A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  For years I had schooled myself to the loneliness and although I was (how can I say it?) much pursued, my discipline was intact. I began to know what the religious mean by detachment. It is a cold word for the warmest feeling. The sense of communion through love – but love only through God. And in all those years I never lost a friend – only gained them in a real and deep way. With you I failed because what you so generously offered me in warmth and devotion tempted me – it seemed like the most wonderful liberation and solace and I also had the illusion that my devotion saved you from a despair, which had been the most potent element in your having called upon me. You may remember that our first evening at the Connaught you played a trick. [He’d started crying and she’d had to comfort him.] You asked me for a sign of compassion, and immediately translated into something, almost I might say to use against me. I was determined not to desert you because you were about to sink beneath the wave – but I failed you and muddled myself by not, at that moment, sticking to my discipline. It just seemed too cruel – but I should have done it …

  I think she means that she’d made a mistake in allowing Ray to believe that she was in love with him, as her ‘discipline’ included chastity.

  When a gentle and kind letter arrives from you I feel an overwhelming happiness & solace – and I believe that what has always been the relationship in tenderness and devotion can’t be killed – whatever is done to bash it on the head. The moment I read one such phrase (as above) in a letter from you – it is as if none of the dissensions had ever existed – That is the pure you – and all the other nonsense is dross.

  If he came to London, couldn’t she pick him up at the airport and bring him directly to the Red Brick Cottage? They could go through all their explanations in private. ‘This place is peace – I live here alone whenever I can, like a Trappist, playing Beethoven, reading – meditating … I believe that something of the aura of the old Abbey exists in the garden (though the Abbey was destroyed in the Dissolution) and at all events the benign stillness of the place is therapeutic and feeds the spirit. And I would like to share this with you without a lot of foreign bodies about.’

  Then arrangements. He should come before the children’s holidays began so they wouldn’t be disturbed. Stephen would be in Tokyo. It was annoying that Ray couldn’t come before 5 April because of his tax problems.

  I do ‘care for you in a serious way’ – probably far too serious for you – but it is for you to decide about that – but my seriousness is always welded into my discipline. I know that the fundamental loneliness that can be the lot of each of us, can only for me be redeemed by prayer – and by love within prayer (that sounds too grandiose a way of describing anything so simple and direct) … For a time I was tempted to believe that the ‘human’ way was open to me – and you certainly made me feel cherished for the only time in my life and I can never forget it. But nag, nag, nag was always the feeling inside me that this was a confusion of my deepest understanding of life. This was all terribly unfair on you – who were looking for something much simpler.

  In the West last year I really behaved atrociously because I never could get near making clear to you what was bothering me. And I snatched at the opportunity to live on a hedonistic plane because I was on the run from facing this truth. When I look back after a year – and after having been honest with myself – I do quite literally blush with shame. You can quite understandably feel that I ‘used’ you. But you mistake my feelings utterly although it was just as hard for you as if I had set out to use you. I’m not trying to make it sound better than it is – but don’t you see that my feelings about you are ‘serious’ enough? God knows I suffered quite atrocious behaviour from you too (which equally was not wilfully disgusting but had the same effect on me at the time as if it had been. Now I understand that it was a symptom of the underlying struggle) and I did my best to help you there – only my own inner conflict made me worse than useless.

  It seems that in a lost letter he’d been bragging about his sex life, perhaps to underline the fact that with Natasha that aspect had been non-existent. ‘I loved your saying that you are a “tiger with the right woman in the right situation”. I am happy to think of you as you say, “—ing endlessly day and night” you old tiger you! It’s right and proper for you and it’s important to you. Beata lei! [Lucky her!]’

  Can we imagine Ray fucking the right woman like a tiger when the mood was on him? No, we can’t. He was too old and ill and alcoholic. Yet if there was an element of wish-fulfilment on his part, a parallel fantasy was being carefully nursed by Natasha. She accepted his self-image as a demon lover because she wanted him to accept hers, which was that of a pious woman wedded to her ‘discipline’, but brimming with spiritual generosity. Thus their relationship was bound together by reciprocal make-believe.

  Darling Ray – don’t you understand I carry you in my heart as much as I ever did, but I can’t any longer run away from loneliness, when in so doing I involve other people in my predicament. You had enough frustration trying as you thought to help me. Well we can help each other by never denying the deep feeling we have for each other – always being kind to each other and respecting each others view of life. If your view precludes you from enjoying our relationship – then I respect it and you; and you must go in peace …

  In the spring of 1958, while Natasha was writing these letters, Stephen flew back to Japan. It wasn’t the free, careless flight from responsibility he’d initially dreamed of. It was measured, almost valedictory. He had one or two tasks to do for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but as these weren’t enough to keep him in the country for long, he’d arranged a lecture tour to pay for some extra days.

  As soon as he arrived in Tokyo on 20 April, he was told that Masao had lost his job and been rejected by his current lover, an American; and, in despair, he’d tried to commit suicide.

  Stephen met him as soon as he could and heard the whole story. The attempt had been serious, but Masao had also trusted to luck. Having taken a massive dose of sleeping pills, he’d visited his American lover, in front of whom he’d promptly collapsed. Thus he’d been saved. He’d now recovered and was working in a new job as a waiter.

  Masao, having related this story, saw Stephen’s schedule on his desk and asked if he could read it. For a moment, Stephen had doubts. Was he going to be possessive? But no. He merely wanted to see when both men would next be free to meet. This turned out to be in eight days’ time, and Stephen felt relieved. He wrote in his diary, ‘I really am concerned about him. He was very nice when he came, but very tired I thought, as if he would sleep for about two days if I just allowed him to do so in my room.’ This strikes me as typical of my father’s relationships. He loved Masao, and he’d travelled halfway across the world to see him, but in his presence he suddenly felt anxious about his privacy.

  By 12 May, after endless lectures delivered over the heads of unbending Japanese professors, he joined Masao for their few moments alone. Masao, at those quiet hotels with hot baths in the gardens, became Stephen’s protector, shooing off the female attendants and seeing Stephen through the ritual that was both a pleasure and an ordeal.

  Our happiest moments were when he cooled the water till it was of bearable temperature, took my Kimono off, then soaped me all over my body, then ladelled water out of the bath, in little tubs provided in the bath room for this purpose, and poured it over me. Once it was so hot that it caused me to give a violent jerk and rick my neck. This revealed Masao’s indefatigable gifts as a masseur. Afterwards, he massaged me first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and often several times during the day as well. One day Masao said that he would ring up my next guide Shozo, when he got back to Tokyo, and give him instructions how to look after me. ‘What will you tell him?’ ‘Well I’ll tell him that he may take a bath with you and wash your back.’

  Though Masao liked Shozo, he felt awkward among Stephen’s other friends. Perhaps he should go back to Tokyo, said Stephen? Af
ter all, the expenses were piling up. First Masao said he would, then he said he’d like to come to Hokkaido with Stephen and Shozo, then he apologized profusely for having dared to suggest such a thing. ‘This kind of moral scrupulousness surprised me after all the talk about the Japanese having no sense of guilt or sin. But perhaps it is something different.’

  Back in Tokyo, Stephen made an effort to obtain a place for Masao in a university. Surely, given the opportunity, he would improve himself? The officials he dealt with were scrupulously polite, but they suggested that even if he were given a place, Masao would find the work difficult. Trying another possibility, Stephen wondered whether Masao couldn’t go to the International Christian University. He’d write some articles and transfer the money directly to the British Council so that Masao would receive a ‘scholarship’.

  In the background, Masao was more interested in telling Shozo how to behave when he and Stephen went off for a week of lectures. ‘You don’t just have to be his interpreter, you can also enjoy yourself and be a friend to him. Sometimes he will want to think or read, in which case just be quiet and don’t talk to him. You can take a shower with him and scrub his back. In the morning he does not like Japanese breakfast, but should have a fried egg & ham done Western style. The coffee may be bad in the country, so take a tin of Nescafe so you can make him nicer coffee for him.’

  Stephen and Shozo went, leaving Masao behind. But after a few days alone with Shozo, Stephen began to feel besieged. Shozo wanted to translate the lectures Stephen had been giving; wanted to translate more poems. A different kind of demand was being made on Stephen, but he felt equally reluctant to part with these elements of himself. He felt some sympathy for Shozo, however. ‘Perhaps the fact that he wants to get on and do things is less of a weight than Masao’s real lack of concern about anything but personal relations.’ Nevertheless, the idea that he might be exploited by Shozo was unbearable. ‘The slightest degree of self-interest seems monstrous and introduces an element of the incalculable into a relationship.’

  Outside Tokyo, Stephen finally visited the International Christian University and spoke to its President about Masao. This man seems to have been less polite, and Stephen began to falter. ‘In this institution Masao and his “case” seemed strangely improbable. I remembered how Polynesian Masao looks, how unacademic, and thought there is really something about him that anyone in authority would immediately distrust. He is really designed to be Man Friday, I thought.’ And: ‘I was the Robinson Crusoe who saw his naked footprint in the sand.’

  When he came back, he found he had to answer several questions from Reynolds. First of all, did Stephen love his wife?

  I think the answer to your question about Natasha is that I do love her, but that our relationship is extremely frustrated for fairly obvious reasons: that I am too ambivalent and she is too repressed. If she were a different person she might have changed me, and if I were a different person I might have changed her. We probably chose each other because one side of each realized that the other would not change it; but at the same time without such change, real happiness is scarcely possible. Of course, by change I mean a lot more than might appear. I mean, for instance my being ready to give up my ‘freedom’, her being ready to give up concerts. But neither is quite willing to give up these things, for fear that he, or she, would not get anything but loneliness in return. It seems difficult in a way to see where the love comes in. I think it is that under everything else we recognise and respect one another’s needs and problems and don’t just dismiss them as ‘selfish’.

  I don’t understand this. Why does Stephen equate his ‘freedom’ with Natasha’s concerts? Surely they are different kinds of experience? Would he have given up his ‘freedom’ if she’d told him she’d give up the piano in exchange?

  Really, I think Natasha and I live on a kind of deep down mutual respect, and perhaps also on hope – apart, of course, from the children. Sometimes – as happened just before I went away – we draw very close together, which means more than something just momentary, because it involves the realisation that we are close together. We are also certainly married in the sense that we are for life and death totally involved, and would never get [each] other out of our systems. Unless, indeed she fell spectacularly in love, in which case – if with the right person – she might exorcise me …

  About cruelty. Certainly Natasha has suffered a great deal in our relationship through my actions. But then I have suffered also. I am not made happy through causing her unhappiness. Not to be cruel would involve changing things in me which I do not know whether I could change (though I always accuse myself that I could change them).

  One can become cruel through a kind of inverted unselfishness. Other people’s misfortunes can seem so much worse to you than anything you might have to bear alone, that you simply cannot bear to hear or think about them. Fundamentally I feel that I can solve my own problems. But others all too often appear to me unsolvable, just because the other person lacks some-quality-or-other, and therefore I cannot bear to hear about it. Natasha arrive[d] on the scene with a more or less insoluble problem – her music (really a compulsion projected on her in her appalling childhood) which at once drew me to her and made me desperately afraid.

  Imagining other people’s problems is such a strain that you’d prefer to do anything else but that – this is an idea I can understand. What I don’t understand is this curious duel concerning my mother’s career as a musician. I don’t believe that Mum’s music was a compulsion imposed by her childhood experiences; and even if it was, it existed today in the present tense. It was a strain but it could function.

  Was Dad trying to redefine her career as a neurosis in order to make her give it up, because he found it too hard to think of her and her problems? This is what it looked like as I read these letters in the archive of Duke University. All I can say is that when I was a teenager, I thought exactly the opposite. I thought my father wrote in one room and my mother played the piano in the other, and the two endeavours were balanced. I even thought it was an example to emulate somewhere in my own future.

  That summer, my father was working hard to finish a translation of Maria Stuart, the play by Schiller. This had been commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival, and in September he and I drove up there in the Jag for the opening night, leaving Mum behind in the Red Brick Cottage to work on a concert programme and to see Raymond Chandler alone.

  The trip took several days. Somewhere deep in the countryside I climbed a hill and became so overexcited, I couldn’t sleep. Dad gave me an adult sleeping pill. It did the trick, but next day when we were having lunch at Chatsworth with the Devonshires I fell on my knees and vomited all over a valuable carpet. They were very good about it. They said if I hadn’t been so busy apologizing, I would have made it to the loo.

  I was the map-reader, and next day I drew a straight line from Chatsworth to Edinburgh. It led us through the Yorkshire Dales past a tiny hamlet called Muker. Empty, beautiful landscape. Dad didn’t talk much. In a car he went into a dream – of what, I have no idea. Along a stretch with nothing but bleak heath on either side, we saw a blackbird in the middle of the road. We approached. The bird didn’t move. It tried to fly away just as we were on top of it. My father gave a cry of agony as he crushed it, and I had nothing but the echo of that cry in my mind for many miles. It was touching – but was he over-reacting? After all, we ate chicken for supper every week. Was his sensitivity tuned too high?

  His anxiety increased as we approached Edinburgh. I said, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. Whatever happens it can’t be as boring as Hamlet.’ We’d seen a lot of Hamlet that year. Once, it was supposed to have been Cymbeline but he’d picked the wrong day.

  When we came back, we found that Mum had acquired a new household appliance by which she was evidently obsessed: a knitting machine. It was probably a present from Raymond Chandler, though she implied she’d bought it herself. It would pay its way when she’d completed a mere twelve jumpers,
she said. She’d installed it on top of the piano, and whenever she got stuck in a passage of her Beethoven, she’d run an arpeggio on the knitting machine without getting up. Unfortunately this thing kept jamming, and her music would have to be ignored while she unravelled the disorder caused by the machine’s wicked little teeth.

  I was due to go to Westminster School that autumn.

  At the time, the boys had to wear a made-to-measure suit, complete with waistcoat. It was expensive and wasteful and they grew out of them within a year. I remember I wore mine for the first time when Mum and I visited the Tower of London. Raymond Chandler, by that time in London, came with us.

  The Tower of London has green spaces that require walking, and at a certain point Chandler stopped dead in his tracks and refused to budge. Mum went on a few paces, turned round and pouted. She mimed: Come on, you can do it. With a mad smile on his face, Ray trundled on towards her.

  At supper with my parents and Ray at the Red Brick Cottage a few weeks later, we were eating soup. Ray was making a hideous slurping noise and I, a dear little English public-school boy, was disgusted. My parents began to make faces at me. Be polite! At a certain point, aware of the tension in our silence, Ray gave us each a sidelong glance: at Mum and Dad on his right, at me on his left. His neck was stiff, his cheeks were crinkled, his jacket was much too large for him. He looked like a decaying tortoise. Staring down at his plate, he started chuckling. He’d grasped both sides of this silent drama: the snooty schoolboy disgusted at his slobbery noises and the fearsome looks of two parents miming good behaviour at their son. He knew about England. He’d been to school here – Dulwich College, to be precise, along with P. G. Wodehouse. He knew what it took to make an English boy polite and it amused him.