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A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents
Matthew Spender
An intimate portrait of Stephen Spender’s extraordinary life written by Matthew Spender, shifting between memoir and biography, with new insights drawn from personal recollections and his father’s copious unpublished archives.Stephen Spender's life is a vivid snapshot of the twentieth century. Making friends with Auden and Isherwood while at Oxford, together they enjoyed adventures in Europe, becoming early opponents of the rise of fascism. Whilst pioneering modern poetry, Stephen later produced propaganda for the war effort – establishing an enduring reputation for mysterious activity. Despite marrying Natasha Litvin, an ambitious young concert pianist, Stephen was often entangled with young men and never able to reveal his secrets, leaving her to introspective questions, as the artistic world of London circled them. In this elegant memoir, his son Matthew offers an intimate portrait of a father, a marriage and an extraordinary life.
My father and me in 1957.
Copyright (#ub4dc93d5-ea83-5f6a-93c4-bd38938222c1)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Copyright © Matthew Spender 2015
Matthew Spender asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover images © Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection (photographs), except for (top left) by W. Eugene Smith/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (background texture and picture frames)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008132064
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008132071
Version: 2016-05-24
Dedication (#ub4dc93d5-ea83-5f6a-93c4-bd38938222c1)
To my grandchildren: Cleopatra, Aeneas, Ondina and Marlon
Contents
Cover (#u63a9e0fd-1627-5ed3-b63e-cd2cfd6fddae)
Title Page (#u3811230a-ef88-55b2-8736-38c768e50129)
Copyright (#ua8c1e5f7-60a2-502a-af34-ece5bbf86b8d)
Dedication (#u6c292a70-9854-563b-9794-13625d423dad)
Natasha’s Last Wishes (#u11a9a9f5-952e-5cb7-af2e-f31a533978be)
Chapter 1: A worldly failure (#u0b27db47-e6ea-5a9a-913a-8793e5a7a64c)
Chapter 2: Without guilt (#ua22ea834-c26b-5cd4-9592-dd7d41a59c1e)
Chapter 3: Suicide or romanticism (#u80171150-e2a3-5698-969d-ca6a104ad3e7)
Chapter 4: A sly Shelley (#ubbde66b6-c819-5ba3-8083-b84222377ef8)
Chapter 5: Mutual renaissance (#u29407a39-9779-541a-bf23-17504e09d741)
Chapter 6: Fires all over Europe (#uc340e566-2a85-59d1-bbbc-1b96349214c4)
Chapter 7: The purity was hers (#ud70713e5-d1af-5f15-ac13-6ff789c9727d)
Chapter 8: America is not a cause (#ueea915f7-c7e2-50b5-af2d-f50cecb13cff)
Chapter 9: Your sins of weakness (#u2492680f-3f2e-589a-8a78-139924355c46)
Chapter 10: Don’t you ever tell a lie? (#u1ead70e0-1246-5475-b0c1-acdae3e952eb)
Chapter 11: Dreaming one’s way through life (#u69af5e8d-6bf3-586a-95a1-f1d2282b8afd)
Chapter 12: Scandalous gossip (#ua158a923-74b6-523b-9983-84ed5e710943)
Chapter 13: The irresistible historic mixed grill (#uca61a01c-a3be-52b1-88ab-eb3e46889b95)
Chapter 14: The kindest face (#ue698aafd-acc4-50f8-af35-93fc057a0f4c)
Chapter 15: A strong invisible relationship (#u238e5bb8-3f5b-510a-a614-eb488e7b1b38)
Chapter 16: Barrenness and desolation (#u962f2a44-ebfd-5959-82d3-01f9052c69df)
Chapter 17: Too ambivalent (#u05ec55aa-488a-5e5c-8f1b-bb064fdb95ed)
Chapter 18: You’re unique (#u5f20aac0-7cb7-559b-8ce7-f783bfdb6704)
Chapter 19: Without banquets (#ua34d9ad5-dac9-5686-a4ba-c035a5afcf3a)
Chapter 20: Over-privileged? (#udc938f79-bc64-546f-894d-03c57e373f87)
Chapter 21: Might just as well be married (#u5700fe79-2abf-5bf9-99f4-7107d9297cae)
Chapter 22: A nice little niche (#ud814ea22-d922-5a91-b27d-4c44041bee81)
Chapter 23: Trust (#u3064e226-1b9f-5dab-9546-132ee47fc6e9)
Chapter 24: Killing the women we love (#ub0e517e8-963a-5f47-a595-fcd2f6881364)
Chapter 25: Your father will survive (#u47934448-ff23-52e8-8e1e-f2088a947e13)
Chapter 26: Romantic friendships before all (#uaf6de499-7574-5684-b7a2-8d63af6f7997)
Chapter 27: The right to speak (#u6b0d88b6-31a0-51e5-b1ed-5b929750ab78)
Chapter 28: Guileless and yet obsessed (#u3190cbe6-f232-5ebc-8167-7f1aedc9f0e9)
Picture Credits (#u5d85491b-75b0-5887-8e34-1a6dc6cc831e)
Notes (#u67b82445-1fa3-5bf8-a0f7-2434b3892d8f)
Index (#u10c879db-8f84-5136-a28a-a013dc500fd4)
Acknowledgements (#u96606411-a49b-5414-9060-bdf4f1f2949c)
About the Author (#uf031bc6a-3bff-5bce-a850-7fdf82053f19)
By the Same Author (#u3e2807fd-6da4-522b-863b-3328096bc056)
About the Publisher (#ub10ee39a-1b23-5fb9-b75b-8e756e390e37)
NATASHA’S LAST WISHES (#ulink_e1e56f20-8c4e-5d0a-bfbc-c4d476c0b5df)
MY MOTHER DIED on 21 October 2010, at eleven in the morning, in her bedroom on the top floor of 15 Loudoun Road, the rented house in St John’s Wood where she’d lived for the previous sixty-nine years. I heard the news on my cellphone driving along a back road in Tuscany. I rushed home, collected my passport and flew to London, where I arrived at about seven in the evening.
The house had been neglected since my father’s death in 1995. A large crack ran down the external wall to the right of the front door. Squirrels nested in the roof next to the water-tank, and they’d reopen their hole every time we patched it up. I’d offered to make major repairs on condition that I’d be reimbursed after her death, but the lawyer told me, ‘It won’t happen. Buy her an umbrella.’
Downstairs in my father’s study, my mother’s attempt to organize his papers had replaced the creative untidiness of work in progress with the sepulchral untidiness of boxes ready to be taken to an archive. In the music room her Steinway was shrouded and the scores were shelved. In her last years she’d actually forgotten how to play. The back door from the kitchen to the garden, squeezed by subsidence, had been planed so many times to make it fit the frame that it was no longer a rectangle. The house was a tomb long before her death added an aura of absence to the surreptitious creak of decay.
Her live-in minder had packed a rucksack and was waiting with her boyfriend in the hall. As I kissed her cheek, I smelled the excitement of a witness who’d seen someone die. I wondered if the experience was as thrilling as observing a birth.
My wife was waiting for me in the piano room. We phoned for the undertaker. Then I went upstairs to say my goodbyes. I took a sketch-pad with me to make some drawings of my mother as she lay there. I’d done the same with my father and it had been a fascinating experience, but this time it didn’t work. The drawings came out angrier and angrier. Was this my feeling, or hers? She herself just looked exhausted. The anger was in the drawings.
By her bedside lamp lay a curl of papers. In a desultory way I straightened them out. They were documents designed to exclude me from my father’s literary inheritance. A covering letter showed that she’d arranged to sign these in front of the lawyer a few days later.
She’d been talking about this for years and I’d always told her she should do whatever she thought best. Would she or wouldn’t she? There was an element of sadism in my detachment. In the background lay a battlefield. She knew I disagreed with her interpretation of my father’s life. To her, he’d always been a pillar of integrity, and anyone who questioned this was despicable. I agreed about his integrity, but everything else about my father’s life made me want to qualify her pure idea of him with the confusion of reality.
I’d always expected her to change her mind about cutting me off, but here we were. Dutifully, I took the documents to the lawyer the following day. Were we obliged to honour her wishes? The lawyer flipped through the papers and asked, ‘Where’s the signature?’ I said that she’d planned to sign them in his presence – let’s see – tomorrow afternoon. ‘A lot of old ladies leave things just a bit too late,’ he said. And casually he dropped them in the trash.
All other aspects of her Will were fine. She’d left everything to my sister Lizzie and myself. She hadn’t created a foundation dedicated to protecting her husband from my interpretation of his life. The lawyer added soothingly that, as we were our parents’ sole heirs, the literary executorship was of minor importance. So I calmed down.
It took us ten days to organize the funeral. Lizzie had just flown from London to Sydney and she needed time to recover before she’d fly back.
While I waited, I sat alone in the piano room listening to the shuffling of the masonry. I looked through the boxes next door but they contained nothing that interested me. Then I tried the door of the tiny room downstairs where my father used to store all the papers that he felt he couldn’t throw away.
It was still untidy, but no longer the impenetrable chaos it had been during my father’s lifetime. The correspondence had been sorted into slim files stored in alphabetical order. Among them I found two packages marked in my mother’s handwriting, ‘to be destroyed without opening after my death’. One was shut with a strip of Sellotape. The other had also been shut, but somebody had sliced it open. I took them upstairs to the piano room. After an hour of dithering, I began to read the contents of the open file. They were letters from Raymond Chandler to Mum. After reading two or three, I realized they were passionate love letters.
I rang the lawyer and asked if we had to obey her wishes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She had the right to destroy her property, you don’t. You could, but if I were you I wouldn’t.’
Raymond Chandler’s supposed passion for my mother had become one of the great ‘causes’ of her old age. A biographer had come across some evidence in Chandler’s archive and he believed that an affair had actually taken place. My mother went wild. Friends were asked to intervene. She who was so frugal spent hundreds of pounds on solicitors. In the end, the biographer gave in and the evidence was written up as a fantasy, but the letters I was reading in the piano room showed that their friendship hadn’t been quite as limpid as she’d always maintained.
While my mother was alive, I’d accepted her assertion that she was in charge of the past. She was the keeper of the flame, my father’s life belonged to her. She was obsessed by the thought that bad books would be written about Dad and lurk on library shelves waiting to ambush the innocent reader. Now, all those neat files would enter an archive. Wasn’t it my duty to present my parents’ lives in the best possible light, before hostile biographers started plundering them?
That’s what I thought, but a month after I’d started writing, my mother came to me in a dream. She was furious. ‘What makes you think you can write a book about us? For instance, what do you know about—’ and here she mentioned someone I’d never heard of. I mumbled an answer. ‘There you are,’ she said triumphantly. I explained hesitantly that if a book is well written, whether or not it’s the actual truth, it acquires a truth of its own.
In the background, my father sniggered. She asked, ‘And what are you laughing at?’ ‘Well,’ he murmured apologetically, ‘it only goes to show what he thinks of literature.’ I said that they were both dead, so they couldn’t be offended. The dead have no feelings, I said. My father stopped laughing and I woke up.
I lay there thinking how curious it was that they should behave in character, even in a dream. When they were alive, if my mother was determined about something, my father always backed down. But I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant about my thoughts on literature.
My father thought that literature should tell the truth. His poems were always built upon specific moments when life had been revealed to him in all its simplicity and nakedness. The poem had to bear witness to that vision and transcend the mere sentences of which it was made. The idea of truth was very important to him. In politics, which occupied a great deal of my father’s attention, ‘the truth’ meant one must never tell lies in the name of a higher cause, or sacrifice the rights of an individual in the name of the collective good.
These truths are complicated. Both, I think, involve ideas about England. But since I left England forty-five years ago, and since I refused to discuss any aspect of my parents’ lives with them while they were alive, what chance do I have of chasing the truth now?
At this point a memory comes back to me of my father’s study while he lived: the books and articles finished at the last possible minute, stuck together with tape and paperclips. The galley proofs, the glossy sparkle of the published version. To write a book is to embark on a quest, and if in this instance I’ve made mine more difficult, so much the better.
1 (#ulink_4be9c972-52ed-5fe1-9eca-0a3db478e4b2)
A WORLDLY FAILURE (#ulink_4be9c972-52ed-5fe1-9eca-0a3db478e4b2)
IT WAS W. H. Auden who taught me about adjectives. He stayed with us whenever he came to England. I was nine years old. Scene: 15 Loudoun Road, my parents’ house in St John’s Wood, eight-thirty in the morning. I was late for school. Wystan, with an air of having already been up for hours, was smoking at the breakfast table, bored or thoughtful, looking out of the window at the tangled ferns of the basement area. Mum and Dad were still in bed, in their bedroom with a large dressing-table on which lurked strange hairbrushes sold recently to Dad by a sadistic hairdresser who had persuaded him he was losing his hair.
I was in a panic over a test due that morning on what an adjective was.
Wystan looked surprised.
‘An adjective is any word that qualifies a noun,’ he said.
‘I know how to say that,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand what it means.’
He looked around the table, discarded the cereals and found among the debris of the night before a bottle of wine. One object more memorable than the others.
‘Ah … you could say, the good wine,’ he said firmly. ‘Its goodness qualifies the wine.’ Then he thought for a moment, peering at the bottle. ‘The wine was good,’ he said, correcting himself; and added in a tragic voice, ‘now all we have left is an empty bottle.’
That summer, my sister and I had been abandoned on an island off the coast of Wales. I’d liked it. Lots of puffins, a few cormorants and numerous placid sheep. On top of the hill in the middle of this island were three grass tombs of long-dead Vikings, and Bardsey Island had left me with an obsession with barrow-wights and the sinister mystery of Norse ghost stories. Hearing about this later that year, Wystan sent me from New York the Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. I read it straight through.
Auden used to say that he knew where every detail of this trilogy came from and one day he’d write about it. Dad tried it once but he found Tolkien tremendously boring.
Once, Wystan and I wrote Tolkienish poems together, still over breakfast but a few years after the adjectives. I collected them and copied them into a notebook that I decorated with a heraldic crest ‘with whiskers’, as that kind of shading was called at school. Here are a couple of verses:
God knows what kings and lords,
Had their realms on these downs of chalk,
And now guard their bountiful hoards,
One night you may see them walk.
They walk with creaks and groans
