A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender

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A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents - Matthew  Spender


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his diary, which he tried to turn into a novel as soon as he got back to Oxford. This was The Temple, the homosexual coming-of-age novel that failed to find a publisher for nearly sixty years.

      By Stephen’s own account, The Temple went through five major drafts over the next three years. It took time away from writing poetry and it delayed the publication of his first collection of poems with Faber for at least a year. At one point the heroine of The Temple was a girl called Caroline, but this proved impossible and the book returned to the viewpoint of a first-person narrator. Stephen’s problem was that he couldn’t get away from what had happened; and novels surely need to be pushed beyond a disguised version of real events. Auden had been aware of this drawback in Stephen’s writing from the moment they’d discussed it on that famous picnic.

      The Temple was Stephen’s third attempt to write a novel. The first, ‘Instead of Death’, was a thinly disguised account of his first year in Oxford, including his meeting with Auden, who seems to have had a role in the book as a ‘Lord of Death’. Louis MacNeice read this text, which has not survived. He thought the portrait of Auden was bad, but it was ‘an exquisite example of Stephen’s lust to mythologise the world in which he walked’. MacNeice told Stephen bluntly that he didn’t recognize his Oxford. ‘Oh that does not matter, Stephen said, I am thinking of transposing the whole scene to a lunatic asylum.’

      Stephen sent ‘Escaped’, his second novel, to Christopher Isherwood for criticism. He’d met Christopher in Auden’s room in a scene that has been described so many times it’s not worth mentioning, except to say that everyone behaved in character. Stephen was bumbling and enthusiastic, Christopher was clipped and professional. Christopher read ‘Escaped’ and responded with a tough letter. He’d seen some of the sections before as independent pieces, he wrote, and he’d liked them. But they did not add up to a novel and the last section was ‘complete trash’. Stephen’s narrator was mad, and Stephen himself was anything but that. Madmen were boring, wrote Christopher, because they had no connection with reality. The material was too close to the author. ‘You are right down in the scrum with your characters, not up in the grand-stand.’ He must learn the craft of writing. A novel had to add up to more than a paraphrase of real events.

      Stephen was not offended. He took for granted that Christopher was the Master. In 1930, after Stephen had left Oxford (without having obtained a degree), he joined Christopher in Berlin and set about rewriting The Temple. Their relationship – Isherwood makes it clear in Christopher and His Kind – was that of ‘teacher and pupil’. In their later reminiscences, both writers tinged these roles with irony. Stephen took Christopher’s letters as if they’d been red-hot bulletins from a front where literature was being deployed like guns. Isherwood emphasized the huge difference in their relative heights, so the taller pupil would have to bend down to hear whatever words of wisdom the Master might be whispering. But the underlying fact remains: Spender needed to learn from Isherwood. This made him more patient, respectful, even deferential towards Isherwood than he ever was towards Auden. He even followed Isherwood’s diet of lung soup and toffee, with dreadful results for his teeth.

      Stephen saw that Christopher never paraphrased real events. He did something more mysterious: he made events happen. ‘Christopher, so far from being the self-effacing spectator he depicts in his novels, was really the centre of his characters, and neither could they exist without him nor he without them.’ Isherwood lived in a nimbus of his own fiction, like an illustration in a Victorian magazine showing Dickens at a table with Mr Pickwick and Miss Havisham floating in the air above him; only in Christopher’s case his characters were real people walking about in the same room as himself.

      In the early phase of Isherwood’s years in Berlin, he wrote about England. It was painful for him, because he had a profound hatred for that country, which he imagined to be populated by The Enemy – his word for the restrictions of convention.

      On one occasion soon after they’d met, Stephen told him a funny story about a recent clash in Oxford between himself and the academics, the patronizing Wykehamists, the future Foreign Office mandarins. Christopher responded violently. He’d like to take all those beautiful places, like Venice or Oxford or Cambridge, and blow them up with dynamite. Not because they were ugly. On the contrary, they were beautiful. But on top of that beauty The Enemy had constructed good taste, appreciation, weighing things judiciously and ending up with nothing. ‘The whole system was to him one which denied affection and which was based largely on fear of sex.’

      It was a question of Them against Us. Real feelings were accessible only to the few, said Christopher. ‘The poets, the creative writers, the healers, and a few simple people, workers who express themselves in their work, women who have been truly loved, saints and sensualists – are the lords of life. Everyone else is a slave, and the Happy Few who have really lived their experiences and made them a part of themselves, and who don’t just discuss things and reason about them, know it.’ The slaves could destroy the Happy Few. They could ruin your life, they could ‘hem you in with rules and inhibitions which you almost persuade yourself to accept as necessary’. Stephen mustn’t fall for it. He mustn’t allow the formality of Englishness to smother his emotional life. ‘In England, chastity is a puritan myth. It’s a huge conspiracy to pretend that a whole side of human nature in ourselves and others doesn’t exist.’

      Stephen took what he wanted from this diatribe, but neither then nor later did he want to lose contact with England. Nor was he prepared to abandon art galleries and concert halls merely because The Enemy might form part of the audience. Christopher says of himself: ‘He had grown to hate the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts.’ This wasn’t true of Stephen, who heard all the great pre-war musicians in Berlin or Salzburg, where he went for a fortnight every summer with Isaiah Berlin, whom he’d also met at Oxford. Isaiah at this point in his life was hesitating about a career as an academic, and he admired the courage with which Stephen threw himself into amorous adventures; and also, a little later, into predicaments that had sombre political implications.

      During his earlier visit to Hamburg, Stephen had made friends with the German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. Plump, cordial, slightly pompous but also affectionate, this man held the keys to German literature, which Stephen had never studied at school. It was also flattering that Curtius admired Stephen as a writer. ‘It is a wonderful thing to meet a young poet, gifted as you are; a child of the sun,’ wrote Curtius soon after they’d met. ‘It has been an unlooked-for revelation.’ He was sure that Stephen’s energy would last, unlike that of most young talent. ‘You have got power – “to run a factory on” – and purity (a purity of a new, much wanted kind). Both these things show in your verse as well as in your person.’ The letter is serious in a very German way, as if their relationship existed beyond their individual participation in it.

      The ‘purity’ of which he speaks took into consideration the adventurous life that Stephen had begun to lead in Hamburg. Curtius loved hearing about the bad boys who waited for clients in the bars around the docks of the huge industrial port. Stephen told one story about the experience of being robbed – Christopher later appropriated it in one of his Berlin stories – and Curtius just thought it was amusing. It was neither shocking nor tragic, this scene from the lower depths. It was merely absurd.

      Later, thinking about this incident, Stephen tried to understand why he’d found it impossible to think of himself as a victim. Being richer and better educated than the robber, there was a certain Robin Hood justice in being fleeced by him. Even while he was being robbed, Stephen could pity the robber. Stephen’s inner world was inviolable. Whatever was stolen, the robber couldn’t take away the advantages that society had given him.

      This generosity of exploitee to exploiter was a kind of selfishness, Stephen thought, as though the robber’s faults were ‘projections of my own guilt’. But being feeble about an unfortunate experience could also become a part of his professional


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