A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
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dominant memory of her was of her complaints. Too much noise was coming from the children’s room; they’d given her a headache. Because the details of her state of health were never discussed, he probably assumed that his mother was more neurotic than was the case. ‘Hysteria’, in Aristotelian terms, means blood boiling in the womb, and I’m sure that my father’s incapacity, indeed terror, of anything resembling a woman’s lack of control over her body stemmed from an unhealed memory of his mother’s sufferings.
They all spent a fortnight in the Lake District during the First World War. Violet was in a bad state because of the death of her much loved brother in the trenches. The war was present even in this beautiful place. She noticed that Keswick had been emptied of its men, leaving behind only those who were working on the farms. She saw several Scottish soldiers on the train drinking desperately at the thought of having to go back to the front. ‘A thin match-boarding separates us all from some terrible thing dimly known.’
In spite of her dark state of mind, they enjoyed this moment of escape. It was one of the few times when they were together as a family. Stephen chased butterflies, Humphrey collected crystals that glittered on the paths leading up into the hills behind the farm. When it rained, slugs sailed down the paths like barges on the Thames. Michael bonded with Harold and learned how to row a skiff on Derwent Water. Harold also taught Michael about climbing, and gradually they formed a team from which the others were excluded. Harold was a great climber. His guide to the Pyrenees is still read. There’s even a recent translation into Catalan.
For the rest of his life, Stephen wrote and rewrote his memories of Skelgill Farm. A key moment took place when he overheard Harold reading Wordsworth’s Prelude to Violet as they rested in deckchairs looking at the sunset. They were in deepest Wordsworth country; it was a predictable book to choose. Stephen, aged eight, understood ‘Wordsworth’ or ‘Worldsworth’ to have something to do with his father’s metaphorical symbolism: the world was a word, and the word had worth – was valuable.
Stephen asked his mother why Wordsworth was a poet, and what a poet was. She said:
Wordsworth was a man who, when he was a child, ran through the countryside and felt himself to be a living part of it, as though the mountains were his mother, his own body before he was born. And when, in later life, while he was still young, he came back from many journeys to the lakes, he felt all those memories, which were one with the scenery, surge through his arms and legs and his whole body on his walks here, and come out through his fingers that held a pen, as words that were his poems.
After Violet’s death in December 1921, Harold went into a decline. The finances of the household were now controlled by his mother-in-law, Hilda Schuster, with whom Stephen formed a conspiratorial relationship based on books and trips to the theatre and long conversations of a kind that Harold’s self-righteousness precluded. Stephen’s hatred of his father could have derived from a subconscious conviction that Harold was responsible for his wife’s death, but in the many texts my father left, he stresses only the absurdity of his father’s grief. ‘I am a broken man,’ said Harold over lunch, blinking at his children. ‘You are all that your poor old father has left.’
In his autobiography, my father writes: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that at the end his unreality terrified me’. In 1940, writing his novel The Backward Son, Stephen returned to his father’s reaction to his wife’s death. Harold’s lack of reality has become a caricature. ‘He saw what he had never seen – that he was a fool, and that she had a touch of genius. “The divine fire of Parnassus breathed on her,” he thought, automatically trying to make this thought unreal.’ (Harold published Violet’s poems soon after she died, but he never claimed that she was an unrecognized genius.) ‘It was she, he now realised, who had saved him; it was she who had made him, in spite of everything – he could grasp it now – a worldly failure. For he knew now that he would never succeed, he would never be in the Cabinet, he would lose his seat in the House, he would be despised.’ (In this novel Harold is an MP, a role he never achieved in life.) ‘His one saving grace which he could secretly cling to for the rest of his life was his sense of failure.’
‘For one translucent instant of purely sincere feeling, he hated the children.’ Well, one could reverse this thought. In the upset following his mother’s death, one of Harold’s sons hated his father.
By the time they caught up with each other at Oxford, Wystan was a young intellectual of astonishing self-assurance and Stephen was a tall clumsy well-meaning puppy who couldn’t enter a room without tripping over the carpet. From the moment they met, Wystan treated Stephen like a younger brother, partly because he knew everything about the Spender family. He could see that Stephen’s woolly-mindedness was a disguise, a reaction against his elder brother Michael’s super-efficiency. In his wilful way, Wystan deduced that Stephen was the opposite of what he seemed. Auden believed that the characteristics his friends presented to the world were shields protecting qualities that were their opposites. Thus Stephen wasn’t the hapless weakling that his persona projected. On the contrary, he was as tough as nails.
When they met, Stephen was in love with a young man whom he calls Marston in a series of poems he was writing about him. He’d slip these under the door of Auden’s rooms at Christ Church as soon as they were fit to be read. My father at that time gave his poems to anyone who showed an interest, and he’d already acquired a reputation by the end of his first year at Oxford.
One day in 1929, a few days after he’d left with Auden a new poem and a diary entry about walking along the banks of the River Wye with Marston, Stephen received back a short note in Auden’s almost illegible minuscule. ‘Have read your diary & poems. Am just recovering from the dizzy shock. Come out all day Thursday. Shall order a hamper of cold lunch.’
On the Thursday, they set off by bus from Oxford in the direction of the Berkshire Downs. The bus let them off in the countryside. They clambered through a hedge, hopped over a little ditch and climbed to the top of the nearest hill. They ate egg sandwiches and cold roast chicken and drank a bottle of wine, looking out towards the West Country, which Stephen loved.
Auden said that the great strength of Stephen’s writing was his capacity to describe whatever happened to him ‘as though it had never happened to anyone before’. It was this quality that had made him dizzy. ‘When you create your experience you are excellent. When you attempt to describe or draw attention to your feelings you are rotten.’ He quoted from memory two lines from one of the Marston poems. ‘Taking your wrists and feeling your lips warm’, he said, was excellent. But ‘Let us break our hearts not casually, but on a stated day,’ was bad, because the reader couldn’t believe that the writer’s heart was indeed breaking. On the contrary, it was clear from the poem that the writer was enjoying himself.
Auden said he was jealous of the Marston poems, but he added a word of caution: ‘I console myself by thinking that you are hopelessly literal-minded. Actuality obsesses you so much that you will never be able to free yourself and create a work of pure imagination.’
For the first time, Stephen had been given a new idea about how he could use the material that the world threw at him.
Until now, writing for him had been a kind of lottery. If he was emotionally stirred he wrote down the first words that came into his mind, clinging the while precariously to rhyme and form as a rider clings to a horse which is running away from him: then he hoped one day that such ‘inspiration’ and shots in the dark would produce a successful poem. What had happened now was that an experience had brought him in touch with more than an emotion – with a subject matter capable of crystallization in words.
To be a poet was not the same thing, he now understood, as writing good poems one after the other. There had to be a field of experience out there, a known territory, a vision. Violet had bound Wordsworth to a specific piece of land. Auden mapped out for Stephen poetry as a continent.
During that summer vacation, Stephen