A House in St John's Wood
In Search of My Parents
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A son's personal exploration of one of the most influential—and troubled—artistic couples of the twentieth century
Stephen Spender's life, with all its secrets, successes, and contradictions, is a vivid prism through which to view the twentieth century. He befriended Auden and Isherwood while at Oxford, and together the three had wildly transgressive adventures in Europe and were early vocal critics of Hitler and the rise of fascism in their celebrated writings. Like his friends, Spender was drawn to other men, yet he eventually married Natasha, a world-renowned concert pianist, and started a family.
In the midst of a heady world of poetry and liberal politics, gay love affairs and tense silences, Matthew Spender grew up the child of two brilliant artists. Taught how to use adjectives by Uncle Auden and raised among the British cultural elite, Matthew led what might have been a charmed existence were it not for the tensions in his own household. His father, always susceptible to the allure of young men, was unable to stop himself, or reveal his secret, for the sake of his family; and his mother's suffering led her to infatuations of her own. Stephen Spender: In Search of My Father is a son's attempt to reconstruct a portrait of his magnetic father and unconventional family out of the ambiguous experiences of his childhood.
Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries, family keepsakes and youthful memories, Matthew Spender tells the story of a singular family in the midst of its own cold war, as the artistic world of mid-century London circled around them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fraught, private life of English poet and novelist Stephen Spender, torn between his wife and children and his homosexuality, is dissected with rare subtlety in this mix of memoir and biography by his son. Spender (Within Tuscany) gives a lively account of Stephen's public life as a literary lion, with first-hand views of cocktail parties and piquant thumbnails of celebrities such as poet W.H. Auden and Charlie Chaplin. He includes a detailed recap of the Encounter magazine scandal, concluding that Stephen did not know the Cold War era periodical he edited was secretly funded by the CIA. However, most of Spender's focus is on Stephen's troubled marriage to the concert pianist Natasha Litvin, which was roiled by Stephen's affairs with men, Natasha's platonic affair with Raymond Chandler, and their competing neuroses. Spender's child's-eye view informs sympathetic but unsparing portraits of his parents: Stephen, selfish behind a pose of innocent passivity; Natasha, desperate to make others dependent upon her, hiding humiliation and anguish behind a fa ade of domestic propriety. The angst spreads when Spender meets his future wife, who trails her own parental history of infidelity and suicide. Clear-eyed and psychologically rich without wallowing in dysfunction, Spender's memoir is a fine evocation of the ties that bind and chafe. B+w photos.
