In the notes that follow, the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
Previously unpublished letters and journal entries by W. H. Auden are quoted with the permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden.
Previously unpublished letters and diaries by Raymond Chandler are quoted with the permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler.
Quotations from letters to Stephen Spender at the T. S. Eliot Archive, London © the Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted with the permission of the Estate and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from Christopher Isherwood’s letters and diaries © 2015 Don Bachardy.
Previously unpublished writings by Lincoln Kirstein © 2015 the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).
| BL | British Library |
| Bod | Bodleian Library, Oxford |
| CDP | Collection David Plante, London |
| CMS | Collection Matthew Spender, Siena |
| Duke | Special Collections, Duke University Library |
| DUL | Durham University Library |
| KV 2/3215/6 | Stephen Spender’s MI5 files, The National Archives, Kew |
| NA | The National Archives, Kew |
| NSJ | Stephen Spender, New Selected Journals, Faber & Faber, 2012 |
| NYPL | New York Public Library |
| RCAB | Raymond Chandler Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford |
| SSAB | Stephen Spender Archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford |
| SSUJ | Stephen Spender unpublished journals, Bodleian Library, Oxford |
| Tam | Tamiment Library, New York University |
| TSEA | T. S. Eliot Archive, London |
| WWW | Stephen Spender, World within World, New York, The Modern Library, 2001 |
| AMG | Agnes Magruder Gorky, ‘Mougouch’ |
| CI | Christopher Isherwood |
| ERC | Ernst Robert Curtius |
| IB | Isaiah Berlin |
| IK | Irving Kristol |
| JE | Jason Epstein |
| JH | Julian Huxley |
| LK | Lincoln Kirstein |
| MS | Matthew Spender |
| Nikos | Nikos Stangos |
| NS | Natasha Spender |
| PT | Philip Toynbee |
| RC | Raymond Chandler |
| RP | Reynolds Price |
| SS | Stephen Spender |
| TH | Tony Hyndman |
| TSE | T. S. Eliot |
| VW | Virginia Woolf |
| WHA | W. H. Auden |
| WP | William Plomer |
1. the biographer gave in: the scholar whom my mother challenged was Frank MacShane, for The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976).
1. ‘God knows what kings’: poem is dated 18 May 1957, CMS.
2. ‘a great way off’: WWW, p. 8.
3. ‘When they are very young’: SS, ‘Miss Pangbourne’, circa 1990, p. 70, SSAB.
4. ‘A thin match-boarding’: Violet Schuster, Skelgill journal, 1917, Collection Philip Spender.
5. ‘Wordsworth was a man’: SS, ‘Miss Pangbourne’, p. 195.
6. ‘It is no exaggeration’: WWW, p. 10.
7. ‘He saw what he had never seen’: SS, The Backward Son, Hogarth Press, 1940, p. 263.
8. ‘Until now, writing for him’: ‘Instead of Death’ (1928), pp. 96–104, SSAB. This picnic is described more briefly in WWW, p. 69.
9. ‘Now dear, don’t make a fuss’: David Plante, Becoming a Londoner, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 238.
1. ‘ganged up and captured the decade’: Evelyn Waugh, review of WWW in the Tablet, 5 May 1951, p. 356.
2. ‘from the sea’: from Auden’s poem ‘1929’. ‘What is odd …’ and all the quotations that follow are from Auden’s 1929 diary, now in the Berg Collection, NYPL.
3. ‘My dominant faculties’: WHA to SS, April/May 1940, in Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (eds), The Map of All My Youth: Early Works, Friends and Influences, Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 72.
4. but some of the boys: for the boys from the Lokalen, see John Henry Mackay, Der Puppenjunge, translated as The Hustler, Boston, MA, Alyson Publications, 1985.
5. ‘I have always regarded’: SS, The Temple, Faber & Faber, 1988, p. 54.
6. ‘an exquisite example of Stephen’s lust’: Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 128.
7. ‘You are right down in the scrum’: CI to SS, ‘Tuesday’, n.d., circa 14 March 1929, photocopy in SSAB.
8. ‘Christopher, so far from being’: WWW, p. 135. See also CI, Christopher and His Kind, Eyre Methuen, 1977, pp. 46–8.
9. ‘The whole system was to him’: ibid., p. 114. The scene is also in ‘Instead of Death’, pp. 193–202.
10. ‘He had grown to hate the gushings’: CI, Christopher and His Kind, p. 55.
11. ‘It is a wonderful thing’: ERC to SS, 13 Aug 1929, SSAB.
12. ‘Within this inner world’: WWW, p. 131.
13. ‘Your politics are guided’: ERC to SS, 6 Dec 1931, SSAB. The original German was ‘Ihre Politik ist erotisch & ästhetisch determiniert.’
14. ‘He has introduced Order’: SS to IB, n.d. [1931], IB Archive, Bod.
15. ‘He is bored’: SS to Erich Alport, 8 May [1931], BL Add MS 74771B, folio 47.
16. ‘magical with the mystery’: WWW, p. 129.
17. Georg 101: ‘Georg 101’ appears in letters from Stephen to William Plomer, in DUL. The teaching experience in Berlin is in Stephen’s letters to his grandmother Hilda Schuster, in the Schuster Archive, Bod.
18. He solemly told: Stephen and Christopher’s quarrel is covered in WWW, p. 191. And in CI, Christopher and His Kind, p. 85.
19. ‘It’s as though’: SS, Burning Cactus, Freeport, NY, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, from edn of 1936, p. 173. SS spells his name ‘Hellmut’, whereas CI, in Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951 (2000), spells it ‘Hellmuth’. The former is closer to the idea of ‘Light-strength’.
20. ‘I think that all he needs’: SS to VW, 25 Oct 1932, SSAB.
21. ‘We were very affectionate’: SS, 1931 diary Root and Branch, in SS, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett, Santa Barbara, CA, Black Sparrow Press, 1980, p. 155.
22. ‘I have the stupidity’: ibid., p. 157.
23. ‘Hellmut is a nice person’: SS to IB, 29 Dec [1932], IB Archive, Bod.
24. ‘Hellmut is a homosexual’: SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 52.
25. ‘To me the book’: SS to Hilda Schuster, 1 Aug 1931, Schuster Archive, Bod.
26. If he’d ever been arrested: Radclyffe Hall’s letter, dated 4 Dec 1928, is in the SSAB.
1. ‘the son whom I attempted’: WWW, p. 200.
2. ‘To me, from the moment’: TH to SS, 30 Oct 1974, SSAB.
3. ‘In Levanto’ and ‘What happened’: from Tony’s two drafts of his unfinished autobiography, SSAB.
4. ‘I want to go away’: WWW, p. 192.
5. ‘When I was first here’: SS to IB, 15 June 1933, IB Archive, Bod, folio 41.
6. ‘I feel more & more happy’: SS to LK, 21 Sept 1933, photocopy in SSAB.
7. ‘It’s horrid not having you’: SS to TH, 5 Oct [1933], SSAB.
8. ‘He is one of those lucky people’: SS to LK, 15 Oct 1933, photocopy in SSAB.
9. ‘I see being young is hellish’: VW to Quentin Bell, 21 Dec 1933, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5: The Sickle Side of the Moon, ed. Nigel Nicolson, p.34 Hogarth Press, 1979, p. 262.
10. She could provide: SS, Vienna, Faber & Faber, 1934.
11. ‘I find the actual sex act’: SS to CI, 14 Sept 1936, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. In John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography, Viking, 2004, p. 168.
12. 34 ‘As a “character” I am no good’: SS to WP, 19 June 1934, DUL.
13. ‘Tony has been terribly upset’: SS to LK, after 19 Sept 1934, photocopy in SSAB.
14. ‘We had come up against’ and ‘The differences of class’: WWW, pp. 201–2.
15. ‘I had your companionship in my mind’: LK to SS, n.d., SSAB.
16. ‘As far as homosexuality goes’: SS to LK, 5 Aug 1935.
17. ‘Its an uncontrollable unpolarized attraction’: LK to SS, n.d., photocopy in SSAB.
18. ‘I have no character’: WWW, p. 115.
19. ‘she had the kind of drive’: Elizabeth Lake (pseudonym for Inez Pearn), Marguerite Reilly, New York, Pilot Press, 1947, p. 309.
20. ‘I’m just not capable any more of having “affairs”’: SS to CI, 22 Nov 1936, in SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 125.
21. Harry Pollitt … invited Stephen: WWW, p. 230.
22. a missing Russian ship: For an account of the search for the Komsomol, see the first half of Cuthbert Worsley’s Behind the Battle, Robert Hale, 1939.
23. ‘Stephen Spender was born on 28.2.1909’: KV 2/3215, doc. 83.
24. ‘Up till now, as far as we know’: ibid., doc. 82. It transpired that the Komsomol had been sunk by the Italians, so the anxiety of the British authorities was understandable.
25. ‘Oh my darling, it all seems’: TH to SS, circa 22 March 1937, SSAB.
26. ‘What with your family and your friends’: TH in PT (ed.), The Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1976, p. 128.
27. ‘certain methods which were used in Russia’: SS, Life and the Poet, Secker & Warburg, 1942, p. 16.
28. ‘what is so nice’: WWW, p. 269.
29. ‘an irritating idealist’: Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Pandora Press, 1988, p. 98.
30. ‘She was concerned, she said’: ibid., p. 66.
31. ‘When I was in Spain’: SS to Harry Pollitt, 29 July 1937, KV 2/3215, doc. 68.
32. ‘Stephen, she said, was utterly thoughtless’ and ‘I leave the Communist Party’: PT diary, vol. 10, 30 March 1937, Bod.
33. ‘I believe in communism’: SS to WP, 6 Feb [1937], DUL.
1. ‘We must, must do something’: PT diary, vol. 9, 2 Jan 1937, p. 161, Bod.
2. but to say ‘lying is wrong’: WWW, p. 271.
3. ‘Stephen’s affairs are in a fine old tangle’: CI unpublished diary, 19 Nov 1937, p. 28, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
4. ‘In China, I sometimes found myself’: ibid., 20 August 1938, p. 41.
5. ‘If I was scared in China’: ibid., p. 40.
6. ‘Wystan in tears’: ibid., p. 42.
7. ‘the breaking up’: WWW, p. 281.
8. ‘I believe I married’: SS to WP, 6 Feb [1937], DUL.
9. ‘I feel that people can’t exist’: SS, Letters to Christopher, p. 124.
10. ‘If a human relationship’: 10 Sept 1939, in SS, ‘September Journal’, in ibid., p. 174.
11. ‘although our affection’: Inez Pearn to SS, n.d., Mary Elliot Collection, Hartford, CT.
12. ‘His movements like his voice were indolent’: Julian Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, Penguin, 1965, pp. 63 and 74–80.
13. ‘periods of intense energy’: Horizon, vol. 11, no. 12, Dec 1940, p. 279.
14. ‘below them come’: Horizon, vol. 11, no. 9, Sept 1940, pp. 77–85.
15. ‘They are far-sighted and ambitious young men’: Horizon, vol. 1, no. 2, Feb 1940, pp. 69–70.
16. ‘of course I wasn’t offended’: WHA to SS, late April/early May 1940, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 73.
17. ‘an artist ought either to live where he has live roots’: Horizon, vol. 1, no. 7, July 1940, p. 464.
18. ‘I wonder how much of value can be created’: New Statesman and Nation, 16 Nov 1940.
19. ‘Your passion for public criticism’: WHA to SS, 13–[14] March 1941, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 74.
1. ‘Oh come on ducky, you’ll enjoy it’: from my mother’s unpublished memoir, SSAB. All further quotations from my mother are from this text, as yet without dates or page numbers, unless otherwise stated.
2. Cyril Connolly: For a description of Cyril Connolly as editor of Horizon, see Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, pp. 63 and 74–80.
3. ‘Spender praised the representatives of culture’: KV 2/3216, docs 23–5. This MI5 file lists eight public meetings held between October 1936 and November 1938 in which SS took part.
4. Charles Booth: Charles Booth, author of Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–91), was an important philanthropist and early sociologist.
5. ‘I walked with Miss Litvinne’: VW, Thursday 30 March 1924, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 174.
6. ‘Poor Ray Litvin’: VW, Thursday 14 May 1925, in Diary, vol. 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, 1980, p. 20.
7. ‘He had lived his life in phases’: NS memoir.
8. ‘His assuming total responsibility’: NS memoir. See also WWW, p. 306.
9. ‘“Being married”’: SS to JH, 2 April 1941, Julian Huxley Papers, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Texas.
1. ‘No! He couldn’t be that stupid!’: NS memoir.
2. ‘You may notice that I wrote’: SS to Michael Spender, 19 Feb [1940], Collection Philip Spender.
3. ‘I had to undergo an extra week’: WWW, p. 352.
4. ‘Working-class people have a somewhat limited’: SS in William Sansom, James Gordon and SS, Jim Braidy: The Story of Britain’s Firemen, Lindsay Drummond, 1943.
5. ‘We have been’: TSE, ‘Portrait of a Lady’. See also Lucy Hoare, ‘The Apollo Society’, Arts Council Bulletin, April 1951.
6. ‘Stephen Spender, like several other’: KV 2/3216, no doc. number, 28 Nov 1943.
7. ‘I don’t think I shall ever go back’: SS to TSE, 30 May 1943, TSEA.
8. ‘The interviewer at the end of the table’: SS to JH, 4 Dec 1944, in Sutherland, Stephen Spender, p. 298.
9. ‘We can assure you, Mr. Spender’: WWW, p. 333.
10. This resulted in: the secret report on Germany by SS is in FO 371/46935, paper C-6450.
11. he would have spoken differently: ERC to SS, 27 Dec 1945, and [undated] Jan 1946, SSAB.
12. ‘Most people here have taken’: SS to ERC, 9 Feb 1946, SSAB.
13. ‘You discuss the reasons’: TSE to SS, 12 Feb 1946, SSAB.
14. ‘who have my sympathy’: SS to TSE, 11 Feb 1946, TSEA.
15. ‘It is very difficult’: TSE to SS, 15 Feb 1946, SSAB.
16. an SS officer: Hermann Grimmrath, etc: I am grateful to Frank-Rutger Hausmann for these details about Curtius during the war.
17. ‘Against what damage’: TSE to ERC, 16 Feb 1946, TSEA.
1. ‘a role which I could not seriously’: SS, European Witness, Hamish Hamilton, 1946, p. 96.
2. ‘impossible for anyone’: ibid., p. 116.
3. ‘The important thing’: TSE to SS, 26 March 1946, SSAB. The draft for a magazine is in both SSAB and TSEA.
4. UNESCO: Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations 1938–1950, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 149.
5. ‘I suppose you’ve never been really happy’ and the other quotations are from ‘The Fool and the Princess’, in SS, Engaged in Writing, New York, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958, pp. 170–6.
6. ‘What makes separation so bad’ etc.: SS to NS, circa 18 Aug 1947, SSAB.
1. ‘sold out’ etc.: Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, New York, Lime Tree Press, 1993, pp. 325 and 661.
2. ‘doing the hatchet work’ etc.: Mary McCarthy, ‘My Confession’, in On the Contrary, William Heinemann, 1962, p. 102.
3. ‘It is not surprising’: SS, 3 April 1949, NSJ, p. 56.
4. ‘The cars as fertile as weeds’: 4 April 1949, SSUJ.
5. ‘America is not a “cause”’: 24 April 1949, NSJ, pp. 61–2.
6. The second was his essay: The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman, Bantam edn, 1965, p. 241.
1. ‘The mere announcement of fact’: Melvin Lasky to William Donovan, in Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony 1945–1955, Routledge, 2001, p. 165.
2. ‘We had invited them here’: Melvin Lasky, letter to the Manchester Guardian, 24 July 1950.
3. fabulous meals: Diana Trilling, We Must March, My Darlings, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, p. 60.
4. don’t forget John Wayne: from a conversation with Betty Woodman, 30 Aug 2013.
5. The Russians were building: JE to MS, 23 May 2012.
6. ‘To many people, though’ etc.: SS journal entry for 12 March 1952, SSUJ.
7. ‘He is, to me, a new type’: ibid. To add a detail of which my father was unaware: Michael Goodwin was also the editor of the Bellman Books series, published by Ampersand, which recently was revealed to have been the cover publishing house for the branch of British Intelligence that subsequently lay behind Encounter. See Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998, p. 100.
8. ‘Have read World within World several times’: WHA to SS, 20 June 1951, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, pp. 84–5.
9. ‘I believe that you are a very strong, ruthless character’: WHA to SS, 12 April 1942, in ibid., p. 82.
10. ‘Mr Spender has always seemed to me’: Cyril Connolly review of WWW, reprinted in The Evening Colonnade, David Bruce & Watson, 1973, p. 360.
11. ‘what on earth did he think’: KV 2/3216, doc. 49.
12. ‘I still believe Guy to be a victim’: WHA to SS, 14 June 1951, in Bucknell and Jenkins, The Map of All My Youth, p. 84 n. 3.
13. ‘I feel exactly as you do’: WHA to SS, 20 June 1951, in ibid., p. 84.
14. ‘into a little pin-striped shoal’: Cyril Connolly, The Missing Diplomats, Queen Anne Press, 1952, p. 31.
15. ‘It is very difficult to understand’: KV 2/3215, doc. 19. The person in the US who would have been able to make such revelations was Michael Straight, who’d belonged to the ring of Cambridge spies. My parents knew the Straights. We stayed with them on our way to California in 1959. Michael’s version of events is in his After Long Silence, New York, W. W. Norton, 1983.
16. ‘At one time it was thought’: KV 2/3216, doc. 27, Minute sheet dated 1 Feb 1955. Also doc. 55, 10 and 11 July 1951. The biography of Kim Philby by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley describes Skardon as ‘perhaps the best operator MI5 ever had’ (Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, Penguin, 1969, p. 140).
1. the Locrini family could not be called poor: NSJ, p. 127.
2. ‘all the old business’: NSJ, p. 20, April 1949, p. 59. See also Allen Tate, ‘Literature of Social Agitation’, in The Hovering Fly and Other Essays, Cummington, MA, Cummington Press, 1949, p. 33.
3. ‘Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby’: Joel Chandler Harris, The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, was first published in 1881. There are numerous editions.
4. ‘Perhaps you could’: SS to IK, 22 Feb 1953; Kristol’s reply: IK to SS, 26 Feb 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
5. ‘draw an adequate salary’: TSE to SS, 9 April 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
6. ‘it looks as if’: SS to IK, undated [early May 1953], Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
7. ‘Not my branch but you might like them’: SS to IK, 26 April 1953, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
8. ‘Irving Kristol fascinates me’: NSJ, p. 147.
9. ‘There was always the possibility’: IK, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, Free Press, 1995, p. 23.
10. ‘Special Branch began compiling’: Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Oct 1953, in Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 46.
11. ‘I asked him whether to be arrested’: n.d. [1 July?] 1955, NSJ, p. 172.
12. ‘Why should they climb a tree?’: Wildeblood, Against the Law, p. 176.
1. ‘an act “outside” historical materialism’ and ‘strongly attacked the Congress’: 24 and 27 Oct 1954, SSUJ.
2. ‘And the frowning schoolgirl’: W. H. Auden, ‘The Model’.
3. ‘social-democratic Britain was better placed’: Christopher Mayhew, Time to Explain, Hutchinson, 1987, pp. 62 and 106.
4. ‘We regard the Stalinist communists’: FO 1110/533.
5. ‘has created an especial resentment’: 6 Jan 1955, draft statement to the CCF in Paris, to be signed by US members of the CCF, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
6. ‘I had assumed that we were writers’: Arthur Schlesinger to James Burnham, 16 March 1955, Tam 023, Papers of the ACCF.
1. ‘yammered’: RC to NS, 3 Sept 1957, SSAB. The publishing house was Hamish Hamilton, but Jamie never used Hamish as his Christian name.
2. ‘outmanoeuvred’: RC to NS, 27 April 1955, SSAB.
3. ‘it would have been a comfort’: RC to NS, 11 Nov 1956, SSAB.
4. ‘Stephen knows quite well’: SSUJ, and partially in NSJ, 18 May 1955, pp. 153–4.
5. ‘Orch bad’: Chandler’s pocket diary for 1955, RCAB.
6. ‘he has the drunkard’s’: 20 May 1955, SSUJ.
7. When he was asked to leave: Chandler’s biographers suggest he was asked to leave the Connaught for chronic alcoholism, but in fact the problem was incontinence.
8. ‘it’s no good dreaming one’s way through life’: 10 June 1955, NSJ, p. 163.
9. ‘Stern Daughter of the V. of G.’: Alison Hooper letter to Frank MacShane, 29 Nov 1975, photocopy in SSAB.
10. ‘for reasons I no longer recollect’: IK, Neoconservatism, p. 461.
11. ‘if we are building a theatre’: Jennifer Josselson to MS, 26 May 2012.
12. sixteen or seventeen magazines: John Hunt to MS, 24 June 2012.
13. ‘My colleagues’: 28 July 1955, NSJ, p. 193.
14. ‘Dwight has spent a fruitful life’: IK, Neoconservatism, p. 461.
15. ‘At Poros, I had a walk with Matthew’: SS typescript headed ‘1955, 6–16 Aug, August holiday’, p. 23, SSUJ.
16. ‘I think you should have left Stephen’: RC to NS, 21 March 1957, SSAB.
17. ‘the fatal day’: RC diary, 9 Sept 1955, RCAB.
18. ‘As nanny my greatest problem’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, 25 Nov 1955, RCAB.
19. ‘the endless prowling of bazaars’: RC to NS, 2 July 1956, SSAB.
20. ‘I think it is absolutely true’ and ‘In all these things’: RC to SS, 22 Dec 1955, SSAB.
21. ‘rather nice’: RC to NS, 1 Feb 1956, SSAB.
22. ‘You cannot be damaged’ and ‘The whole idea is a fake’: RC to SS, 9 March 1956, SSAB.
23. ‘I regard financial failure’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, 22 April 1949, in Frank MacShane (ed.), The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 170. See also, quoting himself, RC to SS, 1 Jan 1957, SSAB.
24. ‘when I left England’: RC to NS, 13 Nov 1956, SSAB.
1. American GIs walking around Red Square: my memories of Joseph Brodsky are in Valentina Polukhina (ed.), Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries, vol. 2, Brighton, MA, Academic Studies Press, 2010.
2. ‘They were mere embellishments’: Zinovy Zinik to MS, 22 January 2014.
3. ‘The Writers’ Union’: Ilya Ehrenburg to Alexander Werth, in Russia: Hopes and Fears, Penguin, 1969, p. 205.
4. ‘In spite of everything’: SS, Engaged in Writing, pp. 35 and 151–2.
5. ‘He dictated to me the entire action’: 19 July typescript, re 8 July 1956, SSUJ.
6. ‘I think I was fooling myself’: RC to NS, 7 June 1956, SSAB.
7. ‘Any time’: RC to NS, 10 June 1956, SSAB.
8. ‘He is the sort of man who’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 11 June 1956, RCAB.
9. ‘I like this fellow Spender very much’: RC to Jamie Hamilton, in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 170.
10. ‘I don’t know when I have been so unhappy’: RC to NS, 29 June 1956, SSAB.
11. ‘It was hellish with the furniture’: RC to NS, 29 June (bis) 1956, SSAB.
12. ‘I’ll never get anyone as kind’: RC to NS, 13 Nov 1956, SSAB.
13. ‘When I hear your wonderful voice’: RC to NS, 19 Nov 1956, SSAB.
14. ‘You should know that I am not going to embarrass you’: RC to NS, 30 Nov 1956, SSAB.
15. ‘Tremendous fun’: RC to NS, 14 July 1956, SSAB.
16. ‘I wish you were here’: RC to NS, 23 Nov 1956, SSAB.
17. ‘The thinnest tie of social friendship’: RC to NS, 3 Dec 1956, SSAB.
1. ‘the kindest face’: the phrase appears several times in the correspondence between RP and SS, now in the library at Duke University. The same scene is told retrospectively in RP’s memoir, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, New York, Scribner, 2009, pp. 108 and 201–4, etc.
2. ‘I think of this room where I am writing’: SS to RP, 10 Jan 1957, Duke.
3. ‘would have given Cissy the jitters’: RC to SS, 12 Dec 1956, SSAB.
4. ‘We are both – she and I – highly strung’ and ‘cheap little concerts in museums’: RC to SS, 1 Jan 1957, SSAB.
5. ‘Very learned, but much too pontifical’: RC to Jessica Tyndale, 18 Jan 1957, in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 416.
6. ‘Stephen is a loving father’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 26 Jan 1957, RCAB. The later paragraphs of this letter are in MacShane, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, p. 417.
7. ‘The most I really wanted was to take care of you’: RC to NS, ‘Saturday’ [late Jan 1957], SSAB.
8. ‘small, inoffensive’: RC to NS, ‘Sunday night, Monday also’ [late Jan 1957], SSAB.
9. ‘After all, in my Will, I am making Helga’: RC to NS, 30 Jan 1957, SSAB.
10. ‘though I will do one day’: SS to RP, 4 Feb 1957, Duke.
11. ‘not at all like Dylan Thomas’: SS to RP, n.d. [Feb 1957], Duke.
1. ‘because I took it out of Natasha’s frame’: SS to RP, 25 Feb 1957, Duke.
2. ‘we should only know’: RC to NS, but quoting NS, 15 March 1957, SSAB.
3. ‘two frantic parties’: RC to NS, 22 April 1957, SSAB.
4. ‘I’m sorry he has to work so hard’: RC to NS, 16 May 1957, SSAB.
5. ‘why don’t you carry what you have’: RC to NS, 14 Aug 1957, SSAB.
6. ‘There is really nothing to do’: RC to NS, 30 May 1957, SSAB.
7. ‘I am also too proud’: RC to NS, 30 May 1957, SSAB.
8. ‘perhaps the best I can do’: RC to NS, 21 June 1957, SSAB.
9. ‘a handsome nothing’: RC to Michael Gilbert, 5 July 1957, RCAB.
10. ‘With regard to what you say’: Michael Gilbert to RC, 12 July 1957, RCAB.
11. ‘I want what Rimbaud’: SS to RP, 13 April 1957, Duke.
12. ‘I feel I’d sell everything’: SS to RP, 28 May 1957, Duke.
13. ‘deeply disturbed and upset’: SS to RP, 20 June 1957, Duke.
14. ‘What also counts is that for Natasha’: SS to RP, 21 June 1957, Duke.
15. ‘seemed like a final God-inspired kick’: SS to RP, 27 June 1957, Duke.
1. ‘always seemed poised over some abyss’: 28 Sept 1990, re Moravia’s death on 26 Sept, SSUJ. Also NSJ, p. 671.
2. ‘for a week I seemed to have in Japan’: SS to RP, 5 Oct 1957, Duke.
3. ‘I’m in despair over the California trip’ and the following quotations are from NS unpublished diary for 1985, SSAB.
4. ‘I remember when the feeling of barrenness’ etc.: ibid., 2 Feb, p. 14, SSAB.
5. ‘a kind of space around myself’: SS to RP, 22 Oct 1957, Duke.
6. ‘That we won’t be able to see so much’: SS to RP, 27 Oct 1957, Duke.
7. ‘What I knew by the spring’: RP, Ardent Spirits, p. 268.
1. ‘I couldn’t despise Stephen as you do’: NS to RC, 19 Feb 1958, RCAB. The surviving letters from Natasha to Raymond Chandler entered the Bodleian with the other Chandler papers in the 1970s. She made sure that access was restricted during her lifetime but they are now accessible.
2. ‘I really am concerned about him’ and all subsequent quotations in these paragraphs are from Stephen’s Japan diary. He sent this to Reynolds Price for safekeeping. Price typed it and returned the typescript to Stephen, who edited it for the Selected Journals of 1984. The manuscript was returned to me after the death of Reynolds by Bill Price, his brother.
3. ‘I think the answer to your question’: SS to RP, 3 July 1957, Duke.
1. ‘We are having a hell of a time’: SS to RP, 13 Dec 1958, Duke.
2. ‘America! America!’: Dwight Macdonald, ‘America! America!’, republished in Discriminations, New York, Grossman Publishers, 1974, p. 44.
3. ‘reflected the attitude of Encounter’s front office’: ibid., pp. 57–9. It’s possible that Josselson was trying to abandon the CIA backing and acquire funds from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, which would never have tolerated criticism of this kind. See Sarah Miller, ‘The Impresario: Michael Josselson, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, D.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2013, p. 165.
4. ‘I’ll be delighted to see you’: RC to NS, 30 Sept 1958, SSAB.
5. ‘How strange that you’: RC to NS, 4 March 1959, SSAB.
6. ‘The other day I took Matthew’: 30 July 1959, SSUJ.
7. ‘It is essential’: FO 1110/1726, FO Circular no. 37, NA.
1. Margot Walmsley: Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books, 1999, p. 176.
2. ‘the Bronx Box’: Keith Botsford to MS, 12 January 2014.
3. ‘Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap’: Stuart Hampshire to Frances Stonor Saunders, 1977, quoted in Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 331 and 464 n. 10.
4. ‘What Melvin Lasky does’: SS to RP, 30 March 1960, Duke.
5. ‘I am getting to the stage’: SS to RP, 27 March 1961, Duke.
6. ‘The idea that Pasternak’: SS to RP, 5 Sept 1959, Duke.
7. ‘I have received so much advice’: SS to RP, 24 Sept 1959, Duke.
8. ‘My situation is worse’: ‘Three Letters’, Encounter, vol. 15, no. 2, Aug 1960, pp. 3–6.
9. ‘a small gathering’: NSJ, pp. 267–79.
10. ‘I thought it would be a good idea’: 4 Feb 1960, SSUJ.
11. Stephen deduced that Driberg: Tom Driberg (1905–76), Labour politician and journalist, was an old friend of Burgess, of whom he wrote a memoir, Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background (1956). See also Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg, Chatto & Windus, 1990, pp. 316–18.
12. ‘My days are all poisoned’: CI, unpublished diary, 3 Jan 1936, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
13. I wrote him a bitter letter: MS to SS, 17 June 1983, SS to MS, n.d., CMS.
14. ‘Any voyage away from England’: 1994, CMS.
15. ‘if it was not conducted’: 31 March 1960, in SS, Journals 1939–1983, ed. John Goldsmith, Faber & Faber, 1985, pp. 216–19, and NSJ, p. 280.
16. ‘The exchanges of culture’: Friday 20 April 1956, in Philip Williams (ed.), The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell 1945–1956, Jonathan Cape, 1983, p. 500.
1. ‘It revealed to me something’: SS to RP, 6 March 1962, Duke.
2. ‘simply by presenting pictures’: SS to IB, 11 July 1932, IB Archive, Bod.
3. ‘not the words and the lines’: WWW, p. 65.
4. ‘True poetry is the external truth’: 2 Oct 1980, NSJ, p. 564.
1. ‘Matthew and his girl keep on turning up’: SS to RP, 26 Sept 1961, Duke.
2. ‘as a man of letters’: IB to SS, 17 Nov. 1966, IB Archive, Wolfson College, Oxford. Thanks to Henry Hardy for bringing this to my attention.
3. ‘I want you to consider’: SS to MS, 22 May 1966, CMS. The address on the letter is approximate and I think Dad half hoped it wouldn’t arrive.
1. ‘Suddenly I realised that I wanted’: 3 Dec 1962, NSJ, p. 324.
2. ‘It might be quite good for them’: SS to AMG, 22 Jan 1963, CMS.
3. ‘We strongly suspected’: Trilling, We Must March My Darlings, p. 60.
4. the end of the story: JE to MS, 23 May 2012.
5. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ring up Allen’: Sidney Hook, Out of Step, New York, Harper & Row, 1987, p. 425.
6. ‘but none of us’: Trilling, We Must March My Darlings, p. 61.
7. The Alexandria Quartet: Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, consisting of four interconnected novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, was published between 1957 and 1960.
8. ‘a platform in which American points of view’: 14 July 1954, SSUJ.
1. ‘The magic of that day’: NS unpublished diary, 2 Feb 1985, SSAB.
2. ‘Now what I would like’: SS to Nikos, 23 July 1965, CDP.
3. ‘When you are relating a dream’: SS to Nikos, 20 Sept 1965, CDP.
4. ‘I must try and think about that day’: SS to Nikos, 5 and 16 Sept 1965, CDP.
5. ‘During the night I was trying to explain’: SS to Nikos, 20 Sept 1965, CDP.
6. ‘You always relate everything’: SS to Nikos, 14 Sept 1965, CDP.
7. Dad’s book on Botticelli: SS, Botticelli, Faber Gallery, 1945.
8. His book on Florence: Gaetano Salvemini, Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295, Florence, Carnesecchi, 1899.
9. ‘Oxford is anti-creative’: SS to MS, 3 Dec 1965, CMS.
10. ‘Maybe you will be able’: ibid.
11. ‘When Matthew writes’: SS to MS, 22 Aug 1966, CMS.
12. ‘Even if you don’t feel things’: SS to MS, 20 Sept 1966, CMS.
13. ‘enraged Natasha so much’: SS to Nikos, 15 Sept 1966, CDP.
1. ‘I must not think that this meant’: Plante, Becoming a Londoner, p. 5.
2. ‘I suddenly realized the reason’: SS to Nikos, 16 Sept 1965, CDP.
3. ‘to keep Natasha alerted to his sexuality’: Plante, Becoming a Londoner, p. 40.
4. ‘I had managed to design the walk’: NS, An English Garden in Provence, Harvill Press, 1999, pp. 63–5.
5. ‘I wish that when I was your age’: Plante, Becoming a Londoner, p. 52.
6. ‘Natasha is hysterical on the subject of Lasky’: SS to Nikos, 26 May 1967, CDP.
7. ‘I am not going to have anything more to do with the liberals’: Lyndon Johnson to Richard Goodwin, 22 June 1965, in Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America, Boston, MA, Little, Brown, 1988, p. 392.
8. ‘The effect was electrifying’: SS to MS, 30 March 1967, CMS.
9. King was involved: for the Cecil King plot against Wilson, see Peter Wright, Spycatcher, Viking, 1987, p. 369. Wright describes King casually as ‘a longtime agent of ours’.
10. ‘The trouble with this Encounter row’: SS to Nikos, 14 April 1967, CDP.
11. ‘So I did, dear boy’: Sutherland, Stephen Spender, p. 451.
12. ‘The whole story’: David Plante to MS, e-mail of 15 Oct 2013.
13. ‘You and I may think he has been a little naïf’: WHA to NS, 26 May [1967], Berg Collection, NYPL.
14. articles were written: see (among others) Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War’, Artforum, May 1973; Eva Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, Artforum, June 1974; and Serge Guibault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985. I’ve also tried to connect the Trotsky left-wingers in New York and the eventual CIA in my book on Gorky, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
15. ‘Your father is still famous’: Jennifer Josselson to MS, 24 May 2012.
16. paid a fat sum: NS unpublished diary for 1985, n.d., p. 4, SSAB.
1. ‘it makes no difference to S’: NS unpublished diary, Saturday 2 Feb 1985, SSAB.
2. ‘S always thinks in terms of himself’: ibid., Sunday [5 May] 1985, SSAB.
3. ‘S would always put everything else’: ibid., Wednesday 8 May 1985, SSAB.
4. ‘The truth is, if one is not loved’: ibid., Thursday 14 Feb 1985, SSAB.
5. they’d never felt criminal: Plante, Becoming a Londoner, p. 73.
6. ‘No … but he was very fond of you’: David Plante, e-mail to MS, 3 July 2014.
7. ‘You’ve asked me before’: for a biography of Gorky that includes many of Mougouch’s stories, see my From a High Place.
8. his love letters had been copied: for the controversy over the Gorky letters, see Nick Dante Vaccaro, ‘Gorky’s Debt to Gaudier-Brzeska’, Art Journal, vol. 23, Fall 1963, pp. 33–4.
9. ‘It just seems to me that somehow’: this comes from an undated fragment in my diary of the time. I can’t vouch for its accuracy but it sounds like her.
10. ‘I do not believe that writing or any other activity’: 23 April 1995, NSJ, p. 747.
11. ‘Stephen, sentimental’: Plante, Becoming a Londoner, p. 159.
1. His reply was emotional and confused: Jennifer Josselson to MS, 26 May 2012.
2. Following the letter: for Index on Censorship etc., see Sutherland, Stephen Spender, p. 457.
3. there were frequent and recurring difficulties with the State Department: I am grateful to my cousin Philip Spender, who worked for Index, for emphasizing this point.
4. a photo of one man shooting another: this famous photo was taken by Eddie Adams on 1 February 1968.
5. ‘I am beginning to feel’: SS to Nikos, n.d. [early May 1967], DPC.
1. he wrote a ‘diary’ poem about it: the poem on the birth of Saskia was first published in SS, Journals 1939–1983, p. 271. For our Italian life, see MS, Within Tuscany, Viking/Penguin, 1992.
2. ‘This last sentence of his’: MS diary, 3 July 1975.
3. American art was the invention: the earliest evidence I’ve been able to trace regarding an awareness that American art must take a lead after the war comes from a lost circular issued by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, quoted in the New York Times, 22 May 1942. See MS, From a High Place, p. 264.
4. ‘He appealed to me across Arthur’s cocktail glass’: MS diary, 19 Nov 1975.