‘A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents’, by Matthew Spender

We mourn our dead parents by resembling them. As the photographs in this book testify, there’s no question whose father Matthew Spender’s was.

Stephen Spender hated his own father because, quite simply, he was not a worldly success and tried to dupe his family that he was. It was the deception which was sinful. Stephen wrote, by way of obituary, the Oedipal poem “The Ambitious Son”, expressing over his father’s grave “my contempt for your failure”.

Success would be Stephen’s life-long ambition. But at what cost to those attached to him? To go into a room where he was present, his brother Humphrey (the distinguished photographer) told me, was to find that Stephen had used all the oxygen. The critic Cyril Connolly, with whom he co-edited the hugely successful wartime magazine Horizon, said there were in fact two Spenders. One was “a great big silly goose, a holy Russian idiot”; the other was “shrewd and ambitious, aggressive and ruthless”. Those like his family, caught in between, could get crushed.

A gifted, unhappy child, Stephen failed all his exams at Oxford but discovered homosexuality and his poetic mission through his fellow student, one-off lover (it’s supposed), mentor and life-long friend, WH Auden. Matthew Spender’s memoir starts with the striking sentence: “It was WH Auden who taught me about adjectives.” He taught Stephen much more.

TS Eliot recognised a precocious talent. In the blurb for Spender’s Poems (1933), he wrote: “If Auden is the satirist of this poetical renaissance, Spender is its lyric poet.” Christopher Isherwood, in his catty roman à clef Lions and Shadows (1938), lampooned him as the more gooselike “Stephen Savage”, a 6ft adult baby prone to trip over carpets.

Spender, Isherwood and Auden — the self-styled “gang” — went to Weimar Germany for sexual freedom, and the artistic freedom to define their creative personalities. Stephen’s first serious relationship was, shortly after, with Tony Hyndman, a former Welsh guardsman turned occasional male prostitute whom he met, cruising, around Piccadilly.

“Saving Tony” became a mission. It was complicated when, aged 23, Stephen discovered heterosexual love. It was, he told an unconverted Isherwood, “more satisfactory”. Stephen’s life, thereafter, was one of complex intertwinings. After a whirlwind romance, he married Inez Pearn, a young Oxford student. In a huff, Tony joined the International Brigade in Spain. Then he deserted in the face of battle. At some risk to his life and his marriage, Stephen went to Spain to rescue him. The pain of inevitable divorce, and the imminent war, created his finest poems, Ruins and Visions (1942), and his finest prose work, the September 1939 journal. Shortly after he met the concert pianist, Natasha Litvin.

They married as the bombs fell on London. Both part-Jewish and devoutly leftwing, they declined invitations to join Auden and Isherwood in America at a time when invasion seemed very possible. One admires them for that.

Natasha, having found the house in St John’s Wood, north-west London, added motherhood to her busy artistic life. Always a poet but no longer solely devoted to it, Stephen took a new turn after the war. He became a “public intellectual”, a cultural powerbroker. His terms of the complex contract he had with Natasha emerged. He must be free within commitment.

It was painful. Matthew describes a scene in postwar Paris when, at a party of intellectuals, Natasha (still newly married) enquired who the elegant young man talking to her husband was. “Don’t you know?” the worldly Parisian replied. “That’s Stephen’s new lover.” She promptly fainted.

A House in St John’s Wood is, for its first 100 pages, a chronicle of Stephen’s life, familiar enough from his own memoir, World within World (1951). There follows Matthew’s coming to consciousness in the family home, the rupturing departure he had to make, to save himself, and the decades-long “coming to terms” with his parents — something finally achieved after their deaths, and the discovery of his mother’s diary. It’s a narrative that gathers power as it goes.

Despite what would have driven some wives to the lawyers, or lovers, Natasha remained devoted

Despite what would have driven some wives to the lawyers, or lovers, Natasha remained devoted to her undevoted husband. It cost her. Her own career (always undervalued by Stephen, Matthew believes) had crested with the first televised proms, under Malcolm Sargent. But Stephen needed her company in the year-long visiting professorship he had in the US. She went. “A year away, and they forget you,” she once ruefully told me, when I was working (co-working would be a fairer description) on Stephen’s biography.

As a husband and father Stephen played a home and away game for the next 35 years. Homosexual dalliance was for him part of the away package. The pattern was always the same — infatuation followed by rational friendship and, very often, useful career help.

In his infatuation with his last extramarital love, the American ornithologist Bryan Obst, he told the critic Frank Kermode that he would give everything for the young man. Stephen was devastated when Obst (by then with another partner) died from an Aids-related illness in 1991. The pain, as pain usually did, provoked fine poetry. Nobly, Natasha included one of the Obst elegies in the memorial service for her husband. It wasn’t that she forgave. She understood.

Matthew was a clever, perplexed child. The happiest moments of his early childhood were spent under the piano on which Natasha rehearsed interminably, while his father wrote poetry in the room next door. But there was no room for him to grow into himself in the house in St John’s Wood.

The inevitable rupture came when, in his late teens, Matthew fell in love with Maro Gorky — the child of an even more complicated artistic dynasty than his own (Matthew would go on to write the life of painter Arshile Gorky, Maro’s father). Natasha opposed, utterly, the relationship and eventual marriage; for her it was, Matthew says, an affront to “parental authority”. It rankled until the last years of her life. Stephen’s warmer, and more rational, feelings towards his daughter-in-law, and granddaughters, had to be sadly furtive.

Eventually, Maro and Matthew left England to pursue a fiercely monogamous union in Italy. Both became artists in their own right and loving, loved, parents. In one of its aspects this book is a husband’s touching love letter to his wife of 50 years.

Matthew discovered he could love his parents only at a safe distance. I once commented to Natasha on a picture he had done of Stephen. “He hasn’t slept in this house for 10 years,” she said, sadly. And yet the house gives this book its title.

There is much fresh research here: on Raymond Chandler’s crazed (unreciprocated) love for Natasha, for example, and the CIA sponsorship of Encounter magazine, co-edited by Stephen. But the heart of the book is filial and emotional. And very moving.

A few weeks before his death Stephen wrote to a friend, “At the end of my life I feel that my wife and children have been the greatest happiness to me.” At last, one thinks, he realised.

A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents, by Matthew Spender, William Collins, RRP£25, 448 pages. Published in the US in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

John Sutherland is author of ‘Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography’ (Penguin)

Photograph: Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection