Читать книгу A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents - Matthew Spender, Matthew Spender - Страница 11

TONY CAME BACK from Spain in the late summer of 1937, and Stephen and Inez moved out of London to a cottage in Kent – perhaps to avoid him. Shortly after they’d arrived, Auden came to stay. He needed to talk about Spain.

Stephen described the background of the International Writers’ Congress, to which Wystan had intended to go but didn’t, because of visa problems. There had been a violent attack on André Gide for the book he’d written after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935. Indeed, his Retour de l’URSS had divided most fellow-travellers from the rest of the Communist Party. Philip Toynbee, though for the moment he remained loyal, had written in his diary when the book came out: ‘We must, must do something about it – protest first against the Trotskist label attached so readily to critics. Then try to extort a reply from the Soviet Government. All this of course inside the party.’ Stephen had been shocked at the viciousness of the attack on Gide and the refusal to discuss the book itself. And they’d attacked him, too, over Tony. Was this the inevitable fate of all those who disagreed with the communists? Character assassination, rather than rational discussion?

Auden’s view was: ‘political exigence was never a justification for lies’. In spite of the complexity of Auden’s mind, or perhaps because of it, he often insisted on following the simplest of rules. It eliminated long moralistic arguments and much soul-searching; but to say ‘lying is wrong’ also struck at the heart of communist tactics.

One evening at the end of November 1937, Christopher turned up at Stephen’s flat in Hammersmith. ‘Stephen’s affairs are in a fine old tangle. The triangle has turned into a quadrangle.’ He’s referring to Stephen, Inez, Tony, plus an offstage lover of Inez. ‘Stephen said of himself: “I only really feel what my friends tell me I feel.” He’s worried about Inez and about Tony’s future. He even claims to have shed tears last night for an hour. But under all his remorse, he’s really laughing and naughty and very sly. A sly Shelley.’

To Christopher, there’d always been something absurd about Stephen’s marriage. Absurd, too, for Stephen to pretend he had emotions while simultaneously saying they were wished on him by his friends. Meanwhile in front of Christopher, Stephen played down his capacity to love a woman. He did not want to be deflated by a sardonic remark.

Isherwood was planning to leave the country with Auden. They’d take a boat to China and write a book about the war in Manchuria. Christopher’s life since Hitler came to power had been a restless shifting from country to country: Denmark, Holland, the Canaries, Portugal. His lover Heinz had been lured back to Germany and arrested and he was desperate. He did not want to live in England, the land of The Enemy.

In Shanghai they stayed with the British Ambassador. The late British Empire was hospitable. Auden had just won the King’s Medal for Poetry and they were important visitors. Of the two Auden seemed the more important, and this made Isherwood uncomfortable. ‘In China, I sometimes found myself really hating him – hating his pedantic insistence on “objectivity”, which was merely a reaction from my own woolly-mindedess. I was meanly jealous of him too. Jealous of his share of the limelight; jealous because he’ll no longer play the role of dependent, admiring younger brother.’

They visited the front line. Isherwood wanted to test himself. ‘If I was scared in China – far more often than Wystan – I, at least, didn’t show it. And, maybe, as taking those little risks was more difficult for me, I even displayed a kind of mild courage.’ This was a good reason for being there: to test how they’d behave when war came to Europe.

In Auden’s life there had been no equivalent, so far, to Heinz in Christopher’s or Tony in Stephen’s. Several times in the China adventure Auden became depressed by the thought that love might pass him by. He could observe love happen, he could briskly and cheerfully manage sex, but what about love? To love his neighbour as himself he could also manage, both as a Christian principle and as a vision of humanity. But love, in the sense of sex plus affection plus trust, hadn’t yet happened.

They came back via a boat to Vancouver then a train to New York. Auden liked this new city immediately. New Yorkers belonged to their city in a different way than Londoners belonged to London. Auden had never liked London, and literary London took for granted that he belonged there and held certain responsibilities. After all, London had created his reputation. By comparison, New Yorkers seemed to him free from the burden of expectations.

Over their return voyage across the Atlantic, he was in a bad state. ‘Wystan in tears,’ wrote Christopher in his diary, ‘telling me that no one would ever love him, that he would never have my sexual success. That flattered my vanity; but still my sadism wasn’t appeased. And, actually – believe it or not – when we got back to England I wouldn’t have him to stay the night, because I was jealous of him, and wanted to stage the Returning Hero act all to myself.’

Over the summer of 1938, Inez left Stephen; and although several times it seemed as if she’d come back, she didn’t.

Stephen was devastated, yet in his autobiography he writes that their separation was ‘the breaking up of something which had never been completely joined’. But if nothing had become ‘joined’, it was at least partly because he did not want it to. As he’d written to a friend soon after the wedding, ‘I believe I married really because I recognized in my wife someone who doesn’t want to become absorbed in someone else any more than I do.’

He’d suffered intensely to see that she was unhappy and to feel that he was the cause, yet her unhappiness lay beyond his capacity to cure. He hated this feeling and he did not know how to cope with it. As he wrote to Christopher: ‘I feel that people can’t exist without me. Also, I sometimes feel at the very mercy of people – that I cannot refuse any request they make; I now think that this is a [way] of being at the mercy of one’s feelings.’

Tony’s presence must surely have been one of the reasons why the marriage failed; yet this was not mentioned. Stephen felt loyal to Tony, and if Inez had ever suggested this constituted disloyalty to her, he would have become outraged. Jealousy hampered freedom, and freedom was the most important of all political ideas. Thus Tony remained offstage as Inez fled to Wales and Stephen stayed miserably in London. Perhaps Tony hoped that after the separation, he might rejoin Stephen.

Inez left him, not vice versa, so in a sense she seized the initiative. After she’d left, Stephen poured out desperate letters to a mutual friend, and these are helpful in trying to understand what he needed from love. ‘The fact is that one must base life on love and not on “being in love” – at least, that is the difference between Inez and me, that I have love which could last thirty years and she lives on being in love from day to day.’

What was his idea of love?

If a human relationship becomes more important than anything else in two people’s lives, it simply means that there is a lack of trust between these two human beings. A relationship is not a way of entering into a kind of dual subjectivity, a redoubled and reciprocal egotism; it is an alliance of two people who form an united front to deal with the problems of the objective world. The problem of married people is not to become absorbed in each other, but how not to become absorbed in each other; how, in a word, to trust one another in order to enter into a strong and satisfactory relationship with the outside world.

Stephen, so apparently open in his emotions, always kept something back. Auden had noticed this from the moment they’d met. Now Inez took stock of this characteristic and concluded that they’d reached a dead end. Tactfully, she wrote that if she were to return to Stephen, ‘although our affection is very solid, we could not get any further with our relationship and should both be profoundly dissatisfied’.

The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 coincided with the foundation of the magazine where my father worked for two years as co-editor together with Cyril Connolly. So eager was Stephen to have an editorial role that he handed over a flat he’d recently rented on Mecklenburg Square in order to provide Horizon with an office.

Connolly was a critic and writer who so far had produced one excellent novel, The Rock Pool, about expatriate bad behaviour in the Twenties. He was older than Stephen and belonged to the generation which placed fine writing above political commitment – a conviction that had been reinforced by the collapse of the Spanish Republic. By October, he’d settled into a wing chair covered with pink silk by the window overlooking Mecklenburg Square. He wore baggy flannels, a woollen tie and a tweed jacket, like a housemaster at a boarding school. ‘His movements like his voice were indolent, one had the impression he should be eating grapes, but at the same time his half-closed eyes missed nothing.’

As an editor, he described himself as going through ‘periods of intense energy, interspersed with long lulls of sloth’. He also confessed in an editorial that co-editorship with Spender had its ups and downs, with moments when each would be ‘sullenly burning manuscripts in different corners of the room’. Stephen wanted more political articles, Cyril wanted fine prose, and occasionally there were tensions.

Nevertheless the editorials, usually written by Cyril, tackled difficult questions about war aims and choices. Should the techniques of propaganda as perfected by modern advertising agencies be incorporated into the war effort? Would National Socialism of a British kind have to be introduced here? Nationalism – you cannot win a war without patriotism. Socialism – you cannot expect soldiers to fight without guaranteeing benefits for the families they leave behind. The great British capitalists and landlords were potentially Fascist, he wrote blandly. But: ‘below them come the enormous professional and commercial middle-class, which, though capitalist, could easily adapt itself to socialism, and which is morally and geographically anti-Hitler because it believes in Democracy, Christianity and the British Empire’. Cyril certainly believed in democracy, less so in Christianity, and not at all in the British Empire. But the message of Horizon was that England required major social changes if the war was to be won.

Auden and Isherwood had left England at the end of January 1939, nine months before the war broke out. Everyone at their farewell party knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

In January 1940, thinking of this anniversary, Connolly wrote an editorial in Horizon. Their departure was perhaps the most significant literary event of the war so far, he wrote. ‘They are far-sighted and ambitious young men with a strong instinct of self-preservation, and an eye on the main chance, who have abandoned what they consider to be the sinking ship of European democracy, and by implication the aesthetic doctrine of social realism that has been prevailing there.’

Cyril did not approve of the literature of ‘social realism’ so presumably his remark was meant to be supportive. Unfortunately the phrase ‘self-preservation and an eye on the main chance’ provoked endless repercussions. At cocktail parties all over London people asked: Is Cyril really saying that Wystan and Christopher are rats who’ve left the sinking ship? Questions were even asked in Parliament.

Stephen was away when Cyril wrote this comment. When he read it, he worried about how Wystan would take it. He immediately wrote to him. In his reply, Auden wrote briskly, ‘of course I wasn’t offended by the editorial which I thought was very fair’. He added, ‘I wish you were over here, not because I don’t support the allies – which in spite of everything I do – but because there doesnt seem anything that you cannot do just as well here as there.’ Meaning write poetry.

He confirmed this position in a conversation with Louis MacNeice, who appeared in New York for a three-month lecture tour. MacNeice, in a letter that appeared in Horizon, tried to play down the controversy. He said that Auden had told him that ‘an artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all; that in England to-day the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots, always in opposition to a group; that in America he feels just as lonely, but so, says Auden, is everybody else’.

Auden thought that the only obligation of a writer was to write. My father thought this avoided the issue. If Hitler won, writers in Europe would disappear – along with many of their readers. In his ‘Letter to a Colleague in America’, written for the New Statesman, Stephen wrote: ‘I wonder how much of value can be created, even in America, if the conditions in which we are living are so completely misunderstood.’ This was a tactful way of asking, how can one concentrate exclusively on writing while the Nazis are out there, threatening to destroy writing itself?

This evoked a private protest from Auden. ‘Your passion for public criticism of your friends has always seemed to me a little odd; it is not that you dont say acute things – you do – but the assumption of the role of the blue-eyed Candid Incorruptible is questionable … What you say is probably accurate enough, but the tone alarms me. “One is worried about Auden’s poetic future.” Really, Stephen dear, whose voice is this but that of Harold Spender, M.P.’

Bill Coldstream, who’d painted Wystan in numerous long sittings and who’d known him since they were adolescents, was convinced that Wystan had fallen in love. Otherwise he would have come back. There were many reasons why Auden failed to return: a suspicion that England would make a deal with Hitler, a dislike of taking human lives, a strong reluctance to being roped into writing patriotic poems in favour of the British war effort, along the lines of ‘Spain’, a work he’d come to dislike for what he saw as its insincere rhetoric. But of all the reasons to remain in the United States, love came first.