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A house in St John's Wood
In Search of my Parents
By Matthew Spender Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Matthew Spender
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71350-8
CHAPTER 1
A WORLDLY FAILURE
It was W. H. Auden who taught me about adjectives. He stayed with us whenever he came to England. I was nine years old. Scene: 15 Loudoun Road, my parents' house in St John's Wood, eight-thirty in the morning. I was late for school. Wystan, with an air of having already been up for hours, was smoking at the breakfast table, bored or thoughtful, looking out of the window at the tangled ferns of the basement area. Mum and Dad were still in bed, in their bedroom with a large dressing-table on which lurked strange hairbrushes sold recently to Dad by a sadistic hairdresser who had persuaded him he was losing his hair.
I was in a panic over a test due that morning on what an adjective was.
Wystan looked surprised.
'An adjective is any word that qualifies a noun,' he said.
'I know how to say that,' I said. 'But I don't understand what it means.'
He looked around the table, discarded the cereals and found among the debris of the night before a bottle of wine. One object more memorable than the others.
'Ah ... you could say, the good wine,' he said firmly. 'Its goodness qualifies the wine.' Then he thought for a moment, peering at the bottle. 'The wine was good,' he said, correcting himself; and added in a tragic voice, 'now all we have left is an empty bottle.'
That summer, my sister and I had been abandoned on an island off the coast of Wales. I'd liked it. Lots of puffins, a few cormorants and numerous placid sheep. On top of the hill in the middle of this island were three grass tombs of long-dead Vikings, and Bardsey Island had left me with an obsession with barrow-wights and the sinister mystery of Norse ghost stories. Hearing about this later that year, Wystan sent me from New York the Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. I read it straight through.
Auden used to say that he knew where every detail of this trilogy came from and one day he'd write about it. Dad tried it once but he found Tolkien tremendously boring.
Once, Wystan and I wrote Tolkienish poems together, still over breakfast but a few years after the adjectives. I collected them and copied them into a notebook that I decorated with a heraldic crest 'with whiskers', as that kind of shading was called at school. Here are a couple of verses:
God knows what kings and lords,
Had their realms on these downs of chalk,
And now guard their bountiful hoards,
One night you may see them walk.
They walk with creaks and groans
Cloaks fluttering as they go by,
They ride on enormous roans
Which block out the stars and the sky.
Lines two and four of each verse are Auden's. 'Can I use them?' 'Of course.' I got the impression that words could be seized out of the air and given generously from one person to another.
My frequent readings of The Lord of the Rings always featured Wystan in there somewhere. The kind but didactic Wizard. In this earliest phase of knowing Wystan I intuitively grasped his own self-image as a young man, which was that of 'Uncle Wiz', an eccentric Victorian vicar with a bee in his bonnet about the Apocrypha. He didn't want to be taken seriously every inch of the way. He liked to pontificate, but he also wanted be teased about it in return. It was part of his longing for universal love, a very strong need he had.
* * *
Wystan knew a great deal about our family. There's a story of him running round and round the aspidistra at our house in Hampstead when he was a little boy. He was my uncle Michael's friend at Gresham's, Holt, the school they both attended. They were two years older than Stephen, who only met Wystan when they were undergraduates at Oxford.
At Gresham's, Michael and Wystan had sat through a memorable occasion when Harold Spender came down to give the boys a pep talk. My grandfather read the parable of the Prodigal Son, and when he came to the words, 'But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him,' Harold looked lovingly at his son Michael, perched at the keyboard of the organ in full view. I think Wystan must have remembered this story because, without intending to, Harold had for a moment become 'camp'. Anyway, it was Wystan's story. My father was at the under-school of Gresham's at the time so he did not witness this memorable scene.
Having thus embarrassed his eldest son, my grandfather continued with a stirring sermon along the lines of 'On, and always on!' (It's the title of the last chapter of his autobiography.) There was a boy-scout element to Harold and he wanted to inspire these youngsters with manliness. But it did not go down well. It was just after the First World War during which many former pupils had lost their lives. Their names glowed freshly on the oak panels behind him.
'You killed him, my dear,' said Wystan over supper at Loudoun Road, around the time when we wrote the Tolkien poems together. And when Dad started laughing, he said firmly, 'You killed him by ignoring him.' Dad stopped laughing and looked annoyed. He'd never believed Auden's theory that sickness, or even death, comes from damage to the psyche: that heart disease comes from an inability to love, that cancer comes from 'foiled creative fire'. He called this aspect of Auden's imagination 'medieval'. In this case Wystan – smiling at Dad with benign condescension – was saying that the young Spender boys had killed their father with snubs.
* * *
I don't know why my father had such difficulties with his parents, but it might have had something to do with the anger of young people towards the older generation, which they held collectively responsible for the disaster of the First World War. How could anyone believe in the world of 'clean thoughts in clean bodies' after that? Stephen hated his father. He thought he was a failure. He was only seventeen years old when Harold died, so his relationship was frozen in an adolescent image where Harold was the hieratic statue that had to be toppled from its pedestal. If 'killing the father' is an essential part of growing up, Stephen did his early.
It was easy to mock this man who could never earn enough money to keep his family going and who yearned for unattainable positions of power. But the bitterness with which Stephen writes in his novels and his poems about 'failure' meant that, at some level, he subscribed to Harold's romantic notion of life as a series of peaks, of challenges, of high aspirations and magnificent achievements. 'Failure' was Stephen's way of defeating his father, but it also kept alive Harold's scale of values.
When Stephen was twelve, Harold stood as a Liberal candidate in a general election. My father remembered being hauled around Bath in a pony-carriage with his two brothers, each with a placard round his neck saying 'Vote for Daddy'. Harold lost, and the effect on Michael and Stephen was traumatic. Michael said: 'When they are very young, the children of a public man worship their father for being famous – a kind of god: but it's extraordinary how soon they get to realize it if he's a public failure.' Michael developed a stammer. He decided that his father was 'inefficient', which in his eyes was the worst thing a man could be. Stephen, instead, just couldn't stop crying. It confirmed his suspicion that his father was a windbag whose exhortations of 'on and ever on' were meaningless.
Harold Spender's wife, my grandmother Violet Schuster, came from a successful Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany to England in the 1860s. At the time of their marriage, the Schusters established a trust for Violet and her children – a long document camouflaging the fact that Harold wasn't allowed to touch it.
Violet was a delicate woman who gave birth to four children in four years, one after the other. She died in 1922, at home, on the kitchen table, after an operation to remedy complications deriving from a hysterectomy. For years she'd struggled with a condition that could not be named. Her death was a great shock. Until then she had been able to run the house (peremptorily) and accompany her husband on his frequent trips to Europe and America.
My father's 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A house in St John's Wood by Matthew Spender. Copyright © 2015 Matthew Spender. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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