ABSTRACT
Auden’s first books of poems on his own hand press. The liberation from his father’s attitudes figures prominently in Spender’s autobiographical novel The Temple, which was written in 1929 but not published until 1988. In 1930 Spender published Twenty Poems; some of his work also appeared in New Signatures in 1932. At Oxford Spender also made friends with Christopher ISHERWOOD. Both Auden and Isherwood became Spender’s mentors. The relationship among the men is characterized by Spender as Freundschaft (friendship) in his journal of 1939 in which he recounts the period of the late 1920s. Following university Spender travelled extensively. For a time he lived in Barcelona with Helmut, the apparent subject of his poem ‘Helmut’. Originally published in the 1933 edition of Spender’s Poems, which T.S. ELIOT accepted for Faber & Faber, it was not included in the later Collected Poems 1928-1953 but appeared again in Collected Poems 1928-1985. In September 1933 Spender met Tony Hyndman, an unemployed workingclass lad from Cardiff, who features as Jimmy Younger in World within World. They lived together for three years but in 1936 they broke up and Spender announced his marriage to Inez Pearn to whom he was engaged for only three weeks. David LEAVITT adapted many of the details from Spender’s autobiography in his novel While England Sleeps (1993). This resulted in a charge of unlawful use against Leavitt and his publisher, Viking Press, by Spender but the case was settled out of court in February 1994. During the Spanish Civil War Spender went to Spain and worked as a propagandist for the Republicans. In 1937 Spender joined the Communist Party and got much involved in leftwing politics, writing essays such as Forward from Liberalism (1937) and The New Realism (1939). His volume of poems The Still Centre was published in 1939. Spender divorced in 1939 and two years later married the pianist Natasha Litvin with whom he had two children, Matthew, born 1945, and Lizzie, born 1951. With Cyril Connolly, Spender acted as co-editor of Horizon (1939-41) and of Encounter (1953-67), which he co-founded with Irving Kristol. Spender held various university posts both in the USA and in the UK, including being Professor of English at University College, London, between 1968 and 1973. Among his other works are a play, Trial of a Judge (1938), many translations of writers such as Federico García LORCA, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Ernst Toller, a novel, The Backward Son (1940), his Collected Poems (1955), a volume of poetry entitled The Generous Days (1971), and several books of criticism such as The Destructive Element (1935) and The Struggle of the Modern (1963). He also wrote LoveHate Relations (1974) and The Thirties and After: Poetry, People, Politics (1978) and a Chinese Journal (1982), illustrated by the gay painter David Hockney, with whom he undertook the journey to China. He was knighted for his services to literature in 1983.
