Confessions of a Public Son

By R.Z. Sheppard

To judge from his journal and a reissue of his collected verse, Stephen Spender, 76, remains a minor poet and a major luncher: "I had lunch with Eliot a few days ago at the club ... On Thursday went to the luncheon given in honour of John Lehmann at the Trocadero ... Lunch in Paris with Denis de Rougemont ... We gave a luncheon for Auden and the Austrian Ambassador ... In Berlin, at luncheon, I met George Kennan again ... Went to lunch with Robert Oppenheimer ... [Guy Burgess] invited me to lunch at his apartment ... Lunched with Cyril (Connolly) at Whites ... Pauline de Rothschild rang and I lunched with her and Philippe at Prunier." There are also dinners with Igor Stravinsky and Edith Sit-well, breakfasts and quick bites at franchised "inns," where Spender passes lonely hours during U.S. lecture tours.

They provided a convenient time to work on his journals, notes and thoughts about decades of travel, editing, guest teaching, committee work, freelancing and generally keeping up with friends and the literary network on both sides of the Atlantic. The impression left is of a benevolent man who dolefully plays his role as a cultural emissary. He has the appropriate lean aristocratic looks, a title (Sir Stephen since 1982) and a long list of awards and honorary posts, including a term as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. It is not hard to imagine his audiences of college students and Anglophiles treating him as lesser nobility, a surviving link to the Bloomsbury group of Virginia Woolf and the Oxford gang of W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Spender himself.

As a poet, he is best remembered for his lyricism. He was a young man of the ideological '30s, though politically he appears to have been in the thin of it: a Communist briefly in his youth and a liberal during the years before and after World War II. He later joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom and became an editor for its anti-Communist magazine Encounter. He quit in 1967 after learning that the C.C.F. was being used as a funding conduit by the CIA.

Sir Stephen exhibits no outrage or deep sense of betrayal at having been an unwitting partisan in the cold war. He suggests that the iniquity lay not in CIA sponsorship but in that support's having been kept secret. The reader may wonder whether he is being evasive or naive: it is, after all, the agency's job to be secretive. Late in the journals, Spender traces the devolution of his political thinking, from innocence to idealism to resignation and concludes that "the world is run by a special race of monsters."

The author is not an especially convincing cynic. His sustained interest is in power and reputation in the literary world. He yearns to be "a real great writer," not a "fake great man" like his father, Harold Spender, a journalist, biographer and author of books on government and mountaineering. Sir Stephen addressed the issue in his poem The Public Son of a Public Man: "When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,/ I was your son, high on your horse,/ My mind a top whipped by the lashes/ Of your rhetoric, windy of course." Auden cut a more attractive father figure, an artist of superior talent and technique who stalks the pages of the journal as a steady reminder of his friend's shortcomings.

Among them, ironically, is Spender's weakness for windy rhetoric. Auden's Funeral, reprinted in Collected Poems, is a boomy send-off burdened by a sense of its own occasion. Far more affecting is an untitled "diary poem" buried in the journal that describes Auden's crotchets with refreshing immediacy: "His talk/ Is concentrated 'I' ... 'At six precisely I fix up Martinis/ 90 per cent vodka 70 proof./ Dinner at 7.30 not one moment later/ Or I tend to become repetitive./ Then at nine byebyes like mother taught me./ Oh! the relief of getting between the sheets!' "

Such vitality is rare in Spender's poetry and prose. The journals offer much trivial detail, bland descriptions and the sort of intellectual vagaries associated with German romanticism. Spender wrote a good book (The Year of the Young Rebels) about the student riots of 1968, but he often took assignments that left him cold: "At three went to British Council to report on my South American and Caribbean tour. There was really nothing to say." A visit to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem results in the usual throat clearing: "One may well think in Yad va sham that our modern world ... " harrumph, harrumph.

Some lively talk does trickle in. Stravinsky describes the consistency of his blood: "So thick, so rich, so very rich, it might turn into crystals, like rubies." Muriel Spark fields a dumb question about her knowledge of the novel with "I couldn't write them if I knew anything about them." Asked to name her greatest achievement, Jacqueline Onassis answers softly, "I think it is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane."

Spender's assessment of his own accomplishments has the ring of pre-emptive self-criticism. He regrets not having Eliot's or Auden's capacity for work, and registers despair for lacking a disciplined mind and a better education.

Doubts have shadowed Spender throughout his career. In her 1935 diaries, Virginia Woolf admired the poet and essayist for his reach but complained that his work often "peters out in the usual litter of an undergraduate's table." At 70, he wrote: "I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, money making, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion." In other words, it's literature or you're out to lunch. --By R.Z. Sheppard