Poetry/Biography: Had Stephen Spender not gone to Oxford at the same time as his great friend, W.H. Auden, he almost certainly would not have become the writer he did and John Sutherland's biography of him might never have been written.
Spender (1909-1995) is the classic example in 20th-century writing of the hanger-on, the lesser figure who finds himself on to a good thing, acquires a degree of reputation, loses it, settles for the consolation prize of celebrity and a professorship, and ends up almost a figure of fun. Is this a fair description? In his salvage job on this most battered of reputations, John Sutherland argues not.
Spender's reputation may be in disrepair, but his life has never gone short of attention, much of it prurient in the extreme. Hugh David's error-laden Spender: A Portrait with Background caused its subject much distress. David Leavitt's biographical novel While England Sleeps was pursued through the courts by the octogenarian poet, unhappy at Leavitt's portrayal of his homosexuality. David Leeming's subsequent A Life in Modernism is a woeful exercise in celebrity tittle-tattle, with no redeeming qualities whatever.
Sutherland's book differs in being authorised by the poet's widow. In the first and more interesting half of the book this doesn't notably inhibit the writing, as we follow Spender from Oxford to the happy hunting-ground of gay Berlin in the 1930s with Christopher Isherwood ("Berlin meant boys"). His mix of social climbing and insecurity, his bad conscience over his privileged background and naïve leftism make him an awkward, almost buffoonish character - "the Rupert Brooke of the Depression", in Geoffrey Grigson's cruel jibe.
And then there was Spain, which Spender visited during the civil war, offering propaganda assistance to the Republican government. George Orwell was shot in the neck fighting for the same cause, but his description of the experience in Homage to Catalonia is positively bland in comparison to what really annoyed him about the war.
"I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender", he thundered when asked by Nancy Cunard for a contribution to her Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. "Tell your pansy friend Spender," he continued, "that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it . . . I shall rub it in good and hard."
As the "pansy" catcall makes clear, Orwell thought Spender was an effete meddler playing at toy soldiers. And in truth, Spender's Marxism was a passing fancy, quickly supplanted by the God-that-failed rhetoric of his Cold War years. But here too embarrassment lay in wait for him, when it emerged that, unbeknownst to Spender, the CIA had been financing his magazine, Encounter. He resigned, but along came that professorship at the University of London to give him something to do.
By now Spender is married to Natasha Litvin, and Sutherland's book has descended into a portrait of the artist as smiling public man, enjoying his status as living embodiment of the 1930s poet. The US was a favourite venue, with its networking opportunities and easy academic money. Where his writing was concerned, poetry gave way to prose, not unhappily; if there is a book for which he deserves to be remembered, it is his memoir, World Within World.
But what of the poetry? It is still shocking to remember the reputation it once enjoyed. The intoxications of Spender's communist years yielded only a very average vin rouge audenaire [sic]. Granted, he mentions pylons, which seemed very shocking back in the 1930s, but socio-political verse was never really his thing. The long poem 'Vienna' was an embarrassing failure. He was always a neo-Romantic at heart.
Sutherland works hard to present Spender as a figure in his own right rather than just the rear end of that pantomime horse "MacSpaunday" (MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day Lewis), but comparisons will inevitably continue to be made. He has none of Auden's capacity to startle, none of MacNeice's hard-bitten wit, and only a vein of tepid emotionalism to put in their place, as in the dreadful anthology piece 'Elegy for Margaret'. Sutherland is a biographer of many talents, but mounting a case for Spender the poet is not among them. He directs a good deal of spleen at Spender's detractors, crediting them with all manner of motives for their negative judgements, but never considers the obvious - that they were right.
So was Spender the Zelig of modern poetry, the impostor who thought that going to university with enough real poets, standing beside them at Faber parties and having them round to dinner would magically turn him into one too? As Woody Allen said, 80 per cent of success is showing up. And what of the other 20 per cent? An anecdote from an early encounter with T.S. Eliot sheds some light on that. Spender told Eliot he wanted to "be a poet", to which the older man replied: "I can understand your wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by 'being a poet'."
Spender never stopped "being a poet" all his life, even if it meant he never got round to writing any poems that rise above the merely competent, at best. Not for Spender all that Yeatsian guff about "raging in the dark" when there was always another lecture tour to embark on or prize committee to chair. Did he secretly think of himself as a second-rater, a fake, an impostor all along? We'll never know. Still, he seemed happy with the way things turned out: the brilliant friends, the parties, the "being a poet". And who could blame him?