She died in the late 1960s.
Speaight, Robert (1904–1976) . British actor and writer; educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. He established a stage reputation by the start of the 1930s and began publishing novels around the same time. Among his many stage roles was Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. During the later part of his career he published scholarly books on Shakespeare and a number of biographies.
Spender, Humphrey (b. 1910) . English photographer and designer; brother of Stephen Spender. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk; at the University of Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and at the Architectural Association School, London. During the 1930s he worked as a portrait and commercial photographer from his own studio in London, was a staff photographer for the Daily Mirror newspaper, and became the official photographer for Mass Observation. Before the war he moved to Picture Post magazine. He trained in the Royal Army Service Corps (Tanks) in 1941, worked for the Ministry of Information, and became a War Office Official Photographer and afterwards a Photo Interpreter for Theatre Intelligence Service. When the war ended, he returned to Picture Post, but gradually gave up photography to paint and to design textiles. He had many individual shows in these media during the 1940s and 1950s, and also taught design at the Royal College of Art and at several other schools in London until the mid-1970s.
From the late 1970s, a revival of interest in his photographs led to numerous exhibitions of his 1930s work. Spender married twice (his first wife died of Hodgkin’s disease) and had one son with each of his wives.
Spender, Natasha Litvin. English concert pianist; she married Stephen Spender in 1941 and had two children with him, Matthew and Lizzie.
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Glossary
Spender, Stephen (1909–1995) . English poet, critic, autobiographer, editor.
W. H. Auden introduced Isherwood to Spender in 1928; Spender was then an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, and Isherwood became a mentor. Afterwards Spender lived in Hamburg and near Isherwood in Berlin, and the two briefly shared a house in Sintra with Heinz Neddermeyer and Tony Hyndman. Spender was the youngest of the writers who came to prominence with Auden and Isherwood in the 1930s; after they emigrated, he cultivated the public and social roles they abjured in England. He worked as a propagandist for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the National Fire Service during the Blitz. He was co-editor with Cyril Connolly of Horizon and later of Encounter. He moved away from his early enthusiasm for communism, but remained liberal in politics. In 1968, at the request of Russian dissident Pavel Litvinov and with the combined support of various celebrated intellectuals (mostly personal friends) and of Amnesty International, Spender helped to found Index on Censorship to report on and publicize the circumstances of persecuted writers and artists throughout the world. His 1936 marriage to Inez Pearn was over by 1939, and in 1941 he married Natasha Litvin with whom he had two children. Spender appears as
“Stephen Savage” in Lions and Shadows and is further described in Christopher and His Kind and in D 1. He published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951, and his Journals 1939– 1983 appeared in 1985.
Stafford, Jean (1915–1979) . American novelist and short-story writer. Her much-praised first novel, Boston Adventure, appeared in 1944 and her second, The Mountain Lion, in 1947, followed by other novels and numerous short stories. She worked on The Southern Review and occasionally taught college. In 1966 she published an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, A Mother in History. Her Collected Stories (1969) won the Pulitzer Prize. When Isherwood met Stafford in 1947 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, but this first marriage (for both) ended in 1948; later she was married again for a time.
Stern, James (1904–1993) and Tania Kurella Stern (1906–1995) . Irish writer and translator and his wife, daughter of a German psychiatrist. He was educated at Eton and, briefly, Sandhurst. In youth, he worked as a farmer in Southern Rhodesia and as a banker in the family bank in England and Europe, then travelled until settling for a time in Paris in the 1930s, where he met Tania Kurella. They married in 1935. She was a physical therapist and exercise teacher, exponent of her own technique, the Kurella method. She fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution for the left-wing political activities of her two brothers, already refugees. Isherwood met the Sterns in Sintra, Portugal in 1936 through William Robson-Scott and introduced them to W. H. Auden with whom they became close friends, later, in America. James Stern’s books include The Heartless Land (1932), Something Wrong (1938)––both story collections––and The Hidden Damage (1945), about his trip with Auden to survey bomb damage in postwar Germany for the U.S. Army. Tania Stern collaborated on some of his translations. Eventually they returned to England and settled near Salisbury.
Stern, Josef Luitpold (1886–1966) . Viennese poet, journalist, and editor; identified throughout his career with the cause of the workers. Stern reformed Glossary
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the workers’ library in Vienna and was a high-ranking administrator in workers’ education both before and after the war. He arrived as a refugee at the Quaker hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood volunteered during the war, and Isherwood records in D 1 that they met there in the autumn of 1941. Stern returned to Vienna after the war. He published nearly twenty volumes, including Klassenkampf und Massenschulung (1925), Zehn Jahre Republik (1928), Lyrik und Prosa aus vier Jahrzehnten (1948), and Das Sternbild, Gedicht eines Lebens, a collected works in two volumes (1964–1966).
Steuermann, Eduard. Polish-born concert pianist; Salka Viertel’s brother and briefly a member of her extended household during the war. He reestablished his career in the USA, achieving wide recognition as an interpreter in particular of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Among his students was Alfred Brendel. Steuermann married twice, and had three daughters. His second marriage was to his student, Clara Silvers, thirty years his junior.
Steve, also Stevie. Steve Conway; see index and see also D 1.
Stevens, George (1904–1975) . American film director. Early in his career, Stevens directed Laurel and Hardy. He made a number of successful films in the 1930s and early 1940s, and had a special touch for comedy. His prewar films include Alice Adams (1935), Swing Time (1936), Gunga Din (1939), Woman of the Year (1941)––in which he introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn––and Talk of the Town (1942). During the war, Stevens headed the Sigma Corps Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe, where, among other disturbing scenes, he filmed Dachau soon after it was liberated. Although he made some of his best-known films after his return, his work became heavier and, eventually, less successful. Later films include I Remember Mama (1947), A Place in the Sun (1951, Academy Award), Shane (1953), and Giant (1956, Academy Award).
Stokowski, Leopold (1882–1977) . English-born conductor. He studied at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Music. Stokowski began as a church organist in London and then in New York and settled in the USA, becoming a citizen in 1915. He conducted many celebrated orchestras in his long career, in particular the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1938, for which he established a superlative international reputation and where he introduced important European works to U.S. audiences––such as Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Rachmaninoff––as well as performing new American music. He conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and was also involved in several other movies. Afterwards, he conducted leading orchestras all over the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony, finally returning to London in 1972 where he often appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra.