Three

Spender

Cádiz, Valencia, Madrid & Albacete, 1937

FOR THE BRITISH COMMUNIST PARTY, recruiting Stephen Spender represented a real coup. Spender was not just a famous poet, he was a fashionable one, and his relative youth—he was still only twenty-seven—fostered a connection with a generation of undergraduates who admired the way he fused his poetic sensibility with engagé politics. It helped that he was tall, slim, handsome, sexually adventurous, and posh: he was a romantic rebelling against the establishment from which he came, and he was doing it in style. His anti-fascist credentials were strong. He had seen firsthand what the National Socialists were capable of on the streets of Berlin during the final days of the Weimar Republic. Sunbathing on the beaches of Rügen, on the north German coast, Spender and his friends had heard the barking of orders and the reports of shots as stormtroopers conducted their training.¹ As early as 1929 he had heard reports of a compelling demagogue from Austria drawing crowds of the angry and the disenfranchised, and in 1934, on holiday on the Dalmatian coast, a car carrying Hermann Göring almost ran him over as it sped past.² His poetry and journalism reflected his commitment to fighting this emerging enemy. He was part of a group of British writers, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis, who rejected the unofficial doctrine of the Bloomsbury mandarins that politics had no place in literature. Virginia Woolf might find it vulgar—and she told Spender as much—but he felt he had no choice other than to put his art into the service of his politics. “We anti-Fascist writers of what has been called the Pink Decade were not, in any obvious sense, a lost generation,” he recalled years later. “But we were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the world from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right.”³ Standing in the British Communist Party’s headquarters in Covent Garden, just a few days into the new year of 1937, the urge was proving stronger than the vocation: he wanted to go to Spain to serve the Republican cause.

Harry Pollitt, who had been so suspicious of Orwell when they had met a few weeks previously, knew that Spender had significant propaganda value. It is hard to imagine Pollitt, a Mancunian boilermaker, had much personal sympathy for this earnest, Oxford-educated poet, but he knew that the Left Book Club was about to publish Spender’s Forward from Liberalism, a book that advocated for Communism even as it refused to follow the Party line.⁴ The club, founded by Victor Gollancz the previous year, had attracted more than forty thousand members and was preparing to publish Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (later the same year it would publish Koestler’s Spanish Testament). In the meeting Pollitt cheerfully upbraided Spender for misunderstanding the circumstances of the first of the Moscow Show Trials and called him out on various other “deviations.”⁵ Nevertheless, this was the time of the Popular Front and all anti-fascists were supposed to be in it together. Spender joined the Party and wrote an article for the front page of its mouthpiece, the Daily Worker.⁶ As to Spain, Pollitt mused, what about joining the International Brigades? Spender could be naive but he was not a fool. He knew he’d make a hopeless soldier. It is not clear that this mattered too much to Pollitt: Spender had the makings of an attractive martyr. There is a story—most likely apocryphal—that Pollitt even joked that if only Spender would get himself killed, he’d “give the party its Byron.”⁷

It turned out Spender was to be put to more sustainable use. Not long after his meeting with Pollitt he was contacted by the Daily Worker and asked to go to Spain and report on the fallout from the sinking of the Russian supply ship Komsomol by the Italians. This was no ordinary reporting gig: the Russians did not know what had happened to the crew and wanted information on where they were being held. Spender, who spoke decent Spanish, was charged with finding out: a request that “both disturbed and astonished” him. “It raised the question whether to supply such information would be spying,” he wrote. “However, it certainly did not involve betraying my country, nor obtaining military secrets, nor indeed anything outside the run of ordinary journalism.”⁸ Still, he knew he would be filing copy for some very particular readers. He agreed, despite his misgivings, assuaging his conscience by refusing payment and asking that his friend Cuthbert Worsley be allowed to come along as sidekick.⁹

While he was sincere in his desire to fight fascism, there was another motivation for Spender wanting to go to Spain: anxiety over his former lover, Tony Hyndman. Spender had split with Hyndman in September after four years together. To compound the rejection, the following month he began seeing Inez Pearn, a twenty-two-year-old Oxford postgraduate student. On December 15, Spender and Pearn were married at a Hammersmith registry office. When Hyndman found out, he was furious and set out for Spain to fight in the International Brigades. This was a deliberately self-destructive act, as Hyndman was not cut out for military life and he knew it. He was the son of a hotelier from Cardiff, and his father, worried that his son was not made for life in the army or down the pits, had sent him off to secretarial college to learn typing and shorthand.¹⁰ After working for a spell as a clerk in Cardiff he’d ended up joining the Coldstream Guards. Despite shipping out to Khartoum for a spell, he managed to avoid any actual fighting and left after three years of largely inept soldiering. After a couple of years of drifting he’d met Spender in the spring of 1933. They were soon living together, Hyndman working as Spender’s secretary. Spender fell in love with Hyndman’s “background, his soldiering, his working-class home.” Since his youth Spender had been fascinated by “working men,” a fascination that in adulthood manifested itself in a penchant for rough trade. With Hyndman, though, this initial attraction developed into an intense, combative relationship. They both resented Hyndman’s dependence on Spender, and eventually Spender came to realize there was more than excesses of passion to this pattern of behavior: “gradually I came to see that in the moments of our quarrels and the making up of them, when we were most completely and terribly together, there was something in each which wanted to destroy the other.”¹¹ To Spender it now appeared that Hyndman, by going to Spain, was bent on destroying himself.

Spender saw off Hyndman at Victoria Station, handing him £30 in case he changed his mind and wanted to come back. The former secretary was heading first to Brussels, where he was to spend Christmas with Isherwood, traveling with Giles Romilly, an Oxford undergraduate and Winston Churchill’s nephew. After a drunken night with his guests, Isherwood wrote to Spender to try to reassure him that Hyndman was not heading to Spain in consequence of his marriage to Pearn. As much as he wanted to believe Isherwood, Spender knew better: “Someone I loved had gone into this war as a result of my influence and of my having abandoned him.” It was, Spender claimed, the “greatest distress of my life in this decade.”¹²

It was not long before he was making for Spain himself, under his journalistic cover, seeking the location of the missing crew of the Komsomol. The whole “mission” had an element of the absurd to it. He and Worsley arrived in Barcelona on January 6, a week after Orwell and a week before Koestler. The pair made their way to Gibraltar but were prevented from entering Nationalist Cádiz, where the Russian sailors were rumored to be held. Instead of kicking their heels they made day trips across the Mediterranean to Algiers, Marrakesh, Oran, and Tangiers, looking for leads and tasked with reporting any evidence of Italian or German influence in southern Spain.¹³ Spender finally got confirmation that they were being held in Cádiz from Lord Marley, a British official who was allowed into the city. Spender realized he could have easily found out the information from London.¹⁴ What he was doing was not without risk, though, as foreign journalists suspected of spying, like Koestler in Malaga, were being arrested. It was probably for the best that Spender had not managed to talk his way into Cádiz: the idea of the handsome, lanky poet searching out the Russian crew behind enemy lines was not a promising one. Discretion was not among Spender’s virtues.

HYNDMAN’S EARLY POSTCARDS and letters from Spain had been breezy, so when Spender arrived back in London on February 5 he was not particularly concerned. These high spirits did not last. Despite his time in the Coldstream Guards, Hyndman was not good at taking orders and spent a few days in a cell for insubordination during basic training. On release he was given a Soviet rifle and, along with the rest of the British brigade, dispatched to Madrid. They were heading to the Jarama Valley to defend the capital from Franco.

The battle was a bloodbath. The Army of Africa was battle hardened and supported by a huge artillery bombardment. The Republicans held out, but the price they paid was a heavy one: as many as twenty-five thousand killed in the fighting, including large numbers of men in the International Brigades.¹⁵ Hyndman later estimated that three hundred of the nearly four hundred in his battalion died on the first day. He spent it desperately trying to rescue machine guns from an overturned truck while planes swooped down and raked them with bullets.¹⁶ He spent four days cowering in an olive grove while the moans of the wounded and dying rung out around him.¹⁷ Two weeks later, in the hills of Pingarrón, Hyndman refused an order to advance and was taken back to Albacete under armed escort. He was suffering from a stomach ulcer that made him vomit frequently, but the Commissars of the Brigades, fearful that letting him go would set a bad example to the other men, overruled the medical officer’s recommendation of an honorable discharge. There was little sympathy for psychological trauma among the Stalinist officers running the Red Brigades.

While the Battle of Jarama was raging, Spender left London for Spain a second time, on February 20. The British Communist Party had a new task for him: to broadcast propaganda for a trade union radio station in Valencia. Having made his way to the city, via Barcelona, Spender discovered he had just missed W. H. Auden, his poetic mentor and a close friend. Auden had gone to Spain initially planning to join the International Brigades, with Wilfred Owen’s poetry from the trenches of the Great War ringing in his ears, but like Spender, he realized he was not cut out for combat and sought to drive an ambulance instead.¹⁸ In Valencia he found little to do; the tawdry highlight was getting riotously drunk with Koestler before he left for Malaga. On his return to Britain he wrote “Spain 1937,” one of the defining poems of the war. Spender, too, found Valencia a dead end: the radio station he was supposed to work for was closed due to “the unification of political parties.”¹⁹ Freed from his responsibilities, Spender realized there was nothing stopping him from going to Albacete to find Hyndman.

IT HAD TAKEN SPENDER A DAY of wandering the streets of Albacete, but he eventually found the right café. First impressions were deceptive: Hyndman looked good, “fit and bronzed and young in his uniform.” As soon as the pair got out of earshot of the other soldiers, Hyndman opened up and Spender realized that his “physical fitness concealed an extreme nervousness.” He wanted desperately to go back to England, to be an “ordinary chap.”²⁰ He hated war and had decided he was a pacifist. All his left-wing militancy had evaporated.

“You must get me out of here!” Hyndman whispered.²¹ No sooner did Spender have a moment of privacy with his former lover than he was being implored to rescue him. Spender knew it would be difficult to get him transferred out of the Brigades but thought he might intervene on his part and try to get him excused from fighting in the front line. There must, Spender reasoned, be a noncombatant position Hyndman could fill. He patiently persuaded Hyndman that this was the best course of action.

Just as Spender had anticipated, the Political Commissar of the British Battalion, Peter Kerrigan, said there was no possibility of a discharge. Kerrigan was a Glaswegian who had led workers’ strikes back in the mid-1920s and completed his political education at the International Lenin School in Moscow. He was a hard-liner. There appeared to be some horse trading: Kerrigan guaranteed Hyndman would be kept in a noncombatant position, but Spender was expected to visit the front lines near Madrid. Perhaps Kerrigan saw genuine propaganda value in this, or perhaps he simply wanted to be rid of this posh poet making a fuss about a useless soldier. Spender was pleased with the deal and left for Madrid with Captain George Nathan as an escort. (Hyndman had been Nathan’s courier at Jarama.)

In Madrid, Spender got his first taste of the war proper. The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand accompanied him to the trenches in a ridge outside the city, and both momentarily panicked as “bullets spat round us like shrieking starlings in the olive trees.” From the safety of the trench, Spender saw  “corpses lying in No Man’s Land like ungathered waxy fruit.”²² Led to a machine-gun emplacement, Spender was encouraged to fire off a burst into the enemy lines (he privately prayed that he did not hit anyone). Speaking to the troops over lunch, Spender detected their hostility when Hyndman’s name came up and returned to Madrid in a hurry. The city was under siege. It was freezing cold, and the journalists and intellectuals gathered in the same cafés every day trying to fight off the shivers with heavy greatcoats and bad cognac. Reports came in of a comprehensive defeat for the Republicans northeast of the city only for later reports to tell of an unlikely victory; the Italian troops that Koestler had watched walk into Malaga almost unopposed two months previous had been humiliated at the Battle of Guadalajara.

When Spender returned to Albacete from Madrid, he discovered Hyndman was in prison. With news of the Italian advance toward Guadalajara, the International Brigades had been mobilized. Despite Kerrigan’s assurances to Spender, Hyndman had been told he was going to be sent into battle. The prospect forced him into desperate action: along with a friend, John Lepper, he fled for Valencia, hoping to get repatriated by the British Consulate or find a way of smuggling himself out of the country. Hyndman later believed he was betrayed by a local woman who had seemed sympathetic to his plight but was in all likelihood a member of the Spanish Communist Party. Hyndman and Lepper spent several days in a Valencia prison before being sent back to Albacete, where Hyndman was questioned by a young Polish officer who suspected him of being a spy. He was sentenced to two months in a labor camp.

Spender was distraught. He went back to Valencia and wrote to the Judicial Commission of the International Brigades, appealing on Hyndman’s behalf. As he waited for a response, he wandered the city with a new friend, the celebrated novelist Ernest Hemingway, whom he described as a “black-haired, bushy-moustached, hairy-handed giant.”²³ It was a curious friendship under the circumstances. Spender was fretting about a male lover who had behaved like a coward—not exactly Hemingway’s scene. Yet the self-consciously macho American took to Spender, even protecting him when Communists baited him for his association with Hyndman.

When the Commission got back to Spender, he was told that, as a good Communist, he should be “pleased that [Hyndman] is going to be disciplined by us.”²⁴ He tried every avenue he could think of, appealing, via the British Embassy, to the Republican minister of foreign affairs, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, and to his fellow poet Edgell Rickword, who had clout in the upper echelons of the British Communist Party. All he wanted was an assurance that once the two months in the labor camp were up, Hyndman would be allowed to return home. When Spender returned to Albacete he was met by a furious Kerrigan, angered by the fuss Spender was stirring up, and who, as a consequence, refused to let him even see Hyndman. What Spender feared was that, once released, the Communists would send Hyndman back into battle, where he would be “accidentally” shot. That was how difficult soldiers were dealt with.

Again and again, Spender came up against the same cold logic. What was the life of this one soldier compared to the larger struggle? How could one deserter distract you from the cause? Spender could not bring himself to “give up a life which might be saved, and which was of no value in this war, in order to satisfy a state of mind with which I sympathized [. . .] This was a turning point in my affairs. It was the first time I had acted without hesitation and without being obsessed by the need to justify my actions. I was simply determined to do everything in my power to prevent him dying in Spain.”²⁵ He was forced to leave his former lover behind, in the hands of men he felt sure would kill him. Spender had entered the Spanish War a Communist, striding toward a socialist future. Faced with the brutal reality of placing ends over means, he began shuffling backward to liberalism.