Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents
- Narrated by: Laurence Kennedy
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
99p for the first 3 months
A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents
Buy Now for £13.00
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
Summary
An intimate portrait of Stephen Spender's extraordinary life written by Matthew Spender, shifting between memoir and biography, with new insights drawn from personal recollections, and his father's copious unpublished archives.
Stephen Spender's life was a vivid prism on the 20th century. Having met Auden and Isherwood at Oxford, he joined the early vocal critics of Hitler and participated in the Spanish Civil War. His efforts there became distracted by the need to save his lover from being shot as a deserter, and by the outbreak of the Second World War he was judged unfit to fight.
He served instead as a fireman, and later produced propaganda for the war effort - establishing a mysterious connection with the Foreign Office, which has generated much speculation until now.
Examining the growth of Spender's literary reputation, and his later encounters with the CIA, this book sheds new light on his career. Always susceptible to the allure of young men, Spender remained married to his second wife, Natasha Litvin, but continued to believe in male relationships as an essential creative inspiration.
In tension with Natasha's career as a musician after the birth of their two children, a considerable creative tension developed in the household. Stoical in her suffering, Natasha began to agonise over their marriage during her close friendship with Raymond Chandler.
Insightful and revelatory, A House in St John's Wood is the portrait of a marriage, a movement and a father whose complex brilliance continues to be felt widely - and among those closest to him.
Critic reviews
"This is an utterly fascinating book, a portrait of a marriage contract unevenly negotiated and a tour d'horizon of the deadly serious, but often farcical intellectual wranglings of the Cold War. Matthew Spender writes and thinks beautifully, chipping into the negative spaces of his enviably rich primary material like a sculpture." (Frances Stonor Saunders, author of Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War)
More from the same
Narrator
What listeners say about A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars
-
Story4 out of 5 stars
- S Riaz
- 02-03-23
A House in St John's Wood
This is a fascinating investigation of the relationship of Matthew Spender's parents and of his relationship to them. It begins with the death of his mother in 2010 and her attempts to thwart him gaining literary executorship of his father's work. Her death before she could exclude him from his father's literary inheritance resulted in his book - part biography and part memoir.
Matthew Spender was the son of poet, Stephen Spender, and the pianist, Natasha Litvin. However, at the core of this book is his father's sexuality and his relationships with other men, while his mother attempted to maintain the fiction that their marriage was fine and her concentration on keeping up appearances which seemed to cost her a lot. It is obvious that her son has a mixture of sympathy and exasperation with his parents. He loved both and appreciated his mother's attempts to give him and his sister stability and yet gradually realised that all was not well between them. Not only did his father have a tendency to fall, sentimentally, in love with a procession of young men, but his mother had a long and complicated relationship with the writer, Raymond Chandler.
Alongside the personal, this is an interesting account of an era. W.H. Auden taught Matthew about adjectives, his father was a friend of Guy Burgess and he grew up around the literary world and, later, when meeting his wife, artists. There is much about post-war Europe, the Cold War and the magazine his father ran, 'Encounter,' which turned out to be financed by the CIA. I found this an extremely fascinating account of life, his childhood and felt he was fair in his account of both his parents. Excellent reading.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful