A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  This last observation made a big impression on me. I loved the idea that my entire existence could be won or lost like rolling dice.

  To her own parents, Mougouch had ‘thrown herself away’ when she’d married Gorky. Her father had never ceased to believe this, in spite of liking Gorky himself and acknowledging that over the years he’d won a great reputation. He’d wanted something simpler and more wholesome for his beloved daughter – as fathers often do. When he lay dying a few years later he told her, ‘Aggie, you’ve always been a rotten picker in the garden of love.’ She was in tears when she came back from his bedside and told us this. She couldn’t see that the remark wasn’t a reproof, but an expression of love.

  I don’t remember having ‘accused’ my father of not writing poems, but probably some adolescent confrontation of this kind had indeed occurred. Looking back on it, however, I wonder if the real target of my forgotten reproach wasn’t her, not him. I wanted to challenge her idea of what Dad’s ‘work’ entailed, because I thought her interpretation was wrong.

  My mother’s idea was that Dad would sit quietly in his study writing magnificent poems, which she herself would be the first to admire. She would be practising, and he’d come stumbling into the piano room holding a piece of paper and he’d say, excitedly, ‘Read this.’ It was a good fantasy, and I am sure that in certain moods my father shared it; or maybe once or twice it even happened. But my father’s sense of what a poem should be included the spark of an original event that had to be captured, and this was always built around an adventure. I never discussed this with Mum, because it was forbidden territory. But she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t have Dad quietly in the study doing his ‘real’ work, as she often defined it, without accepting the existence of Reynolds, and Nikos, and later on Bryan, because they were essential to the one activity about which she was entirely supportive.

  My father always knew that, to him, creativity was linked to sex. When he was very old and at last impotent, he felt his perception of the world had been destroyed by a form of blindness. A month or two before he died, the realization that his sexuality no longer existed sent him into a kind of panic. ‘I do not believe that writing or any other activity I am capable of can exist without sex.’

  For my mother, once the poem was finished and published, it was transformed into the bricks and mortar of the author’s reputation. This was another paradox. Mum may have believed that creativity was an interior process similar to prayer – the quiet hush of St Jérôme in his study – but everything to do with cultivating a reputation went in the other direction. Publicity. Fame. The world. And she enjoyed being famous. When the time came, she enjoyed being Lady Spender. Yet I could never tell her, all this involves ambition. It would have meant attacking her conviction that a poet is innocent.

  My mother’s ‘innocence’ was not the same as my father’s. To him, the fact that he was unschuldig meant he could do anything without feeling guilty. It was part of his concept of freedom. Perhaps I should say, without being guilty. Such was the strength of his conviction that he was free from guile, deceit, ambition etc., that the mere fact he’d done something automatically conferred on it the virtue of his innocence.

  My mother avoided thinking about her husband’s ambition by convincing herself that his reputation had been awarded to him incidentally. The creative act was solitary – the monastic moment – and its worldly recompense was unsolicited. Success was not evidence that he’d ever sought it. The world had rewarded this unworldly man because what he wrote was good, not because he was ambitious.

  Strangely enough, Mougouch believed in a similar fantasy. To her, Gorky had rejected the temptations of the art world and the machinations of the New York critics, like Harold Rosenberg or Clement Greenberg and ‘all those other Bergs’, as she once put it, with a smidge of snobbery. His paintings, however much they acquired the spirit of New York, always projected the feeling of that intense bucolic mountainside hidden away in – where was it? She couldn’t quite remember. He’d never explained where.

  I didn’t believe Mum on the subject of Stephen’s innocence, and Maro didn’t believe Mougouch on the subject of Gorky’s. I felt that my father was an ambitious man, whose life had been complicated by the distraction of politics, and these had slowed down his capacity to write poems. Nevertheless, I’d subscribed to his theory that sex and freedom and poems went together and I’d always, since I was twelve, thought he had a right to pursue all three. If self-deception came into it – fine, we are all guilty of that vice. Just as long as he didn’t try to involve me in the process.

  The fact that my mother insisted on Dad’s ‘unworldliness’ meant it was yet another subject I could not broach with her. Indeed, I accepted the theory for far too long. The only clue I’d received so far that art isn’t pure was Auden’s unexpected joy at having been given a pat on the back by the Evening Standard. For shame! And the silly old Evening Standard! My obsession with that moment merely underlined how subservient I’d become to the theory that talent is rewarded in proportion to its innocence.

  The pain, for me, of the Encounter business was that I absolutely had to decide how much my father had known about it. If he’d known even a teeny-weeny bit, wouldn’t that destroy Natasha’s theory that poets are innocent?

  I could even reverse this thought. My mother’s hatred of Lasky and the CIA was necessary to her, to allow her to continue to believe in my father’s innocence.

  Maro’s view of Gorky’s failure in New York was simpler. She thought, in a rough-and-ready way, that he’d done his best. It was just that he hadn’t had much luck. New York was tough, that was all. But he’d been successful in the end. Gorky had won his gamble posthumously.

  Maro and I were both children of artists of talent, and we shared an intuitive idea of what was involved. There was the talent, and there was the world, and the two were connected in a mysterious way. If an artist says, I shall pitch my fantasy of the world against the reality of that world and see if I can win, it’s a magnificent spectacle. But if the challenge is rewarded, if for a while the taste of the world and the idea thrown at it combine, then the person of talent finds himself caught within his idea and the world into which it now fits. Nothing can penetrate the hard shell where these two elements intertwine. This is why the lives of successful artists are often so sparse. In time the taste of the world inevitably ebbs away, leaving the carapace of this drama as the only thing still visible.

  One last time I went up to Loudoun Road to go through my fervent marital ambitions and rejection of all worldly ones. ‘Mougouch didn’t understand what you were getting at, last week,’ I said. ‘Can we keep it simple? What kind of job do you imagine would suit me?’

  The answer was unexpected. It wasn’t too late for me to sit the Foreign Office exam, was it? I’d studied history, hadn’t I? The exam wasn’t that hard, and we could probably find someone to ‘recommend’ me. I’d enjoy working in the Foreign Office. ‘It might be rather fun to end up as an ambassador, don’t you think?’

  I just laughed. Maro was hardly cut out to be an ambassador’s wife. I pointed out that she had no sense of tact, and her habit of treating a secret as if it were a delicious substance to be spread over a large area, like anchovy paste on toast, would hardly go down well in the Foreign Office.

  Mum couldn’t resist saying: ‘Well, quite!’

  There was something odd about this comment. I asked her what she meant. My mother, with a careless air as if she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb, said that Maro’s lack of tact might be a very good reason for me to choose someone else to marry.

  I thought this was very funny, and so did Maro, but all the same it somehow represented the end of the line. We were getting married in about a fortnight, and here was Mum making a last-ditch defence of what was right by saying we shouldn’t.

  It was frustrating. Mougouch was a much tougher personality than my mother, and at this point my prospective mother-in-law was r
evealing occasional rough edges by showing pleasure in having defeated Mum. But why, for heaven’s sake, had it always been such a battle? Mum was a vulnerable woman held together by rules. Mougouch was a buccaneer. Mum’s rules had never stood a chance. She shouldn’t have stuck to them.

  My father, sent by my mother a fortnight later to try to achieve some understanding with Mougouch, took her out for a drink. We joined them and kept quietly in the background. Stephen explained that he and Natasha wanted to contribute to the expenses of the wedding; not perhaps all of it, because their finances were in such a bad state. Mougouch told him firmly that it was the duty of the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding, so he needn’t worry.

  ‘I want at least to pay something,’ said Stephen. He laughed. ‘Maybe we could take on the cube root of whatever it’ll cost?’

  After he left, Maro asked her mother why she hadn’t even let him pay for the drinks. ‘Oh well, you’ve heard of something called pride, haven’t you? Pride! Sometimes when you get up, you can see it still stuck to the chair.’

  I had the impression I’d heard this gag before. Never mind. It suited her.

  At St Pancras Town Hall, the man behind the desk said something discouraging along the lines of, British law recognizes one wife per one husband at a time. We were asked to say yes, so we said yes. Afterwards Maro said loudly, before we’d even left the room, ‘I didn’t believe a word of it.’ She was right. It was the meanest of marital vows. We’d wanted ‘with this body I thee worship’. Something transcendental, but it was beyond anyone’s appetite in those days.

  The party was chaotic. Mougouch had to make conversation with Sir George Schuster, my father’s great-uncle, who talked about Stephen’s wedding to Inez in 1936. Cyril Connolly talked to Moura Budberg, in whose arms the other Gorky, Maxim, was supposed to have expired. There were lots of children who, encouraged by Maro, danced all over the room like imps. My father, who’d looked gloomy throughout, sought a telephone towards the end and rang Nikos and David to say how pleased he was that they were together – those two, not us two. ‘Stephen, sentimental about how Nikos and I love each other, sounded drunk, and Nikos and I were embarrassed for him.’

  For our honeymoon we went to Amsterdam. I wanted to compare and contrast Rembrandt with Frans Hals. The bath in our hotel was as small and square as a Japanese coffin, and I got stuck in it with my knees under my chin. Maro had to pull me out. There was a sullen squelch and we ended up on top of each other with water everywhere. She said, ‘This is the last time I get married to you.’

  After walking through the museums, Maro wanted to see some movies as light relief. We saw five different episodes of Angélique, about an uptight Frenchwoman who survives every indignity in order to end up with the deeply unattractive Robert Hossein. She was raped constantly, though the camera always shied away at the last minute to concentrate on the floorboards. Then we’d drink young gin and eat rollmops.

  One bar near the hotel had an aquarium with some very sick fish. My diary of the time has Maro saying: ‘I wouldn’t eat that scrawny old fish if they paid me, with his eyes going round in their saucers. Do you see him, Matt? He’s on his last legs. But it’s nice how they rest on the sand. One feels immediately protective towards the little darlings.’

  It was December and the weather was foul. She said, ‘Can’t we go away? I’m not a fir tree. I’m a lemon tree or an orange tree. My leaves fall off if it gets too cold. Every time I want to laugh, shivers run up my legs. I’m an ice bucket with the cubes tinkling in my belly.’

  I wondered, and not for the first time, if we couldn’t just leave England. Perhaps we could keep on going, beyond Amsterdam and down towards the sun, and never come back?

  27

  THE RIGHT TO SPEAK

  THE EXPOSURE OF Encounter as a weapon of the CIA caused my father a great deal of anguish, especially in the United States, where both in public and in private he had to face some very direct questions. At Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where he’d been invited to speak to the English Department, a student got up and asked him how he felt about the Encounter scandal. His reply was emotional and confused. The student was the daughter of Mike Josselson, but she did not feel like introducing herself afterwards to ask for a clearer answer.

  It would have been the perfect moment for him to give up politics and retreat into a life of writing poetry and books and book reviews. His wife’s fantasy. As it was, within a year he’d taken up a cause that in its way was even more important than Encounter.

  On 12 January 1968, The Times in London and Le Monde in Paris published a letter from the Russian scientist Pavel Litvinov, asking for help on behalf of two dissidents who’d just received heavy sentences in Moscow. My father instantly telephoned Isaiah Berlin, saying that an appeal such as this could not be ignored. A telegram signed by as many distinguished people as possible must be sent to Moscow before the weekend was over.

  Among those who responded immediately were Freddie Ayer and Stuart Hampshire. If over one weekend Stephen was able to raise such support with just a few telephone calls, it was because a wide sympathy existed among his friends for what he’d just been through. Freddie and Stuart might even have had a twinge of guilty conscience. They’d been called in to advise how MI5 could be reorganized after the defection of Burgess and Maclean – Dad told me this in a typically indiscreet moment – so they must have known about Encounter’s financing and the ghostly presence of British Intelligence.

  On the Monday morning, the telegram was duly sent, with a copy published in a newspaper. A few weeks later Litvinov replied by sending a long letter to Spender in which he proposed the formation of an international committee to defend the freedom of expression of all writers everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union, but across the world, as a matter of principle.

  This was a big step forward from the kind of non-governmental connection that for several years Stephen had been trying to establish between Britain and Russia. In the background, many things were changing. Samizdat literature was being circulated, communications between Russia and the outside world had improved, the Russian government was increasingly unsure how it should deal with its dissidents. Repression was still the natural response, but the bad publicity it provoked worldwide was hardly creditable to the cause of Soviet freedom.

  Following the letter he’d received from Litvinov, Spender was able to set in motion the creation of Writers and Scholars International and the magazine Index on Censorship, whose first issue appeared in 1972. Whereas Encounter had had a tiny circulation in Russia, Index went on to create a strong impact. It was circulated as samizdat to a much wider audience and it helped Russian writers to feel they had contact with an audience abroad.

  At this point all my objections to my father’s political involvement give way to admiration. He may have been ambivalent and evasive and a whole host of other adjectives signifying hard to pin down. He was always sure of his integrity, even when what he’d actually done seemed equivocal to everyone else. In relation to myself and my wife and my eventual family, he was bored – I think that’s the simplest explanation – because we insisted on living far from the centres of cultural power. But beneath all the charm of his manners, which never ceased to be courteous and non-confrontational, he was persistent. He was always, and in subtle ways, a man of action.

  Initially, my father had tried to raise money in order to found a new magazine that would drive Encounter out of business. Revenge, through literature. Several times he had to endure the obvious joke, ‘To be called Under the Counter, eh?’ My father would give a polite laugh, but my mother always rose to this heavily: ‘On the contrary, it should be called Over the Counter, as it’s Encounter which is suspect.’

  He decided to bring out an advertisement asking for support for this new idea: a declaration signed by his friends. This had come to nothing. Although they initially said yes, they mysteriously changed their minds. I think Julian Huxley was one. Another was Henry Moore, who te
lephoned a week after he’d agreed to lend his name, saying, ‘Stephen, I’ve been nobbled.’ My father understood. He didn’t ask for an explanation and he didn’t hold it against Moore. In fact he liked Henry’s frankness so much he turned it into a funny after-dinner story. And it was obvious to him who’d done the nobbling: Kenneth Clark, who besides being a strong supporter of Moore, was also a key member of the Establishment.

  My father’s new magazine never materialized, and then his energies were taken up by Index on Censorship, on behalf of which he made several trips to America to raise funds. The Ford Foundation was helpful, but there were frequent and recurring difficulties with the State Department, which was worried that Index would come to the rescue of anti-American writers imprisoned in South America.

  In 1974 I was in Paris, where I was holding my first one-man show of paintings in a tiny gallery on the Île Saint-Louis. My father appeared and was supportive; and then he took me off to have lunch with Mary McCarthy.

  We met at her flat. At some point during the usual introductory conversation she said, with reference to his recent fund-raising activities on behalf of Index, ‘Stephen, tell me what’s been happening about your new magazine.’ Before he could reply, she turned to me and, so that he didn’t see, she gave me a grossly exaggerated wink. I was stunned. It wasn’t a wink that said, ‘He’s got a tough job ahead of him.’ It was a wink that said, ‘Poor sap! He hasn’t a hope in Hell!’

  Mary McCarthy’s relationship with power was particularly clear-headed. She knew every single permutation of leftand right-wingery, both in the United States and in Europe. She also had a deep understanding of how governments and bureaucracies respond to pressure from outside. There was something about her tough childhood that had made her highly observant without becoming cynical. She’d obviously heard a thing or two about Index and she knew it was never going to receive the support of the State Department or any other government institution. Meanwhile my poor father continued to explain in all innocence how curious it was that he could only get so far with the American authorities, and then suddenly everything would collapse.