Matthew Spender was around nine years old when he noticed that something was off about the gardener. The middle-aged Tony, who also did odd jobs around the Spenders’ London home, would "say the weirdest things." For example: "Well, Matthew, and so there you are. Who ever would have thought of Stephen as a family man?" Stephen Spender, the poet, writer, editor, unwitting agent of the CIA, and by this point—1954 or so—a fixture in British letters, was Matthew’s father.
Given a simple task like building a shelter for some new family cats, Tony would go out of his way to suggest to young Matthew that the work he was doing was somehow "a mere formality." Of the cats themselves, he mused in a mysteriously pointed tone: "They’re half wild anyway. They’ll never stay here," leaving Matthew with the impression that Tony wanted him to understand "he knew a thing or two about freedom."
It wasn’t until adolescence, when Matthew took it upon himself to read his father’s autobiography, Worlds Within Worlds, that he learned what was very well known to the literary and cultural circles of which his parents were members—known even to Natasha, his mother—that Tony was Tony Hyndman, his father’s ex-lover. Not just ex-lover, but one alongside whom Stephen had traveled the Continent, and lived with all but openly for years during the 1930s.
And not just that: during one of the more bizarre episodes of the Spanish Civil War, Tony, having enlisted in the International Brigade, decided that he’d had enough, deserted, and then got arrested by Republican forces—leading Stephen to travel across Spain to tangle with various commissars in an effort to save him. The attention this rather romantic effort attracted contributed to Spender’s departure from the Communist Party soon thereafter. He was asking too many questions about methods the Party preferred to keep quiet, and was justifiably terrified of being extorted over his entanglement with Tony—no light matter, as such an affair was still illegal in Britain.
I suppose we all confront our parents’ secrets at some point or another, often in adolescence, but this has to set some sort of standard. And of course it wasn’t even really a secret—these aspects of Stephen’s life weren’t written or spoken of openly and in explicit terms, but anyone who was anyone knew who the "Jimmy Younger" of Worlds Within Worlds was. Virtually everyone knew what was implied when Spender rather breezily noted there that "when I met a young man who was unemployed … I asked him to live in my flat and work for me." When Stephen learned that Matthew had read the book, he was "thrilled," writing him to ask, "And what did you think of that, I wonder?"
The cameos alone in this beautifully written memoir are worth the price of purchase: A.J.P. Taylor throwing a fit in his garden in Oxford over the news that Hitler had invaded Russia; Mary McCarthy feuding in New York with a sinister, Stalinist Lillian Hellman; Guy Burgess making one of his last telephone calls before defecting to Moscow to the Spender home, hoping to catch Wystan (H. Auden), who was visiting, but who happened to be out; Patrick Leigh Fermor tipsily demonstrating ‘survival techniques’ in preparation for a trip Matthew was making to Marseilles with Conrad Asquith; Matthew’s future wife Maro Gorky, incapable of keeping quiet as a teenager, interrupting A.J. Ayer at a dinner party, only to be told by an exasperated Stephen to "SHUT UP."
Those familiar with the broad strokes of Stephen Spender’s life will recognize such a moment as unusually forceful: even wandering around Spain on absurd missions for the Communists (who at one point had the young poet, born into independent means, nosing around for a missing Soviet freighter) he was famously mild-mannered, all aggression thoroughly passive—a characterization that seems generally applicable to his sex life, for that matter. After leaving the Party (vintage of departure: 1937) his politics evolved into something similarly mild. Matthew, after knowing his father for half a century, and after spending years more among his papers, can only conclude that he became a "social democrat or wishy-washy liberal, or whatever it was."
The transition was minimally painful, though in the ’50s the McCarran Act posed an obstacle for obtaining a visa to the United States after Stephen, in a fit of honesty, admitted to Party membership two decades prior—prompting the American consul to smile and ask, "Mr. Spender, don’t you ever tell a lie?" Wishy-washy though it may have been in its doctrinal niceties, Spender promoted his liberalism indefatigably, helping to co-found Encounter and edit it alongside a revolving cast including Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald, Frank Kermode, and Melvin Lasky.
He resigned in 1967 after years of whispers were confirmed with the revelation that, all along, this magazine for socialists and liberals with an anti-Soviet bent had been funded by the CIA. Had such news broken a decade earlier, or even a few decades later, it might not have been so damaging. But, timed as it was with the Vietnam War and boiling anti-American sentiment in Britain, the disclosure was quite nearly fatal to Stephen’s reputation. Few could believe that a man so well-connected, so central to Encounter’s founding and management, could possibly have been as stupid or incurious as he seemed to claim.
Matthew himself struggles with this question, as has anyone who has taken the time to write about his father, relating tense, slightly ridiculous scenes of the Spender household at the time—trying to unwind his mother one evening by bringing out a Ouija board, only to have her demand of the spirit world, "Who is behind the financing of Encounter?" (Matthew and Maro conspired to produce the answer, "Malcolm Muggeridge.")
Stephen made it through, of course, ending up as Sir Stephen, a matter of no small pleasure to his wife—Lady Spender, as a consequence. Matthew doesn’t bother to conceal the fact that this memoir is a tangle less with his father’s legacy than with his now-deceased mother’s fierce guardianship of Stephen’s story. It is a temptation to apply the term "long-suffering" to Natasha, reading of Stephen’s pursuit of a dizzyingly substantial cast of young men throughout their marriage, but somehow it doesn’t seem to fit a woman who was herself such a remarkable figure, albeit damaged by the pain of it all, and certainly by the terror of her family’s exposure when such dalliances could have legal consequences.
Matthew describes his book as partially a contribution to the secret history of the British Establishment, though the experience of growing up in the heart of it seems to have been less damaging than vertigo inducing. Writing this book has left him with a mountain of private controversies to adjudicate, and one gets the sense that he does so responsibly, even if some conclusions strain credulity: that Stephen’s long affair with Reynolds Price was a sexless matter of the heart; and that Natasha’s similarly extended entanglement with a predatory Raymond Chandler, with whom she traveled à deux to Tangiers and Italy and Arizona—this last while Stephen was minding the kids in London and Price had more or less moved into the house—was similarly innocent of carnal knowledge.
On the one hand, that such a complex ménage could proceed without the commission of a sin here or there does beggar belief. On the other hand, Chandler was old and broken by alcohol and the Spenders were British. Either way, from the perspective of Matthew, coming of age in the ’60s and faced with the necessity of a good, old-fashioned youthful rebellion—well, how do you get crazier than this, let alone than Stephen’s well-documented (again, by his own hand, in the memoir) youth cruising the streets of Hamburg and Berlin?
Consciously or not, Matthew hit upon a genius solution—he fell in love with his future wife at the age of 16. There is in fact something poetic in the justice of his observation, "I wondered if I hadn't hit upon the one thing that would irritate my parents: domestic bliss. If I'd run away to Buenos Aires with a sailor, my father would have understood."
At one point Matthew reflects on how the lives of his parents and their circle give the lie to Philip Larkin’s observation that "Sexual intercourse began / in nineteen sixty-three." For Stephen in particular, sex was somehow tied up in both politics and art—Communism initially dangling a promise of freedom from traditional mores, and poetry something best achieved as the result of moments charged with love and attraction. The ’60s could provide no elaboration on any of that, and anyway by then Stephen had become a family man of a sort, to the chagrin of old companions like Tony, who had enjoyed his patronage in a time before so many compromises had to be made, and who seemed to view Matthew’s very existence—at least as he remembers it—as evidence of his father’s betrayal.