A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents
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A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents
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Narrated by:
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Laurence Kennedy
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By:
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Matthew Spender
About this listen
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shifting between memoir and biography, with new insights drawn from personal recollections and his father’s copious unpublished archives.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 twentieth century. Having met Auden and Isherwood at Oxford, he joined the early vocal critics of Hitler 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.
©2015 Matthew Spender (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
‘It’s hard to overstate how bravely honest Matthew Spender’s book is … brilliantly paced … the book also matters in its own right for its insight into how we are all shaped by the strangeness of the families we find ourselves inhabiting … a remarkable book’ Observer
‘This thoughtful and often astonishingly beautiful memoir … is exploratory, analytical, often critical, occasionally disloyal but ultimately a deeply moving work of filial pride, an attempt to try to work out not only the truth about his extraordinary parents but also himself’ Evening Standard
‘Painfully honest … With a son’s harsh condescension he spells out Stephen’s failings and blind spots, while not forgetting his generosity of spirit … He writes with such insight and intelligence that it feels wholly authentic. And by widening his field of vision beyond the family home to explore issues of culture, gender and politics then and now, he makes it our business, too’ Blake Morrison, Guardian
‘Eye-popping’ Daily Mail
‘An outstanding piece of writing, full of wonderfully sharp judgements… a memoir written in such a thoughtful, congenial, matter-of-fact style that it is only after putting it down that one begins to take in the full oddity of the Spenders' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
‘A disarmingly eccentric book … which combines a memoir of his parents … with ruminations on the gilded world in which they disported’ Literary Review
‘Scrupulously even-handed … Matthew Spender is a far more accomplished and engaging prose writer than his father, with a distinct personal voice”TLS
‘The first fully frank biography of his father’ Tatler
‘The heart of this book is filial and emotional. And very moving’ Financial Times
‘Told with extraordinary force and honest and is intensely interesting’ The Oldie
‘My God! What a childhood. What insight’ Stephen Frears
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.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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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.
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