A shrewd goose
Francis King
STEPHEN SPENDER: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by John Sutherland Viking, £25, pp. 627, ISBN 0670883034
In the second paragraph of this biography, John Sutherland claims 'literary greatness' for his subject. This may at once cause the reader to pause. Spender once wrote, 'I think continually of those who were truly great'; but was he one of those truly great himself? Geoffrey Grigson, who always took pleasure in demolishing fellow writers even when they were friends, described him as 'the Rupert Brooke of the Depression'. But since, like Spender himself, Rupert Brooke has been cruelly underestimated in recent years, the judgment is less damning than Grigson clearly intended it to be.
Like Brooke at the outbreak of the first world war, so Spender in the troubled Thirties became an icon for the young; like Brooke's, the poems of his youth, so full of romantic ardour, will continue to be remembered and loved. But just as Brooke cannot be considered the equal of Wilfred Owen, so Spender cannot be considered the equal of Auden. When one reads the elegantly produced New Collected Poems one is all too often queasily aware of an awkward or banal line intruding into something otherwise inspired.
To read this book is rather like being handed a beautifully composed and impeccably focused photograph — such as Spender's brother Humphrey, a professional photographer, might have taken — from which an important area has been snipped out. This area belongs to the second half of the book, when the author deals with his subject's life both as a happily married man and as this country's most energetic and successful literary ambassador at large.
Before that watershed, perhaps because Spender himself was so frank about his early years, we learn as much about his private life as about his public one. After it, what happens is the exact reverse of what happens halfway through Peter Parker's recent biography of Isherwood. The second half of Parker's book threatens to weary the reader with its detailing of one sexual attachment after another; the second half of Sutherland's threatens to have the same nar
cotic effect with its detailing of every event in its subject's public life. Spender himself once wrote of 'the dark and ambiguous experiences which are the night side of my day'. Of those experiences this second half tells one virtually nothing.
Spender frequently decried the 'publishing scoundrels' determined to pry into the private lives of not merely the dead but also the living. In old age he had to endure Hugh David's inaccurate, ill-researched and venomous attempt at a biography, and David Leavitt's roman a clef, an important section of which the American author had based on Spender's own autobiography, surprisingly candid for its time, World Within World, in what Paul Johnson described at the time as 'saturnine cannibalism'. Spender summed up his attitude to books of this sort when he stated, 'The feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.' It may be that in touching so tangentially and so faintly — or sometimes not at all — on relationships vitally important to Spender during his married years, Sutherland was bearing this in mind. It may also be that he suffered the constraints endured by almost every 'authorised' biographer.
What Sutherland does convey — and rightly — is the enduring happiness of Spender's marriage to his beautiful, intelligent and capable second wife Natasha. The marriage, like Michael Redgrave's, was a structure always strong enough to contain the transitory male infatuations and even lasting friendships that intruded into it. Interestingly, the great love of Spender's youth — the charming, totally unreliable exguardsman, Tony Hyndman, whom the poet courageously went to Spain to rescue from execution as an International Brigade deserter — later became Redgrave's lover.
Cyril Connolly identified two Spenders. Spender 1 was 'an inspired simpleton', 'a great big silly goose, 'a holy Russian idiot'. Spender 2 was `shrewd, ambitious, aggressive, ruthless'. Sutherland regards this is as 'a malicious ... compliment'. But it was precisely these dichotomies that made Spender such a fascinating because perpetually surprising friend.
Since wit and high spirits are always difficult to convey at second hand, this biogra
phy, written with unfaltering professionalism, never succeeds in fully conveying the joy of Spender's company. From time to time people would complain, as they did of a no less entertaining talker, Angus Wilson, that he hogged the conversation. But if someone is constantly amusing over a dinner table, it is surely preferable to listen to him holding forth non-stop than to be bored by the other guests.
Spender's social activities can only fill one with wonder at his stamina. Sutherland records that his hated father would urge him and his siblings to reach for the stars. Spender determinedly carried out this injunction, though not perhaps precisely as his father had intended it. Now he was with the Devonshires at Chatsworth, now with the Rothschilds at Château Mouton, now with the Lamberts on their yacht. One evening we find him and Natasha entertaining to dinner Oona and Charlie Chaplin, Clarissa Eden (at the time when Eden was prime minister), Harold Nicolson, Elizabeth Jane Howard and James Pope-Hennessy. A new dining table is bought for the occasion. His public activities were no less frenetic. Like a grasshopper overdosed on speed, he would jump from attending a congress in Japan, to giving a lecture in Israel, to reading his poetry in Greece.
It is easy to mock at all this — and over the years people often did so. But it would be wrong to regard it merely as selfpromotion. As Sutherland constantly demonstrates — and as I repeatedly witnessed for myself — Spender was genuinely one of those people for whom, as Keats put it, 'the miseries of the world are miseries and will not let them rest'. He wrote some memorable fiction, some fine poems and a remarkable autobiography of his early years. But, whether attacking human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, going to the aid of some writer imprisoned for his views, or founding Index on Censorship, he also never ceased to attempt to improve the lot of his fellows. It was in that rote, rather than in his poetry, that, beyond any dispute, he showed an element of greatness.
New Collected Poems by Stephen Spender, edited by Michael Brett, is published by Faber at .60, pp. 392, ISBN 057122279X
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