(STEPHEN SPENDER)

(STEPHEN SPENDER)

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Archive. An archive of two items by Symons related to Stephen Spender. The items are:a) TD. 5pg. 8 x 11. No date [circa 1994, when Stephen Spenders Dolphins was published]. No place [likely England]. A five page typed review of Stephen Spenders poetry book Dolphins by Symons, complete with a few corrections in his handwriting. It states in part: Lines for Roy Fuller, one of the poems in Stephen Spenders collection, reminded me of the powerful effect Spenders Poems of 1932 had on the youthful Fuller. He knew a good many passages by heart: so did I, and we used to cap each others quotationsThe poem for Fuller first appeared as part of a tribute on his seventieth birthdayAt times the frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating. Who else would have cared to reprint between book covers forty years after the event the article he wrote in the Daily Worker on joining the Communist Party in 1937, with its general acceptance that the Party line was sacredWhat other British writer would in 1951 have dared to write with candour about his earlier homosexuality as Spender did in his memorable autobiography World Within World? None of his close contemporaries, certainly, who admitted their past activities only when the climate had made it safe to do soSlightly comic one can never be sure with Spender whether or not the comedy is deliberate is the effect of a question after a lecture asking whether he had really liked AudenAuden had been such an important factor in Spenders life as a writer that one would have thought the question could hardly arisePerhaps the shadow of Auden has always fallen over Spender as poet, and affected his workthe production of some distinctly low temperature verse. Stephen Spenders poetic output, more than that of most writers, needs sieving. The right kind of selection would show him to be, as he has been for a couple of decades, an underrated poet. The document is in very fine condition.b) TD. 4pg. 8 x 11. No date [circa 1992]. No place [likely England]. A four page typed review of Hugh Davids biography Stephen Spender: A Portrait With Background. It states in part: In 1951, Stephen Spender published an account of his first forty years. The book, World Within World, recounted with disarming self-critical humour the sapping of early Left-wing beliefs and attitudes, his brief membership of the Communist Partyhis eagerness to be feted as a star at a Writers Congress held in Madrid during the Spanish Civil WarIt was also, for the time, unusually candid about his homosexual friendship with a working class boy he called Jimmy Younger, who had gone to Spain to fightThe book said goodbye to propagandist politicshe is an easy targetIn journals, diaries and letters that found print as books he tried to discover his real beliefs via endless arguments with himselfHis feelings changed from year to yearSo there was plenty of ammunition lying around. It is the use of Hugh David has made of it that is deplorable[his] shifting attitudes during his early career may be found comic or absurd, but there were always faithful to his beliefs at the timeThe homosexuality is eagerly discussed, in particular just when Spender lost his virginityThe course of Stephen Spenders career has been almost the reverse of what is suggested here. The label attached to him in youth, the Rupert Brooke of the Depression has stuck, and the fine early poems are much underrated. Spender shares are low on the poetic stock market, in part because around 1950 the poets features began to change into those of the literary elder statesman. We may regret that, but it is by those often rawly moving poems of love and loss that he should be remembered, not by the year he lost his virginity or his confused and confusing changes of belief. The manuscript is in very fine condition.

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