A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  But there was something else. Two men living together seemed alien to me, not because I took some moral position about homosexual relationships, but because of the atmosphere. The choice of objects to look at, the special meals to cook, the tidiness of the mantelpiece, the absence of children, the social striving, all seemed to me set to a different rhythm from anything I thought was domestic. It made me feel claustrophobic.

  I told myself that I was suffering from a rejection of the homosexual world, a resurgence of my ancient prejudice regarding homosexuality and power, only this time with pining infants shimmering offstage. I told myself I was wrong; and I was certainly confused. To simplify things, I reverted to a decision that I’d made years previously when I’d decided that the tensions between my parents were not my business. I vowed that I’d never again comment on my father’s sexuality.

  Over time, however, I discovered that keeping this vow was in itself a form of rejection. My silence was accusatory. The Creeping Plante episode, slight though it was, became a key moment when I began to cut myself off from my father.

  Years later, Dad tried to talk to me about his love for Bryan Obst. The words he used to introduce this offstage young man, whom I never met, were these: ‘I have a friend, and he is kind and intelligent and – well, everything, really. And he tells me that he can’t listen to the music of Mozart because it reminds him of a toothpaste advertisement.’

  I greeted this with absolute silence. I didn’t laugh, though I thought the remark was ridiculous. The pathos of ‘well, everything, really’. I’d like to give myself credit for not laughing, but it’s not good enough. I should have said politely, ‘How awful,’ as if Mozart really could be devalued by a toothpaste jingle. I could even have said, ‘When did you meet him?’ And quietly listened to the rest of the story. Instead, I said nothing at all. But I knew my silence signified rejection. And so did he.

  We did not broach this subject again.

  Years later, after Bryan had died, my father told me bitterly that AIDS was the worst thing that had ever happened in his lifetime. I said, ‘Worse than the concentration camps? Worse than the Second World War?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Because AIDS stops people from doing what they like with their bodies, and that freedom is the first of all freedoms.’

  There was another point in cutting myself off from this aspect of my father’s life: loyalty to my mother.

  It was tiresome that Mum didn’t see the attraction of the woman with whom, at the time of the Creeping Plante episode, I’d been living for the past six years, and was now about to marry. But I was damned if then or later I was going to join my father in a conspiracy of men against women. Whatever the difficulties I had with my mother – and there were plenty – I could see that my father’s frequent infatuations with young men were painful to her. Why should I become a part of them?

  My mother at that point had finished her exams and had started a course in Psychology at London University. She was planning a dissertation on Aural Perception, to find out if musicians could hear a barely perceptible bleep, if it occurred in time to an imaginary beat in a bar. She tested Maro and me by wiring us up to headphones and pressing a button on a recording machine. I scored halfway between the musicians and the non-musicians. Natasha was thrilled to discover that Maro failed to score anything at all.

  Stephen took no interest in this new life of Natasha’s, either then or later. Thus she’d sacrificed a musical career in which he felt little interest in favour of a new quest in which he felt none at all. It hurt. She wrote in her 1985 diary, ‘it makes no difference to S whether I read psychology or trash – I don’t talk about either’.

  Though she subsequently made a new career for herself and was able to teach Visual Perception at the Royal College of Art for several years, it never raised a flicker of interest in her husband. She felt that, as far as he was concerned, her only role was that of wife. ‘The feeling is strong upon me that I have wasted my life – The policy of the last 20 years, progressively giving in from the point of view of asserting or even respecting my talents, culminating now in their complete surrender (in the hope of some felicity yet to be discovered to help S) seems to have led to barrenness, though a moderate atmosphere of affection is a little reward.’ But moderate affection could be ascribed to Stephen’s immaculate manners, with nothing behind it.

  I have resigned all ambitions which have annoyed Stephen – I have blotted all commitment to anything but wifemanship from my life. S likes my helpfulness, and it is a surprise to me that he’s more often appreciative & less scolding, so it is rewarding. Perhaps if I had always been only a wife he would have been happier – but no – there would always have been long absences, and I would have been totally without resources.

  The absences were justified by work, for Loudoun Road needed money just like any other household. However, when the house was empty, there was always the suspicion that Stephen, even if he said he missed home, was also seeing his friends in that ‘animated queer scene’ that did not include her.

  She bravely put forward the ‘work’ argument, quelling her secret doubts. ‘S always thinks in terms of himself & justifies putting his work before his personal relationships (at least his central personal relationships)’ – but this brought on worse thoughts so she immediately adds – ‘although of course he hasn’t really devoted himself to his work which has always taken second place to going to conferences or social life.’

  A day later, this thought becomes harsher: ‘S would always put everything else before his closest personal relationship – work before wife but also conferences & social life before work and intense romantic friendships before all.’

  The role of wife had to be rewarded with something more than mere politeness. How to win more? All she had to offer was her wifely skill. ‘The truth is, if one is not loved, it avails nothing to offer devotion.’ This is what Raymond Chandler had told her so often and so relentlessly: without desire, there can be no love.

  Her diary is the only remaining evidence about what she really felt; for her usual rule was that, to the outside world, appearances must take precedence over feelings. I think she would have burned this document in her final years if she’d remembered its existence. I found it after her death in the bottom of a cupboard as I rummaged around in the empty house and waited for my sister to come back from Australia so we could bury her.

  Of her case against my father – if I can put it like that – I knew nothing from her personally; and I resent it. If in this book I’ve sounded hard on her, there’s a reason. I could not stand her sense of privacy. Her reticence grew from pride, and it had a certain dignity, a desire to keep her children out of it. Her own childhood was dreadful; I knew that. She wanted to limit the range of suffering. It wasn’t hard to understand. But it was also a form of rejection. It left me with two options: either to accept the edifice she presented of a family that functioned, with firm walls and solid furniture, or move out and try for an alternative myself.

  In 1967, in the background of what must have been a difficult period of my mother’s life, the laws against homosexuality were at last repealed. The celebrations, if any, were muted. David and Nikos just laughed. Criminals? That’s what the newspapers said they’d been, one morning when they’d woken up in bed together side by side. They’d been criminals all this time and hadn’t even noticed? Well, they’d never felt criminal.

  The repeal of those laws produced a subtle change in my mother. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from her mind. It made me realize that, up until then, the idea of a public accusation aimed at my father, or still worse a court case brought by the police, had always lurked in the back of her mind. I did not notice this anxiety until it had disappeared, but then I thought: Social shame would destroy her. It would not have had the same effect on my father, or even on myself; but my childhood had been secure, hers had been filled with stress.

  I don’t believe my father had ever worried about being arrested. When he was young
, he may even have nursed a fantasy of himself in the dock behaving magnificently during the trial for obscenity of The Temple. After the war, with a wife and two children, the risk of his arrest was almost non-existent, provided he did not provoke the police by importuning in public.

  If as an adolescent I’d raised with Mum the question of my father’s sexual orientation, she would have denied it. His homosexuality was in the past and all evidence to the contrary was brushed aside. With the homosexual law reform bill, she began to move cautiously away from her position that this part of Stephen’s life was over, because public embarrassment was no longer a threat.

  Patiently and skilfully she began to make friends with Nikos and David, moving from a state of polite hostility to one of wise understanding. This did not mean that she’d accepted her role as ‘peripheral’ to Stephen’s inner life. It was more of a question of gaining confidence in public. Other women could look at her at parties and guess how much it cost her. Occasionally I could see someone thinking: Natasha’s doing a fantastic job of keeping up appearances.

  My father’s strength was his weakness. My mother’s weakness was that she always had to appear strong.

  As Nikos and David slowly became integrated into the lives of both Spenders, there were times when they felt they were becoming part of an elaborate game. David, on the phone to Dad, would hear heavy breathing on the upstairs line as Mum listened in. And if the conversation between the two men became facetious, there’d be an audible click as Mum rang off. That click was as effective as a slamming door. The game was simple. Stephen was saying to Natasha as she eavesdropped: ‘I can always run away and join the boys.’ The ominous click was Mum saying, ‘No you can’t.’

  Over time, David became her friend, and when thirty years later Nikos became terminally ill with cancer, she was extremely supportive to them both. Even before that she was always civil, but she’d never allowed either of these young men to occupy the role in Stephen’s life that he himself wanted. Verlaine was not allowed to run away with Rimbaud. After Dad died, David told Natasha that he thought Stephen had loved him. ‘No,’ said my mother with assurance, ‘but he was very fond of you.’ This meant: Even though Stephen is dead, I am still in control.

  Back in London after Patmos, before we got married, I arranged for all Gorky’s work in Chapel Street to be photographed. It was the first step towards a catalogue raisonné – which incidentally is still unfinished. It took a long time and it wasn’t done particularly well, but it was a beginning. Those portfolios of drawings under the bed in the basement, the massive safe that had been installed in the house by Charlie Chaplin when he came to England, which used to contain all his films and now was stuffed with Gorkys – it was time they were documented.

  Once the photos had been numbered I started going through them with Mougouch.

  ‘He had to begin somewhere,’ she said as we looked at a straight copy of a work painted by Picasso in 1923. ‘Everybody does. Sometimes he was still adding the final coat when I was around. He never seemed in a hurry to let go of anything.’

  ‘But even the railings are French! Those are not New York railings. I’ve seen them near the Place Ravignan where Picasso used to live.’

  ‘He didn’t care about that,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I didn’t know it.’

  Gorky’s devotion to the old masters fascinated me. Quotations from Ingres and Bruegel were tucked away in strange corners of his own work, like ghosts from other paintings.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t interested in breaking with the past and doing something new. Gorky thought he could carry the past along with him. I suppose he’d lost so much, he didn’t feel like “killing the father” or whatever it is a man is supposed to do. He’d tell me: you just have to give it a personal twist. It doesn’t have to be much, he’d say, but it has to be yours.’

  She’d translated for André Breton when he came to the studio. And Breton was marvellous. ‘He understood everything immediately, whereas those New York critics always thought Gorky was just a follower. All that business of doing something first, which is so typically American. It’s just as well I spoke French!’

  After the paintings we started on the drawings.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s a walnut tree in the valley. He did a whole stack of drawings from that tree when we were in Virginia, then back in New York he did more, to unravel them.’

  ‘I just see the unravelling. Where’s the tree?’

  ‘You’ll get used to them. I cannot not see the landscape. And this one’, she pulled out a drawing, ‘goes with that one.’

  I looked at the two side by side. ‘I’m sorry, Mougouch, I just don’t see it.’

  ‘Oh. Well, maybe the wind’s coming from the other direction.’

  The work was fascinating. It involved history, chronology, sorting, New York gossip, her views on the Surrealists. Her life with Gorky had been wonderful, frightening, funny, serious, ridiculous, and some days all of the above.

  I told her she should write everything down. ‘No,’ she said.

  My parents saw this as a distraction, and they were right. ‘You’re becoming the bailiff of the Gorky Estate,’ my mother said. I wasn’t a historian or even a trained curator, she added. True enough. ‘Maybe you should join the Courtauld and take a course in curating? If you are serious, that is.’ My attention wasn’t professional. But – this was deeply buried but I felt it was there – my mother also thought that the attention I gave to Gorky was a distraction from the attention I ought to be giving to my father. It was another manifestation of the competition between Chapel Street and Loudoun Road.

  Mindful of my mother’s warning, even though it contained an element of bile, I tried to remain detached from the Gorky story and merely act, as it were, as a long stop near the boundary. Every five years or so, for the next twenty-five years, I encouraged Mougouch to write her own version of her life before someone else produced a hostile biography. She always said no.

  Twenty years later when she married the writer Xan Fielding, far away in a new house in a new country, I asked her one last time. If she didn’t want me to help her, surely she could tell Xan the story and he’d write it down? She said, ‘You’ve asked me before and I’ll tell you one last time: I am through with Gorky! I am happy now! May Gorky rot in his grave!’

  Mougouch would never have said something so harsh to a stranger, but by that time I knew her extremely well. She felt that she had every reason to be defiant, because Gorky had lied to her. He’d never told her he was Armenian, he’d adopted a pseudonym that had already been used, his love letters had been copied from Gaudier-Brzeska. His relatives – including his father – had been kept secret from her. How was it possible that she’d shared her life with such a secretive personality? She’d been open with him. She’d given him everything she could. What level of intimacy had she received in return?

  I’d been there when the article on the copied love letters was published. Mougouch’s shame was painful to see. Something as intimate as the letters that had seduced her had been copied from a book. I took her side. It was awful. Yet Maro, who in all other things told the truth (whatever the price), defended her father’s lies. He was an artist, she said. Artists’ lives are themselves works of art.

  Gorky was a man who’d reinvented himself in the wake of a genocide, and that was understandable; and yes, life as a work of art was surely an admirable thing. But at this point he’d been dead for decades, and here Maro and her mother were fighting over differing loyalties to – what?

  The ‘rot in his grave’ moment occurred in Mougouch’s new garden outside Ronda, in Spain. Xan was watering the roses. I looked up at Maro standing on the veranda. She wasn’t upset, thank heavens. ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘if you find a bucket filled with muddy water, you wait until the mud settles, then you pour off the water into a glass and drink it and you make a tile out of the mud at the bottom. But instead you just keep stirring that bucket and it’s always cloudy!’
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br />   When we were alone I told Maro: This is all very well, but you and your mother can’t go on fighting for the rest of your lives over your father’s life. We know too little about it. One day we must set the record straight. If Mougouch won’t do it, we’ll have to.

  One day, my mother appeared at Chapel Street to tell Mougouch that she wanted me to take a job. This in itself this was straightforward, but as she spoke she became distracted. Here, in Chapel Street, it seemed to her as if she’d come instead to reclaim the soul of her son from the coven of witches that had appropriated it.

  She told Mougouch that when I was sixteen I’d ‘accused’ Stephen of not writing poems. ‘But poor Stephen couldn’t just write poems. Doesn’t Matthew realize the sacrifices he’s had to make for him?’

  This was a complex subject. In this precarious moment after he’d resigned from Encounter, my father’s only source of income consisted of lecture tours or visiting professorships, so the prospect of prolonged absences was in the air. Money, plus me, plus absence, often confused my mother’s train of thought. In adolescence, these sessions with my mother about money always ended in a spasm of guilt on her part, in which I felt obliged to join her. But as tears rolled down my cheeks, I’d wonder: Is this money being earned for me, for her, for us? Whose anxiety is it?

  What should have been a practical conversation between two experienced women ended with my mother weeping and Mougouch completely at a loss. As much as she’d understood of Natasha’s diatribe, it seemed an accusation aimed at herself. My mother didn’t approve of me spending time with those portfolios is how she’d interpreted it. And beyond those portfolios, my mother didn’t approve of Mougouch.

  ‘It just seems to me that somehow she’s reached – we’ve reached – a dead end,’ Mougouch told me afterwards. ‘She tries too hard – and I don’t see why. She doesn’t have to emulate and she doesn’t have to compete.’ My mother must have tried to enlist Mougouch’s support for her values. ‘I’m not going to be converted – and anyway, there’s nothing to be converted to. There’s no one good way of doing life. Doesn’t she realize that when it comes to the direction of your life, it’s only the things you throw away that hit the mark?’