A House in St John’s Wood: In Search of My Parents. Matthew Spender
sorts of absurd dramas being performed.’ Somehow the story fumbled its way to a conclusion without any casualties. Kirk eventually went off to Ibiza and Stephen sent Hellmut back to Berlin.
Because it dealt with homosexual acts, it was inevitable that Stephen’s brave novel The Temple would be turned down. On one of these occasions – and there were many – Stephen wrote a revealing letter to his grandmother, who’d become involved in trying to place the book: ‘To me the book has the significance of a vow that I made to my friends. I promised them that I would write absolutely directly about certain things, and I think it is right that I should fulfil my promise. I am writing and working and living for my own generation and, in that sense, being modern is a religion with me.’ The conventional life of the 1850s was dead, he wrote. ‘As regards sexual abnormality, I don’t think that, or any other of the startling symptoms of contemporary society that so shock the English reader, are nearly so important as people imagine. My feeling is that if one loves one’s fellow-beings, one cant be so very abnormal.’
He’s hinting, I think, that The Temple was in some way connected to the stories that Isherwood was writing at the time. If the comparison is worth making, then his novel is more explicit, perhaps more courageous than the ambiguous and undefined ‘Herr Issyvoo’ of the Berlin stories. Christopher read several versions of the book but, having once written a ferocious criticism of a novel by Stephen, he kept his comments to himself.
Deep down, my father must have known that The Temple would never be published. Quite apart from its sex scenes, it was also libellous. I suspect he sustained himself through five rewrites by the fantasy that one day it would come out, and the book would be denounced to the magistrates and banned, and he himself put on trial for obscenity. At Oxford he’d met Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, and he’d invited her to speak to the English Society. She’d replied with a letter of touching bravery describing all her troubles with the magistrates, which were long and costly. Stephen also admired unconditionally D. H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover had also been banned. If he’d ever been arrested, he would have given a passionate speech in support of freedom of expression along the lines of the letter he’d sent to his grandmother.
IN THE SPRING of 1933, near Piccadilly Circus, a few weeks after he’d published his first volume of poems with Faber, Stephen met Tony Hyndman. The book had placed Stephen firmly in the limelight and critics were beginning to pay attention to a whole new school of young British poets. He was full of confidence and, in his usual impetuous way, Stephen immediately invited Tony to come and live with him. They were together for the next six years; and at some level they remained attached to each other for the rest of Tony’s life.
I take the view that Stephen’s desire to live openly with Tony in the early Thirties was a brave attempt for the time. If the affair failed, it was because Tony couldn’t reach the role that Stephen had imagined for him. Though he was quick and sharp about London literary gossip, he was unable to become a serious person. The initial attraction of Tony was, of course, the opposite of this. He was down to earth, humorous, light-hearted. But since he never changed, since he couldn’t learn to love Mozart or Michelangelo (as it were), my father lost his temper. By the time he ran off to fight in Spain, Tony had become ‘the son whom I attempted to console, but of whom I was the maddening father’.
I remember Tony from my childhood, when he was not much older than forty. He spoke with a slight Welsh lilt and was cheerful to look at, with curly brown hair and a friendly smile. My father employed him in the garden whenever he was desperate for cash, which was often. Tony was full of compliments for my small self but touchy about his relationship with Stephen, which he implied had included a wealth of experience that had nothing to do with Mummy or me. This wasn’t clear to me at the age of eight, but by the age of twelve I’d noticed that Tony wasn’t a real handyman. He was too knowing.
Years later when he was planning his autobiography, Tony wrote that it must have been fate that had brought them together. ‘To me, from the moment I left Hyde Park Corner I was alone. Every step towards the Circus, each pause at a shop window in case some gent might pick me up, all the moments of time, step and pace led me to you.’
They moved into Stephen’s small flat in St John’s Wood. After less than a fortnight they left England and toured Europe: Paris, Florence, Rome, then northwards to Levanto on the coast between Tuscany and Liguria. There, in a palm-secluded hotel above the sea, they went through their first major confrontation. Tony mentions it twice in his memoirs. ‘In Levanto where I wept because suddenly all my resistance went. There was the urge to give, not to take; to protect instead of protection.’ And again: ‘What happened was inevitable, having got so far. “Will we always be friends” said Stephen one night: I broke down: never given myself to anyone before: it was complete: I wept with relief.’
Stephen remembered this occasion differently. According to him Tony said, ‘I want to go away. You are very nice to me, but I feel that I am becoming completely your property. I have never felt like that before with anyone, and I can’t bear it.’ He probably expected Stephen to beg him to stay, but instead Stephen said he was free to go, if that’s what he wanted. They’d meet again in London, perhaps. However, ‘by saying this, I had deprived him of any reason for wishing to leave’.
In those days, working-class boys who lived with some ‘gent’, as Tony put it, assumed identities that had been worked out for them since time immemorial. They learned these roles in the bars and the barracks and the Lokalen where boys congregated. Gerhart Meyer, Auden’s lover in Berlin, was a ‘tough’ boy. Harry Giese was the ‘reliable ox’ who wanted to be cared for. Hellmut Schroeder was a ‘broken wing’ boy, the misunderstood genius; and Stephen had followed the fantasy as far as it could go, given that Hellmut didn’t actually produce anything. These roles formed a protective shell to disguise the fact that the ‘boy’ was in a subordinate position. It was a matter of pride. That’s why, after Tony collapsed in Levanto, he never forgot. He’d revealed once and for all that he was Stephen’s dependant. No amount of reassurance from Stephen could eradicate this mistake.
If you have a wide education you don’t mind being humiliated, because you have nothing to lose. Everything important is in your head where nothing can get at it – as Stephen had realized when he’d been robbed in Hamburg. Even something as humiliating as scrubbing lavatories in jail won’t affect your capacity to think, but if you are aiming to improve your social status, the faintest trace of public humiliation raises questions about rank and respect. Tony’s position is therefore, to me, more poignant than Stephen’s. And Stephen’s generous offer of equality to Tony was self-delusional. It merely underlined the fact that Tony was not Stephen’s equal.
Yet there was something in this unexpected confrontation that broke an inhibition in Stephen as well. He was made to realize that he could, after all, communicate with Tony in spite of the difference of class. This had never happened so far. As he wrote to Isaiah: ‘When I was first here the very fact that I was with someone whose difference from me I had to accept & recognize made things very painful for me. Because till now I have always had that kind of relationship with people who were tarts or sneaks or liars or something, & all that was required from me was an attitude. This is quite different & was at first less noble and more difficult. However now we are both reaping the fruits.’
Back in London in the early summer of 1933, they tried to create an identity as a couple before their friends came back from their holidays. Tony looked for a new flat