The poet Stephen Spender wanted his son to be a part of his bohemian circle. Hannah Ellis-Petersen talks to Matthew Spender about the sexual complexities of his family life
It was almost 50 years ago that Matthew Spender and his wife Maro abandoned their life and family in London to live in isolation in a crumbling farmhouse in Tuscany. She would paint; he would sculpt and make furniture. The lives of their parents, filled with repression, sexual impropriety, hedonism and guilt, would no longer be at the centre of their lives. While the pair succeeded in cutting themselves off, they left behind an extraordinary world: one that always lingered in the background – ignored but never quite gone.
As the eldest son of Stephen Spender, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated poets, Matthew’s was a starry childhood. WH Auden was a regular fixture in the house (they would sit together and write poems inspired by Tolkien), and the other figures that flowed in and out of their family home in St John’s Wood ranged from Christopher Isherwood and TS Eliot to Sylvia Plath, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. His mother, Natasha, was a beautiful concert pianist. To an outsider their home, where literary dinner parties took place for decades, was a shrine to the intellectual elite.
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