During this visit, Dad told Mougouch something so strange that she didn’t pass it on to me for several weeks. ‘We Spenders have always succeeded in killing the women we love.’ To her it was meaningless but maybe I could make something of it. She raised her eyebrows and looked at me full in the face, her eyes particularly green. I said that I thought it might have something to do with the death of his own mother; but he’d also placed himself in the forefront of what was surely my mother’s problem, not his. She nodded. ‘We can forget about it,’ she said decisively.
On the day after the operation, in bed and presumably still under the influence of morphine, my mother had an experience that she treasured for a long time.
The magic of that day in the hospital – trussed up to machines – one of which made a noise like a motor boat going round a Greek island, and absolved from all duties, guilts and exertions. Peacefully listening to the sounds – suddenly from the pretty little Victorian garden below my window, with its little drinking fountain with tin cups attached on chains – a sound of many rapid pattering feet – scuffles rattles of the tin cups on their chains – a multitudinous sound like a flock of chattering birds – more pattering of feet departing, and then a clear solitary silver voice of a young child – saying ‘You fucking bastards – why can’t you wait for me?’ I thought I had never in my life heard anything so beautiful as that little voice.
She decided there and then that she should treat every subsequent day as a gift, to be treasured as if it were time acquired in the face of death. She wrote this entry in a moment of depression, when she’d let herself in for the trip to California to meet Bryan Obst, my father’s last lover. She was counting up the moments in her life that she valued, and this was one of them. She noted that in the South of France where she was brooding, sometimes the days came and went without anything happening at all. ‘Yesterday’s accidie [laziness] therefore is inexcusable, according to my “every day is a gift”.’
Sonia was ready for her when she came back from the hospital. She’d primed my father on what he had to do. When Mum came in, Sonia hissed: ‘The flowers, Stephen, the flowers.’ Dad produced a big bunch of flowers and offered them – to Sonia. ‘Not to me, you fool! To her!’ Mum staggered through this scene and went straight upstairs to bed.
My mother was told that she’d never be able to perform a concert again.
She didn’t touch the piano for two years. Not only that, but she refused to go to concerts, or to the opera, or even listen to music on the gramophone. My father was shocked. This made me feel that either he didn’t know about music, or he didn’t know his wife. It seemed to me utterly reasonable to dump the whole thing. No second best! No tinkling the ivories between cooking his meals! That’s what she’d always said. Did Dad think she didn’t mean it? Or had he never taken her music seriously to begin with?
Not being able to perform meant that Mum had to give up the camaraderie of the musical world, with its feeling of ‘let’s row this boat ashore’ that performance entails. She never said that she missed it. On the contrary, she always implied that the world of music, except at the very highest level, was limited. But, without her career, she had to face the reduction of her sense of self to that of housewife and helpmeet. Silence was never so precise as in Loudoun Road thereafter.
Over the winter, my mother did her best to pull herself together after the operation.
In Dad’s study I overheard her tell him: ‘One has to be so careful in this second chance sort of life. One can’t risk making any mistakes.’ A touching remark. But I brooded about it. Wasn’t there a kernel of ambition in there somewhere? Didn’t it mean that she wanted to recover, catch up, overtake, succeed?
Over the winter, she decided that she’d go back to university and start again. Richard Wollheim at London University was encouraging. She started learning Latin from scratch for an O level; and she’d certainly manage music A level, even though it meant studying a symphony by Sibelius that she hated. A group of Auden’s poems was set for her English exam. The next time he turned up at Loudoun Road, she handed them to him for the latest corrections. I remember seeing ‘Spain’ with a vertical line crossing out the whole thing.
The second interesting remark that I overheard occurred during a private conversation between my mother and Sonia. After one’s body had been so martyred, Mum said, there’s no question of taking on a new lover. It’s hard enough to retain the lover one has, and then only because he recognizes what he used to love.
To me, this was a very unexpected remark. I’d assumed that the big difference between Mougouch and my mother was that Mougouch was inside the world of love affairs, Mum wasn’t. It suggested that, however faithfully my mother remained loyal to her ‘discipline’, the idea of a new love had survived until then, ticking away somewhere in the back of her mind.
In the early summer of 1965, when he was fifty-six years old, Stephen met and instantly fell in love with Nikos Stangos, a young Greek poet working as a press attaché in the Greek Embassy in London. Twenty-eight years old, Nikos was slim, curly-haired, well read and brilliantly intelligent, but touchy. It’s a quality I’m grateful for. In Stephen’s love letters to him, time and again he has to explain what he expects from love.
They’d hardly met before they were separated by the summer holidays. From 23 July, Stephen and Natasha were in the South of France, where my mother struggled with her Provençal house. Maro and I joined them there for a week. Mougouch had told Maro that she mustn’t mention the word cancer to me, as Natasha wanted to keep her operation secret. Mum wanted to seal the floor of the kitchen with a polish called Starwax that she’d brought out from England. She became fanatical about spots on her kitchen floor. Maro layered that floor daily with Starwax, but she wasn’t pleased that Mum persistently called her by the name of her Portuguese maid back in London.
As part of me was still a sulky adolescent, I thought the tensions in the house were normal, so I hid in the bedroom. But there was one evening when my mother went wild and escaped across the hillside. Perhaps she’d guessed something about the still invisible Nikos. We all went out to look for her, Dad included. We’d never have found her if she hadn’t said, from beneath a Provençal rock, ‘Go away.’ My father told us gently but firmly that he’d deal with the situation now. So Maro and I wandered back to the house. As usual, my parents kept their problems to themselves.
Stephen tried to nurture his relationship with Nikos with letters. Fantasy fuelled his patience during a long, difficult summer. ‘Now what I would like is that we always – or for a long long time – regard one another with the same affection and consideration. Which means that during the next year or so, we must accept intervals in which we write to and think of one another.’
Maro, my mother and me at Saint-Jérôme in the summer after her operation.
He longed to see Nikos again, but between the end of the summer and his departure for Washington in October, there wouldn’t be much time. He arranged for them to spend two days alone and built fantasies around this expectation as my mother struggled with her garden – that barren patch of land desperately needing to be fed. And the water problem. And the builders. But she was determined to make that house work – because, unlike Loudoun Road, it was hers.
In England, over the weekend of Friday 3 and Saturday 4 September 1965, Stephen joined Nikos somewhere in Sussex.
They drove back to London on the Sunday, stopping off for a walk along the Sussex downs, where they sat and talked under some trees on a low hill. Stephen asked Nikos about his relationship with a friend. ‘That is a pornographic thought,’ said Nikos sharply. Later, Nikos rolled down the hill, which Stephen thought was a magnificent gesture. It was a curious two days. At one point Stephen had to make a detour and speak to Malcolm Muggeridge. He left Nikos outside in the car. The weather was also strange, glowering as if to send them back to the city, then brightening up.
Driving towards London, Nikos told Stephen of a recent dream that had
disturbed him. Stephen kept thinking about it.
When you are relating a dream as you did on our drive home, or when you explain your attitude to poetry, or when you write a letter then I think you are a writer, as Proust was, perhaps. Now I know I’m taking terrible risks saying this, but it is said out of my love for you: which means that I am not pressing you in any way with my opinion, but giving it because you want to know what I think, giving it so you may reject it instantly.
Less than a week later, Stephen flew to Washington to take up his job as Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress. He was required to be in an office from nine to five, preferably writing poems. ‘There is something too creepy about the idea of the official poet sitting in his office really writing poetry. The idea of “behaving” exactly to fit an allotted role is a bit mad really, like a depressive maniac really looking depressed.’
His fantasies about Nikos balanced the absurdity of his official duties. And so, back again to that meeting in Sussex: ‘I must try and think about that day we had on the downs in a way that makes it not just a recollected happiness but a present one, which it is.’ In his mind, he went over everything he’d said to Nikos, regretting that he hadn’t been clearer on some points, continuing the discussion of others. ‘I thought always that if we were alone for two days every minute would count as an hour and there would be moments we would keep for the rest of our lives. This really is so, and I thank you more than I can say.’
Nikos had a distinctive voice: precise, with a faint touch of bitterness. Stephen’s imaginary conversations were real to him because he could hear that voice in his mind. Sleepless in Washington: ‘During the night I was trying to explain to you that when I asked you about you and Nickyphoros and you said “that is a pornographic thought”, somehow I adored your saying so in that way too much to explain that really I meant something quite different which was: “is what we really want more than anything with each other a passionate conversation?”’
Nikos often responded sharply to Stephen’s interpretation of his personality. He was good at reading between the lines and detecting hidden drops of poison. It was maddening for Stephen to have to keep apologizing for having insulted Nikos, but Stephen longed to forgive him. ‘You always relate everything to some standard which is marvellously clear and pure in your mind. When you say things which seem severely critical I can recognize the truth in them and feel that I was longing for them to be said. That is partly of course in the way in which you say them.’
Because so much had been left unsaid, that one memory could become a creative fuel. ‘I found what you said in the car very convincing. You think of me as judging or as untouched. The position really is that I am anxious to learn … I would like to say to you “please write more poems so that I can learn from an act of writing of a kind which has been blank for so long in me”.’
This, I think, is the key. The afternoon with Nikos on the Sussex downs was elevated by Stephen so that it became a kernel of intense experience, of the kind that his poems came from. Over and above whatever he loved or expected from Nikos, Stephen hoped that he himself was still capable of the intense feelings from which a poem springs.
Let me try to sum up my father’s expectations from love.
There are many clues in this book that Stephen had doubts about the reality of his own feelings. He always insisted that he was the victim of his friends; had no will of his own; had doubts about the condition of love. Auden had said, early on, that this was all untrue: Stephen needed love as much as anyone else, but he didn’t want to reveal the fact, because it would make him vulnerable to others.
In the earliest phase, when at Oxford he was in love with a young man he calls Marston in his first book of poems, the love object was untouchable. Wystan blasted Stephen out of his hesitation. The second phase, the boys from around the port of Hamburg and from the Lokalen of Berlin, was complicated. There was sex, and there was an attachment of sorts, although this love was linked to The Temple, the polemical book that Stephen wanted to write about the experience, and to his need to prove something to himself and to his friends.
When he met Tony in 1933, Stephen recognized an amalgamation of sex plus intelligence and he chose it instantly. It was a courageous attempt, but unfortunately Tony lived only for the moment. He had no other dimension, clever though he might have been. It was impossible to live with Tony, because he required constant attention of the kind that would drive anyone insane. And so Stephen counted out for ever the possibility of living with another man. Two men in one apartment would always disagree, because each to the other was, as he’d once put it, ‘a substitute for something else’.
There followed the relationships with Muriel, Inez and my mother.
In his relationships with women, I think my father’s sense of pity predominated. He could empathize with a woman’s unhappiness, but it also made him panic. This reaction perhaps went back to the lack of sympathy he’d shown to his mother when she was about to die a miserable death, a rejection of unhappiness as a rejection of death – but this is to drift into psychological areas where I’m not qualified to have an opinion. Suffice it to say that he could offer sympathy to a woman if she were unhappy, he could tune into that unhappiness to a remarkable degree, but to help her do something about it was beyond him. The most he could feel was helpless, because he had no will of his own.
Sympathy and good manners are excellent virtues for a long and solid marriage, but they lack the vital element of desire. Inez, recognizing this, left. She reclaimed her initiative. My mother was tempted to leave, but a) the tempter (Raymond Chandler) was physically unattractive (and off his head), and b) she truly enjoyed the creation of a home, plus status, which marriage to my father brought with it.
When Nikos came into my father’s life, Stephen opted as soon as possible for the solution he’d already found by trial and error with Reynolds Price: the young man as a source of inspiration, the creator of events that might crystallize into a poem. However physical his relationship with Nikos may have been (and I have no information about this), Stephen wasn’t going to run away from Loudoun Road and live with him.
Meanwhile, because these feelings were so heavily imbued with fantasies that were not his, Nikos resisted any of the attributes that Stephen wished on him. Nikos insisted he was a real person, not a pretext for a poem.
In spite of my dislike of Oxford and my waste of its benefits, my academic interests refused to die. I took Dante as a special paper, on the grounds that I’d never read him otherwise. It was hard work, made harder when Maro came down for the day and read the whole of the Inferno in one go, sitting in the Radcliffe Camera in a ray of sunshine. She said she liked it. I felt helpless. Liking it wasn’t part of what I needed to do with it.
I took a special paper with Edgar Wind, whose lectures on the Sistine Chapel I’d admired. ‘Here vee see zee dagger sretning zee örthh.’ Was that supposed to be, ‘threatening the earth’? He thought that Michelangelo was a follower of Savonarola. (I’ve since been told that he fudged the evidence.) He wore his spectacles on the tip of his nose and he had a long stick to point with, and I thought he was a kindly man. I knocked on his door and asked to join a class he was giving to postgraduates. I wasn’t eligible, but he let me come anyway.
The class was on the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This was the attempt by Reynolds to create an art-loving public in England in the 1770s. He argued that art beautified a gentleman’s country seat and conveyed to the owner a mysterious halo of superiority. ‘Is he rrright in zaying zis?’ Just for the heck of it I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘No,’ said Dr Wind. ‘You are abzolutely wrong.’ Art sprang from the innermost feelings of the unbound spontaneous liberation of the human spirit. Dr Wind was everything one wanted in a German professor: opinionated, and a firm disciplinarian.
I had been heavily reproved – and I brooded. Reynolds had tried to make the Brits love art. Why didn’t they love art anyway? Why in France and Italy does the picture fit the fr
ame, the frame fits the room, the room fits the house, the house fits the square and the square fits the city and in England, it doesn’t? Art in England was as Reynolds described it: a sprinkling of sugar on top.
I began to think of art as an interior need. It wasn’t a question of an ornament or an expression of taste or a means to a reputation. You had to need it. This need was an interior craving that required no visible manifestation to make it real, though obviously a work of art ought to appear at some point, too. In Europe, the need for art was part of the culture of several countries. The same had not happened in England. The period from Henry VIII to Oliver Cromwell, so formative politically, had had the side-effect of destroying art as an integrated part of society.
I persisted nevertheless with Wind, and he took me under his wing. As my Finals approached, he said that he wanted me to take a doctorate and go to Moscow to study the works of Matisse in the Shchukin collection. I said thank you, but I want to paint. Ach, he said, looking puzzled. A week later he told his secretary, Well it will serve Stephen Spender right if his son does becomes a painter. It will be the judgement of heaven for that bad book he wrote on Botticelli. Wind’s secretary passed on his remark and I grinned. Wind was right. Dad’s book on Botticelli was bad.
I was doing fine with Dante, too. Dons gave me hints about my academic future. ‘This is the Keeper of Western Manuscripts. You’ll find he’ll come in useful when you go on to do research.’ I shook hands with a large lugubrious man and left the room as soon as possible. Panic was setting in. Did I want it, or didn’t I?
Via Dante, I came across the great Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini. His book on Florence in the late thirteenth century put forward a Marxist theory of class struggle that I thought was wrong. A second idea for a doctorate was that I’d go to Italy and research the Florentine archives to see if the guilds of the period could be described as ‘class’, in a Marxist sense. I suggested this to one of my tutors and he said Yes, this is a good subject for a PhD.
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