A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  What was his idea of love?

  If a human relationship becomes more important than anything else in two people’s lives, it simply means that there is a lack of trust between these two human beings. A relationship is not a way of entering into a kind of dual subjectivity, a redoubled and reciprocal egotism; it is an alliance of two people who form an united front to deal with the problems of the objective world. The problem of married people is not to become absorbed in each other, but how not to become absorbed in each other; how, in a word, to trust one another in order to enter into a strong and satisfactory relationship with the outside world.

  Stephen, so apparently open in his emotions, always kept something back. Auden had noticed this from the moment they’d met. Now Inez took stock of this characteristic and concluded that they’d reached a dead end. Tactfully, she wrote that if she were to return to Stephen, ‘although our affection is very solid, we could not get any further with our relationship and should both be profoundly dissatisfied’.

  The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 coincided with the foundation of the magazine where my father worked for two years as co-editor together with Cyril Connolly. So eager was Stephen to have an editorial role that he handed over a flat he’d recently rented on Mecklenburg Square in order to provide Horizon with an office.

  Connolly was a critic and writer who so far had produced one excellent novel, The Rock Pool, about expatriate bad behaviour in the Twenties. He was older than Stephen and belonged to the generation which placed fine writing above political commitment – a conviction that had been reinforced by the collapse of the Spanish Republic. By October, he’d settled into a wing chair covered with pink silk by the window overlooking Mecklenburg Square. He wore baggy flannels, a woollen tie and a tweed jacket, like a housemaster at a boarding school. ‘His movements like his voice were indolent, one had the impression he should be eating grapes, but at the same time his half-closed eyes missed nothing.’

  As an editor, he described himself as going through ‘periods of intense energy, interspersed with long lulls of sloth’. He also confessed in an editorial that co-editorship with Spender had its ups and downs, with moments when each would be ‘sullenly burning manuscripts in different corners of the room’. Stephen wanted more political articles, Cyril wanted fine prose, and occasionally there were tensions.

  Nevertheless the editorials, usually written by Cyril, tackled difficult questions about war aims and choices. Should the techniques of propaganda as perfected by modern advertising agencies be incorporated into the war effort? Would National Socialism of a British kind have to be introduced here? Nationalism – you cannot win a war without patriotism. Socialism – you cannot expect soldiers to fight without guaranteeing benefits for the families they leave behind. The great British capitalists and landlords were potentially Fascist, he wrote blandly. But: ‘below them come the enormous professional and commercial middle-class, which, though capitalist, could easily adapt itself to socialism, and which is morally and geographically anti-Hitler because it believes in Democracy, Christianity and the British Empire’. Cyril certainly believed in democracy, less so in Christianity, and not at all in the British Empire. But the message of Horizon was that England required major social changes if the war was to be won.

  Auden and Isherwood had left England at the end of January 1939, nine months before the war broke out. Everyone at their farewell party knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

  In January 1940, thinking of this anniversary, Connolly wrote an editorial in Horizon. Their departure was perhaps the most significant literary event of the war so far, he wrote. ‘They are far-sighted and ambitious young men with a strong instinct of self-preservation, and an eye on the main chance, who have abandoned what they consider to be the sinking ship of European democracy, and by implication the aesthetic doctrine of social realism that has been prevailing there.’

  Cyril did not approve of the literature of ‘social realism’ so presumably his remark was meant to be supportive. Unfortunately the phrase ‘self-preservation and an eye on the main chance’ provoked endless repercussions. At cocktail parties all over London people asked: Is Cyril really saying that Wystan and Christopher are rats who’ve left the sinking ship? Questions were even asked in Parliament.

  Stephen was away when Cyril wrote this comment. When he read it, he worried about how Wystan would take it. He immediately wrote to him. In his reply, Auden wrote briskly, ‘of course I wasn’t offended by the editorial which I thought was very fair’. He added, ‘I wish you were over here, not because I don’t support the allies – which in spite of everything I do – but because there doesnt seem anything that you cannot do just as well here as there.’ Meaning write poetry.

  He confirmed this position in a conversation with Louis MacNeice, who appeared in New York for a three-month lecture tour. MacNeice, in a letter that appeared in Horizon, tried to play down the controversy. He said that Auden had told him that ‘an artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all; that in England to-day the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group; that in America he feels just as lonely, but so, says Auden, is everybody else’.

  Auden thought that the only obligation of a writer was to write. My father thought this avoided the issue. If Hitler won, writers in Europe would disappear – along with many of their readers. In his ‘Letter to a Colleague in America’, written for the New Statesman, Stephen wrote: ‘I wonder how much of value can be created, even in America, if the conditions in which we are living are so completely misunderstood.’ This was a tactful way of asking, how can one concentrate exclusively on writing while the Nazis are out there, threatening to destroy writing itself?

  This evoked a private protest from Auden. ‘Your passion for public criticism of your friends has always seemed to me a little odd; it is not that you dont say acute things – you do – but the assumption of the role of the blue-eyed Candid Incorruptible is questionable … What you say is probably accurate enough, but the tone alarms me. “One is worried about Auden’s poetic future.” Really, Stephen dear, whose voice is this but that of Harold Spender, M.P.’

  Bill Coldstream, who’d painted Wystan in numerous long sittings and who’d known him since they were adolescents, was convinced that Wystan had fallen in love. Otherwise he would have come back. There were many reasons why Auden failed to return: a suspicion that England would make a deal with Hitler, a dislike of taking human lives, a strong reluctance to being roped into writing patriotic poems in favour of the British war effort, along the lines of ‘Spain’, a work he’d come to dislike for what he saw as its insincere rhetoric. But of all the reasons to remain in the United States, love came first.

  5

  MUTUAL RENAISSANCE

  MY PARENTS MET in August 1940, a fortnight before the beginning of the Blitz. Tony invited a young pianist from the Royal College of Music to lunch at Horizon, just around the corner from where they happened to be: my mother, Natasha Litvin, aged twenty-one. She thought ‘Horizon’ was the name of a pub, not the magazine where my father worked. She wasn’t sure if she’d come. ‘Oh come on ducky, you’ll enjoy it,’ said Tony. And so she went.

  Mum was living with her mother off Primrose Hill at the time, in a flat with one sitting room, one bedroom, and a tiny room under the eaves with a stove and a sink. She once told me that when she was a child practising on the upright piano perched on the landing, if she fell into a daydream, the door above her head would open and Granny would lean out and whack her head with a saucepan to get her going again. At this point however her childhood was over. She was a scholarship student with a promising career, and she’d been invited to practise on the grand piano of Ian and Lys Lubbock, who lived near Coram Square.

  Every morning she walked down past the Zoo and along Prince Albert Road to the Lubbocks. Signs of war were everywhere. On Primrose Hill, an ancient wood had been cut down to make room for an
ti-aircraft guns. The animals of the London Zoo were being evacuated to Whipsnade in Bedfordshire, protesting, in large canvas-covered trucks. The bombing was expected to start at any moment.

  The first thing she noticed as she walked into the Horizon office – my father’s flat – was a long table against the wall, piled high with books and manuscripts. The larger room overlooking the square contained a wing chair covered with pink silk, a big horn gramophone with a stack of records running along the floor and a long trestle table set for lunch. Awed by these surroundings, Natasha knelt and flipped through Stephen’s records: Schnabel’s ‘Beethoven Society’ recordings of the sonatas, the Busch recordings of the Haydn quartets and Fritz Busch conducting Mozart operas at Glyndebourne. Her taste precisely. And casually propped against the wall near the records, a little Picasso watercolour.

  She was briefly introduced to Stephen, but before she could ask him about his taste in music, they sat down to lunch. A crowd of about ten people in the small flat. Cyril Connolly, Horizon’s main editor, sat at the head of the table. Natasha was down near the novelist Rose Macaulay, whom she remembered as having kept her crumpled velvet hat on at table, complete with veil.

  Looking at Stephen surreptitiously from a distance, Natasha realized this wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. Three years earlier, in October 1937, she’d joined a group of music students at the Kingsway Hall in London during a rally on behalf of the Spanish Republic. By that time the Spanish cause was as good as lost, but this did not make Stephen Spender less of a glamorous figure. He described the young English poets who had fought and died for Spain: John Cornford, for example, and Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. (‘Spender praised the representatives of culture who had lost their lives whilst fighting with the Spanish Government Forces,’ wrote a listener from MI5.) Natasha admired Stephen’s speech because, unlike the others on the platform, what he said was free from the usual bombast.

  After lunch the guests mysteriously disappeared, leaving Stephen with the washing up. Natasha helped – and that was that. As a child I often imagined this scene: the guests leaving with their fingers to their lips like actors miming silence in a film. He’d been depressed all winter and his friends were longing for him to start a new life.

  Years later, she described how she looked when Stephen first saw her. ‘He probably thought me rather demure, even old fashioned, with my hair parted in the middle and the two long plaits wound over the head in Victorian style.’ This is typical of the way my mother saw herself: shy, retiring, perhaps at some level even anti-social.

  After they’d tidied up, they walked around Mecklenburg Square, and then out to supper together, staying on until the restaurant closed, darkness fell and Natasha had to go home in a taxi. During their walk Stephen mentioned the death of a friend, and he stopped and shut his eyes in an unconscious expression of pain. This was what attracted her: his willingness to reveal emotions. Not many Englishmen she knew did that.

  They were both tall, so there was no problem about keeping up with each other when they walked in Regent’s Park next day. And the next. And the next. Less than a week later, in another taxi with the Lubbocks going from a cocktail party to their house to have dinner, a tipsy Ian leaned forward and told Stephen that he should ‘take on’ his wife Lys, not Natasha. Which suggested to Natasha that in the eyes of the world, she and Stephen had already ‘taken on’ each other.

  My mother writes this regarding her first impressions: ‘The sudden luminosity of spirit which possessed me from that first day, I remember as a kind of mutual renaissance shared with Stephen, in whom one could sense this tentative turning towards the light, whilst I also was moving away from a restless year I had spent in Hampshire as paying guest of Susan Lushington, where music had been the only solace from the troubled impermanence I had known since 1939 in both outer and inner life.’ It’s a long sentence. When it came to revealing her emotions, my mother wanted to cram everything in and move on.

  With several other Royal College students she’d been evacuated to Ockham Hall, where Susan Lushington, a keen amateur musician, had offered them hospitality. ‘Despite successful achievements at the College and beyond, in recovering from an illness I had been troubled about the value and direction of my daily devotion to music.’ She was certainly something of a success. In March 1940, she’d performed Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto with the Royal College Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent. Not the easiest piece in the world. But illness? I know nothing about this, but my mother once told me that she’d had a stomach ulcer at the age of twelve, which suggests stress.

  Her fellow students were marrying or going off to the war, or both in quick succession. What was to become of her? She didn’t want to live with a musician and she hardly knew anyone else. A musician ‘would be confining, compounding of stress, and prone to shop-talk. Too narrowing.’ She was not interested in politics. ‘Public life, its battles, crowds and compromises were not for me.’ She could see herself doing good in a quiet way, at an individual level. ‘I was a kind of agnostic Christian, totally unconcerned with dogma, but fond of and admiring those selfless lives, whether historical or personally known to me, which combined a sense of the sacred with understanding, love and tolerance.’

  In the few diaries my mother left she insists that an introspective life would have suited her best. The life she chose with Stephen was the opposite of that, but she wasn’t incapable of presenting a brave face to the world. Quite the contrary. She was also a musician, so she knew how to perform.

  My mother was the illegitimate daughter of Rachel Litvin, an actor of Jewish ancestry born in Estonia, who’d come to England with her family as a child. Her father was Edwin Evans, a well-known music critic and champion of contemporary French composers. Unfortunately, my grandfather was married when Ray became pregnant, and although he offered to obtain a divorce, my grandmother refused.

  In these dire circumstances, Ray was helped via her friendship with Betty Potter, a fellow actor, whose powerful sisters took over my mother’s birth and foster care. Bardie, one of Betty’s sisters, even offered to adopt her, but Ray refused. Margaret Booth, married to the son of the shipping magnate Charles Booth, became Natasha’s ‘Aunt Margie’. In fact all the sisters became Natasha’s elective ‘aunts’.

  When Natasha was a few months old, the ‘aunts’ found a foster-mother for her. Unencumbered, my grandmother did her best to continue her career. ‘I walked with Miss Litvinne, mother of an illegitimate child, down Longacre, & found her like an articulate terrier – eyes wide apart; greased to life; nimble; sure footed, without a depth anywhere in her brain. They go to the Cabaret; all night dances; John Goss sings. She was communicative, even admiring I think. Anyhow, I like Bohemians.’ Thus my grandmother depicted by Virginia Woolf, of the sharp eye and sharper tongue, in the year 1924, when my mother was three. The following year she saw Ray acting the part of an orphan in a play. She was not impressed. ‘Poor Ray Litvin’s miserable big mouth & little body.’

  Throughout my mother’s childhood, the Booth family at their grand house on Campden Hill, or at their even larger property at Funtington in Suffolk, took care of my mother and encouraged her musical gifts. Funtington was full of the Booth children, although they were slightly older than Natasha. There are photographs. She is with them. They are in a magnificent tree-house in a chestnut tree. ‘The joy was to be allowed to join them there among the dark foliage, pulling the ladder up after us, impregnable in our leafy hideaway.’ At Funtington there was a bedroom known as ‘Natasha’s room’, which means that my mother must have spent most of her holidays there.

  The Booths were obsessed by music. Everyone played an instrument and they could perform complex chamber pieces without the help of musicians from outside the family. Aunt Margie looked down the table one Sunday lunch and said, ‘Oh good. This afternoon we can play the Trout.’ This, to my mother, was incredible luxury – and she was right! Who today can play Schubert’s Trout Quintet, and the performers a
re all related? Beyond their music, the Booths enjoyed what my mother calls ‘a democratic radical classlessness going back to Bright and Bentham’. I’m not sure whether ‘classlessness’ is the right word, but the Booths stood at the head of a strong tradition of English socialism. And they were rich.

  Little Natasha grew up in three worlds: that of her foster-mother Mrs Busby, that of the powerful self-appointed aunts, and that of everyday life at school. She learned to speak in three different accents and she was proud of the fact that she could alter these voices instantaneously. ‘As I grew, so did my ability for chameleon changes of manner to suit the ambience in which I might find myself. Yet at the centre of this changing stream of consciousness and easy, reliable adaptation to frequent changes of scene, there was a certain unequivocal sense of unity, an intact sense of self.’

  Until she was twelve years old, Mum hadn’t even known that she had a father. By that time she was in secondary school and doing well. She loved her foster-mother and the Booth family stood in the background to give her a sense of security. Then suddenly my grandmother told her that she’d be leaving Mrs Busby and coming back to London to live with her; and that the following day she’d have to visit the person Ray had never married and ask him for money.

  The next day Mum boarded the 74 bus from Primrose Hill to Earls Court to meet the unknown man who happened to be her father. A housekeeper opened the door and she found herself in front of a large bearded gentleman in a pair of carpet slippers. He neither hugged her nor shook her hand, but he was a musician, so he could talk about that. He showed her his scores stacked from floor to ceiling, talked about French composers she’d never heard of and took her to the piano and played a bright little sonata by Scarlatti.