Peter Marchant and Stan Sanvel Rubin
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN SPENDER
SR:
You published an autobiography,
World Within World,
in 1951.
Are you working on another to bring that one up to date?
SS:
I don't quite want to bring it up to date, because I think that peo–
ple's lives get very boring in autobiographies at the point of their
becoming famous figures; the latter half of that sort of "life" tends to
be a list of your accomplishments and the places you've been to-a
kind of travelogue, almost. I might avoid that by cutting up the
original autobiography and putting in new material. But I'll have to
read
World Within World
again to decide whether I can do that. I
haven't read it since I wrote it in 1950.
PM:
You've had many lives-prep school, adolescence, Oxford,
Germany, England in the thirties and its literary life, Spain, the
Auxiliary Fire Service. Which has been the worst?
SS:
I always think that prep school was, far and away, the worst. I
was very unhappy at the boarding school I was sent to when I was
nine. I was totally unsuited to go to a boarding school, and I felt as if
I'd been sent to prison. I always used to think, well, I'll never be as
unhappy again as I am here. As a matter of fact, a master once said
that to me. He noticed that I was very unhappy and said, "Anyhow
you can have this consolation, that you'll never be so unhappy
again." And it turned out to be quite true. When I was twenty-one, I
wrote to him and thanked him very much for having made that
remark and said that it had got me through being at school. I felt like
a prisoner really, imprisoned with all these other awful little boys.
PM:
Which has been the best period of your life?
SS:
I was probably happiest after I had left Oxford and was away
from any kind of institution . Oxford in a way I liked because I made
friends there, but I didn't make anything of Oxford . My ambition
Editor's Note: This interview was edited by Earl G. Ingersoll from a transcription of
a videotape produced by the Educational Communications Center on February 14,
1978, and sponsored by the Brockport Writers Forum, Department of English,
SUNY
College at Brockport, New York. Copyrighted
C
October 29, 1987, by
SUNY.
All rights reserved by the State University of New York. Not to be reprinted
without permission.
