A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  7. ‘He had lived his life in phases’: NS memoir.

  8. ‘His assuming total responsibility’: NS memoir. See also WWW, p. 306.

  9. ‘“Being married”’: SS to JH, 2 April 1941, Julian Huxley Papers, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Texas.

  Six: Fires all over Europe

  1. ‘No! He couldn’t be that stupid!’: NS memoir.

  2. ‘You may notice that I wrote’: SS to Michael Spender, 19 Feb [1940], Collection Philip Spender.

  3. ‘I had to undergo an extra week’: WWW, p. 352.

  4. ‘Working-class people have a somewhat limited’: SS in William Sansom, James Gordon and SS, Jim Braidy: The Story of Britain’s Firemen, Lindsay Drummond, 1943.

  5. ‘We have been’: TSE, ‘Portrait of a Lady’. See also Lucy Hoare, ‘The Apollo Society’, Arts Council Bulletin, April 1951.

  6. ‘Stephen Spender, like several other’: KV 2/3216, no doc. number, 28 Nov 1943.

  7. ‘I don’t think I shall ever go back’: SS to TSE, 30 May 1943, TSEA.

  8. ‘The interviewer at the end of the table’: SS to JH, 4 Dec 1944, in Sutherland, Stephen Spender, p. 298.

  9. ‘We can assure you, Mr. Spender’: WWW, p. 333.

  10. This resulted in: the secret report on Germany by SS is in FO 371/46935, paper C-6450.

  11. he would have spoken differently: ERC to SS, 27 Dec 1945, and [undated] Jan 1946, SSAB.

  12. ‘Most people here have taken’: SS to ERC, 9 Feb 1946, SSAB.

  13. ‘You discuss the reasons’: TSE to SS, 12 Feb 1946, SSAB.

  14. ‘who have my sympathy’: SS to TSE, 11 Feb 1946, TSEA.

  15. ‘It is very difficult’: TSE to SS, 15 Feb 1946, SSAB.

  16. an SS officer: Hermann Grimmrath, etc: I am grateful to Frank-Rutger Hausmann for these details about Curtius during the war.

  17. ‘Against what damage’: TSE to ERC, 16 Feb 1946, TSEA.

  Seven: The purity was hers

  1. ‘a role which I could not seriously’: SS, European Witness, Hamish Hamilton, 1946, p. 96.

  2. ‘impossible for anyone’: ibid., p. 116.

  3. ‘The important thing’: TSE to SS, 26 March 1946, SSAB. The draft for a magazine is in both SSAB and TSEA.

  4. UNESCO: Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938–1950, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 149.

  5. ‘I suppose you’ve never been really happy’ and the other quotations are from ‘The Fool and the Princess’, in SS, Engaged in Writing, New York, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958, pp. 170–6.

  6. ‘What makes separation so bad’ etc.: SS to NS, circa 18 Aug 1947, SSAB.

  Eight: America is not a cause

  1. ‘sold out’ etc.: Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, New York, Lime Tree Press, 1993, pp. 325 and 661.

  2. ‘doing the hatchet work’ etc.: Mary McCarthy, ‘My Confession’, in On the Contrary, William Heinemann, 1962, p. 102.

  3. ‘It is not surprising’: SS, 3 April 1949, NSJ, p. 56.

  4. ‘The cars as fertile as weeds’: 4 April 1949, SSUJ.

  5. ‘America is not a “cause”’: 24 April 1949, NSJ, pp. 61–2.

  6. The second was his essay: The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman, Bantam edn, 1965, p. 241.

  Nine: Your sins of weakness

  1. ‘The mere announcement of fact’: Melvin Lasky to William Donovan, in Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony 1945–1955, Routledge, 2001, p. 165.

  2. ‘We had invited them here’: Melvin Lasky, letter to the Manchester Guardian, 24 July 1950.

  3. fabulous meals: Diana Trilling, We Must March, My Darlings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, p. 60.

  4. don’t forget John Wayne: from a conversation with Betty Woodman, 30 Aug 2013.

  5. The Russians were building: JE to MS, 23 May 2012.

  6. ‘To many people, though’ etc.: SS journal entry for 12 March 1952, SSUJ.

  7. ‘He is, to me, a new type’: ibid. To add a detail of which my father was unaware: Michael Goodwin was also the editor of the Bellman Books series, published by Ampersand, which recently was revealed to have been the cover publishing house for the branch of British Intelligence that subsequently lay behind Encounter. See Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p. 100.

  8. ‘Have read World within World several times’: WHA to SS, 20 June 1951, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, pp. 84–5.

  9. ‘I believe that you are a very strong, ruthless character’: WHA to SS, 12 April 1942, in ibid., p. 82.

  10. ‘Mr Spender has always seemed to me’: Cyril Connolly review of WWW, reprinted in The Evening Colonnade, David Bruce & Watson, 1973, p. 360.

  11. ‘what on earth did he think’: KV 2/3216, doc. 49.

  12. ‘I still believe Guy to be a victim’: WHA to SS, 14 June 1951, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 84 n. 3.

  13. ‘I feel exactly as you do’: WHA to SS, 20 June 1951, in ibid., p. 84.

  14. ‘into a little pin-striped shoal’: Cyril Connolly, The Missing Diplomats, Queen Anne Press, 1952, p. 31.

  15. ‘It is very difficult to understand’: KV 2/3215, doc. 19. The person in the US who would have been able to make such revelations was Michael Straight, who’d belonged to the ring of Cambridge spies. My parents knew the Straights. We stayed with them on our way to California in 1959. Michael’s version of events is in his After Long Silence, New York, W. W. Norton, 1983.

  16. ‘At one time it was thought’: KV 2/3216, doc. 27, Minute sheet dated 1 Feb 1955. Also doc. 55, 10 and 11 July 1951. The biography of Kim Philby by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley describes Skardon as ‘perhaps the best operator MI5 ever had’ (Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, Penguin, 1969, p. 140).

  Ten: Don’t you ever tell a lie?

  1. the Locrini family could not be called poor: NSJ, p. 127.

  2. ‘all the old business’: NSJ, p. 20, April 1949, p. 59. See also Allen Tate, ‘Literature of Social Agitation’, in The Hovering Fly and Other Essays, Cummington, MA, Cummington Press, 1949, p. 33.

  3. ‘Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby’: Joel Chandler Harris, The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, was first published in 1881. There are numerous editions.

  4. ‘Perhaps you could’: SS to IK, 22 Feb 1953; Kristol’s reply: IK to SS, 26 Feb 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.

  5. ‘draw an adequate salary’: TSE to SS, 9 April 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.

  6. ‘it looks as if’: SS to IK, undated [early May 1953], Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.

  7. ‘Not my branch but you might like them’: SS to IK, 26 April 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.

  8. ‘Irving Kristol fascinates me’: NSJ, p. 147.

  9. ‘There was always the possibility’: IK, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, Free Press, 1995, p. 23.

  10. ‘Special Branch began compiling’: Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Oct 1953, in Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 46.

  11. ‘I asked him whether to be arrested’: n.d. [1 July?] 1955, NSJ, p. 172.

  12. ‘Why should they climb a tree?’: Wildeblood, Against the Law, p. 176.

  Eleven: Dreaming one’s way through life

  1. ‘an act “outside” historical materialism’ and ‘strongly attacked the Congress’: 24 and 27 Oct 1954, SSUJ.

  2. ‘And the frowning schoolgirl’: W. H. Auden, ‘The Model’.

  3. ‘social-democratic Britain was better placed’: Christopher Mayhew, Time to Explain, Hutchinson, 1987, pp. 62 and 106.

  4. ‘We regard the Stalinist communists’: FO 1110/533.

  5. ‘has created an especial resentment’: 6 Jan 1955, draft statement to the CCF in Paris, to be signed by US members of the CCF, Tam 023, Papers of t
he ACCF.

  6. ‘I had assumed that we were writers’: Arthur Schlesinger to James Burnham, 16 March 1955, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.

  Twelve: Scandalous gossip

  1. ‘yammered’: RC to NS, 3 Sept 1957, SSAB. The publishing house was Hamish Hamilton, but Jamie never used Hamish as his Christian name.

  2. ‘outmanoeuvred’: RC to NS, 27 April 1955, SSAB.

  3. ‘it would have been a comfort’: RC to NS, 11 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  4. ‘Stephen knows quite well’: SSUJ, and partially in NSJ, 18 May 1955, pp. 153–4.

  5. ‘Orch bad’: Chandler’s pocket diary for 1955, RCAB.

  6. ‘he has the drunkard’s’: 20 May 1955, SSUJ.

  7. When he was asked to leave: Chandler’s biographers suggest he was asked to leave the Connaught for chronic alcoholism, but in fact the problem was incontinence.

  8. ‘it’s no good dreaming one’s way through life’: 10 June 1955, NSJ, p. 163.

  9. ‘Stern Daughter of the V. of G.’: Alison Hooper letter to Frank MacShane, 29 Nov 1975, photocopy in SSAB.

  10. ‘for reasons I no longer recollect’: IK, Neoconservatism, p. 461.

  11. ‘if we are building a theatre’: Jennifer Josselson to MS, 26 May 2012.

  12. sixteen or seventeen magazines: John Hunt to MS, 24 June 2012.

  13. ‘My colleagues’: 28 July 1955, NSJ, p. 193.

  14. ‘Dwight has spent a fruitful life’: IK, Neoconservatism, p. 461.

  15. ‘At Poros, I had a walk with Matthew’: SS typescript headed ‘1955, 6–16 Aug, August holiday’, p. 23, SSUJ.

  16. ‘I think you should have left Stephen’: RC to NS, 21 March 1957, SSAB.

  17. ‘the fatal day’: RC diary, 9 Sept 1955, RCAB.

  18. ‘As nanny my greatest problem’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, 25 Nov 1955, RCAB.

  19. ‘the endless prowling of bazaars’: RC to NS, 2 July 1956, SSAB.

  20. ‘I think it is absolutely true’ and ‘In all these things’: RC to SS, 22 Dec 1955, SSAB.

  21. ‘rather nice’: RC to NS, 1 Feb 1956, SSAB.

  22. ‘You cannot be damaged’ and ‘The whole idea is a fake’: RC to SS, 9 March 1956, SSAB.

  23. ‘I regard financial failure’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, 22 April 1949, in Frank MacShane (ed.), The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 170. See also, quoting himself, RC to SS, 1 Jan 1957, SSAB.

  24. ‘when I left England’: RC to NS, 13 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  Thirteen: The irresistible historic mixed grill

  1. American GIs walking around Red Square: my memories of Joseph Brodsky are in Valentina Polukhina (ed.), Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, vol. 2, Brighton, MA, Academic Studies Press, 2010.

  2. ‘They were mere embellishments’: Zinovy Zinik to MS, 22 January 2014.

  3. ‘The Writers’ Union’: Ilya Ehrenburg to Alexander Werth, in Russia: Hopes and Fears, Penguin, 1969, p. 205.

  4. ‘In spite of everything’: SS, Engaged in Writing, pp. 35 and 151–2.

  5. ‘He dictated to me the entire action’: 19 July typescript, re 8 July 1956, SSUJ.

  6. ‘I think I was fooling myself’: RC to NS, 7 June 1956, SSAB.

  7. ‘Any time’: RC to NS, 10 June 1956, SSAB.

  8. ‘He is the sort of man who’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 11 June 1956, RCAB.

  9. ‘I like this fellow Spender very much’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 170.

  10. ‘I don’t know when I have been so unhappy’: RC to NS, 29 June 1956, SSAB.

  11. ‘It was hellish with the furniture’: RC to NS, 29 June (bis) 1956, SSAB.

  12. ‘I’ll never get anyone as kind’: RC to NS, 13 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  13. ‘When I hear your wonderful voice’: RC to NS, 19 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  14. ‘You should know that I am not going to embarrass you’: RC to NS, 30 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  15. ‘Tremendous fun’: RC to NS, 14 July 1956, SSAB.

  16. ‘I wish you were here’: RC to NS, 23 Nov 1956, SSAB.

  17. ‘The thinnest tie of social friendship’: RC to NS, 3 Dec 1956, SSAB.

  Fourteen: The kindest face

  1. ‘the kindest face’: the phrase appears several times in the correspondence between RP and SS, now in the library at Duke University. The same scene is told retrospectively in RP’s memoir, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, New York, Scribner, 2009, pp. 108 and 201–4, etc.

  2. ‘I think of this room where I am writing’: SS to RP, 10 Jan 1957, Duke.

  3. ‘would have given Cissy the jitters’: RC to SS, 12 Dec 1956, SSAB.

  4. ‘We are both – she and I – highly strung’ and ‘cheap little concerts in museums’: RC to SS, 1 Jan 1957, SSAB.

  5. ‘Very learned, but much too pontifical’: RC to Jessica Tyndale, 18 Jan 1957, in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 416.

  6. ‘Stephen is a loving father’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 26 Jan 1957, RCAB. The later paragraphs of this letter are in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 417.

  7. ‘The most I really wanted was to take care of you’: RC to NS, ‘Saturday’ [late Jan 1957], SSAB.

  8. ‘small, inoffensive’: RC to NS, ‘Sunday night, Monday also’ [late Jan 1957], SSAB.

  9. ‘After all, in my Will, I am making Helga’: RC to NS, 30 Jan 1957, SSAB.

  10. ‘though I will do one day’: SS to RP, 4 Feb 1957, Duke.

  11. ‘not at all like Dylan Thomas’: SS to RP, n.d. [Feb 1957], Duke.

  Fifteen: A strong invisible relationship

  1. ‘because I took it out of Natasha’s frame’: SS to RP, 25 Feb 1957, Duke.

  2. ‘we should only know’: RC to NS, but quoting NS, 15 March 1957, SSAB.

  3. ‘two frantic parties’: RC to NS, 22 April 1957, SSAB.

  4. ‘I’m sorry he has to work so hard’: RC to NS, 16 May 1957, SSAB.

  5. ‘why don’t you carry what you have’: RC to NS, 14 Aug 1957, SSAB.

  6. ‘There is really nothing to do’: RC to NS, 30 May 1957, SSAB.

  7. ‘I am also too proud’: RC to NS, 30 May 1957, SSAB.

  8. ‘perhaps the best I can do’: RC to NS, 21 June 1957, SSAB.

  9. ‘a handsome nothing’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 5 July 1957, RCAB.

  10. ‘With regard to what you say’: Michael Gilbert to RC, 12 July 1957, RCAB.

  11. ‘I want what Rimbaud’: SS to RP, 13 April 1957, Duke.

  12. ‘I feel I’d sell everything’: SS to RP, 28 May 1957, Duke.

  13. ‘deeply disturbed and upset’: SS to RP, 20 June 1957, Duke.

  14. ‘What also counts is that for Natasha’: SS to RP, 21 June 1957, Duke.

  15. ‘seemed like a final God-inspired kick’: SS to RP, 27 June 1957, Duke.

  Sixteen: Barrenness and desolation

  1. ‘always seemed poised over some abyss’: 28 Sept 1990, re Moravia’s death on 26 Sept, SSUJ. Also NSJ, p. 671.

  2. ‘for a week I seemed to have in Japan’: SS to RP, 5 Oct 1957, Duke.

  3. ‘I’m in despair over the California trip’ and the following quotations are from NS unpublished diary for 1985, SSAB.

  4. ‘I remember when the feeling of barrenness’ etc.: ibid., 2 Feb, p. 14, SSAB.

  5. ‘a kind of space around myself’: SS to RP, 22 Oct 1957, Duke.

  6. ‘That we won’t be able to see so much’: SS to RP, 27 Oct 1957, Duke.

  7. ‘What I knew by the spring’: RP, Ardent Spirits, p. 268.

  Seventeen: Too ambivalent

  1. ‘I couldn’t despise Stephen as you do’: NS to RC, 19 Feb 1958, RCAB. The surviving letters from Natasha to Raymond Chandler entered the Bodleian with the other Chandler papers in the 1970s. She made sure that access was restricted during her lifetime but they are now accessible.

  2. ‘I really am concerned about him’ and all subsequent quotations in these paragraphs are from Stephen’s Japan diary. He sent this to Reynolds Price for safekeeping. Price typed it and ret
urned the typescript to Stephen, who edited it for the Selected Journals of 1984. The manuscript was returned to me after the death of Reynolds by Bill Price, his brother.

  3. ‘I think the answer to your question’: SS to RP, 3 July 1957, Duke.

  Eighteen: You’re unique

  1. ‘We are having a hell of a time’: SS to RP, 13 Dec 1958, Duke.

  2. ‘America! America!’: Dwight Macdonald, ‘America! America!’, republished in Discriminations, New York, Grossman Publishers, 1974, p. 44.

  3. ‘reflected the attitude of Encounter’s front office’: ibid., pp. 57–9. It’s possible that Josselson was trying to abandon the CIA backing and acquire funds from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, which would never have tolerated criticism of this kind. See Sarah Miller, ‘The Impresario: Michael Josselson, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013, p. 165.

  4. ‘I’ll be delighted to see you’: RC to NS, 30 Sept 1958, SSAB.

  5. ‘How strange that you’: RC to NS, 4 March 1959, SSAB.

  6. ‘The other day I took Matthew’: 30 July 1959, SSUJ.

  7. ‘It is essential’: FO 1110/1726, FO Circular no. 37, NA.

  Nineteen: Without banquets

  1. Margot Walmsley: Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, 1999, p. 176.

  2. ‘the Bronx Box’: Keith Botsford to MS, 12 January 2014.

  3. ‘Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap’: Stuart Hampshire to Frances Stonor Saunders, 1977, quoted in Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 331 and 464 n. 10.

  4. ‘What Melvin Lasky does’: SS to RP, 30 March 1960, Duke.

  5. ‘I am getting to the stage’: SS to RP, 27 March 1961, Duke.

  6. ‘The idea that Pasternak’: SS to RP, 5 Sept 1959, Duke.

  7. ‘I have received so much advice’: SS to RP, 24 Sept 1959, Duke.