A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  As a result of this, and on the grounds that we were irredeemably anti-militarist, Tristan and I were excused from further service in the Corps. Instead of stripping down a Lee-Enfield rifle, I was given permission to go to the Slade School of Fine Art to learn how to draw the nude. I don’t remember how the Slade came into the picture, but the head of it, Bill Coldstream, was an old friend of Dad’s.

  The Slade was tucked away in the corner of the main quadrangle of University College, London. When I arrived, I found at the door a uniformed beadle with a big brass buckle round his waist. I presented myself to Coldstream, not knowing at the time how closely he was connected with several members of my family, though aware that my father had studied in a much earlier art school he’d organized somewhere along the Euston Road. I was free to do what I wanted, said Bill kindly, since I wasn’t officially on anyone’s books.

  I went downstairs to the Life Class, a large room full of students sitting on their ‘donkeys’, a strange trestle table that was also a stool. They were drawing intently, holding up their pencils at arm’s length from time to time in order to measure something. No one spoke. I found a spare donkey, propped my sketchbook against the cross at one end and raised my eyes to the naked woman posing on a stand not far off. So far I hadn’t dared look at her. There she was, and I didn’t know what to do. Her back was towards me and she was leaning on one leg. She was fiftyish and stringy and, yes, she was absolutely and totally without clothes. I put the tip of my pencil against the paper and kept it there, wondering what to do next. Just then a spasm went up her left leg. I looked at my paper, and there was a nice fresh mark on it, made when I’d flinched in sympathy.

  The Slade at the time was very keen on marks on paper. A drawing was often a succession of marks, the freshest one ‘qualifying’ those already in place. There was a distant echo of Cézanne, but crabbier. One teacher called these marks, ‘statements’. Thus you could have the sincerity of the statement and the integrity of the statement, and so on. A negative word was ‘arbitrary’, which could lead to ‘I feel this statement is a bit arbitrary.’ Some sense of truth was involved, as if there were a parallel between getting your words right in an essay on logic, and turning your marks on paper into a convincing elbow. One thing your marks must not be was decorative. The negative word in this case was ‘slick’. As in: ‘I don’t like Modigliani. He’s much too slick.’ Dexterity was a trap, because if you did something automatically, it couldn’t be sincere.

  ‘Slick’ signified consigning your soul to a generic formula inherited from the previous centuries, without scrutinising the object in front of you. Art must strive for the new, a fresh adventure taking place every time the artist sits down in front of the easel. The true artist reinvents the language. Art must not repeat itself. Art must be pushed forward. I couldn’t help thinking that if you did the same thing day after day for decades, it would become a habit, and at some point resistance to style would itself become a style.

  Anyway, I wanted to be taught how to draw with skill.

  A teacher came over to have a look at my drawing. He was so old he hadn’t even made it to the revolution of Cézanne. He was a relic from the age of Tonks, who’d taught Augustus John. He told me that I should study anatomy. The spinal column, he said, grows out of the pelvic basin in the same way that a geranium grows out of a flowerpot. On the side of my drawing he drew a delicate flowerpot-pelvis from which leafy vertebrae crept upwards. I thought this drawing was strange, but I liked it. Afterwards some students came up to me, grinning. This dear old thing was a figure of fun in the Life Class, a fossil dating from the days before sincerity had won.

  20

  OVER-PRIVILEGED?

  DAD HAD BROUGHT back from Moscow several gramophone records that weren’t available in London at the time. One of these featured three piano sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev played by Sviatoslav Richter, including the 9th, which was dedicated to him. This was before Richter had created a reputation in the West, but we’d already heard about him through the grapevine of musicians.

  In my last study at Liddell’s House, shared with a nice Canadian boy who felt detached from Westminster, late at night I’d play Prokofiev in this unavailable recording on a gramophone given to my mother by Raymond Chandler while smoking a Soviet cigarette sold by only one shop in Pall Mall and I’d wonder, am I over-privileged, or what? The cigarette had no filter, just a long tube one was supposed to pinch twice in a special way, as recommended in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. The 5th Sonata lasted exactly the length of one cigarette. At midnight, after the housemaster had gone to bed. With the window open to let the smoke out, so that the experience was even more Russian: the cold bare steppes of London.

  I was interested in my father’s life and I’d tried to catch up with it, starting from my schoolboy knowledge, which as I’ve said was late imperial. From Conan Doyle and John Buchan and Saki I’d reached the First World War, which meant Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, and Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. Since we were at a famous public school, my friends and I had read Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, which led us to Orwell’s Such, Such were the Joys, and thus to the state of England of our own childhood. It was a curious way of catching up with one’s own father, for it involved stacking up English history like overlapping playing-cards. On the other hand we were studying history, and the pleasure of understanding how events follow each other was growing.

  Yet over-privilege often brought with it a sensation of claustrophobia.

  I remember once when Dad was driving me back to school one cold damp winter’s evening, we’d turned off Buckingham Palace Road, and an ominous cloud unexpectedly loomed up in front of us. I said: ‘It’s fog that comes up Queen Victoria Street from the Thames.’ My father said, ‘That’s a line as beautiful as anything in T. S. Eliot.’ I was happy to have made him laugh, but I also felt hemmed in. Had I made this subliminal reference to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ on purpose, as a form of flattery? Or was a desire to crack literary jokes one of those vices bred by too much culture?

  Looking down at the great sycamore of Little Dean’s Yard from the window of my study in Liddell’s House, the feeling grew on me: is it possible to do anything original in England? I felt the tremendous weight of everything that had been done before, the familiar predicaments so intelligently described: the agony of public school, the embarrassment of belonging to the upper-middle class. As themes, they’d come and gone. I wondered if I shouldn’t just write twenty angry poems, and die. Motorbike crash at Hangar Lane. Matt in black leather with his head lolling over the kerb. Tragic! But then I thought of Dad at my funeral being so brave, so proud, at last bringing to the attention of his adoring public the performance he’d imagined about being brave at his own father’s funeral, only at Matthew’s graveside not Harold’s. And I thought, Oh God, but everything has been done before, including my own funeral.

  One weekend I was sitting at Dad’s desk at Loudoun Road writing an essay on the Crimean War. This was the war that had featured the Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the worst disasters of the British Army at its most unlucky. It fitted in with Russia, too, because Tolstoy and his generation had written about this war; and without hate, without clichés.

  Behind me on the bed sat Auden. He’d arrived the night before and would be with us for another week.

  The weather was dark and gloomy. So was the subject. I read about the mess of the Crimean War as the day got wetter and more horrible all around the house.

  Suddenly I realized that Wystan on the bed behind me was just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing. He was not reading. He was not thinking. From time to time, he sighed. And outside the window, filthy water coming down from the sky in tons.

  The phone rang. A journalist from the Evening Standard.

  Wystan radiant over the telephone.

  ‘But I like the rain,’ he said. ‘I love British weather.’

  After this, his mood entirely
changed. He put Tristan und Isolde on the gramophone, the recording with Kirsten Flagstad. Now and again he sang over her voice, those beautiful lines about love-in-death.

  I was young enough to be shocked by the sudden improvement in his mood. Wystan, I knew, was one of the ‘truly great’. Did he really need a phone call from the Evening Standard to cheer him up? Surely mere vanity could not be part of the make-up of a ‘truly great’ man?

  Even as late as the 1960s, people were unable to forget that Auden had not come back to England during the war. The resentment lasted for a remarkably long time. I remember an occasion when Auden was in London to launch a book of his: I think his Commonplace Book. Dad, in the car driving me to school, said this volume would cause ‘an absolute sensation’. We were at the corner where Baker Street almost meets Regent’s Park. The spot still has for me a feeling of divine glory about to fall from a magnanimous heaven. But I was old enough to check the reviews later, and they did not resemble the dreams of glory we’d had in the car, driving between the Nash terraces on our right and the flowering Judas-trees behind the park railings on our left. In fact, the critics were unduly harsh. Certain remarks were only comprehensible in terms of some long-held rancour.

  For Auden, Loudoun Road was a safe haven. There, at least, he’d be secure from recrimination. In the evenings, he’d sit in the piano room in a self-absorbed heap, benign but remote. Wystan smoking: a small quick puff, and ‘tah’, the cough a moment later, like a well-oiled piston letting off steam. Now and again he’d emerge from this somnolent state and give me a direct, blue-eyed stare. It would only last two seconds, then he’d pull back within his usual frontiers, as if he’d corroborated some long-held suspicion.

  Dad often said happily, ‘Doesn’t he look like me?’ Wystan would shake his head. ‘I see a lot of Natasha in him.’ A principle was involved. We are all children of two parents, and we have to come to terms with both.

  I remember my sister, care-taking for Wystan one weekend, seething about it in the basement with me. ‘Aaah, Lizzie,’ came his voice from up above. ‘Aaah’, as in an organ-pipe clearing its throat, ‘Lizzie’ with three notes, two going up, one down. And my sister not listening as he called down the stairs to say what he wanted her to do for him that day. She hissed at me, ‘He’s so spoilt, so spoilt,’ and refused to call back. Wystan, pausing on the landing, wondering if he’d been heard.

  Lizzie was referring to Wystan’s complete lack of domestic talents, multiplied by his confidence that these gifts belonged to others and were at his disposal. Once, my mother rang him from central London where she was running late. Would he please go downstairs and put the chicken in the oven? Wystan did exactly that – without lighting the oven.

  Auden’s other-worldliness permeated his poetry. Reading his work at that time, I also wrote a poem about him. I showed it to my father. One of the lines went, ‘and did he ignore the “I” of its making?’ Dad said he didn’t understand what this meant. I explained that, in my opinion, Auden’s detached and ‘objective’ voice avoided any true engagement with the subject of a poem. Why no emotions? How could you write a poem and exclude your feelings? Dad frowned and gave a little nod, as if he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  In 1962, Stephen wrote to Reynolds about a recent poem that Auden had given him for Encounter: ‘It revealed to me something I had never quite thought about Wystan: that often he uses the subject of a poem simply as an occasion for producing an effect of verbal smartness instead of writing out of the living experience of the situation. An idea occurs: click! He sees how it will make a poem.’

  He states this as if it were a fresh thought, but in fact Stephen had always known that he differed from Wystan in his idea of what a poem should be. In 1932, during the second summer holiday that Stephen and Christopher spent on Rügen Island off the Baltic coast, Stephen compared himself with Wystan in a letter to Isaiah Berlin. Auden, he said, was able to write poetry ‘simply by presenting pictures of what that world is like’. Auden was interested in the form of a poem, the poem as an object. ‘Auden is a much “purer” poet than I, because even where he uses far more modern phraseology than I would use, he uses it so that it all fits into a pattern.’ For Stephen, a poem must bear witness to a specific experience. ‘The integrity of my poetry is proved or disproved by the fact of its solving or not solving the problems of my life and life in general as I see it.’

  My father resisted the idea that a poem is an artefact. He refused to learn poems by heart. As he writes in his autobiography, when he read a poem, he wanted to grasp ‘not the words and the lines, but a line beyond the lines, a sensuous quality which went, as it were, into the lines before they were written by the poet and which remained after I, the reader, had forgotten them … The feeling of a poem which I did not completely remember seemed to put me in touch with the poet’s mind in a way which the exactly recollected poem itself could not do.’

  At the age of seventy, he wrote: ‘True poetry is the external truth transformed in the poetry. It’s the truth which reaches outside the enclosed poetry to the outside of nature, the human condition. Why one admires poets like Frost and Edward Thomas is because one sees so clearly that lines and images have an inside which turns back into their interior darkness, an outside which turns out towards nature and human beings. One doesn’t tire of seeing them do this. I don’t have confidence that I do it.’ Yes, that was the problem. If he’d always pinned his poetry to specific events, when the events could no longer provide the experience, he could no longer write the poem.

  I’m not the right person to praise my father’s achievement as a poet; and anyway any assessment of mine will be discounted as being dazzled by proximity. It seems to me, however, that his sense of the grittiness of life, and his desire to handle this grittiness truthfully, accounts for both the strength and weakness as a poet. His poems are strong when we feel this immediacy over and beyond the physicality of the poem itself. They are weak when the grip on his sense of immediacy falters. When this happens, we become aware that the natural attributes of a poem, in the sense of metaphor, syntax and rhythm, have been sacrificed; and we want them back.

  In April 1961, Mum drove us to Italy for Easter.

  We stayed in the Pensione Bencista in Fiesole, which had a decent piano. ‘We’ included Eliza Hutchinson, the daughter of Jeremy Hutchinson and Peggy Ashcroft. Mum and Peggy had performed dozens of concerts together. For my mother, the Hutchinson family was one of those solid families she admired unreservedly, as if she couldn’t dream of emulating such constancy.

  My mother was a fiendish tourist, so the days were filled with movement and appreciation. ‘You must admit it’s beautiful,’ she’d say of something. I was an adolescent and I kept turning this phrase over in my head. Does one ‘admit’ something is beautiful? It seemed to me this sentence started out from the wrong place.

  One morning we ran into Henry Moore in the Brancacci chapel. He made us look at Masaccio’s Tribute Money as if it were three-dimensional. ‘Look where the feet are placed,’ he said. ‘They show that the figures are standing in a circle.’ He said that when he’d lived in Florence as a student, he’d come in to see the frescoes of Masaccio every morning, first thing, whatever else he did that day. We tried to do the same, but Fiesole is a long way from San Frediano and we soon gave up.

  A provincial museum in Tuscany, full of cheerful ceramics two thousand years old, and moving from the cool room of the exhibition to the hot outdoors, birds screeching, the creak of insects blurred within an undulating background of sound, with warm cypress trees and the detritus of cigarette butts by the overflowing rubbish basket of the parking lot. The grocery store where we stopped for water, the perfume of white soap from Marseilles and salt cod, a perfect combination, furry and ancestral, the smell of a strong woman’s armpit.

  I knew that Peggy Ashcroft was Mum’s closest friend and that I was supposed to fall in love with Eliza. She was nice, but hard to pin down. Her opinions on art sounded good
, but they floated insubstantially. You weren’t sure if she really liked what she was talking about. Well, I did my best. On the wall of the Bencista, sitting side by side in the twilight, the birds now silent and one lone bat circling among the freckled stars, I tried to kiss her. At the last minute however she turned her head. All I got was a mouthful of wiry hair.

  For the summer of 1961, a Westminster boy invited me to spend a fortnight with him in a house on the old Venetian port of Chania, on the west side of Crete. Dad sent me up to Hampstead to ask John Craxton for a few tips, for Cracky had lived in Greece for many years. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said when I described where we were going. ‘That’s my house!’ He’d offered it to a friend, who’d invited James, who’d invited me. As he wasn’t using it, Craxton said it was OK. He even gave me a list of things we should see in Athens on our way down.

  I showed John a small Auerbach etching of a nude that I planned to take with me to study. Frank had given it to Dad. It was dark and obsessed and I liked it very much, but I didn’t understand it. Auerbach was teaching at the Slade and I’d had one short intense lesson with him. He was among those who thought that traditional skills got in the way of seeing things freshly. I thought I wanted what he had, but John told me I should look at the icons in Athens. ‘At least they have technique. You can learn from them,’ he said. ‘You can’t learn anything from this. You can’t even tell which is her buttock and which is her breast.’

  Two days before we left, James and I went to see Les Noces in the Albert Hall. Four pianos, plus chorus, plus that family connection with my grandfather. In that vast Victorian space, the tinkling of the pianos ceased to be notes and became a brilliant silvery texture, like chain mail. When we got home to Loudoun Road, I was so excited I drank half a bottle of vodka straight off. It should have killed me. Instead, next morning I found I’d thrown up all over the top floor. I had to spend a humble day scrubbing carpets.