Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Spender CBE | |
---|---|
Born | Kensington, London, England | 28 February 1909
Died | 16 July 1995 St John's Wood, London, England | (aged 86)
Occupation | Poet, novelist, essayist |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University College, Oxford |
Spouse |
|
Children |
Sir Stephen Harold Spender
Early life
Spender was born in
Spender was acquainted with fellow
Career
This section needs additional citations for verification. (December 2022) |
Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988, under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England's, particularly about relationships between men, and shows frightening harbingers of Nazism that are confusingly related to the very openness the man admires. Spender wrote in his 1988 introduction:
In the late Twenties young English writers were more concerned with censorship than with politics.... 1929 was the last year of that strange Indian Summer—the Weimar Republic. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives[5]
Spender was discovered by
His early poetry, notably Poems (1933), was often inspired by social protest. Living in
At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work: Paul Valéry, André Gide and Eliot. Hemingway even broke his rule of not reading in public if Spender would read with him. Since Spender agreed, Hemingway appeared for a rare reading in public with him.[8]
In 1936, Spender became a member of the
In January 1937, during the
In July 1937, Spender attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers, including Hemingway, André Malraux, and Pablo Neruda.[13]
Pollitt told Spender 'to go and get killed; we need a
Spender's 1938 translations of works by Bertolt Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.[14]
Spender felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half-Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, and her mother came from an upper-class family of
After leaving the Communist Party, Spender wrote of his disillusionment with communism in the essay collection
After the war, Spender was a member of the
With
Spender insisted that he was unaware of the ultimate source of the magazine's funds. He taught at various American institutions including University of California at Berkeley and Northwestern University.[19][20] He accepted the Elliston Chair of Poetry[21] at the University of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961, he became professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.
Spender helped found the magazine
During the late 1960s, Spender frequently visited the University of Connecticut, which he declared had the 'most congenial teaching faculty' he had encountered in the United States.[24]
Spender was Professor of English at
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life... and left the vivid air signed with your honor'.
World of art
Spender also had profound intellectual workings with the world of art, including
Spender 'collected and befriended artists such as Arp, Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Giacometti, Gorky, Guston, Hockney, Moore, Morandi, Picasso and others'. In The Worlds of Stephen Spender, the artist Frank Auerbach selected art work by those masters to accompany Spender's poems.[29]
Spender wrote China Diary with David Hockney in 1982, published by Thames and Hudson art publishers in London.[30]
The Soviet artist Wassily Kandinsky created an etching for Spender, Fraternity, in 1939.[31]
Personal life
In 1933, Spender fell in love with Tony Hyndman, and they lived together from 1935 to 1936.[17] In 1934, Spender had an affair with Muriel Gardiner. In a letter to Christopher Isherwood in September 1934, he wrote, 'I find boys much more attractive, in fact I am rather more than usually susceptible, but actually I find the actual sexual act with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting, and, in fact, more everything'.[17] In December 1936, shortly after the end of his relationship with Hyndman, Spender fell in love with and married Inez Pearn after an engagement of only three weeks.[32] The marriage broke down in 1939.[17] In 1941, Spender married Natasha Litvin, a concert pianist. The marriage lasted until his death. Their daughter, Elizabeth Spender, previously an actor, was married to the Australian actor and satirist Barry Humphries until his death in April 2023, and their son, Matthew Spender, is married to the daughter of the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky.
Spender's sexuality has been the subject of debate. His seemingly changing attitudes have caused him to be labelled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply something complex that resists easy labelling.[33] Many of his friends in his earlier years were gay. Spender had many affairs with men in his earlier years, most notably Hyndman, who was called 'Jimmy Younger' in his memoir World Within World. After his affair with Muriel Gardiner, he shifted his focus to heterosexuality,[17] but his relationship with Hyndman complicated both that relationship and his short-lived marriage to Pearn. His marriage to Litvin in 1941 seems to have marked the end of his romantic relationships with men but not the end of all homosexual activity, as his unexpurgated diaries have revealed.[34] Subsequently, he toned down homosexual allusions in later editions of his poetry. The following line was revised in a republished edition: 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution' to 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution'. Nevertheless, he was a founding member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, which lobbied for the repeal of British sodomy laws.[35] Spender sued 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.
Death
On 16 July 1995, Spender died of a heart attack in Westminster, London, aged 86.[36] He was buried in the graveyard of St Mary on Paddington Green Church, in London.
Stephen Spender Trust
The Stephen Spender Trust is a registered charity that was founded to widen the knowledge of 20th-century literature, with a particular focus on Spender's circle of writers, and to promote literary translation. The trust's activities include poetry readings; academic conferences; a seminar series in partnership with the Institute of English Studies; an archive programme in conjunction with the British Library and the Bodleian; work with schools via Translation Nation; the Guardian Stephen Spender Prize, an annual poetry translation prize established in 2004; and the Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize, a worldwide Russian–English translation competition.[37]
Awards and honours
Spender was awarded the Golden PEN Award in 1995.[38]
Works
Poetry
Drama
Novels and short story collections
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Criticism, travel books and essays
Memoir
Letters and journals
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See also
- List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric
References
- ISBN 978-0-19-517816-6.
- ISBN 978-1-4299-3974-4.
- ISBN 978-0-19-517816-6.
- ISBN 9781611688542.
- S2CID 161250466.
- ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 4 August 2019.
- ^ a b "Trial of a Judge: A Tragedy in Five Acts". Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ISBN 9780803260979.
- ISBN 9780099561071.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 8 October 2017.
- ^ Sutherland, John (21 August 2015). "A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents by Matthew Spender; Review by John Sutherland". The Financial Times. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
- ISBN 978-0-00-813208-8.
- ISBN 978-0-141-01161-5.
- ^ New Writing at Google Books. Retrieved 21 March 2009.
- ^ "Stephen Spender". poetryarchive.org.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Stephen Holt, Manning Clark and Australian History, 1915–1963, St Lucia: UQP, 1982, p. 60.
- ^ . Retrieved 21 December 2008.
- ^ Frances Stonor Saunders (12 July 1999). "How the CIA plotted against us". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 11 November 2010. Retrieved 21 December 2008.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 12 January 2023.
- ^ Archives, L. A. Times (17 July 1995). "Sir Stephen Spender; British Poet, Essayist". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 12 January 2023.
- ^ "Resources: George Elliston Poetry Foundation". asweb.artsci.uc.edu. Archived from the original on 21 February 2002. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
- ^ Warwick McFadyen, review of John Sutherland's biography Stephen Spender, The Age, p. 3 [date missing]
- ^ "Poet Laureate Timeline: 1961–1970". Library of Congress. 2008. Retrieved 19 December 2008.
- required.)
- ^ "No. 42683". The London Gazette (Supplement). 25 May 1962. pp. 4316–4317.
- ^ "No. 49375". The London Gazette (Supplement). 10 June 1983. pp. 1–2.
- ^ "No. 49575". The London Gazette. 20 December 1983. p. 16802.
- ^ "- Henry Moore: Prints and Portfolios". webarchive.henry-moore.org. Retrieved 11 August 2019.
- ^ The Worlds of Stephen Spender ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 2018 Catalog Hauser & Wirth Publishers Books Exhibition Catalogues 9783906915197.
- OCLC 490550105.
- ^ "Vasily Kandinsky. Plate (folio 9) from Fraternity (1939)". MoMA.org. Retrieved 11 August 2019.
- ISBN 978-1-9996543-2-0.
- ^ "glbtq >> literature >> Spender, Sir Stephen". glbtq.com. Archived from the original on 9 October 2014. Retrieved 8 April 2015.
- ^ Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century, Penguin Books (ISBN 978-0-14-192430-4), 2013, p. 216.
- ISBN 9781906791988. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
- ^ Stephen Spender: A Literary Life
- ^ "The Stephen Spender Trust". stephen-spender.org.
- ^ "Golden Pen Award, official website". English PEN. Archived from the original on 21 November 2012. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
Further reading
- Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation. 1976.
- Spender, Matthew. A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
- Sutherland, John. Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography. 2004; U.S. edition: Stephen Spender: A Literary Life. 2005.
- Sutherland, John & Feigel, Lara (eds.) Stephen Spender: New Selected Journals 1939-1995. Faber & Faber, 2012.
External links
- Stephen Spender Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
- profile and poems at Poets.org
- profile and poems written and audio at Poetry Archive[permanent dead link]
- profile and poems at Poetry Foundation
- Peter A. Stitt (Winter–Spring 1980). "Stephen Spender, The Art of Poetry No. 25". The Paris Review. Winter-Spring 1980 (77).
- Ernest Hilbert reviews of Stephen Spender's autobiography World Within World. Random House Publishers
- Stephen Spender Trust
- "Spender's Lives" – Ian Hamilton, The New Yorker
- "Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?" – Stephen Metcalf, Slate.com, 7 February 2005
- Stephen Spender at the Internet Broadway Database
- Stephen Spender at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Stephen Spender collection, circa 1940-1987