Eric Pace (obituary date 18 July 1995)

SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, July 18, 1995, p. B11.

[Pace is an American journalist. In the obituary below, he surveys Spender's life and career.]

Sir Stephen Spender, the British poet, critic and novelist, died Sunday at St. Mary's Hospital in London. He was 86.

He had been taken to the hospital after collapsing at his home in north London, a spokesman for the hospital said.

In the 1930's, Stephen Spender was one of a small number of young poets who gave a new direction to English letters by insisting that poetry be linked to political and social concerns and other aspects of the larger world.

In yesterday's issue of The Guardian, the scholar and critic Sir Frank Kermode wrote that Mr. Spender's writings on politics, "and on the relation of artists to politics, remain the most considered and the most serious of any by the young writers of the period."

In 1930 Mr. Spender, as he was then—he went on to be knighted in 1983—drew wide attention when his Twenty Poems was published; two years later, some of his poems and those by W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and others were included in an anthology, New Signatures, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press.

Mr. Spender, Auden, Louis MacNeice and a few others came to be known as the Oxford poets, since they had all studied there at around the same time.

Sometimes Mr. Spender was described as "Shelleyan" because of the fervor of his call for sweeping change and of his lyrical way with words. Because of that lyricism, coupled with his good looks, he was also once labeled "the Rupert Brooke of the Depression," in a barbed reference to the handsome British war poet who died during World War I.

Mr. Spender often wrote about the world around him—which he saw with sorrow and anger. In 1934, he wrote a long narrative poem, Vienna, about a recent Socialist up-rising in that city. And in "The Landscape Near an Aerodrome" he almost lovingly described the descent a plane with "furred antennae feeling its huge path / Through dusk."

Later, during World War II, he wrote of his feelings about politics in a series of articles on "Books and the War." He began one article with these words:

We are living in a political age. That is to say political beliefs and events play a part in the lives of contemporaries which religious and spectacular warnings of the working out of doom amongst the great used to play in the past.

Poets are faced, then, with the problem of transforming into the comprehensive terms of the imagination the chaos of this politically observed world.

In the late 1920's, Mr. MacNeice described Mr. Spender as "redeeming the world by introspection," and he remained involved with the world and its continuing need for redemption in his poetry and prose, as critic and commentator. And although he gained less worldly renown than did his friend Auden, his poems appeared widely in anthologies.

Appraisals of Mr. Spender and his writings have varied spectacularly. The worldly British man of letters Cyril Connolly said, "One must compare him to Goethe and Gide, artists who combine sensuality with puritanism, loving with willing, innocence with guile."

But the grumpy conservative novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote, "To watch him fumbling with our rich and delicate English language is like seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee."

Mr. Spender, who was shy and generous as well as modest, called Waugh's jibe "horrible" but added, "I do write with great difficulty and have absolutely no conviction that I write well."

Stephen Harold Spender was born on Feb. 28, 1909 in London, into a noted Liberal family that was in comfortable but not, according to his autobiography, particularly happy circumstances. His mother died when he was 12 and his father not many years later; Stephen and his three siblings were left under the care of their maternal grandmother, Hilda Schuster. He grew up tall and handsome, attended schools in Norfolk and London and went on to University College at Oxford.

There he met Mr. MacNeice, Auden, Isaiah Berlin and Christopher Isherwood, who became his friends and literary colleagues. With the help of a small independent income, he left Oxford in 1931 to devote himself entirely to poetry writing. He went frequently to Germany, where he spent time with Isherwood, whose experiences of that era led eventually to his Berlin stories and the play I Am a Camera, which was made into the musical Cabaret.

Mr. Spender's first prose book was a 1934 volume of essays, The Destructive Element, which commented on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats and others. His first collection of short stories, The Burning Cactus, came out in 1936. The following year saw the publication of his Forward From Liberalism, an exposition of his political thinking, which led to an invitation to join the British Communist Party.

It was an association that lasted only a few weeks. "I wrote something for The Daily Worker attacking the party," he recalled later, "and that was the last I heard of my membership." In 1950, he, Arthur Koestler, André Gide and others contributed to a book of essays, The God That Failed, relating their disillusionment with Communism.

As it was for many of his contemporaries, the Spanish Civil War for Mr. Spender was a searing experience. Evading a British Foreign Office ban on visas, he went to Spain in 1937 as a delegate to an International Writers' Congress in Barcelona.

Later that year, he edited Poems for Spain with John Lehmann, and in 1938 wrote Trial of a Judge, a five-act play in verse about Nazi Germany.

In 1939, he was a founder of the literary magazine Horizon, of which he was co-editor, with Cyril Connolly, until 1941.

Mr. Spender was a pacifist, and he served as a fireman in London during most of World War II. He continued to write and to have works published as the war went on, including two collections of poems and his translations of work by other poets, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Federico Garcia Lorca.

Just after the war, in 1946, there appeared Mr. Spender's book European Witness, which included an analysis of the situation of German intellectuals under Hitler. One of his most acclaimed poems, "Elegy for Margaret," dedicated to his terminally ill sister-in-law, was published that year in Poems of Dedication.

His 1949 volume of verse, Edge of Being: Poems, was less well received by the critics. His autobiography, World Within World, published in 1951, also received mixed reviews, but critics agreed that it was worth reading, if only for its incisive sketches of the stars of the British literary world.

Mr. Spender continued to write prose—like Learning Laughter, about a trip to Israel—as well as poetry, and a volume with his collected poems was published in 1953.

In 1953 also, he and Irving Kristol founded Encounter, an anti-Communist intellectual journal that soon wielded influence far out of proportion to its small circulation (about 40,000). It published everyone from Nancy Mitford to Mr. Koestler on topics ranging from semantic snobbery to Britain's future.

In 1967, Mr. Spender cut his ties to the magazine when it was disclosed that it had been partly supported by funds supplied indirectly by the Central Intelligence Agency.

His poetry, meanwhile, was generating other diverse appraisals. The Times Literary Supplement, in 1971, asked whether it did not make "better sense" to look at his work as basically personal introspection, "as attempts at redemptive and quasi-religious self-searching, than it ever did to see them as coming primarily from social or political concerns.

The critic David Daiches, writing in 1958, cited what he called Mr. Spender's "limited range" but praised his "quiet control in descriptive or confessional verse that has its own appeal."

In his later years, Mr. Spender produced far more prose than poetry, including The Creative Element: A Study of Vision, Despair and Orthodoxy Among Some Modern Writers (1953); a sympathetic look at student rebellion, The Year of the Young Rebels (1969); Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities, and The Thirties and After (1978).

In 1993, Viking published a novel by David Leavitt, an American, entitled While England Sleeps, and Sir Stephen—as he was by then—asserted that the novelist had committed plagiarism by using material from his autobiography.

Sir Stephen also filed suit in Britain against Viking Penguin, which was obliged to withdraw the book. In an out-of-court settlement reached early in 1994, Viking also agreed not to keep on selling the novel in its original form anywhere in the world.

In an essay published in The New York Times Book Review in September 1994, Sir Stephen contended that Mr. Leavitt's novel was "closely derived in plot and text from about 30 pages of my autobiography, concerning my relationship with a man I call Jimmy Younger."

"My book," Sir Stephen added, "describes how after my marriage to Inez Pearn, my friend, who was also my former lover, joined the International Brigade and fought in the Spanish Civil War."

Events involving Jimmy, Sir Stephen wrote, were "almost exactly transcribed in Mr. Leavitt's novel, though the character in the novel was named Edward."

For his part, Mr. Leavitt had contended that "When writing historical fiction about a period in which one did not live, one obviously has to look into the past—to eavesdrop on history itself."

In his essay in The Times Book Review, Sir Stephen wrote, "No one would disagree with him there, but doing so surely does not mean finding some past person's autobiography and presenting a great part of it as one's own current fiction."

"Mr. Leavitt's fantasy accretions to my autobiography, which I find pornographic, certainly do not correspond to my experience or to my idea of literature," Sir Stephen observed, adding: "Authors of the 1990's, like Mr. Leavitt, who are entirely free to exploit a wave of popular interest, would do well to understand that writers as recently as the 1950's ran considerable risks of being prosecuted" under intolerant British laws.

"It was for this reason that in 1950, while prepared to take the risk for myself, I gave my former lover the pseudonym Jimmy Younger in World Within World. My autobiography was received in 1951 as ahead of its time in its frankness, admired as such by some reviewers, attacked by others for what was seen as excessive candor."

By March 1995, Mr. Leavitt made 17 editorial changes in the novel's text, and a revised edition is to be published by Houghton Mifflin in the fall.

Meanwhile, in September 1994, St. Martin's Press reissued World Within World in the United States, with a new introduction by Sir Stephen. At that time St. Martin's also published Dolphins, a book of his recent poems. It was his first new volume of poetry in nine years, and it also came out in Britain in 1994.

With the passage of time, World Within World has proved to be in many ways Sir Stephen's most enduring prose work because it gives the reader revealing glimpses of its author, Auden and Mr. Isherwood and of what it was like to be a British poet in the 1930's.

In his new introduction to the 1994 edition, Sir Stephen wrote, "Our ideal was always to make out of experience artifacts—verbal objects as poems or fictions—which within themselves would have transcended their origins whether these were politics or sex or history."

But he added this caution: "It is quite wrong to be nostalgic about the Thirties on the grounds that during that decade many young people felt there were political causes worth fighting and dying for. Auden's description of the Thirties, sitting in a bar in New York in September 1939, as a 'low dishonest decade' at least deglamorizes it. The young should take the Thirties as a warning rather than as a cause for envy."

In addition to writing, Mr. Spender lectured widely, in Europe and Asia and at universities in the United States, where he also was a visiting professor on several campuses. He was a professor of English literature at University College of London University from 1970 to 1977.

He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1962 and in 1971 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. In 1965, he was the first non-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress.

Mr. Spender's first marriage, to Agnes Marie Pearn, known as Inez, ended in divorce in 1939. In 1941 he married Natasha Litvin, a pianist. She, their son, Matthew Francis, and their daughter, Elizabeth, survive.

The Times, London (obituary date 18 July 1995)

SOURCE: An obituary in The Times, London, July 18, 1995, p. 19.

[In the obituary below, the critic surveys Spender's life and career.]

Latterly the reputation of Stephen Spender had been very much that of critic, lecturer, scholar and ambassador for culture, a role reflected in the seemingly belated knighthood bestowed on him in 1983. But these were functions which usefully filled the void left by his waning powers as a poet. As a creative artist Spender will always be indissolubly linked with the 1930s and his impressive stature and handsome features made him the physically dominating presence in the aesthetes' group which gathered around Auden and Isherwood at Oxford in those days. It was the decade when politics invaded the innermost recesses of literature, but as a poet Spender's inspiration was intensely personal, and he could never bring himself to wave flags or chant slogans for very long. His characteristic note was one of compassion for the deprived and the defeated, coupled with a painfully honest examination of his own motives.

Spender's sincerity sometimes exposed him to ridicule, leading him to write verse which was gauche or exaggeratedly lachrymose, but it was a price which he was willing to pay; and at his best he records the helpless anguish of the Thirties more directly than any other English poet of the period, with the true voice of feeling. Later he turned to writing in a more purely lyrical and reflective vein, often with great tenderness. In the opinion of many good judges, his finest work is to be found in the wartime collection, Ruins and Visions (1941) and in Poems of Dedication (1946).

Stephen Harold Spender was the second son of Edward Harold Spender. His uncle was J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, and he grew up in the afterglow of Edwardian Liberalism. It was a comfortable and cultivated atmosphere which he described, not without irony, in his autobiography, World Within World (1951).

His interest in poetry was first aroused at a very early age, and confirmed during adolescence when he came heavily under the influence of his maternal grandmother, Hilda Schuster, a woman of cosmopolitan breadth of culture. He was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and University College, Oxford, and while an undergraduate he came into the orbit of the figure who was to become his close friend, W. H. Auden; he also got to know other aspiring poets who were later to figure in the public mind as members of the Auden group.

Together with Louis MacNeice he edited Oxford Poetry in 1929; in 1930 he edited it with Bernard Spencer. Another important friendship was with Christopher Isherwood, who has left an amusing glimpse of the youthful Spender in his memoir Lions and Shadows of 1938. Like Isherwood, he was drawn to Germany and lived there for two years after leaving Oxford. The intellectual and artistic ferment of the Weimar Republic fired his imagination, and he also found himself witnessing the rise of Hitler at first hand. Subsequent periods spent in Vienna confirmed his sense of the impending catastrophe of Nazism.

Along with other poets of his generation, Spender first became known to a wider public through Michael Robert's anthology New Signatures in 1932. A first volume, Poems, published in the following year, was enthusiastically received, and critics began to refer to the new triumvirate of Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. A little later MacNeice's name was added to the list, and the mythical composite MacSpaunday was complete.

Like other literary schools, the movement was less concerted and less tightly-knit than journalistic legend would suggest, but there was undoubtedly great excitement in the air. The technical lessons of Eliot, Hopkins and Wilfred Owen had been absorbed; the crosscurrents of Marxism and psychoanalysis were flowing with unprecedented vigour. Above all, the sense of deepening international crisis arising from the Nazi threat to civilised behaviour brought home to writers a sharp new sense of social responsibility.

Spender was in the vanguard, as a regular contributor to New Writing and New Verse; he also turned to prose, and wrote one of the few volumes of "committed" Thirties literary criticism which is still worth reading, The Destructive Element (1935). His growing radicalism was passionately if not always lucidly summed up in Forward from Liberalism (1936), an early Left Book Club selection. When the Civil War broke out he went to Spain and carried out propaganda work for the Republicans. He was also induced by Harry Pollitt in person to join the Communist Party, an unhappy experience from which he emerged disenchanted, and which he was to describe many years later in his contribution to R.H.S. Crossman's symposium The God that Failed (1949).

On the whole Spender's shorter poems of protest—a good example is "An Elementary School Classroom"—have worn better than more ambitious efforts such as his verse-play Trial of a Judge (1937). He published several collections during the 1930s, and became a well-known figure in literary London. T.S.Eliot and Leonard and Virginia Woolf were among those who encouraged him, and he was also taken up, perhaps inevitably, by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

He was one of the founders of Horizon, and from 1939 to 1941 helped Cyril Connolly to edit it. From 1941 to 1944 he was a fireman with the National Fire Service and then worked in a wartime branch of the Foreign Office. In 1947 he became a counsellor with the Section of Letters of Unesco. Between 1953 and 1967 he was coeditor of Encounter, first with Irving Kristol and then with Melvin Lasky, but resigned when it became apparent, despite the latter's denials, that the magazine had received money from the CIA.

He tended to bring a poet's vagueness to the administrative details of editing, but his disinterested love of literature, his generous appreciation of younger talent, and his wide range of artistic connections contributed greatly to the magazine's success. He had a knack of spotting talent in writers both at home and abroad, and was always anxious to get the voices of new writers heard in the pages of Encounter. In later years he continued the struggle for intellectual freedom in the columns of Index on Censorship.

Latterly he spent much of his time travelling and teaching. He was a tireless delegate to conferences, and few men have done more to consolidate international literary relations. He was particularly popular in America, where he had a wide circle of friends and admirers, and was much in demand as a lecturer, undertaking tours of the country until only a few years ago. At various times he was Elliston Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, Beckman Professor at the University of California, and Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University, Illinois. In 1965 he was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in Washington, the first foreigner to be thus honoured. He was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard). In France his achievements were recognised by an honorary DLitt from the University of Montpellier.

But the apogee of his career as an academic—which is what he had by then almost entirely become—was his appointment as Professor of English at University College London in 1970. While in this post, which he held until 1977, he published a number of more formal editions and studies such as A Choice of Shelley's Verse (1971); D. H. Lawrence, novelist, poet, prophet (ed 1973) and T. S. Eliot (1975). After this period there were lighter-hearted essays such as his voyage to China with David Hockeny which produced their joint China Diary in 1982.

Spender had been appointed CBE in 1962 but his services to literature were more fully recognised in his knighthood of 1983.

His Collected Poems had been published in 1955; a subsequent volume of verse, The Generous Days, in 1971 and Collected Poems, 1930–1985 in 1985. The publication of a collection, The Dolphins, celebrated his 85th birthday last year. Besides poetry, he also published volumes of fiction, reportage, and translations from the German, notably of Schiller and Rilke. But he had also produced a version of Sophocles's Oedipus Trilogy which was performed at the Oxford Playhouse in 1983. His outstanding prose work is World Within World, which is likely to remain one of the classic memoirs of its period, although his Journals, 1939–1983 (1985) also make absorbing reading.

More recently he had published a novel The Temple which appeared in 1988 but had been written 59 years previously. The story of a young bisexual boy depicted in his wanderings down the Rhine and along the Baltic littoral in the Indian Summer of Weimar libertarianism, it had originally attracted the attention of Auden and Isherwood but their criticisms of it were enough to make its modest author shelve it. It had to wait for another, and completely different, age to see the light of day, revised by Spender along the lines Auden and Isherwood had suggested so many years before.

Spender was in the headlines even more recently when, in 1993, the American novelist David Leavitt published a novel While England Sleeps which, Spender claimed, infringed the copyright of his own World Within World. Leavitt had written of a friendship between two men in the 1930s closely resembling that described in Spender's autobiographical work, but emphasising the relationship as a specifically homosexual one. Invoking a part of the 1988 Copyright Act banning "distortion or mutilation" of an artistic work, Spender secured the suppression of Leavitt's book in 1994 after a four-month legal action, and its publishers Viking Penguin agreed to stop selling it anywhere in the world.

Spender had a notable gift for friendship, and numbered among his intimates not only writers, but some of the most distinguished artists, musicians, philosophers and scholars of his time. With the young he was invariably kind and helpful, while he was always an unstinting and dependable supporter of good causes, both private and public. One quality is not altogether apparent from his writing: strangers who expected him to be sombre or withdrawn must often have been surprised to find that in conversation he was extremely witty, and an agreeably worldly raconteur. Physically he was very striking: he had a handsome profile and piercing blue eyes, and there can have been few literary gatherings where he was not the tallest man in the room.

He married first, Agnes Marie (Inez) Penn. The marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1941, the pianist Natasha Litvin. She and their son and daughter, married to Barry Humphries, survive him.