Reviewed by Jonathan Wright

Matthew Spender's parents worked hard to keep marital tensions away from the children. Theirs was not a home of blazing rows and slammed doors. Nor, upon casual inspection, did the young Matthew have much cause for complaint. He enjoyed a first-class education and lots of foreign travel, and there were advantages to having a celebrated poet for a dad: Charlie Chaplin might pop round for supper or W H Auden might teach you about adjectives over breakfast. For all this, Matthew Spender is perfectly entitled to be haunted by the relationship between Stephen Spender and his pianist wife Natasha. It makes for a poignant tale.

There was a time, Spender recalls, when he "thought my father wrote in one room and my mother played the piano in the other, and the two endeavours were balanced". The notion of balance was wide of the mark. We have no reason to suppose that Stephen didn't love Natasha, in his way, but he patently regarded himself as her intellectual superior. Natasha feared that "no opinion of hers on art, on books, not even on music, would distract him from his interior soliloquy".

This was hardly the worst of it. Natasha was fully aware of Stephen's earlier homosexual adventures but hopes of putting the past behind them were dashed when Stephen embarked upon a series of infatuations and relationships (not necessarily physical). Spender has no problem with his father's homosexuality, and nor should he, but he feels sorry for his mother. Whatever view Stephen "held of marriage, it wasn't hers... she was faced with the existence of a dark area of their shared life which she could never reach."

This did little to attenuate Natasha's own significant shortcomings. We are told that she could be controlling and judgemental, and fashioned herself as the saviour of those in distress. The latter is a noble-sounding quality but it could get out of hand. The curious relationship with Raymond Chandler is a case in point. When he drifted into the Spenders' life he was an ill and ageing drunk: Matthew remembers encountering someone who resembled a "decaying tortoise". Natasha decided to rescue Chandler from self-destruction but the great man apparently mistook pity for love. Awkward letters and holidays ensued and, while there was never any sex, Stephen became rather irked by his wife's relationship. One more ghost for Spender Jr to chase.

Spender has no desire to denounce or demonise his parents. This book was envisaged as a "gesture of mourning and affection" though Spender concedes that "revenge came into it, too". As an adolescent he decided that "this contest is not mine. Its entirely theirs", but decades later he is still trying to fathom his parents. There is the impact of their uneven, baffling relationship to ponder, but also a very ordinary species of filial ambivalence. Most of us, when thinking about our mums and dads, encounter a muddle of gratitude and resentment: the things they did, the things they didn't do, the things they might have done better. Spender remembers being allowed to play with his toys under the piano while his mother practised, but also recalls not letting on that he was learning the clarinet because Natasha would have something "levelling" to say. He remembers his father giving him a translation of the Iliad that was quickly devoured, but also thinks back to the awkward car journeys that passed in silence.

Matthew Spender needed to be rescued from the house in St John's Wood. Enter Maro, the art student at the Slade. Matthew began courting her well before he went up to Oxford. She became his wife and, for me, she is the hero of this book. One evening, she came to dinner and the company was illustrious: not just Stephen Spender, but Auden and Freddie Ayer. Maro was not remotely intimidated and held forth on various literary topics. Matthew's father, normally so placid, told her to "Shut. Up." She did but, I'm guessing, had gone a long way towards winning Matthew's heart.

This book discusses the pros and cons of Stephen Spender's poetry, the hazy business of the CIA funding cultural initiatives with which Spender Sr was involved (how much did he know? Not very much, and it doesn't really matter, seems to be the conclusion), and a fine account of British intellectual life in the post-war years. This is all scintillating stuff but it has nothing on the story of a son who simply wants to understand his parents. Matthew Spender charts this difficult journey with respectfulness, candour and uncommon bravery.