In an age of bravely honest kiss-and-tell memoirs, it is hard to overstate how bravely honest Matthew Spender’s book is. It is the most truthful account we have had of the poet Stephen Spender and an unusually candid book for any son to write about his parents. It is also fearless in its self-exposure. We learn that Matthew Spender had a mastectomy after misguidedly breastfeeding an abandoned kitten; we are presented with a full list of the women he has loved.
Stephen Spender’s credibility has declined in the two decades since his death following attempts to sanitise both his political and sexual reputation. Having sacrificed much of her life for her husband, his widow, Natasha, insisted on preserving the myth of Spender as a contentedly uxorious heterosexual who knew nothing of the CIA funding of his magazine Encounter.
John Sutherland’s 2004 biography of Spender was unusually engaging, but a book that acknowledged Natasha as almost “a co-author” could not tell the whole truth. When Sutherland and I edited Spender’s journals a few years later, we were encouraged by Matthew to include some controversial passages. Nonetheless, there were very few journal entries that addressed either Spender’s homosexuality or his response to the Encounter revelations.
Now Matthew writes frankly about Spender’s sexuality and politics for the first time. The opening pages portray Matthew drawing angry pictures of his mother’s corpse while waiting for the undertaker. This sets the tone in a book that probes insightfully into the neuroses, compromises and strange mutual dependency of Stephen and Natasha while also analysing the complexity of the narrator’s.
Matthew shirks none of the crucial issues. We learn categorically that Spender did know about the CIA funding and that he did have gay affairs during his marriage, though this didn’t mean that he wished to divorce Natasha and live with a man, except at a few impassioned moments.
Impressively, Matthew is detached enough to see the humour of the events he describes and the results are often hilarious. Editing the journals, I suspected that there had been more affairs than I knew about, but I did not expect as many as his son reveals. I certainly did not know that Natasha had a long, intense but non-consummated quasi-affair with Raymond Chandler, whose love-sick letters to her are quoted here.
At the heart of the book is a brilliantly paced account of the Spender family’s Christmas in 1956. Chandler has persuaded Natasha to accompany him to Arizona for a period of mutual recovery (his alcoholism, her whiplash). “You could lie in the big double bed and rest and I could feed you,” he tells her, though when she arrives and gets into his car the first thing he does is crash into a fence. While she is gone, Stephen invites Reynolds Price, an aspiring young writer, to spend Christmas with him and his children. For 10 days, Price entertains the family, while Stephen makes no mention of his absent wife. “If there was a Mrs Spender, where was she?” Price commented, looking back. Stephen is pleased to receive a letter from Chandler suggesting Natasha stay for longer, stressing the need for them to “get this girl well” together. He meanwhile suggests Price move in with him, so that they can take on the roles of Verlaine and Rimbaud and “go to the furthest possible degree of every kind of exploration and exploitation of one another”.
This is all great fun but may leave the reader wondering if it is, ultimately, entertaining higher gossip. I think it has significance, though, because the Spender we see through the letters to Price and Matthew’s recollections is so much more honest and likable than the Spender presented to us in recent years. The power of Stephen Spender’s best writing, whether it’s the poetry, stories or journals, is in its honesty, its willingness to face uncomfortable and contradictory truths in examining experience.
He knew this himself and as a result he would have liked to be more honest. It was for the sake of the woman whom he knew he had wronged in marrying with insufficient desire that he did his best to remain as publicly respectable as she wanted him to be. Because his best work tends to be personal, it is easier to admire it when there are no longer awkward unspoken half-truths occluding his image.
The book also matters in its own right, for its insight not just into this family but into how we are all shaped by the strangeness of the families we find ourselves inhabiting, showing the possibilities and limits of filial love and loyalty. Matthew’s often reluctant love for his parents imbues his writing, even when he is most frustrated by them. Mentally, he is prepared to defend his father against his mother’s accusations of selfishness and his mother against his father’s accusations of brittleness and snobbishness. He can see that his parents probably shouldn’t have married but doesn’t think they did too bad a job of bringing him up. He seems to have come through remarkably unscathed, though the years of secrecy have left him with a horror of untold truths that seems to have provided the motivation for this remarkable book.
A House in St John’s Wood is published by Harper Collins (£25). Click here to order a copy for £20
