The Arts in Britain : No. 1

Contents:
Conditions in which Poets Have Worked
Conditions of British Poets in War Compared with those of Poets in Europe
T. S. Eliot's "Four Quarters"
Miss Edith Sitwell
Other Poets of an Elder Generation
Robert Graves
Edwin Muir
W. H. Auden and the Poets of the 'Thirties
Day Lewis, MacNeice and Spender
William Empson and Others
Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne
Poets who Have Become Known Since 1939
Regionalism


Spender, Sir Stephen Harold (1909–1995), poet, was born on 28 February 1909 at 47 Campden House Court, London, the son of (Edward) Harold Spender (1864–1926), a journalist and author, and his wife, Violet Hilda, née Schuster (1878–1921), daughter of Ernest Joseph Schuster (1850–1924), barrister, and his wife, Hilda Weber, daughter of Sir Herman Weber, physician...

In May of his final year at Oxford Spender published Twenty Poems, which was well received. T. S. Eliot invited him to contribute to The Criterion. Having spectacularly failed his final exams he left for other education in Hamburg in June 1930. Over the next few years he wrote and rewrote his Bildungsroman, The Temple. Its frank depiction of homosexual love rendered it unpublishable in the UK. Eliot, meanwhile, urged him to write poetry. On a visit to England at Christmas 1930 Spender met John Lehmann, and embarked on a long and often vexed friendship. Early in 1931 he moved from Hamburg to Berlin, to be with Isherwood; this was a relationship which, if not always harmonious, was important to both men until after the Second World War.

Spender's reputation was lifted by the appearance of his poems (notably ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’) in Michael Roberts's New Signatures in February 1931. Late in 1932 Spender returned to England to see his Faber collection (Poems, 1933) through the press. A temporary rift with Isherwood led to a withdrawn dedication. On publication in January 1933 the book was a huge success confirming Eliot's verdict that ‘If Auden is the satirist of this poetical renascence, Spender is its lyric poet’ (dustjacket).

Late in 1933 Spender embarked on a permanent love relationship with a Welsh former guardsman, Tony Hyndman (1911–1980) (Jimmy Younger in World within World). Settled in Maida Vale, Spender cultivated relations at this period with the Bloomsbury set. Among his younger friends were J. R. Ackerley, William Plomer, Cecil Day Lewis, and the Lehmanns (Rosamond and John).

Early in spring 1934, holidaying with Hyndman near Dubrovnik (and working on his study of Henry James, The Destructive Element, published in 1935), Spender met Muriel Gardiner (1901–1985). She was American, rich, a divorcee, and studying to be a psychoanalyst. When Hyndman, a few weeks later in May, fell ill with appendicitis she arranged for treatment in Vienna. The Austrian capital was seething with street battles between the communists and the fascists. Gardiner was involved with the leftist underground smuggling of refugees to safety. She and Spender became lovers. ‘I find boys much more attractive, in fact I am rather more than usually susceptible, but actually I find the actual sexual act with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting, and, in fact, more everything’, Spender informed a disapproving Isherwood (MS letter, 14 September 1934, Huntington Library). Spender's relationship with Gardiner was complicated by the presence of Hyndman and ended when, in spring 1935, she fell in love with the Austrian socialist Joseph Buttinger, whom she later married.

Spender finished The Destructive Element in July 1934 and went on to publish his long political poem Vienna for Faber in November. This eminently unlyrical work pleased neither T. S. Eliot nor the reviewers, but his critical writing was well received and led to a lifelong friendship with Cyril Connolly.

Between November 1935 and March 1936 Spender embarked on an experiment in communitarian living in Cintra, Portugal, with Christopher Isherwood, and their partners Hyndman and Heinz Neddermeyer. The experiment failed. In April 1936 Faber published Spender's book of short stories The Burning Cactus, to mixed reviews (Rosamond Lehmann found them brilliant, but ‘terribly cranky’).

Germany had collapsed into fascism and Spain was embroiled in civil war. Spender seized the moment with a ‘political book’ for Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club, Forward from Liberalism (1937). In September 1936 Spender broke with Hyndman and the two men ceased living together. A few weeks later, early in October, he fell in love with Inez Maria Pearn (1914–1977), a modern languages postgraduate at Oxford. They married on 15 December. In the same month Hyndman joined the International Brigade in Spain.

Forward from Liberalism brought Spender to the notice of the Communist Party. They needed, as Harry Pollitt put it, ‘their Byron’. Spender was disinclined to lay down his life, but he agreed to undertake an investigatory trip to southern Spain. On his return, in February, he announced in the Daily Worker that he had joined the party, but he almost immediately let his membership lapse. In April 1937 he went to Spain again, ostensibly to work for a republican radio station in Valencia. He was increasingly concerned about the fate of Hyndman who, after the battle of the Jarama, had deserted and was in custody. Spender's experiences in Spain were profoundly disillusioning. They produced the finest of his (anti-)war poems: ‘The Coward’ and ‘Ultima ratio regum’. He finally succeeded in extricating Hyndman in July 1937. His marriage during these months came under strain. Spender made one last trip to Spain in July 1937 as a delegate to the second international congress of writers in Madrid. It led to his total severance from the Communist Party.

On his return to Britain, Spender studied painting with the Euston Road group and undertook a course of psychoanalysis with Karen Stephen. He worked with J. B. Leishmann on a translation of Rilke, published as Duino Elegies in 1939, and joined Rupert Doone's Group Theatre as literary director. In March 1938 the company produced his verse play, Trial of a Judge. His long-awaited second collection of verse, The Still Centre (1939), established him as the leading poet of his generation still in Britain, Auden having left for America.

The strains in Spender's marriage climaxed in August 1939 when Inez eloped with the poet Charles Madge, whom she later married. The Second World War broke out a fortnight later. Out of this period of breakdown Spender produced his confessional September Journal. At the same time he completed his novel The Backward Son (published in April 1940) and joined with Connolly, and the rich patron Peter Watson, to set up the literary magazine Horizon.

In summer 1940 Spender met the 21-year-old concert pianist Natasha Litvin (b. 1919), whom he subsequently married on 9 April 1941. Slightly over-age and wholly unfit for military service, he failed his medical exam twice and spent the winter of 1940 teaching at Blundell's School in Devon. By ‘pulling strings’ he finally contrived to get himself in the Auxiliary Fire Service and began his basic training in September 1941. In slack periods over the next three years' service he wrote poetry, reviewed extensively, and organized educational programmes for his fellow firemen. His publications include Ruins and Visions (1942, chronicling his recent breakdown and recovery), the sonnet sequence Spiritual Explorations (1943), and the manifesto Life and the Poet (1942).

In July 1944 Spender transferred to the Foreign Office's political intelligence department. In March 1945 he and his wife had their first child, Matthew, and moved to the house in St John's Wood which was their home for the next fifty years. On 11 May 1945 Squadron Leader Michael Spender was killed in a flying accident. A deeply affected Stephen wrote the elegy ‘Seascape’ for a brother with whom his relationship had always been difficult.

With peace, Spender took up service with the control commission—charged with restoring civil order to Germany. Out of his work in 1945 for this body he wrote his reportage volume European Witness (1946). His personal life was meanwhile darkened by the lingering death of his brother Humphrey's wife, Margaret, from Hodgkin's disease, at Christmas 1945. His ‘Elegy for Margaret’—an ambitious sequence—headed Poems of Dedication, was published in 1947.

On leaving the control commission late in 1945 Spender was appointed literary counsellor to the newly established UNESCO in Paris. He held this post until early in 1947 when he accepted an invitation to teach (from September 1947 to July 1948) at Sarah Lawrence College in New York State. After teaching ended Spender undertook an extensive travel and lecturing itinerary across the US. Through Auden he met Frieda Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, and she invited him to use the remote ‘Lawrence Ranch’ for writing. This he did, from September to October 1948, producing the first drafts of World within World and his political memoir for Arthur Koestler's and Richard Crossman's collection The God that Failed (published in January 1950). World within World (published in April 1951) is candid about his relations with his father, his brother Michael, his friends Auden and Isherwood, his wives, and—most controversially—Tony Hyndman. The book was a best-seller, clearing 50,000 copies in its first year.

In December 1949 Spender brought out The Edge of Being and the critical tide turned against him. He resolved ‘not to run the gauntlet of another volume of poetry ever again’ (unpublished journal). Over the next years Spender would undertake numerous international trips for the British Society for Cultural Freedom, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and PEN.

In 1952, following a trip to Israel, Spender published a book on the new state, Learning Laughter, and from February to June 1953 he occupied the Elliston chair at the University of Cincinnati giving the lectures on modernism published as The Creative Element (1953). Later in 1953 he accepted (from the CCF) the invitation to serve as ‘English editor’ for the new monthly magazine Encounter. His co-editor was the American Irving Kristol. The first issue of the magazine came out in October 1953 and for the fourteen years of his co-editorship, Spender was hoodwinked as to the financing of the journal...

Spender's mobility was curtailed by a serious accident in 1980, and a collapse of health in 1994, after which he did not travel again.

Stephen Spender died at his home, 15 Loudoun Road, St John's Wood, London, of heart failure, on 16 July 1995; he was cremated and his ashes were subsequently buried at St Mary's, Paddington Green, on 21 July. Although he was subjected to more satire and sarcasm than most famous modern poets (particularly by the followers of F. R. Leavis), few who knew him well seem not to have loved him.
-- John Sutherland, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography