Stephen Spender: a Life in Modernism - Hardcover

Leeming, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805042490 ISBN 13: 9780805042498

Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

The first critical biography of one of the twentieth century's towering literary figures.

Stephen Spender was a minor poet, but a major cultural influence during much of the century. Literary critic, journalist, art critic, social commentator, and friendend of the best-known cultural figures of the modernist and postmodernist periods (Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, Auden, Eliot, Isherwood, Hughes, Brodsky, Ginsberg-a "who's who" of contemporary literature). Spender's writing recorded and distilled the emotional turbulence of many of the century's defining moments: the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; the human rights struggle after the war; the Vietnam protest, the Cold War, and the 1960s sexual revolution; the rise of America as a cultural and political force. As David Leeming's fascinating biography demonstrates, Stephen Spender's life reflected the complexity and flux of the century in which he lived: his sexual ambivalence, his famous friends, the free-love days in Germany between the wars, the CIA-Encounter scandal. In David Leeming's capable hands, this comprehensive, unauthorized study of Spender is a meditation on modernity itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Leeming, a former professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, is the author of The World of Myth, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, and James Baldwin: A Biography (Owl Books, 0-8050-3835-3). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Stephen Spender

1

CHILDHOOD AND HERITAGE

Stephen Harold Spender was born on February 28, 1909, at 47 Campden House Court in London. The Spenders were the epitome of the reasonably well-to-do, upper-middle-class late-Edwardian family with liberal-progressive views on politics and somewhat "low church" Victorian ones on morality and lifestyle. Stephen Spender would ultimately absorb the essence of the former and reject the latter.

Spender's liberal social and political attitudes and his role as a public man of letters and a consummate insider were inevitably influenced by the presence and priorities of his strong father. Harold Spender was a reformist journalist with the London Daily News and a sometimes Liberal politician. He was a man who "knew everybody" in the Liberal Party during its last years of power, including the prime minister, David Lloyd George, whose authorized biographer he was.

The outsider side of Stephen Spender's personality, the side characterized by shyness and awkwardness, can be attributed in part to his sense of being cornered by his father's Victorian values of duty, purity, and discipline in both the public and private spheres. From an early age Spender rejected and rebelled against his father's abstract principles andhis tendency to be rhetorical rather than personal. He reveled instead in the concrete and the physical and in the exploration of his inner self and by adolescence had developed a desire to experiment in activities of which his parents would have disapproved. He sensed that his father's world was a dying one, that his father was essentially a "failure" in spite of his rhetoric and his dominance in the family. The Spender household was one of "Puritan decadence" that led Stephen to a retreat into himself.

If Spender's predilection for confessional poetry and self-searching autobiography was attributable in part to his rejection of his father, it was perhaps even more attributable to the personality of his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, whom Harold had married in 1904. A poet and painter, and a chronic victim of heart problems and other ailments, Violet Spender was very much the sensitive, self-absorbed outsider. Spender always felt, too, that the sense of his Jewishness, inherited from his mother, contributed to his tendency toward self-deprecation--a "self-hatred and self-pity, an underlying perpetual mourning amounting at times to spiritual defeatism"--and, more positively, to a certain softness and inquisitiveness that contrasted with the "aloof, hard, external English" ways that he simultaneously envied, feared, and loved.1 In later years Oxford friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice would tell Spender that he had always thought of him--even at Oxford--as being Jewish "because under everything there is an underlying quality of melancholy or sadness about your character," a characteristic MacNeice associated with Jews.2

In his relationships with both of his parents, young Stephen felt dissatisfaction, then. Before his rebellion he longed especially for the approval of his exacting father, even deciding at a young age that he must strive to be prime minister one day in order to please him. Stephen always felt, however, that Harold much preferred his more athletic and academically successful older son, Michael, who had a great deal of that "aloof, hard, external English" aspect. Michael was able to tolerate Harold's impersonal and rhetorical approach to his children. Spender describes in World Within World how Harold Spender once visited Michael at school and was asked to read the lesson at the evening chapel service. The lesson was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Michael was the organist that day, seated, therefore, in the organ loft far away from where his father was standing. At a crucial point in the lesson, Harold Spender, "with a flourish," removed his glasses "and gazing up at my brother in the distance exclaimed in the voice of the father beholding his prodigal son: 'But when he was as yet a great way off, his father saw him ... .'"3

Harold Spender was born to a family of successful and progressive physicians and writers. His maternal grandfather, Edward Headland, was known for his "modern" ideas about the education and the role of women in society. He married the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, who gave birth to Lily Headland in 1835. Lily would be educated far beyond the level of most women of her time. She became a linguist and a writer (under the name of Mrs. J. K. Spender). Her novel Parted Lives (1873) achieved some considerable success, as did several others after it. In 1858 she had married John Kent Spender, a prominent physician of progressive leanings, whose father was also a doctor who held similar views. The Bath Spenders were descended from an old Bradford-on-Avon family. John Kent Spender achieved fame for his medical writings, but it was Lily's publications that created the trust money that would provide their children and grandchildren with some financial security. Stephen Spender never knew his paternal grandparents, as they both died before he was born.

Harold was the second son of Lily and John Kent. There were eight children in all, one of whom, Hugh, followed in his mother's footsteps by becoming a popular novelist. Throughout his life Harold stood in the shadow of his older brother, Alfred, who later went by the name J. A. Spender when he was chairman of the Liberal Federation, influential editor of the Westminster Gazette, and authorized biographer of his friend the prime minister H. H. Asquith, archrival in the Liberal Party of Harold Spender's hero, David Lloyd George. The rivalry between Asquith and Lloyd George was reflected in a certain coldness between the two brothers.

All of the Spender children, male and female, were formally educated.Both Alfred and Harold excelled at the local Bath College--a progressive school, developed as an alternative to the great public boarding schools, and committed to the highest academic standards. Harold followed Alfred as head boy at the school before also following him to Oxford, but to University College rather than to Alfred's much more prestigious Balliol College. Both men did well at the university, Harold a bit better than Alfred, but it was Alfred who, on their arrival in London, quickly became the greater success in their chosen profession of journalism.

Stephen's mother, Violet, was as difficult to please as her husband, but for different reasons, and young Stephen felt that she kept him at a distinct distance. Perhaps because of her chronically "delicate" state, she was self-absorbed and impatient with the noise of children. One of Spender's early memories of her places her with "a plaid rug over her knees, ... on a chaise longue, perpetually grieving over I know not what."4 Another time, when he was a small child, she appeared at the door of the nursery, "with a white face of Greek tragedy, and exclaimed like Medea: 'I now know the sorrow of having borne children.'"5 Although Stephen shared her sensitivity and love of things artistic, he sensed his mother's impatience with him, and rather than consider her an ally, he associated her with his father's Victorian emphasis on duty, purity, and discipline.

Violet came from a family as formidable in its way as the Headlands and Spenders. Her grandfather Sir Herman Weber was a German Catholic whose mother had been partly Italian. After his migration from the Rhineland in Germany to England he became a prominent physician, was close to the great Liberal prime minister William Gladstone, and was knighted in 1899. He died on Armistice Day in 1918. Sir Herman's wife was a Danish Lutheran whose family name was Gruning. Among their children was Hilda Weber, who was artistic, interested in modern art and literature, liberal in her...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805042490
• ISBN 13: 9780805042498
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar