A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
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appear in print, a booklet of ‘About 45 copies’, as the title page casually puts it.
Auden visited the Spender household while this was going on. He asked to be included in the domestic arrangements; meaning a cup of tea for him too, please, whenever the servants made theirs (which was eight times a day).
Wystan told Stephen’s governess – she’d become an important figure in the orphaned phase of his childhood – that Stephen’s ‘innocence’ was, of course, the exact opposite of what it pretended to be. Stephen projected an image of himself as someone who was timid, considerate, over-generous and unsure. This was a result of his refusal to accept himself as he really was: ruthless, selfish and domineering. His generosity was purposefully asphyxiating. He forced people to reject him, so as to avoid the guilt he’d feel if he rejected them. He wrote self-confessional letters to his friends, apparently throwing the whole of his life at the recipient’s head, in order to disguise the fact that he always kept something back. His love for Marston was ‘symptomatic’. Marston had been chosen as a love object because he was untouchable, which of course meant that Stephen himself did not want to be touched.
Stephen’s supposed capacity to be humiliated was a sham. Only love involved humiliation, and Stephen was not prepared to love anyone. ‘One can’t be physically intimate without revealing oneself as one really is.’ In place of intimacy, Stephen cultivated an exaggerated view of his friends. Auden himself was ‘the Sage’. To turn friends into myths was a way of not communicating with them. ‘One does not reveal one’s worse nature to a hero.’
One afternoon during this printing-press phase of their friendship, they went out for a walk on Hampstead Heath. There, Wystan learned that Stephen had no money problems, because he enjoyed an allowance of three hundred pounds a year. What! And yet he complained about being unhappy? Nobody, said Wystan dogmatically, had the right to be unhappy on three hundred pounds a year. He himself would kill for half that amount! In fact, would Stephen consider splitting it? (I can imagine my father laughing politely and changing the subject.)
‘Are you a Verger?’ Wystan asked Stephen abruptly. Stephen said he didn’t understand the question. ‘Are you a Virgin?’ Stephen gave a vague reply. ‘Well, presumably you must know whether you are or you aren’t,’ said Wystan. This particular problem was solved soon afterwards. And when Stephen put up some resistance, Wystan told him briskly, ‘Now, dear, don’t make a fuss.’
AS I SEE it, Auden’s extraordinary matter-of-factness about sex liberated my father, but it was also a challenge. Stephen saw that the guilt that had been drummed into him as a well-brought-up schoolboy could simply be dropped. But if love was to be elevated into an acceptable or even a central part of his life, then with whom and on what terms? This Wystan couldn’t answer – though he said that Marston wasn’t the one. And pragmatic though he may have been in many ways, Auden himself did not solve this problem for a very long time. Christopher found Heinz, Stephen found Tony, but Wystan did not manage to create a permanent love until he found Chester in New York during the Second World War. In 1928, the war was not even remotely visible.
Auden, Isherwood, Spender: these were the three young writers who ‘ganged up and captured the decade’, as Evelyn Waugh put it years later in a grumpy mood. There’s an element of truth in saying that they shared a programme, but as their writings are so different from each other’s, it’s hard to say if this involved life choices, or how life fits into art, or a desire to challenge conventional England, or a need to resist Fascism, or a mixture of all of these.
Auden left England in the early summer of 1928 as soon as he’d graduated. First, he found rooms in a quiet suburb of Berlin, but at the beginning of the following year he moved to the centre of town and began to lead a more adventurous life. He kept an interesting diary, which seems to follow a programme involving the relationship between love and sex. He sought adventures with the boys of the Adonis Bar and other Lokalen, with their wide assortment of different talents, and he kept his reactions under observation.
After numerous trials, Auden fell passionately in love with a sailor called Gerhart Meyer, ‘from the sea / The truly strong man’, as he appears in one of Auden’s early poems. Gerhart’s thing was to fuck a prostitute in Wystan’s presence, and Wystan went along with this, even though the intention was clearly to make him jealous. With detachment Auden writes in his diary: ‘What is odd is that when he could have any woman he liked from the Queen of England upwards, he chooses whores and not the prettiest either.’ Auden does not want to feel jealous, so he tries to define jealousy to see if he fits into its parameters. ‘Jealousy is of two kinds, the fear that I don’t exist, and the fear that he or she doesn’t exist.’ Usually, writes Auden, he’s not jealous – for the simple reason that he’s so sure of himself he can never feel he isn’t there. Therefore Gerhart, or category two, must be the case. Indeed, ‘He seems to belong to another world and might go up in smoke any moment.’
This diary, which has never been published, shows how difficult it was for Auden to perceive reality. The right-hand page is for experience summarized as objectively and truthfully as possible. The left-hand page is for abstraction. In a letter written to my father at the beginning of the war, Wystan said that he needed a great deal of abstraction, in the shape of rules and theories, before he understood what he felt. ‘My dominant faculties are intellect and intuition, my weak ones feeling and sensation … I must have knowledge and a great deal of it before I feel anything.’
Gerhart may have been a ‘truly strong’ man, but some of the boys of the Adonis Bar dressed up as sailors, took their lovers to Hamburg on the grounds that they were about to set sail, fleeced them for farewell gifts and then secretly took the train back to Berlin. From Auden’s diary, it looks as if Gerhart was one of these – for in Hamburg, he suddenly vanished.
In another mood – this is also typical of Auden – he totted up the expense. He was missing his dressing-gown and a pistol, and he’d spent too much money on Gerhart’s shoes. Not too bad, considering. But he became depressed. He took a day trip out of Berlin to look at the countryside. Observing the beautiful indigo sky behind the steel works as he came back, he thought: ‘Country on a fine day always makes me feel Why do I bother about people. They are insignificant. But country is not enough.’
Auden’s 1929 diary is one of the rare occasions where one can guess how his strange and exceptionally intelligent mind worked. Love, and sex, and writing, must surely be connected – but how? My father thought that they could be welded together into one gift, but he found by experience that although an adventure opened up new possibilities for his writing, the long-term prospect of love got in the way.
In the long vac of 1929, Stephen also went to Germany, but he stayed in Hamburg rather than Berlin. He also had a plan. ‘I have always regarded my body as sinful, and my own physical being as something to be ashamed of and to be overcome by compensating and atoning spiritual qualities. Now I am beginning to feel that I may soon come to regard my body as a source of joy.’
At a party filled with beautiful uninhibited young people, he overheard the word unschuldig, and he assumed they were referring to him. It means ‘without guilt’. Stephen latched on to this word as a talisman that would guide him through all his future explorations of love. Whatever he did with his body, it would be ‘without guilt’. My father often talked to me about the German concept of the ‘guiltless fool’, with reference to Parsifal, for example. The guilt that had been drummed into him by his education was to be kept at bay with this word. It was his shield, his banner, his credo.
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