A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  So off they went. They stayed at the Albergo Gardesana at Torri del Benaco – our family hotel, as it were. What about the scandal, asked Ray? Stephen told him, ‘my friends won’t misunderstand me and I don’t care about the others’. What could be more high-minded than that? They had separate rooms and Ray took care that they had separate bills, though of course he paid both.

  Natasha tried to keep Ray busy with sightseeing: Verona, Venice for the night (there’s mention of difficulties in finding a hotel on the Lido). If this was a rest cure for my mother, then ‘gallivanting’ (one of her favourite words) was hardly the right recipe. Ray was drinking, and she thought that keeping him on the move was a way of separating him from the bottle – and to some extent this worked. But she was out of her depth.

  They got back to London in the last week of September. Chandler’s residential permit had expired and he should have been on his way back to America. On the 27th, he had lunch with Ian Fleming, who gave him a copy of Dr No, inscribed ‘from Private Fleming to Sergeant Chandler’. (Ray gave it to Natasha, and she sold it years later for a colossal sum.) Ray also had lunch with Eric Ambler at the Garrick Club. Ambler at that time was more famous than Ian Fleming, but Chandler was the leader of them all.

  Finally, he went back to New York.

  In November 1955, obsessed by the imminent operation my mother had to face on the anniversary of Cissy’s death, Chandler came back to London in order to give her another holiday. This time they went to Tangiers. They stayed in a hotel with two separate bedrooms, sharing a bathroom and the living room. There was one kiss, it seems. He mentioned it eighteen months later as a rare and treasured moment.

  Once again, her idea was to keep him on the move. They went for a walk in the old part of town, quarrelled, she stomped off and when Ray finally caught up with her, he got stuck in some mud. He remembered it because of the laughter of some nearby Arabs. I can just imagine this scene. Whenever my mother became irritated, she would walk off briskly into the distance; but she expected to be pursued.

  She thought she was taking care of him. He thought he was taking care of her. ‘As nanny my greatest problem was to keep her from exhaustion,’ he wrote to Jamie Hamilton. To her, he grumbled later about ‘the endless prowling of bazaars when you knew I could hardly stand up’.

  They came back a few days before her operation, which my mother always insisted subsequently was ‘routine’. Ray spent the evening with Stephen at Loudoun Road, and Stephen had to stay awake half the night to calm him down.

  At this point it finally dawned on my father that the situation had become equivocal. The fact that he’d made no comment earlier suggests that he’d never considered Ray to be anything more than one of Mum’s ‘causes’. In an attempt to regain the initiative, Stephen wrote to Ray to ask if he could pay back some of the money Ray had spent on the various trips they’d made together, not to mention the operation Natasha had just been through – for which it seems that Chandler had insisted on picking up the tab. Surely he owed Ray something in the region of six hundred pounds?

  This letter confused Chandler. At first he thought he was being rejected. Hadn’t he been giving Natasha a holiday? Or alternatively, if she’d saved his life, wasn’t his gift to her a legitimate expression of gratitude? ‘I think it is absolutely true that Natasha gave me something to live for when I was in a very despairing condition, but I like to think that I should have acted the same.’ Repayment for kindness didn’t come into it, he decided. It was a matter of principle for him to help a woman in distress.

  Chandler brooded about Stephen’s offer for several days. In the end he decided that it put him in a position of power, because Stephen couldn’t afford to hand over six hundred pounds anyway. He didn’t have that kind of money. ‘In all these things you have acted with immense dignity and generosity,’ he wrote, with a smidge of condescension that would have maddened Stephen. ‘You have exposed all three of us (I don’t matter, because I don’t care) to the possibility of scandalous gossip.’ This implied that beyond their intimate circle they were seen by London society as a love triangle. Ray could now address Stephen as man to man. ‘My only fear now is that the damn girl will get so well and so strong and so vibrant that we will all lose her to her music.’

  Mentioning money made things more complicated. My mother thought a great deal about money. Its lack had been a constant anxiety throughout her childhood. She always wanted to save, while my father’s attitude was if a cheque was in the post, he could go out and have lunch with his friends. But Chandler was strange about money, too. Though rich, he was blowing his capital very quickly. He had ‘the incredible frivolity of those about to die’, as Proust puts it. It gave him a secret pleasure to buy my mother jewellery, and watch her wear it, and take out an insurance policy in case she lost it, and remind her when the premium was due, even as my father was attempting to repay what he thought he owed Chandler, in instalments, through a solicitor, so that they didn’t have to talk about it when they met. Trying to keep things under control, when Dad saw a diamond necklace around Mum’s neck he made her take it straight back to Asprey’s.

  These skirmishes between the two men ended shortly before Christmas, when Chandler had to go to hospital to recover from a binge. This allowed Dad to forget about Ray. If he was ill, his manipulations descended to the level of symptoms.

  When Ray came out of rehab, Natasha found him a furnished flat around the corner from Loudoun Road. This proprietary move on her part meant that the other members of the ‘shuttle service’ dropped out. She was assuming responsibility for him. In retrospect she thought she should have found a live-in nurse. She wasn’t really up to taking care of him by herself.

  Loudoun Road lies on an east–west axis, which means Stephen’s study got the sun for the greater part of the morning and Natasha’s piano room was lit in the afternoon. Carlton Terrace, where Ray was now staying, runs north–south; and number 49 faces north. No sun. I remember Ray’s flat as dark and horribly furnished. In his letters he said he hated it and it’s hardly surprising. The windows were dusty, there was a three-bar electric fire and a wing chair, and not much else.

  He reminded her later of the times when she’d come round, thrown herself in that chair and said, ‘What heavenly peace,’ as if he represented an oasis of tranquillity. Which he didn’t. But by saying that he did, she was helping him to reach out for it.

  In February 1956, she went off to Switzerland to convalesce from the operation as a guest of Hansi Lambert. Chandler missed her. Was it really so great to sit in a grand house and be waited on by servants, he asked grumpily? Meanwhile he was taking his meals in Loudoun Road, where Francesca cooked for him. (He had his difficulties with Francesca.) Dad was away somewhere and his only company was myself and my sister. Once, I came in to supper with filthy hands and he asked how was it possible to get hands so dirty in just one day? I immediately apologized and went off to wash them – which he said in a letter to Mum was ‘rather nice’.

  Her letters to him from Gstaad, which he later threw away, were gloomy. Their secret name for that mood was ‘Maudie’, which I suppose comes from ‘maudlin’.

  While she was away, Stephen wrote another letter to him about money. Ray couldn’t believe that Stephen was worried about what people might think. ‘You cannot be damaged in reputation by anything to do with money,’ he wrote to him reassuringly. ‘If there is damage, it has already occurred, and was inevitable from the time I was sent off to Italy with Natasha.’ All this sounds as if he’s trying to provoke Stephen, but here he adds an unusually submissive sentence: ‘I have always had someone to care for and protect. It is part of my excuse for living.’

  Feeling better, Ray went back to teasing Stephen. He wasn’t really making a real offer, was he? He was just appealing to be let off the debt on the grounds of poverty. What would happen if Stephen couldn’t send an instalment to his solicitor? Would Stephen’s solicitor dun him on Chandler’s behalf? No! ‘The whole idea is a fake.
’ Better for Stephen to give up one of his live-in maids, Ray wrote sarcastically – a low blow, since Francesca had been feeding him regularly.

  Beneath this skirmish lay a deeper chasm to do with the profession they were supposed to share. Chandler disapproved of writers who failed to earn money by their writing. ‘I regard financial failure as essentially a moral failure. People should have the strength to live in the world of their time.’ The writer should understand the culture of his age and invent a work of art that was truly contemporary. Shakespeare in our age would have written for television. ‘He would have taken the false gods and done them over.’ To write a few weak verses for five friends living in Chelsea just wasn’t good enough.

  Chandler’s early work consists of short stories that took him months to write and did not earn much when they were published, so his toughness on this subject is worthy of respect. But in my opinion he’s striking a pose, not providing an argument. At this late stage of his career, his wealth came not from his novels but from Hollywood. In the film industry, there is work and there is money and there are films, and sometimes the writer wins. More often he loses. Sometimes all that remains of the writer is one gag immersed in a script written by others. The connection between money and words is tenuous, and the idea of Chandler taking on the false gods and producing marvels is only a fantasy.

  My father was never competitive in this way with any writer, but it has to be said that he had no opinion at all of Chandler’s work. He didn’t like detective stories, and that was it. My mother tried the Marlowe novels, but there was something about Philip Marlowe’s attitude towards women that she found unreal: a mixture of chivalry and sadism, neither of which she found attractive. Neither of my parents responded to the idea that Raymond Chandler had given the city of Los Angeles an identity it would not otherwise have; and that this gift has a touch of genius about it.

  A week after trying to unravel his debt to Ray, Stephen went off to Venice for a congress involving Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Silone and other serious European intellectuals. He was at the height of his involvement with power.

  Two days after coming back, he gave a supper for Charlie Chaplin. Ray wasn’t invited, and it rankled. Passing the peanuts, I remember Chaplin moving his legs in a facetious hop when he leaned against the piano, as if the shiny Bechstein needed taking down a peg.

  On 10 May, the Spenders gave a farewell party for Ray before he flew back to America. He appeared with presents for us children. He was benign: this was his family. He wasn’t the only guest, however, and there was a limit to the amount of attention my mother could give to him. After lunch, he was packed into a taxi by himself to catch his plane at Heathrow. It seemed ominous. In November of that year, by that time back in California, he wrote to Natasha, ‘when I left England last May I knew I had lost you, since, if I hadn’t, you would never on any pretext have let me go to Heath Row without you’.

  13

  THE IRRESISTIBLE HISTORIC MIXED GRILL

  EARLIER IN THE year, on 26 February 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech at the 20th Party Congress during which he’d denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin and the ‘cult of personality’ with which Stalin had surrounded himself. This speech is often taken as marking the end of the first phase of the Cold War. The Soviet leadership had acknowledged the most appalling crimes. The communist parties of France and Italy lost a great many members, and those who remained were tied to die-hard Stalinists who defended the indefensible. It became clear that in neither country would the respective communist parties ever gain power via the ballot box.

  Towards the end of the year, the governments of Poland and Hungary attempted to break free from Russian control. The Polish attempt ended badly, the Hungarian attempt disastrously. It was suppressed by the Russian Army at the cost of many lives.

  When all this was over, Stephen was invited to visit Poland. He got on well with the members of the Polish Writers’ Association, and at the end of a banquet in his honour he was told he could talk to any writer he wanted, even if that writer was languishing in jail. It was an interesting offer, tinged with irony. Perhaps the idea was to show that, even within a repressive regime, a degree of liberty existed.

  Stephen got up and told this audience of colleagues that there was one person he was curious to meet. He would like to meet a communist. There was dead silence. Then a voice from the back called out, ‘Vous êtes arrivé trop tard, Monsieur.’ You’ve arrived too late, Sir. It became one of my father’s favourite after-dinner stories, but it shows that even after the disasters of Hungary and Poland he still thought of communism as an ‘idea’.

  In the newspapers, this was the great moment of the so-called ‘Kremlinologist’. Academics, Foreign Office mandarins plus recent refugees from Russia guessed what was going on behind those vast red walls of Red Square. Khrushchev’s policies swung forwards and backwards. He visited foreign countries and proposed arms limitations. Was this just a ploy? He denounced the ‘cult of personality’, but he himself was a personality of monumental proportions. To whom was he responsible? The Party? The Politburo? After he had eliminated the remaining Stalinists in the Politburo, was he going to become another Stalin?

  Kremlinologists might have had some idea of what was going on in Moscow, but most Russians had none. And the West had no idea what it meant to live under such a repressive regime. Politics could not be discussed, opinions had to be camouflaged even from close friends. To readers in the West, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four was a sinister fantasy. To Russian readers, it was stone-cold reality.

  By the mid-Sixties, Russia subsided into a series of vast interlocking bureaucracies incapable of taking decisions. The Politburo met for long inconclusive discussions about what should happen next. Huge black cars floated round Moscow late at night giving the impression that something was about to be decided. The idea of taking over the world developed in a vacuum. Russians went wherever Americans had not yet arrived, while some dissidents in Moscow nursed the crazy fantasy that one day they might be liberated by American bombs, followed by an invasion. I remember Joseph Brodsky talking to us about this: American GIs walking around Red Square handing out cigarettes to the grown-ups and candy to the kids.

  One of the vast bureaucracies was in charge of cultural matters. ‘Events’ had to be organized. It was important that they occur, but nothing was supposed to take place that might tie the department to a future course of action. ‘They were mere embellishments on the ideological façade,’ as the novelist Zinovy Zinik, who was born in Moscow, told me recently. ‘Every Soviet citizen, from the Politburo members to the plant workers, were prisoners, subject to the prison regime’s code of behaviour and regulations; and then Stephen Spender turns up at the prison gates and demands from these prisoners a sincere public response and active participation in the life outside.’

  Thus Stephen raised the banner of free speech and the right of fellow writers to communicate directly with each other. Chance of success, zero. ‘The Writers’ Union, founded in 1934, was a Stalinist institution for the regimentation of thought,’ said Ilya Ehrenburg to an interviewer in the post-Khrushchev phase. But, throughout the Cold War, my father continued to hope that somewhere within the folds of Soviet bureaucracy there was someone with whom he could talk.

  The Venice meeting over Easter of 1956 was one of those complex affairs where nothing serious is discussed, but much takes place beneath the surface. There was a group of European communists, another of liberals, and an official Russian delegation which nevertheless did not seem interested in representing the point of view of communist orthodoxy.

  After it was over, Stephen wrote a novel about the event, amalgamating it with another similar meeting held in Milan in July. Engaged in Writing includes thinly disguised portraits of Sartre and Malraux and Silone, who are involved in an arcane ideological wrestling match while the representatives from Russia observe them with detachment, clothed in the mystic virtue of survival. Everybody knows that t
housands of Russian writers have been sent to jail, or shot. Yet ‘In spite of everything that had happened, the Russian delegates still had the aura of a priesthood not wholly discredited.’

  What seduced the Westerners most of all was that which they least admitted: an insatiable curiosity about what was happening ‘over there’. There was a great dish, and what hid it was not so much an iron curtain as a silver cover. Under this, they knew there to be a course consisting of the irresistible historic mixed grill: revolution, murder, personal power, oppression and a sauce of reform. The steam of gossip shooting out on all sides was sanctified: every rumour a specimen, sniffed over.

  There were intrigues that Stephen doesn’t go into. Though he notes that the French delegates were particularly opaque, discussing subjects such as whether a discussion can itself be discussed, he doesn’t mention the fact that the French and Italian delegates had to accept that, in their own countries, their respective communist parties dominated the selective processes in the arts festivals and the choice of novels to be published. There was no question of challenging mechanisms so powerful. The best these intellectuals could do was to flirt with the possibility of disagreeing with them.

  In the end the hero, the Spender substitute, can stand it no longer. ‘Dipping deep into the bran-tub of a past which seemed stuffed with different personalities marking different stages of his career, he adopted the manner he had used when most of those had been in their revolutionary prime.’ This was the great unmentionable fact: these middle-aged Europeans shared a past during which they’d all believed in communism; and they faced three Russians who, by the fact that miraculously they were still alive, represented the awful consequences of that belief. Flamboyantly, he resigns. The gesture is treated with sympathy, for deep down the other representatives – who of course wouldn’t dream of abandoning their roles – recognize he’s done the only honest thing possible.