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

‘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 bought a little printing press, and in the basement of the family house in Hampstead he set up a group of Auden’s poems. These were the first poems of Auden’s to 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.’

2

WITHOUT GUILT

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.

In Hamburg he went through one unsatisfactory night of love with his host, a rich and cultured young German who ‘collected’ writers. Stephen wrote about it in 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 equipment. ‘Within this inner world even weakness could become a 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.’