Sir Stephen Harold Spender (February 28, 1909 - July 16, 1995) was an English poet and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work.
Life
Born in London to a journalist father, Spender went to University College, Oxford, where he met WH Auden. He did not finish his degree however, and went to Germany. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis. He knew T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf too, to such a degree, that it has been claimed they were his surrogate parents! He would later come to know Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Brodsky , Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas and Sartre amongst many others.
His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.
When the Spanish civil war began, he went with the International Brigades to fight against Franco's fascist forces. Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party, told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement."
A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism in the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which many leftists saw as a betrayal.
In WWII he was with the London fire service. He co-founded Horizon magazine with Cyril Connolly and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. He was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966. Spender taught at various American institutions, accepting the Elliston Chair of Poetry at Cincinnati University in 1953.
In 1980, following a lecture in Oneonta, New York, Spender's plane was grounded due to bad weather, so he took a taxi 287 miles to Manhattan for a date with Jacqueline Onassis. "I simply had to get there," he said.
Stephen Spender was knighted in 1983. In many ways, this demonstrated how much he had diverged politically from his pre-WWII days.
Stephen Spender and homosexuality
He was friends with gay fellow poets Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, with whom he had a mentoring relationship. Spender himself had many homosexual affairs in his earlier years, most notably with Tony Hyndman (who is called "Jimmy Younger" in his memoir World Within World). During World War II, he decided to shift his focus to heterosexuality, marrying concert pianist Natasha Litvin in 1941. Consequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry, for example the line
- "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution."
got revised to read
- "Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution."
Spender also sued gay author David Leavitt for allegedly using his relationship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt's While England Sleeps in 1994. The case was settled out of court with Leavitt removing certain portions from his text.
Spender's seemingly changing attitudes towards homosexuality and heterosexuality have caused him to be labeled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labeling.
Perhaps this discussion was foreseen by him, because he addresses this issue quite thoroughly in World Within World. However, even there he cannot fully decide on one explanation for what he does but prefers to give several ones, right after writing about his first, clearly homosexual, but also very one-sided relationship with a fellow student at Oxford:
-
1. Spender feels the assignment of labels to emotions to be limiting oneself's freedom, an act which was unnecessary until the 20th century:
-
- "Yet I have come to wonder whether many contemporaries in labelling themselves [homosexuals] do not also condemn themselves to a kind of doom of being that which they consider themselves in the psychological text-book. (...) As a result of this tendency to give themselves labels, people feel forced to make a choice which, in past times, was not made."
-
In other words, labeling oneself a certain way may have a feedback on behavior, as he describes in another part of his autobiography, that when he learns he is part Jewish, he begins to "feel Jewish".
-
2. He feels homosexual relationships mostly coexisted with "normal", that is heterosexual, relationships throughout history, for example in Shakespeare's sonnets "what does Shakespeare say to his lover? Get married and have a child."
-
3. He somewhat questions the whole concept of a "third sex", that is, people who are exclusively homosexual, as put forth by 19th century science:
-
- "At no point is there an acceptance of the idea of the poet and his lover friend belonging to a world of a third sex, which is characteristic of much literature in the twentieth century."
- 4. Without further reasons, he asserts that one's goal in life should be to be "normal", which he defines as matching closely what society perceives as "normal" and what is "normal" for oneself, i.e. to "conform with" one's nature. This act is regarded by him as an overcoming of "limitations" in oneself, a word he uses repeatedly to suggest his attraction to other men.
- 5. Spender feels that an artist (and maybe specifically a poet) requires the interaction with "normal" people as an inspiration and may not place himself in a situation where he is "cut off from this warm flow of the normal general life".
- 6. Finally (and maybe this reason is somewhat more telling than the others, because it is less rational), Spender blames others for "guarding" him from intimacy with women, both at Oxford and before. At the same time, however, he admits that his expression of emotion towards an "attractive nurse" was "without consciousness of the implications" of what he was doing, which stands in marked contrast to his very conscious, painful feelings of attraction to his fellow student.
Bibliography (incomplete)
Poetry
-
Twenty Poems (1930)
-
Vienna (1934)
-
Poems of Dedication (1936)
-
The Still Centre (1939)
-
Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (1955)
-
The Generous Days (1971)
- Selected Poems (1974)
-
Collected Poems 1928-19851986)
- New Collected Poems Edited by Michael Brett, 2004
Letters
Essays
- The Destructive Element (1935)
-
The God That Failed ((1938) - with others, ex-Communists' testimonies)
- The Creative Element (1953)
- The Making of a Poem (1955)
- The Struggle of the Modern (1963)
- Love-Hate Relations (1974)
- The Thirties and After (1978)
Drama
Memoir
- World Within World (1951)
Fiction
External links
