The Jewish cultural roots of Stephen Spender (1909–1995) lay in his view that,
as he put it, “The greatest art is moral” and poets are committed
individuals. This idea is prominent among Spender’s Romantic literary
ancestors, particularly Byron and Shelley in England and Goethe and Schiller
in Germany, but its Hebrew origins are in the biblical prophets, for whom
poetry was a tool for social change. Spender’s friend Isaiah Berlin saw
early on the moral passion of his writing: “very naive and morally
impressive and shrewd at the same time, [using] words like good and bad,
right and wrong, kind and cruel . . . with great simplicity and full values
and restoring the moral currency”. Berlin admired similar qualities in
Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Spender was born into a distinguished family in which privilege co-existed
with traditions of service and creativity – and, on both sides, a history of
conversion to Christianity. His father, Harold Spender (1864–1926), was an
Oxford-educated parliamentary journalist, novelist and biographer. For
several years, Harold Spender (who himself had a Jewish great-grandfather)
worked among Jews in London’s East End, including survivors of the Russian
pogroms in 1881–2. He admired the drive for educational improvement among
immigrant Jews and opposed Christian missionary work and restrictions on
immigration. In 1904 he married the partly Jewish Violet Schuster
(1878–1921), an Oxford graduate and poet and the daughter of Sir Ernest
Schuster, who came from a wealthy, thoroughly anglicized, German-Jewish
banking family.
Stephen Spender’s early life was scarred by his mother’s chronic illness and
death when he was twelve. His father, broken and ill, was left with four
children to raise. Harold Spender’s earnings from writing and lecturing were
erratic and inadequate, and his parliamentary ambitions came to nothing. His
family regarded him as a failure, a windbag and spendthrift. Ernest Schuster
and his bank kept the Spenders afloat financially. After he died in 1924,
his widow Hilda (an important influence on Stephen) humiliatingly controlled
the Spender purse strings: only then did Stephen find out that he was
part-Jewish and began to “feel Jewish”. This sudden emergence of a Jewish
skeleton from the family closet was perhaps less common in England than in
more anti-Semitic Germany and France, where assimilated Jews such as Theodor
Lessing and Simone Weil made similar discoveries.
After his father’s death in 1926, a Schuster bequest was vital in Stephen
Spender’s career. Unlike his friend W. H. Auden, he enjoyed financial
security and sufficient funds to see him through Oxford, ensure his artistic
freedom, allow experiments in living (including homosexual and Communist
phases and psychoanalysis), pay for frequent travel (most importantly to
Germany in the years before 1933), and spare him the need to pass
competitive exams and find a steady job. The young Spender chose to be
peripherally in the thick of things: in Germany and Austria at the time
Hitler came to power; in Spain during the Spanish Civil War; and in the
Second World War fighting fires in the London Blitz. After his first, failed
marriage in the 1930s, a second marriage to the pianist Natasha Litvin
lasted over fifty years, until his death. Perhaps alone among poets of his
generation, Spender could be described in the latter half of his life as
truly happy.
Despite his early rebellious streak, Spender inherited his parents’ liberal
views and commitment to social causes, progress and culture. In the extent
of his love of German Kultur – Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Rilke – Spender
stood out among English poets of his generation. His faith in culture – in
the “truly great”, as the phrase from his famous poem has it – has more than
a trace of his German, and specifically German-Jewish, background. The
German Jews had embraced Kultur virtually as a passport to legal
emancipation and civil rights, obtained by 1871, and to ultimate acceptance
in German society, in which they were to be brutally disenchanted.
Many of Spender’s best-known poems were written in Germany; it could be argued
that his poetry generally declined after 1933, when it was no longer safe
for him to live there, and he turned increasingly to prose. He spent much of
his later life translating and editing German literature. In 1940, he
considered committing suicide if the Germans invaded England: under Nazi
racial laws he would have been classed as a Mischling and, as a critic of
Nazism, sent to a concentration camp. Yet Spender remained under the spell
of German high culture and, as soon as the war ended, he revisited Germany
and wrote a book about its ruins. Spender had something of the bizarre
attachment of German Jews to Germany, described by Frederic Grunfeld: “While
half the German Jews were being murdered in the name of a greater Germany,
many of the rest continued to think of themselves as ambassadors of the
German Geist”. The poetry of Goethe and Schiller, whom Spender translated,
represented to him the highest creative ideals.
Spender’s own mature voice – a unique mixture of learning and satire, comedy
and ironic melancholy, excruciating sensitivity and loneliness, and a
lambent musical beauty – is heard, perhaps, less in his poetry than in his
autobiography, especially World Within World (1951). The historical context
in which most of Spender’s best-known poems were written – the Great
Depression, the poverty and unemployment of the 1930s, the rise of Fascism
and socialism and the weakening of democracy – has meant that Spender has
been seen as a “poet of the Thirties”, one in a litter of writers – Auden,
Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis – who also responded
to world crisis. He never entirely shook off the homoerotic associations of
Oxford and Weimar Germany, in poems such as “In 1929”, with its three naked
men: “the new, bronzed German, / The young communist, and myself, being
English”. Yet in social conscience, if not artistically, Spender transcends
his age, partly for reasons having to do with his German-Jewish background
and the failed “symbiosis” of Deutschtum and Judentum, of the prophet Isaiah
and Goethe, with an admixture of English Romanticism and Liberalism.
To Spender, great art is good, beauty is truth. (The Nazis violently hated
such idealism.) It is the Romantic strain that links him most closely to the
Jewish tradition – “Jewish law is poetry”, Spender wrote. He approved of
William Blake’s equation of religion with politics. Unlike Auden, who wrote
that “poetry makes nothing happen”, Spender took Shelley’s view that poets,
like prophets, can be “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. The moral
basis of Spender’s Communist sympathies was the biblical idea that, as he
wrote, “all men are equal in the eyes of God, and that the riches of the few
are an injustice to the many”.
Similarly, he saw the creation of the State of Israel in moral terms, as the
rectification of a historic injustice. Spender described as miraculous
Israel’s survival after being attacked in 1948 by five Arab countries as
well as Palestinian Arabs, when many predicted its annihilation and a
renewal of the Holocaust. In his book on Youth Aliyah, Learning Laughter
(1952), commissioned by George Weidenfeld, Spender defined Israel’s purpose
– like that of all nations which have adopted the Hebrew Bible – as
religious and moral: to be “a light unto the nations”, an example to the
world. As a poet with a social conscience (see, for example, “An Elementary
School Classroom in a Slum”), Spender was particularly moved by the care
given in Israel in the early years of statehood to deprived and traumatized
children (including many Holocaust survivors) from dozens of countries, the
majority being refugees fleeing persecution in Arab lands. He suggested that
the integration of Oriental and Western children in Israel could be an
international model for pluralism.
Israel seemed to fulfil biblical prophecy, as an apocalyptic redemption after
centuries of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust: “There has been a
terrible wave of persecution; there has been the miracle of the birth of the
State; there has been the deliverance from the invading Arabs; there has
been the Ingathering; and now there is the struggle demanding a unity which
accepts the significance of all these things”. Of the modern significance of
the festival of Passover, Spender wrote: “It is not only the celebration of
a past religious experience but participation in the miracle of our own
times”. Great religious poetry was needed to retell the biblical story in
modern terms: Uri Zvi Greenberg was Israel’s poet of national rebirth.
Was Spender himself truly great? John Sutherland, in his authorized biography
(reviewed in the TLS, August 13, 2004), makes a strong case. Spender was an
international literary figure, versatile in many genres: poetry, stories,
novels, plays, autobiography, translation, literary criticism, political and
travel journalism; he helped found and edit the leading cultural journals
Horizon and Encounter as well as Index on Censorship; he was England’s
pre-eminent cultural ambassador to Europe and America in the post-war years
(uniquely, he was America’s poet laureate and, later, knighted); he was also
a fine lecturer and teacher, a talented painter, and friend and patron to
many artists and scholars. Spender did practically everything a Great
Literary Man can do – except what his co-editor on Horizon, Cyril Connolly,
described as the only function of a writer: to produce a masterpiece.
As a poet Spender brings to mind Rashi’s gloss on Genesis 6:1 – “Noah was in
his generation righteous”: righteous in his own generation but not in that
of Abraham. Though highly praised among the 1930s generation (his first
book, Poems, 1933, received extraordinary acclaim, for which, he felt, the
sometimes harsh criticism his later work attracted was a kind of “tax”),
Spender acknowledged W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Auden and Dylan Thomas to be
unquestionably greater.
When I was a student at University College London, Spender advised me, when
reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, not to bother too much with critical
literature but listen instead to Beethoven’s last quartets. The music was
more fascinating than the poetry; it was perhaps the highest form of art. In
it, the artist transcends time and suffering, creating a spiritual world of
truth and beauty. By Beethoven’s standard, Spender felt he had botched his
creative life. He might have taken heart from the Hasidic story about two
tzaddikim (righteous men), Reb Zusia and Rabbi Elimelech. Reb Zusia speaks
mournfully about his prospects of reaching Heaven after death: “I am not
worthy. I have not a fraction of the righteousness of Abraham”. Rabbi
Elimelech consoles him: “When you go to Heaven, you will not be asked: Were
you Abraham? You will be asked: Were you Zusia?”.
David Aberbach is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill
University, Canada. His recent books include Major Turning Points in Jewish
Intellectual History, 2003, and Jewish Cultural Nationalism, 2008.
