’Brien, who thinks he is God and who has been in an asylum for many years. We learn that ‘the years of insanity may have changed him beyond all recognition’ (p. 211). Spark observes that medication can affect appearance.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

In Spark’s most famous novel the main character, Jean Brodie, is to some extent mentally disturbed. The narrator hints at this occasionally, for example, observing: ‘It is not to be supposed that Miss Brodie was unique at this point of her prime; or that (since such things are relative) she was in any way off her head’ (Spark, 1961: 42). By raising the question of Brodie’s sanity, the narrator acknowledges that some might think she was mad. There is also the typically Sparkian aside, ‘such things are relative’. For Spark, madness is not a fixed and unambiguous entity. The narrator continues: ‘And, so seen in this light, there was nothing outwardly odd about Miss Brodie. Inwardly was a different matter, and it remained to be seen, towards what extremities her nature worked her’ (p. 43). Spark is suggesting that there is a difference between outward behaviour and what is happening inside a person. She remains somewhat ambiguous as to what is happening in Brodie’s inner world and what effect it has on how she behaves.

The Girls of Slender Means (1963)

In this novel there is a mad character, Pauline Fox. She lives in the May of Teck Club with the other girls of slender means. We are introduced to her in this passage:

On this floor was the room of a mad girl, Pauline Fox, who was wont to dress carefully on certain evenings in the long dresses which were swiftly and temporarily reverted to in the years immediately following the war. She also wore long white gloves, and her hair was long, curling over her shoulder. On these evenings she said she was going to dine with the famous actor, Jack Buchanan. No one disbelieved her outright, and her madness was undetected. (Spark, 1963: 29)

In fact Pauline regularly takes a taxi ride round and round the park when she is supposed to be at dinner with Jack Buchanan. The taxi drivers suspect she is mad. She is seeing a new psychiatrist, of whom she reports, ‘he makes me rest after every session. I’ve got to lie down’ (p. 85). Her madness is akin to fantasy, to wish fulfilment. It is also a form of self-deception.

The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)

In this novel Freddy Hamilton starts to behave out of character. Freddy is a rather dull British Consulate whose only interesting feature is that he writes poetry. However, he has an episode when he behaves quite differently. He takes risks, helps the main character, Barbara Vaughan, to be smuggled out of Jordan, sleeps with a woman and stands up to his tyrannical mother. Is he reacting to a remark by Barbara about his blandness? She quotes a passage from the Book of the Apocalypse: ‘I know of thy doings, and find thee neither cold nor hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth’ (Spark, 1965: 24). Barbara notices that Freddy changes after this. She thinks his problem lies with his ‘overbearing mother’ (p. 234).

Freddy subsequently has no memory of the period when he was behaving with uncharacteristic boldness. Has he had a fugue state? Has he had sunstroke? Have his daring activities unsettled him? Was it the stress of helping Barbara escape? Had he been drugged by the Arabs or robbed? He is seen by Dr Jarvis who tells him that he has amnesia and it is a type of ‘coast memory’ which affects white men in the tropics (p. 150). Freddie is annoyed that the doctor seems to be suggesting that his amnesia is ‘hysterical’ in origin. He argues with the doctor: ‘I’ve got no mental disturbance … So if you were thinking of recommending me to see a psychiatrist, my answer is no. Not while I’ve got my wits about me, and remain officially, do I consult any psychiatrist’ (p. 151). Freddy is annoyed, but tells the joke: ‘Anyone who consults a psychiatrist wants his head examined’ (p. 152).

However, it seems that Dr Jarvis has a low opinion of psychiatrists too. He replies:

‘I haven’t said a word to you about a psychiatrist. In fact, I haven’t got a great deal of time for them, myself. They all hold different theories. There’s hardly two who would treat a patient in the same way. You don’t know where you are with them. They’re a lot of bloody robbers as well. I’ve known people, sick people, remain in the hands of psychiatrists, two sessions a week, for twenty years, and nothing to show for it.’ (p. 152)

The doctor, however, does want a diagnosis. Freddy reluctantly agrees, but adds: ‘I won’t necessarily accept their diagnosis, or act on it, or answer their probing questions. Probing questions are plain bad manners to me …’ (pp. 152–3). As a buttoned-up English gentleman, Freddy is aghast at the prospect of being asked about his inner world. The doctor and Freddy then have this exchange:

‘Oh, well, bad manners, good manners – they don’t exist in the Unconscious.’

‘I don’t believe there is such a thing as the Unconscious,’ Freddy said. ‘How could there be certainty about something that is unconscious? If something is unconscious it is unknown. So the Unconscious is a hypothesis at best’. (p. 153)

Although Freddy is hostile to Freudian theory, his amnesic episode could be understood in terms of the psychoanalytic notion of repression. He had repressed the memory of his more exuberant behaviour because he could not deal with it.

Dr Jarvis mentions hypnosis, but Freddy is not keen. Instead the doctor gives him sedative tablets. Freddy says he feels ‘perfectly normal’, but actually he feels ‘terrible’. After the doctor leaves, ‘he sat with his head in his hands, while currents of horror, unidentifiable, unknown to experience, charged through his mind and body continually. Mind or body, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, they were both and neither’ (pp. 153–4). However, Freddy’s memory will gradually return over the coming weeks and years. When he comes to look back at these events, he thinks that ‘it had made a free man of him where before he had been the subdued, obedient servant of a mere disorderly sensation, that of impersonal guilt’ (p. 176). He has emerged from his mental turmoil in a better state of mind.

During his amnesic episode, Freddy has a ‘premonition of bloodshed’ (p. 160). It turns out that this relates to the murder of his mother by her mad servant, Benny. Benny had sent a ‘mad’ letter to him in which she stated she heard voices and that Freddy’s mother was a ‘true friend of the Devil’ (p. 164). She added: ‘There will be bloodshed come out of it’. Freddy had written to Benny, his mother and the family doctor but he did not send the letters. Instead, he flushed them down the toilet as it occurred at the time he was being rebellious and trying to free himself from his mother. He feels remorse about this and, on hearing about his mother’s murder, he wants to go back to England to make sure Benny is looked after properly and not locked away in a lunatic asylum (p. 390). Again, a psychoanalytic reading would suggest that Benny carried out Freddy’s matricidal wishes. He had, after all, commented earlier that he could see why someone would want to cut his mother’s throat. When his desires are enacted, he feels guilt.

The Public Image (1968)

In this novel, Spark considers the subject of suicide. The novel relates how Frederick Christopher, the husband of a famous actress, Annabel, commits suicide. The novel asks: why did he kill himself? In a key passage in the book, Annabel wonders about her dead husband: ‘there had been a vast unknown about Frederick’ (Spark, 1968: 66). There is no easy explanation. His manner of killing himself suggests it was a way of getting back at his wife, who was more successful than him. Frederick had written a series of suicide notes in which he made up a story of how he couldn’t cope with his wife’s debauched lifestyle. He also arranged for people to gather at her house on the evening of his suicide to give the impression she was having a wild party. Annabel was actually living a fairly quiet life. Frederick also wrote a suicide letter to his mother, or ‘Mamma’; perhaps he thought it would play well with the media.

There had been concerns about Frederick’s mental health before his suicide. An executive told Annabel that her husband should see a psychiatrist. In retrospect, Annabel wonders if her husband had been driven crazy by all the women chasing him. The Italian film producer Luigi Leopardi, who has made Annabel famous, asks if Frederick had been insane and jealous of him. In terms of the public perception of the event, Annabel puts forward the case that Frederick was mad or will be perceived to have been mad because he wrote so many suicide letters. At the court inquest, Annabel states that her husband was ‘insane’ (p. 142). However, with typical Sparkian ambiguity, the book ends without revealing the decision of the court. So suicide is something which takes place in a public arena and affects those left behind. People speculate as to the motives of the suicide: madness, jealousy, spite – but, ultimately, it remains unknowable. As Goldie (2010: 5–6) has observed of Spark: ‘One of the principal questions asked of her work – related to the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’… concerns how much we can ever truly know what is going on in other lives.’

Not to Disturb (1971)

This novel draws on the Gothic stereotype of the madman with comic relish. The madman in question is Gustav Anthony Klops. For much of the book he is off-stage, confined in an attic, where he barks and hurls plates when not sedated by his nurse. We do not learn his name until near the end of the book; instead, he is referred to merely as ‘him in the attic’ (Spark, 1971: 15). He is described in semi-animalistic terms, for example: ‘From an upper room comes a sound like a human bark followed by an owl-screech’ (p. 30). We learn that he never went to school because he was intellectually impaired, and that sometime in the recent past he had ‘got loose’ and impregnated Heloise, a maid in the house (p. 63). His nurse, Sister Barton, offers to marry him, possibly because he is due to inherit the family fortune. However, the ceremony does not go to plan as Gustav becomes unruly. He is attracted to another housemaid, Irene:

The zestful cretin’s eyes fall first on Irene. He neighs jubilantly through his large teeth and shakes his long white wavy hair. He wears a jump-suit of dark red velvet fastened from crotch to collar-bone with a zip-fastener. The zipper is secured at the neck by a tiny padlock … (p. 70)

He then plunges on Irene. He wants to take his clothes off and is aroused by the female company. He escapes again and tumbles on Heloise. He emits a ‘howl of delight’ when he is told that he is the father of Heloise’s baby. He marries Heloise instead of Sister Barton and breaks loose once again, smashing vases. He gets out of his clothes, damages furniture and falls on his bride.

So this madman is animalistic, disinhibited, out of control and of limited intelligence. Spark was obviously not trying to create a sympathetic picture of mental illness. Instead she was playing with the Gothic genre to introduce comic mayhem into her story. Spark was interested and influenced by the work of Mary Shelley and the Brontës (Spark, 2014b). Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs Rochester is off-stage for much of the novel and is also described using animalistic metaphors.

The Hothouse by the East River (1973)

This novel was based on Spark’s experience of living in New York in the early 1960s. It takes a satirical and critical look at not only psychoanalysis but also the self-obsessed citizens of the city. Spark (1973: 11) sets the scene:

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection: New York heaves outside the consultant’s office, agitating all around her about her ears.

The novel centres on a couple, Paul and Elsa. At first it seems that Elsa is mad, then it appears that it is her husband who has lost touch with reality. However, there is also the strong suggestion that the couple have been dead since 1944 when they were killed by a bomb in London during the war. Are they ghosts or are they deluded?

The novel begins with Paul wondering if his wife is mad because her shadow does not fall in the right place. She claims to have seen a man called Kiel, who actually died in prison many years ago. Paul thinks she is a ‘schizophrenic’, because she is changeable, veering between hysterical gaiety and brooding. She is also uncommunicative and Paul is concerned that she laughs ‘rather fearfully’ (p. 36). There are other manifestations of mental disturbance. She says she has knifed her maid, Delia, when she has not (p. 41). She goes to Zurich and telephones Paul to say she is sleeping with ‘Kiel’ to test if he is who he says he is. She wants to call herself ‘Countess’. She throws tomatoes at the actors at the premiere of her son’s play. We learn that, in the past, Elsa experienced ‘supernatural communications’, which she described as spiritual in nature (p. 60). Again, Spark is linking mental disturbance with religious experience.

Paul himself starts to appear deluded. He claims that he, too, has seen Kiel, but Elsa tells him it is an illusion (p. 36). Paul tells his son that he was a spy in the Second World War. He was responsible for sending Kiel to prison and he subsequently died. Paul claims that he didn’t die, because someone else was substituted for him. He says ‘Kiel is after me’ (p. 51). He also feels he is in danger from his wife’s analyst, Garven.

Elsa and Paul each have an analyst, and much of the novel is given over to demonstrating the absurdity of psychoanalysis. The tone is set when, early in the story, Elsa tells her friend, Princess Xavier, that she has an analyst, Garven, whom she describes as her ‘guidance director’ (p. 33). The Princess declares: ‘Liberate yourself from all such people,’ She says that she used to have a priest but she got rid of him. She goes on: ‘You should never take guidance from one man only. From many men, many women, yes, by watching them and hearing, and finally consulting with yourself. It’s the only way. Life should be one’s guidance director’ (p. 33). Garven is portrayed as an ineffectual analyst who is more interested in making money out of his patient and writing a book about her case, which will give him credit. He also makes questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, for example he notices that Elsa’s shadow falls the wrong way and observes: ‘It is a major event in your case history. You’ve externalized.’ (p. 46).

Paul’s analyst, Dr Armitage, talks even more incomprehensible jargon, for example she refers to ‘infra-paranormalization’ (p. 109). She also outlines her new method of therapy:

‘… my new method does not involve the personality of the subject and therefore the impetus to therapy-resistance is obliviated. My new method is strictly bio-psychological. I locate in the various organs of the body the psychological disorder and I treat the patient strictly on the basis of the defective organ. Right now I’m treating a patient who suffers from schizophrenia of the pancreas. I have a gentleman with a hyper-introspective bladder complicated by euphoria of the liver. I have under my care a manic-depressive kidney, a cardiac super-ego, a case of hallucinations of the diaphragm and a libidinal spleen … a person can suffer from egomania of the toe-nails. You name it, I can therapeutize it.’ (pp. 129–30)

Analysts think everyone has ‘problems’. Elsa says that her analyst always asks patients what their problem is, so, she concludes, they ‘must have a problem’ (p. 39). Dr Armitage in a striking monologue outlines all the ‘problems’ in New York. These include: ‘the youth problem’, ‘the racist problem’, ‘the sex problem’, ‘the incarceration problem’, ‘the gyno-emancipation problem’, ‘the physiopsychodynamics problem’, ‘the tri-sexual problem’ and ‘the anthro-egalitarian problem’ (p. 108). Spark is poking fun at the psychopathologicization of everyday life.

The novel suggests that not only are the therapists crazy, but that all the residents of Manhattan are crazy too. At one point, after speaking to his wife who is away in Zurich, Paul thinks: ‘come back to Manhattan the mental clinic … where we analyse and dope the savageries of existence … Come back to New York the sedative chamber where you don’t think at all and you can act as crazily as you like and talk your head off all day, all night’ (pp. 75–6). For Spark, psychoanalysis intrudes into normal human suffering and gives people permission to be self-indulgent. It militates against stoicism and acceptance of the tragic dimension of life. Andrew Scull (2014) has shown how psychoanalysis dominated popular culture and psychiatry in America during the period in which Spark’s novel is set. Unlike her American fellow-writers, Spark offers a much more negative appraisal of psychoanalysis.

The Abbess of Crewe (1974)

This novel relocates the Watergate affair to an English convent in order to satirize the duplicity of politicians. The Abbess of Crewe, Alexandra, who is a Richard Nixon-like figure, has reached the top by dishonourable means. She declares at one point: ‘the human race is possessed of a universal dementia’ because of wars, famine and tyranny (Spark, 1974: 54). Alexandra makes pronouncements about madness and psychiatry. Generally she has a high opinion of herself and her mental fortitude, and a low opinion of psychiatry and those who seek it out. She comments:

‘It is useless to tell me not to worry … since I never do. Anxiety is for the bourgeoisie and for great artists in those hours when they are neither asleep nor practising their art. An aristocratic soul feels no anxiety nor, I think, do the famine stricken of the world as they endure the impotent extremities of starvation.’ (pp. 81–2)

In this last comment, Alexandra suggests that higher beings like herself and great artists do not succumb to nerves. In this they resemble the starving, who do not have the luxury of fretting. Of the great creative ones, she includes Hamlet, Werther, Rousseau and Kierkegaard, who, when they were mentally troubled, were ‘far more interesting neurotics than St Francis’ (p. 40).

One of the nuns, Felicity, is going to see a psychiatrist in the wake of being excommunicated from the convent. Alexandra, who has plotted against Felicity to become the Abbess and who was responsible for getting her excommunicated in the first place, observes that she would rather suffer from famine than ‘go, as I hear Felicity is now doing, to a psychiatrist for an anxiety cure’. Alexandra continues:

‘she is undergoing psychiatric treatment for a state of anxiety arising from her excommunication for living with Thomas in sin … She has to become resigned to the idea … According to Felicity, that is her justification for employing a psychiatrist. There was more clap-trap, but I switched it off’ (pp. 81–2).

Alexandra evidently thinks seeing a psychiatrist is a waste of time.

Loitering with Intent (1981)

This novel, which can be seen as a companion to The Comforters, tells the story of the development of another female writer, again based on Muriel Spark. This is Fleur Talbot, who is neurotic and variously described as ‘paranoiac’, ‘in a state of anxiety’, ‘hysterical’, ‘tight-strung’ and ‘depressed’ (Bold, 1986: 113). At one point Fleur reflects on a time when ‘I was thought rather mad, if not evil’ (Spark, 1981: 76). Fleur is accused of writing a sick novel. However, the most seemingly-deranged character in the book is Sir Quentin Oliver’s mother, Lady Edwina. She represents another Gothic portrayal of madness. Fleur, who is telling the story, observes:

As to her bizarre appearance, I liked it. I liked to see her shaking, withered hand with its talons pointing accusingly, I liked the four greenish teeth through which she hissed and cackled … with her wild eyes and her pre-war tea gowns of black lace or draped, patterned silk always hung with glittering beads. (p. 25)

Fleur likes ‘her dramatic entrances and her amazing statements’, but shrewdly adds: ‘I could see that she was more in charge of her senses that she let appear to her son’ (p. 24). Lady Edwina behaves herself with Fleur and talks normally. In part, this is because Fleur treats her with much greater respect than others do. Edwina tells an unwelcome truth to her son: he is a snob. She accuses him of wanting to give her sleeping pills and shut her up. She declares that she is damned if she is going to be ‘Queen Lear’. Lady Edwina is a supposedly mad person who is more astute than her sane companions and is able to articulate the truth about matters. She is aware that others want to label her as mad, but she refuses to comply. Ironically, it is her son, Sir Quentin, whom Fleur considers to be the real ‘lunatic’. He has been drugging his guests with Dexedrine. She tells him he will have to see a psychiatrist.

A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)

The main character in this novel, Mrs Hawkins, encounters two women who have paranoid ideas. Mabel is the wife of Patrick who works in the same office as Mrs Hawkins. Mabel thinks Mrs Hawkins is having an affair with her husband, and she is in the habit of visiting the office to accuse her. Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, receives threatening letters and begins to see spies everywhere. She accuses Mrs Hawkins of plotting against her. She is clearly having a breakdown. When Mrs Hawkins calls on her, Wanda tells her: ‘Go and plot that I am mad. That you report me to the police. That you decide that my friends and my sister should turn against me. Is it my fault that Mrs Hawkins is to die?’ (Spark, 1988: 130). Her neighbours think she needs a sedative and professional treatment. Wanda accuses Mrs Hawkins of talking to her Catholic priest about her and that she is plotting to get her taken away by a doctor on the grounds that she is mad.

Mrs Hawkins goes off to look for a priest, but in the meantime Wanda jumps into a canal and drowns. The policeman observes that ‘Catholic doesn’t help with an unsound mind’. He also calls it a ‘crime’ (p. 146). Mrs Hawkins realizes how little she knew about Wanda, ‘far less her mind’. Earlier she had observed: ‘Suicide is something we know little about, simply because the chief witness has died, frequently with his secret that no suicide can square with the proportions of the event’ (p. 40). Spark often observes that it is almost impossible to know what is going on in the minds of others. It emerges, after Wanda’s suicide, that she had a radionics box and thought she was harming Mrs Hawkins with it. She had obtained cuttings of her hair and was being manipulated by one of Mrs Hawkins’ enemies, Hector Barlett.

Symposium (1990)

In this novel we meet Magnus, mad uncle and guru of the Murchie family. Here, madness is presented as a state which is superior to dull conformity. Spark writes of Uncle Magnus: ‘Although he was decidedly mad, he was the least boring of all [the family]’ (Spark, 1990: 143). She also comments: ‘Magnus was the only imaginative factor that had ever occurred in the Murchie’s family, but unfortunately he was mad’ (pp. 65–6). He says to his brother: ‘Look at yourself in your drab sweater from some popular department store. I wouldn’t be you if you paid me a fortune to do it’ (p. 145). He says he doesn’t want to be normal. Magnus conforms to the literary stereotype of the madman. He has a vast beard, dresses bizarrely and is prone to violence:

… Magnus was beyond cure, but modern medicine had done a great deal to mitigate his condition. He had a mad look. He was large, and ate voraciously. There had been times when he was too violent to have at home, but thanks to the pills they gave him he was violent no more. He had always had periods of comparative lucidity, hours and hours of clarity, even days of it. Then, at any moment, he might go off on his ravings. (pp. 65–6)

Spark writes that Magnus was not merely a ‘normal Scottish eccentric’, which rather implies that she thought such eccentrics were common in Scottish life. She explains:

It was only his overwhelming fits of wild and savage mania, lasting for as much as three weeks, even with the pills, that distinguished him from a normal Scottish eccentric and made necessary his permanence in hospital. But as he only put in an appearance during a more placid mental cycle, many of his contemporaries were convinced that there was nothing much wrong with him. (pp. 144–5)

Despite the fact he is insane, Magnus is regarded as the guru of the family. The author notes: ‘families do not normally consult the mad people even if they have lucid periods, the families do not go to them for advice. The Murchies were different’ (pp. 65–6). One relative observes that in the Middle Ages, the insane were considered to be ‘divinely illuminated’ (p. 66). Spark is portraying madness as a condition which may be associated with wisdom and the attainment of spiritual insights. But, as ever with Spark, the picture is ambiguous. Is Magnus a force for good or evil? Is Magnus a guide or the family’s worst enemy? (p. 146). At one point Magnus is said to possess ‘the demonic will and single-minded purpose of the mad’ (p. 46).

In the novel, Magnus’s mother is murdered. There is the strong implication that he engineered her death. Mrs Murchie was killed by an escaped lunatic from the nursing home where Magnus was also resident. It also emerges that he persuaded his mother to change her will shortly before she was murdered. Instead of leaving her money to her children, she left it to her husband. The police are called, and the inspector observes of the mentally disturbed killer: ‘“It’s useless”, said the Chief Inspector … “trying to find a motive when you are dealing with the insane. They are infinitely cunning, they bide their time …” They also have “superhuman strength”.’ (p. 71). Once again, we find Spark drawing on literary stereotypes of the mad, in this case that of the unfathomable being with extraordinary strength.

Reality and Dreams (1996)

In this novel there is a character whose madness manifests itself in an antisocial way. This is Marigold, the daughter of Tom and Claire. She is described as follows:

Hideous Marigold. Always negative Marigold. Her parents had searched through the past, consulted psychiatrists, took every moment to bits. In no way could she be explained. The second psychiatrist had even interviewed Marigold. ‘You see,’ he told Claire, ‘it’s a cocktail. Personality is a mixture of genes. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t put there what there isn’t a place for, you can’t take anything away without leaving a bad trace. She would have to want to change.’ (Spark, 1996: 87)

Tom thinks about her upbringing and his attempts to make her part of the family:

Her manners were frightful. She was a positive embarrassment at any party that involved her parents’ friends. This was apparent before her fifteenth year, when she could be described as ‘difficult’. But as her adolescence wore off, she became ever more aggressive, ever more impossible to have around the house, ever less welcome in a house where some elements of domestic staff were necessary. Tom and Claire tended at first to blame themselves. But they were in no wise to blame. Marigold was simply a natural disaster. (p. 89)

Marigold goes missing for a period, and the family speculate as to what has happened to her.

Tom wonders if Marigold ‘might be somewhat out of her mind … He was convinced that if she was still alive she had lost her memory’ (p. 98). Her parents suspect Marigold is behind the shooting of Dave, Tom’s taxi driver. Tom says to his wife: ‘but she’s mad, don’t you see that … It was nearly murder, very near’ (p. 135). In this picture of madness, Marigold is seen as having an unpleasant, violent personality. Family upbringing cannot explain her behaviour. She is unfathomable. The psychiatrists cannot help her.

Aiding and Abetting (2000)

In this novel we have a portrait of a psychoanalyst and a madman. What unites them is that they are both practising deception. The analyst, Dr Hildegard Wolf, had another persona in a previous life and has invented herself anew as a therapist. The madman claims to be Lord Lucan, who has been living under an assumed identity since he murdered his wife. In fact Dr Wolf has two patients claiming to be Lord Lucan, which further compounds the problem of who is to be believed. The question of identity and an individual’s ability to take on new identities is thus fundamental to the novel. Dr Wolf tells Lucan: ‘Most of the money wasted on psychoanalysis … goes on time spent unravelling the lies of the patient’ (Spark, 2000: 65). Here, Wolf puts forward an interesting inversion of Freudian theory, which holds that patients unconsciously deceive themselves; she is suggesting that they do it consciously.

Lucan tells Dr Wolf: ‘I have come to consult you … because I have no peace of mind. Twenty-five years ago I sold my soul to the Devil’ (p. 1). Dr Wolf had been recommended to him by a priest. She had told the priest to stop praying, read the Bible, and to try and see Jesus’ point of view. Once again Spark situates her depiction of madness in the context of the spiritual.

Dr Wolf is the most successful psychiatrist in Paris. She has perfected her own method, which consists of her talking about herself for the first three sessions. Only later in an off-hand manner will she begin to ask the patient about themselves. Spark was clearly fascinated with the techniques of analysts and describes their practice with a wry amusement. She has Dr Wolf behave in an exactly opposite manner to that of an orthodox analyst who is supposed to be a blank screen onto which the patient projects their fantasies. The analyst should reveal nothing personal.

Dr Wolf wonders if Lucan is mad. He hears voices, and she speculates that this could result in him being found not fit to plead at any future trial. Lucan talks about the Blood of the Lamb and she thinks he is a ‘religious maniac’ (p. 44). Later she suggests ‘his mind is giving up. His conscience is taking over. In his mind, God might tell him to kill again’ (p. 61). Dr Wolf is approaching Lucan’s problems from a secular, clinical perspective: she thinks he is mentally ill. Lucan sees his problems from a religious viewpoint. He wants help because he believes he has sold his soul to the Devil and he wants it back. Lucan also reveals that he had been a priest, but was now defrocked. Despite his religious perspective, Lucan is seeking out a psychiatrist to help him. The similarity between the work of the psychiatrist and the priest is underlined when Dr Wolf’s partner, Jean-Pierre Roget, comments: ‘People generally have faith in the discretion of a psychiatrist, as they do with a priest’ (p. 64).

Dr Wolf considers Lord Lucan’s motives for murdering his wife. She thinks: ‘But there was no doubt that in the weeks before the murder a certain madness had set in. ‘Uncontrollable gambling … was in itself only a symptom. His hatred of his wife had been an obsession …’ Also he owed money. She wonders at what point he had said ‘goodbye to reality’ (p. 135). It should have been obvious that he would not have escaped detection indefinitely. Was it the approach of his 40th birthday, combined with being a failure in life? She concludes: ‘The calling of a gambler is madness. Being an earl, full stop, is madness’ (p. 136). So there were many factors in Lucan’s mental breakdown. Not least was the anachronistic role of being an earl in modern society. Wolf thought that Lucan needed the help of a psychiatrist, and her in particular. A female character who knew Lucan as a child reflects: ‘there comes a moment when the best of friends … when faced with a certain person’s irrational behaviour, had to admit that the person is more or less mad. “Mad” covers a whole minefield of mental conditions’ (pp. 74–5). Indeed, in Spark’s work, madness does cover a wide variety of conditions.

The Finishing School (2004)

Spark’s last novel relates how a creative writing tutor, Rowland, becomes jealous of one of his young pupils, Chris, because he seems to be effortlessly talented, whereas Rowland is experiencing writer’s block. He becomes obsessed with Chris and thinks that he is deliberately trying to torment him. Rowland’s wife, Nina, thinks he is going mad and protests that she doesn’t want to become a ‘wife-psychiatrist’ (Spark, 2004: 56).

Rowland decides he is going to send Chris an email, and his wife asks why:

‘To warn him I’m on his track. I have to warn him.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Nina, ‘you’re going mad.’

‘Do I sound mad?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then I won’t send him any email messages. That’s just what he’s waiting for. He’s waiting to accuse me, that I’ve gone mad.’ (p. 67)

Nina accuses of Rowland of having an obsession with the boy. She wonders whether he is an unconscious homosexual, but concludes: ‘Rowland was simply going mad with jealousy about the writing of novels’ (p. 69). Nina has been telling her male friend, Israel, of her concerns about Rowland. She thinks he needs a psychiatrist, but Israel disagrees, saying it was a ‘spiritual problem’ (pp. 85–6). Later, though, he considers that Rowland is ‘plainly psychotic’ (p. 102).

Rowland goes to a monastery and recovers. Later, Chris comes to the monastery. He says he can’t work without Rowland, who tells him he is mad, ‘more mad than me’ (p. 123). Chris then tries to murder Rowland. Eventually, however, they resolve their hostility to one another and, in fact, become gay lovers. One explanation, then, for Rowland’s seemingly mad obsession with Chris is that he had unacknowledged sexual desires for him. Another explanation comes from the doctor who diagnoses Rowland with Meniere’s disease and ‘nerves’(p. 104). Spark offers yet another explanation: she frames Rowland’s problem in terms of religion. She tells us that Rowland ‘suffered’ from the fourth sin in the Roman Catholic faith, ‘Envy of another’s Spiritual Good’, and adds:

Suffered is the right word, as it often is in cases where the perpetrators are in the clutches of their own distortions. With Rowland, his obsessive jealousy of Chris was his greatest misfortune. And jealousy is an affliction of the spirit which, unlike some sins of the flesh, gives no-one any pleasure. (p. 80)

Characteristically, Spark does not resolve these different explanations.

Concluding remarks

The frequency with which themes of madness occur in the work of Muriel Spark reflects her abiding curiosity with the subject. She depicts mental disturbance in many different ways and uses it for a variety of literary purposes. However, one aspect that is missing in her treatment of mental disturbance is any sense of compassion. She adopts a characteristically detached position as she describes her characters’ problems. In Not to Disturb the mad character, ‘him in the attic’, is described as a Gothic stereotype and is there to provide humour.

One does not read Spark to get a sense of the inner experience of psychiatric illness. Even The Comforters, which is based on her own breakdown, is more an examination of the nature of fiction than an existential account of psychosis. In many ways Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold gives the reader a better picture of what it feels like to hear voices and be subject to paranoid fears. In her defence, one could say that Spark was not attempting to give an empathic account of mental illness: her concerns were essentially literary. Maley (2008: 45) has defended Spark against the charge that her characters lack ‘interiority’ by arguing that, although they lack the ‘pseudo-psychology of other literary creations’, they are actually very complex. Kolocotroni (2010: 25) observes: ‘Spark never … issues a diagnosis or final account … their motive or profile is never fully caught from within’.

Spark’s depiction of psychiatrists is largely critical. She is sceptical of psychoanalysis and portrays much of it as absurd. With her belief in the essential mystery of human beings, she finds the claims of analysis presumptuous, arrogant and misguided. For Spark one should stoically face the misfortunes of life, not seek out a therapist in order to recite one’s woes.