A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  Harold Spender’s wife, my grandmother Violet Schuster, came from a successful Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany to England in the 1860s. At the time of their marriage, the Schusters established a trust for Violet and her children – a long document camouflaging the fact that Harold wasn’t allowed to touch it.

  Violet was a delicate woman who gave birth to four children in four years, one after the other. She died in 1922, at home, on the kitchen table, after an operation to remedy complications deriving from a hysterectomy. For years she’d struggled with a condition that could not be named. Her death was a great shock. Until then she had been able to run the house (peremptorily) and accompany her husband on his frequent trips to Europe and America.

  My father’s dominant memory of her was of her complaints. Too much noise was coming from the children’s room; they’d given her a headache. Because the details of her state of health were never discussed, he probably assumed that his mother was more neurotic than was the case. ‘Hysteria’, in Aristotelian terms, means blood boiling in the womb, and I’m sure that my father’s incapacity, indeed terror, of anything resembling a woman’s lack of control over her body stemmed from an unhealed memory of his mother’s sufferings.

  They all spent a fortnight in the Lake District during the First World War. Violet was in a bad state because of the death of her much loved brother in the trenches. The war was present even in this beautiful place. She noticed that Keswick had been emptied of its men, leaving behind only those who were working on the farms. She saw several Scottish soldiers on the train drinking desperately at the thought of having to go back to the front. ‘A thin match-boarding separates us all from some terrible thing dimly known.’

  In spite of her dark state of mind, they enjoyed this moment of escape. It was one of the few times when they were together as a family. Stephen chased butterflies, Humphrey collected crystals that glittered on the paths leading up into the hills behind the farm. When it rained, slugs sailed down the paths like barges on the Thames. Michael bonded with Harold and learned how to row a skiff on Derwent Water. Harold also taught Michael about climbing, and gradually they formed a team from which the others were excluded. Harold was a great climber. His guide to the Pyrenees is still read. There’s even a recent translation into Catalan.

  For the rest of his life, Stephen wrote and rewrote his memories of Skelgill Farm. A key moment took place when he overheard Harold reading Wordsworth’s Prelude to Violet as they rested in deckchairs looking at the sunset. They were in deepest Wordsworth country; it was a predictable book to choose. Stephen, aged eight, understood ‘Wordsworth’ or ‘Worldsworth’ to have something to do with his father’s metaphorical symbolism: the world was a word, and the word had worth – was valuable.

  Stephen asked his mother why Wordsworth was a poet, and what a poet was. She said:

  Wordsworth was a man who, when he was a child, ran through the countryside and felt himself to be a living part of it, as though the mountains were his mother, his own body before he was born. And when, in later life, while he was still young, he came back from many journeys to the lakes, he felt all those memories, which were one with the scenery, surge through his arms and legs and his whole body on his walks here, and come out through his fingers that held a pen, as words that were his poems.

  After Violet’s death in December 1921, Harold went into a decline. The finances of the household were now controlled by his mother-in-law, Hilda Schuster, with whom Stephen formed a conspiratorial relationship based on books and trips to the theatre and long conversations of a kind that Harold’s self-righteousness precluded. Stephen’s hatred of his father could have derived from a subconscious conviction that Harold was responsible for his wife’s death, but in the many texts my father left, he stresses only the absurdity of his father’s grief. ‘I am a broken man,’ said Harold over lunch, blinking at his children. ‘You are all that your poor old father has left.’

  In his autobiography, my father writes: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that at the end his unreality terrified me’. In 1940, writing his novel The Backward Son, Stephen returned to his father’s reaction to his wife’s death. Harold’s lack of reality has become a caricature. ‘He saw what he had never seen – that he was a fool, and that she had a touch of genius. “The divine fire of Parnassus breathed on her,” he thought, automatically trying to make this thought unreal.’ (Harold published Violet’s poems soon after she died, but he never claimed that she was an unrecognized genius.) ‘It was she, he now realised, who had saved him; it was she who had made him, in spite of everything – he could grasp it now – a worldly failure. For he knew now that he would never succeed, he would never be in the Cabinet, he would lose his seat in the House, he would be despised.’ (In this novel Harold is an MP, a role he never achieved in life.) ‘His one saving grace which he could secretly cling to for the rest of his life was his sense of failure.’

  ‘For one translucent instant of purely sincere feeling, he hated the children.’ Well, one could reverse this thought. In the upset following his mother’s death, one of Harold’s sons hated his father.

  By the time they caught up with each other at Oxford, Wystan was a young intellectual of astonishing self-assurance and Stephen was a tall clumsy well-meaning puppy who couldn’t enter a room without tripping over the carpet. From the moment they met, Wystan treated Stephen like a younger brother, partly because he knew everything about the Spender family. He could see that Stephen’s woolly-mindedness was a disguise, a reaction against his elder brother Michael’s super-efficiency. In his wilful way, Wystan deduced that Stephen was the opposite of what he seemed. Auden believed that the characteristics his friends presented to the world were shields protecting qualities that were their opposites. Thus Stephen wasn’t the hapless weakling that his persona projected. On the contrary, he was as tough as nails.

  When they met, Stephen was in love with a young man whom he calls Marston in a series of poems he was writing about him. He’d slip these under the door of Auden’s rooms at Christ Church as soon as they were fit to be read. My father at that time gave his poems to anyone who showed an interest, and he’d already acquired a reputation by the end of his first year at Oxford.

  One day in 1929, a few days after he’d left with Auden a new poem and a diary entry about walking along the banks of the River Wye with Marston, Stephen received back a short note in Auden’s almost illegible minuscule. ‘Have read your diary & poems. Am just recovering from the dizzy shock. Come out all day Thursday. Shall order a hamper of cold lunch.’

  On the Thursday, they set off by bus from Oxford in the direction of the Berkshire Downs. The bus let them off in the countryside. They clambered through a hedge, hopped over a little ditch and climbed to the top of the nearest hill. They ate egg sandwiches and cold roast chicken and drank a bottle of wine, looking out towards the West Country, which Stephen loved.

  Auden said that the great strength of Stephen’s writing was his capacity to describe whatever happened to him ‘as though it had never happened to anyone before’. It was this quality that had made him dizzy. ‘When you create your experience you are excellent. When you attempt to describe or draw attention to your feelings you are rotten.’ He quoted from memory two lines from one of the Marston poems. ‘Taking your wrists and feeling your lips warm’, he said, was excellent. But ‘Let us break our hearts not casually, but on a stated day,’ was bad, because the reader couldn’t believe that the writer’s heart was indeed breaking. On the contrary, it was clear from the poem that the writer was enjoying himself.

  Auden said he was jealous of the Marston poems, but he added a word of caution: ‘I console myself by thinking that you are hopelessly literal-minded. Actuality obsesses you so much that you will never be able to free yourself and create a work of pure imagination.’

  For the first time, Stephen had been given a new idea about how he could use the material that the world threw at him.

  Until now, writing for h
im had been a kind of lottery. If he was emotionally stirred he wrote down the first words that came into his mind, clinging the while precariously to rhyme and form as a rider clings to a horse which is running away from him: then he hoped one day that such ‘inspiration’ and shots in the dark would produce a successful poem. What had happened now was that an experience had brought him in touch with more than an emotion – with a subject matter capable of crystallization in words.

  To be a poet was not the same thing, he now understood, as writing good poems one after the other. There had to be a field of experience out there, a known territory, a vision. Violet had bound Wordsworth to a specific piece of land. Auden mapped out for Stephen poetry as a continent.

  During that summer vacation, Stephen bought a little printing press, and in the basement of the family house in Hampstead he set up a group of Auden’s poems. These were the first poems of Auden’s to appear in print, a booklet of ‘About 45 copies’, as the title page casually puts it.

  Auden visited the Spender household while this was going on. He asked to be included in the domestic arrangements; meaning a cup of tea for him too, please, whenever the servants made theirs (which was eight times a day).

  Wystan told Stephen’s governess – she’d become an important figure in the orphaned phase of his childhood – that Stephen’s ‘innocence’ was, of course, the exact opposite of what it pretended to be. Stephen projected an image of himself as someone who was timid, considerate, over-generous and unsure. This was a result of his refusal to accept himself as he really was: ruthless, selfish and domineering. His generosity was purposefully asphyxiating. He forced people to reject him, so as to avoid the guilt he’d feel if he rejected them. He wrote self-confessional letters to his friends, apparently throwing the whole of his life at the recipient’s head, in order to disguise the fact that he always kept something back. His love for Marston was ‘symptomatic’. Marston had been chosen as a love object because he was untouchable, which of course meant that Stephen himself did not want to be touched.

  Stephen’s supposed capacity to be humiliated was a sham. Only love involved humiliation, and Stephen was not prepared to love anyone. ‘One can’t be physically intimate without revealing oneself as one really is.’ In place of intimacy, Stephen cultivated an exaggerated view of his friends. Auden himself was ‘the Sage’. To turn friends into myths was a way of not communicating with them. ‘One does not reveal one’s worse nature to a hero.’

  One afternoon during this printing-press phase of their friendship, they went out for a walk on Hampstead Heath. There, Wystan learned that Stephen had no money problems, because he enjoyed an allowance of three hundred pounds a year. What! And yet he complained about being unhappy? Nobody, said Wystan dogmatically, had the right to be unhappy on three hundred pounds a year. He himself would kill for half that amount! In fact, would Stephen consider splitting it? (I can imagine my father laughing politely and changing the subject.)

  ‘Are you a Verger?’ Wystan asked Stephen abruptly. Stephen said he didn’t understand the question. ‘Are you a Virgin?’ Stephen gave a vague reply. ‘Well, presumably you must know whether you are or you aren’t,’ said Wystan. This particular problem was solved soon afterwards. And when Stephen put up some resistance, Wystan told him briskly, ‘Now, dear, don’t make a fuss.’

  2

  WITHOUT GUILT

  AS I SEE it, Auden’s extraordinary matter-of-factness about sex liberated my father, but it was also a challenge. Stephen saw that the guilt that had been drummed into him as a well-brought-up schoolboy could simply be dropped. But if love was to be elevated into an acceptable or even a central part of his life, then with whom and on what terms? This Wystan couldn’t answer – though he said that Marston wasn’t the one. And pragmatic though he may have been in many ways, Auden himself did not solve this problem for a very long time. Christopher found Heinz, Stephen found Tony, but Wystan did not manage to create a permanent love until he found Chester in New York during the Second World War. In 1928, the war was not even remotely visible.

  Auden, Isherwood, Spender: these were the three young writers who ‘ganged up and captured the decade’, as Evelyn Waugh put it years later in a grumpy mood. There’s an element of truth in saying that they shared a programme, but as their writings are so different from each other’s, it’s hard to say if this involved life choices, or how life fits into art, or a desire to challenge conventional England, or a need to resist Fascism, or a mixture of all of these.

  Auden left England in the early summer of 1928 as soon as he’d graduated. First, he found rooms in a quiet suburb of Berlin, but at the beginning of the following year he moved to the centre of town and began to lead a more adventurous life. He kept an interesting diary, which seems to follow a programme involving the relationship between love and sex. He sought adventures with the boys of the Adonis Bar and other Lokalen, with their wide assortment of different talents, and he kept his reactions under observation.

  After numerous trials, Auden fell passionately in love with a sailor called Gerhart Meyer, ‘from the sea / The truly strong man’, as he appears in one of Auden’s early poems. Gerhart’s thing was to fuck a prostitute in Wystan’s presence, and Wystan went along with this, even though the intention was clearly to make him jealous. With detachment Auden writes in his diary: ‘What is odd is that when he could have any woman he liked from the Queen of England upwards, he chooses whores and not the prettiest either.’ Auden does not want to feel jealous, so he tries to define jealousy to see if he fits into its parameters. ‘Jealousy is of two kinds, the fear that I don’t exist, and the fear that he or she doesn’t exist.’ Usually, writes Auden, he’s not jealous – for the simple reason that he’s so sure of himself he can never feel he isn’t there. Therefore Gerhart, or category two, must be the case. Indeed, ‘He seems to belong to another world and might go up in smoke any moment.’

  This diary, which has never been published, shows how difficult it was for Auden to perceive reality. The right-hand page is for experience summarized as objectively and truthfully as possible. The left-hand page is for abstraction. In a letter written to my father at the beginning of the war, Wystan said that he needed a great deal of abstraction, in the shape of rules and theories, before he understood what he felt. ‘My dominant faculties are intellect and intuition, my weak ones feeling and sensation … I must have knowledge and a great deal of it before I feel anything.’

  Gerhart may have been a ‘truly strong’ man, but some of the boys of the Adonis Bar dressed up as sailors, took their lovers to Hamburg on the grounds that they were about to set sail, fleeced them for farewell gifts and then secretly took the train back to Berlin. From Auden’s diary, it looks as if Gerhart was one of these – for in Hamburg, he suddenly vanished.

  In another mood – this is also typical of Auden – he totted up the expense. He was missing his dressing-gown and a pistol, and he’d spent too much money on Gerhart’s shoes. Not too bad, considering. But he became depressed. He took a day trip out of Berlin to look at the countryside. Observing the beautiful indigo sky behind the steel works as he came back, he thought: ‘Country on a fine day always makes me feel Why do I bother about people. They are insignificant. But country is not enough.’

  Auden’s 1929 diary is one of the rare occasions where one can guess how his strange and exceptionally intelligent mind worked. Love, and sex, and writing, must surely be connected – but how? My father thought that they could be welded together into one gift, but he found by experience that although an adventure opened up new possibilities for his writing, the long-term prospect of love got in the way.

  In the long vac of 1929, Stephen also went to Germany, but he stayed in Hamburg rather than Berlin. He also had a plan. ‘I have always regarded my body as sinful, and my own physical being as something to be ashamed of and to be overcome by compensating and atoning spiritual qualities. Now I am beginning to feel that I may soon come to regard my body as a source of joy.’
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  At a party filled with beautiful uninhibited young people, he overheard the word unschuldig, and he assumed they were referring to him. It means ‘without guilt’. Stephen latched on to this word as a talisman that would guide him through all his future explorations of love. Whatever he did with his body, it would be ‘without guilt’. My father often talked to me about the German concept of the ‘guiltless fool’, with reference to Parsifal, for example. The guilt that had been drummed into him by his education was to be kept at bay with this word. It was his shield, his banner, his credo.

  In Hamburg he went through one unsatisfactory night of love with his host, a rich and cultured young German who ‘collected’ writers. Stephen wrote about it in his diary, which he tried to turn into a novel as soon as he got back to Oxford. This was The Temple, the homosexual coming-of-age novel that failed to find a publisher for nearly sixty years.

  By Stephen’s own account, The Temple went through five major drafts over the next three years. It took time away from writing poetry and it delayed the publication of his first collection of poems with Faber for at least a year. At one point the heroine of The Temple was a girl called Caroline, but this proved impossible and the book returned to the viewpoint of a first-person narrator. Stephen’s problem was that he couldn’t get away from what had happened; and novels surely need to be pushed beyond a disguised version of real events. Auden had been aware of this drawback in Stephen’s writing from the moment they’d discussed it on that famous picnic.

  The Temple was Stephen’s third attempt to write a novel. The first, ‘Instead of Death’, was a thinly disguised account of his first year in Oxford, including his meeting with Auden, who seems to have had a role in the book as a ‘Lord of Death’. Louis MacNeice read this text, which has not survived. He thought the portrait of Auden was bad, but it was ‘an exquisite example of Stephen’s lust to mythologise the world in which he walked’. MacNeice told Stephen bluntly that he didn’t recognize his Oxford. ‘Oh that does not matter, Stephen said, I am thinking of transposing the whole scene to a lunatic asylum.’