Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE, (
February 28,
1909 –
July 16,
1995) was an
English poet and
essayist who concentrated on themes of
social injustice and the
class struggle in his work.
Born in
London to a journalist father, Spender went to
Gresham's School, Holt, and
University College,
Oxford, where he met
W. H. Auden, another old boy of
Gresham's, but a little older. He did not finish his degree and went to Germany. (However, he was made an honorary fellow of the college in 1973.) Around this time he was also friends with
Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in
Weimar Germany), and fellow
Macspaunday members
Louis MacNeice, and
C. Day Lewis. He would later come to know
W.B. Yeats,
Allen Ginsberg,
Ted Hughes,
Joseph Brodsky,
Isaiah Berlin,
Mary McCarthy,
Roy Campbell,
Raymond Chandler,
Dylan Thomas,
Jean-Paul Sartre and
T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the
Bloomsbury Group, in particular
Virginia Woolf.
His early poetry, notably
Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in
Vienna (1934], a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of
Viennese socialists, and in
Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography,
World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.
Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988 under the title
The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than Englandâ€"particularly about relationships between menâ€"and showing frightening anticipations of Nazism, which are confusingly related to the very openness the main character admires. Spender says in his 1988 introduction::In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer -- the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives....
When the
Spanish civil war began, he went with the
International Brigades to fight against
Francisco Franco's
fascist forces.
Harry Pollitt, head of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a
Byron in the movement."
A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with
communism in the essay collection
The God that Failed (1949), along with
Arthur Koestler and others. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between
Nazi Germany and
Stalinist Russia, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like fellow poets
W.H. Auden,
Christopher Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender managed to avoid serving in the military in
World War II. However, he did not go to America but spent the war in the London fire service.
He felt close to the
Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half Jewish (her father's family were
German Jews who converted to
Christianity, while her mother came from an upper-class family of
Catholic German,
Lutheran Danish and distantly
Italian descent). Spender's second wife,
Natasha Litvin/
Lady Spender, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish.
With
Cyril Connolly and
Peter Watson Spender co-founded
Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. He was editor of
Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966. Spender taught at various American institutions, accepting the
Elliston Chair of Poetry at the
University of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961 he became professor of
rhetoric at
Gresham College, London.
He was Professor of English at
University College, London, 1970-77, and then became
Professor Emeritus.
Spender was made a
CBE in 1962 and
knighted in 1983.
Spender sued gay author
David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt's
While England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.
Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. Spender's seemingly changing attitudes towards
homosexuality and
heterosexuality have caused him to be labeled
bisexual, repressed, latently
homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labelling. Many of his friends in his earlier years were
gay. Spender himself had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably with
Tony Hyndman (who is called "Jimmy Younger" in his
memoir World Within World). During
World War II, he shifted his focus to
heterosexuality, marrying concert pianist
Natasha Litvin in 1941. Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry. The following line was revised in a republished edition:
Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.
It was later revised to read:
Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.
In 1980, following a lecture in
Oneonta, New York, Spender's plane was grounded due to bad weather, so he took a taxi 287 miles to
Manhattan for a date with
Jacqueline Onassis. "I simply had to get there," he said.
Poetry
Twenty Poems (1930)
Vienna (1934)
Poems of Dedication (1936)
The Still Centre (1939)
Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (1955)
The Generous Days (1971)
Selected Poems (1974)
Collected Poems 1928-1985 (1986)
*
New Collected Poems Edited by Michael Brett, 2004
Letters
*Letters (1980)
Essays
The Destructive Element (1935)
European Witness (1946)
The God That Failed ((1949) - with others, ex-Communists' testimonies)
The Creative Element (1953)
The Making of a Poem (1955)
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
Love-Hate Relations (1974)
The Thirties and After (1978)
Drama
*
Trial of a Judge (1938)
Memoir
World Within World (1951)
Fiction
The Backward Son (1940)
The Temple (1986-1987)
#Quoted in Richard R. Bozorth,
"But Who Would Get It?": Auden and the Codes of Poetry and Desire (ELH 62.3 [1995] 709-727).
*
Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (2005) ISBN 0195178165
* List of
Gresham Professors of Rhetoric*
Stephen Spender Memorial Trust*
NY Review of books bibliography*
"Spender's Lives" - Ian Hamilton,
The New Yorker*
"Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" – Stephen Metcalf,
Slate.com,
February 7,
2005
