Stephen Spender with Peter Marchant and Stan Sanvel Rubin (interview date 14 February 1978)

SOURCE: An interview in Partisan Review, Vol. LV, No. 1, 1988, pp. 45-54.

[In the following interview, which was conducted on February 14, 1978 and later edited for inclusion in Partisan Review, Spender discusses his relationship with W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and other literary figures, and remarks on his career as a poet, critic, and teacher.]

[Rubin]: You published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951. Are you working on another to bring that one up to date?

[Spender]: I don't quite want to bring it up to date, because I think that people's lives get very boring in autobiographies at the point of their becoming famous figures; the latter half of that sort of "life" tends to be a list of your accomplishments and the places you've been to—a kind of travelogue, almost. I might avoid that by cutting up the original autobiography and putting in new material. But I'll have to read World Within World again to decide whether I can do that. I haven't read it since I wrote it in 1950.

[Marchant]: You've had many lives—prep school, adolescence, Oxford, Germany, England in the thirties and its literary life, Spain, the Auxiliary Fire Service. Which has been the worst?

I always think that prep school was, far and away, the worst. I was very unhappy at the boarding school I was sent to when I was nine. I was totally unsuited to go to a boarding school, and I felt as if I'd been sent to prison. I always used to think, well, I'll never be as unhappy again as I am here. As a matter of fact, a master once said that to me. He noticed that I was very unhappy and said, "Anyhow you can have this consolation, that you'll never be so unhappy again." And it turned out to be quite true. When I was twenty-one, I wrote to him and thanked him very much for having made that remark and said that it had got me through being at school. I felt like a prisoner really, imprisoned with all these other awful little boys.

Which has been the best period of your life?

I was probably happiest after I had left Oxford and was away from any kind of institution. Oxford in a way I liked because I made friends there, but I didn't make anything of Oxford. My ambition always was to be independent—and to have a typewriter and a room of my own—and to start doing my own work.

I joined forces with Christopher Isherwood, who was living in Berlin and was rather lonely there—he wanted someone to talk to about literature and things. We lived very close to each other, and we met for every meal. That really was my life then—seeing Christopher Isherwood and getting on with my writing.

Had your relationship with Isherwood remained the same as it had been when you were an undergraduate?

Yes, I think my relationships with nearly all my friends have stayed the same. We're very fond of one another, and we meet whenever we can.

[Rubin]: There is a popular image of the poet as always a youthful figure and yet, in fact, you are writing poetry well into old age, just as Frost and Eliot and Stevens did.

In a way it's a phenomenon of living in the twentieth century. Poets tend to get terribly preoccupied in middle life. In early life one is neglected and, therefore, free from being called on the whole time, so one can get on with one's work. Then in old age one is also suddenly free again, and things are falling away from one. One interesting thing about being old is that one is invisible: if I get into an elevator, say, and it's full of young people, they don't look at me; they're looking at one another. That sense of being invisible is rather nice.

[Marchant]: Has your view of yourself changed? In World Within World, the sense I had of you as an undergraduate was somebody very sensitive and shy, easily humiliated. Someone made the remark to you that artists thrive on humiliation.

Yes, Auden said, "You will always be a poet because you will always be humiliated." I'm rather beyond being humiliated. But otherwise I think I am very much as I was.

[Rubin]: You talk about not changing, but I wonder if your time in America has had any direct impact on your writing.

I never felt very "English" as a writer. In fact, in my generation, to be young and a member of the English upper-middle class, the kind of person who goes to an English public school and to Oxford or Cambridge, meant that if you were not English—and by origin I am a quarter-German and a quarter-Jewish—one was made very conscious of being a bit of an outsider. Also I belonged to a time when people of my generation resented England very much—the public school system, the Conservative Party, all the governments of England between the two wars, the British Empire, the whole English upper-class code. Not feeling myself very English anyway, I always felt happier abroad than in England. During the war, as a matter of fact, if one was in England, one recovered a great feeling of England. I can think of Englishness as something almost sacred, but I always feel a bit of an outsider and not really English myself; therefore, wherever I am, I feel pretty well at home. If I go to Asia, for instance, I don't feel that I have a white face in contrast to these peoples of different colors; I really feel as if I'm almost one of them. I've never found it very difficult to bridge those gulfs, which are supposed to exist. I've always felt myself rather international, I think.

[Marchant]: You've been extraordinarily prolific—you've written seventy-five books—yet you describe yourself as being very social, finding it difficult to say "no" to invitations. What exactly is your work routine? How do you manage to write so much?

If one has lived a fairly long time, there have been a great many days in one's life. I've probably written on the average an hour or two a day, every day of my life, and if you worked it out, one could have written seventy-five books, I think. On the whole, when I am working on something that I care about, I really am working at it, or thinking about it, the whole time. A friend of mine always says, "I think of you as having a certain expression on your face when you're pretending to listen to me." When I'm pretending to listen to people, I'm usually getting on with whatever I happen to be writing.

[Rubin]: You've written and spoken about what you term the need for "pressure" in writing, which I understand to mean the tension between the content and the form. Do you perceive a difference in your own approach to fiction (which you've not written for some time) versus poetry or journalism? How do you handle these diverse forms of "pressure"?

Journalism I do simply to make money, although one needn't necessarily. It could be like writing a letter, for instance, which I do. In fact, I really prefer writing things I'm not paid for, and what I like very much is writing letters to people. Writing for one person seems to me the ideal situation.

Actually I think one has to keep on more or less writing in a genre like fiction, and if one doesn't, one forgets how to write in that genre. I would like to write stories, but I have the feeling that fiction has developed a great deal since the time when I did write stories, and I don't really know how to start again. I have kept on writing poetry just about enough to feel that I don't have to ask myself, "How does one write a poem?"

[Marchant]: You've also written a play [Trial of a Judge], about Germany in the thirties. Did you find it a struggle to write a play, that you didn't know how?

I see a great many plays and feel very critical of them, in the sense that I know they are not written as they should be written.

You've said that you didn't much like Cabaret, which is the Hollywood version of you and Isherwood in Berlin. Was your play any sort of reaction to that film?

I always say to Christopher that I often have a good mind to call my play My Berlin, in contrast to his. I noticed in his last book that he really wanted me to leave Berlin, because he was afraid that I would use his material. In the middle of the play, which is entirely political, there is a sort of cabaret scene which impinges on Christopher Isherwood's kind of Berlin.

Was Isherwood pleased with Cabaret?

No, we both felt the same: nothing happens in Cabaret that Christopher and I could have possibly afforded to do. Hollywood seems quite incapable of really doing anything about the lives of people like students who are comparatively poor. Cabaret is quite ridiculous. Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles, was a very unsuccessful performer in a cabaret, and really, I suppose one would have to say, a sort of whore, although I hate to say that because she was a person I adored. But that really is the way she made her money. In this movie she's the toast of Berlin and at the same time she's always asking for cigarettes because she's so poor. That kind of unreality I find depressing and painful. It seems a pity that Hollywood couldn't make something much more interesting out of what was real—the kind of life we did live.

[Rubin]: What do you think now of the work that Isherwood, Auden, MacNeice, and you did in the thirties?

On the whole, politics didn't help us at all in our writing. Isherwood and MacNeice kept very clear of politics, in fact. Auden wrote a great deal about politics, all of which he suppressed. I went over all the journalism and everything Auden had written in the thirties the other day, and I was amazed how much he'd done and how serious he was about politics. He was always trying to reconcile socialism with Christianity and that kind of thing. It was a major effort, but it didn't seem to help him in his work. When he stopped being interested in politics and went to America, there's immediately a sense of release and he can get on with being Auden, I think.

In a certain sense, I'm interested in politics, as a theme and as it provides material—some really horrifying material. The question is whether one can make something of it. I always thought I could make one thing of it, which was my great interest in the struggle going on in Nazi Germany, when I was there and after I left.

On the whole, does the world seem a better one, say, for a young writer than it was when you went to Oxford?

Yes, in the sense that even if young poets in England today don't have a spectacular success, they can still support themselves fairly well because the Arts Council pays for readings they give. We didn't have any opportunity of that kind. A few writers when I was young—and I happen to be one of them—really had very little difficulty because we were recognized almost immediately. But the ones who weren't recognized did have a very difficult time.

Back in the sixties, writing about the state of British poetry at that time, you singled out Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn. Whom would you add to that list now?

There are quite a lot of poets who write quite interesting poems, but I don't think that there has been a major figure since Larkin and Gunn and Hughes.

[Marchant]: Auden, in his first Collected Poems, talks about the "slim volume for which one is honestly grateful." Looking back on your years of writing and friendships, what seems to count the most?

A selection of poems, perhaps, the autobiography, and that's about it, I think.

You were critical of Virginia Woolf, looking at Edith Cavell's statue, and saying, "Patriotism isn't enough." You wanted to say to her, "Sensibility isn't enough." Doesn't she turn out to be right in the end? Aren't personal relationships what matter most?

No, I don't think she is right. I adored Virginia Woolf, and I very much like her work. But I don't think a work of just sensibility is enough.

[Rubin]: You've written of the development in this century of the poet-critic and the critic-poet. You yourself have done a number of critical, or scholarly, books in the past few years regarding the state of the artist in society. Do you think, on the whole, that criticism has improved in our time?

A lot of criticism that's written now I simply don't understand at all. I don't understand what's meant by "structuralism," for instance, and I don't think I want to. Unless I felt that understanding, say, structuralism would help me to write, I'd rather not know about it. So I'll give it the miss; I find that I give a lot of things the miss, and ten years later everyone's stopped being interested in them anyway.

But criticism did make great contributions to our understanding. Certainly the whole school of the New Criticism did, and one learned really quite a lot from it. I'm not interested now in either writing or reading criticism at all. I don't know whether that's just personal or whether it reflects something of the present state of affairs.

[Marchant]: Did Auden encourage you to write more criticism?

No, Auden was not at all interested in criticism. He wrote some himself, of course, but it was always written from an extremely personal point of view; it was a kind of commonsense criticism, multiplied by a certain zany quality of Auden himself. But I don't think he read any literary criticism.

I know very few writers who really are interested in criticism, in spite of everything that's said. Robert Graves didn't read criticism; I'm sure Yeats didn't either. I don't think Eliot read anyone else's criticism very much.

There was a time when writers had to pretend that they were interested in criticism, because the critics, especially the New Critics, were so formidable.

One does learn to read more critically, but over a long period of time. I think that I understand what Eliot was trying to do in his poetry, really through reading his criticism. So to that extent, his criticism has been helpful. Also the whole idea that poetry is the manipulation of language and that what you are doing only exists within the language itself—I think I've learned that through the analyses of people's poems made by critics.

[Rubin]: In other words, Eliot is rather an exception in writing criticism and poetry.

Well, Eliot was always writing his best criticism from the point of view of a poet who was, as it were, clearing space for himself to write his poetry. In that way, his early criticism is very like the criticism you get in Keats's letters, for instance. It's the criticism of a working poet who's setting goals for himself.

What is it that turned you toward those critical studies that you've done?

Being in part a journalist, I have the awful habit of thinking of books that I would like to read and then I make the mistake of thinking that I can write them. For instance, Love-Hate Relations about American and English relations is really a very good idea for a book which someone else ought to have written, but which I wrote myself. I don't have any scholarship at all; I'm really very unscholarly. And I think that book suffers from my lack of scholarship; I'm not really qualified to write that sort of book. I regret that I spent so much time writing about what were quite good ideas but for which I lacked the scholarship or the intellectual stamina. I wish that if I had written criticism I'd have written first-class criticism.

[Marchant]: I admire enormously your detachment. It's genuinely professional. I like your story of Eliot's reaction to a negative review that you wrote of his work. I wish you could tell it.

During the 1930s we worshipped Eliot—Auden, myself, and all our friends—but one disagreed with him often about his opinions. He wrote a very opinionated book, called After Strange Gods, which he himself regretted later on. It was an attack on D. H. Lawrence and various writers whom we admired, written from a very moralizing and politically reactionary point of view. It was a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, where he probably thought these views would be well accepted at that time. I attacked this book—I've forgotten what I said—but then I felt very bad about my criticism and wrote to Eliot, saying that I was sorry that I felt the way I did and regretted having published the review. He wrote me back a very nice letter in which he said: "You must always write exactly what you think about me, and it makes absolutely no difference to our personal friendship." I thought that showed Eliot's very high standards. Auden once said to me that of all the older literary people whom we'd known since we were very young, Eliot was the only one who had always behaved decently and had been consistently friendly to us all through his life, and I think that was true.

Did Auden also feel that whether you liked or disliked his work that it oughtn't affect your personal relationship?

Oh, yes, I'm sure he'd feel that. Auden probably wouldn't approve of my writing an attack on Eliot; Auden himself really never wrote attacks on people. Maybe it was just diplomacy, but I think he felt that on the whole it wasn't worth doing. He felt, and I think there's some truth in it, that destructive criticism almost always misfires. With very few exceptions, if a thing is bad, it's better to leave it alone and not attack it.

I remember at one point when I was editing I considered asking F.R. Leavis—although he probably would have refused—to write a column every month to say what he thought about literature. Auden said, "You know, that would be an absolutely irresponsible thing to do, because Leavis is a critic who is very good on what he likes, but who is completely unfair about what he doesn't like. You would just be exposing yourself to publishing most unfair attacks on people." I think that on the whole Auden felt that's true of most critics.

You wrote criticism of Isherwood's book, which you didn't like, and he was hurt and angered by that.

I'm not quite sure that I agree with him about his belief, and I'm not even sure how far he agrees with himself. However, he believes that if you are personal friends with people, you should write only favorably about their work. If a friend writes a book that you don't like, you just shouldn't write about it. I don't absolutely agree, because it may be important to do so. One can think of controversies in the history of the arts in which an attack made by someone who was a personal friend of someone else has played a very important role. For instance, Nietzsche's attack on Wagner is marvelous and interesting, because Nietzsche was such a friend of Wagner at one time and so admired his work.

I'm not sure whether I agree with Isherwood, but I think that if there was serious reason to attack someone with whom one had a personal friendship one might want to do so. For instance, one might have attacked the whole cult of sensibility which we were talking about in Virginia Woolf. One might want to analyze it in the work of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and others in Bloomsbury and stage an attack on it, in spite of the fact that one had been so friendly with the people concerned.

She really attacked you and MacNeice and Auden in "Letter to a Young Poet."

That's right. She did, but we didn't have any resentment toward her for her having done it.

You took it as a wish to be helpful, to offer "constructive criticism"?

No, I don't think it was. She was fond of me, but I don't think she knew the others. No, I think that when she was alone in her study writing she said things she would not have even felt if one had been in the same room. We were absolutely unharmed by this attack, because from our point of view all that essay showed was that Virginia Woolf, great genius as she was and perceptive critic as she was, really knew nothing about modern poetry. It was the kind of attack that didn't hurt at all.

But it sounds as if you are very much helped by what your friends say of your work in progress. Just as at Oxford, your group read each other's work and were critical, even so now. You write for a few people and care intensely about what they say.

I think that the only criticism which is really helpful in one's life and which usually occurs when one's very young is the criticism of a group of writers who are friends and very interested in each other's work, who even to some extent identify with one another so that one shares the sense of success of any other member of the group. In this kind of criticism, the "critic" is almost criticizing his own work in criticizing yours.

You can have groups of friends who are all absolutely lacking in any critical sense, and then the effect is disastrous, because they become a mutual admiration society, encouraging the worst tendencies in each other. I'm not sure but that the Beats weren't like that. I can't think that anyone in that group had a real understanding of what the others were doing—perhaps Ginsberg did, but I doubt it. We were very lucky because Auden was an enormously intelligent and very intellectual person. He had an intelligence comparable to that of Bertrand Russell.

[Rubin]: You've been a teacher at several points in your career. How do you approach that role?

I try to understand what should be the development of the particular student. I don't treat all the students as though they are the same but try to help each student to realize the potentiality of writing the kind of thing which I feel he can write—to discover his own voice, as it were. I don't feel that everyone should be taught to do just formal verse or free verse.

I'm beginning to think that it's very important today to teach students that it's difficult to write, because they tend to think poetry is a kind of lottery and that if you write enough of it maybe some of it will be good. That's really rather how I felt when I was about sixteen. I try now to share selections of poetry with my students to show them a particular difficulty which the poet had to overcome, regardless of how easy the writing looks.

You said earlier that you regret the time you invested in your critical studies. How do you feel about your tenure at Encounter?

It was quite enjoyable, but it was rather a waste of time, really. It was playing the role of being self-important and selecting other people's work and so on. I had to work with its political editor, who was appointed by an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom; this meant one was always involved in a kind of fight with the political side. I always think that's a rather miserable business in a magazine when one side, representing the arts, is fighting against the other, representing politics. The politicians always think that theirs is the "serious" side of the magazine, on which the literature is merely so much froth. Also, as literature is supposed to be permanent and politics is day-to-day, one is always being asked to postpone publication of a poem or story, because it will be just as good in ten years' time as it is today, whereas the article on Vietnam has to be published immediately. I'm very glad to be away from that. I'd much rather be teaching.