World Within World, Stephen Spender

c. 2001, the Modern Library edition.

Often there is no obvious reason why I choose / chose a certain book to read. In this case, the jacket, the publisher, the size, the font, the feel of the hard cover edition, all intrigued me. I knew nothing about Stephen Spender. I had never heard of him, and I consider myself a fairly good reader (now). If the Modern Library series chose to publish his work, it was something worth at least looking through. I saw he was a poet. I have never been able to understand, read, enjoy poetry, but I keep trying. And that was probably another reason I ended up buying it.

The "look" of the book reminds me of one of my all-time favorite books: Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, also the Modern Library edition, c. 1999.

I started reading it some time ago. I forget when. I recently found the book again in my apartment I had not been to in several months, and felt ready to attack it again. I don't remember any of it; a complete blank. [I don't remember why I had not been in my apartment in several months. July 23, 2024.]

The aggressive reading program that I began in 2002 and the luxury of time allows me to now read books the way I want to read them, not necessarily from front to back. In this case, I noted that Spender had added an afterword to this edition. I read that first. Wow. It explained so much.

Spender wrote  his autobiography, World Within World (WWW), at the end of WWII over the course of two or three years while living in Frieda Lawrence's (of D.H. Lawrence fame) home near Taos, New Mexico.

He was forty years old. He presciently realized that his life would be two volumes: pre-war and post-war. I'm not sure now, I forget, whether he met Spanish Civil War or WWII. It does not matter.

The author's afterword explains so much:

• why artists, writers, poets became a political group in the modern world
• the Spanish Civil War -- everyone else understands it; I finally get it; I guess I was slow
• T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
•  W.H. Auden's peculiarities
• the importance of Henry James
• why WWW had a resurgence in popularity in 1993
• maybe a bit about the 60's in our own country
• and, maybe a bit about the times we now live in

I was completely surprised by the amount of ink Spender devoted to Henry James in his afterword. Whether folks have read their works or not, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, seem to me, well-known. Not so with Henry James, although that may be entirely personal and unique. Be that as it may, the triad of writers for Spender was Auden, Eliot, and Henry James. Christopher Isherwood is mentioned often, but perhaps more as a friend than a mentor. I don't know. I will know more when I have finished the autobiography.

I owe my knowledge of Henry James to a wonderful woman I met in Yorkshire (England) some years ago. She was a voracious reader, but unlike me, had begun reading in high school and never quit.  She remarked to me that she remembers an excruciating year in high school having to read Henry James. That intrigued me enough to read one or two biographies of Henry James (two or three, if you include biographies of the family) and a few of his short stories and at least one novel, The Ambassadors. The Turn of the Screw did not scare me all that much; maybe I need to read it again. But the Beast in the Jungle haunts me to this day.

So, a huge thank you to my friend in Yorkshire. I never would have guessed that an autobiography of a poet would have brought back such strong memories of another life, far away and long ago.

[Note: I did not realize that I have already written about this book on this blog. It's a pretty good note, if I say so myself.]

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Contents, as they were

I: Child to adolescence

II: Oxford

III. Modernism in Germany. First, Hamburg, still a student; then, Berlin with Christopher Isherwood
IV. The Spanish Civil War 

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Best parts

1. Afterword, written in 1994, one year before his death
2. The last five or six pages of section I in which he talks about Bertella
3. His observations of Oxford, the University
4. His observations of W. H. Auden
5. Discussion of memory and Auden, p. 65
6. His observations on relationships, love, during his coming of age years
7. His discussion of poetry, ~ p. 101
8. His discussion of modern literature, p. 105; begins, of course, with Joyce's Ulysses, and Eliot's The Wasteland; and, then: Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Ernetst Hemingway, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, Ezra Pound, Henry Green, Herbert Read -- "to name a few."
9. Long piece on D. H. Lawrence, p.107
10. Christopher Isherwood, p. 110
11. His description of Berlin,  ~1929; p. 141. Hitler first mentioned, p. 143; six months of each year between 1930 and 1933, in Germany;
12. His "explanation" of Marxism, world class struggle, p. 149
13. The critics linking Auden, Day Lewis, and Spender, p. 151
14. The discussion of  Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Raymond Mortimer, and perhaps David Garnett; E.M Forster and T. S. Eliot are associated with the group but are not "belonging."
15. Rosamond Lehmann, p. 156
16. Stayed with Harold Nicolson and his wife, Victoria Sackville-West, p. 158
17. Dined with Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their home in Tavistock Square, p. 165
18. Virginia Woolf on writing novels: prose, poetry, p. 169 [I noted this when I typed the entire Mrs Dalloway in free verse]; I don't think Mrs Dalloway had yet been published yet. Spender is talking of the period of 1929 - 1933; Orlando came out in 1928; Mrs Dalloway, in 1935; it's very possible she was working on Mrs Dalloway when she made this comment; later on that page, Spender says he talked with Leonard in 1934; and then then the next page, Spender mentions Mrs Dalloway (wow); more on prose-poems (though Spender does not use this term);
19. Thursdays with Lady Ottoline, p. 178
20. Coincidentally while reading Spender, I re-read parts of The Waves (which I have re-typed in its entirety. On page 179 of Spender: "After tea, I listened, relieved not to have to take part in the conversation, while Yeats sat on the sofa with Virginia Woolf and explained to her that her novel, The Waves, expressed in fiction the idea of pulsations of energy throughout the universe which was common to the modern theories of physicists and to current discoveries in psychic research."
21. Yeats, beginning on page 179
22. Concluding remarks regarding E. M. Forster, p. 183
23. His break with Christopher Isherwood, p. 190
24. On meeting Jimmy Younger; about 1932; in the spring of 1933, they traveled to Italy, p. 192
25. His "transition" to women, p. 202
26. On love, p. 203
27. Goethe's definition of creative human energy, p. 203
28.

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So Many Good Lines

 

One day when I said I was unhappy, he [Auden] replied: "You have no reason to be unhappy. You have sufficient money, you are talented and you are in love." This was a remark made at the right moment. I realized that it was true. Yet twenty years later I can now see that at the age of twenty I had days when I was seriously unhappy because I could not see then that unhappiness, unless it has a permanent physical or economic or psychological cause, is only a mood. -- p. 71

Joyce, Proust, Eliot and Virginia Woolf had turned a hero or heroine into a passive spectator of a civilization falling into ruins. -- p. 106.