Stephen Spender : The Authorized Biography

by John Sutherland

Seven years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised life of this brilliant, but famously enigmatic, man. Sutherland's account ranges from the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and the dominant influence of his archetypal Victorian father) via Oxford, to the breakaway years in 1930s Weimar Germany, where his comrades in liberated exile were W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. We follow him through the war as Britain's most famous fireman, to the postwar years of international celebrity - a celebrity which provoked some animosity; Spender?s reputation is among the most unfairly contested of its time but of all the great writers of the 1930s he lived longest and lived most fully. Stephen Spender was, and still is, a controversial figure. One thing is, however, irrefutable. Anyone who was anyone, in literary or cultural terms, crossed his the pageant of his friends, acquaintances (and, sometimes, antagonists) includes Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly.. As well as being a colleague of Spender?s during the 1970s, John Sutherland has had unhindered access to archive material and living witnesses to Spender's career. Stephen Spender is a biography of a remarkable writer - a hero of the 1930s - and a panoramic portrait of the troubled century which he as poet, cultural ambassador and man of letters.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, LGBT, World History

640 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

John Andrew Sutherland is an English academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

Reviews

[James Henderson]

"But do you really think I'm any good?" a nervous Stephen Spender asked WH Auden, some six weeks after they'd met. "Of course," Auden said. "Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated." Humiliation was Spender's lifetime companion. Few poets have been more savagely reviewed. And none has nurtured a greater sense of inadequacy. This is the man who, having dismissed John Lehmann as a potential lover because he was a "failed version of myself", adds: "but I also regarded myself as a failed version of myself." With Spender, self-deprecation reaches comic extremes of self-abasement.
Enjoying his poetry is only part of the wonder encountered in John Sutherland's recent biographical portrait, Stephen Spender. From his privileged upbringing to his adult life filled with self-abnegation this biography is a literary goldmine. His marriages, travels, relationships with men, and more are part of this comprehensive tome. It truly was a "Literary Life". I enjoyed reading this book as it drew me into hie wonderful world of literary friendships with Auden and others with his time in Berlin fascinating as an account of the early journey of the young poet.
Sutherland convincingly shares a description of Spender as a "fine" or even "great" poet. That is the poet I know when I read him and like Stephen Spender, "I think of those who were truly great", and in doing so cherish the transcendent geniuses of the past. Spender's poetry is only part of his superb literary output.

[Eduardo]

This an excellent biography of a wonderful poet, and writer, insightful human being, kind person, an adventurous spirit that outlived all his friends and yet remained youthful. An inspiring life on many levels, he is worth reading and admiring.