STEPHEN SPENDER

• Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995)
was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated
on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was
appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States
Library of Congress in 1965.
EARLY LIFE
• Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Harold Spender and Violet
Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet, of German Jewish heritage.[1][2] He went first
to Hall School in Hampstead and then at 13 to Gresham's School, Holt and later
Charlecote School in Worthing, but he was unhappy there. On the death of his
mother, he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he
later described as "that gentlest of schools".[3] Spender left for Nantesand
Lausanne and then went up to University College, Oxford (much later, in 1973, he
was made an honorary fellow). Spender said at various times throughout his life
that he never passed any exam. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had
the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden, who introduced him to Christopher
Isherwood. Spender handprinted the earliest version of Auden's Poems. He left
Oxford without taking a degree and in 1929 moved to Hamburg. Isherwood invited
him to Berlin. Every six months, Spender went back to England.
CAREER
• 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
• Spender was discovered by T.S. Eliot, an editor at Faber & Faber, in 1933.[5] His early poetry, notably Poems (1933), was often inspired by social protest. Living
in Vienna, he further expressed his convictions in Forward from Liberalism; in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Austrian socialists;
and in Trial of a Judge[6] (1938), an antifascist drama in verse. 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.
• In 1936, Spender became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Harry Pollitt, its head, invited him to write for the Daily Worker on the Moscow
Trials. In late 1936, Spender married Inez Pearn, whom he had recently met at an Aid to Spain meeting.[8][9] She is described as 'small and rather ironic' and
'strikingly good-looking'. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Daily Worker sent him to Spain on a mission to observe and report on the Soviet ship
Komsomol, which had sunk while carrying Soviet weapons to the Second Spanish Republic. Spender travelled to Tangier and tried to enter Spain via Cadiz, but
was sent back. He then travelled to Valencia, where he met Hemingway and Manuel Altolaguirre. (Tony Hyndman, alias Jimmy Younger, had joined the
International Brigades, which were fighting against Francisco Franco's forces in the Battle of Guadalajara.) In July 1937 he 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.[10] Pollitt told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement". Spender
was imprisoned for a while in Albacete. In Madrid, he met Malraux; they discussed Gide's Retour de l'U.R.S.S.. Because of medical problems, he went back to
England and bought a house in Lavenham. In 1939, he divorced.
• His 1938 translations of works by Bertolt Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.[11] He 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 Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distant Italian descent). Spender's second wife, Natasha, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish. In 1942,
he joined the fire brigade of Cricklewood and Maresfield Gardens as a volunteer. Spender met several times with the poet Edwin Muir.