Sir Stephen Spender | |
|---|---|
 Spender in 1933 | |
| Born | (1909-02-28)28 February 1909 Kensington, London, England |
| Died | 16 July 1995(1995-07-16) (aged 86) St John's Wood, London, England |
| Occupation | Poet, novelist, essayist |
| Education | University College, Oxford |
| Spouse | |
| Children | |
Sir Stephen Harold SpenderCBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes ofsocial injustice and theclass struggle. He was appointed U.S.Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.
Spender was born inKensington, London, to journalistHarold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet, ofGerman Jewish heritage.[1][2] He went first toHall School inHampstead and then at 13 toGresham's School,Holt and later Charlecote School inWorthing, but he was unhappy there. On the death of his mother, he was transferred toUniversity College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of schools".[3] Spender left forNantes andLausanne and then went up toUniversity College, Oxford (much later, in 1973, he was made anhonorary fellow). Spender said at various times throughout his life that he never passed any exam. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him wasW. H. Auden, who introduced him toChristopher Isherwood. Spender handprinted the earliest version of Auden'sPoems. He left Oxford without taking a degree and in 1929 moved toHamburg. Isherwood invited him to Berlin. Every six months, Spender went back to England.
Spender was acquainted with fellowAuden Group membersLouis MacNeice,Edward Upward andCecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly withDavid Jones and later came to knowWilliam Butler Yeats,Allen Ginsberg,Ted Hughes,Joseph Brodsky,Isaiah Berlin,Mary McCarthy,Roy Campbell,Raymond Chandler,Dylan Thomas,Jean-Paul Sartre,Colin Wilson,Aleister Crowley,F. T. Prince andT. S. Eliot, as well as members of theBloomsbury Group, particularlyVirginia Woolf. He was involved with American writerWilliam Goyen and later traveled with a group through India with Goyen's former partner, American artistJoseph Glasco.[4]
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Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988, under the titleThe Temple. This partly-autobiographical novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England's, particularly about relationships between men, and shows frightening harbingers of Nazism that are confusingly related to the very openness the man admires. Spender wrote in his 1988 introduction:
In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer—the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives[5]
Spender was discovered byT. S. Eliot, an editor atFaber and Faber, in 1933.[6]
His early poetry, notablyPoems (1933), was often inspired by social protest. Living inVienna, he further expressed his convictions inForward from Liberalism; inVienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the1934 uprising ofAustrian socialists; and inTrial of a Judge[7] (1938), anantifascistdrama in verse.
At theShakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce'sUlysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work:Paul Valéry,André Gide and Eliot. Hemingway even broke his rule of not reading in public if Spender would read with him. Since Spender agreed, Hemingway appeared for a rare reading in public with him.[8]
In 1936, Spender became a member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain.Harry Pollitt, its head, invited him to write for theDaily Worker on theMoscow Trials. In late 1936, Spender marriedInez Pearn, whom he had recently met at an Aid to Spain meeting.[9][10] She was described as "small and rather ironic" and "strikingly good-looking".
In January 1937, during theSpanish Civil War, theDaily Worker sent Spender to Spain on a mission to observe and report on the Soviet shipKomsomol, which had sunk while carrying Soviet weapons to theSecond Spanish Republic. He travelled toTangier with his close friend,T. C. Worsley and tried to enter Spain viaCadiz, but they were sent back. They then travelled toValencia, where Spender met Hemingway andManuel Altolaguirre. A secondary (or possibly the primary) reason for his trip was an initially unsuccessful attempt to rescue his jilted lover, the "former Welsh Guardsman turned occasional prostitute" Tony Hyndman, who had left for Spain two days after Spender's marriage to join theInternational Brigade.[11] Hyndman saw action at theBattle of Jarama in February 1937, and promptly deserted. He was captured and imprisoned in a Republican jail on charges of desertion and cowardice. Spender eventually secured his release and repatriation, in the process being forced to disclose the sexual nature of their relationship to Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party of Great Britain, leading shortly afterwards to his departure from the Party.[12]
In July 1937, Spender attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, held inValencia,Barcelona andMadrid and attended by many writers, including Hemingway,André Malraux, andPablo Neruda.[13]
Spender was imprisoned for a while inAlbacete. In Madrid, he met Malraux; they discussed Gide'sRetour de l'U.R.S.S.. Because of medical problems, he went back to England and bought a house inLavenham. In 1939, he divorced.
Spender's 1938 translations of works byBertolt Brecht andMiguel Hernández appeared inJohn Lehmann'sNew Writing.[14]
Spender felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half-Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, and her mother came from an upper-class family ofCatholic German,Lutheran Danish and distant Italian descent). His second wife,Natasha, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish. In 1942, he joined the fire brigade ofCricklewood andMaresfield Gardens as a volunteer. Spender met several times with the poetEdwin Muir.[citation needed]
After leaving the Communist Party, Spender wrote of his disillusionment with communism in the essay collectionThe God that Failed (1949), along withArthur Koestler and others.[15] It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was theMolotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like Auden, Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service inWorld War II. He was initially graded C upon examination because of his earliercolitis, poor eyesight,varicose veins and the long-term effects of atapeworm in 1934. But he pulled strings to be reexamined and was upgraded to B, which meant he could serve in the LondonAuxiliary Fire Service. Spender spent the winter of 1940 teaching atBlundell's School, taking a position that had been vacated byManning Clark, who returned toAustralia as a consequence of the war to teach atGeelong Grammar.[16]
After the war, Spender was a member of theAllied Control Commission, restoring civil authority in Germany.[17]
WithCyril Connolly andPeter Watson, Spender co-foundedHorizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. From 1947 to 1949, he went to the US several times and saw Auden and Isherwood. He was the editor ofEncounter magazine from 1953 to 1966 but resigned after it emerged that theCongress for Cultural Freedom, which published it, was covertly funded by theCIA.[18]
Spender insisted that he was unaware of the ultimate source of the magazine's funds. He taught at various American institutions including University of California at Berkeley and Northwestern University.[19][20] He accepted the Elliston Chair of Poetry[21] at theUniversity of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961, he became professor ofrhetoric atGresham College, London.
Spender helped found the magazineIndex on Censorship, was involved in the founding of thePoetry Book Society and did work forUNESCO.[22] He was appointed the 17thPoet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.[23]
During the late 1960s, Spender frequently visited theUniversity of Connecticut, which he declared had the "most congenial teaching faculty" he had encountered in the United States.[24]
Spender was Professor of English atUniversity College London from 1970 to 1977 and then becameprofessor emeritus. He was made aCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) at the 1962Queen's Birthday Honours,[25] andknighted in the 1983 Queen's Birthday Honours.[26][27] At a ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of theNormandy Invasion on 6 June 1984, US PresidentRonald Reagan quoted from Spender's poem "The Truly Great" in his remarks:
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life... and left the vivid air signed with your honor'.
Spender also engaged profoundly with the world of art, including intellectual exchanges withPablo Picasso. The artistHenry Moore did etchings and lithographs to accompany the work of writers, includingCharles Baudelaire and Spender. Moore's work in that regard also included illustrations of the literature ofDante,Gide and Shakespeare. The exhibition was held at The Henry Moore Foundation.[28]
Spender "collected and befriended artists such asArp,Auerbach,Bacon,Freud,Giacometti,Gorky,Guston,Hockney,Moore,Morandi, Picasso and others". InThe Worlds of Stephen Spender, the artistFrank Auerbach selected art work by those masters to accompany Spender's poems.[29]
Spender wroteChina Diary with Hockney in 1982, published byThames and Hudson art publishers in London.[30]
The Russian-born artistWassily Kandinsky created an etching for Spender,Fraternity, in 1939.[31]
Spencer had multiple relationships with both men and women during his life. In 1933, he fell in love with Tony Hyndman, and they lived together from 1935 to 1936.[17] In 1934, Spender had an affair withMuriel Gardiner. In a letter toChristopher Isherwood in September 1934, he wrote, "I find boys much more attractive, in fact I am rather more than usually susceptible, but actually I find the actual sexual act with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting, and, in fact, more everything".[17] In December 1936, shortly after the end of his relationship with Hyndman, Spender fell in love with and marriedInez Pearn after an engagement of only three weeks.[32] The marriage broke down in 1939.[17] In 1941, Spender marriedNatasha Litvin, a concert pianist. The marriage lasted until his death. Their daughter,Elizabeth Spender, previously an actress, was married to the Australian actor and satiristBarry Humphries until his death in April 2023, and their son,Matthew Spender, is married to the daughter of the Armenian artistArshile Gorky.
Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. His seemingly changing attitudes have caused him to be labelled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply something complex that resists easy labelling.[33] Many of his friends in his earlier years were gay. Spender had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably Hyndman, who was called "Jimmy Younger" in his memoirWorld Within World. After his affair with Muriel Gardiner, he shifted his focus toheterosexuality,[17] but his relationship with Hyndman complicated both that relationship and his short-lived marriage to Pearn. His marriage to Litvin in 1941 seems to have marked the end of his romantic relationships with men but not the end of all homosexual activity, as his unexpurgated diaries have revealed.[34] Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry. The following line was revised in a republished edition: "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution" to "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution". Nevertheless, he was a founding member of theHomosexual Law Reform Society, which lobbied for the repeal of British sodomy laws.[35] Spender sued authorDavid Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt'sWhile England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court, with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.
On 16 July 1995, Spender died of a heart attack inWestminster, London, aged 86.[36] He was buried in the graveyard ofSt Mary on Paddington Green Church, in London.
The Stephen Spender Trust is a registered charity that was founded to widen the knowledge of 20th-century literature, with a particular focus on Spender's circle of writers, and to promote literary translation. The trust's activities include poetry readings; academic conferences; a seminar series in partnership with the Institute of English Studies; an archive programme in conjunction with the British Library and the Bodleian; work with schools via Translation Nation; the Guardian Stephen Spender Prize, an annual poetry translation prize established in 2004; and the Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize, a worldwide Russian–English translation competition.[37]
Spender was awarded theGolden PEN Award in 1995.[38]
Drama[edit]
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Memoir[edit]
Letters and journals[edit]
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