A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  Meals at the Empson house in Hampstead were cheerful mayhem. There was none of the respectful hush that my mother cultivated at Loudoun Road. If what Bill was arguing became too arcane, he spoke to the ceiling and the rest of the table went on rowdily saying whatever came into their heads. Once, Hetta leaned across me and said something particularly intense to Mogador, in Chinese. I asked for a translation. Mog said calmly, ‘She’s just told me that I’m an unspeakable mountain of shit.’

  Hetta was what used to be called ‘a free spirit’, but the scale of her freedom was so grand it made most other bohemians look shifty. I remember dancing with Hetta once, and soon she was clasping me in a tight clinch. I think this must have been at the Round House at one of those dance-and-poetry readings. I didn’t know how to cope, so I said, ‘Hetta, not in front of them.’ She looked over to where a neatly dressed couple was watching us curiously. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Hetta. ‘You owe ’em money or something?’ I said, No. ‘Well then, fuck them.’

  With what contempt Hetta cornered one of Bimba’s boyfriends and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re a Trot.’ In London at the time, to be a follower of Trotsky signified an intelligent approach to communism – but not to Hetta.

  I think it was driving in a taxi to another gig at the Round House that Bill leaned across Hetta and tapped me on the knee. Does Stephen know he’s working for the Americans? Flustered, I said I wasn’t sure. Bill started to expand on this warning, but Hetta interrupted saying he shouldn’t interfere. What have Matthew and Maro got to do with it?

  I told Mougouch about this strange remark. She said, ‘He probably means that Encounter is paid for by the CIA.’

  ‘Is that so? You seem to take it for granted.’

  ‘Everybody’s known about it for years.’

  ‘Everybody? My father doesn’t,’ I said. ‘So, if I may ask, how do you know?’

  She puffed at her cigarette. ‘Maybe John Gunther told me.’ This was a famous journalist of his time, whose ‘Inside’ books had provided American readers with intelligent observations of countries in Africa and Europe. His wife Jane had known Gorky since the mid-Thirties. ‘I can’t remember who told me. How funny that Stephen says he doesn’t know! I can hardly believe it.’ Another puff. ‘And Junkie’s an old friend of ours.’

  ‘Ours? Junkie Fleischmann is a friend of the Magruders?’

  ‘A friend of my uncle Sidney’s,’ she said. ‘I saw him as a child when I went to Ohio. He’s a very friendly person. Everybody liked him out there. And it wasn’t a secret, what he was doing. They all said how sweet it was that he enjoyed working for the State Department.’

  ‘What! Your uncle Sidney was a friend of Junkie Fleischmann?’

  She told me that her uncle Sidney Hosmer, her mother’s brother, came to a sad end in about 1942. He ran away from Ohio to New York and she and Gorky had had to take care of him. He was an alcoholic, ‘Wouldn’t you know?’ And one day he was mugged and ended up in Bellevue among the loonies. She took him a pair of Gorky’s pyjamas, for he had nothing – and there was nothing to be done. He died a short time later, still in Gorky’s pyjamas.

  ‘Please! So you knew Junkie Fleischman as a child?’

  Her father Captain Magruder had resigned from his club at Newport, Rhode Island, because they’d refused to serve his friend Junkie Fleischmann, on account of him being a Jew.

  ‘We all got up in a flurry of dignity and my father said that if Mr Fleischmann was barred, they could do without the Magruder family, too. And so we left. I remember, because I was hungry and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t eat first.’

  I felt dizzy. This was what Maro and I used to call a ‘short circuit’, meaning one of those moments when her world and my world turned out to be too intimately connected. It always made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want us to be all riding along in the same machine.

  Maro and I were beginning to feel that our lives were much too dominated by the previous generation, whose mixture of approval or disapproval seemed to have no connection with the high-minded world they were supposed to represent.

  A literary party in the early Sixties.

  Upstairs, Louis MacNeice chatting to W. H. Auden, who’d asked especially to see him – had telephoned from New York to arrange this supper at Loudoun Road. Wystan had been ready for hours in the piano room before Louis, tall and pale, arrived.

  Leaving them to it, we could hear the boom of Wystan’s voice from up above, while in the kitchen my mother was being helped with the supper by Chester Kallman, Auden’s companion, and Sonia Orwell. Sonia and Chester were both sweet people but they brought out the worst in each other.

  ‘I mean it’s become absolutely impossible to talk to Louis,’ said Sonia, stirring a pot. ‘He’s completely sold his soul to the BBC.’

  And Chester egged her on. He disliked London, where he could appear only as second fiddle to Auden, a role that understandably he detested.

  At that moment Louis walked in. He asked for an ashtray.

  Of the occupants of that tiny kitchen, was I the only one to feel shame? Was this the dark side of having a reputation? If so, it did not seem worth it.

  My father disapproved of Chester. He thought he treated Wystan badly. Indeed, Chester was chronically unfaithful. A story Dad told several times was of sitting in a square with Chester and Wystan, then Chester saw a handsome boy pass by, got up and followed him. Wystan went on talking in a completely normal way, but my father noticed that he was weeping.

  Chester knew more about opera than Wystan, at least at the beginning. Chester’s advice was essential when Wystan came to write the libretto for The Rake’s Progress. Thus we have one of the strangest stories of twentieth-century creativity: one genius, Stravinsky, leaning on another genius, Auden, leaning on Chester Kallman – who, loveable though he may have been in many ways, would surely qualify for a World Prize as Broken Reed. Chester didn’t believe in heterosexual love. As a result it’s absent from The Rake’s Progress, which is in all other respects a masterpiece.

  Dad disliked this opera, and he took it as evidence of Chester’s underlying frivolity. In a moment of irritation he said to Wystan, ‘You could leave him, you know. There must be plenty of other people who’d love to live with you.’ Wystan just shut his eyes and murmured, ‘Schluss.’ Meaning, the argument is closed.

  Yet Chester always got on well with Maro and me. Perhaps we felt a similar unease with London life. We once met him outside a grand cocktail party. ‘Hello Maro, hello Matthew,’ he said – and we were pleased he’d recognized us, for we didn’t see him that often. ‘My first instinct in these kind of things is to flee.’ For us, the perfect remark.

  About a year after I’d been living with Maro, I showed Wystan a poem. It was about the images that went through my head when I was fucking. Since my only love at the time was Maro, showing him the poem was also a provocation.

  If I’d expected a comment on our relationship, I was disappointed. He read it through fast, once, and handed it back saying, ‘It’s a good poem. Ah – perhaps too many hyphenated words; but no, it’s a good poem.’

  Anyone else would have been thrilled to receive praise from W. H. Auden but for some reason, I wasn’t. I’d wanted to hear what was wrong with it, followed by a lecture about what a poem should aim for. To have written a poem that was merely ‘good’ deflated the whole thing.

  Towards the end of the Sixties, Auden began to withdraw into himself. Many forms of social behaviour became harder for him. He could foresee the end of a story long before it arrived, and would start saying ‘ya, ya’ halfway through. It required persistence to talk through this barrier. You thought that what you were saying was banal, or that he was bored, or both.

  My parents did their best to force him to participate. There was one joke which I must have heard Auden tell half a dozen times at the dinner table, encouraged by Dad. It was about Wystan and the sadomasochist. The punchline was, ‘I’m no boy scout, my dear. I can’t tie knots.’
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  My mother told me that when they were alone in the house he’d start breakfast with a list of the things he was grateful for. It was a litany he had to recite, she said, before he could face the day. It was almost a prayer.

  Wystan’s aura of solitude was tempered by his love-thy-neighbourliness, which nearly overcame it, but this was expressed in flashes that were thrown out briefly before he subsided again. Pills and alcohol had worn him out. Uppers in the mornings, downers at night and alcohol in between. He thought of his mind as an engine that needed an engineer. He switched himself on in the mornings and off again at night. The pills were the switches.

  His huge mouth gobbling pills, lower lip flapping, elephantine, washing it down quickly, with an air of There, that’s that. Now I’m ready. Now I’m done.

  ‘Wystan thinks he’s going to live till he’s eighty,’ said Dad, who’d spoken to Auden’s doctor in New York. ‘The trouble is, he IS eighty.’ In fact, Auden was not much older than sixty at the time.

  Among themselves they talked about death as if it was another prize they were all aiming for. I remember Wystan telling Dad, ‘My dear, you’re the one who’ll have the last word. You’re going to bury us all.’

  23

  TRUST

  AFTER I’D SPENT six months in France and about a year in Oxford, it became clear that my relationship with Maro wasn’t going to evaporate, so my mother decided she had to make friends with her. This was a hard decision, as by that time Maro had accumulated several black marks against herself, socially speaking.

  In order to offer Maro her friendship, my mother had to assemble everything she knew about Maro’s childhood: her mother’s East Coast background; her father Gorky, the famous suicide. This was dangerous territory, as Maro felt very possessive about her past, even though she loved bringing out at the dinner table casual horror stories about her earliest experiences. These were presented with such a flourish, however, that it was impossible to believe this voluble young woman had been in any way traumatized. Or at least not traumatized enough to render her speechless.

  One day, at supper when there was just the three of us, my mother said to Maro, ‘It must have been a dreadful experience for you to lose your father at such a tender age.’ This didn’t immediately produce the desired reaction. ‘I mean,’ she said, leaning towards her, ‘poor Maro.’

  She stretched out her hand.

  ‘I’m nobody’s poor Maro,’ said my future wife coldly.

  It was a terrible rejection, and it had happened so fast I hadn’t been able to stop it.

  My mother was coaxing Maro into a role where she, Natasha, could bring out the best in herself. She wanted to show compassion. But compassion is a gift, and if it is offered, it has also to be received. Quick as a flash, Maro had grasped that compassion requires the giver to occupy a higher moral position than the receiver. She was not prepared for that kind of a relationship with Natasha Spender. From her point of view, there wasn’t much to choose between my mother, the instructor in table manners who pinched, and my mother, the compassionate prop of the downtrodden.

  No, this is unfair.

  My mother’s patience with those who were in real need was infinite. I can think of at least three people who owe her such a debt for her help that they’ll reject with outrage the point of view of my eighteen-year-old self, even allowing for the fact that I feel retrospectively protective about Maro. It’s hard for me to be fair to both aspects of Mum’s character: my mother as a saver of desperate people, and my mother who had such inexplicable difficulties in forming equal relationships. Except with a few people with whom she worked professionally, like Peggy Ashcroft, she wasn’t at ease with the idea of equality. There were those whom she admired unconditionally: the ‘absolutely alpha’ kind of person, as she’d put it. And there were those whom she could help.

  After Maro had refused so bluntly the role of victim, my mother was placed in a quandary. It was very hard for her to think of a role which did not involve compassion. Sacrifice, especially self-sacrifice, stood at the very centre of her values, not just as a gift from her to another but also as a spiritual aim for herself.

  After several months spent brooding about this rejection, my mother found the victim she needed in this story. Unfortunately, it was herself. She decided that Maro and ‘her crowd’ were against her. Though occasionally there were better moments thereafter, my mother was never able to revise this interpretation. Maro was against her – and it wasn’t just a question of personal incompatibility. Maro had rejected the underlying Christian ethics on which the principle of compassion rests. There must be something ‘unspiritual’ about her. Maro’s mother was also against her. I, her son, was against her. I had been corrupted by the conspiracy whose one aim was directed against her.

  Maro and me in our student years.

  This predicament was solidified for all time two years later, when my mother told Maro that Mougouch, her mother, was responsible for the death of her father. Maro could say such a thing – and often did, directly to her mother’s face – but it wasn’t for other people to intervene.

  ‘Natasha,’ said Maro ominously, ‘what do you know about it?’

  ‘And what do you know about it?’ said Mum, implying that Maro was floating frivolously on a cushion of lies.

  There was something mad about it. My mother wanted to be compassionate, and this led her to say the one thing that was the absolute negation of compassion. The extraordinary thing is that whenever my mother delivered one of these supposedly ‘objective facts’, she felt much better for it afterwards. Next morning she’d have forgotten that she’d said anything wrong. The rest of us would just have to bleed and pass the breakfast cereal.

  I never was able to find a way out of this predicament. If I’d been tremendously wise, I suppose I might have fixed things. But in the back of my mind there was always my father’s remark – quoting Anna Freud, no less – that any attempt to unravel Natasha Litvin could end up disastrously.

  And decades later, Maro’s daughters were against their grandmother.

  A few years before my mother died, at a lunch I gave, the guest of honour asked Mum politely, ‘And do you see your grandchildren often?’ Mum said: ‘Well, as they were brought up in Italy, the answer is no, not very often.’ At this point our daughters had been living in London for more than half their lives. Fifteen years had passed during which Mum could have made friends with them. But I bit my tongue and said nothing.

  In the summer of 1964, Maro, Mougouch and I set off to drive down through Yugoslavia to Athens and take the ferry to Crete.

  Things began well. In Calais we picked up a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle with export number-plates, and off we went. Gripping the wheel, Mougouch said happily, ‘This is such a tight little car.’ Running away always brought out the best in her.

  In Dubrovnik Maro and her mother had a flaming row, of an intensity I’d never seen before. They were accusing each other of the most horrendous crimes. I thought that I must be involved, as both parties kept appealing to me – for what? I was out of my depth.

  I told them next morning that I would take the boat to Athens, and they could get on with their whatever-it-was without me. It was an irresponsible decision, but meekly they took me to the docks and waved me off. They drove on through Albania, subdued, and with no more fights; and luckily they were not molested on the way.

  I met them in Crete in a village twenty miles west of Chania. We found a hutch on the beach of Platanias, two villages further along. After Mougouch left, Maro and I bought paint and painted our hutch inside and out and the whole village watched in awe, knowing that we’d only be living in it for a month.

  In the local café, Maro and I had a conversation which changed my life. She said that I treated her as if deep down I believed that men were superior to women, and that my thoughts on history were more important than her female concerns with day-to-day living. The accusation was true. That’s exactly what I did think. I vowed to reform. Th
e big trees with whitewashed trunks fluttered all around us as the clients of the restaurant came and went, and the bottles of retsina piled up between us, and the more the bottles accumulated the righter she became.

  This change in my personality was partly a tribute to my parents. I’d seen from their example that a pianist could work in one room and a writer could write next door; and they were equals. Years later I realized that if I’d been thinking of Stephen and Natasha, nothing could have been further from the truth. My father, deep down, put performing musicians in the same category as actors: however good they were, they did not dwell in the world of the imagination. They just dressed up in other people’s clothes. I understood that, to my father, Mum had never been his equal, because what she did was interpretative, not creative.

  My father placed a very high value on the creative act. He believed in the ‘vision’ – the supreme moment when something wonderful is revealed. This initial spark could dart sideways in several directions: into a poem or a painting or a sculpture or a piece of music. It was the moment of revelation that mattered. The reader or the listener or the onlooker had to search for this kernel in the work of art. Everything that got in the way, including errors of the artist himself (ungainly sentences or ‘filling-in’ painting or banal harmonies), could be ignored as long as the ‘vision’ was understood.

  In many ways I still admire this point of view, because it does away with questions of taste. It’s the opposite of the aesthete who lingers over some particularly fine detail hidden away in the bottom left-hand corner of a painting. But was he right or was he wrong? The idea that all artistic disciplines spring from the same initial spark has become an obsession that has lasted all my life. I’ve tested it personally: the language of sculpture, of painting, of writing a book, even of composing – or at least of arranging – a piece of music. Without saying that Dad got it wrong, I can only say that in my experience each discipline is different, and the body responds accordingly as the thing is made.