My mother observed these moments of tension from a distance. From time to time she was even sympathetic about the tortured path I’d chosen, but there was also an element of reproach. If I was so interested in ancestral stories, why wasn’t I channelling all this energy into my father, instead of into my father-in-law?
I tried to explain the attraction of a man who’d invented a past in order to protect himself, for reality was unbearable. But Mum had no sympathy with this predicament. There is always the truth, she implied; and its opposite is a lie. I suddenly realized that my mother was constitutionally incapable of understanding my late father-in-law, for she was just as much a self-created personality as he had been.
As for our own lives, it’s hardly surprising if we’ve played things straight.
Maro’s fidelity is based on a rejection of the confusion that her mother’s love-life always involved. My fidelity derives from the fact that I cannot desire a woman without seeing her as a vessel containing our future children. The one-night stand for me is out. It’s permanence or bust. I can see now, having written this book, that I possess at least one family characteristic: a version of my father’s desire for instant domesticity, only in my case the first successful pounce was also my last.
Choosing to be faithful doesn’t save you from the disaster of falling in love. Over the years, there have been four subjects of my impossible yearnings: Susannah (Maro’s sister, and therefore an absolute no-no); Vittoria (the heroine of my book on Tuscany); Marta (who was in love with Maro, I think); and finally Fiamma, an opera singer with whom I became infatuated when we were on tour together – in Bari, of all places, and in the dead of winter. (It snowed.) In the evenings on stage I took the role of Noah in Stravinsky’s The Flood, while in the daylight hours I wandered the backstreets of Bari pining for Fiamma. I’d look at her hopelessly in the bar we all frequented and think: what will our future be as we wait for our babies to burgeon? Will I be washing our knickers in the bidet of a remote hotel while she’s five blocks away, singing brilliantly on stage?
My father thought that domesticity could be manipulated so that he could enjoy his freedom. My idea of domesticity is the opposite: total immersion. But in what? In the lateral thinking of women, so laced with impossible long-term vendettas, yet at the same time so immediately tied to the present?
This book started as an imaginary conversation with the ghosts of two parents whom I never challenged while they were alive. It was intended as a gesture of mourning and affection, an attempt to answer several unasked questions concerning their relationship. Revenge came into it, too – a rejection of my mother’s idea that appearances must be kept up at all costs. But in these last pages I’m overtaken by the strangeness of all our choices. Do the lives of Stephen and Natasha hold insights about their time and the customs of their country? I hope so. It would be satisfying if clues about human behaviour lie in the background of these two distinguished twentieth-century individuals. But perhaps fidelity, and love, and work, and freedom and sex and self-sacrifice, twist themselves together in different ways for all of us.
There is no logic to my father’s conviction that freedom and marriage can be made to fit together, or that a poet can immerse himself in power yet retain his innocence. There is no logic to my mother’s idea that she could simultaneously be the formidable Lady Spender, and a compassionate woman whose life was entirely turned inwards. There is no logic to my feeling that to possess time in which to make a work of art is all the privilege I need, and all other privileges must be rejected. There is no logic to Maro’s idea that her ancestors watch over her and stand invisibly in the corners of the kitchen garden, and that she at last has been given all the rewards that centuries of repression once kept from them.
This book is for our grandchildren, who will soon wonder how the predicament of inheritance affects their own lives. I look at them and ask: Is there a glimmer of Stephen’s dreaminess in Aeneas? Does Ondina have Mougouch’s craving to dazzle and dominate? Is my mother’s brow visible in Cleopatra’s clear features? Is Marlon the maker of things as manual as Gorky?
It takes us half our lives to discover who we are and where we come from, and the other half is spent thinking, But of course! There are two streams! The river above my head concentrates my ancestors in me, and the river that springs below me will dilute my genes in my grandchildren. And theirs. And in turn, theirs.
PICTURE CREDITS
The photographs reproduced in this book are from the Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection, with the following exceptions:
here: by Ida Kar, 1957 © National Portrait Gallery, London
here: courtesy of the Humphrey Spender Archive
here: courtesy of Natasha Gorky
The author and publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the author and publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.
NOTES
In the notes that follow, the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
Previously unpublished letters and journal entries by W. H. Auden are quoted with the permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
Previously unpublished letters and diaries by Raymond Chandler are quoted with the permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler.
Quotations from letters to Stephen Spender at the T. S. Eliot Archive, London © the Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted with the permission of the Estate and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from Christopher Isherwood’s letters and diaries © 2015 Don Bachardy.
Previously unpublished writings by Lincoln Kirstein © 2015 the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).
Locations
BL British Library
Bod Bodleian Library, Oxford
CDP Collection David Plante, London
CMS Collection Matthew Spender, Siena
Duke Special Collections, Duke University Library
DUL Durham University Library
KV 2/3215/6 Stephen Spender’s MI5 files, The National Archives, Kew
NA The National Archives, Kew
NSJ Stephen Spender, New Selected Journals, Faber & Faber, 2012
NYPL New York Public Library
RCAB Raymond Chandler Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford
SSAB Stephen Spender Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford
SSUJ Stephen Spender unpublished journals, Bodleian Library, Oxford
Tam Tamiment Library, New York University
TSEA T. S. Eliot Archive, London
WWW Stephen Spender, World within World, New York, The Modern Library, 2001
People
AMG Agnes Magruder Gorky, ‘Mougouch’
CI Christopher Isherwood
ERC Ernst Robert Curtius
IB Isaiah Berlin
IK Irving Kristol
JE Jason Epstein
JH Julian Huxley
LK Lincoln Kirstein
MS Matthew Spender
Nikos Nikos Stangos
NS Natasha Spender
PT Philip Toynbee
RC Raymond Chandler
RP Reynolds Price
SS Stephen Spender
TH Tony Hyndman
TSE T. S. Eliot
VW Virginia Woolf
WHA W. H. Auden
WP William Plomer
Natasha’s Last Wishes
1. the biographer gave in: the scholar whom my mother challenged was Frank MacShane, for The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976).
One: A worldly failure
1. ‘God knows what kings’: poem is dated 18 May 1957, CMS.
2. ‘a great way off’: WWW, p. 8.
3. ‘When they are very young’: SS, ‘Miss Pangbourne’, circa 1990, p. 70, SSAB.
4. ‘A thin match-boarding’: Violet Schuster, Skelgill journal, 1917, Collection Philip Spender.
5. ‘Wordsworth was a man’: SS, ‘Miss Pangbourne’, p. 195.
6. ‘It is no exaggeration’: WWW, p. 10.
7. ‘He saw what he had never seen’: SS, The Backward Son, Hogarth Press, 1940, p. 263.
8. ‘Until now, writing for him’: ‘Instead of Death’ (1928), pp. 96–104, SSAB. This picnic is described more briefly in WWW, p. 69.
9. ‘Now dear, don’t make a fuss’: David Plante, Becoming a Londoner, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 238.
Two: Without Guilt
1. ‘ganged up and captured the decade’: Evelyn Waugh, review of WWW in the Tablet, 5 May 1951, p. 356.
2. ‘from the sea’: from Auden’s poem ‘1929’. ‘What is odd …’ and all the quotations that follow are from Auden’s 1929 diary, now in the Berg Collection, NYPL.
3. ‘My dominant faculties’: WHA to SS, April/May 1940, in Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (eds), The Map of All My Youth: Early Works, Friends and Influences, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 72.
4. but some of the boys: for the boys from the Lokalen, see John Henry Mackay, Der Puppenjunge, translated as The Hustler, Boston, MA, Alyson Publications, 1985.
5. ‘I have always regarded’: SS, The Temple, Faber & Faber, 1988, p. 54.
6. ‘an exquisite example of Stephen’s lust’: Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 128.
7. ‘You are right down in the scrum’: CI to SS, ‘Tuesday’, n.d., circa 14 March 1929, photocopy in SSAB.
8. ‘Christopher, so far from being’: WWW, p. 135. See also CI, Christopher and His Kind, Eyre Methuen, 1977, pp. 46–8.
9. ‘The whole system was to him’: ibid., p. 114. The scene is also in ‘Instead of Death’, pp. 193–202.
10. ‘He had grown to hate the gushings’: CI, Christopher and His Kind, p. 55.
11. ‘It is a wonderful thing’: ERC to SS, 13 Aug 1929, SSAB.
12. ‘Within this inner world’: WWW, p. 131.
13. ‘Your politics are guided’: ERC to SS, 6 Dec 1931, SSAB. The original German was ‘Ihre Politik ist erotisch & ästhetisch determiniert.’
14. ‘He has introduced Order’: SS to IB, n.d. [1931], IB Archive, Bod.
15. ‘He is bored’: SS to Erich Alport, 8 May [1931], BL Add MS 74771B, folio 47.
16. ‘magical with the mystery’: WWW, p. 129.
17. Georg 101: ‘Georg 101’ appears in letters from Stephen to William Plomer, in DUL. The teaching experience in Berlin is in Stephen’s letters to his grandmother Hilda Schuster, in the Schuster Archive, Bod.
18. He solemly told: Stephen and Christopher’s quarrel is covered in WWW, p. 191. And in CI, Christopher and His Kind, p. 85.
19. ‘It’s as though’: SS, Burning Cactus, Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, from edn of 1936, p. 173. SS spells his name ‘Hellmut’, whereas CI, in Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951 (2000), spells it ‘Hellmuth’. The former is closer to the idea of ‘Light-strength’.
20. ‘I think that all he needs’: SS to VW, 25 Oct 1932, SSAB.
21. ‘We were very affectionate’: SS, 1931 diary Root and Branch, in SS, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett, Santa Barbara, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1980, p. 155.
22. ‘I have the stupidity’: ibid., p. 157.
23. ‘Hellmut is a nice person’: SS to IB, 29 Dec [1932], IB Archive, Bod.
24. ‘Hellmut is a homosexual’: SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 52.
25. ‘To me the book’: SS to Hilda Schuster, 1 Aug 1931, Schuster Archive, Bod.
26. If he’d ever been arrested: Radclyffe Hall’s letter, dated 4 Dec 1928, is in the SSAB.
Three: Suicide or romanticism
1. ‘the son whom I attempted’: WWW, p. 200.
2. ‘To me, from the moment’: TH to SS, 30 Oct 1974, SSAB.
3. ‘In Levanto’ and ‘What happened’: from Tony’s two drafts of his unfinished autobiography, SSAB.
4. ‘I want to go away’: WWW, p. 192.
5. ‘When I was first here’: SS to IB, 15 June 1933, IB Archive, Bod, folio 41.
6. ‘I feel more & more happy’: SS to LK, 21 Sept 1933, photocopy in SSAB.
7. ‘It’s horrid not having you’: SS to TH, 5 Oct [1933], SSAB.
8. ‘He is one of those lucky people’: SS to LK, 15 Oct 1933, photocopy in SSAB.
9. ‘I see being young is hellish’: VW to Quentin Bell, 21 Dec 1933, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. Nigel Nicolson, p.34 Hogarth Press, 1979, p. 262.
10. She could provide: SS, Vienna, Faber & Faber, 1934.
11. ‘I find the actual sex act’: SS to CI, 14 Sept 1936, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. In John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, Viking, 2004, p. 168.
12. 34 ‘As a “character” I am no good’: SS to WP, 19 June 1934, DUL.
13. ‘Tony has been terribly upset’: SS to LK, after 19 Sept 1934, photocopy in SSAB.
14. ‘We had come up against’ and ‘The differences of class’: WWW, pp. 201–2.
15. ‘I had your companionship in my mind’: LK to SS, n.d., SSAB.
16. ‘As far as homosexuality goes’: SS to LK, 5 Aug 1935.
17. ‘Its an uncontrollable unpolarized attraction’: LK to SS, n.d., photocopy in SSAB.
18. ‘I have no character’: WWW, p. 115.
19. ‘she had the kind of drive’: Elizabeth Lake (pseudonym for Inez Pearn), Marguerite Reilly, New York, Pilot Press, 1947, p. 309.
20. ‘I’m just not capable any more of having “affairs”’: SS to CI, 22 Nov 1936, in SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 125.
21. Harry Pollitt … invited Stephen: WWW, p. 230.
22. a missing Russian ship: For an account of the search for the Komsomol, see the first half of Cuthbert Worsley’s Behind the Battle, Robert Hale, 1939.
23. ‘Stephen Spender was born on 28.2.1909’: KV 2/3215, doc. 83.
24. ‘Up till now, as far as we know’: ibid., doc. 82. It transpired that the Komsomol had been sunk by the Italians, so the anxiety of the British authorities was understandable.
25. ‘Oh my darling, it all seems’: TH to SS, circa 22 March 1937, SSAB.
26. ‘What with your family and your friends’: TH in PT (ed.), The Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1976, p. 128.
27. ‘certain methods which were used in Russia’: SS, Life and the Poet, Secker & Warburg, 1942, p. 16.
28. ‘what is so nice’: WWW, p. 269.
29. ‘an irritating idealist’: Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Pandora Press, 1988, p. 98.
30. ‘She was concerned, she said’: ibid., p. 66.
31. ‘When I was in Spain’: SS to Harry Pollitt, 29 July 1937, KV 2/3215, doc. 68.
32. ‘Stephen, she said, was utterly thoughtless’ and ‘I leave the Communist Party’: PT diary, vol. 10, 30 March 1937, Bod.
33. ‘I believe in communism’: SS to WP, 6 Feb [1937], DUL.
Four: A sly Shelley
1. ‘We must, must do something’: PT diary, vol. 9, 2 Jan 1937, p. 161, Bod.
2. but to say ‘lying is wrong’: WWW, p. 271.
3. ‘Stephen’s affairs are in a fine old tangle’: CI unpublished diary, 19 Nov 1937, p. 28, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
4. ‘In China, I sometimes found myself’: ibid., 20 August 1938, p. 41.
5. ‘If I was scared in China’: ibid., p. 40.
6. ‘Wystan in tears’: ibid., p. 42.
7. ‘the breaking up’: WWW, p. 281.
8. ‘I believe I married’: SS to WP, 6 Feb [1937], DUL.
9. ‘I feel that people can’t exist’: SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 124.
10. ‘If a human relationship’: 10 Sept 1939, in SS, ‘September Journal’, in ibid., p. 174.
11. ‘although our affection’: Inez Pearn to SS, n.d., Mary
Elliot Collection, Hartford, CT.
12. ‘His movements like his voice were indolent’: Julian Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, Penguin, 1965, pp. 63 and 74–80.
13. ‘periods of intense energy’: Horizon, vol. 11, no. 12, Dec 1940, p. 279.
14. ‘below them come’: Horizon, vol. 11, no. 9, Sept 1940, pp. 77–85.
15. ‘They are far-sighted and ambitious young men’: Horizon, vol. 1, no. 2, Feb 1940, pp. 69–70.
16. ‘of course I wasn’t offended’: WHA to SS, late April/early May 1940, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 73.
17. ‘an artist ought either to live where he has live roots’: Horizon, vol. 1, no. 7, July 1940, p. 464.
18. ‘I wonder how much of value can be created’: New Statesman and Nation, 16 Nov 1940.
19. ‘Your passion for public criticism’: WHA to SS, 13–[14] March 1941, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 74.
Five: Mutual Renaissance
1. ‘Oh come on ducky, you’ll enjoy it’: from my mother’s unpublished memoir, SSAB. All further quotations from my mother are from this text, as yet without dates or page numbers, unless otherwise stated.
2. Cyril Connolly: For a description of Cyril Connolly as editor of Horizon, see Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, pp. 63 and 74–80.
3. ‘Spender praised the representatives of culture’: KV 2/3216, docs 23–5. This MI5 file lists eight public meetings held between October 1936 and November 1938 in which SS took part.
4. Charles Booth: Charles Booth, author of Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–91), was an important philanthropist and early sociologist.
5. ‘I walked with Miss Litvinne’: VW, Thursday 30 March 1924, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 174.
6. ‘Poor Ray Litvin’: VW, Thursday 14 May 1925, in Diary, vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 20.
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