A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
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kind of strength. It isolated me and disqualified me from other kinds of work than poetic writing.’
My father’s increasing interest in communism from 1931 onwards grew from his fascination with this vast, unfamiliar subculture. He thought that the poor and the underprivileged were in possession of some secret, and he believed without question that communism was on the side of the workers; whereas it was equally obvious that the Nazis were luring the unemployed into vast armies that would be destroyed in a future war. Curtius, who saw this change taking place in Stephen as a result of his life in Berlin, decided that this wasn’t really a political revelation, but a form of sentimentality based on the attraction of the working classes.
It was after a visit to Curtius in November 1931 that Stephen wrote his most famous poem, ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’. Its heroes were the great writers of German Romanticism that Curtius had so brilliantly brought before him. Stephen sent Curtius the poem as soon as it was finished, and Curtius placed it in the context of Stephen’s recent enthusiasm for the workers. It was his best poem so far. It was ‘both particular and grand’, he wrote. It suited him much better than Bolschewismus. He was sure that, with his temperament of a poet and with his sensitivity towards beauty, Stephen would soon see through communism, in the same way that Whitman had seen through American democracy. ‘Your politics are guided by your sense of eroticism and aesthetics.’
In Hamburg and later in Berlin, Stephen fell in love with various boys with whom, throwing caution to the winds, he attempted to create a long-lasting relationship. Being in love heightened his sensitivity to his surroundings, and from that mood his poems could spring. But he was also interested in creating a permanent relationship.
One of the first of these was Harry Giese, a pleasant somewhat dumpy young man (there’s a photo in the Isaiah Berlin Archive in Oxford), and the only reason why they were together was that Harry had asked Stephen to take him away to the countryside, where he thought he could be happier. ‘He has introduced Order into my life,’ wrote Stephen to Isaiah. Harry managed their money (and was more frugal than Stephen), and their days were now blest with ‘Regular Hours’. They met every day for lunch at a quarter to one, and after lunch they played a game of chess. ‘The difficulty with him is that he won’t ever leave me alone, and that bores me awfully.’ He couldn’t stand Harry’s ‘aura of respectability’. ‘I imagined it would be very exciting to have a boy always, but, as a matter of fact, it is very bourgeois and ordinary.’
They planned to go off to the mountains for a while, ‘to see if he is better when he has work’. And that was another problem. The boys who haunted the bars of Berlin waiting for an admirer were longing to be saved, but once this had happened, what next? No question of them spending the day indoors reading a book. In Munich, when Stephen went to the Alte Pinakothek to look at paintings, Harry refused to join him. He went window-shopping instead. ‘He is bored in a rather hopeless kind of way, as boys from town often are.’
Harry Giese was mundane; but Stephen always hoped that one day a working-class crim would produce a poem from his pocket, ‘magical with the mystery of the lights and silver balls of amusement arcades, or smouldering with the passion which chooses a different bed-mate from the pavements every night’.
After Harry, there was a seventeen-year-old Russian stateless boy whom Stephen calls in his letters Georg 101. I have no idea what the 101 stands for, but Georg might have been connected with the school for workers in the Karl-Marx suburb of Berlin where my father taught English for a while.
In 1932 there was a more serious adventure, though it sprang from a ridiculous beginning.
At this point Stephen had been living in Berlin for several months every year next door to Christopher, who was immersed in the material that later became his Berlin stories. But Stephen also kept his presence alive in London, which he visited frequently. Christopher, on one of his rare trips back to England, found that Stephen had been dining out on their Berlin adventures. He panicked. His material was being appropriated. He solemnly told Stephen that Berlin was no longer large enough to accommodate the two of them and their friendship was at an end. Instead of telling Christopher, Don’t be silly, my father was so upset that he ran off to Barcelona to save a German boy who was miserable. They’d never met. Someone at a party in London told Stephen he should go, so off he went.
The boy in question, Hellmut Schroeder, turned out to be a narcissistic former waiter from one of the main hotels in Berlin. He was convinced that he’d been victimized by all the people who’d befriended him. ‘It’s as though all those crowds of people in the square here, and in Berlin, and in the hotels where I have waited, had slimed across me, leaving their tracks like snails.’ The name ‘Hellmut’ means ‘Light-strength’, but in letters written back to Christopher in Berlin, Stephen said he should really be called ‘Dunkelmut’, or ‘Dark-strength’, such was the boy’s melancholia. He’d even become unhappy if Stephen told him he was looking happier today than yesterday.
‘I think that all he needs is to be liked,’ Stephen wrote to Virginia Woolf, ‘so as I like him extremely I shall stay here.’ He preferred the days that were ‘domestic’. Hellmut became gradually less sulky, indeed he attempted to respond to Stephen’s kindness. They began vaguely looking for somewhere to live. House-hunting reassured Hellmut, because it suggested permanence. Yet there was something odd about Stephen’s affection, something that Hellmut felt he had to challenge. ‘We were very affectionate all of yesterday. Yet H. questioned me again, because he is always anxious to prove that I am fond of him, but that my fondness is unlike that of the hundreds of people who have been physically attracted to him.’
Stephen gradually became aware that, in spite of his efforts, he could not become close to Hellmut. He blamed himself. In a rare passage of analysis in his diary, he gives way to self-loathing. ‘I have the stupidity & the intelligence, the openness & the tiresome subtlety of the educated savage.’ There’s a lot of Englishness packed into that one sentence, or at least the Englishness of a certain class and education of the time: ‘The central regret of the person who is intellectual & who realizes that intellectualism has no absolute moral worth is that he is dependent for this realization on his intellect. Therefore he wishes to prostrate himself to a class of people who are unintellectual.’
My father thought that the working class possessed a secret which had been eradicated from the bourgeoisie by education. The working class, having been exploited for the benefit of the bourgeoisie ever since the Industrial Revolution, had managed to keep alive their feelings. Their lack of sexual inhibition was a gift; and sex was the highest form of communication between people. Sex stood at the core of universal brotherhood. Though at an intellectual level he would acknowledge that women also faced the challenge of bringing their sexuality into line with other forms of freedom, to him the sexuality of men was more romantic, more moving. The breadlines consisted of queues of men; women were hardly visible.
In Barcelona, they tried to create a social life. Then Hellmut began to have affairs with other men. At first Stephen was upset, then he was merely bored. He realized he’d been stupid to think he could save him. ‘Hellmut is a nice person, very hysterical, beautiful, uninteresting, sensation-mongering, and second-rate who has the incredibly petit-bourgeois mentality of most German homosexuals.’ Stephen thought that Hellmut was jealous of him, ‘because I am not completely petty and because I live very happily in a world that he cannot reach’.
Enter unexpectedly an alcoholic American writer called Kirk, sent by a friend of Isherwood’s in Berlin. Where Hellmut was difficult, Kirk was impossible. What’s more, they were jealous of each other. ‘