Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism - Hardcover

Leeming, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805042490 ISBN 13: 9780805042498

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 1999

Synopsis

The literary critic, journalist, and art critic's insights into the Spanish Civil War; the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism; World War II; Vietnam; the sexual revolution; and modern and post-modern figures such as Yeats, Woolf, Sartre, and Eliot are explored in this critical biography of a great literary figure. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Stephen Spender spent much of his final years in pitched battles over how his long life should be presented. When Hugh David published his unauthorised Stephen Spender: A Portrait with Background in 1992, Spender and his wife Natasha launched a public campaign lambasting David for his alleged misinterpretations and inaccuracies. A year later, gay novelist David Leavitt reworked elements of Spender's autobiography World Within World in his While England Sleeps, making explicitly sexual what was before only implicitly erotic. Spender threatened to sue and Viking-Penguin were forced to withdraw the novel.

Spender died in July 1995 but even if he were alive to read David Leeming's new biography, it's doubtful that he'd have been provoked into disgusted letters to the Times Literary Supplement or new litigation. Deeming, as his preface makes clear, is a literary gentleman of the old school, who regarded Spender as a friend from the time they shared an office 30 years ago at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Although he insists this is an "unauthorised" biography, it is in fact as near as authorised as any could be, since Leeming is heavily reliant on Spender's own copious autobiographical writings and journals, published from as early as 1946's European Witness, and his unpublished papers at Berkeley's Bancroft Library (all but four of chapter 1's 23 notes are to World Within World, for example). The result is a leisurely, warm, sympathetic and utterly uncontroversial book that trots through Spender's literary friendships (MacNeice, Auden, Isherwood) and the intriguing pre-war years in Germany and Spain (dubbed here "free love") before seeing him settle down into bluff, devoted family man old age. In ironing out all the creases, Leeming leaves many questions unanswered--most especially why Spender, even in his 80s, should have wasted so much energy on closing down discussion of what clearly was a fascinating early life. --Alan Stewart

About the Author:

David Leeming, a former professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, is the author of The World of Myth, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, and James Baldwin: A Biography (Owl Books, 0-8050-3835-3). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0805042490
• ISBN 13: 9780805042498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304