A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  We were sitting at a restaurant not far from St Mark’s Square. Dad had just described being in Venice with Stravinsky after the first night of The Rake’s Progress, the opera he’d written with Auden. Afterwards, the Venetians had come out from their bars and restaurants and applauded as the Maestro walked through their city, and he was touched. Then the subject turned to my sister Lizzie. She was studying to become an actress, but her teacher hadn’t inspired any confidence in him. In fact Dad thought he was crazy. He said that, nevertheless, sooner or later Lizzie would become a ‘success’. He was sure of it.

  My father and me in Venice in 1975, discussing the question of success.

  This was the very subject I wished to broach. He’d told me several times that growing cabbages in Tuscany was inadequate. I wanted to know what alternative he had in mind. What career, what success?

  I’d always felt that my father possessed a mystical reverence for ‘success’ as something palpable. A rock, rather than a mirage. A substance that was somehow independent of the objects created in order to achieve it. I asked him what he meant by ‘success’ – but the conversation immediately went wrong. Dad thought I was accusing him of trying to ‘pursue’ success. In other words, of promoting himself. ‘Most of the successful people I know would never dream of promoting themselves. Wystan for instance. And I have never in my life done anything in any way in order solely to promote my career.’

  This was the first time I’d come up against my father’s toughness when he thought he was being attacked. I could not go on. In my diary I wrote: ‘This last sentence of his, about his own lack of promotion, stuns me, and strikes me as being blindingly true. His own success came so early and was so total that he was never required to make an intellectual analysis of the way of the world, and so tempt it towards cynicism.’ I was trying ineffectually to reconcile my parents’ idea of my father’s ‘innocence’ with how I saw him actually behave. ‘He is guileless, and yet obsessed,’ I wrote; but my use of the word ‘cynicism’ means that subconsciously I thought he’d made a pact with the Devil.

  If he denied his interest in power – what then? Would I have to confront him with his relationship with the Establishment and turn my love for him into a fight? I’d never felt like fighting with him before and it was too late to start now.

  At the time I was unaware that both Wystan and Cyril, two friends who’d known him extremely well, had viewed my father’s self-proclaimed lack of worldliness with scepticism, but I certainly felt there was something odd about his self-image. How could anyone so tremendously involved with power think of himself as an innocent? But all I thought at the time, in a rough-and-ready way, was that there wasn’t much difference between my father’s idea of success and that of his own father, except the metaphorical Mendip Hills of Harold were now the towering Himalayas of Stephen. Success was such a reality to him that those who were successful occupied pre-cut niches in a cave where a multitude of deities were worshipped. Even the unsuccessful had roles to play, as acolytes looking ever upward, believers in the inviolable status of success.

  At that Venetian restaurant in this key conversation I dropped the subject; but I brooded in my diary: ‘At the same time, there is no doubt that Dad has a fascination for the whole idea of success and spends a great deal of time if not thinking about it at least talking about it, and using the word in a way that’s odd, even obsessional.’ I remembered the moment when my father had told me in hushed tones that our family physician, Dr Berkeley Way, had defined me as a more ‘successful’ baby than he, Stephen had been. Dr Way had seen us both as babies so he was in a position to know.

  I saw Dad three times alone in Italy in later years. Our ‘honeymoons’ involved touring the villas of Palladio or visiting the dusty studio of Canova at Possagno. We ate and talked, but I never again revived the question of ‘success’, or Encounter, or politics as it had intruded in our lives – though occasionally I tried.

  Living in Italy meant I’d had to accept the fact that cultural life was dominated by the Italian Communist Party. (This continued until the PCI withered away into social democracy.) I hated the way that to be intelligent and creative in Italy presupposed allegiance to the Party and I was willing to discuss this with Dad, but he was unresponsive. I decided that although he liked talking about political ideas, political tactics made him nervous.

  The equivalent to Encounter in Italy in the Fifties was Tempo Presente, one of whose directors, Ignazio Silone, was an old friend of Dad’s. This magazine sought a cultural ‘Third Way’ somewhere between the doctrinaire bias of the PCI and the solid conformity of the Christian Democrats. It failed, because the big political parties controlled the apparatus by which culture is distributed. Over the years I’d heard rumours that the ‘Third Way’ had received American backing, and on my last ‘honeymoon’ with Dad I wanted to talk with him about this. Again, he didn’t respond. I’d learned that Tempo Presente had received its money in the simplest way possible: Mel Lasky used to arrive on a regular flight from Paris bearing a little suitcase of cash. I didn’t dare tell him, not even as a joke.

  In November 1975 we went to New York to talk to as many friends of Gorky as were still alive. This was Maro’s half of ‘Tackle your Parent-Complex Year’. I kept a diary, and the trip was fascinating.

  I couldn’t help noticing that some of the people we interviewed seemed amused at the thought that Matthew, son of Stephen Spender, had ended up with Maro, daughter of Arshile Gorky. Several New Yorkers were aware that American art was the invention of American art critics, and that the Congress of Cultural Freedom was in the mixture somewhere. It was seen as one of life’s little jokes that we’d ended up married to each other.

  Our progress was complicated by the fact that Dad was also in New York at that time. He didn’t like the fact that our trajectory through Manhattan had nothing to do with our own careers. When he heard that we were planning to go to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Collection, he said that he wanted to arrange a lunch for us with Henry McIlhenny, a key figure in that city. We said no. He took us down to South Houston to see the studio of Jasper Johns, which was in a vast former bank. That also led nowhere. When I told him I’d met Leo Castelli – at that time the most important dealer in New York – and he’d asked to see my work, Dad wanted me to go back next day with photos and a catalogue. He said he’d come with me. I said that I didn’t feel confident enough to do so. He insisted. I laughed, not believing him. ‘He’ll certainly be more interested in you than he is in Gorky,’ he said. ‘Because you are alive and Gorky is dead.’

  This disturbed me. It was touching, in its way – but we also had a job to do.

  On Wednesday 19 November, we went to a cocktail party given for Maro by Jane Gunther. The company was so distinguished it was hard to believe that certain people were actually real: for instance Mr Jones, of the Dow Jones Index. Or Charles Addams, to whom later in the evening when I was full of liquor I tried to give an idea for a cartoon: Adam and Eve as in the fresco of Masaccio, stark naked on a beach, being asked by a heavily dressed policeman to identify themselves. (Charles Addams smiled grimly.) It was a year when people were being arrested for taking off their clothes.

  Dad was also present. An edition of Raymond Chandler’s letters was being assembled, and Dad was having a wonderful time telling Arthur Schlesinger how Mum had tried to stop the inclusion of several letters in which Chandler had boasted about their love affair. (My father would not have been so entertaining if Mum had been present, but she was in London.)

  Dad turned round. ‘He appealed to me across Arthur’s cocktail glass,’ says my diary. So I told Arthur about the occasion when Raymond Chandler and Mum and I had gone to the Tower of London together. I described Ray’s frail state and said that I didn’t think that anything sexual could have taken place between them. ‘They did not give off that kind of atmosphere when they were together.’

  Something about my know-all-ness irritated Dad. He asked me what I could possibly
have known about ‘that kind of atmosphere’ since I was only about twelve years old at the time.

  Before I had time to reply, he turned to Arthur. ‘My children are going to curse me with their total recall,’ he said. ‘They remember everything! I can just see Matthew now, in front of some court, saying to the judge, “Oh yes, Your Honour, I remember exactly the moment when Dad signed his contract with the CIA. I was under the table at the time – aged two!”’

  Arthur looked tremendously embarrassed. ‘Dad, of course, thought it was hilarious,’ says my diary. ‘Everyone else looked around for a hiding place.’

  At the end of the cocktail party I came across Dad curled up in a corner of the room in a foetal position, trembling. He was red in the face and I thought he’d had a heart attack. But no. He was merely imitating the pose of our second daughter, aged three, who was asleep behind the sofa on a heap of coats. ‘Doesn’t she look like me?’ he said as he got up, laughing, and dusted himself off.

  A few days later, Maro and I went to have supper with Jeanne Reynal, a mosaicist and an old and trusted friend of Gorky and Mougouch. We arrived early, because Maro wanted me to see the house.

  Jeanne was Maro’s godmother and this extraordinary house was a key part of her childhood. Above the mantelpiece hung a Gorky, yellow with smoke from the fire. A fabulous Pollock of about 1938 hung above the drinks tray, thickly painted and darkly sinister. One whole wall of the next room was taken over by a birdcage, and on the opposite wall hung numerous Hopi dolls. When the French Surrealists arrived in New York during the war, they’d snubbed the US artists and concentrated on Hopi dolls and Eskimo masks, so Jeanne’s taste was a reminder of their passage through the city. Between the Hopi dolls hung exotic ear-rings and Navaho jewellery: great bear claws on a thick red string separated by bright blue beads.

  Jeanne had invited the art critic Harold Rosenberg and his wife Mae, because she wanted Harold to arrange a meeting between Maro and Bill de Kooning. This took place at the end of the following week. De Kooning talked to Maro about Gorky without interruption for ten solid hours. It changed her life, because de Kooning described Gorky’s choices in the early days as if they were happening now. This allowed Maro to see her father as a painter, a person with problems similar to her own, without having to peer through the usual misty cloud of fame.

  Also invited to that supper were the left-wing critic Nico Calas and his wife, for Elena Calas had something she wanted very much to tell Maro.

  My father came too, as he’d met Jeanne at the Jane Gunther party and invited himself – which was tiresome, as it wouldn’t be easy to talk about Gorky in his presence. He hissed to me in passing that he’d never been able to stand Nico Calas, not since they’d first met in Spain in 1937. I remembered that Calas and Rosenberg belonged to a brand of New York ex-Marxists with whom Dad had some distant bone to pick; and that Partisan Review, to which Calas and Rosenberg often contributed articles, had been for years the trans-Atlantic rival of Encounter. Sure enough, at supper, my father challenged Harold Rosenberg about Partisan Review. Should that magazine have been more partisan, or less? I had to block my ears. It ended with Calas shouting and Harold banging his stick angrily on the floor, so it must have been a powerful exchange.

  Elena was at our end of the table. She came from Georgia, which is next door to Armenia, so she shared with Gorky a distant background. She was telling Maro about Gorky’s last days. How Gorky had wandered through the woods of Sherman, Connecticut, with Maro and a rope, asking Elena to choose a good tree from which he could hang himself. And Elena, not contesting his right to die, but saying to Gorky: You must not speak of these things in front of your daughter.

  Of all the short circuits between my father’s life and Gorky’s, this evening was certainly the most dramatic.

  Next morning Maro and I went back to Jeanne, bringing her a case of champagne. As we chatted about our recent discoveries, she told us something that struck home like an axe felling a tree. ‘The thing about Mougouch’, she said, ‘is that she thinks she’s better than any man.’

  We got on well with Jeanne. She made things with her hands, like us. We could talk to her about the glass-makers of Murano and the intense gold tesserae of Byzantine mosaics. This was the kind of conversation my father would have found maddening. To him, only the idea counted. The making of things was incidental. But for Maro and me, in our new-found life among craftsmen and peasants, we’d gone back to the myth of Heraclitus: ‘There is harmony in the bending back, as in the bow and the lyre.’ Seeing Jeanne with her back bent over a little anvil cutting tesserae in the basement of her brownstone on the edge of Greenwich Village was a moving experience. Fragments of cut glass had over the years worn out her lungs, yet she refused to give up.

  In those last violent weeks of Gorky’s life, Jeanne knew that he was going to die. She held it against him that he’d done it so badly. ‘It would have been so nice if now and again he’d said something simple, like what a nice day it was. Don’t you see?’ She said this to Maro; and it was so harsh, so true, I felt I shouldn’t be there. Women, who are in charge of life, often have a pragmatic attitude to death. Without being censorious, without taking into consideration the role of Mougouch in his death, Jeanne took the view that Gorky should have gone through that door with tact and dignity. And Maro, accepting from Jeanne what she wouldn’t have accepted from anyone else, was comforted.

  ‘Your father’s last words to me were that he’d come back and haunt me. He stared at me through that very window. His mouth was open and his eyes were huge and he looked like a ghost already. I didn’t even dare open the door.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Haunt me?’ said Jeanne. She smiled, with a curious air of being pleased with herself. ‘Oh well, you know. There have been so many.’

  Hesitantly, we told Jeanne the version that we’d heard in Chapel Street: Mougouch had been forced into infidelity by Gorky’s cruelty to her during the last six months of his life.

  There was a long pause. Jeanne patted her hair absent-mindedly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I noticed, last time we’d met, that Mougouch has been honing down those fine old stories.’

  Maro insisted on knowing more. What was the truth about her mother’s affair with Matta? Was it love? She had to know.

  ‘She was very young,’ said Jeanne, tactfully. ‘And the situation was kind of extreme. Gorky wanted her to be submissive and respectful and assume that he was right about everything; and there were certain things – like sex, for instance, or the consequences of his cancer operation – which he passionately refused to discuss. Her task was to obey and listen and follow him at a distance, so to speak. Well, that’s not our Mougouch! She did her best to live up to what he wanted in a wife, but she couldn’t. Nor could you. Nor could anyone. It was an unfair thing to ask.’

  Jeanne, though she was light-hearted, spoke with authority. ‘You’re grown up now, aren’t you, dear?’ she said to Maro. ‘You surely must have enough experience to know that we can’t do everything right.’

  On our way back to Siena, we stopped off for a week in London. Mougouch was irritated with us. We’d started to gather new information about her and her late husband and it lay beyond her control. There was a suggestion of betrayal – though she made this point with her usual glorious indifference. Perhaps she was right. Maro now possessed a part of Gorky’s life that had nothing to do with Mougouch. There was the Armenian genocide, which did not concern Mougouch – though it was a constant undeclared presence in Maro’s imagination. And there was Gorky’s relationship with the New York intellectuals, with whom we could talk, but Mougouch apparently could not.

  Maro, at a simpler level, came back from New York much heartened by her renewed friendship with Jeanne. She insisted on building a huge birdcage on the loggia behind our bedroom at San Sano, and soon we had to live with the nattering of fretful finches and colourful canaries. When Mougouch turned up to stay with us, one day when we were out shopping
, she opened the cage and shooed them all away. Or rather, she’d ‘freed’ them – said with a brilliant smile.

  The weather was cold and Maro took her mother’s destruction of the finches as a rejection of Jeanne Reynal. I wouldn’t have thought of this myself but to Maro it was obvious. In the bathroom we all shared, she took down the photo of her mother and put up a photo of Jeanne in its place. This worked. For the next thirty years Mougouch looked at this photo moodily whenever she visited us. Then she’d turn to a blank patch of wall where she implied that her own photograph ought to be hanging.

  By the 1990s, when I started writing my book on Gorky, my relationship with Maro had lasted five times as long as Mougouch’s with any man. My impeccable constancy, plus Maro’s desire that her husband should be entrusted with this book, did not put me into a strong position, however. Mougouch thought fidelity was pathetic. Sheer laziness. A coward’s ploy. Not facing the challenge of Love with a capital ell. Thus, although she was flattered by the attention I offered in writing her story, she did not give me exclusive access. She told the same story to Nouritza Matossian, an Armenian who passionately took Gorky’s side, and to Hayden Herrera, who accepted Mougouch’s version of events but mixed them into her interpretation of Gorky’s work. So I had two rivals who were also engaged in writing Gorky’s life. Hayden, moreover, was the daughter of Jack Phillips by an earlier marriage, and this made things internecine.

  I’d never felt upstaged by Mougouch on the subject of love or sex or the joys of existential mayhem, because I wasn’t competing. But to write a book – and it took me seven years – while thinking all the time that Mougouch was giving my research to my rivals, was a painful experience. Occasionally, when my rivals appeared to be overtaking me, she was even pleased. In those moments, I really did feel I was her abject slave.