Stephen Spender
THE LIFE OF LITERATURE*
When I was fifteen or sixteen, I was staying in Marden,
Kent, at the house of my uncle,
J.
A.
Spender. One morning my
uncle announced that a poet was coming to tea. This poet was Frank
Kendon, then quite a young man. The announcement filled me with
a spiritual excitement which I can analyze rather than describe. Of
Mr. Kendon's work I knew a long poem,
Judas lscariot,
the opening
of which, if I remember rightly, describes an early meeting of Judas
in
his
boyhood, with a snake, amid sun-bright stony Palestinian
scenery (my memory of the poem may
be
inaccurate, but the point
here is to be faithful to my own impression). The rest of the poem
tired me, but I did not blame Mr. Kendon for this. In those days I
found it difficult to sustain my interest in a long poem.
If
I could
not follow a poem, I assumed there was something wonderful in it
beyond my comprehension.
So Mr. Kendon was for me a maker of crystalline miracles, a
lord in the realm of the imagination, where above all things, I longed
to have a humble existence. To write one line, or, at most, one poem,
which was really "poetry" and which might appear in print, an
object which produced the ravishing sensation of something concretely
made with words, like a branch of coral extended in the mind of
the reader-that was my highest ambition.
Mr. Kendon also represented a life of liberty to me from the
chains which I vaguely felt to fret the life of my uncle. When, for
example, my uncle, blowing out his small white moustache a little
and leaning back in his armchair, or on one of those long walks where
I watched with fascination the perspiration at the back of his neck
melt away the starch of his white collar: when he said: "Poetry!
Well, when I was your age I also used to make charming little pat-
*
This is a chapter from an autobiographical work in progress.
1194
