When in the end we emerged from customs, we were greeted by a strikingly beautiful woman, tall and almost regal in her deportment. She kissed Wystan on the cheek and introduced herself. "I am Natasha," she said. "I hope you don't mind staying with us. Wystan is staying with us also." And as I began to mumble something not entirely grammatical, Auden intervened, "She is Stephen Spender's wife. Best if you say yes. They've prepared a room for you."
The next thing, we were in a car, with Natasha Spender at the wheel. Evidently they'd thought of everything; perhaps they'd discussed it over the phone—although I was a total stranger. Wystan hardly knew me, the Spenders even less. And yet . . . The London suburbs were flashing by in the car window and I tried to read signs. The most frequent was BED AND BREAKFAST; I understood the words, but luckily couldn't grasp—due to the absence of a verb—their meaning.
III
Later that evening, as the three of us sat down for supper, I tried to explain to Natasha (all the while marveling at the discrepancy between that wonderfully chiseled face and the homey-sounding Russian name) that I was not exactly a total stranger. That in fact back in Russia I'd had in my possession some items from this household, brought to me by Anna Akhmatova upon her return from England, where she had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965. The items were two records (Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and Richard Burton reading a selection from the English poets) and a veritable tricolor of some college scarf. They were given to her, she told me, by an extraordinarily handsome English poet whose name was Stephen Spender and who asked her to pass these things on to me.
"Yes," said Natasha. "She told us a lot about you. You were in prison, and we were all terribly worried that you would be cold. Hence the scarf."
Presently the doorbell rang and she went off to open the door. I was in the middle of a conversation with Wystan, or more exactly, I was listening to him, as my grammar would allow for very little initiative. Although I'd translated quite a bit from English (mostly the Elizabethans, as well as some modern American poetry and a couple of plays), my conversational skills at that time were minimal. I'd say "trepidation of the ground" instead of "earthquake." Besides, Wystan's speech, because of its extraordinary speed and truly transatlantic texture, required considerable concentration on my part.
But momentarily I lost it completely. In walked a very tall, slightly stooped, white-haired man with a gentle, almost apologetic smile on his face. He moved about what I assumed was his own dining room with the tenta- tiveness of a newcomer rather than the master of the house's certitude. "Hello, Wystan," he said, and then he greeted me.
I don't remember the exact words, but I remember being stunned by the beauty of their utterance. It felt as if all the nobility, civility, grace, and detachment ofthe English language suddenly filled the room. Like an instrument's chords being played all at once. To me, with my then untrained ear, the effect was spellbinding. It owed, no doubt, in part to the instrument's stooping frame: one felt not so much this music's audience as its accomplice. I looked about the room: nobody betrayed the slightest emotion. But then accomplices never do.
IV
Still later that same night, Stephen Spender—for that was he—and I went to the BBC television station, for the late- news program's on-camera interview. Twenty-three years ago the arrival in London of somebody like me still counted as news. The whole thing took two hours, including the round trip by taxi. During those two hours—and during the taxi ride especially—the spell I was under began to let up somewhat, since we were talking logistics. Of the TV interview, of the Poetry International that began the next day, of my stay in England. Suddenly conversation was easy: we were just two men discussing relatively tangible matters. I felt oddly comfortable in the presence of this six-foot-tall, blue-eyed, white-haired old man I had never met before, and I marveled, Why? Most likely, I simply felt protected by his superior height and age, not to mention his Oxonian. But_ quite apart from that, in the gentle tentativeness of his deportment, bordering on the awkward and accompanied by a guilty smile, I sensed his awareness of the provisional, faintly absurd nature of any reality at hand. To this attitude I wasn't a stranger myself, as it comes not from one's physique or temperament but from one's metier. Some people are less ready to display this, some more. Then there are those incapable of concealing it. I sensed that he and I belonged in the latter category.
v
I'd pick this as the main reason for the subsequent twenty- three years of our unlikely friendship. There were several others, and I'll mention some. Yet before I go any further, I must say that if what follows sounds a bit too much like a personal memoir, with too much of my own presence in it, this is because I find it impossible—at least for now—to speak about Stephen Spender in the past tense. I don't intend to play the solipsistic game of denying the obvious: that he is no more. It would perhaps be an easy thing for me to do, since for all these twenty-three years that I've mentioned, we saw each other rather infrequently, and never for more than five days in a row. But what I think and do is so intertwined in my mind with his and Wystan Auden's lives and lines that to reminisce seems more appropriate at present than trying to comprehend my emotions. Living is like quoting, and once you've learned something by heart, it's yours as much as the author's.
VI
For the next few days that I stayed under their roof, I was mothered by the Spenders and by Wystan in the most minute way, from breakfast to supper and into the nightcap. At one point, Wystan tried to teach me how to use the English public phone and was alarmed at my slow-wittedness. Stephen attempted to explain the Underground system, but in the end Natasha drove me everywhere. We lunched at the Cafe Royal, the scene of their courtship during the Blitz, where they'd sit for a hot meal between air raids as the waiters swept away shards of the cafe's broken windows. ("As the Germans were pounding us, we were actually wondering how soon the Russian planes would join them. In those days we were expecting the Russian bombers anytime.") Or else we'd go for lunch to Sonia Orwell. (" 1984 is not a novel," Wystan declared. "It is a study.") Then there was dinner at the Garrick Club with Cyril Connolly, whose Enemies of Promise I'd read just a couple of years before, and Angus Wilson, of whom I knew nothing. The former looked gray, bloated, and oddly Russian; the latter, in his pink shirt, resembled a tropical bird. The conversation escaped me, and I was reduced to observation.
This was often the case with me at that time, and I felt rather awkward on a number of occasions. I explained that to Stephen, but he evidently believed in osmosis more than analysis. One evening he and Natasha took me to a dinner party somewhere in South London, at the local bishop's rectory. His Eminence turned out to be a bit too lively, not to say gregarious; too purple, not to say lavender, for my untrained eye. Still, the food was superb, so was the wine, and his stable of pretty young clerics waiting on the guests was lovely to look at. When the meal was over, the ladies departed to an adjacent chamber; the gentlemen stayed for their port and Havanas. I found myself sitting across from C. P. Snow, who began to extol to me the virtues and verities ofMikhail Sholokhov's prose. It took me about ten minutes to summon the appropriate entries from Partridge's dictionary of English slang (back in Russia, I had only Volume I) for an adequate reply. Mr. Snow's face went indeed white; Stephen laughed uproariously. In fact, I was aiming not so much at the pink novelist as at the lavender host, whose lacquered loafer was footsieing my honest Hush Puppy under the table.