‘FROM PILLAR TO post.’ I hear my mother’s voice with the expression she always used to describe a life with no fixed abode. For a while they rented rooms outside Oxford from the historian A. J. P. Taylor, whose wife was also a musician. They happened to be sitting in the garden together on Sunday 22 June 1941, the day when Hitler invaded Russia. Taylor tossed his spade in the air and shouted, ‘No! He couldn’t be that stupid!’
Hitler had occupied my father’s thoughts for a decade. Now he realized that Hitler was just as much a prisoner of the war as everyone else. War was a machine that would grind on until one side or the other claimed victory. If England lost, Stephen had a suicide plan. He would swim far out to sea and drown.
During the Blitz the staff of Horizon was evacuated to Devon, where Cyril amused himself by fishing for shrimps with a net, standing in the water with his trousers rolled up. Stephen visited him there and wrote a beautiful poem about watching an air raid over Portsmouth, but otherwise he was absent teaching at Blundell’s School. He’d planned to work as a teacher for a whole year, but he couldn’t stand the conventions of discipline and left after one term – which he seems to have spent trying to persuade one turbulent boy he shouldn’t run away.
Stephen’s elder brother Michael had become an officer in RAF Intelligence early in the war. From this lofty position he could not resist ticking off his younger brother, asking if he was ‘taking the war seriously’. Stephen sent an angry reply insisting his war work was valuable. It consisted of broadcasts, a monthly article for New Writing, his play set in early Nazi Germany, plus his poems, plus his editorial work on Horizon. ‘You may notice that I wrote a considerable part of the last Horizon, which the Min of Inf [Ministry of Information] considers the most valuable propaganda of its kind we have in neutral countries.’
At that point, the most important neutral country was the United States, for England fought Hitler for two years before the US joined in, and any effort to encourage American participation was worth trying. He was going to talk to someone in the Ministry of Labour the following week. ‘I am sorry to hear that if I want a job you won’t recommend me for R.A.F. Intelligence,’ wrote Stephen bitterly. ‘But it is just as well to know to whom one may turn & to whom one may not.’ Michael thought Stephen should join the war, but not in any responsible capacity. His elder brother despised Stephen’s intelligence – a stimulating factor, I think, in my father’s ambition.
A few weeks later, Stephen went through his army medical tests. He failed. By begging the doctors to change the result, he made himself eligible to join non-combatant units stationed in England. Thus in September 1941 Stephen joined the London branch of the National Fire Service. He often used to joke that he became a fireman ten minutes after the Blitz ended and left ten minutes before the first buzz-bomb fell on London.
He and Natasha moved to Cricklewood for his basic training and he did his clumsy best to become a well-trained cog in a vast machine. ‘I had to undergo an extra week of training, owing to a neurotic inability to pass any examination whatever. This has led to my sinking naturally to the bottom of the social scale during the war.’ He was never promoted above the lowest rank and he was only asked to fight a fire twice. The first time, the man next to him took over. The second time, ‘surrounded by a lacquered screen of fire, I felt strangely at peace, settled in the centre of the element, as though rowing in wide circles for hours on end’.
Lucian Freud, Tony Hyndman and John Craxton on the roof of Maresfield Gardens during the war.
He’d never been in a work environment such as this. Too many men in a confined space, the radio perpetually tuned to the Light Programme, chickens in the courtyard, snooker in the back room and a small factory near by assembling bits and bobs of electrical equipment. He was fascinated by the pecking order of the NFS. Professional firemen of low rank had suddenly been put in charge of large numbers of Auxiliaries, many of whom would have far outranked them in civilian life. They gave their orders awkwardly, almost apologetically. In trying to work out why the situation was so charged, Stephen concluded: ‘Working-class people have a somewhat limited view of existence because they are tied to such a limited and narrow situation in the world.’ From this perhaps obvious starting-point, he went on to analyse why social resentments, though they existed, were muted because of the war, although potentially dangerous for the future.
After he’d completed his training, he was stationed in north London not far from where he’d lived as a child. He rented rooms from Ernst Freud, one of Sigmund Freud’s sons. His connection with the Freuds came through Muriel Gardiner, who’d helped to bring over Freud and his family just before the war. She’d also helped to finance a clinic set up by Freud’s daughter Anna. It took care of refugee children. My mother worked there for a while. She was entrusted with a little boy called Robert. She wanted to have a child herself, but was having difficulty carrying her pregnancies to term.
The house in Maresfield Gardens still kept a student atmosphere. The Bechstein, back from Oxford, was played, and Stephen worked in the attic whenever he could, seeing that he was on duty forty-eight hours out of seventy-two at the fire station around the corner. Ernst’s son Lucian, whom Stephen had met when he was still a schoolboy, painted dead birds in one room. John Craxton, a young painter who’d studied alongside Lucian Freud, lived near by. Tony Hyndman was in and out of the house the whole time.
Tony had a proprietary interest in Stephen’s new marriage, for after all he’d introduced the happy couple. It was cheeky of him to turn up, as he’d behaved very badly towards Muriel. In order to bring her daughter’s nanny to England, Muriel had asked Tony to marry her, which he had, but then he’d blown a large sum of money that Muriel had given his new wife so she could buy herself a house.
By now, my mother had learned everything she needed to know about Tony. Out of respect for Stephen, she refused to be jealous. She merely put Tony on one side on the grounds that she was working. ‘There was in Tony’s nature a deep pool of idleness, even, paradoxically, a militant idleness, he wished to deflect the industry of his companions, to make them feel that their work was a slavish bad habit, an act of unfriendliness, that they were prisoners of discipline whereas it was superior to be free of it, unbuttoned, open to the experiences and the enjoyment that the moment had to offer.’ My mother stunned Tony with music. She played that piano at him for hours on end. She slugged him with Beethoven. After a while, Tony would get bored and slope off.
The huge military mechanism needed to win the war had heightened everyone’s awareness of how fragile life is. As if to satisfy a spiritual need, much larger audiences than normal attended concerts of classical music and the art exhibitions were crowded.
Peggy Ashcroft, an actor who became a close friend of my mother’s, started giving poetry readings in 1941. Two years later Natasha began to be involved with the ENSA concerts, the Entertainments National Service Association. She says primly, ‘My war work concerts demanded a larger repertoire of romantic salon music than I would otherwise have cared to learn.’ Then in May 1943, coming back on a train from Cambridge where they both happened to have performed, Peggy and Natasha decided to pool their resources. Together with Stephen, and several other actors and writers, they founded the Apollo Society, a group of artists who travelled up and down the country performing poetry readings interspersed with music.
A line from T. S. Eliot would be read by Peggy: ‘We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole / Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.’ A Chopin prelude would follow, except the hair and finger-tips would be Mum’s. The group discovered through trial and error that certain poets went well with certain composers. Shelley with Debussy, for instance. Such an unlikely combination. Only by performing them could they have discovered that they worked well together.
My mother stayed with the Apollo Society for twenty-five years, and it gave her a companionship she would not otherwise have had. It was something she needed. Her quest for a career as a solo performer was otherwise an uphill struggle.
By the time Stephen joined the Fire Service, it had become so large that it faced the problem of what to do with the men when there were no fires. Noticing this, he wrote to the London Civil Defence Region suggesting the formation of debating societies. The idea was well received, and soon he found himself in the role of Area Organizer of Discussion Groups in No. 34 Fire Force.
The beginnings were simple. The firemen met and the organizer asked a question, such as What did everybody feel about Russia? It would be up to the men to come up with ideas. Then Stephen began to invite his friends to participate. These included Kenneth Clark, a key figure in cultural activities during the war, and Julian Huxley, the distinguished zoologist. Count Mihály Károlyi, former President of Hungary, told his audience that they should be lighting fires all over Europe, not putting them out. Stephen was teased about this by his fellow firemen for weeks afterwards.
My father’s lifelong socialism included a desire to ‘educate’ the working classes in order to bring them up to the level that he and his friends took for granted. If his fellow firemen teased him about Count Károlyi and his other eccentric friends, it suggests that they knew what he was doing, recognized the class element and were good-humoured about it. Meanwhile it never seems to have occurred to Stephen that the spirit in which he followed this self-imposed duty was close to that of his father Harold, who’d spent most of his life engaged in good works of this kind.
Stephen persisted in applying to join various branches of political intelligence but without success. According to my mother, in one interview he was asked: ‘and what kind of a degree did you get at Oxford, Mr Spender?’ He explained that he had not taken his Finals. He had no degree. ‘Oh? And so what exactly did you do with your time?’
This was the voice of conventional England at its most cutting. Yet this world was in retreat. During the Second World War, England changed radically without anyone being fully aware of the fact. Food rationing was a logical step for a country under siege, but it was also a move towards a more egalitarian society. In other words, socialism. That bottle of extra-strong orange juice filled with vitamins was a benefit that transcended class, though the working classes added a teat and gave it to babies and the upper classes poured it into a tumbler with gin.
In November 1943, an internal vetting request regarding Stephen received this answer from MI5: ‘Stephen Spender, like several other young and progressive thinkers, joined the Communist Party in the days of the united front because he saw in this the only way to combat fascism. His behaviour and writings of recent years show that he is no longer in sympathy with communism and in fact will have nothing more to do with them. There is no security objection to his employment by P.W.E. on the Continent.’ The Political Warfare Executive was in charge of propaganda to Europe during the war.
In May 1944, Stephen was given three months’ leave from the Fire Service. ‘I don’t think I shall ever go back,’ he wrote to T. S. Eliot, ‘because the Chief Regional Fire Officer has complained to the Regional Commissioner that my hair is untidy. Truly. They don’t like my hair, and they don’t like to say so … I am quite delighted, as I had never expected such recognition. It is like their deciding that, after all, Virginia Woolf is not quite suitable to be a Watchroom Attendant.’
He was discharged from the Fire Service a fortnight later and started a new job in the Political Information Department, the visible face of the otherwise secret PWE. The PID had an address – Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC – a phone number and paper with letterhead, which Stephen occasionally used for his private correspondence.
His first job was to file information on Italian Fascism. He did not speak Italian and he had no knowledge of Italian politics. Was he being tested, or was it just the usual confusion of Britain at war? Of this peculiar period of his life, he told me one wonderful detail. In the corridor he bumped into Charlotte Bonham-Carter, who was working on aerial reconnaissance in the Italian section. ‘My dear, I’ve just ordered a sortie over Verona,’ she said. ‘So beautiful, the Roman Arena! I simply had to see whether it was all right.’
I was born on 13 March 1945, at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in west London. My birth coincided with the explosion of one of the last German V2 rockets to land on the city. It fell near Maresfield Gardens, so it’s just as well that Mum was busy elsewhere.
Soon after my birth my parents moved into 15 Loudoun Road, the house in St John’s Wood where they lived for the rest of their lives. It stood at the head of long rows of terraces built down the hill towards Abbey Road. The view down the hill gave a feeling that the original wood of St John’s Wood was not totally dead. Mum could sit at the piano and look out at greenery and dream of nature. As I grew up, I got to know the nearest trees as intimately as I knew my bedroom on the top floor. My thigh tingles at the memory of one huge pear tree, long gone, which several times I slid down in my shorts desperately clinging to the trunk.
I can just remember Loudoun Road in the early days, the walls unpapered and the floorboards without their fitted carpets. In my bedroom there was a lithograph in four panels showing a little boy bowling a hoop, by Pierre Bonnard. I loved it. But the key memory of my earliest bedroom is a light hanging from the ceiling whose nakedness was not covered by the lampshade. It was like living in a painting by Francis Bacon. In fact to this day I cannot separate the London of my childhood from Bacon’s canvases, or vice versa.
The bombed London of my childhood smelt differently from how it smells today. There was a fine dust in the air – or at least so I remember – vaguely electrical with overtones of mouldy carpet. The war took a long time to fade. At the Church Street market they sold useful war debris, like a mile of tangled copper wire, or a gas mask of crumbling rubber, or a primitive machine for turning old gramophone records into flower pots by warming them over a mould, or a fireman’s helmet with dents in it, or a liquid for giving colour to black-and-white photographs. ‘Our wonderful country makes the best coloured pencils in the world,’ said the woman selling this potion, and a surge of patriotic pride would make us hand over a threepenny bit, even if we had no photos worth colouring.
Down Baker Street, cheap shops squatted in the holes left by grander ones that had been bombed … I can’t remember the end of the war, of course, for I was a mere babe in arms, but I can remember the mood six or seven years later. I think I can understand how deep the craving was to get out of recently besieged Britain as soon as the fighting ended.
As France was liberated, Stephen became obsessed by the idea that he should get to Germany as soon as the hostilities were over. If only he could speak to Ernst Robert Curtius, he might find some explanation for the disaster of the Nazis.
He was interviewed for this purpose by the Allied Control Commission in November 1944. It went badly. He described this interview twice, once soon after it happened in a letter to Julian Huxley, and then six years later in his autobiography, World within World. In the letter to Huxley, he said he’d told the interviewers that he wanted to make contact with German intellectuals who would be involved with literature and culture after the war. ‘The interviewer at the end of the table said: Do you think that after the Nazis there can really be such a development? Among what class of people?’ Stephen mentioned Curtius, but his application was rejected.
Retelling this incident in World within World, he quotes this man as having said, ‘We can assure you, Mr. Spender, that after this war there will be no culture in Germany.’ This sounds like an after-dinner improvement of the original story. But whatever was said, the interviewers were looking for trained officers to send to Germany for a full two years after the war to help with reconstruction. Spender did not have the necessary qualifications.
In an unexpected turn of events, he was offered a candidacy for the Labour Party in the snap election called by Churchill for July 1945. Either he turned the offer down, or somehow the message didn’t reach him because he was in Paris. But this non-event marks the beginning of a new phase in his life. In the future his political activities would take place within the system rather than knocking fruitlessly on the back door.
Labour won by a landslide, and it radically altered his position. He was commissioned to go to Germany and research its post-war intellectual life, just as he’d wanted. This resulted in a secret report that was only declassified recently. It makes interesting remarks about German war guilt and suggests that more should be done to educate the up-and-coming generation of young Germans.
His photographs show wrecked guns and downed planes and rude refugees sticking out their tongues at him as he floated past sitting in the back of a car with a corporal driving. Signs outside the barracks reminded officers to travel armed. They were warned that Werewolves, ex-members of the Hitler Youth, had been ordered to resist even after the surrender. The officers had to tackle huge refugee problems and there were ominous discussions in the Officers’ Mess as to whether tensions with the Russians would lead to another war.
The car he was given suffered from a neurotic carburettor and sometimes he’d find himself in the countryside with nothing to do but listen to the larks singing in an empty sky. His driver became friendly with a German girl and Stephen was curious as to whether they’d become lovers. (They hadn’t.) The black market thrived in the larger towns – which Dad seems to have enjoyed. He met a dodgy sergeant-major who could fix any deal, and became involved in complex negotiations to exchange a carton of cigarettes for an immense music box. This instrument became a part of my childhood. La forza del destino, with supplementary arpeggios tickled by wee prongs touching nails stuck into a shiny bronze roller.
When Ernst Robert and Stephen were reunited at first all went well. Curtius talked openly about ‘war guilt’. Yes, the Germans were responsible. There may have been excuses – their lack of democratic experience, their deference towards authority – but this did not alter the fact that Germany bore responsibility for the most abominable crimes Europe had ever seen.
It was exactly what Stephen had wanted to hear, but mixed up with his forthright opinions Curtius complained about his present situation. It was humiliating that the German army had been beaten by such amateur soldiers as the Americans, he said. And what were the Allies going to do about Russia? Where was the crusade against Bolshevism that was so obviously necessary? The triumph of Bolshevism would mean that culture in Germany would be utterly destroyed, he said. And could Stephen please get his suit back? It had been sequestered and he couldn’t teach without it. Dutifully, Spender went where he was directed. Without a word, the officer opened a door into a room crammed with people whose condition was far worse than lacking a respectable suit.
Stephen began to feel that behind these views lay a peculiar selfishness, as if Curtius was unable to see the European point of view, only the German one.
My mother was also touring Germany at the time, but they did not travel together. She was giving concerts for ENSA.
Once during her visit, she played two concerts on the same day in wildly different surroundings. The first took place in the concentration camp of Belsen in front of an audience of survivors. Later that same evening she played for a group of senior British officers in a baroque theatre attached to a castle.
At Belsen, she was warned that the ex-inmates could not endure anything profound, so she played short cheerful pieces on an upright piano. Even so, their reaction overwhelmed her, as if these listeners had no control over their emotions. ‘Their applause after each piece was almost vociferous, there was an atmosphere of vehement pleasure, as if the music was a sign to them that they were indeed in the real world.’ At the castle that evening, playing on a superb Steinway to a group of English officers who seemed completely detached from their surroundings, the response to a Schubert impromptu was ‘courteous and much less demonstrative’. Somehow the two performances cancelled each other out. ‘I remember the day’s experience as imposing a profound recognition that only seldom, if ever, can one truly – entirely – enter into the lot of any other human being.’
My parents caught up with each other the next day by accident. The car taking Natasha to Berlin stopped by the side of the road to help a stranded vehicle, and out of it emerged Stephen. They spent a few days together in the devastated city. There’s a dark photo in a family album of my mother wrapped in a coat standing in the middle of Hitler’s Chancellery. An immense chandelier dangles from wires and three Russian soldiers scurry along in the background.
Over the summer, Stephen typed out his diary and began turning it into a book. He showed a draft to Cyril, who wanted to publish the Curtius material immediately. Stephen had promised to show the text to Curtius first, but he allowed himself to be overruled.
In January 1946, Curtius saw his words quoted in Horizon and he was appalled. He had received Stephen as a friend, not as an interviewer. If he’d known that Stephen had intended to publish his thoughts, he would have spoken differently. His remarks about German war guilt, in print, would make him seem disloyal to other Germans.
Stephen apologized several times. Curtius refused to accept his apologies and Stephen began to lose patience. ‘Most people here have taken it to be a defence of your conduct since 1933, though perhaps you would not wish me to do that.’ This was a hint that he thought there’d been something equivocal about the fact that Curtius had refused to leave Germany.
Curtius appealed to T. S. Eliot, who defended the German’s right to have seen the article before it was published. Eliot also thought that Stephen did not understand the position of Curtius within Nazi Germany. ‘You discuss the reasons for his not leaving Germany after 1933 but I don’t think that you attempt to justify his remaining there, you merely go a certain distance towards condoning it.’
My father insisted that Curtius should be held to his words. Remarks about etiquette were irrelevant. He wrote to Eliot that in his Horizon article he’d tried to give an idea of Germans such as Curtius, ‘who have my sympathy, but whom nevertheless I regard as very dangerous unless their views can be dragged into the open and they themselves made responsible for them’. Eliot thought this was simplistic. ‘It is very difficult for the majority of human beings to recognize any sense of collective guilt in which they are personally implicated.’
Stephen knew nothing about the condition of ‘inner exile’ adopted by those Germans who hated the regime but refused for patriotic reasons to leave Germany. They hid in curious places and kept silent. It was a German secret, a syndrome, an ailment. It could not be discussed without raising awkward questions about loyalty.
Stephen took the view that by teaching medieval Latin literature to his students, Curtius had evaded his responsibilities. He underestimated how tightly the Nazis controlled their intellectuals. Curtius belonged to a group of democratic professors who were under constant surveillance. In the mid-Thirties, he’d engaged an SS officer as his assistant, a certain Hermann Grimmrath. This man had protected Curtius until 1940, when he was sent to the Russian front, where he was killed. A colleague at Bonn University was denounced by a pupil and arrested, but by concentrating on Latin, Curtius avoided dealing with anything that belonged, as it were, to the present tense.
Eliot was closer to Curtius than Stephen, and he did his best to calm things down. He wrote to Curtius:
Against what damage he may have done you by it [the Horizon article], I can say nothing, for I am ignorant; but for the element of pure bad taste and stupidity I can plead. He is really a good and affectionate young man – though very callow for his years; but he has sometimes offended me – and, I think, others – by the tone he adopts. He is a Liberal, and therefore tends to intolerance and judging others; and he tends to take an unconsciously superior tone on the basis of very imperfect understanding.
The remark is ironic, but covers genuine irritation. The peculiar thing about the dispute is that, underneath, these three were in agreement that European culture was united. It wasn’t a series of separate cultures divided by language and nationality. Only, Eliot thought the underlying unity came from its Christian roots, Curtius thought it depended on the structure of medieval Latin, and Spender thought – what? That it required to be invented in the immediate future?
Before he’d even set out for Germany, Stephen had hoped that he and Curtius might found a European magazine together. This plan had to be abandoned as a result of the quarrel. The idea, however, unexpectedly reappeared in a request from Information Services Control, one of the government bodies supervising Germany, to provide a blueprint for such a magazine. It was just the opening that Stephen had been waiting for.