A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  My father came for a visit while I was staying with Idelma. As I took him up the hill to have lunch, I showed him the cemetery and talked about our local life. ‘That’s Idelma’s aunt. And that’s her cousin over there. Such a pity she died young, she looks so nice in the photo on the gravestone. You notice that some of the graves have little lights? Those are for the good people of Torri. Not many of them were good,’ I said, ‘because there aren’t many lights.’

  Idelma and family gave us a wonderful meal, so good that the finest restaurant would have been proud of it. This led my father to reflect on poverty. If this was the way they lived, with their ancestors in the nearby graveyard and delicious food on the table, then the Locrini family could not be called poor. Well, they were poor, because they had no money, but culturally speaking they were rich-poor. And there were plenty of people in the world who were poor-rich, who had money but were miserable.

  He confided these thoughts to his diary, but he mentioned to my six-year-old self that we’d had a most wonderful luncheon. Oh, I said. Don’t think we live like that every day. Mostly it’s polenta with mince-and-tomato sauce, I said. Or polenta with just a chopped anchovy and some parsley to give it flavour. Or – and usually – polenta.

  Early in 1953, Stephen travelled to Cincinnati, where he had been appointed to the George Elliston Chair for Poetry. In the background lay his determination to create an international magazine of which he would be the editor. It was an idea that he had pursued, at this point, for nearly a decade.

  It hadn’t been easy for him to obtain a visa in London. The American Consul asked him if he’d ever been a member of the Communist Party and he’d said, ‘Yes, for about ten minutes in 1937.’ The McCarran Act of 1950 prohibited giving visas to communists, even if they’d repented and changed their views. The Consul smiled and said, ‘Mr Spender, don’t you ever tell a lie?’ It became one of my father’s favourite after-dinner stories.

  In Cincinnati, Stephen made friends with the Southern writer Allen Tate. There was a plan that Stephen and Allen would found a magazine together. This had been in the air since Stephen’s first visit to the United States and he wanted to consolidate.

  Tate had a heightened sense of the South as a ‘subject’. He saw himself as a lonely figure resisting the pressure of Northern critics to steer Southern writers towards ‘a literature of social agitation’, as he put it with an air of disgust. Unfortunately, Tate’s nostalgia for the South was not shared by Stephen. In his first visit to the South two years before, Stephen had been shocked by how much his hosts had talked about what he calls in his journal ‘all the old business’, meaning the South before the Civil War. ‘Hatred of the bankers, the Negro problem, struggling with poverty, consciousness of the “hill billy country”, and the “Old Kentucky home”. Not to mention the ineradicable resentment of Southerners against the Yankees for having put Negroes in charge of Whites in the period of reconstruction.’

  If this magazine had ever been launched, would Tate and Spender have managed to create a bridge between England and the Southern United States? How many sympathetic readers would it have gained in New York? What would British readers have made of White Supremacy in literary form? The plan only goes to show how keen Stephen was to edit a magazine, anywhere, on any terms.

  Though Tate was in several respects out on a limb, the two men got on well. I remember being left with him on one of his visits to London. He and I were put in the piano room by ourselves, because Dad wanted Tate to read to me ‘Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby’. Which he did with great relish, with all the different accents. It’s considered today to be a viciously racist book, but as a child I just listened to this strange man with a funny moustache enjoying his own ability to perform. I liked it, though there’d been a moment of panic when Dad had left the room. I could see from the shape of his shoulders that he thought, ‘Rather you than me!’

  While my father was in Cincinnati, Mike Josselson, the head of the CCF in Paris, wrote to him saying the American CCF was planning to found a magazine. Irving Kristol would be one of the editors. Stephen immediately wrote to say that the English CCF had already made a plan, which he’d discussed recently with Allen Tate. Tactfully, he wrote to Kristol, ‘Perhaps you could let me know how matters stand?’

  Kristol wrote back saying that in Stephen’s absence the heads of the English CCF had had several discussions with Josselson in Paris. It was a choice between two rival proposals. In one, the magazine would be based in New York, in the other the base would be London.

  Before it even existed, Stephen started asking his friends for material for this future magazine. His access to great literary figures established his claim that he should be one of the editors. Eliot, one of the first authors whom Stephen contacted, wrote saying he hoped Stephen would ‘draw an adequate salary, and that the magazine is to be comfortably subsidized’. (How like a fragment from a poem by Eliot are the words ‘comfortably subsidized’!) Eliot could not let him have any of his own work to publish at the moment, unfortunately, but he thought that to mix politics and literature was a good idea, especially as contributors such as Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron would mean they would be dealing with politics ‘on the highest level’.

  Soon, Stephen wrote to Irving: ‘it looks as if we are both to be employed by the British Committee’. Again, the phrase is casual. It suggests that in the background the negotiations between the American CCF, the Paris office and the English CCF had tilted in favour of the British; and that he was not directly involved in the process.

  There’s another revealing phrase in a subsequent letter to Kristol. Stephen had put forward suggestions for two political articles. One was to cover the current state of socialism in the United States. Stephen says apologetically about these: ‘Not my branch but you might like them.’ This implies that Stephen was to concentrate on literature and leave the political articles to his co-editor. Which indeed became the case. His subsequent role with all three co-editors, Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald and Melvin Lasky, was that he was in charge of literature and they were in charge of politics.

  An article on socialism in the United States was a good idea, but the proposal was naive. The word ‘socialism’ was liable to give most Republican readers in the United States stomach cramps. It still would. The suggestion came straight from the heart of British social democracy. It pays no attention to what could be discussed in a magazine aiming for a wide readership in the United States. Nevertheless, it begs a question. If Encounter in its entire career gave scant coverage to the major problems of the United States – issues of race, Civil Rights, the Vietnam War – was it perhaps because somewhere or other, perhaps in the desk of Stephen’s American co-editor, there was a list of subjects that were taboo?

  Meanwhile my father’s idea of a magazine had undergone a change since 1946. The magazine he’d wanted to start with Curtius was intended to have been more political than literary, judging by the draft proposal he’d sent to T. S. Eliot. By the time Encounter was founded, he’d become more interested in promoting literature. Politics were divisive and time-consuming, and his ambivalence about America as an ‘idea’ meant he wasn’t the right person to act as a promoter of its values.

  The first issue of Encounter came out in October 1953.

  The most remarkable thing about Irving Kristol, Stephen’s co-editor, is the trajectory which took him from the extreme left to the extreme right of the political spectrum. Along with many other New York intellectuals, he was educated at City College, where he thrashed out with his classmates every single permutation of left-wing political theory; and yet he ended up as one of the founders of neo-conservatism.

  ‘Irving Kristol fascinates me,’ wrote Stephen in his diary after they’d worked together for a few months. ‘He looks rather like a caterpillar which has pale bright blue eyes placed rather flatly in his head.’ He was always in the office by the time Stephen arrived, and his ideas of how a magazine should be edited were quite unlike Stephen’s.
He ruthlessly rewrote the political articles as they came in. ‘He regards a contribution as a chassis to which he then adds the coachwork. He loves doing this. He will arrive at the office saying that he has been up all night “editing” Nathan Glazer’s or Leslie Fiedler’s piece. “Hope he won’t mind,” he says. Then adds, reassured, “Nah, he won’t. He does the same to mine.”’

  Kristol’s view of Spender was the mirror image of this. ‘There was always the possibility of friction, a possibility that was realized less often than I had feared. A poet, a man of letters, and a gentleman, Stephen was absolutely no kind of editor. I ran the magazine, he made contributions to it.’

  I don’t believe my father ever took an interest in Kristol’s intellectual position. He recognized the general flavour of it, which at the time was that of a New York repentant-Trotskyite-but-still-somehow-Marxist Democrat. To my father, it was all just sectarianism. He’d seen endless backbiting of this kind before the war. What stuck in his throat was what Irving actually did, which was to take someone else’s prose, put it on his desk and start hacking.

  By this time I was a traditional English schoolboy with grubby knees and a uniform who went to the Hall School, a three-ha’penny bus ride up the Finchley Road from us.

  If I walked to school instead of taking the bus, the route took me past a bomb-site that was being turned into a secondary modern school, one of the first and largest in London. After the site had been cleared, a truck arrived laden with ceramic stand-up urinals. With the help of friends, we made a tunnel out of these white and glittering masterpieces. And after we’d discovered a dead bird teeming with maggots, we called our magnificent temple the Maggot Place. There we could do useful boyish things such as throwing shards of broken glass like boomerangs and watch them curve round in the air and come back at us.

  Our education was still deeply immersed in the British Empire even in the mid-Fifties. We schoolboys were dimly aware that the Empire was over in spite of what we were being taught. Troops from the Empire had taken part on our side in the Second World War, especially in the Far East. Were they to go back to knuckling their foreheads at the Brits afterwards? Yet we were told about the Indian Mutiny and the Black Hole of Calcutta, how those naughty natives had shut our tall blond officers in a hole and held torches to the entrance so that they all died of suffocation.

  Behind the teacher’s head the world stretched out its indented silhouettes against a background of soothingly empty blue. London was dead centre. Well, that was just a coincidence to do with map-making, but even so the composition seemed beautifully balanced. A thread of pink ran from country to country all the way around. These were colonies or Commonwealth, they were ours and they were contiguous except for a small bit centre right. Yemen was pink; but Iran? Afghanistan? Why couldn’t we take over the missing chunk and make it finally true that the sun never sets on the British Empire?

  I read G. A. Henty, given to me by my father who remembered the novels from his childhood. With Clive in India, With Wolfe in Quebec. After a while I got the hang of it. Young well-born Englishman finds faithful batman, saves his life and has him as a loyal supporter ever after, always in the background holding the tea things as the hero wrestles with fuzzy-wuzzies. They were not equals, these two adventurers, either in martial spirit or social graces, but they were loyal to each other through thick and thin. The hero’s lot was solitary, except for this servant’s steadying presence. An odd image of binary solitude began to appear. There were no women and only a few companions to talk to.

  My father often gave me books he thought I should read. One of these was Homer’s Iliad, not in a version toned down for children but in Fitzgerald’s translation which had just come out. I read it from cover to cover. There’s a battle at the beginning and a battle at the end, both so horrifying, no more vivid description of battle has ever been written. I loved this book. The death of soldiers by spear-wounds seemed to me magnificent, a moment of intense feeling dipped in red.

  Our Latin teacher at the Hall had been a sergeant in the First World War. He mixed the campaigns of Julius Caesar with reminiscences of his life in the trenches. The Roman gladium or sword was the same length as the regimental bayonet, he said. Some of us didn’t like the idea that war was, and has remained, nasty. Sine mora, meaning ‘without delay’, was once translated by the boy next to me as ‘without morals’. Mr Rotherham thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He leaned back in his chair and his fat, comfortably buttoned waistcoat appeared above the edge of his desk. Without morals! I wish I could say that I was the one who’d thought of this brilliant mistranslation, for it surely indicates doubt regarding Caesar’s joy in killing the early French.

  On 9 January 1954, Peter Wildeblood, a political journalist, was arrested and charged under the laws prohibiting homosexual relationships. This followed the similar arrest of Lord Edward Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, who’d been caught in a tent with two boy scouts. These became key cases. It took ten years or more, but the public debate over these trials eventually led to the creation of the Wolfenden Committee and the abolition of the laws against homosexual relationships.

  Wildeblood took the courageous decision to state in court that he was homosexual, instead of becoming involved with the contortions of proving that the police had faked the evidence against him. Inevitably, he went to jail.

  In the book he wrote about his experiences, he suggests that the impetus to prosecute British homosexuals had come from the FBI. At the time of his arrest, he was the Diplomatic Correspondent of the Daily Mail. He’d received information that purges were taking place in the US State Department. The administration wanted to weed out homosexuals from key government jobs on the grounds that they were security risks, and the British authorities were about to do the same. He quotes a newspaper report: ‘Special Branch began compiling a “Black Book” of known perverts in influential Government jobs after the disappearance of the diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who were known to have pervert associates. Now comes the difficult task of side-tracking these men into less important jobs – or of putting them behind bars.’ This suggests the arrest of Montagu, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood took place in the context of a security shake-up.

  Stephen met Wildeblood soon after he came out of prison. ‘I asked him whether to be arrested and tried must not be overwhelmingly shameful, however convinced one might be that the law had no right to judge this offence. He said that at first he felt very shaken, but as soon as he discovered the methods of the police, he was filled with such indignation that he ceased to feel concerned with any moral guilt on his side.’

  I don’t believe that my father was worried about the ‘shame’ that he himself might face if he ever found himself in the same position; and he certainly was not going to allow fear to shape his own life. He had a right to pursue his own desires. Sex was one aspect of political freedom. The idea of arrest was just something that had to be accepted, like car accidents or cancer. In the clubs where homosexuals met, the custom was never to mention the name of someone who’d ended up in prison. He was merely ‘away’. And when he came back, everyone would pretend he’d never been absent.

  In the Fifties, the police took the view that, whatever the law said, if two men lived together as a couple within their own premises, they should be left alone. Respecting people’s privacy took precedence over the repressive laws. The police were less tolerant about soliciting in the street, but it was difficult to read this as persecution. Wildeblood initially believed that his arrest was evidence of homophobia in the judiciary, but after much research he decided it had more to do with promotion than with prejudice. Promotion depended on the number of arrests an officer made, and it was easier to catch a homosexual than a thief. As a fellow prisoner told him when he was in jail, ‘Why should they climb a tree to catch a burglar, when they can pick up people of our sort like apples off the ground?’

  The painter Francis Bacon, a close friend of Stephen’s, said of the Montagu
case, ‘Never trust a boy scout.’ This remark was widely quoted, for boy scouts of course are supposed to be protectors of all that is finest in British values.

  That summer, my sister and I were taken to Wales for the holidays. She was four years old and I was nine. Our parents must have stayed with us for a while, because a draft fragment of The Temple is signed at the bottom, ‘Bardsey Island, 1954’.

  It was a strange place to leave two small children: a bird sanctuary off Anglesey, total population fourteen. Our hosts were a woman artist aged forty and her lover, a Breton fisherman who was there for the fish. He wore a knitted cap and striped jumper and he was gone for most of the day.

  We lived in an old brick vicarage with a walled garden to shut out the wind. Here, two hardy Siamese cats raided a small flock of racing pigeons. These birds didn’t belong to the house. They bore the names of their rightful owners on plastic bands around their legs. They had been blown here in a storm during a race – blown all the way from Yorkshire where the fanciers trained them.

  The bay contained an area of darker water with fewer white-tops, just the occasional wedge of wind from the shore sketching powdery lines upon its surface. The Breton fisherman once took me out there in his boat. His fish-hooks were made with any decorative material: feathers, coloured wool, tinsel left over from the Christmas tree. When the mackerel ran, he said, they took anything. Sure enough we passed over a shoal and he and I took out from the sea regularly spaced intervals of fish, like socks from a wet chest of drawers.

  Four of the fourteen inhabitants of the island were ornithologists. They wore identical clothes and were uniformly thin. Their overcoats in cold weather were shut with wooden toggles and they lived in a disused lighthouse. One day I took them a seagull covered in oil. Its shiny black eye, so lively, contrasted with the matte black of its tarred and useless body. The ornithologist took it from me, said thank you politely and, whirling the bird around his head, smashed its head against the parapet. The bird flapped once or twice and died. When I got back to the vicarage I was told never to get tar on my shirt again.