A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents

by Matthew Spender

Overview

A son's personal exploration of one of the most influential—and troubled—artistic couples of the twentieth century

Stephen Spender's life, with all its secrets, successes, and contradictions, is a vivid prism through which to view the twentieth century. He made friends with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood while at Oxford, and together the three had wild adventures in Europe, where they became early critics of Hitler and the rise of fascism. Like his friends, Stephen was drawn to other men, yet he eventually married Natasha Litvin, an ambitious young concert pianist, and they started a family.

Matthew Spender grew up in postwar England as the child of two celebrated artists deeply immersed in the political and cultural life of their times. Taught how to use adjectives by Auden and raised among an influential elite, Matthew led what might have been a charmed existence were it not for the tensions within his own household. His father, always susceptible to the allure of young men, was unable either to stop himself for the sake of his family or to reveal his secret; and his mother's suffering led her on a strange introspective quest of her own. Drawing on a wide range of unpublished letters and diaries, secret documents, and youthful memories, A House in St John's Wood is Matthew's remarkably clear-eyed attempt to make sense of the many conflicting messages of his unconventional youth and a deeply felt portrait of his magnetic father and guarded mother.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536466
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/25/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Matthew Spender is a writer and sculptor. His previous books include Within Tuscany, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky, and Goats on the Roof. He lives in Italy.

Editorial Reviews

It is hard to overstate how bravely honest Matthew Spender’s book is . . . Brilliantly paced . . . The book also matters in its own right, for its insight . . . into how we are all shaped by the strangeness of the families we find ourselves inhabiting . . . [A] remarkable book.” —Lara Feigel, The Guardian

"The heart of the book is filial and emotional. And very moving." —John Sutherland, The Financial Times

"[This] thoughtful and often astonishingly beautiful memoir . . . is exploratory, analytical, often critical, occasionally disloyal but ultimately a deeply moving work of filial pride, an attempt to try to work out not only the truth about his extraordinary parents but also himself." —Juliet Nicolson, Evening Standard

“A mesmerizing and gripping fulfillment of the universal wish of children to learn their parents' secrets, to know them as adults, A House in St. John's Wood is alive with the sensation of doors finally creaking open, of truths being told. That Matthew Spender's dad was Stephen Spender, who cast one of the longest literary shadows of the twentieth century, makes these discoveries not only personal but crucial missing pieces in our social history. A vivid writer as well as a sculptor, Spender uses language as a precision tool to reveal the soul of his extraordinary family.” —Brad Gooch, author of Smash Cut

“It is hard to overstate how bravely honest Matthew Spender's book is. It is the most truthful account we have had of the poet Stephen Spender . . . Matthew shirks none of the crucial issues. We learn categorically that Spender did know about the CIA funding and that he did have gay affairs during his marriage, though this didn't mean that he wished to divorce Natasha and live with a man, except at a few impassioned moments . . . The book also matters in its own right, for its insight not just into this family but into how we are all shaped by the strangeness of the families we find ourselves inhabiting, showing the possibilities and limits of filial love and loyalty . . . [A] remarkable book.” —Lara Feigel, The Guardian

“Like a circus aerialist, Matthew Spender performs on a high wire strung above his incredibly talented yet tormented family, searching for the reality behind their lives, for his relationship to Natasha Litvin, his celebrated pianist-mother, and his even more celebrated writer-father. After meeting Auden and Isherwood at Oxford, did Stephen Spender give up his early sequence of young male lovers to become the "pillar of integrity" that Natasha proclaimed him? And as co-editor of Encounter magazine, did he really miss completely the fact that the CIA was funding the magazine? Was Natasha's long relationship with mystery writer Raymond Chandler a romantic one? Most important, does Matthew ever connect with his parents? To find out, you will have to read this story that is at once biography and memoir, a tale written without a safety net, told with grace and sympathy.” —Ian MacNiven, author of Literchoor is My Beat

From the Publisher

10/19/2015
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 War–era 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 bind—and chafe. B+w photos. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2015-07-28
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 naiveté 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.

Kirkus Reviews