A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

My father saw Inez just that once at Isaiah’s, then a month later he invited her to a housewarming party at his new flat in Hammersmith, freshly decorated with the latest furnishings bought with the unexpected profits from the ‘communist’ book (as he called it) that he’d just written: Forward from Liberalism. Bentwood chairs and copper ceiling lights such as he’d seen in Hamburg in his earliest moment of freedom. There, seeing how attractive she was, he took her into a side room and kissed her. The next day he invited her to lunch at the Café Royal and proposed marriage.

  She went back to Oxford in tears, and when she saw Philip Toynbee that evening, he was appalled to hear that she hadn’t said no. Though he tried to persuade her not to go through with it, he knew that in the end Stephen would win.

  In the contorted weeks that followed, Philip continued to sleep with her while Stephen stayed in London. At one point, to shake off Philip, Inez had a brief fling with Freddie Ayer, a young philosophy don. It didn’t work. Freddie and Philip met and made friends. They agreed over drinks that it was important to them to give satisfaction to a woman in bed; yet in all this mayhem nobody was permitted to show jealousy towards anybody else. Jealousy infringed upon freedom; and ‘free love’ in those days was almost a political belief.

  Stephen proposed to Inez on 13 November 1936, and they were married a month later in a registry office in London. ‘I’m just not capable any more of having “affairs” with people,’ he wrote to Christopher; ‘they are simply a part of a general addiction to sexual adventures.’

  The marriage had a devastating effect on Tony, who’d been joking and plotting with Philip Toynbee up to the very last minute, in the taxi as they went to the ceremony together. He left to fight in Spain two days after the wedding. He’d been threatening to do this for months. Stephen had been torturing himself with thoughts that if Tony went to Spain, he, Stephen, would be responsible. Tony couldn’t make up his mind whether this interpretation was true or not. On the one hand it was good if Stephen suffered, because it would keep their relationship alive. On the other hand it took away Tony’s autonomy as a man who was in charge of his own life – as someone capable of taking a moral decision to go and fight, unlike the pusillanimous Stephen.

  Less than a month after Tony left, Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party of Great Britain, invited Stephen to the Central Office in King Street and proposed that he travel to Spain in order to trace the whereabouts of the Komsomol, a Russian ship loaded with munitions which had mysteriously disappeared on its way to Barcelona. It was an odd thing to ask. Finding the Komsomol was a problem that either could be solved easily, by asking the Red Cross, or else was very difficult, in which case Stephen risked being shot as a spy.

  In Spain, my father’s idea about how to find a missing Russian ship was to ask anyone he met in newspaper offices and in bars if they’d heard anything about it. Within a week of his arrival, three intelligence services knew about him: Republican, Fascist and British. At one point he wanted to cross the lines and ask the Fascists, but by that time his quest was well known and he was turned back at the frontier. It would have been embarrassing for General Franco if he’d had to shoot a British national.

  The British authorities became interested. What was he up to? London sent back this message: ‘Stephen Spender was born on 28.2.1909 and is a person of leisure and private means. He became a passionate anti-fascist as a result of travel in Germany, and has lately come to see in communism the only effective solution of world problems. His views are set out in his two recent books, The Approach to Communism, and Forward from Liberalism and he has also produced poems of considerable power. He is in touch with members of the international left-wing group in London, but has not, so far as we know, engaged in active politics.’ The local officer in Gibraltar noted: ‘Up till now, as far as we know, his communism has not been more than theoretical. It may be necessary to keep a sharper eye on him in the future.’

  He went back to London none the wiser on the subject of the Komsomol and reported his lack of findings to King Street. Harry Pollitt then persuaded him to join the Communist Party, which Stephen did, writing a dramatic article for the Daily Worker: ‘I join the Communist Party’. Then Pollitt sent him back to Spain to run a radio station.

  By the time he arrived in Valencia, the radio had been suppressed.

  At this point Stephen heard that Tony had attempted to desert from the International Brigade and was under arrest. He spent the following weeks attempting to save Tony and bring him safely back home. This enormous effort brought him into conflict with the communist commissars whose job it was to keep discipline among the volunteers. Sadistically, they restricted the occasions when they could see each other; though they didn’t stop Tony from writing to Stephen – these letters being read by their censor. ‘Oh my darling, it all seems so terribly unfair,’ wrote Tony after one of these meetings. ‘I don’t think I could bear even to see you again only for a short while. Such short-lived happiness only leaves me more torn and miserable than ever. But do come if you can.’

  Stephen went behind the backs of the commissars. He contacted the British acting Consul in Valencia, who was sympathetic, and the Spanish Minister of Munitions, Alvarez del Vayo. Stephen’s reputation as a poet was a valuable commodity to the Spanish Republic, more valuable than the intransigence of the commissars, who naturally became furious when they realized they’d been bypassed.

  Stephen could see Pollitt’s point of view, which was that deserters from the front couldn’t be treated leniently. But he also felt that, if he could save this one man from a fate he did not deserve, he shouldn’t give up. ‘What with your family and your friends, you have been more trouble to me than the whole British Battalion put together,’ Pollitt told Tony on one of his visits to Spain. He promised Tony he’d be on his way home within a week.

  Exasperated by endless meetings with Stephen to discuss the Tony problem, Pollitt cut through one conversation by asking Stephen a simple question: ‘Is there any sex in this?’ It was a key moment in my father’s life. He did not tell lies. As far as he was concerned, he had no choice but to answer truthfully. So he said, ‘Yes.’

  The Spanish Civil War retained a personal element that vanished in the subsequent much larger European war. Even so, a confrontation discussing the sexual relationship of a deserter and his lover seems to me one of the strangest of all war stories.

  Stephen last visited Spain to attend an international writers’ conference that took place under the threat of imminent defeat. Groups of authors were driven in grand cars from one hotel to another. Speeches were made and delicious meals eaten. Stephen decided to challenge this opacity and ask the delegates for information about ‘certain methods which were used in Russia and in Spain and were they prepared to say that they accepted full responsibility for these because they were inevitable and necessary?’ Was it true that summary executions of members of the anarchist brigades by the communists were taking place behind the scenes? ‘I wanted to know what was going on, and why, and who was responsible for it.’ There was no answer. Instead, the question was attacked and Comrade Spender criticized for believing ‘bourgeois propaganda spread by fascist agents’.

  The writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, a member of the committee in charge of the English delegation, told him firmly, ‘what is so nice is that we didn’t see or hear of a single act of violence on the Republican side’. She saw Stephen as ‘an irritating idealist, always hatching a wounded feeling’. She wanted him expelled from the Party immediately. ‘She was concerned, she said, lest they were giving the wrong advice to their young writers: this was an issue of far greater importance than the fate of Spender.’ The Hyndman case would provide all the necessary justification.

  As soon as he got back to England, Stephen wrote a letter of protest to Harry Pollitt. He was being victimized in a smear campaign. ‘When I was in Spain I discovered that the other members of the English delegation were occupied in acting as amateur detectives, apparently under the impres
sion that it was their duty to “send a report to King Street”. If any such report has been made, I think I should be allowed to answer it.’

  Had Harry Pollitt betrayed him? ‘I would like to remind you that on an important occasion when you asked me a leading question, I answered it truthfully. I am prepared to answer any other questions. But it is very painful to me that my confidential answer to your confidential question has been used to slander and prejudice people against me.’ He was worried that his ‘yes’ on that fateful occasion might enter the public domain.

  A few days later, Stephen invited Philip Toynbee to lunch at his flat in Hammersmith. Philip had visited Spain and the inevitable fall of the Republic was on everyone’s mind. He’d also been seeing Inez in Stephen’s absence, resisting her offer to leave Stephen and come back to him. In an aside, she spoke very bitterly about her husband. ‘Stephen, she said, was utterly thoughtless and egocentric, unimaginative, going through the motions of generosity, but hopelessly ungenerous in his heart.’

  The conversation at lunch was entirely about Tony: his stomach ulcers, the censorious moralism of the British commissars and the authoritarian role of Harry Pollitt. Stephen was panicking at the thought that he’d told Pollitt the truth. His ‘Yes’ meant that he’d descended to the level of sexual predator, with Tony as his innocent working-class victim. His own view of himself as an upright and honest man was under siege, for his position was dishonourable in the eyes of the CP.

  Whenever my father thought that his integrity was under threat, he’d lash out in self-defence. He’d learned this at school, I think. He makes a comment somewhere in his journals: you can accept any kind of teasing or bullying at school, but there comes a point where you have to lash out, or sink.

  After lunch, Inez and Philip were left alone. Inez, who’d been silent during the meal, told Philip wearily, ‘It’s like this every day!’ When Stephen came back, he went on talking about Spain. ‘Stephen very anti-Russian,’ wrote Philip, who still followed the Party line, ‘grotesquely & ignorantly.’ Inez whispered to Philip in the background: We can now look forward to an article entitled, ‘I leave the Communist Party’.

  My father abandoned communism after the Spanish experience, not just for political reasons – though there were plenty of those – but because the puritanism of the communists regarding personal behaviour was so great it constituted a political threat of its own. The communists were as repressed as the Victorians, Stephen wrote to William Plomer. It was inescapable. ‘I believe in communism & wd therefore like to be a good communist, which means being a very normal & bourgeois person indeed. But now I know I can’t manage to fit into this kind of life any more than the life which my parents wd have liked for me.’

  If it meant leaving the Communist Party because of Tony, then so be it.

  It is much best to accept the fact that I am not only a cad but that in the last resort I am prepared to act unscrupulously. If one accepts this, then there is quite a good working basis on which to adjust things as I don’t want to make people unnecessarily unhappy although I have done so without meaning to & would now even do so knowingly if I thought it was necessary to break away from the new bourgeois trap in which I am caught.

  It’s a confused sentence. He’s sorry about hurting people’s feelings, he’s a ‘cad’, but at the same time he’d fight ‘unscrupulously’ against the ‘bourgeois trap’ of communism. Yet all the while he still believes in communism as an idea.

  4

  A SLY SHELLEY

  TONY CAME BACK from Spain in the late summer of 1937, and Stephen and Inez moved out of London to a cottage in Kent – perhaps to avoid him. Shortly after they’d arrived, Auden came to stay. He needed to talk about Spain.

  Stephen described the background of the International Writers’ Congress, to which Wystan had intended to go but didn’t, because of visa problems. There had been a violent attack on André Gide for the book he’d written after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935. Indeed, his Retour de l’URSS had divided most fellow-travellers from the rest of the Communist Party. Philip Toynbee, though for the moment he remained loyal, had written in his diary when the book came out: ‘We must, must do something about it – protest first against the Trotskist label attached so readily to critics. Then try to extort a reply from the Soviet Government. All this of course inside the party.’ Stephen had been shocked at the viciousness of the attack on Gide and the refusal to discuss the book itself. And they’d attacked him, too, over Tony. Was this the inevitable fate of all those who disagreed with the communists? Character assassination, rather than rational discussion?

  Auden’s view was: ‘political exigence was never a justification for lies’. In spite of the complexity of Auden’s mind, or perhaps because of it, he often insisted on following the simplest of rules. It eliminated long moralistic arguments and much soul-searching; but to say ‘lying is wrong’ also struck at the heart of communist tactics.

  One evening at the end of November 1937, Christopher turned up at Stephen’s flat in Hammersmith. ‘Stephen’s affairs are in a fine old tangle. The triangle has turned into a quadrangle.’ He’s referring to Stephen, Inez, Tony, plus an offstage lover of Inez. ‘Stephen said of himself: “I only really feel what my friends tell me I feel.” He’s worried about Inez and about Tony’s future. He even claims to have shed tears last night for an hour. But under all his remorse, he’s really laughing and naughty and very sly. A sly Shelley.’

  To Christopher, there’d always been something absurd about Stephen’s marriage. Absurd, too, for Stephen to pretend he had emotions while simultaneously saying they were wished on him by his friends. Meanwhile in front of Christopher, Stephen played down his capacity to love a woman. He did not want to be deflated by a sardonic remark.

  Isherwood was planning to leave the country with Auden. They’d take a boat to China and write a book about the war in Manchuria. Christopher’s life since Hitler came to power had been a restless shifting from country to country: Denmark, Holland, the Canaries, Portugal. His lover Heinz had been lured back to Germany and arrested and he was desperate. He did not want to live in England, the land of The Enemy.

  In Shanghai they stayed with the British Ambassador. The late British Empire was hospitable. Auden had just won the King’s Medal for Poetry and they were important visitors. Of the two Auden seemed the more important, and this made Isherwood uncomfortable. ‘In China, I sometimes found myself really hating him – hating his pedantic insistence on “objectivity”, which was merely a reaction from my own woolly-mindedess. I was meanly jealous of him too. Jealous of his share of the limelight; jealous because he’ll no longer play the role of dependent, admiring younger brother.’

  They visited the front line. Isherwood wanted to test himself. ‘If I was scared in China – far more often than Wystan – I, at least, didn’t show it. And, maybe, as taking those little risks was more difficult for me, I even displayed a kind of mild courage.’ This was a good reason for being there: to test how they’d behave when war came to Europe.

  In Auden’s life there had been no equivalent, so far, to Heinz in Christopher’s or Tony in Stephen’s. Several times in the China adventure Auden became depressed by the thought that love might pass him by. He could observe love happen, he could briskly and cheerfully manage sex, but what about love? To love his neighbour as himself he could also manage, both as a Christian principle and as a vision of humanity. But love, in the sense of sex plus affection plus trust, hadn’t yet happened.

  They came back via a boat to Vancouver then a train to New York. Auden liked this new city immediately. New Yorkers belonged to their city in a different way than Londoners belonged to London. Auden had never liked London, and literary London took for granted that he belonged there and held certain responsibilities. After all, London had created his reputation. By comparison, New Yorkers seemed to him free from the burden of expectations.

  Over their return voyage across the Atlantic, he was in a bad state. ‘Wysta
n in tears,’ wrote Christopher in his diary, ‘telling me that no one would ever love him, that he would never have my sexual success. That flattered my vanity; but still my sadism wasn’t appeased. And, actually – believe it or not – when we got back to England I wouldn’t have him to stay the night, because I was jealous of him, and wanted to stage the Returning Hero act all to myself.’

  Over the summer of 1938, Inez left Stephen; and although several times it seemed as if she’d come back, she didn’t.

  Stephen was devastated, yet in his autobiography he writes that their separation was ‘the breaking up of something which had never been completely joined’. But if nothing had become ‘joined’, it was at least partly because he did not want it to. As he’d written to a friend soon after the wedding, ‘I believe I married really because I recognized in my wife someone who doesn’t want to become absorbed in someone else any more than I do.’

  He’d suffered intensely to see that she was unhappy and to feel that he was the cause, yet her unhappiness lay beyond his capacity to cure. He hated this feeling and he did not know how to cope with it. As he wrote to Christopher: ‘I feel that people can’t exist without me. Also, I sometimes feel at the very mercy of people – that I cannot refuse any request they make; I now think that this is a [way] of being at the mercy of one’s feelings.’Tony’s presence must surely have been one of the reasons why the marriage failed; yet this was not mentioned. Stephen felt loyal to Tony, and if Inez had ever suggested this constituted disloyalty to her, he would have become outraged. Jealousy hampered freedom, and freedom was the most important of all political ideas. Thus Tony remained offstage as Inez fled to Wales and Stephen stayed miserably in London. Perhaps Tony hoped that after the separation, he might rejoin Stephen.

  Inez left him, not vice versa, so in a sense she seized the initiative. After she’d left, Stephen poured out desperate letters to a mutual friend, and these are helpful in trying to understand what he needed from love. ‘The fact is that one must base life on love and not on “being in love” – at least, that is the difference between Inez and me, that I have love which could last thirty years and she lives on being in love from day to day.’