A new biography of Muriel Spark, astounding novelist

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

http://www.salon.com/books/biography/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/04/20/muriel_spark

"After her Observer winnings dwindled, she took Dexedrine diet pills not
only to stay slim but to keep her food costs down. The hallucinatory,
paranoiac effects of amphetamine poisoning were unknown at the time, and
Spark had always been given to intense literary passions, so friends saw
nothing amiss in her fixation on T. S. Eliot's Christian play "The
Confidential Clerk" until she began to speak of threatening codes that she
believed were embedded in the text and directed at her. "Obsessively she
began to seek them out, covering sheet after sheet of paper with anagrams
and cryptographic experiments." As her delusions intensified, she became
convinced that Eliot had taken a job with some of her acquaintances as a
window-washer in order to rifle through their papers."


Heikki