A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  My father had lost his head. He’d invited Reynolds to share his life in exactly the same way that he’d wanted Tony to move in, twenty-four years earlier; or proposed marriage to Inez after seeing her just twice. But Stephen was not alone in the world any more. He was not a free agent. And Reynolds, a much cleverer man than Tony, had no intention of alienating the offstage Mrs Spender and the half of London that would inevitably take her side if he’d really moved into Loudoun Road.

  One day, we went for a walk on Hampstead Heath. The day was cold but sunny. The Whitestone Pond had a sheen on it, sky and water were the same bright element. Stephen and Reynolds talked while Lizzie and I romped around, half showing off, half wanting to be called back so that we could check up on this new relationship. Children depend on grown-ups and any alteration of the status quo must be closely observed. With the feral anxiety of animals at the vet, they quiver in anticipation of some nasty moment about to be experienced.

  This afternoon is clear in my memory, not least because my father asked me to take photos of him standing next to Reynolds. ‘We’ on this occasion consisted of Dad, Reynolds, me, Lizzie and Dimitri, the son of Francesca. On this walk we discovered that our relationship in terms of age ran 48:24:12:6, and 3 for little Dimitri. My father thought this created a pact between us.

  I remember that my father and Reynolds talked about Yeats. Reynolds asked a question and Stephen answered, ‘Well, I think …’, crinkling his forehead to indicate the subject was serious.

  Mum had caught up with Raymond in California on 12 December, the second anniversary of his wife’s death. Ostensibly he’d offered her a rest from her concert tour so that she could recover from her whiplash. Natasha got into the passenger seat of his car and the first thing he did was run into a fence. Then he backed out and promptly drove off the road. Her neck still hurt, she hadn’t slept for days and she was in a highly anxious state. She wanted to get out of the car and fly right back east, but instead she stayed. They got to the hotel. She went to bed and slept through the rest of the day.

  Next day they drove aimlessly towards the mountains, came to a dead end and drove back. On day three, they drove two hours through the Tonto National Forrest to the Roosevelt Dam and back over mountain roads of the kind that ‘would have given Cissy the jitters unless she had been driving herself’. The trip got Ray back into the habit of driving. He thought she now had confidence in him. On Sunday, she ate and slept and sunbathed. On Monday, they went shopping in Phoenix …

  Ray described all this in a long letter to Stephen, the point of which was that he wanted her to stay longer. ‘If we can’t get this girl well, and I mean well, her life is bound to be a succession of exhaustions, near breakdowns, vitality too low to resist infection, and so on.’ Unless she regains perfect health, ‘she cannot live the exacting life of a musician and a mother of two rather demanding children whom she adores, and be the manager of a household, and also have even a limited social life’. If she had to give up her life as a musician she would cease to be herself. ‘You of all people should know that an artist deprived of his or her art is a defeated human being … a true professional can never become an amateur, but only become broken-hearted by giving up.’ She had to stay with him longer, otherwise ‘it’s going to be like Tangier; she will return looking immensely better, but it won’t go deep enough to last’.

  There is a great deal of truth in all this. My mother lived on her nerves, the effort of will was huge and it affected her health, but she wasn’t going to be satisfied with becoming a second-rank musician. Yet in her article on Chandler written twenty years later, the only thing she was willing to reveal was that she had wanted to save him from suicide. This implies that hers was the position of strength. She was the noble and magnanimous nurse. As things turned out, Chandler died as predicted and her description of her role in retrospect was honourable, but it is by no means the whole story.

  Back in London my father accepted Ray’s argument, passing over the implication that he and Ray were two men taking care of the same woman, equidistant from her and with equal rights. He sent messages to Natasha encouraging her to stay – not surprising, since he had Reynolds in the house. On 1 January 1957, Ray wrote to thank Stephen for having encouraged her to be with him. If Natasha tells him that he’s been ‘angelic’, it was only the truth! He’d deferred to her in everything! ‘We are both – she and I – highly strung and capricious people. We both have quick tempers which are soon over.’ This is carrying the triangle of two men plus one woman a step further. It’s as if Ray and Natasha are on one side while Stephen is drifting away into the distance.

  As for her concert career, it seemed to Ray to require ‘more egoism than she is capable of’. Maybe she should try the Women’s Club circuit? And what’s wrong with her agent? It was such a shame that she’s being given ‘cheap little concerts in museums’. She tells him he’s wrong to talk about money, but it’s just as well that he has some; and it is at her service, and at the service of the whole Spender family. ‘I rather feel now that the Spender family is my family. And I need the Spender family far more than they need me.’ If Stephen needs money, he’s ready.

  However, behind his cunning use of money as a theme of their relationship, there lay a mundane reality. While Natasha was in Phoenix, whenever she ran out of places to drive to, she went shopping; and he’d picked up the tab. He hadn’t earned anything in two years, he’d just scrapped the first draft of his new novel, and if he went on living off his capital like this, he would soon run out.

  My mother’s train of thought at this point went like this: Raymond wants me to leave Stephen and join him, but I won’t. What can I invent that will keep this relationship alive, help him, and isn’t just a hollow deception on my part? The answer was: a house. If Chandler wanted her, he could buy her a house, live in it, and she would come down and be there as often as she could. If it were hers, she would. The financial and emotional tensions of living with Stephen, compounded by her insecure childhood, needed to be balanced by a place she could call her own.

  Chandler recognized an impossible fantasy based on a real need. It was similar to his own, of having Natasha replace his dead wife Cissy. He played through her wish-fulfilment to the bitter end. Where would this cottage be? In France? He spoke French and that would be no problem, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to live in France. In Wales? In Ireland? And what would happen if one day she invited some guests to come and visit her? As they sat over tea, they’d hear a curious tapping noise coming from the next room. What was that, they’d ask? She’d have to say airily, ‘Oh, that’s just Chandler at work on his new book.’

  On Christmas Eve, she phoned London to wish us Happy Christmas. Then she left Ray in Palm Springs while she drove off on ‘a round of visits’. She spent New Year’s Eve in the house of Edward and Evelyn Hooker, two psychologists who lived in Los Angeles. In Natasha’s absence, Ray started drinking again, and when he joined them for supper on 6 January 1957, they were appalled. He needed psychiatric help, they said. Natasha wasn’t trained to deal with him. Her own health was precarious and she had more concerts to perform.

  Through Natasha, Chandler invited Christopher Isherwood and his companion Don Bachardy out to lunch, followed by a drive around ‘his’ Hollywood. In the evening the Hookers invited Gerald Heard to dinner. Heard was a very English intellectual, interested in scientific and also in mystical ideas, a friend of Aldous Huxley and, like him, an early influence on the Californian counter-culture. The conversation was high-minded in the extreme and Chandler felt excluded. ‘Very learned, but much too pontifical,’ he wrote later. ‘Americans generally seem to be quite content to be lectured at for a whole evening.’ Isherwood and Bachardy came in after supper and brought the conversation back to the afternoon’s drive, for which they thanked him; but he refused to cheer up.

  Next day he drove Natasha back to Palm Springs to continue their vacation. With her in the house, Ray managed to settle down to work at his new novel
, swim, eat regularly and go to the movies in the evening. This continued for five days. Then, unexpectedly, Edward Hooker died in LA of a heart attack. Natasha’s instinct was to go back and join Evelyn so as to be supportive, but Evelyn overruled her. She should stay with Chandler and perhaps come up three days later for the funeral.

  When the time came, Natasha went up alone and came back with Evelyn a few days later. Christopher and Don joined them on the following day.

  Decades later, I was sitting gloomily zapping the TV and thinking of my mother and there she was, in her thirties, in a swimsuit, on the screen in front of me. She turned and gave me a cheerful wave. It was also a somewhat sexy wave – and at that point I assumed I was having a nervous breakdown, of the kind when number-plates in the street start sending you secret messages. I sat there rigidly, and it turned out that the programme was a French documentary on Chandler. Indeed, he was in the background doing somersaults from the diving board, looking froglike and cheerful.

  I rang Mum and told her this story. The joke was that you can’t always have a nervous breakdown just because the TV sends you messages. Sometimes it’s coincidence! She brooded about this for a few days then rang back to explain all the circumstances: Evelyn’s recent loss, Chandler’s state of mind, the presence of Christopher and Don. Who had made this programme, she asked coldly? She didn’t think my joke was funny.

  In that motel after Edward’s death, after the swim, the conversation turned to religion. Isherwood was involved with mysticism, and my mother was interested in religious experience, regarding which Chandler in his letters is sometimes catty. On deckchairs around that pool, Chandler told them that he knew that Cissy was gone for ever. He would not see her again. This was not the most tactful thing to say in front of Evelyn Hooker, who had just lost her husband – and here an element of competition crept in. Just because she’d lost her husband more recently than he’d lost Cissy, it didn’t mean that Natasha had to give all her attention to Evelyn.

  My mother in Palm Springs, playing patience when she should have been

  practising the piano, but keeping an eye on Raymond Chandler …

  They began to talk about going back to Los Angeles, and at this point Chandler began to panic. Natasha wasn’t thinking of leaving him, was she? She had a concert to perform and the Hookers had a piano on which she could practise. The motel didn’t. She remained alone with him for another fortnight. He worked, she played patience. She was wined and dined one last time at the Starlite Room of the Riviera Hotel, then she flew from Palm Springs to LA. She spent the weekend with Evelyn and flew to Washington on Monday 28 January to resume her concert tour.

  Crazy though Raymond Chandler’s love for my mother may have been, it worked for him. When he was with her he could write and settle down to a ritual existence where everything was in place. When she wasn’t, he immediately fell to pieces. But for my mother the visit to Palm Springs was equally decisive. Ray’s competitive grief had shocked her. Since much of her attention was dedicated to helping people who were desperate, she assumed that among them there existed a hierarchy of need, and that Ray should have recognized that Evelyn’s was greater than his own. The fact that he hadn’t was a big point against him.

  … who was visibly falling to pieces. He labelled this photo ‘Before the Autopsy’.

  Clearly she wouldn’t be coming back. The cottage in the country was Ray’s last chance, and it had gone. He tried to marshal his thoughts in a letter to his lawyer, who was also a friend.

  Stephen is a loving father and in many ways a very lovable man. His good manners and consideration for others rather hide the fact that he is really a ferocious egotist and egoist, who, fundamentally, thinks only of himself. The unforgivable crime, and Auden feels as strongly about this as I do, is for a homo to marry and thereby to destroy a woman’s right to the love of a husband, above all a woman whose sense of duty will never allow her to inflict a divorce on her children. It’s a goddamned mess and it just so happens that I can do a little, not very much, to restore her to her pride in being desired.

  He then went on to describe how to get the best service from waiters at the Starlite Room.

  As a comment on homosexuality and marriage, it seems to me that Chandler makes a fair point (and Auden, supposing he really did think this). If there is no physical desire in the marriage, what has the wife got? But the dogmatism involved is surely wrong, for if two people live together, what business is it of outsiders to question the moral standards of the relationship? In this respect, and in spite of the emotional contortion of the Chandler episode, Natasha and Stephen were confident in each other in ways that were not at risk. In one of her letters to Stephen she promises him, ‘no more lame ducks!’ Which surely means that my parents were in agreement about the situation: Raymond Chandler was a sinking ship, and Mum had devoted too much time to him, and she blamed herself for having allowed herself to be distracted.

  She wrote a thank-you letter (now lost) to Ray for her visit to California, in which she mentioned his having ‘entertained’ her. Was that the right word for what he felt about her, he wrote back? ‘The most I really wanted was to take care of you.’ But, ‘forget it’, let’s discuss the future when she planned to ‘entertain’ him in privacy. ‘You know damn well that Stephen won’t be the one to buy or help you buy the little cottage.’ But supposing he did, how could Ray fit in? ‘I am not a friend asking you to lunch.’

  She’d ‘tried to give him everything he wanted’: what did she mean by that? He didn’t want to hear anything about giving. What they had together, they shared. She’d mentioned prayer in her letter: he had his difficulties with God. ‘To me Cissy is utterly gone; to God perhaps not. To me prayer is not an asking; it is a communion, or an attempt at a communion.’ And via three pages on prayer, back to Natasha. ‘It takes great strength for a man like me to live alone. I think I have it now, but I did not have it then. I thought too much of myself and not enough of my dedicated love for you.’

  It sounds as if he was going to try living alone. But wait. While writing this letter a woman had answered his advertisement for a secretary. He told Natasha that she’d described herself as a ‘small, inoffensive person with no nasty habits’. His fingers were giving him trouble, the typewriter was unfamiliar.

  This letter was followed by a telephone call in the middle of which Natasha hung up on him. He’d mentioned Helga Greene, to whom he’d told various things. ‘After all, in my Will, I am making Helga my Literary Executor, and I have to trust her.’ Natasha was never going to dedicate her life to Ray, but the idea that there were other women out there who would nevertheless made her jealous.

  Early in February, with Natasha still in Phoenix with Chandler, Reynolds received another letter from Stephen. He wasn’t going to write about Reynolds in his diary, he wrote, ‘though I will do one day. But I shall not put anything you’ve told me even into that. Occasionally I note something of more or less historic interest like J. Hayworth’s [he means John Hayward’s] version of T. S. Eliot’s marriage, and I write about affairs of people when these are fairly public anyway – in fact I note the Secret History of Our Time which is what everybody knows but which the Establishment keep to themselves. What I do not note is my [rare?] attachments to people and their confidences to me.’ (If only my father had written the secret history of the British Establishment. This present book about my parents is partly an attempt to do just that, but he would have done it so much better.)

  Stephen’s letter implies that the moment when this relationship might have become physical was already over. Years later, Reynolds went out of his way to tell me that he and Stephen were never lovers, and I believe him. The letters suggest that as soon as this had been ruled out, my father set about creating a different basis for their friendship.

  In his next letter he wrote to Reynolds about Rimbaud, who was:

  not at all like Dylan Thomas, as I am sure all the dumbells suppose. He didn’t so much systematically derange his se
nses (his slogan) as systematically undermine his own happiness. And I have always felt there is a great deal to be said for doing this. Happiness of a rather low-grade kind is the real bourgeois materialist trait of all our societies all over the world. Directly the note of authentic unhappiness – or refusal to be comfortable – is struck one recognizes something that does not exist elsewhere.

  Stephen was forty-eight, Reynolds twenty-four. The identification with Verlaine and Rimbaud was tempting. ‘I wonder whether you would have liked Rimbaud. If you were R and I were Verlaine, we would go to the furthest possible degree of every kind of exploration and exploitation of one another.’ Stephen was fascinated by the idea of a reciprocal predatory relationship that produced quantities of poems. ‘I think Rimbaud was aware of a problem which he learned about as the result of sleeping under bridges in the frost, being raped by soldiers in the Caserne … That is that although one knows things, one’s desire for complacency or comfort is so great that until one becomes an object, an instrument, on which to inflict themselves, one remains “literary”, that is, comfortable.’

  Is this is about sex? No, I don’t think it means that Stephen and Reynolds should emulate this aspect of the lives of Verlaine and Rimbaud. It’s a sketch for a hypothetical future of unease that would charge the writings of Reynolds and Stephen with a new energy.

  Reynolds was sympathetic, but being a much younger man his view of precariousness was different. He’d seen nothing of his own writing published, his B.Litt. on Milton was going very slowly, he had no partner and he wasn’t sure what kind of a future he sought. He could understand the argument that a writer must avoid complacency and he could sympathize with Stephen’s predicament as an established writer caught in a web of obligations, but a total derangement of the senses in order to become creative wasn’t what he needed at this stage of his life.