A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  Stephen sent ‘Escaped’, his second novel, to Christopher Isherwood for criticism. He’d met Christopher in Auden’s room in a scene that has been described so many times it’s not worth mentioning, except to say that everyone behaved in character. Stephen was bumbling and enthusiastic, Christopher was clipped and professional. Christopher read ‘Escaped’ and responded with a tough letter. He’d seen some of the sections before as independent pieces, he wrote, and he’d liked them. But they did not add up to a novel and the last section was ‘complete trash’. Stephen’s narrator was mad, and Stephen himself was anything but that. Madmen were boring, wrote Christopher, because they had no connection with reality. The material was too close to the author. ‘You are right down in the scrum with your characters, not up in the grand-stand.’ He must learn the craft of writing. A novel had to add up to more than a paraphrase of real events.

  Stephen was not offended. He took for granted that Christopher was the Master. In 1930, after Stephen had left Oxford (without having obtained a degree), he joined Christopher in Berlin and set about rewriting The Temple. Their relationship – Isherwood makes it clear in Christopher and His Kind – was that of ‘teacher and pupil’. In their later reminiscences, both writers tinged these roles with irony. Stephen took Christopher’s letters as if they’d been red-hot bulletins from a front where literature was being deployed like guns. Isherwood emphasized the huge difference in their relative heights, so the taller pupil would have to bend down to hear whatever words of wisdom the Master might be whispering. But the underlying fact remains: Spender needed to learn from Isherwood. This made him more patient, respectful, even deferential towards Isherwood than he ever was towards Auden. He even followed Isherwood’s diet of lung soup and toffee, with dreadful results for his teeth.

  Stephen saw that Christopher never paraphrased real events. He did something more mysterious: he made events happen. ‘Christopher, so far from being the self-effacing spectator he depicts in his novels, was really the centre of his characters, and neither could they exist without him nor he without them.’ Isherwood lived in a nimbus of his own fiction, like an illustration in a Victorian magazine showing Dickens at a table with Mr Pickwick and Mrs Haversham floating in the air above him; only in Christopher’s case his characters were real people walking about in the same room as himself.

  In the early phase of Isherwood’s years in Berlin, he wrote about England. It was painful for him, because he had a profound hatred for that country, which he imagined to be populated by The Enemy – his word for the restrictions of convention.

  On one occasion soon after they’d met, Stephen told him a funny story about a recent clash in Oxford between himself and the academics, the patronizing Wykehamists, the future Foreign Office mandarins. Christopher responded violently. He’d like to take all those beautiful places, like Venice or Oxford or Cambridge, and blow them up with dynamite. Not because they were ugly. On the contrary, they were beautiful. But on top of that beauty The Enemy had constructed good taste, appreciation, weighing things judiciously and ending up with nothing. ‘The whole system was to him one which denied affection and which was based largely on fear of sex.’

  It was a question of Them against Us. Real feelings were accessible only to the few, said Christopher. ‘The poets, the creative writers, the healers, and a few simple people, workers who express themselves in their work, women who have been truly loved, saints and sensualists – are the lords of life. Everyone else is a slave, and the Happy Few who have really lived their experiences and made them a part of themselves, and who don’t just discuss things and reason about them, know it.’ The slaves could destroy the Happy Few. They could ruin your life, they could ‘hem you in with rules and inhibitions which you almost persuade yourself to accept as necessary’. Stephen mustn’t fall for it. He mustn’t allow the formality of Englishness to smother his emotional life. ‘In England, chastity is a puritan myth. It’s a huge conspiracy to pretend that a whole side of human nature in ourselves and others doesn’t exist.’

  Stephen took what he wanted from this diatribe, but neither then nor later did he want to lose contact with England. Nor was he prepared to abandon art galleries and concert halls merely because The Enemy might form part of the audience. Christopher says of himself: ‘He had grown to hate the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts.’ This wasn’t true of Stephen, who heard all the great pre-war musicians in Berlin or Salzburg, where he went for a fortnight every summer with Isaiah Berlin, whom he’d also met at Oxford. Isaiah at this point in his life was hesitating about a career as an academic, and he admired the courage with which Stephen threw himself into amorous adventures; and also, a little later, into predicaments that had sombre political implications.

  During his earlier visit to Hamburg, Stephen had made friends with the German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. Plump, cordial, slightly pompous but also affectionate, this man held the keys to German literature, which Stephen had never studied at school. It was also flattering that Curtius admired Stephen as a writer. ‘It is a wonderful thing to meet a young poet, gifted as you are; a child of the sun,’ wrote Curtius soon after they’d met. ‘It has been an unlooked-for revelation.’ He was sure that Stephen’s energy would last, unlike that of most young talent. ‘You have got power – “to run a factory on” – and purity (a purity of a new, much wanted kind). Both these things show in your verse as well as in your person.’ The letter is serious in a very German way, as if their relationship existed beyond their individual participation in it.

  The ‘purity’ of which he speaks took into consideration the adventurous life that Stephen had begun to lead in Hamburg. Curtius loved hearing about the bad boys who waited for clients in the bars around the docks of the huge industrial port. Stephen told one story about the experience of being robbed – Christopher later appropriated it in one of his Berlin stories – and Curtius just thought it was amusing. It was neither shocking nor tragic, this scene from the lower depths. It was merely absurd.

  Later, thinking about this incident, Stephen tried to understand why he’d found it impossible to think of himself as a victim. Being richer and better educated than the robber, there was a certain Robin Hood justice in being fleeced by him. Even while he was being robbed, Stephen could pity the robber. Stephen’s inner world was inviolable. Whatever was stolen, the robber couldn’t take away the advantages that society had given him.

  This generosity of exploitee to exploiter was a kind of selfishness, Stephen thought, as though the robber’s faults were ‘projections of my own guilt’. But being feeble about an unfortunate experience could also become a part of his professional equipment. ‘Within this inner world even weakness could become a kind of strength. It isolated me and disqualified me from other kinds of work than poetic writing.’

  My father’s increasing interest in communism from 1931 onwards grew from his fascination with this vast, unfamiliar subculture. He thought that the poor and the underprivileged were in possession of some secret, and he believed without question that communism was on the side of the workers; whereas it was equally obvious that the Nazis were luring the unemployed into vast armies that would be destroyed in a future war. Curtius, who saw this change taking place in Stephen as a result of his life in Berlin, decided that this wasn’t really a political revelation, but a form of sentimentality based on the attraction of the working classes.

  It was after a visit to Curtius in November 1931 that Stephen wrote his most famous poem, ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’. Its heroes were the great writers of German Romanticism that Curtius had so brilliantly brought before him. Stephen sent Curtius the poem as soon as it was finished, and Curtius placed it in the context of Stephen’s recent enthusiasm for the workers. It was his best poem so far. It was ‘both particular and grand’, he wrote. It suited him much better than Bolschewismus. He was sure that, with his temperament of a poet and with his sensitivity towards beauty, Stephen would soon se
e through communism, in the same way that Whitman had seen through American democracy. ‘Your politics are guided by your sense of eroticism and aesthetics.’

  In Hamburg and later in Berlin, Stephen fell in love with various boys with whom, throwing caution to the winds, he attempted to create a long-lasting relationship. Being in love heightened his sensitivity to his surroundings, and from that mood his poems could spring. But he was also interested in creating a permanent relationship.

  One of the first of these was Harry Giese, a pleasant somewhat dumpy young man (there’s a photo in the Isaiah Berlin Archive in Oxford), and the only reason why they were together was that Harry had asked Stephen to take him away to the countryside, where he thought he could be happier. ‘He has introduced Order into my life,’ wrote Stephen to Isaiah. Harry managed their money (and was more frugal than Stephen), and their days were now blest with ‘Regular Hours’. They met every day for lunch at a quarter to one, and after lunch they played a game of chess. ‘The difficulty with him is that he won’t ever leave me alone, and that bores me awfully.’ He couldn’t stand Harry’s ‘aura of respectability’. ‘I imagined it would be very exciting to have a boy always, but, as a matter of fact, it is very bourgeois and ordinary.’

  They planned to go off to the mountains for a while, ‘to see if he is better when he has work’. And that was another problem. The boys who haunted the bars of Berlin waiting for an admirer were longing to be saved, but once this had happened, what next? No question of them spending the day indoors reading a book. In Munich, when Stephen went to the Alte Pinakothek to look at paintings, Harry refused to join him. He went window-shopping instead. ‘He is bored in a rather hopeless kind of way, as boys from town often are.’

  Harry Giese was mundane; but Stephen always hoped that one day a working-class crim would produce a poem from his pocket, ‘magical with the mystery of the lights and silver balls of amusement arcades, or smouldering with the passion which chooses a different bed-mate from the pavements every night’.

  After Harry, there was a seventeen-year-old Russian stateless boy whom Stephen calls in his letters Georg 101. I have no idea what the 101 stands for, but Georg might have been connected with the school for workers in the Karl-Marx suburb of Berlin where my father taught English for a while.

  In 1932 there was a more serious adventure, though it sprang from a ridiculous beginning.

  At this point Stephen had been living in Berlin for several months every year next door to Christopher, who was immersed in the material that later became his Berlin stories. But Stephen also kept his presence alive in London, which he visited frequently. Christopher, on one of his rare trips back to England, found that Stephen had been dining out on their Berlin adventures. He panicked. His material was being appropriated. He solemnly told Stephen that Berlin was no longer large enough to accommodate the two of them and their friendship was at an end. Instead of telling Christopher, Don’t be silly, my father was so upset that he ran off to Barcelona to save a German boy who was miserable. They’d never met. Someone at a party in London told Stephen he should go, so off he went.

  The boy in question, Hellmut Schroeder, turned out to be a narcissistic former waiter from one of the main hotels in Berlin. He was convinced that he’d been victimized by all the people who’d befriended him. ‘It’s as though all those crowds of people in the square here, and in Berlin, and in the hotels where I have waited, had slimed across me, leaving their tracks like snails.’ The name ‘Hellmut’ means ‘Light-strength’, but in letters written back to Christopher in Berlin, Stephen said he should really be called ‘Dunkelmut’, or ‘Dark-strength’, such was the boy’s melancholia. He’d even become unhappy if Stephen told him he was looking happier today than yesterday.

  ‘I think that all he needs is to be liked,’ Stephen wrote to Virginia Woolf, ‘so as I like him extremely I shall stay here.’ He preferred the days that were ‘domestic’. Hellmut became gradually less sulky, indeed he attempted to respond to Stephen’s kindness. They began vaguely looking for somewhere to live. House-hunting reassured Hellmut, because it suggested permanence. Yet there was something odd about Stephen’s affection, something that Hellmut felt he had to challenge. ‘We were very affectionate all of yesterday. Yet H. questioned me again, because he is always anxious to prove that I am fond of him, but that my fondness is unlike that of the hundreds of people who have been physically attracted to him.’

  Stephen gradually became aware that, in spite of his efforts, he could not become close to Hellmut. He blamed himself. In a rare passage of analysis in his diary, he gives way to self-loathing. ‘I have the stupidity & the intelligence, the openness & the tiresome subtlety of the educated savage.’ There’s a lot of Englishness packed into that one sentence, or at least the Englishness of a certain class and education of the time: ‘The central regret of the person who is intellectual & who realizes that intellectualism has no absolute moral worth is that he is dependent for this realization on his intellect. Therefore he wishes to prostrate himself to a class of people who are unintellectual.’

  My father thought that the working class possessed a secret which had been eradicated from the bourgeoisie by education. The working class, having been exploited for the benefit of the bourgeoisie ever since the Industrial Revolution, had managed to keep alive their feelings. Their lack of sexual inhibition was a gift; and sex was the highest form of communication between people. Sex stood at the core of universal brotherhood. Though at an intellectual level he would acknowledge that women also faced the challenge of bringing their sexuality into line with other forms of freedom, to him the sexuality of men was more romantic, more moving. The breadlines consisted of queues of men; women were hardly visible.

  In Barcelona, they tried to create a social life. Then Hellmut began to have affairs with other men. At first Stephen was upset, then he was merely bored. He realized he’d been stupid to think he could save him. ‘Hellmut is a nice person, very hysterical, beautiful, uninteresting, sensation-mongering, and second-rate who has the incredibly petit-bourgeois mentality of most German homosexuals.’ Stephen thought that Hellmut was jealous of him, ‘because I am not completely petty and because I live very happily in a world that he cannot reach’.

  Enter unexpectedly an alcoholic American writer called Kirk, sent by a friend of Isherwood’s in Berlin. Where Hellmut was difficult, Kirk was impossible. What’s more, they were jealous of each other. ‘Hellmut is a homosexual of the “major unknown authors of our time” type, so that the arrival of Kirk led to all sorts of absurd dramas being performed.’ Somehow the story fumbled its way to a conclusion without any casualties. Kirk eventually went off to Ibiza and Stephen sent Hellmut back to Berlin.

  Because it dealt with homosexual acts, it was inevitable that Stephen’s brave novel The Temple would be turned down. On one of these occasions – and there were many – Stephen wrote a revealing letter to his grandmother, who’d become involved in trying to place the book: ‘To me the book has the significance of a vow that I made to my friends. I promised them that I would write absolutely directly about certain things, and I think it is right that I should fulfil my promise. I am writing and working and living for my own generation and, in that sense, being modern is a religion with me.’ The conventional life of the 1850s was dead, he wrote. ‘As regards sexual abnormality, I don’t think that, or any other of the startling symptoms of contemporary society that so shock the English reader, are nearly so important as people imagine. My feeling is that if one loves one’s fellow-beings, one cant be so very abnormal.’

  He’s hinting, I think, that The Temple was in some way connected to the stories that Isherwood was writing at the time. If the comparison is worth making, then his novel is more explicit, perhaps more courageous than the ambiguous and undefined ‘Herr Issyvoo’ of the Berlin stories. Christopher read several versions of the book but, having once written a ferocious criticism of a novel by Stephen, he kept his comments to himself.

  Deep
down, my father must have known that The Temple would never be published. Quite apart from its sex scenes, it was also libellous. I suspect he sustained himself through five rewrites by the fantasy that one day it would come out, and the book would be denounced to the magistrates and banned, and he himself put on trial for obscenity. At Oxford he’d met Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, and he’d invited her to speak to the English Society. She’d replied with a letter of touching bravery describing all her troubles with the magistrates, which were long and costly. Stephen also admired unconditionally D. H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover had also been banned. If he’d ever been arrested, he would have given a passionate speech in support of freedom of expression along the lines of the letter he’d sent to his grandmother.

  3

  SUICIDE OR ROMANTICISM

  IN THE SPRING of 1933, near Piccadilly Circus, a few weeks after he’d published his first volume of poems with Faber, Stephen met Tony Hyndman. The book had placed Stephen firmly in the limelight and critics were beginning to pay attention to a whole new school of young British poets. He was full of confidence and, in his usual impetuous way, Stephen immediately invited Tony to come and live with him. They were together for the next six years; and at some level they remained attached to each other for the rest of Tony’s life.