High in the Tuscan hills, a light grilling is underway. “Sexually, probably, I could be faithful,” seventy-two-year-old Spark is in the middle of explaining, “though that’s not the point.” It is 1990, and Spark, sitting neatly in an armchair in the lounge of Arezzo’s Hotel Continentale, has just been asked for the umpteenth time why it is that she remains unmarried. This afternoon’s interrogator is Lynn Barber, whose reputation for hatchet jobs has led her to be known as “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” “Mrs Spark will answer your questions gamely, politely,” Barber will later report of her “daffy” subject, “but with her mind clearly elsewhere.”Article continues after advertisement
But now Spark snaps into focus. Setting down her drink, she leans forward in her chair. She smooths her blouse, and straightens the feather quill brooch pinned to the lapel of her jacket. She is ready to make herself clear.
“The point is,” Spark continues, that if she were married, she “couldn’t concentrate on the job” of writing novels: “I’m too interested in my writing: I couldn’t work at a marriage.” There was an additional complication. “My experience of men,” she says, “is that they resent it if you are successful—and I never had the slightest intention of not being as successful as I could be.” As Barber continues to probe, Spark spells out her difficulty with marriage in the plainest terms possible. “All I say is, you’re only half a person if you’ve got to go along with someone else.”
