The British authorities became interested. What was he up to? London sent back this message: ‘Stephen Spender was born on 28.2.1909 and is a person of leisure and private means. He became a passionate anti-fascist as a result of travel in Germany, and has lately come to see in communism the only effective solution of world problems. His views are set out in his two recent books, The Approach to Communism, and Forward from Liberalism and he has also produced poems of considerable power. He is in touch with members of the international left-wing group in London, but has not, so far as we know, engaged in active politics.’ The local officer in Gibraltar noted: ‘Up till now, as far as we know, his communism has not been more than theoretical. It may be necessary to keep a sharper eye on him in the future.’
He went back to London none the wiser on the subject of the Komsomol and reported his lack of findings to King Street. Harry Pollitt then persuaded him to join the Communist Party, which Stephen did, writing a dramatic article for the Daily Worker: ‘I join the Communist Party’. Then Pollitt sent him back to Spain to run a radio station.
By the time he arrived in Valencia, the radio had been suppressed.
At this point Stephen heard that Tony had attempted to desert from the International Brigade and was under arrest. He spent the following weeks attempting to save Tony and bring him safely back home. This enormous effort brought him into conflict with the communist commissars whose job it was to keep discipline among the volunteers. Sadistically, they restricted the occasions when they could see each other; though they didn’t stop Tony from writing to Stephen – these letters being read by their censor. ‘Oh my darling, it all seems so terribly unfair,’ wrote Tony after one of these meetings. ‘I don’t think I could bear even to see you again only for a short while. Such short-lived happiness only leaves me more torn and miserable than ever. But do come if you can.’
Stephen went behind the backs of the commissars. He contacted the British acting Consul in Valencia, who was sympathetic, and the Spanish Minister of Munitions, Alvarez del Vayo. Stephen’s reputation as a poet was a valuable commodity to the Spanish Republic, more valuable than the intransigence of the commissars, who naturally became furious when they realized they’d been bypassed.
Stephen could see Pollitt’s point of view, which was that deserters from the front couldn’t be treated leniently. But he also felt that, if he could save this one man from a fate he did not deserve, he shouldn’t give up. ‘What with your family and your friends, you have been more trouble to me than the whole British Battalion put together,’ Pollitt told Tony on one of his visits to Spain. He promised Tony he’d be on his way home within a week.
Exasperated by endless meetings with Stephen to discuss the Tony problem, Pollitt cut through one conversation by asking Stephen a simple question: ‘Is there any sex in this?’ It was a key moment in my father’s life. He did not tell lies. As far as he was concerned, he had no choice but to answer truthfully. So he said, ‘Yes.’
The Spanish Civil War retained a personal element that vanished in the subsequent much larger European war. Even so, a confrontation discussing the sexual relationship of a deserter and his lover seems to me one of the strangest of all war stories.
Stephen last visited Spain to attend an international writers’ conference that took place under the threat of imminent defeat. Groups of authors were driven in grand cars from one hotel to another. Speeches were made and delicious meals eaten. Stephen decided to challenge this opacity and ask the delegates for information about ‘certain methods which were used in Russia and in Spain and were they prepared to say that they accepted full responsibility for these because they were inevitable and necessary?’ Was it true that summary executions of members of the anarchist brigades by the communists were taking place behind the scenes? ‘I wanted to know what was going on, and why, and who was responsible for it.’ There was no answer. Instead, the question was attacked and Comrade Spender criticized for believing ‘bourgeois propaganda spread by fascist agents’.
The writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, a member of the committee in charge of the English delegation, told him firmly, ‘what is so nice is that we didn’t see or hear of a single act of violence on the Republican side’. She saw Stephen as ‘an irritating idealist, always hatching a wounded feeling’. She wanted him expelled from the Party immediately. ‘She was concerned, she said, lest they were giving the wrong advice to their young writers: this was an issue of far greater importance than the fate of Spender.’ The Hyndman case would provide all the necessary justification.
As soon as he got back to England, Stephen wrote a letter of protest to Harry Pollitt. He was being victimized in a smear campaign. ‘When I was in Spain I discovered that the other members of the English delegation were occupied in acting as amateur detectives, apparently under the impression that it was their duty to “send a report to King Street”. If any such report has been made, I think I should be allowed to answer it.’
Had Harry Pollitt betrayed him? ‘I would like to remind you that on an important occasion when you asked me a leading question, I answered it truthfully. I am prepared to answer any other questions. But it is very painful to me that my confidential answer to your confidential question has been used to slander and prejudice people against me.’ He was worried that his ‘yes’ on that fateful occasion might enter the public domain.
A few days later, Stephen invited Philip Toynbee to lunch at his flat in Hammersmith. Philip had visited Spain and the inevitable fall of the Republic was on everyone’s mind. He’d also been seeing Inez in Stephen’s absence, resisting her offer to leave Stephen and come back to him. In an aside, she spoke very bitterly about her husband. ‘Stephen, she said, was utterly thoughtless and egocentric, unimaginative, going through the motions of generosity, but hopelessly ungenerous in his heart.’
The conversation at lunch was entirely about Tony: his stomach ulcers, the censorious moralism of the British commissars and the authoritarian role of Harry Pollitt. Stephen was panicking at the thought that he’d told Pollitt the truth. His ‘Yes’ meant that he’d descended to the level of sexual predator, with Tony as his innocent working-class victim. His own view of himself as an upright and honest man was under siege, for his position was dishonourable in the eyes of the CP.
Whenever my father thought that his integrity was under threat, he’d lash out in self-defence. He’d learned this at school, I think. He makes a comment somewhere in his journals: you can accept any kind of teasing or bullying at school, but there comes a point where you have to lash out, or sink.
After lunch, Inez and Philip were left alone. Inez, who’d been silent during the meal, told Philip wearily, ‘It’s like this every day!’ When Stephen came back, he went on talking about Spain. ‘Stephen very anti-Russian,’ wrote Philip, who still followed the Party line, ‘grotesquely & ignorantly.’ Inez whispered to Philip in the background: We can now look forward to an article entitled, ‘I leave the Communist Party’.
My father abandoned communism after the Spanish experience, not just for political reasons – though there were plenty of those – but because the puritanism of the communists regarding personal behaviour was so great it