Earlier, Stephen had written to Kirstein: ‘As far as homosexuality goes, it is for me utterly promiscuous, irresponsible, adventurous excitement: the feeling of picking someone up in a small village and going on somewhere else next day. This is very anti-social, but there it is.’ Kirstein agreed. ‘Its an uncontrollable unpolarized attraction which swells up around any one that looks in kind of a warm way.’ The opposite, in other words, to faithful companionship. Kirstein wondered if he should give up the idea of living with anyone. ‘I hate to think I’m completely separating a very important part of my life from its front source, but that’s what seems to be happening.’
To Kirstein, casual affairs gave a sense of loss. ‘The intensity of some super-charge is there, for waste. The waste is what is detestable. Also it’s all confused with me in questions of class. I idealize the workmen and I can’t stomach the boys I knew in college. In one way its suicide or romanticism, but in another it prevents me from being promiscuous and widens the range of my sympathies.’ Kirstein had already eliminated the idea of living with a social equal. Now, living with a social inferior presented its own problems. But he told himself, at least desire for working-class boys had nurtured his sympathies regarding their predicament.
Stephen’s separation from Tony took three years and it was as painful as any ending of a relationship could be. There was no separation between their private feelings and the dark progress of Fascism in Europe, corroborating my father’s lifelong conviction that in the Thirties, in a most unusual way, private and public dramas became fused.
At the end of 1935 Stephen and Tony, together with Christopher and Heinz, sailed to Portugal where they had vague plans to start a writers’ retreat. This failed early in 1936 and Tony and Stephen left for Barcelona, a city that Stephen knew from his days there with Hellmut. They arrived just in time to see the first phase of the Spanish revolution which, towards the end of the year, was challenged by the arrival from North Africa of a Fascist army bent on destroying it. Back in England, Stephen became engrossed in attempts to drum up support for the Republic; and, between one public appearance and another, he married his first wife.
I never met Inez Pearn. I remember staring at a portrait in an exhibition labelled ‘Mrs Spender’, painted in 1937 by Bill Coldstream, who later became the head of the Slade where I studied art. I must have been fifteen or so. I did not recognize my mother. I told Dad that it was a very bad likeness and he said, ‘That’s not Natasha. That’s Inez.’ This was the only time I ever heard her mentioned.
The portrait shows a tense though intelligent young woman trying to nestle deeper into the sofa on which she’s resting. My father first met her at tea with Isaiah Berlin at All Souls one afternoon in October 1936. He’d come up to Oxford to give a speech in support of Spain. Seeing Stephen eyeing Inez intently, Isaiah joked that perhaps this was the woman he’d marry. Isaiah always blamed himself for putting the idea into Stephen’s head – and he may not have been wrong. My father, intensely self-willed, had the peculiar idea that he had no will at all. ‘I have no character or will power outside my work,’ he’d written in 1929 in his Hamburg journal. ‘In the life of action, I do everything my friends tell me to do, and have no opinions of my own. This is shameful, I know, but it is so.’
When Inez met Stephen, she was in the middle of two love affairs, one with Denis Campkin, who happened to be the son of Stephen’s dentist, and another with a young up-and-coming Oxford communist, Philip Toynbee. This was a period when Oxford was polarized between those who wanted to intervene in Spain on the side of the Republic, and the ‘hearties’ who backed the British government’s policy of neutrality. Toynbee was a glamorous figure, in fact he went on to become the one and only communist ever to be elected President of the Oxford Union. But if Philip was glamorous, Stephen was even more so. He was a famous poet, and his support for the Spanish Republic meant that he was constantly present at meetings – distracted and sometimes confused, but perhaps for that reason a useful supporter for the communist cause. A hesitant conscience was more convincing to the students than dogma.
Inez could never bring herself to end one affair before starting a new one. She was not confident in her looks, although ‘she had the kind of drive and concentration on the other sex which leads to success. Those who were attracted to her thought her very pretty, those who were not found her ordinary looking’. This in a romantic self-portrait from one of her novels. It bolstered her self-confidence if a man fell in love with her, because it reassured her that she was capable of love. She suspected that love had been drummed out of her by her dreadful upbringing. Her father had died before she was born, and she was raised by her weak mother and a manipulative aunt. She was determined not to fall back into the dismal predicament of her childhood.
Inez a few weeks after marrying Stephen.
My father saw Inez just that once at Isaiah’s, then a month later he invited her to a housewarming party at his new flat in Hammersmith, freshly decorated with the latest furnishings bought with the unexpected profits from the ‘communist’ book (as he called it) that he’d just written: Forward from Liberalism. Bentwood chairs and copper ceiling lights such as he’d seen in Hamburg in his earliest moment of freedom. There, seeing how attractive she was, he took her into a side room and kissed her. The next day he invited her to lunch at the Café Royal and proposed marriage.
She went back to Oxford in tears, and when she saw Philip Toynbee that evening, he was appalled to hear that she hadn’t said no. Though he tried to persuade her not to go through with it, he knew that in the end Stephen would win.
In the contorted weeks that followed, Philip continued to sleep with her while Stephen stayed in London. At one point, to shake off Philip, Inez had a brief fling with Freddie Ayer, a young philosophy don. It didn’t work. Freddie and Philip met and made friends. They agreed over drinks that it was important to them to give satisfaction to a woman in bed; yet in all this mayhem nobody was permitted to show jealousy towards anybody else. Jealousy infringed upon freedom; and ‘free love’ in those days was almost a political belief.
Stephen proposed to Inez on 13 November 1936, and they were married a month later in a registry office in London. ‘I’m just not capable any more of having “affairs” with people,’ he wrote to Christopher; ‘they are simply a part of a general addiction to sexual adventures.’
The marriage had a devastating effect on Tony, who’d been joking and plotting with Philip Toynbee up to the very last minute, in the taxi as they went to the ceremony together. He left to fight in Spain two days after the wedding. He’d been threatening to do this for months. Stephen had been torturing himself with thoughts that if Tony went to Spain, he, Stephen, would be responsible. Tony couldn’t make up his mind whether this interpretation was true or not. On the one hand it was good if Stephen suffered, because it would keep their relationship alive. On the other hand it took away Tony’s autonomy as a man who was in charge of his own life – as someone capable of taking a moral decision to go and fight, unlike the pusillanimous Stephen.
Less than a month after Tony left, Harry Pollitt, head of the Communist Party of Great Britain, invited Stephen to the Central Office in King Street and proposed that he travel to Spain in order to trace the whereabouts of the Komsomol, a Russian ship loaded with munitions which had mysteriously disappeared on its way to Barcelona. It was an odd thing to ask. Finding the Komsomol was a problem that either could