Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism

by David A. Leeming

The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures.

Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

aka David Adams Leeming

Reviews

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d read about so many of Spender’s contemporaries and their work—Isherwood, Auden, Wescott, the Sackville-Wests—and felt that I must now explore his life. By way of this biographer, Spender would seem to have been a quiet but self-proclaimed bisexual. In his young life, he was as active and promiscuous as his contemporaries, but later on after he married and had children, he (apparently) kept this part of his life under wraps. In the eighties writer David Leavitt used what Spender considered to be private information about him in Leavitt’s novel, While England Sleeps, and Spender sued to get the novel amended. In response Leavitt rewrote parts of the book. (The remainders were all pulped by the publisher, so only a few were sold in the U.S. I happened to locate one, cheers, for an ungodly amount of money, at Larry McMurtry's store in Archer City, Texas) . The biography, on the whole, seems cramped somehow. Leeming pursues a certain line of thinking and then stops. And yet, what he has written, appears to be well researched, accurate. He likes his subject without either being too fawning or too critical.

Some favorite passages:

“The people who most meant ‘poet’ to him were the great modernists of the generation before him. Spender, Auden, and their friends had since their first Oxford days been excited by the ‘inclusion within new forms, of material which seemed ugly, anti-poetic, and inhuman.’ Eliot in The Waste Land and Joyce in Ulysses revealed the ‘modern life could be material for art.’ Spender particularly admired the ‘hard clear imagery,’ the ‘boldness of experimentation,’ and the ‘search for means of expressing complicated states of consciousness and acute sensibility’ that he found in James, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Hemingway, the Sitwells, Pound, and his friend Herbert Read” (68).

“[E.M.] Forster advised his younger friend on the revision of The Temple and shared with him his own unpublished homosexual novel, Maurice, which he revealed was ‘wish fulfillment’ rather than ‘autobiography.’ In spite of his keeping his private life ‘closeted,’ Forster was a better role model and adviser in connection with sexual matters than Spender’s other older-generation author confidants, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, who were both somewhat embarrassed by the open Hyndman relationship. During the troubles that would face Spender and especially Hyndman in the years to follow, Forster remained a faithful and supportive friend to both men” (83).

“Spender’s return to London at the end of the summer [1935] coincided with the publication of his collection of short stories, The Burning Cactus. Besides ‘The Burning Cactus,’ ‘The Dead Island,’ and ‘Two Deaths,’ the book included two autobiographical stories. ‘The Cousins’ is essentially a parable about a young Spender-like aesthete who chooses socialism and art over the life of his superficial bourgeois relatives, one of whom is a boy based on his cousin John Schuster, with whom he had been in love as an adolescent. ‘By the Lake,’ the rewriting of the early story Spender had shown to Auden and Isherwood at Oxford, is based on his sojourn in Switzerland before going up to the university. The hero of the story, who falls in love with a younger English companion, is a thinly veiled portrait of the young Spender. The Burning Cactus is marked by the psycho-erotic concerns of D.H. Lawrence’s work and by the mixture of poetry and prose that Virginia Woolf had suggested to Spender as an appropriate modern approach to fiction. The work is a modernist collection, which embodies something of the ‘destructive element’ discussed by Spender in his book of that name. The reader confronts in all of these stories lives that can best be understood against the background of a wasteland world of looming catastrophe. Spender dedicated The Burning Cactus to Tony Hyndman and W.H. Auden” (98).

“At Christmastime Christopher Isherwood came to London, and he and Stephen went bookshopping. But Christmas had become a chore: ‘This part of winter be-comes every year more like a dark tunnel one enters about 15 December’” (185).

“Highlights of the visit were dinner with George Kennan, a Robert Frost reading, and lunch with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, whom Spender had thought of primarily as one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, was surprisingly cultivated and interesting. He showed Spender his painting, especially a van Gogh he prized. He criticized the recent English-French-Israeli action in Suez, unlike Kennan, who had approved of it. Spender ‘had the impression that Oppenheimer examined whatever was said to him, and condemned what was superficial’” (199-200).

“Reading, he felt, was the ‘passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative would be meaningless.’ It was the ‘immortal spirit of the dead realized within the bodies of the living.’ Reading, like writing, painting, and composing, was ‘sacramental’” (245).