A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  The fight in Dubrovnik was the first time that I’d come up against the constant drama that existed between Maro and her mother regarding Gorky’s death. I had no idea how to handle it at the time, which is why I’d run away. Indeed, I didn’t even know the story. It was only later, patiently over many years, that I became a kind of shock-absorber between two women who otherwise often looked as if they were going to tear each other to pieces.

  Maro took up her father’s cause with a constancy that never wavered. It didn’t stop her from loving her mother, but, as she frequently put it, even to Mougouch herself, ‘I love her, but I don’t like her.’ She wasn’t motivated by revenge, and it wasn’t neurosis, and it wasn’t really an unresolved trauma. It was ideological. Maro thought Mougouch was responsible for Gorky’s death, and that she should admit it and say she was sorry.

  Losing her father when she was only five years old had had the effect of turning Maro into an adult even at that early age. She’d been rejected; for suicide is also rejection. She disapproved of her father’s rejection. He should not have taken that step. That closed the subject. (Perhaps, having grown up so young, she kept alive some part of her five-year-old self. It would explain her lack of awe and the absence of censorship between what she thought and what she said.)

  Yet if her father was dead, her mother was still alive. Mougouch also was responsible. As Maro put it brilliantly to me one evening, ‘There are two sides to Van Gogh’s ear.’ She meant that Gorky was wrong to have hanged himself, but that Mougouch was also wrong to have pushed him into taking that step.

  Her mother was damned if she’d ever apologize to anyone about anything, least of all about that. When Mougouch was feeling confident, she was actually proud of what had happened. She’d found a penniless artist stuck in a rut, a middle-aged follower of Picasso, and she’d inspired him to take a great leap forward in his art and ‘flower’ into a genius – greater than anyone in the generation that followed, because his love of paint was greater. But he’d betrayed her trust and, as a result, she’d abandoned him. And then he’d killed himself.

  Trust was a key word in this interpretation: ‘I couldn’t trust him.’

  The question of ‘trust’ revolved around a key incident that had happened a few weeks before Gorky died. Mougouch, stressed beyond endurance by her husband’s state of depression, escaped for a brief weekend of love with the great Surrealist painter Matta. When she came back, Gorky was ominously silent about her escapade. She could not ‘trust’ him to think she had been forgiven.

  There were moments when she felt crushed by guilt. She’d created, with the help of Gorky, an edifice of beautiful paintings, and then she’d destroyed the creator. In the fifty-two years I knew her, she could reveal this face, the face of a guilty woman, but always with a certain bravado. For coequal with her sense of guilt lay her pride, her idea of herself as ‘muse’. She possessed the ability to take a man and inspire him to do great things. The power was hers. She, Mougouch, was the prime mover. She herself had always been in charge, from the moment she met Gorky until the day he died. Those paintings were hers. She’d made them. The only difference was that some days she felt proud, some days she felt shame. But she resisted that shame with tremendous energy.

  Mougouch believed so strongly in the ‘muse’ idea that, for her, children were a gift the mother made to her man as a tribute to his masculinity; a peculiar idea, possibly Surrealist. (Matta, for instance, left his wife Ann Alpert when she gave him twins, on the grounds that they were an insult to his testicles. They constituted over-production.) Mougouch’s daughters picked up on the fact that they were tender little gifts with no autonomous virtues, and there was a feeling in Maro that went: What was the point of Mougouch giving Natasha and me to Gorky as a tribute to his maleness if then she’d turned around and killed him?

  Maro refused to accept her mother’s idea that Mougouch was responsible for Gorky’s paintings, because it left Gorky in a subordinate role. Her mother had never been in charge. She was not a creative person. She had no idea how to assemble a consecutive thought or draw a line on a piece of paper, let alone paint. Her gifts were entirely to do with taste. She was neither Kali the creator nor Kali the destroyer. She was just a housewife who’d made a mistake.

  Maro disapproved of women who sought power through men. This was a matter of principle rather than a critique aimed at her mother. She thought all women suffered from a slave mentality brought about by the simple fact that men were stronger and could, if necessary, beat up their spouses to make them toe the imaginary line. It was not angry enough to become a political ideology. It was merely an observation she made whenever she saw a woman steal a man or manipulate a husband. She shouldn’t do it – was her line – but she can’t help it. She’s a woman, therefore a slave. She has to manipulate the world if she wants to fit in.

  The ‘muse’ idea, as Mougouch presented it, always placed the woman in front. Maro thought that if the ‘muse’ existed, she was stuck somewhere at the back. She’d inspired the man, then the man had actually gone out there and done it, while the ‘muse’ went back indoors to wash dishes. Not good enough. Maro wanted to do the doing herself.

  Mougouch knew she was fun. Fun was how she’d stolen that address book which she and Natasha Spender had in common. This gift was connected to her rootlessness, for she could exercise it anywhere: in an Albanian café, in a villa off Bellosguardo above Florence, in high society or among gnarled Cretan shepherds. In any given room there was always someone to conquer. My mother instead never felt confident about taking social risks and Loudoun Road was stiff with artifice.

  Mougouch was sympathetic regarding my difficulties with Loudoun Road. ‘You have to be patient with your parents,’ she’d say. ‘After all, they have careers.’ She said this neutrally. She wasn’t implying that careers were things to be avoided. On the other hand, she did imply that a certain heaviness on their part was due to the fact that their social life was connected to their work; and consequently, it was not free.

  There was also the question of sex. In this area Mougouch joined in, my mother did not. Mougouch met Mum’s women friends, and they swapped notes in delicious intimate lunches of plovers’ eggs and champagne, with toast on the side kept warm in a linen napkin poised in a basket. There was a bed nicknamed ‘the Battlefield’ in the background of one of these friends. But Mum’s ‘discipline’ kept her out of this aspect of the world they shared.

  Mougouch could be very funny about her love life.

  In the interest of straightening out a footnote for this present book, I asked her when she was very old whether she’d ever had an affair with the great Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. I’d seen them together once in about 1964, but I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t last long. He asked me to go canoeing with him along the canals of the Loire. I knew what that meant, so I called it off.’

  I was aware that Koestler had had a reputation for being a brute, sex-wise, but canoeing sounded like a gentle occupation.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘But, as you know, I have a weak back. If you go canoeing with a gentleman along the canals of the Loire, there always comes a point when you have to lift up half a canoe!’

  Was she interested in sex, or was she interested in power? I do not know. But it was always important for her to be out in front.

  ‘Madame Cinq à Sept’, Mougouch occasionally called herself in Chapel Street in the Sixties when she felt despondent. It was true that several powerful men had tea with her after their office hours and before they went back to their wives, but there were also moments when ‘Madam Five to Seven’ didn’t have enough hours in the day to keep everyone happy. She had to invent an aunt in the country to justify her occasional flights from Chapel Street.

  When a friend of mine from Westminster saw her on a station platform with Freddie Ayer ‘looking as if she was about to elope’, I passed it on to her; and she was furious. No, she was not going to elope with Fre
ddie. What a ridiculous idea! Fifty years later she added, ‘and anyway, it didn’t count if you had an affair with Freddie. Everybody did.’

  Philip Larkin’s famous poem about sex being invented in 1963 just before the Beatles’ first LP but rather late for him, is nonsense; and to say he’s being ironic doesn’t make the thought more real. Sex in the Thirties was just as free, and with some interesting rules that faded later, such as that jealousy was socially unacceptable. Sex in the Sixties wasn’t more free. It was merely out in the open.

  Maro took a dim view of her mother’s pursuit of love, and Mougouch responded by being condescending about Maro’s. Meaning me. According to Mougouch, Maro just wasn’t trying. And I’d say: You are absolutely right. Maro ought to make more of an effort in that area. Why only me? Let’s face it, the world was full of men, and certainly sooner or later she’d find someone who did it better than my humble self.

  Though my mother was wrong to say I was in love with Mougouch, it was true that I enjoyed forming a team with her against Maro. This was peculiar, but we all enjoyed it. Maro always relied on her mother, always loved her, so to see me and Mougouch united gave her a sense of security, even if she was on the receiving end of jokes that could go wrong.

  Maro’s position was that, as far as sex was concerned, she preferred tenderness. She wasn’t interested in sex, she said. This wasn’t repression. It was history. She said her refusal derived from her Armenian background. ‘Centuries of rape by Kurds and Turks means we have to stay numb, in order to pull ourselves together next morning and tidy up.’ Rape destroys Eros, but it could not eradicate the state of loving, because love depended on other sources of emotion. That was her position, half comic half sincere. She saw sex and tenderness as natural opposites.

  Rape is about power rather than sex, and Maro’s rejection of sex-as-rape was surely a rejection of power. Perhaps, in view of her mother’s dedication to its pursuit, to reject sex-as-power was also to reject Mougouch. Anyway, Maro took a vow to remain anorgasmic for the duration of our sex life, which was otherwise perfectly happy and lasted for forty-five years. She had no hesitation in announcing at supper, surrounded by her mother’s guests, that if she ever sank to the level of an orgasm, she would join her mother in Hell. She would have become complicit in the death of her father. And whenever Mougouch tried to use her sexuality as a form of snobbery – and she did: Your orgasms aren’t a patch on mine – Maro would say, ‘Ha! I knew it. You killed my father!’

  Mougouch usually retaliated by telling Maro that Gorky had always been no good as a lover, and a woman has every right to feel sexually satisfied. She insisted that her affair with Matta had only lasted for that one weekend, and her ‘betrayal’ was a justifiable gesture signifying freedom, so that Gorky wouldn’t treat her ‘like a garage’. But Maro knew that the affair had been more serious than her mother pretended, because she could remember Matta with Mougouch at the time, even though she was only five years old.

  At this point everyone would be shouting.

  I found this mayhem riveting, because at Loudoun Road the last subject that could be discussed in any shape or form was sex. This was the foremost question that could not be asked, but since this subject was closed, so were many others. Politics, for example. In retrospect I do not understand why this was so, but it may be that I accepted my father’s passionate conviction that sex and politics were part of the same condition.

  Maro’s duel with her mother went on for years. Neither would abandon her position and their reciprocal front lines became fossilized. Before she died, one of the last things Mougouch said to me was that the only thing she regretted in her life was having killed her first husband. It was said casually, truthfully – the ultimate throwaway line.

  In my second year at New College I belonged even less to the university. On days when I had a tutorial I would get up at three in the morning, read five books by breakfast, write the essay by ten, read it to the tutor at eleven and by lunch the whole experience had come and gone like a car crash glimpsed in a newspaper.

  I’d learned from my mother how to procrastinate. It had something to do with her sense of timing, which was part of her musicianship. I could feel her postponing the time when she absolutely had to learn a passage by heart, and she’d approach the moment, and then she would do it, and that would be that. I could work in the same way myself: set myself the hour for the essay, steal a moment halfway through to enjoy the view outside the window with the detachment of a goldfish floating in its bowl, go back and catch up with myself, overtake a paragraph, linger on the curve and finish with a sprint to coincide with the second hand ticking up the clock-face to the hour.

  The rest of the time I painted offal. A sheep’s head cost a shilling in the market and it fitted a square canvas nicely. Or interlocking fish. Or, in the style of Giorgio Morandi, I painted the slanting rain against the slanting slate of the New Buildings.

  One of the rare lectures I went to was the last given by a gnarled man who had spent his life reading archives relating to the Wars of the Roses. He gave few tutorials and fewer lectures and he was not accessible to mere conversation. He never wrote, but now he was dying of cancer and he had to give the results of his researches to the world. In some blackened Oxford hall he spoke slowly over a silent sea of students and professors, who took down his words as dictation, this being before the days of the portable tape recorder. A feeling of awe came over us as we absorbed small details concerning the lateral branches of the Poles and de la Mares. How on earth could this be useful? The larger themes of the fifteenth century were reduced to the fact that certain families had became extinct, right down to a third cousin twice removed. A tireless researcher, this wonderful man was beyond synthesis.

  Beryl Smalley, my tutor in my second year, was tiny, and so thin that when she crossed her legs under her old tweed skirt, they became one. She also sought precision. At one point she interrupted me as I was reading my weekly essay. The subject was Berengar’s options during the Second Crusade. ‘Excuse me, Mr Spender, but are you identifying with the person under discussion?’ I replied, ‘Of course. How else can I understand what he was trying to do?’ There was an ominous silence. I asked her tentatively, ‘Don’t you identify with the people you research?’ The silence became longer. I’d said something that had disturbed Miss Smalley. ‘I think’, she said at last, ‘I would have known what to say to Innocent the Third.’ I was speechless. She’d spent thirty years editing the correspondence of Pope Innocent III, in Latin, in untold volumes.

  I did not have the right to waste the time of such valuable people.

  But by this time the restlessness that overtook the Sixties was beginning to emerge, like bamboo growing through the debris of a forest. I remember at the cinema, on Pathé News, there appeared a ‘mini-gun’ mounted on a helicopter in Vietnam. The word ‘mini’ was fashionable. Girls in London were wearing mini-skirts, and here was a mini-gun. It was appropriate to the age in which we were living. A voice-over on screen said how many rounds this gun could fire per minute, and the camera looked down on a Vietnamese fisherman as he dived from his boat into a froth of bullets. Someone behind me said in a languid Oxford accent, ‘A mini-gun – for mini-life.’

  In the newspapers every article on Vietnam ended with a body count. What did it mean? That when a certain number of Vietnamese were declared dead, we could all pack up and go home?

  24

  KILLING THE WOMEN WE LOVE

  IN SEPTEMBER 1964, my mother was diagnosed as having cancer. She had to have an operation immediately.

  I heard this news at the Marlborough Gallery during the opening of an exhibition of recent work by Francis Bacon. I was standing in front of Man on a Bicycle. Sonia Orwell was just this minute saying intently, ‘At last Francis has managed to paint a cheerful painting.’ Then I was called outside. My father was in tears. He did not use the word ‘cancer’. He just kept repeating, ‘Afterwards the doctors say she’ll be able to lead an absolutely normal l
ife.’ I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I assumed that Mum was about to die. My only reaction (I’m ashamed to say) was selfish: She’s done what she was put on the planet to do, give birth to me.

  We now know from her letters to Raymond Chandler that she’d been suffering from a physical ailment for years. Whether this had any connection with the cancer, I do not know. My mother was incredibly secretive about her illnesses. She didn’t want any of us to know, and she insisted then and for several years afterwards that Lizzie and I weren’t to be told that she’d been operated on for cancer.

  Though Dad knew that my mother had problems with Mougouch, he came to Chapel Street to talk about it. Mougouch offered to help. He said, ‘Well, if you could do something about the garden.’ Mougouch’s only garden was a bay tree in a wooden tub on the roof outside the kitchen at Chapel Street, but she telephoned for some professional gardeners and she paid the bill.

  My mother had always neglected the garden at Loudoun Road, because the house was rented and she didn’t think of it as being hers. She lived in that house for nearly seventy years and she never spoke of her potentially beautiful garden as being anything but a ‘problem’. Seeing from the piano room window how nicely it was coming along, with three gardeners turning it into a little gem, my father telephoned Mougouch and asked her (and Maro and me) not to mention to Natasha, when she came back from the hospital, that Mougouch was paying the bill. It would upset her, he said.

  I said thank you awkwardly to Mougouch several times. I felt ashamed. She thought it was rough, but she pushed Mum’s garden on to one side and told me briskly, Don’t worry, Natasha will recover. ‘Most women have to go through that kind of an operation,’ she said. She herself had been told that her womb was a ‘leathery old thing’ which would have to come out sooner or later. This reassured me, because it was so matter-of-fact.