On that first visit, John also showed me dozens of small and inexplicably economical portrait sketches of Greeks whom he met briefly in cafés and wherever else, young men who (not yet entirely Westernized) could easily have stepped from Homer’s battle scenes, the somber tragedies of Aeschylus, or even the raucous ithyphallic comedies of Aristophanes—their adamant dignity and craving for life was still that firmly intact and vividly conveyed in a few pencil lines. My first turn through John’s sketchbooks was among my earliest experiences of the true collector’s longing—at once, I wanted almost all these drawings.
Meanwhile, since I’d ultimately spend a good deal of time there, I’ll note a few characteristics of the extraordinary Craxton household. John’s father was Harold Craxton, one of the most respected piano teachers of his time at the Royal Academy of Music. Between pupils, he wandered round the large three-story house with the distinctly vague air of a cartoon character—say, Mr. Magoo. Likewise in residence were John’s sister Janet, principal oboist in the BBC Symphony, and—somewhat later—their brother Anthony, a senior producer for BBC Television, frequently in charge of programs involving the royal family. John’s mother Essie—who often seemed harassed but was never less than quietly masterful—somehow managed to hold this unparalleled artistic menagerie together. Among them, almost from our first meeting, John became a valued friend.
Stephen himself became, in the few days of that first visit to his home, a friend who’d remain impeccably loyal for the rest of his life (and he died peacefully a year after I last saw him, when he was eighty-six). I’ve noted that I learned, from his autobiography when I was hardly out of my teens, how his past had been marked by a complex sexuality. Without burdening the reader unduly, I can honestly condense the nature of our early relation by recording that, from the day we met, I was aware that Stephen was signaling the possibility of a sexual intimacy.
The signals, though, came from the other side of the room (literally) in nervously laughing and thoroughly shy remarks. As hints, the signals were never pressing—they seemed offered almost idly as tests of a particular situation—and when I, first, ignored them and then made it politely clear that my feelings were otherwise involved, the cloud quickly dispersed with no ill will on either side. Despite the fact that Stephen was then twice my age—and knew so many men and women who were far more accomplished than the young man I was (Auden and Isaiah Berlin had been his closest contemporary friends since their undergraduate days)—we nonetheless had so much in common, in our lives and work, that an enduring friendship grew when one of its possible directions was shut off at the start.
By far the chief subjects of our earliest conversations were our reading, our love of music, of the great masters of twentieth-century painting, and our friends, eager to laugh at almost any moment—sympathetically, ironically, or mercilessly. In retrospect I’d note that my first responses to Stephen were virtually identical with my last. In 1994 I made my first return trip to England in many years—ten years after I’d taken to a wheelchair with the remains of spinal cancer—and saw Stephen back in the Loudoun Road dining room with Natasha (he was eighty-five; they’d been married for fifty-three years, and whatever waves had troubled the marriage seemed mainly calmed in mutual old age).
Stephen had a passion for the workings of the independent liberal mind, with all its most harmless foods and pleasures, like that of no one else I’ve known (the Spenders were an old liberal family). A department of that passion was his constant search for something that’s grown increasingly impossible to find—the kind of romantic friendship with which I’d also been increasingly involved since my own early days at Oxford—the physically imposing friend who’d share one’s deepest enthusiasms and engage with one in adventures that might range from physical love to dangerous gestures in the effort to aid another friend or even helpless strangers.
In World Within World, Stephen describes just such a gesture. When his former partner, whom he calls Jimmy Younger (the real name was Tony Hyndman), feels abandoned by Stephen’s impulsive first marriage, Jimmy flees to Spain to fight with the International Brigades in the Civil War and is promptly caught and threatened with execution. Stephen quickly follows him to Spain, and considerably endangers himself, in the attempt to rescue Jimmy (the rescue succeeded, Stephen’s marriage promptly failed, and the remainder of Jimmy’s life was a sad downslide).
The fact that Stephen’s poetry was always subject to almost violently opposing views from his readers—a paradox that virtually silenced his publication of poems in the 1950s and ’60s—was a humiliating sadness for him; and I can only be glad he wasn’t alive to read the recent British reviews of his posthumous Collected Poems. For an American who’s loved, studied, and written poetry with attentive passion for more than six decades, it was astonishing to see how almost completely those reviewers failed to recognize the kind of poem Stephen Spender was always trying to write and often did—a neo-Romantic lyric, all but anti-Modernist in its tones, rhythms, and actual vocabulary and profound in its feeling. It’s my conviction that, in time—when the enemies he accumulated so readily in the course of a long and politically stormy public life in Britain and America have likewise died (he published a number of intemperate and often hilariously sardonic reviews in both countries and thereby earned a portion of his treatment)—several dozen of his poems will be seen as strikingly original and piercingly true to a particular time, place, and extraordinary mind. Of how many continuously anthologized poets can we say more?
* * *
During the remainder of my first stay on Loudoun Road, there was a dinner with Malcolm Muggeridge, who was then editor of Punch and by no means the doctrinaire Christian he later became. Toward the end of a good deal of wine, I recall his saying to Stephen words to this effect—“Don’t you know how fond you can become of a man whose wife you’re fucking?” Stephen laughed nervously and nodded. There was a dinner with Cyril Connolly and Lionel Trilling, who was in England without his widely dreaded wife Diana (Stephen and his friends had heard with relief that she hated flying). Trilling himself was quietly polite, though he gave off a soberly academic whiff of disapproval of these laughing English writers; and they of course could never forget that he’d written an entire humorless book about E. M. Forster without perceiving that Forster was queer.
Still, I enjoyed a Sunday afternoon’s visit to the Royal Academy show with Trilling and Stephen and a Sunday-afternoon lunch at Loudoun Road with Trilling, Cyril, and Rose Macaulay, who was by then an ancient-seeming woman (only five years older than I am now but as shrunken as the Cumean sibyl); her recent masterpiece, The Towers of Trebizond, was a novel I’d much admired and have continued to read. Also at the table for Francesca’s ample spread was Sonia Orwell, the widow of George Orwell. I’d see Sonia many more times in my last eighteen months in England and always found her good-looking, warm, and funny—never the difficult and inscrutable person she apparently became in her last years. Toward the end of my visit, I began to wonder at the furious pace of Stephen’s social life and slowly came to realize—over many years—that he literally craved the mental stimulus of very bright friends: fine conversation, in a single word. I also learned that—infallibly—at the end of the busiest day, he’d go down to the cleared dining table and work till the early hours—on poems, his journal, or a short novel he’d just begun. It was ultimately published as Engaged in Writing and concerned itself with the grave, and comical, Cold War–cultural problems that arose in the Venice conference which he was attending when I first saw him.
So my first stay at the Spender household—some ten days—ended with our attendance at a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio by the Sadler’s Wells Opera. Fidelio had been among Stephen’s highest pleasures since his early visits to Germany and Austria. This performance in January ’57 was sung in English by competent British performers. And while it had—almost unavoidably—stretches of musical and dramatic excitement, it was no match for my own prior Fidelio, a thrilling perfo
rmance with Kirsten Flagstad which I saw and heard Bruno Walter conduct at the Met in March ’51. Nonetheless the evening provided a useful marker for the start of a friendship that would help us both powerfully through four more decades of life and work.
A final marker of that long week was the fact that, on my last morning in London, I went with Stephen to the Zwemmer Gallery to see a small show of the etchings Picasso had made, years earlier, as illustrations for an edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Those uncomplicated line drawings of superb elegance were so cheap that Stephen bought several; and even I, broke as I was, bought one: the fall of Phaeton in the chariot of the sun for only twenty guineas (a guinea in the currency of the ’50s was a pound and a shilling, hence twenty-one shillings). I also got to meet Mr. Zwemmer himself, a white-haired and distinguished feature of the London gallery world whom I’d eventually see more than once again.
14
BACK IN OXFORD by mid-January ’57, Michael and I were hard at work on our separate chores—his final exams and my thesis—but we often met for lunch in the Open Market off the High near Carfax. There was an upstairs diner called George’s Café (pronounced “cafe” to rhyme with strafe) run by a burdened, though cheerful, family with a lovely tall daughter. Their clientele, in a space no larger than the average American living room, consisted of workingmen—masons, lorry drivers, and dustmen among them—and students. Each day there was a single menu with no more than two choices for your meal, inscribed on a blackboard by the door. You paid your small sum of money in advance, sat at one of the few long green-painted tables with whomever might have got there before you, and waited till the lovely daughter brought your plate. Whatever the blackboard had said, what you got was mainly potatoes, the odd slice of carrot, a few bits of pastry, and maybe a lump or two of boiled mutton.
Fairly wretched food if truth be told; but the attraction for most of the student patrons was twofold—a belly-filling plug of hot edibles for very little money and a certain sense of matey mingling with the working class. A bulky man in his workman’s cap might jostle your elbow, grin, and ask for the mustard in his country-Oxford accent (there were virtually no immigrants working in Oxford then). Ah, you were living!—and on a plain that stretched far below the base of your Tower which, however you denied it, was indeed carved most meticulously and magnificently from the finest ivory available in the Western World at least.
* * *
Yet with all that suspect sense of camaraderie, my most indelible memory of George’s is that a red-haired American from another college entered the café in late January and told me that he’d heard on the BBC just now that Arturo Toscanini had died in suburban New York only two months short of his ninetieth birthday. For educated Americans of our generation that was genuine news, and for me it has its own special pitch and pathos. Younger readers may not know that Toscanini was among the two or three supreme orchestral conductors of the twentieth century. After a long maturation in Italy, primarily as a conductor of opera, he’d come to America and conducted a brilliant seven years at the Met; then departing from the Met—primarily it seems because of a love affair gone bad with the queen of the house, the American diva Geraldine Farrar—he spent an equally superb nine years with the New York Philharmonic. He returned in the early 1930s to Europe for extraordinary productions of Wagner, Mozart, and Verdi at Bayreuth and Salzburg (a number of those performances can still be heard on surprisingly listenable recordings).
And when fascism triumphed in Europe, he was lured back to America where the National Broadcasting Company created a first-rate orchestra for him. In weekly Sunday-afternoon broadcasts (which I began to hear, without fail, in my early teens), he proceeded to bring to an enormous radio audience often astonishing performances of the standard repertoire of what we now called classical European music. I recall the first afternoon when I sat on our living-room floor alone and heard him conduct Brahms’s First Symphony; that great opening sweep was likely my initial revelation of what such music held in wait for the remainder of my life. And Toscanini continued to retain that eminence—in my life and the nation’s—on into his eighties, and in 1950 he took the NBC Symphony on an unprecedented tour of the States.
As a high-school senior I seized the opportunity; drove to Richmond, Virginia and stayed in the ornate Jefferson Hotel (which still had live alligators in the lobby), and heard the maestro lead his ninety-odd men in the Mosque auditorium. Though he was then eighty-three, he conducted a demanding program that included memorable performances of Beethoven’s Eroica and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, followed eventually by a single encore—an unannounced but instantly audience-rousing performance of “Dixie.” The song had not then acquired quite the political significance it now exerts (the Civil War, which destroyed much of Richmond, was not a century behind us). Nonetheless it was a performance that—despite Toscanini’s international standing as a public enemy of Hitler and Mussolini—would now be impossible to play, both for the conductor and much of his audience.
I joined in the clamorous ovation, featuring Rebel yells, throughout the old Confederate anthem and for long after the beautiful old man tottered into the wings—no conductor has ever rivaled his physical beauty or perhaps his often gratified hunger for beautiful young women. Among my strongest memories, now in my own old age, is that he left the stage finally with a ramrod-straight back after so much exertion in the cause of beauty, passionately pursued (through the long evening he had never once touched the supportive railing round his podium).
The news of his death, then, was the first time I’d experienced a shocking tear in the fabric of my love of the arts. Here early in the twenty-first century there are persistent detractors who’ve attacked Toscanini’s old unchallenged eminence. And of course he had his faults—an occasional hyperfeverish propulsion—but an immense archive of his performances survives; and while I sometimes hear the faults, I also hear an unrivaled clarity of texture, a gorgeous awareness of the powers of varied rhythm (when appropriate); but above all his burning conviction that the finest music—orchestral, operatic, or choral—is the highest form of human expression.
How lucky I was then, like millions of other Americans, to learn in youth so many of the supreme cornerstones of Western music at the hands of a purveyor of such genius. And how I wish he were still available on weekend afternoons—or whenever—to reach new generations of young listeners, the vast majority of whom are enslaved to kinds of music which (however good some of it may be) have left them ignorant of the culture’s greatest treasures. In George’s Café, when I was two weeks short of my twenty-fourth birthday, I could hardly see this far; but I had a strong sense of what I’d lost.
* * *
In the remainder of that winter and spring, I went on dealing with two personally urgent matters—the thesis and any future I might have as a writer. In mid-January Stephen told me that he’d established, with his co-editors, that Encounter now definitely wanted to publish “A Chain of Love.” And only a few days later, Diarmuid informed me that The Paris Review would publish the story in the next issue—or the next issue thereafter (not a heartwarming commitment, it seemed to me). At that point I made up my own wobbly mind and let Stephen know that, given my American agent’s involvement in the sale of the story to The Paris Review, I felt committed to allowing the story to go forward there. Should Encounter like any of my other stories, it would be most welcome to them. Stephen didn’t seem to feel cheated in the matter and said he’d let me know about the other stories.
Meanwhile, with the selflessness that would mark all his dealings with me for nearly four decades to come, he endorsed my work so generously to British and American publishers that they began to contact me directly. In the course of that winter term, then, I had a visit in Oxford from Cass Canfield, a famous senior editor at Harper’s in New York (who happened also to own the company). He took me out for a sedate but enormous lunch at the Mitre Hotel on the High, treated me and my work with apparent seriousness (though I couldn’t
tell how much he’d read), and contacted Diarmuid as soon as he was back in the States, offering what Diarmuid called a lien—presumably an option—on my work-to-date. Diarmuid thanked him but didn’t like liens and said that, for now, we’d wait.
Then Hamish Hamilton, the eponymous proprietor of a British house of considerable eminence, asked if he could come to Oxford and see me. Six years earlier he’d published Stephen’s autobiography to considerable success (and was, as I’d later learn, one of Vivien Leigh’s oldest friends). I took him for a long walk round and round the Merton gardens. He seemed to me mildly chilly; still I could tell that he’d read the few existing stories and said he liked them greatly. As I recall, though, he made no prompt offer. But his visit was followed quickly by one from Peter Calvocoressi, an editor at Chatto and Windus in London. In a letter home I noted that he was “the nicest of the three publishers I’ve met.”
After another garden walk at Merton and a long conversation on the bench at the height of the wall above Dead Man’s Walk, Calvocoressi returned to London and informed Diarmuid that Chatto would offer an immediate contract for a book of short stories—no lien or option but a real contract with a cash advance, the present equivalent of $700. After a longish pause to consider the offer, Diarmuid recommended that we take it—for a British edition—and by midsummer we signed the contract. Clearly at age twenty-four, I was more than pleased by the commitment. I’ll note, as well, that the publishing world which I encountered first—Canfield as a representative of an old American house, Hamilton and Calvocoressi as younger Britons—was much more like the world known to, say, Henry James and Edith Wharton than anything that’s available today when a young writer begins to hunt for attention. It was a staunchly all-male world of panel-walled men’s clubs and restaurants, excellent wines, fine tailored suits, and dignified but—if they’d gone so far as to ask you to lunch—dead serious interest in your work. This was, after all, a time when what we now call “serious fiction” was treated a great deal more seriously by publishers and reviewers than it is now (my first novel, when it was ultimately published in 1962, would receive almost ninety individual newspaper reviews in the States and Britain; today even the most admired first novel would be lucky to rack up twenty separate reviews). With a fully executed contract in my drawer, I could settle back in, a little more confidently, to write my thesis before returning to my fiction for the final pages of a book-length manuscript.
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