A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  In January 1960, after he’d received the Pasternak letters but six months before they were published, Stephen travelled to Moscow in the company of Muriel Buttinger, who wanted to make contact with a sculptor she’d befriended in the 1920s.

  Through the British Embassy in Moscow, Stephen arranged to visit the Union of Soviet Writers. It took a day or two, and when he arrived he was met by two women who explained in a friendly way that all the writers he wanted to meet were unavailable, and that not many ‘specialists’ had ever heard of his work. If he came back on Tuesday maybe they’d be able to arrange ‘a small gathering’.

  Undiscouraged, Stephen told them that he thought the present arrangement of official meetings between writers of the East and the West was too cumbersome. Perhaps something simpler could be arranged? ‘I thought it would be a good idea if a dozen or so people could go away together for a week or two and exchange their views in a quieter and simpler atmosphere without banquets and publicity. They were amused at this suggestion and seemed to think that it would be asking an awful lot of the participants.’ Their laughter covered their embarrassment. It was highly unlikely that the Soviet authorities would agree to such a proposal.

  Word went round that Spender was in Moscow. Since he’d accompanied Muriel in a private capacity, he did not represent anyone but himself. A couple of days later, at one in the morning, he received an unexpected telephone call from an old friend: Guy Burgess. They arranged to see each other on the following day.

  Stephen wrote a record of their meeting. He had not sought it, therefore the initiative was with Burgess. His predominant feeling was one of compassion: Burgess wanted to justify himself. He told Stephen that his flight from England did not mean he was guilty of anything. He’d only intended to accompany Maclean to Prague and then come back to London. Maclean had panicked because of the ferocious attentions of the American police when he’d been working in Washington.

  Now and again Guy referred to Stephen as an ‘American agent’, and when Stephen protested, Burgess backed off saying it was ‘only a tease’. He seemed to remember every single occasion when they’d met: a conversation before the war in a Paris bar about a tragi-comic episode in Stephen’s life when he’d tried psychoanalysis. Once, Stephen had lent Guy his flat. And when John Cornford, the young communist poet who was killed in the Spanish Civil War, had as a schoolboy sent Stephen his poems, Stephen had written him a six-page letter of advice. Burgess knew this, too. He was evoking a list of good works: to flatter his listener, or was this just nostalgia? These incidents, all of which Stephen had forgotten, gave an air of having been polished as lovingly as a jeweller polishes stones. Stephen didn’t know what to make of it. Burgess was behaving ‘like some ex-consular official you meet in a bar at Singapore and who puzzles you by his references to the days when he knew the great, and helped determine policy’.

  There came the moment when Burgess tried to describe what he’d actually done: which, he said, was to hand over information about what people had discussed, in those high diplomatic and political circles he’d frequented. What was wrong with that, he asked defiantly? Burgess said that Churchill, when in opposition before the war, had often passed information to Maisky, the Russian Ambassador. During the war British and Russian intelligence officers had met regularly, and ‘the rules of secrecy were more or less ignored or considered to be suspended’.

  Stephen said cautiously that it wasn’t clear to him ‘what was the borderland dividing giving away information from giving away real secrets’. If Dave Springhall had ended up in prison for having given the Russians some plans for an aircraft, he said – well, that was one kind of betrayal. Perhaps just handing on information fell into a different category. The example came from personal knowledge. Springhall was one of the commissars whom he’d had to confront in Spain when he’d tried to save Tony Hyndman.

  A few weeks later, at a party back in London, Stephen was approached by the Home Secretary R. A. Butler. He told Stephen that if Burgess wanted to come back to England, he personally would have no objection – though he supposed that the boys in MI5 might have other views. If Stephen were to write to him …? Stephen didn’t follow this up. It didn’t seem to offer Burgess any guarantee against prosecution.

  A second figure intruded into this strange predicament: Tom Driberg. At this time, Driberg was a journalist, a former Labour MP and member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. He urged Stephen not to encourage Burgess to come back. Driberg knew Burgess well and had published a respectful biography of him. Stephen deduced that Driberg did not want Burgess to reappear in London and start naming names.

  I met Tom Driberg in the street with my father soon after these events. It was the only time I saw him. I thought that he was loud and invasive, and although Dad was friendly, I detected a certain hesitation on his part.

  As he and I walked away he murmured, ‘That man is supposed to have been Moscow’s representative inside the British Parliament.’ I said I didn’t understand. He explained that Driberg came from the communist wing of the Labour Party, and if the government needed to communicate something urgently to Moscow, well, they could rely on Tom to deliver the message.

  I was shocked. It went against the whole concept of ‘us’ against ‘them’: the capitalists against the commies. There was a war in progress, not a nearby war, a distant war, a domino-theory war, a ‘cold’ war – but still a war. What was this private-chat option?

  He said, with all his usual mildness, ‘I think it’s good when people go on talking to each other, don’t you?’

  Nothing could bring out more forcibly the difference between English and American relations with Russia at that time. American intellectuals couldn’t even meet ‘real’ communists, because the McCarran Act kept them out of the USA; and here was Tom Driberg who apparently could pick up a phone and call his friends in Moscow whenever he felt like it. Meanwhile in London, though many people were shocked by the defection of Burgess and Maclean, it was assumed they had valid reasons for whatever it was they were supposed to have done. None of their friends rejected them with outraged cries of ‘traitor’.

  Years later, the art historian John Pope-Hennessy told me that when Anthony Blunt first heard that he was under investigation, he put on his coat, walked down to the MI5 building off Whitehall, walked through the guards and up to the third floor, found his file, put it under his coat and walked out again, unchallenged. This slowed down the investigation considerably! Pope-Hennessy thought it was a wonderful scene: ‘Anthony was a very arrogant man. I can just imagine him doing it.’ And he laughed.

  If I’d said, ‘But he betrayed his country,’ Pope-Hennessy would have just changed the subject. It would have been a remark in bad taste. So, as an Englishman brought up within the rules, I kept quiet.

  In 1960 I gave up rowing, with all that yucky business of comparing cocks among the steam, and joined the tribe of fencers.

  One result of the Hungarian revolution was that Westminster had acquired a fantastic fencing teacher, Bela Imregi. Up until then fencing had been the sport of the non-sporty, who’d hang around dressed in white duck canvas, gossiping. Imregi taught us how to use our reflexes. Don’t think, move; and always move forward.

  A friend among the fencers was Simon Baddeley. His speciality in épée was a flèche to the big toe of his opponent. Risky, because all the opponent needed to do was tuck back his toe and stretch forward and Simon would be hit in the head. But, because it was so unexpected, it worked well on away matches.

  During one of these matches I happened to be talking about the British Museum. Simon said, ‘It’s in Bloomsbury, isn’t it?’ To which I said, ‘Where is Bloomsbury?’ Simon was the editor of a literary magazine, so he published a snippet somewhere in the back: ‘Spender, son of Stephen, asks “where is Bloomsbury?”’ Dad laughed when he saw it, but it made me wary of Simon.

  One day Simon said, ‘Your father is part of the Establishment by now, isn’t he?’ I wasn’
t going to ask, ‘What is the Establishment?’ and find another droll quote in Simon’s magazine. I had to edge around the subject. I learned that the Establishment stood for the skill with which England makes room for its critics, gives them a title or some other indication of rank and requires them to stand up for the very institution which up until then they’d done their best to challenge.

  I didn’t like the implications of Simon’s joke. It occurred to me: can I ask my father, ‘Dad, are you a poet of the British Establishment?’ I knew that if I did, he would be offended. And Dad when he was offended really was upset, as if something much larger than his own feelings had been hurt. Did I want to descend so low? Could I? The answer was obviously no, I could not hurt my father. He was too weak.

  Being a member of the Establishment attached Stephen to a much wider circle of English life than the restricted enclave of poetry. The next generation of British writers chose to live far from the centres of power. Philip Larkin in his library at Hull, for instance, complaining about his boring job – in fact complaining bitterly about practically everything. In his obtuse way, Larkin represented post-imperial England sinking back into a peripheral role after having controlled a third of the world’s surface. ‘Little England’ was a virtue born of necessity. My father hated it. I remember him reading Larkin’s first poems with a grim frown. Was he going to publish them in Encounter, I asked? Yes, he said; and sighed with exasperation.

  In his willingness to go anywhere in the world on behalf of the British Council or the PEN Club or whatever, patriotism of a peculiar kind was involved. This patriotism had been clear to his friends Auden and Isherwood from a long way back. (‘Little England’ regarded this patriotism with misgivings. It seemed connected with Britain’s imperial past. The thought was wrong, but perhaps understandable for the times.)

  Years before, in 1936, Stephen and Christopher had retreated to Sintra in Portugal, where they hoped to set up a small community of writers. There were tensions from the start, mainly between Tony and Christopher’s boyfriend Heinz, and the experiment did not last beyond the middle of March. At one point Christopher noted in his diary, ‘My days are all poisoned and I can no longer discuss things frankly with Stephen – because we are divided from each other by a secret mutual knowledge of our intentions: Stephen means to return to England if things get nasty – I don’t.’ The reference is to the imminent danger of war. Christopher had already made up his mind that if war broke out, he would not participate. His attachment to Heinz, and thence to Germany, precluded it.

  Auden shared this feeling from about 1938, when he won the King’s Medal for Poetry. He knew this was ‘the end’, as he put it, because the prize signified his credentials as a freshly elected member of the Establishment. He did not want to become a respected icon of British literature.

  My father’s credentials were confirmed in 1983, when he was given a knighthood. I was deeply upset at the time. I thought it cut him off from writing poetry. I wrote him a bitter letter hinting as much. He wrote an extraordinary reply. Life, he said, is very much like school. Sooner or later one has to join the Sixth Form. Most of his friends were in the Sixth Form already: Sir Isaiah, Sir Stuart, Sir Freddie. What’s wrong with that? (And besides, he added cunningly, think of the pleasure it would give Natasha when she becomes Lady Spender.)

  Yet, if patriotism lay somewhere inside Stephen’s many trips abroad, there was also the pleasure of leaving Little England behind. One of his last interviews consisted of a questionnaire in which he was asked what gave him most pleasure in life. He wrote, ‘Any voyage away from England.’ I was standing beside him at the time. We were in the garden of a villa outside Florence. I said, ‘You can’t write that.’ I added to what he’d written – it’s in my handwriting, ‘– and any voyage back to England.’ It was too late for him to opt out.

  A month after Stephen came back from Moscow, Konstantin Fedin, Chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, arrived in London together with Alexander Tvardovsky, the main editor of the literary magazine Novy Mir. They told their hosts at the British Council that the one person they wanted to see was Stephen Spender.

  He assumed that they just wanted to apologize for the snub he’d received from the ladies of the Writers’ Union in Moscow, but in fact they seemed genuinely interested in the idea of arranging private meetings of small groups of writers away from the eyes of officialdom, ‘if it was not conducted in setting one side against the other, and with interested parties looking over shoulders’.

  Fedin at the time was a somewhat despised cultural bureaucrat. Tvardovsky was a more courageous figure, who subsequently got into trouble by insisting that Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago should be published in Russia. (It wasn’t.) It’s possible that Tvardovsky saw himself as a figure corresponding to that of Spender, in search of the same thing: better communication between writers.

  Stephen took them to lunch at the Garrick Club. At the end of the meal, Tvardovsky referred to the idea of the seminars and said that it would be appropriate if Spender were to direct them. Stephen refused – which is interesting. If his initiative had been set up by the British Council or some other official body, he would surely have accepted on the spot. ‘I tried to make it clear that I did not wish them to feel they were committed to having me.’

  This meal was followed by a private supper at Loudoun Road in April. Spender showed Fedin and Tvardovsky the guest list beforehand. They balked at one name: Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Opposition. No politicians, they said. Spender persuaded them that Gaitskell would not be present in any official capacity. He was a personal friend, and he was an intelligent man.

  They must have been puzzled that Stephen, on the one hand so eager to take groups of writers away from politics, should want them to meet the head of the Labour Party. Unfortunately, he did not write a diary entry on this occasion but I vaguely remember it, as Gaitskell sat at the head of the table and, as usual, I’d passed the peanuts up to that moment.

  A few years previously, Gaitskell himself had tried to tackle the question of improving cultural relations between the two countries. He’d spoken to Nikolai Mikhailov, a young assistant of Khrushchev’s. ‘The exchanges of culture in which he was so interested would only be of value if they were completely outside the propaganda sphere.’ But ‘he struck me as a young man who was desperately anxious to bring off more cultural interchanges because his job depended on it’. If he was only interested in plumping out his CV, it hardly seemed worth pursuing.

  At Westminster it was still compulsory to take part in the Combined Cadet Force, an Officer’s Training Corps which was supposed to teach us military virtues. Our equipment went back to the First World War and some of the masters felt dubious about our activities; on the other hand we were studying history, and history includes battles, so we might as well learn what large-scale fighting involves.

  My best friend at the time was Tristan Platt, another boy in Liddell’s House. He was a militant pacifist, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Following his lead, he and I began to challenge the OTC. During an exam in which we were asked to look at an Ordinance Survey map and describe how to get from A to B using ‘dead ground’, we invented a bus route which took us off the map to an imaginary pub. This did not go down well.

  A few weeks later Major French, who was fanatical about the Corps, gave us a lecture about different weapons: the Sten gun which cost a mere five bob to build but was only effective at close quarters; and the Bren gun, ‘a beautiful weapon’, which was good up to a range of five hundred yards. Tristan raised his hand to ask a question. Yes? ‘Would you mind explaining to us what you mean by a beautiful weapon, Sir, given that you are describing a piece of machinery that can only be used for killing people?’ This also went down badly.

  By this time our study at Liddell’s, a large room with desks for six boys, was beginning to discuss whether we shouldn’t take part in the Ban the Bomb protests that met now and again in Trafalgar Square. I had doubts about unil
ateral disarmament. The others were more committed. One boy was a fan of Bertrand Russell, but I had doubts about Russell too, because he’d advocated war against Russia in 1945, changing his mind immediately after the Russians had acquired the atom bomb. (It was logical but it was weird.) The fun of marching finally overtook our political arguments. Six of us went forth one Saturday afternoon clutching an umbrella with a message that read, ‘Eating People Is Wrong’. This was the only cause we could agree on. It was written in toothpaste and it melted in the rain.

  One day the Dean of Westminster, the Right Reverend Eric Abbott, delivered a sermon to us Westminster boys in the Abbey. He described a motor tour he’d made through Germany during a recent vacation. He gave us his thoughts on the Second World War and the necessity for patriotism and I dozed off. Suddenly he brought the sermon to a close with, ‘God give us something to live for, and God give us something to die for.’

  Tristan, who’d been listening with great attention, got up and booed. I stood up beside him to be supportive.

  The Dean was an independent authority whose office predated the Norman Conquest. He was older than the school by six hundred years – and the school had been founded by Queen Elizabeth I. We were ordered to apologise; and off we went. But Tristan had no intention of abandoning his pacifism. He told the Dean he was wrong to have made a warlike speech, however justifiable, in the House of God, since Christ had preached that we must love our neighbour, not try to kill him. The Dean grew angry but Tristan stuck to his theme, with me at his side murmuring occasionally, ‘I think he’s right, Sir.’