A House in St John's Wood

October 19, 2015
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 Warâera 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 façade 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 bindâand chafe. B+w photos.

Starred review from August 15, 2015
A frank memoir of Spender's problematic poet father and his emotionally remote pianist mother. Growing up among a generation of brilliant, creative British men who had to overcome enormous obstacles to their embrace of homosexuality left poet Stephen Spender's only son, sculptor and writer Matthew, with both a deep reverence for the creative act and a nose for self-deception. When his mother, Natasha Litvin, died in 2010 at the house in St. John's Wood where she had lived for nearly 70 years, the author recognized that he felt angrily ambivalent about his mother, who accused him of not properly guarding the rather romantic legacy of his father, who died in 1995. In his tremendously honest memoir, Spender explores his mother's absurd attempts to keep up appearances whiles her husband's work was devoted to truth, both in word and in politics, into which he plunged with his magazine Encounter. Spender traces the early life and career of his father and his important friendships with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who all influenced each other. Dallying with communism briefly and between romances with men and an early marriage, the poet married the classically trained Natasha in 1941. A pianist "who lived on her nerves," according to her son, she was continually devastated by her husband's dalliances with men, which began to dawn on the son when he read his father's autobiography. Gaps and silences pervaded the household, especially when his mother took off to care for Raymond Chandler in Palm Springs and his father took up with a young Reynolds Price. In the latter part of this touching memoir, the author looks at his father's political naivete over the CIA's bankrolling of Encounter and his own youthful romance with Maro Gorky, whose elusive father would become the subject of his first book, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (1999). A pointed family memoir from a writer keenly attuned to and reverent of genius.

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May 15, 2015

Chamberlain (The Silent Sister) adds to her stack of popular works about seesawing family dynamics with a novel centered on 14-year-old Molly Arnette, who lives on 100 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains with her therapist father and adoptive mother; her biological mother lives nearby. Summer 1990 starts out promisingly, but the adults have plans that will upend Molly's world.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015
As the first child of poet Stephen Spender and pianist Natasha Litvin, Matthew lived in a privileged world with access to some of the twentieth century's most influential people. In this guileless memoir-meets-biography, he portrays his parents as two well-known, politically and culturally active artists in post-WWII England who tried to establish a normal family. But their domesticity was built on an unsteady foundation, given Stephen's indifference to marriage, his homosexuality, and Natasha's resentful acceptance thereof. Still, the Spenders remained married, raised children, pursued careers, traveled, and lived abroad. Despite Stephen's ongoing affairs with men, they presented a united front to the world. Now, through Matthew's memories and use of unpublished documents, we have a realistic, in-depth view of charismatic, freedom-loving, and shrewd Stephen and perfectionist, stiff-upper-lipped, simmering-beneath-the-surface Natasha. Stephen believed in truthful writing; so did Natasha, if it was confined to a diary. Matthew continues the legacy of written truth by offering a sugar-free version of his own engaging life story while he unpacks the complicated tale of his parents' difficult and fascinating lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)