Whenever I talked about Marxism with my father, I said the problem was that I couldn’t think of people as being representatives of a class. He didn’t understand. Couldn’t I see that there was something called the Working Class, he asked? No, I said. I could meet a man in a pub and he might come from a different background from mine, but to me he would be just someone to talk to, or not, as the case might be. He would not be a ‘representative of the Working Class’. Dad thought this was very funny. Fancy that! Matthew can’t understand the meaning of Class War!
There was something awkward about this exchange. I suddenly thought: is he listening to me, or to a ‘representative of the Youth of Today’?
I ended my miserable Oxford career stuck in the library with books I loathed reading and no brain to make sense of them. But I was there, in the Upper Bodleian, and my father was disturbed by what he took to be my academic ambition. One day he asked Maro: ‘Is Matthew really going to become a Donny-wonny?’
Oxford is anti-creative. It wants to turn people into nice people not embarrassing boars [bores?] who do things. Scholarship is tolerated, because it shuts people up and prevents them being social nuisances: unless they are clever enough to be both scholarly and excellent after dinner conversationalists. But the arts when actually practised and not seen in museums are like muddy boots on the carpet. However, even they are allowed if you can convert them into social currency.
This isn’t a wild adolescent reproof of mine against my father. It’s a letter from Dad to me, giving what he thinks is supportive advice. He may have intended it to calm me down, but it was the exact opposite of the advice he’d given me when I’d started out at New College, which was that artists need to cultivate their brains. He’d have done better to say nothing at all. And part of my being at Oxford, so I thought, was to obtain the degree he’d failed to win himself. To please him! What was he doing casting doubt on the whole process?
My father’s Oxford career was in its way spectacularly successful, even though he went for a bicycle ride instead of taking his Finals and so failed to obtain any degree at all. He’d written and published the Marston poems, which many critics say are his finest achievement. He’d drafted two novels, though the first had to be abandoned and the second, The Temple, didn’t find a publisher for fifty years. As head of the Oxford English Society he’d been able to talk to many distinguished authors, who always seemed happy to come up to Oxford from London in order to meet the students. He’d published his first book of poems in a small edition, half of which was subscribed before publication by his friends, ‘most of whom got Firsts’, as he put it blandly in a letter to his grandmother. Above all, he’d made friends with Auden and Isherwood so that the three of them, if not exactly forming a gang, certainly added up to one of the strongest literary movements of the decade. All of which my father presented as ‘Don’t worry about Finals. I’ve never passed an exam in my life.’
As for failure, the clincher came decades later when he was stopped by a policeman driving his car around Trafalgar Square when drunk. He was asked to blow into the famous compromising balloon, but it failed to react. ‘I’m so sorry, officer,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been able to pass a test.’
At some point during that autumn my father took me to one side and asked if he could dedicate a poem to me. It was called ‘The Generous Days’. I read it several times over a period of a week and rang him up to say No, I’d prefer it if he didn’t.
I disliked this poem, partly because I thought he was trying to send me a message in public of the kind that he would never dare to give me in private. The poem was about love, and I could glimpse Maro and myself in the background. But ‘Mindless of soul, so their two bodies meet.’ The couple in the poem wandered about, hopelessly kicking the leaves. And wasn’t there something masochistic in their relationship? ‘Soul fly up from body’s sacrifice, / Immolated in the summons.’ Also: ‘After, of course, will come a time not this / When he’ll be taken, stripped, strapped to a wheel.’ The ‘of course’ was especially offensive, because it seemed to take my fate for granted. I had no desire to be strapped to a wheel of daily life by my father, not even in a metaphor.
Deep down, I felt that Dad disapproved of my relationship with Maro because it was happy. At the time, I knew nothing about his comments to Reynolds Price on Rimbaud and the ‘derangement of the senses’. I just felt that he disapproved of happiness in the same way that he disapproved of academic studies, because both seemed to him complacent.
On my desk in front of me there’s the copy of The Temple which he gave us when the book finally came out in the Eighties. The dedication reads: ‘to Maro and Matthew, these youthful indiscretions, love dad’. I can’t help feeling there’s a gleeful note in there somewhere, a mild reproof.
The lease on St Andrew’s Mansions ran out and Maro began looking around for somewhere else to live. By chance, Sonia Orwell was leaving her old flat in Percy Street off the Tottenham Court Road in order to live in a house she’d bought in Kensington; so Maro took over from her.
Three rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom remarkably full of plumbing. One of the rooms was known as the ‘divorce’ room, because halves of estranged couples would squat there while their relationships irretrievably crumbled. Sonia was a good woman, but she loved taking sides in marital disputes.
We redecorated the whole flat in our usual double-quick time. The ‘divorce’ room was so small Maro could only paint gouaches in it. The living room had a wonderful Gorky in it, on loan from Mougouch. When I left Oxford, the bookshelves filled up with my academic books, plus a collection of old Horizons which we’d found in the attic that Sonia said we could keep.
This had been George Orwell’s last flat, though I don’t think he lived there long. It was also haunted. Several times Maro woke up and found a sandy-haired young man staring down at her. She said he had a very 1930-ish atmosphere. I never saw him.
Percy Street was within walking distance of the Slade, but Maro had finished her four years of study there. She began working in interior decoration. An early job was to decorate a bathtub for Ricky Huston, ex-wife of the film director John Huston (and mother of Anjelica). Ricky and Mougouch did gym together, writhing their elegant limbs on an antique kilim and swapping gossip about various friends they had in common. Painting that bathtub took Maro a long time. She was a quick worker, but Ricky thought the price she’d quoted was high in relation to the hours she’d spent on it, so she made Maro repaint it three times.
Opposite the British Museum, I discovered the communist book shop where Tony Hyndman used to hang out in the Thirties. I was fascinated by this shop. On a table in front of the entrance lay The Little Red Book we were supposed to wave on protest marches. Tucked away at the back were volumes by Mao Zedong on the tactics of guerrilla warfare, which were down to earth, and horrible. How to shoot class enemies. There was also a shelf of books by the victims of the Russian totalitarian state: Victor Serge and Ivanov-Razumnik. These were later overshadowed by the works of Solzhenitsyn, but even before his books came out, there was plenty of information on how badly things had gone wrong.
I wasn’t political. Just wishy-washy left-wing. It was the Kronstadt Rebellion that kept me from sympathizing with the Trots. The followers of Trotsky thought that if he’d taken power instead of Stalin, the revolution would never have gone bad, but it seemed to me that Trotsky had been perfectly capable of acting ruthlessly, because ruthlessness was part of the predicament.
I remember having a conversation about this with a friend after a party. We were both drunk. The question was: where is the morality in being communist? We both knew about the persecution of the kulaks and the Purges of the 1930s and both of us, therefore, hesitated in our left-wingery. Underneath a lamp-post, we talked it over. Surely there’s some moral high ground in communism?
He said: Everything to do with Russian history leaves one too dazed to form an opinion. For instance, one of the reasons why they won the war i
s because Stalin moved their heavy industries behind the Urals where the Germans couldn’t get at them. The cost of this operation was staggering. Thousands of people shot, incredible disruption pushed forward with brutality. He said that nobody in the West dared to argue that it was worth it, because it enabled Russia to win the war, even though it was probably true. ‘We just aren’t capable of calculating the morality of decisions made on such a scale.’
My Finals crept up with historical inevitability in June 1966.
During those dreadful eleven days, I kept clear of both Maro and my father, as neither of them believed in what I was doing. Instead, I phoned my mother each evening and she steered me through. She knew about performing on a particular hour of a particular day.
And six weeks later, my Viva came and went in a flash. I was asked to define the English Gentleman, as I’d said something iffy on that subject. The result was a decent Second, with a touch of alpha in four papers and gammas in three others. You can’t really be an academic with a gamma double-minus in the background, so whatever temptation there was, withdrew.
Maro and I spent that summer in Majorca, where I started painting again.
I wrote to my father saying that I was trying to unlearn the habit of thinking in words. It was similar to something he’d said before my Finals: ‘Maybe you will be able to shed some of Oxford in the next two years.’ But he’d also said that artists in England were stupid. ‘The great ones of course are clever and don’t need educating much, but the majority even of quite good ones are such inchoate oafs.’
I must have written him a letter saying I wanted to join the oafs. In midsummer he wrote back, to both of us: ‘When Matthew writes about having to learn not to think I see what he means but wonder whether he is right. Obviously a painter has to work from his senses and a certain kind of thinking is bad for this. On the other hand the idea that a painter has to be a dumb instinctive animal seems very Anglo-American and accounts for the limitations of Anglo-American painting … Painters don’t think enough. Nowadays the best of them seem to have one-track minds, which make them arrive at a formula – Motherwell, Rothko, Rauschenberg and even Francis Bacon – and then they stick to this out of an inability to think of anything else.’ There was one exception: Picasso. ‘The point is to be one thing one doesn’t have to jettison one’s other gifts. One somehow has to do the one thing out of the development of all of them.’
Just as I was wondering what to reply, he sent us a crushing letter written from a hotel halfway up France. We’d been planning to visit them, but Majorca to Arles wasn’t an easy journey and I must have asked him for some money. ‘Even if you don’t feel things you might consider other people to the extent of trying to enter into, imagine their reactions. Not to do so is just embarrassing, like Melvin Lasky.’
Dad’s harsh letter was the result of three stresses. We’d delayed telling them what our plans were, and ‘what are your plans’ figured highly in my mother’s sense of order. Then André Malraux had invited him to Paris, and he wanted to go, and so did Mum (because she wanted Malraux to force the phone company to give her a telephone, which he did). If we’d told them earlier that we were coming, Dad might have cancelled Malraux: but on the other hand, maybe not. (The argument was hard to follow.) Last but not least, an article had just appeared in Time magazine about the machinations of Encounter.
Even at this late date, my father tried to laugh it off. He wrote to Nikos that the article ‘enraged Natasha so much (partly because I treated it as a joke) that it was really quite appalling. In a funny way I don’t think we’ll ever quite recover.’ Lasky was involved, and my mother honed in on him as the root of the evil. But Stephen wasn’t about to assign all the blame to him. He added mildly, ‘Lasky does seem to have this gift for making the wives of his colleagues hate him, while his colleagues merely despise him.’
I arranged for Maro and me to sail back to England as the crew of a tiny yacht. There was room for just the three people: us two, plus the skipper who at least knew how to sail. I looked at this lopsided sloop tucked away in the harbour and thought, With any luck we’ll be drowned, so I won’t have to face any more of this.
25
YOUR FATHER WILL SURVIVE
WE DIDN’T DROWN as we sailed across the Bay of Biscay, but the trip was grotesquely uncomfortable. There was a leak in the exhaust of the diesel engine and the yacht staggered along, full of fumes. I must have vomited on every nautical mile of the sea between Vigo Bay and Portsmouth, spattering on the heaving asphalt of the Atlantic confetti-like fragments of my insides. Good. It had the effect of placing a full stop, new chapter, underneath my Oxford days.
I found a studio on the top floor of a house in Holloway near the Nag’s Head. The building was owned by a racketeer who couldn’t evict his tenants and the place was a mess. Underneath me, a veteran of the First World War thought I was dropping grenades on him every time I walked across the room. Underneath him lived a bus-driver with a young wife and baby daughter. As Mr Puttock, the war veteran, was off his head, I made friends with the wife and baby, especially the baby. I made a portrait of her. It was a fat baby on a fat pillow, pink on pink.
In my attic, I went back to the former themes of New College: rooftops, slabs of meat and self-portraits. I hated what I was doing and my head was full of words. I’d paint for an hour and then have an interesting thought about Titian or Frans Hals; stop to write it down, then tear it up impatiently, as ‘words on paper’ was not the medium I wanted to create in.
Walking back from a pub one day, I heard a voice in my head say, ‘And he was using up his pencils at the rate of one a week.’ Where did this voice come from and whose was it? It was ridiculous to claim that using up one pencil per week meant anything, for what ‘he’ was drawing might be completely worthless. But who was ‘he’? Well, obviously, ‘he’ was me.
I protested. But I don’t want a ‘he’ in my head pretending to be me. It’s crazy. And there are too many people up in my head anyway – the ultimate attic, far above Mr Puttock who can’t forget the trenches. Twenty-two years old, free of education, free of exams, out in the big wide world, no problems with my love life, yet here a worm-like voice still dug its way through the churned suburban burden of my mind.
I decided: this voice isn’t mine. It’s my father’s.
Through the clutter of trying to make decisions about my life shone this interior commentator I’d inherited from him, from Stephen. For it was Stephen Spender, the poet with the alliterative name, who carried with him the eternal commentator, the divine recording angel of his own success. Wasn’t ‘success’ behind ‘him’? Yes, because otherwise the commentator wouldn’t have been impressed – and he shouldn’t be impressed – by the fact that I was using up one pencil every week.
In June 1966, Nikos Stangos met David Plante, a young American writer who’d recently arrived in London. They became lovers, and after a week Nikos invited David to come and live with him. Even though the gesture was generous, Nikos warned David not to come too close; or, as David wrote in his diary, ‘I must not think that this meant I should feel I had to return the feelings Nikos had for me.’
Stephen at this point was an absent ‘older Englishman’, who’d have to be told about the new relationship when he came back to London. Luckily, when they all met a few weeks later, Stephen was thrilled. For him it solved an increasingly difficult situation. The tendency of Nikos to reject any compliment, however mild, had begun to exasperate Stephen to the point where he thought he’d have to bring the relationship to an end.
Nikos Stangos and David Plante.
Nikos didn’t want to be tied down. When he complained about his rooms and wondered if he shouldn’t redecorate them, Stephen said he liked them as they were; but even this was a risky thing to say. ‘I suddenly realized the reason is that I had never seen your rooms apart from you. They are, in my mind, irradiated by you, and somehow miraculous. Probably you’ll consider this subtly insulting and write an angry prote
st.’
As the memory of that first weekend in September began to fade, Stephen turned to trying to help Nikos find his way as a writer, both with advice concerning the writing itself and with recommendations to various people for jobs. At one point he wanted Nikos to help him turn his inaugural lecture at the Library of Congress into a book. They’d split the profits, fifty–fifty. He accepted a poem by Nikos for Encounter, then hesitated, partly because Frank Kermode was now in charge of the literary side of the magazine, partly because he could not be sure that the poem would ever come out, given Lasky’s delaying tactics. Finally, after about a year, Stephen agreed to revise some translations of Cavafy that Nikos had started years before. These were eventually published in a special edition, with illustrations by David Hockney.
Two weeks after David arrived in London, Stephen was sent by Natasha to plant some trees in her garden in Provence. She was swotting for her exams and couldn’t go herself. At Nikos’ suggestion, Stephen took David with him. Nikos evidently thought this was the quickest way of integrating David into the relationship that he’d awkwardly shared with Stephen: or maybe he thought David could become a part of it.
On the train to Paris, Stephen caught sight of Francis Bacon, about to attend an important exhibition of his work at the Galerie Maeght. They joined forces, and for a few days David was introduced to a glamorous side of English and French life that hitherto he’d never even imagined. Mary McCarthy, Philippe de Rothschild, Louis Aragon. Jokes were made about having to plant plants with Plante. And when Stephen and David continued down to the South of France to plant those trees, Francis Bacon came with them.
A House in St John's Wood Page 33