She was planning to become baptized; and that was good. ‘I am sure that would be a great happiness to you. I also think that our Catholic friends are right in thinking that you are in a state of grace and that I am not.’ She should ‘go on and be Christian, if that is your fulfilment. In any case, I am sure it will not come between us.’ I don’t know if Mum went through with her conversion, but I don’t think so. Perhaps she wanted to balance her relationship with Stephen with something else, then found that it wouldn’t carry any weight with him, so she let it go.
He continues: ‘It is so brave of you to play in the proms and to study the Bible and to pursue all your spiritual adventures.’ There’s something so vague about this, it’s almost insulting. He corrects himself:
I think of you all the time, in fact for me our marriage is a religion and I shall try to be a better observer of that religion than I have been because I realize now that appearances are very important as well as realities. For even when our relationship is authentic one has to make a great effort of creation and imagination the whole time to prevent its authenticity from being cheapened and thrown into apparent doubt.
He’d told his grandmother that to write about contemporary life was almost a religion to him, and now it’s the institution of marriage that has religious connotations. Yet my father was fundamentally atheist. It’s either an attempt to create a bridge with a certain aspect of his grandmother’s temperament, or my mother’s; or else it’s a dramatic statement regarding his own commitment to her as a belief, a quest.
‘But all I can say is that I love you, love you, love you, more than ever before, though I have always loved you, and if I have caused you to doubt it at moments I am very sorry and I ought not to have done so. I shall be living with you in my thoughts all this time when we are separated. In future let us do all we can to avoid long separations, though, of course, we cannot make absolute rules.’
MY EARLIEST MEMORY as a child is of rolling down the lawn in front of the house in Scarsdale where we lived when my father taught at Sarah Lawrence. It’s not much of a memory. I vaguely recall being plump and cheerful. My mother was with us; also an English nanny who longed to go home. The only things that interested the nanny were the sales in the department stores.
This was my father’s first visit to the United States, and it represented the beginning of a new axis in his life. America represented money, and like many English writers he came regularly to the country on visiting professorships or on lecture tours. Sarah Lawrence was a good place to start. Among others, he met Robert Lowell, who came for a visit, and Mary McCarthy, who taught there for a year while she gathered material for The Groves of Academe. I don’t know what my father thought of his pupils, but when a Picasso lithograph he’d brought with him disappeared, he complained to the President. ‘Sarah Lawrence girls don’t steal,’ was as far as that went.
During this time there occurred a famous quarrel between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. Hellman represented the unrepentant Stalinist wing of the old American Communist Party, a position which by this time McCarthy found physically repellent. She came across Hellman speaking unofficially to a group of students at a party where Stephen was present – not his own party, it seems, though later he remembered himself as being the host. Hellman didn’t notice McCarthy, who looked no older than the other students. Hellman was speaking in a patronizing way about the writer John Dos Passos. In Spain, he’d ‘sold out’. But then John had always liked his food, and there wasn’t much he wanted to eat in the restaurants of Spain in the middle of a war. And so on.
McCarthy instantly recognized this as a piece of communist character assassination. The real background was that Dos Passos had seen the communist repression of the anarchist brigades in Barcelona, and he had been appalled, and had begun to say so. Hemingway had seen the same thing but he’d kept quiet. Therefore, back in the United States, Hemingway was hailed as the up-and-coming writer and Dos Passos became the victim of a whispering campaign.
Mary McCarthy’s career in politics had much in common with that of my father. She was tougher and less romantic, but their early experiences with communists had a similar trajectory of well-meaning idealists led astray.
In My Confession, McCarthy describes the bizarre way in which, in 1936, she became an anti-communist. Until that date, she’d merely fitted communists into social categories. The literary communists, ‘doing the hatchet work on artists’ reputations’, she held in low esteem. ‘The forensic little actors who tried to harangue us in the dressing-rooms.’ The silent types, evidently in charge of something (but what?), who were admired because their reticence suggested authority. The ‘fellow-travellers’ who remained outside the party on some tiny doctrinal point to appear intelligent. Apart from that she’d enjoyed reading Trotsky’s autobiography; and that was about it.
Then came the news of Stalin’s purge of his former friends in the Moscow Trials – which she had missed, because she’d been in Reno getting a divorce. Back in New York, because of something she said at a cocktail party, she found herself on a list of supporters of a ‘Fair Trial for Trotsky’ group. Once there, she found she was outside the Party; and being outside, she felt the pressure of arcane, late-night persecution. This only made her dig in her heels. All of which, told in her ironic but precise way, is very interesting – but right at the end she adds a fascinating clincher: ‘Those of us who became anti-Communists during that year, 1936–37, have remained liberals – a thing less true of people of our generation who were converted earlier or later.’
This is especially true of my father, and it formed a special bridge between him and McCarthy. Yet liberalism in England meant something different from liberalism in the United States. There had been, after all, a Liberal Party in England, and it had survived from the 1840s until the First World War, when it was overtaken by Labour. Stephen belonged to those liberals who’d joined the Labour Party via the circuitous route of left-wing politics, but to be a ‘liberal’ in the United States meant working outside the folds of either political party. These liberals had no constituency. This suited Mary McCarthy very well. She could stand outside practically everything yet still represent an idea. Spender, by comparison, was mainstream.
On their way back to New York, Natasha and Stephen stayed with the composer Samuel Barber at Mount Kisco. Barber had written a setting for Stephen’s poem, ‘A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map’, and he was a friend from way back.
Barber listened to my mother perform. Afterwards he told my father: she has a great deal of talent, but she’s missing a piece of technique without which her career will be very difficult. But don’t worry! There are piano schools where she can check herself in, like a car going into a garage. Six months later she’ll re-emerge with everything in the right place. It’s extremely boring, because it’s purely mechanical, but without it Natasha will always have to work by straining her will.
My mother had given up the Royal College without graduating. She thought she was being badly taught. She’d begun to study with Clifford Curzon, who in turn had studied with Artur Schnabel, the greatest Beethoven specialist of his generation. Clifford – he was my godfather, so I saw him at various times – could remember every word that Schnabel had ever said to him. But he taught interpretation, not mechanics. He could take a piece that Mum was studying and analyse a passage saying, Schnabel would have done it this way, Rudolf Serkin does it like this.
My father