'I was never in the faintest doubt of his devotion to me'


Natasha Spender survived childhood neglect to become a concert pianist, socialite and wife of poet Sir Stephen Spender. At 85, her memories of him - and his intense friendships with younger men - have been sharpened by a new biography. But before recalling them, she has a photocopier to fix...


Harriet Lane
Sunday May 9, 2004
The Observer



The stone gateposts are lurching like drunks; there's a Post-It on the front door asking visitors to knock loudly because the bell is broken; and, inside the hall, subsidence has pushed the parquet floor up into ripples. Standing on the front step of the house she and her husband first rented in 1944, a house on a blossom-strewn and now terribly smart street in St John's Wood, Lady Spender watches, baffled, as yellow diggers tear up the shrubbery next door. It was, she says, such a wonderful, mature garden, but the new owner, Philip Green (the man from BHS), doesn't want it - it's all quick-fix makeovers now, isn't it? - and so it must go.

At one point she mentions that she is on the waiting list for a hearing aid; at another, that when her husband, Sir Stephen Spender, died in 1995, she inherited 'one of those necklaces' he had been given by the borough council (which I think means a beeper like the one that alerts the emergency services to poor Mrs Hope, who is forever falling down the stairs in the back of magazines). Three weeks ago she was 85 - an event she celebrated at a Chinese restaurant with her daughter and several friends, including John Sutherland, whose authorised biography of Sir Stephen is about to be published, coinciding with a new Collected Poems - so it is not surprising that age should occupy her thoughts, but it does so only as the milk occupies her refrigerator. What with the cranberry juice, the leftover potatoes and the semi-circular ruin of a chocolate birthday cake that I spy when fetching milk for our 'Ness', her generic term for instant coffee, there's a bunch of other stuff in there as well.

When Sylvia Plath met the Spenders at a 1960 dinner given by TS Eliot, she described Natasha Spender, then a successful concert pianist, as 'lean, vibrant, talkative'. The words still fit today. We go inside, away from the awfulness in the next-door garden, and she becomes one of the most vividly alive people you could ever meet: sprinting to fetch books, to answer the phone, to the piano to play the opening bars of Schubert's Fantasy sonata. In a rare still moment, she coolly fixes the photocopier when it throws a wobbly. Though she insists words have started to elude her, just in the last six months - 'I do get stuck for names, like a donkey before a gate, in the middle of a sentence' - nothing stalls her today. The names pour forth.

And what names. Anna Freud, Jackie Kennedy, WH Auden, Isaiah Berlin: that's just the first three minutes. Lady Spender, it's obvious, is happiest talking about other people. What sounds initially like name-dropping is in fact self-effacement. Her anecdotes shift attention from herself. 'Well, I think there's one's inner life and one's outer life,' she says. 'One's inner life is not to be talked about, for it's so largely music.'

Towards the end of his life, Spender became, as Sutherland notes in his enjoyable biography, a 'sweeper-up of the Thirties group', a walking memory bank (gracious, too, as my mother found at a party 10 years ago. Not being clued up on his poetry, she asked him, rather apologetically, about George Orwell, 'and he gave the impression of being very glad to talk about him, he seemed to enjoy remembering slightly odd stories about him. He was charming; he opened a little window for me'). After a glorious debut - he was still an undergraduate when Eliot published him - Spender's own talents would always be to some degree overshadowed by his extraordinary connections, a fact he accepted for the most part with good humour, though it set him up as something of an Aunt Sally for the next generation.

The Spenders were first introduced at a jolly lunch party at Horizon, the magazine Sir Stephen had co-founded with Cyril Connolly. 'I was so not into literature,' says Lady Spender, 'that when they asked me to Horizon, I thought it was a pub.' It was 1940, and Natasha Litvin was a 21-year-old music student on the edge of an arty crowd; Spender was 10 years older, an established poet and critic closely associated with Auden, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis. He was also recovering from a disastrous first marriage to an earnest and exhausting-sounding beauty called Inez Pearn. After lunch, Natasha and Stephen did the washing- up, and went for a walk around Mecklenburgh Square, and out for dinner, and then met every day for the next fortnight. Not long afterwards, they were married. Stephen's most significant ex-boyfriend, Tony Hyndman, was one of the witnesses.

Right after Sir Stephen's death, Lady Spender's memory of that first meeting died too. This is a common symptom of bereavement, she says, like those hallucinatory visions you have sometimes in the street, when you're sure that's your husband in the distance. 'I thought I'd lost my memory completely. I was slightly alarmed. Then I received a letter from Isaiah which described Stephen from his undergraduate days, and it came back, absolutely - it unlocked everything. That was the man I married: very truthful, very open, and with an immense talent for happiness. When both of us were having a difficult time, one way or another, he'd make some kind of perceptive joke that restored one's equanimity. I suddenly remembered not only where we met, at the luncheon in the Horizon office, but the old telephone books outside the door, the noises in the street - everything.'

She must have been a very self-confident 21-year-old, I say, to hold her own with the Horizon crowd at that first party. But she says it wasn't confidence as much as 'having read, and being amused. I was always very curious then. The people they were talking about sounded exotic. I longed to know more. No, it wasn't self-confidence... I could behave. I could be plausible.' It was a social skill that she had learnt the hard way, though she would not phrase it like that herself.

One of the Spender family's much-loved maids, Bertha Mills, warmed to Natasha at their first meeting because 'she's illegitimate, and don't care who knows it'. Natasha's mother was Rachel (Ray) Litvin, an actress of Baltic extraction, who was a rising star at the Old Vic during the First World War. Natasha's father - though she was only told of his existence when she was 12 - was Edwin Evans, a music critic, friend of Stravinsky and Debussy, who happened to be married.

As her mother was busy earning a living, the infant Natasha was farmed out to a foster mother, 'the awful Mrs James' in Sussex, who left her in a high chair all day. Fortunately a friend of Ray's intervened - the implication being that Ray wasn't too bothered - and Natasha, then two-and-a-half, was passed over to Mrs Busby, 'this wonderful, steady, working-class woman', in Maidenhead. 'I really owe all the stability I have in my temperament, such as I have, to Mrs Busby.' Natasha grew up calling Mrs Busby 'Mother'; Ray was 'Mummy'. George and Margaret Booth, musical friends of her mother, were 'my other family', and she spent happy holidays at their house near the Sussex Downs.

She learnt how to fit in anywhere. 'In Maidenhead, I had my Berkshire voice. Staying with the Booths, I had my upper-class voice. I never got confused. Once or twice Uncle George taught me how to say "agin", instead of "again", things like that, but I found I could slip from one to the next without any problem. I could change gear like that.' Occasionally, when these worlds overlapped, there was a price to pay. Every three months, Ray would pay rather alarming visits when she would lay down the law, informing Natasha that she was not, for instance, to play with the other children on the street. 'It was,' says Lady Spender generously, 'because she was over-anxious.' One weekend with her mother was spent staying with Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, 'who seemed to live in a house in a tree'. He signed her autograph book, 'To Natasha from her admirer, Charles Laughton', though when she showed this off back in Maidenhead, everybody thought she had faked it.

Then Ray contracted typhoid and went deaf quite suddenly, which put paid to the stage career. Just short of her 12th birthday, Natasha went to live with her mother for the first time, in a one-room flat in Primrose Hill. (She went back to see the Busbys in Maidenhead occasionally. Her foster sister, Nan, married a bank manager and wrote several Mills and Boons; her foster brother, Cecil, became a publican.) In London, the steadiness was now provided by her music teacher. It was clear that Natasha must become a pianist.

Cash was a problem. Out of the blue, Ray told Natasha that she had a father who was alive, and that she must ask him for some money. 'Not the best beginning to a relationship. We were rather embarrassed, really. Somehow we got over it. I really spent the time playing the piano to him and he said I ought to be a composer and he would get lessons for me.' Her father was 'the fattest man in London', and wore a huge opera hat. She found him rather frightening.

In 1935, aged 16, Natasha won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. A fellow student, a cellist, was a refugee from the Nazis, and Lady Spender remembers her 'playing with her life to earn the money to get her parents out of Germany'. Talking to John Sutherland has illuminated many memories like this, things that had slipped away into the darkness. It has been a salutary experience, she says. 'In having to describe those things to a biographer, one relives them. One had forgotten the intensity of it.' For his part, Sutherland pays tribute to Lady Spender in his acknowledgements: 'At no point has she imposed restraint on the biographer.' (The debt is two-way. Staying at the Spenders' Provençal home in 1999 while researching the book, Sutherland and his wife saved Natasha from a brush fire which completely destroyed the house and garden.)

People have always been fascinated by Stephen Spender's sexuality, not least because in his 1951 autobiography, World Within World, he wrote frankly about his early homosexual experiences. He wasn't being political about it, says his widow: just truthful. 'I feel a bit amused at the moment when people in the gay world see themselves as knight errants when it costs them very little in comparison. I won't say they're on a bandwagon, because they still have things to contend with. But Stephen was really courageous because when he wrote World Within World, he could have been put in prison, and he knew that. It was a hair-raising time.'

Throughout his life, Spender continued to have very intense relationships with younger men. Sutherland is clear that his long-lasting bond with the academic Reynolds Price was not sexual, but he is less definite about the May-December friendship struck up in his seventies with Bryan Obst, a twentysomething American zoologist (Spender had always been interested in the natural world. As a boy, he prayed for his caterpillars when everyone else was praying for those on the Western Front) who died of Aids in 1990.

Lady Spender says she never felt shut out by her husband's intimate friendships, 'because I understood . What's very interesting about all those friendships is that they were always talented people, people that he taught. We say people,' she corrects herself, 'but there's only two or three.'

So what was going on with Bryan Obst? Was it sexual or not? 'It's less clear, isn't it?' says Lady Spender, lightly. 'I think it was passion but nevertheless it was related to their shared talent.' Marriage, she says, 'is not ownership, it's devotion. I was never in the faintest doubt of Stephen's total devotion - or mine to him. And so it doesn't touch you as it might a person who thinks, "He's my husband, what's he doing with so-and-so?" That didn't really occur. I do know young people who behave as if they bought their husband at Selfridges.'

It must have helped that her identity came not just from her role as Stephen Spender's wife, and mother of Matthew and Lizzie, but from her own professional achievements. In her forties, she was forced to give up the piano because of breast cancer, which affected her arm muscles, but she quickly re-established herself as an academic specialising in the psychology of music, and contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. There was a dreadful period of adjustment, but 'I was prudent. I knew that if I thought about the works I'd not yet played in public but wanted to do, I'd torment myself.' She remembers arriving to stay with her husband in Chicago, where he was then working, and the radio being tuned to Rudolf Serkin playing the second Brahms concerto. 'Now I knew the second Brahms concerto but I'd never played it with an orchestra. I had to switch it off. But other than that, I just avoided occasions that I thought might make me feel very, very wistful. I very quickly felt less pain.'

Losing Stephen has similarities, she says, with losing the music, though rather than avoiding emotional triggers, she has immersed herself in them by becoming her husband's literary executor. Shortly after the Queen Mother died, Lady Spender was listening to the wireless, to a lady-in-waiting recollecting a discussion they'd had about bereavement. 'She'd said to the Queen Mother, "Ma'am, does it ever get any better?" And I knew the Queen Mother a bit so I can hear her saying this; she said, "No, actually, it doesn't get any better, but you get better at it." And that was such a wise thing to say.'

{ Harriet Lane, The Guardian, 9 May 2004 }