STEPHEN SPENDER

A LIFE IN MODERNISM

by David Leeming ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 1999

A “Pylon Poet’s” progress over the century, from the official biographer of James Baldwin. If Spender always seemed somewhat overshadowed by his friends Auden in poetry and Isherwood in fiction, he made up for it by pervading the English literary scene, with American forays, through a career lasting almost seven decades. Although he wasn—t averse to publishing parts of his life, notably World Within World and his Journals 1939-1983, as well as autobiographic fiction, he was dismayed by Hugh David’s “portrait” in 1992, not to mention David Leavitt’s 1993 roman Ö clef, While England Slept. With this background, Leeming, who got to know Spender during one of the poet’s many visiting professorships in America, has to work with both a good deal of interesting material and an inhibiting inheritance. The name-dropping alone—T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, Isaiah Berlin, Ted Hughes, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, et al.—is enough to underscore Spender’s famous line, “I think continually of those who were truly great.” Throughout his life, Spender underwent numerous contradictions that deserve closer probing than Leeming is willing to do: Spender’s lyric gift, influenced by Wordsworth and Shelley, that he turned to 1930s modernism under Auden’s influence (including verses on power pylons and express trains); several intense homosexual relationships both before and during a long and happy marriage; a radical political outlook, despite disillusionment with the Spanish Civil War and the Communist Party, that led to protests against the wars in Vietnam and the Falklands yet did not impede a CBE and a knighthood; and missing out on Great Britain’s laureateship and instead getting named poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, i.e., the American poet laureate. Leeming diligently describes these facts of Spender’s paradoxical life, but aside from occasionally discussing Spender’s poetry, never analyzes his personality. Although not an authorized biography (Spender wanted an Englishman), Leeming’s work has the feel of one in its diffident summarization and reticent analysis of the life. (b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1999

ISBN: 0-8050-4249-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION