Stephen Spender

Sir Stephen Harold Spender, British poet, novelist, playwright and critic, died on July 16th 1995, at the age of 86

In 1933, when Stephen Spender was 24, he wrote the poem that came to be most closely associated with his name. In later life he confessed to worrying that he would be remembered, not by his numerous novels, plays, translations, essays and other poems, but by only this one poem with its first line, “I think continually of those who were truly great.” His heart would have sunk had he read this week’s voluminous words of praise, which were often accompanied, glutinously, by this work.

Still, even with his one remembered poem, Stephen Spender has done better in a bid for immortality than most of his contemporaries. Christopher Isherwood, who also died in his 80s with millions of words behind him, is remembered mainly as the creator of the minx Sally Bowles, and that because his story of pre-war Berlin was turned into a musical, Cabaret. Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis, close friends of Spender, and themselves once famous poets, have sunk pretty well without trace.

But, most important, Stephen Spender stood for an era, as distinctive as that of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsberries or of Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. Once it was royals who marked eras. Now it is writers. In the 1930s Spender, Isherwood and the others formed a circle of admiration around W. H. Auden, the 20th century poet most likely still to be read in 100 years’ time. Spender and Auden met at Oxford. Auden, slightly older than Spender, was haughty and self-possessed. Spender was awkward and affected. He had gained some notoriety by sitting on a cushion in a college quadrangle reading poetry. When unpoetical hearties burst into his room he read aloud from Blake as they broke up his furniture.

Spender tentatively showed Auden some of his poems. Auden’s cruel comment was, “You are infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation.” The unhumiliated Spender printed Auden’s first collection of poems, and remained his champion. Being a young and noticed poet was fun in the 1930s, with plenty of travel and the patronage of the famous, although Auden called it, accurately, a “low, dishonest decade”.

Like Auden, Spender had homosexual affairs, but later said he was “not really happy” living with another man. “It was a sort of club, and if you forsook the club they got very annoyed.” His early homosexuality, he said, “just withered away”. He was married twice, since 1941 to Natasha Litvin, a pianist, and fathered two children.

In company with many Oxbridge intellectuals, Spender flirted with communism. Some made a career of it and became Soviet spies. But Spender soon left the party. He decided that telling lies was incompatible with being an artist. He would have made a poor spy. Cyril Connolly called him “a great big silly goose”. Along with a number of other former sympathisers, among them Arthur Koestler, he confessed his sins in a recantation in “The God that Failed”, published in 1949. But unlike many who rejected that god, Spender never moved to the right. He resigned from the staff of Encounter, which he had helped to found, when it turned out the magazine was getting money from the CIA.

Any youthful transgressions were eventually forgiven or forgotten. At the safe age of 74 the “grand old man of letters”, as he had become, joined other entertainers who were by then being given knighthoods and he became Sir Stephen. Still, he never seemed entirely comfortable with the gifts of a middle-class life. In an interview in 1994 he agonised over a familiar moral dilemma: what to do if the television shows pictures of starving African children when the viewer is eating a meal. “Do you stop eating the lamb chop? Do you turn off the television?” he asked. “I think you somehow have to go on … facing the lamb chop and thinking, well, this is my life.”

If Spender fell a little short of greatness in his writing, he was a delightful and indulgent person. But in the last decade of his life he surprised many of his admirers by reacting furiously to two attempts by others to write about him. He dismissed one unofficial biography as rubbish, and filed a 40-page rebuttal of it in the British Library. He went to court to secure the banning in Britain of a novel called While England Sleeps, based on a homosexual relationship Spender had already written about. Many people thought Spender was acting out of character. He was, after all, a campaigner

Auden, Isherwood and Spender in 1938

for freedom of speech, and a founder of a journal called Index on Censorship.

But one of the penalties of Spender’s long life was his increasing concern with reputation. Last year he grumbled that obituaries about him were being prepared, and that they were “all about your sex life and things like that”. And don’t forget that poem.