A WORLDLY FAILURE

2 3 R A W O R L D L Y F A I L U R E M A T T H E W S P E N D E R It was W. H. Auden who taught me about adjectives. He stayed with us whenever he came to England. I was nine years old. Scene: 15 Loudoun Road, my parents’ house, eight-thirty in the morning. I was late for school. Wystan, with an air of having already been up for hours, was smoking at the breakfast table, bored or thoughtful , looking out the window at the tangled ferns of the basement area. Mum and Dad (Natasha and Stephen Spender) were still in bed, in their bedroom with a large dressing-table on which lurked strange hairbrushes sold recently to Dad by a sadistic hairdresser who had persuaded him he was losing his hair. I was in a panic over a test due that morning on what an adjective was. Wystan looked surprised. ‘‘An adjective is any word that qualifies a noun,’’ he said. ‘‘I know how to say that,’’ I said. ‘‘But I don’t understand what it means.’’ He looked around the table, discarded the cereals and found among the debris of the night before a bottle of wine. One object more memorable than the others. 2 4 S P E N D E R Y ‘‘Ah . . . you could say, the good wine,’’ he said firmly. ‘‘Its goodness qualifies the wine.’’ Then he thought for a moment, peering at the bottle. ‘‘The wine was good,’’ he said, correcting himself, and added in a tragic voice, ‘‘Now all we have left is an empty bottle.’’ That summer, my sister and I had been abandoned on an island o√ the coast of Wales. I’d liked it. Lots of pu≈ns, a few cormorants , and numerous placid sheep. On top of the hill in the middle of this island were three grass tombs of long-dead Vikings, and Bardsey Island had left me with an obsession with barrow wights and the sinister mystery of Norse ghost stories. Hearing about this later that year, Wystan sent me from New York the Tolkien trilogy The Lord of the Rings. I read it straight through. Auden used to say that he knew where every detail of this trilogy had come from and one day he’d write about it. Dad tried it once but he found Tolkien tremendously boring. Once, Wystan and I wrote Tolkienish poems together, still over breakfast but a few years after the adjectives. I collected them and copied them into a notebook that I decorated with a heraldic crest ‘‘with whiskers,’’ as that kind of shading was called at school. Here are a couple of verses, from a poem dated 18 May 1957: God knows what kings and lords Had their realms on these downs of chalk, And now guard their bountiful hoards, One night you may see them walk. They walk with creaks and groans Cloaks fluttering as they go by, They ride on enormous roans Which block out the stars and the sky. Lines two and four of each verse are Auden’s. ‘‘Can I use them?’’ ‘‘Of course.’’ I got the impression that words could be seized out of the air and given generously from one person to another. My frequent readings of The Lord of the Rings always featured Wystan in there somewhere. The kind but didactic Wizard. In this earliest phase of knowing Wystan I intuitively grasped his own self-image as a young man, which was that of ‘‘Uncle Wiz,’’ an eccentric Victorian vicar with a bee in his bonnet about the Apoc- A W O R L D L Y F A I L U R E 2 5 R rypha. He didn’t want to be taken seriously every inch of the way. He liked to pontificate, but he also wanted to be teased about it in return. It was part of his longing for universal love, a very strong need he had. Wystan knew a great deal about our family. There’s a story of him running round and round the aspidistra at our house...