Alone in a gondola, he remembers a sudden revelation he’d had during a previous meeting four years earlier, in a castle in eastern Europe where they’d sipped a lot of wine. Drunk and lonely, he’d caught a glimpse of a young man tending some vines. ‘Lake below, mountains above, and between the lane of turreted leaves, the human form – the labourer in the vineyard. His dark-tanned trousers formed a pedestal of bark, split, stripped at the navel, peeled to reveal the bare torso of the burned sun-god, Apollo carved in wood, breast of lyre, mouth coining song.’
The image is a poem. All it needs is to be written down.
There the poem was so clear, so complete, simple as a single line, luminous as the day. It was perfect in his mind, he saw it clear and whole. He knew it as though he had been born with it silver in his mouth, and it would be scrolled within his hollow bones when he died. And yet it was at this exact moment that he realized that the virtue which could enable him to write it had gone out of him. There was no form, no rhythm, only the perfectly clear idea. The rhythm that can no more be defined than the unstated revelation in the shaping of a single letter of handwriting, had gone.
There was a price to be paid for attending congresses. If you believed that a fragment of life was the basis of a poem, the rare fragments that appeared in the life of the junketing poet would be crushed by the weight of congressional banalities and that poem would not be written.
On 8 July 1956, Stephen joined Nicky Nabokov at his château not far from Paris. Nabokov had asked him to write the libretto of an opera for which he’d compose the music. It was about the assassination of Rasputin, the mystic who acquired an unusual power at the court of Tsar Nicholas II, through the Tsarina. Nabokov had known many of the people involved in this dramatic incident.
Stephen’s contribution to the libretto was limited to adding words to an idea that Nicky had already mapped out in the smallest details. ‘He dictated to me the entire action of the play, with all the scenes, all the positionings of characters on the stage, the outlines of every piece of dialogue, from the first moment to the last. He has a capacity for grasping an idea in its concreteness from beginning to end, which would be genius if it goes with a corresponding creative grasp in every detail of the music.’ Stephen sounds bemused. Nevertheless, ‘It was very pleasant to be alone with him and not in the usual tangle of committees and dinners.’
One evening, probably during this visit, Nicky and Stephen were having supper alone together. At a certain point Nicky swept all the food and the cutlery off the table in front of him and buried his head in his arms. Glasses and porcelain lay broken around his feet, but he paid no attention. He was weeping uncontrollably. Through this muffled, histrionic, drunken, self-pitying heap, Stephen saw the full extent of Nicky’s grief; how deeply he missed that idyllic pre-revolutionary world, how impossible it was for him to forgive those who had destroyed it.
In his long relationship with Nicky Nabokov, my father admired the intensity of his hatred for the Bolsheviks, because it was so honest. Nicky wasn’t mourning a lost society that had pampered the Nabokov family. He was a fighter for a civilization that had been violently destroyed. Stephen often felt that his own position as a social democrat or wishy-washy liberal, or whatever it was, didn’t amount to much. He wanted the working classes to be treated better than they had been, but beyond that, it would be hard to say what political aims he had in mind. And he often felt that communism was a ‘cause’ in ways that the capitalist West was not. Without occasional extremists like Nicky Nabokov, the other side would have had all the energy.
By this time Raymond Chandler had settled into a hotel back in California. He’d had a bad fall and been hospitalized for malnu-trition due to alcoholism, but he was pulling himself together. He described his room. From the window, all he could see were women’s legs. Presumably he was near the swimming pool. He didn’t know if he liked those legs or not. They were distracting.
He wrote to Natasha regularly. He wanted to entice her to join him. He felt that she’d done a good job in helping him, and he indeed felt better, but as for being cured, ‘I think I was fooling myself out of my great love for you.’ This was a compliment, but immediately he adds: ‘I don’t suppose that from the citadel of family life you could appreciate the forlornness of my life.’
He wanted her to join him, but she would have to leave behind her family. ‘In my own mind I have to divide you into two people. It is surely not that I love you less, nor that I admire you less as an adorable hostess and a sweet, devoted mother. But I must love you in sunshine and clean air – and alone.’ Those damn children, for instance. Too spoiled! ‘Any time a five year old child is allowed to dominate a dinner table and outtalk everyone else and I get reproved by you for not answering an unintelligible question the little brat fires at me – any time that happens, there is something wrong.’ (Not me! The child was Lizzie. She was six, I was eleven.)
He was wondering whether he should leave Natasha something in his will. Like giving jewels, he enjoyed this fantasy. He wrote to his lawyer that he wanted Natasha to inherit his copyright, but added that it was important that Stephen didn’t get his hands on it. ‘He is the sort of man who, if he had fifty pounds, would spend it on a painting instead of paying the grocer’s bill. He is good to his children and loves them. But he is not a normal man. He is not like you and me and his judgment is very faulty except in his proper sphere of pretentious and anaemic writing.’
Ray’s opinion of my father’s writing had started high. In 1949 he’d written to Jamie Hamilton: ‘I like this fellow Spender very much. In fact I like him better than Auden, about whom I have always had reservations.’ But when my father’s autobiography came out in 1951, Chandler was shocked. Was this the kind of book that a man with a wife and two children should have written? Surely it was irresponsible, to say the least? Then he found out the interesting fact that, six years after publication, my mother still hadn’t read it! This was a godsend, of course. Whenever she tried to defend her husband, all Chandler had to say was ‘Have you read “World within World” yet?’
Publicity photo taken before my mother’s concert tour of the USA in 1957.
Chandler found an apartment and began to bring from storage some furniture from his old house. He hadn’t seen these pieces since Cissy died. But he hesitated to move in. An apartment – and alone? ‘I don’t know when I have been so unhappy. There was just about a month between your letters and though you said there were others they have never come. I have been so lonely that my life was almost unendurable.’ He was bored with California. Even if Natasha came to join him, ‘I can’t see how I can count on having you for more than a couple of months a year at most, and what the hell do I do with the other ten?’
My mother hated writing letters, and she was not above pretending to have written one when she hadn’t. Ray sat in the hotel and waited. Finally a letter from her came through.
He made the mistake of taking it to the new apartment where he was surrounded by Cissy’s belongings. He opened it and read. ‘It was hellish with the furniture, almost like reading the letters of someone very dear who has died.’
Did she understand what this implied? It wasn’t just a question of Ray asking her to abandon her husband and children and come to California. He had a role for her in mind, and it had something to do with his dead wife. Cissy had also played the piano, and Cissy also had needed doctors. Chandler seems to think that the only thing that would hold him together was if he had my mother in La Jolla. Only then would his life become sober and solicitous. She would be ill, he would bring her meals in bed and write at night, as he had done with Cissy. He would care about his life, because he would be caring for her.
It was worse than impossible. It was downright sinister.
In October 1956, the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal. England and France decided to invade the country to reimpose their sovereignty over a piece of property they considered theirs. The invasion went well to begin with,
but the canal was blocked with scuppered ships and both the Americans and the Russians disapproved. It turned out to have been a mistake.
This took time, of course, but in the early days of the war the British press was full of stirring accounts of the bravery of Our Boys. I was eleven, and very excited. The news fluctuated daily. I followed the events on a map, sticking pins in remarkably square Egypt and its remarkably triangular delta. My father instead looked mildly worried and anything but military.
That winter saw the last great Smog of London. It killed twenty thousand people. The Clean Air Act was passed so that it wouldn’t happen again. The fog didn’t shut the school. I remember how extraordinary it was to feel my way from the bus stop to the school gates, touching the wall on my right and projecting on to this grey gritty screen a memory of where I was.
The following term I won the poetry prize, with an ode called ‘Autumn’. The prize was presented by Peggy Ashcroft, and when she read out the poem it indeed sounded good. As a result of this I was made a school prefect. I did not want the job. I hated the idea of reading the Lesson at prayers, those snippets from the Bible which required at least a minimal self-confidence and the capacity to ‘project’. I persuaded a friend and co-prefect to read for me. He read very well. I thought it was a fine solution to the problem. Not so. The headmaster called me up at the end of prayers and chastised me in front of everyone. I was avoiding my responsibilities, he said. It was not for this that he’d made me a prefect.
The headmaster had a wart on the back of his neck which he fiddled with when angry, and an old war wound in his leg that made him occasionally stamp. I watched him fiddling and stamping and I took off my badge, a silver Maltese Cross, put it on the table in front of him and said I was resigning. He refused to accept it and I was irrevocably condemned to the rank of newly commissioned officer.
From mid-October, Natasha and Stephen were in America. He had some lectures to give and she had arranged a concert tour on the East Coast. They stayed with Sam Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti at Mount Kisko, and then for a few days with Muriel Gardiner (now Buttinger) on her farm in Pennington, New Jersey. Having given his lectures, Stephen then returned to London to take care of us while Natasha continued her concert tour alone.
A few days after my father left, Chandler learned that Natasha had suffered whiplash in a car accident outside Boston. The pain was placing her tour in doubt. He wanted her to come immediately to California and recuperate with him. It was his chance to repay the tenderness she had shown to him during the previous year.
By this time he was living with a woman called Louise, who was easy to be with, but as he wrote to Natasha, he was not in love. ‘I’ll never get anyone as kind and gentle [as Louise], and even if we do have occasional disagreements, they don’t have to be catastrophic. After all, I shan’t live very long anyhow and I am too tired to care. It has been given to me as to few men to love two of the most wonderful women it is possible to imagine, and to have them love me.’ (He meant Cissy, and Natasha.)
Louise heard that Natasha was on her way, and she took the hint. She left for San Francisco, where she still had a husband. ‘All I can say is that I loved having her here, that she is a charming and indulgent companion, although not a great lady like you, that it is awful for me to be alone, but that damn it all, no second best is good enough.’
Giving it one last try, Louise came back to La Jolla a few days later. Bad luck had it that on Sunday evening, 18 November, she picked up the telephone – and it was Natasha from the East Coast, wanting to discuss with Ray her imminent visit to California. He was on the other line. ‘When I hear your wonderful voice I like to try to express some of the ecstasy I feel.’ Poor eavesdropping Louise at last got the message. After the call ended, she started drinking. ‘I couldn’t say she was ever drunk in the usual sense but her whole nature changed.’ In fact, ‘she turned out to be something less than a lady’. It would have been all right, wrote Ray, if he’d been drinking too, then they could have had a nice old-fashioned fight! The sad thing was that he didn’t care enough for her to take that route.
Next morning, Louise got on the plane back to San Francisco. A few days later he received a touching note written from the airport saying that their relationship was at an end.
Was Natasha really coming? Ray could hardly believe it. Where could he take her? How about the San Marcos Hotel in Chandler, Arizona, followed by Palm Springs? Three times in his letters Ray chides her for worrying him about the sleeping arrangements. Yes, they would have separate bedrooms. No need to drum it in. ‘You should know that I am not going to embarrass you or make any demand on you that you don’t feel like granting.’ Mind you, he knows of a hotel in LA which has a ‘bordello wing’ with cottages for privacy, ‘but it is hardly flattering to invite a lady there’.
To Ray, my mother was a ‘lady’. At some point he even goes as far as to imagine the day when Stephen becomes Sir Stephen and she becomes Lady Spender. That would be ‘tremendous fun’, wrote Chandler in his best hate-the-British mode. Ironically, in another episode of the Chandler saga set in the distant future, my father said to me, ‘The thing is, Natasha is not what used to be called a “Lady”. The reaction of a real Lady to all this’ – he was referring to a biography of Chandler which assumed that an affair had indeed taken place – ‘would surely be to forget the whole thing.’ He was right. A well-brought-up Englishwoman, trained from an early age at one of those stoical boarding schools and finding herself wrongly accused of having had an affair, would say, ‘God, what a bore,’ and leave it at that.
Between 18 November when Louise left and 6 December when Natasha arrived in Arizona, Ray started drinking again. On 23 November he wrote to her, ‘I wish you were here. The weather is rather jolly, bright and warmish. You could lie in the big double bed and rest and I could feed you.’
Did she really want to come? His love for her was immense, her compassion also – but he wanted love. It had to be all or nothing on both sides. He wrote to her, ‘The thinnest tie of social friendship was always more important [to you] than my feelings. And I rather think quite rightly so. I came so late into your life and was so intolerable. But you must search your soul. If I mean so little to you, I mean nothing at all, and for us to be together in Arizona is just another amour sans amour.’
14
THE KINDEST FACE
AT ONE POINT during the Venice meeting earlier that year, a young American noticed two distinguished men crossing a steep humped bridge near the Ducal Palace not far from the Bridge of Sighs. The short man with pebble glasses and a downturned mouth he knew was Jean-Paul Sartre. He did not recognize the second figure, tall and deferential, but decided he had to find out who he was.
The second man on the bridge was Stephen, and the young man looking up at him was Reynolds Price. Thus, entirely independently but in some way parallel, my father began a relationship as contorted but as powerful as my mother’s with Raymond Chandler.
At the end of September, Reynolds wrote a letter to Stephen in which he described this moment on the bridge and said he thought he had ‘the kindest face I have ever seen’. Could they meet? Stephen replied cautiously. He was very busy at the moment, and soon he’d have to go to the US to give some lectures. Reynolds took this reply as encouraging, and he sent him some stories he’d written. Stephen found them on his return from the US and wrote to say that he liked them. They arranged to meet.
On 13 December 1956, the day after Natasha arrived in Arizona to stay with Chandler, Stephen invited Reynolds to lunch at Loudoun Road. Three days later Stephen accepted Reynolds’ story ‘The Anniversary’ for publication in Encounter. Before Christmas, he invited him to spend the New Year with us. Reynolds was staying in a boarding-house in Brighton at the time and Stephen didn’t want him to spend the New Year alone.
I remember when Reynolds came to live with us at Loudoun Road: neat, not much older than me (early twenties), somewhat pockmarked with acne, extremely polite but frequently
laughing, interested in us children. Reynolds stayed in the house for about ten days over the New Year. He slept in the bed in the study where Auden stayed whenever he came to London.
After he’d left, Stephen wrote to him to say how grateful he was for the time they’d shared. ‘I think of this room where I am writing as your room and of how you understood the children and my preoccupation with them.’ It was wonderful to have spent these days together,
which were beautiful in themselves and in which we discovered what a lot of things we liked in common: Fidelio for example. I think it is having values and the ability to share them and the wish to go on sharing them and creating the circumstances in which we go on doing so that our friendship will find its future. We discovered the things we could share in common, and now what we have to know is whether we shall want to go on doing so. This is not really a matter of straining and willing things, but of trust, and patience and discovery of ourselves as much as of one another. I do have trust and I don’t want to force anything. And whatever happened I would still have an awful lot from this week. One day I shall be able to write a poem about what that is. But I can’t even approach doing so now.
This is clearly a love letter. How had Reynolds replied to this instant crush on my father’s part? More than fifty years later, Reynolds told me with a grin: ‘I could see that Stephen wasn’t living alone, because there were two children at Loudoun Road. But if there was a Mrs Spender, where was she? And why hadn’t she been mentioned?’
A House in St John's Wood Page 17
