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.