A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
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WORLDLY FAILURE
IT WAS W. H. Auden who taught me about adjectives. He stayed with us whenever he came to England. I was nine years old. Scene: 15 Loudoun Road, my parents’ house in St John’s Wood, eight-thirty in the morning. I was late for school. Wystan, with an air of having already been up for hours, was smoking at the breakfast table, bored or thoughtful, looking out of the window at the tangled ferns of the basement area. Mum and Dad were still in bed, in their bedroom with a large dressing-table on which lurked strange hairbrushes sold recently to Dad by a sadistic hairdresser who had persuaded him he was losing his hair.
I was in a panic over a test due that morning on what an adjective was.
Wystan looked surprised.
‘An adjective is any word that qualifies a noun,’ he said.
‘I know how to say that,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand what it means.’
He looked around the table, discarded the cereals and found among the debris of the night before a bottle of wine. One object more memorable than the others.
‘Ah … you could say, the good wine,’ he said firmly. ‘Its goodness qualifies the wine.’ Then he thought for a moment, peering at the bottle. ‘The wine was good,’ he said, correcting himself; and added in a tragic voice, ‘now all we have left is an empty bottle.’
That summer, my sister and I had been abandoned on an island off the coast of Wales. I’d liked it. Lots of puffins, a few cormorants and numerous placid sheep. On top of the hill in the middle of this island were three grass tombs of long-dead Vikings, and Bardsey Island had left me with an obsession with barrow-wights and the sinister mystery of Norse ghost stories. Hearing about this later that year, Wystan sent me from New York the Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. I read it straight through.
Auden used to say that he knew where every detail of this trilogy came from and one day he’d write about it. Dad tried it once but he found Tolkien tremendously boring.
Once, Wystan and I wrote Tolkienish poems together, still over breakfast but a few years after the adjectives. I collected them and copied them into a notebook that I decorated with a heraldic crest ‘with whiskers’, as that kind of shading was called at school. Here are a couple of verses:
God knows what kings and lords,
Had their realms on these downs of chalk,
And now guard their bountiful hoards,
One night you may see them walk.
They walk with creaks and groans
Cloaks fluttering as they go by,
They ride on enormous roans
Which block out the stars and the sky.
Lines two and four of each verse are Auden’s. ‘Can I use them?’ ‘Of course.’ I got the impression that words could be seized out of the air and given generously from one person to another.
My frequent readings of The Lord of the Rings always featured Wystan in there somewhere. The kind but didactic Wizard. In this earliest phase of knowing Wystan I intuitively grasped his own self-image as a young man, which was that of ‘Uncle Wiz’, an eccentric Victorian vicar with a bee in his bonnet about the Apocrypha. He didn’t want to be taken seriously every inch of the way. He liked to pontificate, but he also wanted be teased about it in return. It was part of his longing for universal love, a very strong need he had.
Wystan knew a great deal about our family. There’s a story of him running round and round the aspidistra at our house in Hampstead when he was a little boy. He was my uncle Michael’s friend at Gresham’s, Holt, the school they both attended. They were two years older than Stephen, who only met Wystan when they were undergraduates at Oxford.
At Gresham’s, Michael and Wystan had sat through a memorable occasion when Harold Spender came down to give the boys a pep talk. My grandfather read the parable of the Prodigal Son, and when he came to the words, ‘But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him,’ Harold looked lovingly at his son Michael, perched at the keyboard of the organ in full view. I think Wystan must have remembered this story because, without intending to, Harold had for a moment become ‘camp’. Anyway, it was Wystan’s story. My father was at the under-school of Gresham’s at the time so he did not witness this memorable scene.
Having thus embarrassed his eldest son, my grandfather continued with a stirring sermon along the lines of ‘On, and always on!’ (It’s the title of the last chapter of his autobiography.) There was a boy-scout element to Harold and he wanted to inspire these youngsters with manliness. But it did not go down well. It was just after the First World War during which many former pupils had lost their lives. Their names glowed freshly on the oak panels behind him.
‘You killed him, my dear,’ said Wystan over supper at Loudoun Road, around the time when we wrote the Tolkien poems together. And when Dad started laughing, he said firmly, ‘You killed him by ignoring him.’ Dad stopped laughing and looked annoyed. He’d never believed Auden’s theory that sickness, or even death, comes from damage to the psyche: that heart disease comes from an inability to love, that cancer comes from ‘foiled creative fire’. He called this aspect of Auden’s imagination ‘medieval’. In this case Wystan – smiling at Dad with benign condescension – was saying that the young Spender boys had killed their father with snubs.
I don’t know why my father had such difficulties with his parents, but it might have had something to do with the anger of young people towards the older generation, which they held collectively responsible for the disaster of the First World War. How could anyone believe in the world of ‘clean thoughts in clean bodies’ after that? Stephen hated his father. He thought he was a failure. He was only seventeen years old when Harold died, so his relationship was frozen in an adolescent image where Harold was the hieratic statue that had to be toppled from its pedestal. If ‘killing the father’ is an essential part of growing up, Stephen did his early.
It was easy to mock this man who could never earn enough money to keep his family going and who yearned for unattainable positions of power. But the bitterness with which Stephen writes in his novels and his poems about ‘failure’ meant that, at some level, he subscribed to Harold’s romantic notion of life as a series of peaks, of challenges, of high aspirations and magnificent achievements. ‘Failure’ was Stephen’s way of defeating his father, but it also kept alive Harold’s scale of values.
When Stephen was twelve, Harold stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. My father remembered being hauled around Bath in a pony-carriage with his two brothers, each with a placard round his neck saying ‘Vote for Daddy’. Harold lost, and the effect on Michael and Stephen was traumatic. Michael said: ‘When they are very young, the children of a public man worship their father for being famous – a kind of god: but it’s extraordinary how soon they get to realize it if he’s a public failure.’ Michael developed a stammer. He decided that his father was ‘inefficient’, which in his eyes was the worst thing a man could be. Stephen, instead, just couldn’t stop crying. It confirmed his suspicion that his father was a windbag whose exhortations of ‘on and ever on’ were meaningless.
Harold Spender’s wife, my grandmother Violet Schuster, came from a successful Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany to England in the 1860s. At the time of their marriage, the Schusters established a trust for Violet and her children – a long document camouflaging the fact that Harold wasn’t allowed to touch it.
Violet was a delicate woman who gave birth to four children in four years, one after the other. She died in 1921, at home, on the kitchen table, after an operation to remedy complications deriving from a hysterectomy. For years she’d struggled with a condition that could not be named. Her death was a great shock. Until then she had been able to run the