Matthew Spender’s clear-eyed, perceptive portrait of his talented parents, Stephen and Natasha shows him to be a dab hand at analysing the motives for particular actions or responses on both their parts. It's as though he has studied mam and dad long and hard. He steps adroitly into the thought processes of Stephen, the generous-spirited, bi-sexual poet and political activist. He takes a sober look inside the heart and mind of his mother Natasha, the intensely striving concert pianist. That's her indoors - and often out of doors too - at the family home in St John's Wood which also included Matthew’s sister Lizzie and an Italian nanny.
Despite the somewhat irregular domestic arrangements, life in the Spender household was trouble-free in its own way - there were few confrontations in front of the children and Matthew has no chip on his shoulder. His mother assured her son as an adult that he had enjoyed a happy childhood and not to suggest any nonsense to the contrary. In reaction perhaps to a pompous, self-regarding father whom he hated, Stephen Spender was an indulgent father, who loved his wife, his son and his daughter.
Correspondingly, there are pleasant memories and anecdotes dredged from the welter of interminable tensions about lovers and friends which divided his parents. Or did such tensions ultimately unite them? Stephen and Natasha were fated to stay together, despite time out which included Natasha's masochistic days in Arizona and California with Raymond Chandler who was a chronic alcoholic.
The author recalls a holiday spent with his mother in Portofino on the Ligurian coast in 1949. On impulse, she commandeered a boat which she began to paddle it vigorously in an attempt to beat a female friend in a race which involved the latter climbing a long series of steps to arrive at the same destination.
"I’ve done my best to raise it (the race) to the level of trauma, but my life on the whole has been free of anything traumatic, so it remains just an instance of my mother behaving competitively, “ writes Matthew. From his toddler viewpoint, at that moment Natasha "shone with the gleeful sheen of early motherhood. Beautiful, with a child and a husband and a career, she was in the stage when the young mother says, Life, throw me a problem! There’s nothing I can solve!” There is also a loving evocation of the Italian resort of Torri del Benaco, on the Eastern shore of Lake Garda, a favoured holiday retreat for the family.
Stephen was not always - or even often - present at home, being a busy public figure at post-war literary conferences, teaching in the USA, or courting various male lovers. Natasha's discovery of continuing homosexuality in their marriage in the spring of 1947 led to a threat to throw herself off an Italian train, the memory of which threat still upset Stephen forty years later. “My father was terrified by this incident,“ writes his son. “It revealed to him an unpredictable area of her soul, and he had no idea how deep it reached.” A photograph from that time, included in the book, shows his parents standing side by side on a street in Verona, each of them mired in their own painful anxieties.
The couple had begun this ill-fated trip in France. “At a party in Paris, Natasha saw her husband across a crowded room talking to an elegant young man, “ writes Matthew. “She asked the person next to her who this man was. The reply: `Don’t you know? That’s Stephen’s new lover. My mother stood up, and promptly fainted. It was a terrible moment.”
However, such turbulence is only part of the peculiar story of the Spenders and their unconventional marriage, recalled vividly by their son who has lived and worked as a sculptor with his artist wife Maro for many years on a farm near Siena in Italy. Highly recommended.
Paddy Kehoe
