AND ANOTHER THING
Old age, death and apotheosis of a well-dressed poet
PAUL JOHNSON
We live in a vale of tears made bear- able by friendship. But the trouble with friends is that they die, leaving great, jagged holes in one's defences against the world's battalions of sorrows, holes that can never be filled. The truest observation Dr Johnson ever made was that 'friendship should be kept in constant repair'. He used the word in its collective sense: you should add to your friends deliberately to make good the inevitable losses of time. But this becomes more difficult with age, as old friends die faster and new ones are harder to come by.
Sometimes, however, there is an uncovenanted stroke of fortune, when a new friendship is made which acquires almost instant maturity so that, by the sec- ond encounter, it already has a patina of understanding. This happened to me a few years back with Stephen Spender. We had nodded to each other periodically over 30 years or more, but now, staying in the same house on the shores of an Italian lake, we suddenly became friends, and a great new delight entered my life.
To say that Stephen had a gift for friend- ship is to understate: he had a genius. Dis- parities in age, generation gaps, nationality, race, gender meant nothing to him, except as rich subjects for laughter — he reached a delicate tendril across them all to grasp the essence of his interlocutor. He struck the perfect balance between being a good talk- er and a good listener. He told his anec- dotes with enviable skill, but his relish for your own was heartening. He asked ques- tions. He listened hard to the answers. He made you feel he was learning something valuable from you. And his own memory was full of treasures, intimate stories about the great which went back to the second half of the Twenties, shrewd reflections on literature, views of living panjandrums which had the necessary salt of an almost imperceptible malice but which were never cold or cruel or unfair.
And all this was pervaded by his quintessential characteristic — modesty. I never met a man less inclined to boast, to push himself forward or to peacock. Elder- ly giants of letters, in my experience, are inclined to be resentful of the thrusting young, or broody about honours withheld. There was none of that about Stephen. He was genuinely astonished at the lustre of his name, felt he had received more than his fair share of laurels and had not a whisper of envy. All his best stories were self-depre- ciative, showing himself bossed or humiliat- ed by Auden, outwitted by Isherwood, snubbed by T.S. Eliot, even made to feel small by the sly and dishonest Dylan Thomas. I never knew Stephen tell a tale from which he emerged victorious.
Yet there was something godlike about the man. He has been criticised for saying, when very young, that he wished 'to be a poet'. The right expression, it is argued, is, 'I wish to write poems.' But Stephen merely spoke the truth, as he always did. He made no claim to poetic genius but he wanted to devote his life to poetry, to serve the muse with devotion and industry — and that he did, throughout his long and full life. I hesi- tate to judge his work. But all I heard, I liked.
At his memorial service last week. Harold Pinter read a fine poem of Stephen's describing a lowland farm of his youth, images overlaid on a Wordsworthian palimpsest of the high Lakeland fells. Stephen read his own poetry superbly, not with any panache or flourish but with clari- ty and simple assurance. Not long ago he insisted on attending an Evening Standard literary lunch because he had promised' to do so, though he had had a slight heart- attack only the day before. His address was hesitant and nervous and I feared he might break down. But once he began to recite a poem of his, a delightful thing about his beloved grandchildren, his voice grew con- fident and the audience was rapt. It was a magic moment, and young people present will recall it half a century hence.
Last year, despite his venerable age, he was made the object of a vicious plagiarism by one of those sub-sects which infest the American literary scene. I was able to spring to his defence in these pages, and shame Penguin, who were about to publish the offending book, into disowning its impudent author. Stephen was grateful because he was the last man on earth to Do you think the men from MAFF really exist?' wield a claymore on his own behalf. He was vulnerable and sensitive, just as he was sen- sitive to the feelings of others and specially delicate in dealing with those he knew, instinctively, to be vulnerable themselves. His chief concern on this occasion was that the attack on him would hurt his devoted wife Natasha. No one I ever knew had stronger or more tender feeling for his family.
But to list Stephen's virtues does not quite convey the man. There was some- thing else, a metaphysical factor, which lift- ed him over the rest of us. He had the true charisma of the good man. The ancients believed — it is an axiom of the Old Testa- ment — that, just as all men are made in God's image, so the best of them have a singular bodily grace. Stephen was not just a handsome man, he was beautiful. Not small, either, in the tradition of poets like Pope, Keats and Shelley, but a big Norse god or a radiant golden knight from the Nibelungenlied. It was his physical glamour as well as his ardent poetic aspirations which made him a welcome guest at Gars- ington and in Bloomsbury when he was only 18, so that he got to know the literary titans from 1927 on, years before Auden and Co entered the competition.
This striking beauty he retained right to the end of his life. Indeed, it seemed to me that, in his very last years, he became even more beautiful — and younger — as though the splendour of his noble features was undergoing a premonitory apotheosis. Then, as always, Stephen was totally uncon- scious of his allure. Clothes were of no importance to him. Oddly enough, in his last phase, his amazing son-in-law, Barry Humphries — who as a showbiz paladin attached significance to dress — insisted on buying him some magnificent suits. Stephen wore them with initial trepidation, then with growing pleasure.
It was a rich source of amusement to him that at long last, on the threshold of eterni- ty, he had attained the distinction of a Well-Dressed Man. I saw him thus adorned a week or so ago, at Mrs Drue Heinz's annual lunch in Mayfair. Standing next to him was the Duke of Devonshire, also exquisitely dressed, two pre-war gentlemen of the old school, the poet and the aristo- crat, each a model of good manners, of consideration for others, and of modesty. I thought to myself: thank God for England.
Now Stephen is gone, but his memory is safe in our hearts.
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