John Sutherland
Stephen Spender:
The Authorized Biography.
Oxford, 627 pages, $40

Stephen Spender
New Collected Poems,
edited by Michael Brett.
Faber & Faber, 393 pages, £30

There have been two previous biographical studies of Sir Stephen Spender (1909–1995). The first, by Hugh David (1992), was a hatchet job which caused the family great distress. The second, David Leeming’s Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism (1999), was more respectable, but it was still too frank about Spender’s bisexuality for the comfort of some. This is odd, since Spender was open about the matter himself in his autobiography, World Within World (1951), and his autobiographical novel The Temple, first drafted in the early 1930s but published, in a revised version, only in 1988. It will be noticed that these accounts stop early in Spender’s life, and it seems there was a feeling that the undeniable happiness of Spender’s second marriage should not be overshadowed, in the public mind, by the admission that he continued to feel strong, even passionate, attachments to younger men.

John Sutherland, who knew Spender well during the latter’s brief professorship at University College, London, has written, as his subtitle proclaims, not just “an” but the authorized biography. He has had access not only to the family papers but also to Spender’s widow and his two surviving siblings. This gives his picture of Spender’s childhood and youth, in particular, unrivaled interest and authority, even if his account of the later years is circumspect in places and needs supplementing by Leeming’s book.

Nevertheless, Sutherland’s “official” status also obliges him to maintain, and perhaps even to believe, that Spender is a significant poet. The belief cannot survive a reading of the Collected Poems in Michael Brett’s new edition, which, for the first time, gives us Spender’s entire output in unrevised form. Spender’s own ruthlessly selective “collected” poems is about half the length of Brett’s, and one has to grant him a degree of self-criticism, but what he left in was not much better than what he dropped. Sutherland’s disdain for “the sterile hand of F. R. Leavis and his fanatically purist disciples” (I’d be interested to meet a half-hearted purist, by the way) is entirely misplaced. Spender’s current standing in England, as a minor satellite of Auden, known through a few anthology pieces but largely of historical interest only, is perfectly fair. His criticism is that of a gentleman amateur, who can speak strongly of his own experiences and acquaintances and who has a broad, generous sympathy with European modernism—the modernism of Rilke (whom he translated) and Pasternak as well as of Eliot and Auden. His freedom from donnish pedantry is a blessing, but he had little gift for sustained thinking, whether in prose or poetry.

In 1976, when Spender was sixty-seven, he embarked on a relationship with a twenty-year-old student at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He wrote about this in some of his last poems, “Letter from an Ornithologist in Antarctica” and “Farewell to my Student,” which contains these lines:

Perhaps Bellini
Delved from antiquity such an image
Of a twenty-year-old Triton, against waves
Blowing on a conch;
And Seurat, centuries later, in the profile
Of a hallooing boy against the Seine.

               But then you turned to me and said
With that mild glance, a third thing to remember:
“You are gone already, your thoughts are far from here
At least three thousand miles away
Where you will be tomorrow.”

Then ten years passed till, today, I write these lines.

One notices here that Spender offers two pictures, drawn from Bellini and Seurat, which most readers will identify, and then parallels them with a flat reminiscence. The external images are expected to animate a memory he can only report, not evoke or make moving for a third person. To be blunt, he is parasitic upon other men’s creativity. The poem achieves at best a clumsy authenticity. In this it is representative of Spender’s work when it is not simply bad. I realize that I am asking the reader to take a great deal on trust here, given that Brett’s Collected Poems runs to nearly four hundred pages, but great swathes of the volume are barely readable. Spender’s alternative to gawky plainness was a wildly undisciplined use of metaphor, often toppling over into the grotesque, the risible, or the meaningless. A frequently cited anecdote in World Within World documents a conversation with Eliot:

At our first luncheon he asked me what I wanted to do. I said: “Be a poet.” “I can quite understand you wanting to write poems, but I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘being a poet.’”

Sutherland’s comment is, “Stephen knew what he meant.” Precisely: that was just the trouble.

Spender’s father, Harold, was another trouble, a figure he spent his whole life trying to exorcise. One of his best poems, “The Ambitious Son,” was prompted by his father’s death. It has a sureness of touch and a controlled fury very rare for him:

Old man, with hair made of newspaper cutting
And the megaphone voice,
Dahlia in the public mind, strutting
Like a canary before a clapping noise …

Soon you lay in your grave like a crumpled clown
Eaten by worms, by quicklime forgotten,
Fake, untragic …

Harold Spender, a double First from Oxford, a moderately successful journalist, lecturer, and Liberal loyalist, married into money, was painfully conscious of being supported by his wife, and idolized his eldest son, Michael—a frigid prig incapable of humor, who despised his siblings. Harold wrote Stephen off as “flabby” and “unmanly.” In turn, Stephen indicted Harold’s “ignorant windbaggery … everything my father touched turned to rhetorical abstraction” (a fault from which his own poetry is not free). Harold Spender was a cultural philistine, propelling his children past Renoir nudes in the galleries with a cry of “Boiled lobsters, don’t look!” He was appalled to find Stephen reading that dangerous radical, Bernard Shaw. It was left to Spender’s maternal grandmother, who kept a beady eye on the accounts, to introduce him to Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg, thus ensuring that his concept of modern literature would be European and not parochial.

At preparatory school Spender was bullied and miserable, comparing himself to St. Stephen the martyr. Only the music master was kind to him, and he retained a cultivated interest in music all his life. University College School, London, proved a more liberal and humane environment, but the boy was repressed and morbidly self-conscious: “I had learned that the whole of civilization was based on the concealment of physical acts,” he wrote, and again: “My body seemed skewered on the gaze of everyone I passed in the streets.” He began to contribute poems to the school magazine, and to read Freud and Joyce in reaction against his father’s Victorianism.

In 1927 he went up to University College, Oxford (Shelley’s old college—the comparison was duly made) to read History, but changed after two terms to Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Here Spender rediscovered the unpleasantly arrogant and oafish types of his prep school days. The college was filled with hearty sportsmen, whose reaction to the reproductions of Klee and Gauguin in his rooms may be imagined. He fell in love with a fellow undergraduate only to be informed that he was a bore. Rescue came when he was introduced to W. H. Auden, then an undergraduate at Christ Church but already hailed as the best poet of his generation. Auden was cruel, telling Spender that he was valuable because he was “infinitely capable of being humiliated,” and also, less reliably, that his great height had come about because “you want to escape from your balls.” Nevertheless, to be accepted, even maliciously, by Auden, guaranteed that Spender became known as a poet, and a pamphlet of his work was published. He neglected his studies so much that he failed to obtain even a pass degree, an achievement which took something like genius in 1920s Oxford. He did not care: “I don’t want to be efficient and have a trained mind any more than I want to be a motor-car.”

The subsequent events—his sexual liberation in the twilight of Weimar Germany, his disastrous first marriage, his support for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, his fire-fighting activities during the Blitz, his postwar work in Berlin for the Allied Control Commission, his role in UNESCO, his stream of lectureships at home and abroad—are all chronicled by Sutherland with, at times, excessive attention to detail. About half the book is taken up with the period up to 1940, a deliberate imbalance because Spender is so much a man of the 1930s. His later career was as a teacher of creative writing, a cultural influence through his editorship of Horizon and Encounter (which he long refused to believe was indirectly funded by the CIA), and, of course, as a reader of his own work.

He continued to write poems but felt increasingly ignored, and he never escaped the baleful influence of Auden, whose prodigious abilities could only be resisted by a profounder creativity than Spender possessed. Others in Auden’s circle, such as Christopher Isherwood, found their own voice through prose. Spender’s prose was at least workmanlike but he had no ear for cadence, no sense of the aesthetic organization of a sentence or paragraph. Besides, he was so set on “being a poet.” He knew what he owed to Auden and managed to give it moving expression in a late poem, “Auden’s Funeral,” in which he remembers Chester Kallman putting on a record of “Siegfried’s Funeral March” at the wake:

Down-crashing drums and cymbals cataclysmic
End-of-world brass exalt on drunken waves
The poet’s corpse borne on a bier beyond
The foundering finalities, his world,
To that Valhalla where the imaginings
Of the dead makers are their lives.
The dreamer sleeps forever with the dreamed.

The slightly fusty diction, the Miltonian inversion of “cymbals cataclysmic,” and the Tennysonian lilt are oddly touching.

In the end, the irony is that Spender remained in some ways a Victorian like his rejected father. The scion of a high-minded Liberal family, with a tireless social conscience and a great capacity for friendship, he may well ultimately have valued human beings more than literature—in one sense, an entirely honorable position, but it enfeebled his writing. He found the variety of modernism represented by the “Movement” poets trivial, and (fortunately for him) literary theory passed him by completely. He looked to America to provide the true inheritors of the titans of his youth, admiring Roethke and Anne Sexton (whom he taught), less convinced by Lowell. But, never having acquired much intellectual discipline, he tended to react by intuition alone. He liked what he liked because he liked it: his approval was self-validating. This means that, if we are not drawn to him personally, we shall find it hard to share his enthusiasms or to respect his judgments. John Sutherland, who clearly does like him and cherishes his memory, never really asks himself how he might persuade the unconverted, while Michael Brett unintentionally presents much of the evidence for the opposition.

On the day of his death, Spender was working on a lecture he had agreed to give about Robert Graves. He was amazed, he told his wife, at Graves’s gullibility, but perhaps this “was all an act.” “These,” Sutherland adds, “were his last recorded words.” Spender had always had a nose for fakes, from his father onwards. He himself, although often, as he would admit, muddled and self-contradictory, emerges from Sutherland’s book as an honest man trying to be true to his impressions and to live a dignified life. It is just a pity that the poetry remains, even after one has tried one’s hardest to find merits in it, so largely dead on the page. Thanks to these two books, however, he has had what he once said he wished for: “I want a few poems to survive and some memoir of myself as distinct from any group.”

Paul Dean is Head of English at Dragon School, Oxford and a Fellow of the English Association