Eminent poet whose works never matched his ample fame

STEPHEN SPENDER: A LITERARY LIFE

By John Sutherland

Oxford, $40, 627 pages

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

“I think continually of those who are truly great.” That line of verse — one of the few memorable ones the English poet Stephen Spender ever managed to produce — is the key to his life as an artist and as a man. It is also a poignant expression of his relationship to the great tradition of English literature into which he was born and which he struggled throughout his life with only moderate success to augment.

Born into a literary family in London in 1909, Spender seems to have been a case of ancestry making destiny. His father and uncle were true 19th-century men of letters: writers and editors associated with the now-forgotten but once influential “Westminster Gazette;” the name Spender was certainly no handicap to a young man determined to become a writer.

Tall, blue-eyed, with an unruly but distinctive shock of hair, Spender’s striking appearance and studiedly poetic temperament engendered a natural comparison to the great Romantic poet and figure, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The trouble was that he lacked not only Shelley’s brilliant intellect (apparently Spender never passed an exam in his life) but also his prodigious talent and consummate artistry.

Indeed, Spender is an interesting example of a writer blessed with considerable name recognition among the reading public, a knighthood from queen and country for services to literature, and a reputation sufficient to ensure him a constantly supply of visiting positions at universities round the world. In short a writer with everything but a body of work that one might expect is the sine qua non of such eminence.

A career that spanned more than six decades of literary activity produced a lot of poems that are not much remembered, some ephemeral essays and other assorted prose, and — significantly — an autobiography of his youth and early maturity entitled “World Within World” that is widely admired and still available in a hardcover edition from Modern Library. For it is as the public face of poetry, the very type of the species, that we remember Spender a decade after his death and, sadly, not for the verse he actually produced.

To his credit, Spender was keenly aware of his failure to achieve what he had set out to do. Unlike his close friend Christopher Isherwood, he was never thought to hold the future of English literature in his hands, but much was expected of him and, more importantly still, he had great expectations for himself.

Yet he seems not have let this crucial failure embitter him nor in any way ruin his life. Like Isherwood, he achieved great personal and emotional happiness in his maturity after navigating very turbulent waters earlier on and this, combined with the busy public life of a successful literary figure, seems to have provided him with an ample measure of satisfaction.

Spender, then, would seem to be the perfect subject for a literary biography. A certain amount of emotional sturm und drang, a complicated sexuality with plenty of activity with partners of both sexes, fervent engagement in politics and world events, frequent travel, interesting friends and acquaintances — what better raw material could the biographer ask for? And yet John Sutherland’s “Stephen Spender: A Literary Biography,” which is also labeled “The Authorized Biography,” is a disappointingly lackluster work.

Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at London University, Sutherland is an experienced biographer whom one would think admirably suited to this subject. The biography begins promisingly enough with its vivid descriptions of the family and milieu into which Spender was born and continues strongly through his childhood (he lost his mother to illness and finally death when he was only 12), his education, and the wandering years in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe.

His youthful love affairs, homo- and heterosexual, a disastrous first marriage, his efforts for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War, his associations with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and other writers are all handled skillfully. Interestingly enough, much of this material was also memorably evoked by Spender in “World Within World,” yet Mr. Sutherland never seems merely to be rehashing the poet’s own version of events. Rather he successfully juxtaposes Spender’s account with his own, with the result that the reader of this biography gets a much fuller, more truthful picture than he could from the earlier book.

Mr. Sutherland notes that he originally intended to write his book only about Spender’s earlier life and it is perhaps unfortunate that he did adhere to his original plan. For the rest of his tale is a pretty dull one. Once you get through the poet’s incongruous but valiant work as a fireman during London’s terrible bombing in Hitler’s blitz and he settles down to a happy half-century of marriage which produces a son and daughter and lasts until his death, the book loses its acuteness.

It becomes one of those leaden biographies that seems little more than a fleshed-out version of someone’s date book: flying here, staying there, meeting this one. There’s a lot of surface but not much depth; the reader feels that he is only getting to see the faade, the public face, rather than the inner man.

Spender’s marriage and his bisexuality alone seem to cry out for sophisticated, savvy analysis. The facts of these topics are well documented in this book; what is lacking is exploration beneath the surface and at least a measure of explanation. Unlike Peter Parker’s recent biography of Isherwood, Mr. Sutherland’s does not seem to be entirely comfortable in the homosexual worlds of its subject. Perhaps it is because Lady Spender is still alive that he has felt constrained. Yet from interviews which this remarkable woman has given (and indeed because of the very qualities that enabled her to create such a happy marriage), it seems unlikely that she would have set such limits.

Mr. Sutherland knew Spender, not very well it’s true, but it is sad that the biographer seems as distant from his subject as the two men apparently were from one another.

Politics is another sphere where this biographer does not shine. He devotes due attention to the 1960s controversy when it became known that the journal Encounter, of which Spender was the founding British editor, had been financially supported by the CIA. Although this had been to some extent an open secret, Spender vowed total ignorance of CIA connections to his journal, which he had helped make into one of the liveliest and most admired literary publications of its time.

Full of righteous indignation, Spender resigned. Could he really have been that nave? Surely he knew that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (and the people associated with it) had CIA connections. His line seems to have been that he was more annoyed about being lied to than about the link itself.

Perhaps. But as one who had contributed to that seminal text of the anti-communist struggle, “The God That Failed,” and as someone who was actively opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms but even more sensitive to the communist variety because of his own past adherence to the party, why was Spender so outraged? Although Mr. Sutherland presents a full account of the brouhaha, he is unable, once again, to come up with the true illumination one looks for in a biography.

Spender’s position in 20th-century English literary history and his engagement (albeit in very different forms) with communism and nazism/fascism, the twin evils which poisoned so much of that century, makes it virtually certain that he will attract other biographers. Perhaps they will enable us to get under the skin of this enigmatic figure and thus understand why he loomed so large on the literary scene but was unable to enter the visionary company of the truly great of whom he thought so much.

Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.