Sir Stephen Spender

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 20:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:26

My castaway this week is a poet, a member of what he has called a special band of thirties writers. He came to prominence with WH Orton, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeese. Now aged eighty and a knight, he seems to represent the history of English letters in the twentieth century.

Presenter0:44

Although he failed his degree at Oxford, he has since had literary honours heaped upon him. For seven years he was professor of English at London University. But poetry is his first love, and, whatever his titles and honours, memories of his radical past ensure that he is no easy member of the establishment.

Presenter1:05

They write of you now, Sir Stephen, as a survivor, because the famous Who Are Your Friends Orden, Isherwood, Elliott, Virginia Woolfe are dead. Is that how you feel, one of the last survivors of a generation?

Sir Stephen Spender1:16

Yes, I do. I think. I feel that I'm like something dropped from outer space, coded with messages from outer space, from all my friends who are dead, and all the people I n know who are dead.

Presenter1:29

So are you constantly asked to recall them and recount tales of them?

Sir Stephen Spender1:33

Constantly. And then if I do, I'm I'm accused of dropping names.

Presenter1:38

But you're rather like a medium, really, aren't you, being used to contact the dead?

Sir Stephen Spender1:41

Yes, I feel like a medium. I actually I think a great deal of my friends. One thinks

Sir Stephen Spender1:48

Of a funny story. Oh, I must ring Auden and tell him that, and then you suddenly realize Auden's dead.

Sir Stephen Spender1:54

That's rather distressing.

Presenter1:56

You're you're eighty, as I was saying. Do you do you feel eighty, or is age something that has stolen up on you?

Sir Stephen Spender2:02

I don't know quite what feeling eighty is. I mean, I think, of course, the trouble about being old is that either you are decrepit or you aren't, and I don't happen to be decrepit, so therefore and as I happen to be a person with an extremely long memory

Sir Stephen Spender2:18

At all times of my life I feel almost as if I am the same person living at the same time.

Presenter2:24

So what what sort of age is that person? What age are you in your head?

Sir Stephen Spender2:28

I should think I'm what's called a permanent adolescent.

Presenter2:31

So you're just playing at being old, really?

Sir Stephen Spender2:34

Ye oh yes, oh it's playing me.

Presenter2:37

Shall we hear then the first piece of music that you've chosen to take with you on your desert island?

Sir Stephen Spender2:41

Well, I thought through all the pieces I'm choosing.

Sir Stephen Spender2:44

Are connected with my past or with friends. Now, when I was an undergraduate, or when we were undergraduates, Isaiah Berlin and I used to go to Salzburg, and this was at a time when at the opera conductors like Brunewalte and Toscanini conducted. And one of the great pieces we heard was Toscanini conducting Falstaff. Unfortunately, this is not the Toscanini recording, but still it's one of the most beautiful passages in Verdis Falstaff.

Speaker 43:16

Nanetta Tasi que moi due bachi infretta infreta.

Sir Stephen Spender3:21

Yeah.

Sir Stephen Spender3:43

Table s

Speaker 23:44

Uh

Speaker 43:49

Oh it might

Sir Stephen Spender3:50

Uh

Speaker 43:53

Far Barley, Johnny.

Speaker 43:56

Mama Trinia Sasir.

Sir Stephen Spender3:59

Your susiner

Presenter4:10

Yeah.

Presenter4:16

Act two of Verdi's Falstaff with Sigerian Devons and Ilva Ligabuy, and the RCA Italiana Opera Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter4:26

So Stephen, when did you know that you you wanted t to write poetry? Can you remember? Was there a moment when it came to you?

Sir Stephen Spender4:32

Well, I can remember a very important thing in my life and also the life of my brothers and my sister, and that is during the First World War in nineteen sixteen, we were living at Sherringham on at Norfolk, on the east coast, and zeppelins were dropping stray bombs on us, and we were evacuated to the lake district near Lake Derwentwater. My parents used to read poems of Wordsworth to each other at night in the lawn when we were upstairs supposed to be asleep in a house called Skelgill Farm, which I remember very well.

Sir Stephen Spender5:09

And this gave me the idea of Wordsworth, and the idea of poetry, which I associated with the whole landscape, really. It wasn't just Wordsworth, it was all these streams.

Sir Stephen Spender5:21

flowing through the countryside were all poetry by Wordsworth, and I became very absorbed in this, and I think that gave me the idea

Sir Stephen Spender5:30

of poetry.

Presenter5:32

It sounds very English, th th th very poetic, doesn't it? It's the the the landscape and that whole feeling that you sound.

Sir Stephen Spender5:39

Well, that's right. I think of England as a very rare thing within England itself, very rare countryside, very rare people too. But when they're they're most rare, I think of them as poetic.

Sir Stephen Spender5:53

And I think I've always remembered the most beautiful poetry in the world is really English poetry, although the English seem rather to despise poetry. One doesn't go round saying one is a poet, one doesn't write poet in one's passport, I don't think.

Presenter6:09

What do you write in your passport?

Sir Stephen Spender6:10

I think I write journalist or something.

Presenter6:13

Can you remember how old you were when you wrote your first poem?

Sir Stephen Spender6:16

Oh, I think I was eight or nine.

Presenter6:19

Yeah.

Sir Stephen Spender6:19

Do you remember what it was? It says something like O Nature, O Nature, with all thy powers, What dost thou do in the long winter hours? I love thee, O Nature, so sweet and so good, But where dost thou get thy winter food?

Sir Stephen Spender6:37

I do remember that, yes.

Presenter6:39

Should we have the second record?

Sir Stephen Spender6:42

I wrote a poem called I Think Continually of Those Who Are Truly Great, which is often sneered at, a very exalted kind of poetry. But I think I got this from my passion for late Beethoven when I was very young, and I think the A minor quartet is amongst the most s sublime music in the world.

Presenter8:02

Beethoven string quartet in A minor, opus one hundred and thirty two, played by the Melosch quartet.

Presenter8:09

Both your parents died when you were quite young, didn't they?

Sir Stephen Spender8:12

Yes. My mother died when I was eleven, my father when I was sixteen.

Presenter8:17

Do you recall being very upset by those deaths?

Sir Stephen Spender8:20

No, the awful thing is I wasn't.

Sir Stephen Spender8:23

because they were rather liberating their deaths because my mother died at a time when I was at the most horrible and terrible preparatory school, and so when she died I was brought home in order to be a companion to my father. So it was really what it was rather liberating.

Sir Stephen Spender8:41

Then my father died when I was adolescent, and a a very revolting kind of adolescence against the kind of liberalism of my father. And so that in a way was also rather a release. It's rather terrible to say that. And one thing I do spend the end of my life in doing is trying to mourn my father and really trying to appreciate what he was like and thinking how uncharitable my thoughts most of my life have been about my father.

Presenter9:13

What kind of man was he?'Cause he was he was a uh quite a well known journalist, wasn't he?

Sir Stephen Spender9:17

journalists in a sense which I really don't like very much, very rhetorical, always talking about great causes, high ideals and so on. You never felt that he was very much in touch with reality, but he was in touch with this kind of world of journalism and public life and worshipping the great figures of public life.

Presenter9:40

And what was he like at home?

Sir Stephen Spender9:43

Um, well rather like that. I mean, he actually he was very kind to us, extremely nice, I think. And after my mother died, incapable of understanding adolescence, I think.

Sir Stephen Spender9:54

And so there wasn't really very much contact.

Presenter9:57

So you went off you went off to university.

Presenter10:00

Ripe in a sense for further rebellion, yes?

Sir Stephen Spender10:04

Yes. When I went to the university I was being a very affected kind of aesthete. I was very excited about modernism, about, say, James Joyce's Ulysses, that kind of writing.

Presenter10:17

But you you didn't read English. You chose to read uh politics.

Sir Stephen Spender10:20

Well, I was very stupid. I've and I've been blaming myself ever since for that. Out of some kind of masochism, I suppose, I didn't read the subject I was really interested in. And I read the subjects that I was not interested in and really hated, which was philosophy, politics, and economics. All of them I hated equally, I think.

Sir Stephen Spender10:39

And it might have been a good idea to make myself do something I hated, if I had been capable of making myself do something I hated. But what the result was, really, that I did absolutely nothing except well, I did read Shakespeare and a lot of literature, but I really ignored

Sir Stephen Spender10:55

My actual school.

Presenter10:57

So you you didn't in the end get a degree?

Sir Stephen Spender10:59

No, I plowed. I did very badly.

Presenter11:02

Shall we pause for another record?

Sir Stephen Spender11:04

Well, again, I'm sticking to friends, and I wanted to choose something from The Rake's Progress, which was written the libretto by Orden, and the music, of course, by Stravinsky. Orden was a great friend of mine at Oxford, and also really for the rest of his life. And Stravinsky, I got to know late in Stravinsky's life, and we had very many pleasant times with him. And we went in fact to Venice for the first performance of The Rake's Progress, and I remember afterwards when we came out of the Fenice Theatre and walked through the Piazza, people standing up at all the tables in the Piazza and clapping Stravinsky. It was a very moving moment.

Speaker 411:51

Agree.

Speaker 411:57

We're not presenting.

Speaker 412:33

Now is the season.

Speaker 412:37

Were the Scythian Queen with genius?

Speaker 412:45

But it's all

Presenter12:47

The first act of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress sung by Philip Langridge and Catherine Pope, with the London Sinfonietta Chorus, conducted by Riccardo

Presenter12:59

You were at University College, sister Steven, and Whiston Auden was at Christchurch. How did you come to catch his eye?

Sir Stephen Spender13:06

We knew about each other because both my brothers were at Gresham School Holt with Orden.

Sir Stephen Spender13:13

And it's very funny about things then, manners then, because even if one was an undergraduate, in order to meet another undergraduate at another college you had to be introduced.

Sir Stephen Spender13:25

And so these old Grashamians, who rather patronised me as my elder brother, held before my eyes all through my first year that one day they might introduce me to Auden. But actually I wasn't introduced to Auden until my second year when someone asked both of us to a luncheon party. And after that we got on very well. I used to go and see him. I was two years younger than he, so I was already very much in the position of a disciple. He told me what poets I should like, what poetry was about. He asked me about my personal life.

Presenter14:03

But why why was he a figure which inspired so much awe, that one day you might, if you were terribly lucky, be introduced to this person?

Sir Stephen Spender14:11

Well, I think he he knew a very great deal. The poetry that he wrote when he was a a young man is extremely beautiful. And al it's also extremely difficult. It still is extremely difficult poetry. His contemporaries didn't understand it very well, but they did realize, you know, there's something about it which was absolutely wonderful. And then he was completely sure of himself. I've never known anyone in my life who was so completely sure of himself as Auden was.

Presenter14:41

He flaunted his homosexuality, did he not?

Sir Stephen Spender14:43

He was very open about his homosexuality, yes.

Presenter14:47

And and did people find that shocking, or were they outraged, or were they fascinated, or both?

Sir Stephen Spender14:53

Well, I think it was so much, you know, a matter of cliques that I think that if you were in that particular kind of clique, or if you knew Auden, you simply accepted it.

Presenter15:04

What was your lifestyle, then? How did you all go on?

Sir Stephen Spender15:08

We were a generation.

Sir Stephen Spender15:11

whose lifestyle was definitely much lower than a previous generation of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, that older generation, who were rather smart and moneyed.

Sir Stephen Spender15:26

Auden, De Luis, MacNeese, and myself we were all children of professional people, and we represented a definite sort of lowering of social standards.

Presenter15:37

And how did that manifest itself? I read somewhere you never made your beds, you never drew your curtains, you sort of.

Sir Stephen Spender15:43

Well, this is Auden didn't. Auden was very careless about uh things like that right up to to the day he died. I mean, to go into a room inhabited by Auden was like going into the nest of some extremely untidy animal.

Presenter15:59

But those days, um the twenties at Oxford are obviously um days that you recall with a deal of affection, perhaps some longing even.

Sir Stephen Spender16:08

Yes, I think they were beautiful. I had a postcard from uh an American friend of mine of a bit later, Lincoln Kirsten, two days ago, enclosing a photograph of one of us young, and just writing, Those were the days. So I think that those were the days in a way. Yes, they were wonderful really. They were very free.

Presenter16:29

Another record, please.

Sir Stephen Spender16:32

In those days my brother had a friend called Eddie Edmiston.

Sir Stephen Spender16:37

Who is Aratha?

Sir Stephen Spender16:39

A sissyish kind of person, I suppose, a great joker, always teasing, always making jokes. And I think of him a lot because during the war he became incredibly brave and was a parachuter and was killed. He was one of those sort of very, very brave sisses, I should say. One of the songs he used to sing was I Am a Tree by Douglas Byn. And so lately, in the way that one comes round back to one's past, I've been thinking a lot about Douglas Byn, his songs. So I'd like to take I Am a Tree with me to the Desert Island.

Speaker 417:13

The thing that I should ever be.

Speaker 417:17

Just nothing better than a tree.

Speaker 417:20

Stuck here in lonely solitude

Speaker 417:24

So old and shivering in the nude.

Speaker 417:27

Without a leaf to form a verdant cloak, It's not a joke to be a blasted oak.

Speaker 417:35

I'm a tree, a little bird is used to nest in I'm a tree.

Presenter17:41

Tuggless Bing, singing I'm a tree. It it's strange, Sir Stephen, that humour is obviously very much a a a part of your personality, but it's not something that comes through in your your writing, is it?

Sir Stephen Spender17:51

Well, I'm trying to write things in which it does come through a bit recently. So I hope it'll come through uh on my desert island before I'm ninety. I give myself the next ten years to be humorous in.

Presenter18:04

We talked about the the kind of um character Auden was. What about you? What sort of figure did you cut, then? What did you look like?

Sir Stephen Spender18:11

Well, I was very tall and thin, uh red-faced, large blue eyes. Uh there's a rather famous description by Christopher Ishwood of me as like being a s this sort of scarlet, awkward uh boy who he thinks is completely crazy. And I acted rather crazy. I thought it was rather smart to be crazy. I used to read a great deal of Dostoevsky, and I'd like to identify myself with a character like uh Alyosha in The Brothers Karamadsov.

Presenter18:46

Why did you and Orden then, on leaving Oxford, go to Berlin? For you to meet Isherwood, certainly, but why why did you decide to go and live there?

Sir Stephen Spender18:55

I think we were reacting against Bloomsbury, which went to Paris. Paris was smart and sophisticated, and they were always talking about it in their sort of rather fluty voices as, you know, they extremely intellectual. And I think we went to Berlin because Berlin was very rough really. We went to Berlin bars and nightclubs. We didn't actually go to these very decadent, expensive places. In fact, if you take a movie like Cabaret, which is about Christopher Isherwood's early story, Sally Bowles, I remarked to Isherwood when I'd seen Cabaret that there wasn't anything in Cabaret that we could have afforded to do when we were living in Berlin, nor could Sally Bowles, whom I knew very well, as a matter of fact, Jean Ross, that girl there. if you associate us with Berlin, you mustn't think of that kind of transvestite, kind of very decadent Berlin. You must think of something rougher, sort of working class young men and boys who

Sir Stephen Spender19:59

who were unemployed and were very glad to have friends like us, you see, and just much more like that.

Presenter20:07

But did you also, um, in those years sense the horror of that which was to come? I mean, you saw that that Nazism there of the early thirties.

Sir Stephen Spender20:15

He certainly did. And well, my sympathies were very much to the left. I remember thinking, well, perhaps I'm being stupid about the Nazis. I'm just anti Nazi because all my friends are.

Sir Stephen Spender20:29

But so I then bought a lot of Nazi literature, like Mein Kampf and Kampf vum Berlin by Goebbels, and I thought they were not only wicked, but they were extremely cynical. For instance, I think it was Hitler or Goebbels who said, If you want the people to believe a lie, tell the biggest lie possible. Well, a man who was supposed to be a leader of the people was boasting of the fact that he told them, his followers, the biggest lies possible, and they were all delighted. Nazism was like being given a bottle of medicine which has poison written very big in a label.

Sir Stephen Spender21:08

And the person who gets the bottle is delighted to drink it. It was an extremely cynical movement.

Presenter21:16

Shall we have uh your fifth record?

Sir Stephen Spender21:18

Well, again returning to friends, this is our friend and neighbour, Alfred Brendel, whom I think is the greatest living pianist. And this is a recording of him playing the allegretto of Schubert's A Major Sonata.

Presenter22:37

The allegretto from Schubert's piano sonata in A major played by Alfred Brendel. All these names, Sir Stephen, from Brendel to Stravinsky, Wolfe and Elliott. I think your your daughter Lizzie has said that uh she was brought up believing that if you were an actress you were Peggy Ashcroft and if you were a sculptor you were Henry Moore, because all these people she was surrounded by. Do you count yourself lucky to have known so many brilliant people? Or do you take?

Sir Stephen Spender23:01

And I think I'm very lucky indeed.

Sir Stephen Spender23:04

In a way it connects with my mother, because my mother was a very brilliant woman, I think. Um uh she wrote poems and she was very good at drawing.

Sir Stephen Spender23:14

But I think she was very isolated within our family and in this public political world, journalistic world, my father, and I've always thought that if she'd known someone like Virginia Woolf, she would have been a quite a different kind of person.

Presenter23:28

When as you said, you were fell under the spell of that Bloomsbury set, if you like, Virginia Wolfe and TS Eliot you knew there too, didn't you? How did they treat you? Because they were older than you, weren't they?

Sir Stephen Spender23:39

Well, both Elliott and Virginia Woolf were extremely nice to me. Of course, one knows what Virginia really thought of one, because she r wrote her journals and she wrote letters, all of which had been published, and some rocks about me are extremely snide. But they are also very nice remarks, too.

Sir Stephen Spender23:59

Within limits, I had a very real understanding with her. You know, she was always supposed to be very touchy and to

Sir Stephen Spender24:07

snub people very much. And I think I was aware, again perhaps because of my mother, who was also a bit mad, really is clinically mad.

Sir Stephen Spender24:16

I was aware of this extreme sensitivity.

Presenter24:20

Now the leading hostess at the time was Lady Ottiline Morrel, was it not? a somewhat eccentric woman.

Sir Stephen Spender24:27

Yes, well she was the great hostess. Uh she was s s s somewhat grotesque.

Sir Stephen Spender24:33

if one can say this politely. She always wore she dressed almost like an eighteenth century shepherdess, really. She was extremely open in her conversation, and she really adored these intellectuals Bertrand Russell, with whom she had a love affair, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence, with whom I strongly suspect she had a love affair.

Presenter24:57

and she used to drop her ear rings in her teacup.

Sir Stephen Spender25:00

Well, once she invited me anyhow to tea alone.

Sir Stephen Spender25:04

And it began with her dropping her earring into the a teapot. And the next thing is that tea teacup I mean the next thing was her the whole front of her dress had come down and I was there were her naked breasts. So I sort of had to uh wait embarrassed while she tucked those up. And she was extremely eccentric, I must say.

Presenter25:29

Shall we have some more music?

Sir Stephen Spender25:31

Well, again sticking to my family or people I know, I m certainly want to take with me uh a recording of my wife uh playing at a promenade concert, the uh slow movement of the second Beethoven piano concerto.

Presenter26:47

A slow movement of Beethoven's piano concerto number two in B flat, played by Natasha Litvin, your wife's Stephen of forty seven years now.

Sir Stephen Spender26:57

Yes.

Presenter26:57

Well was there then after Berlin a a moment when when you decided to put aside all homosexuality and decided that what you wanted was a wife and a family?

Sir Stephen Spender27:08

I don't know whether I decided, but I fell in love, really.

Sir Stephen Spender27:12

I don't know, it just happened, I think.

Presenter27:16

And you then discovered that um you had to earn a living.

Sir Stephen Spender27:20

Well, yes, we had our first child in 1945. Well, then it

Sir Stephen Spender27:26

There was increasing pressure to earn a living, and I did so mostly by going to America. I have earned the main part of my living by teaching in America, apart from seven years when I was at London University.

Presenter27:39

But you never in all of this time lost touch with your old friends, did you, as as as long as they lived?

Sir Stephen Spender27:45

Christopher Isherwood and Auden had both left England after at the beginning of the war. But as soon as the war was over I saw them either because they came to England, Auden came a lot to England of course, Isherwood less or because whenever I went to America I I took great trouble to go and see them however far I had to travel. I mean in Isherwood's case it meant going to Los Angeles.

Presenter28:10

And were they surprised that that when you eventually

Presenter28:14

genuinely fell in love, that you had fallen in love with a woman.

Sir Stephen Spender28:18

I think they were very annoyed, yes. I didn't quite understand how annoyed they were. You see, I think that homosexuality is very clique and it was particularly then, and one had betrayed the side. I mean, after all, if you belong to a side uh which is sort of persecuted, and in Isherwood's case, he could almost identify the persecution of homosexuals or the persecution of the Jews, an attitude I disagree with. But if he had that attitude, then he would deplore the abandonment, as he'd think it was, of the tribe or the cause by any of its members.

Presenter29:01

Some more music, please.

Sir Stephen Spender29:03

Well, this is one of my standbys.

Sir Stephen Spender29:07

An incredibly beautiful piece of music, which is almost a secret, I suppose, to people who like it. And that's the adagio of one of Haydn's quartets. And I've always thought that if I ever have a memorial service or anything, this is the music I would rarely like, rather than the grandiose and sublime, altogether sublime, and out of this world music, which I've been selecting in other parts of the programme. There's a kind of quietness and reflectiveness about it, which moves me extremely.

Presenter30:45

The adagio from Haydn's string quartet in F minor played by the tertri string quartet.

Presenter30:52

So, Stephen, you say you'd like to have that at your memorial service. Do you think much, worry much, about dying?

Sir Stephen Spender30:59

No, I don't. All I would hate is to have a very long illness, which would be a great nuisance to everyone.

Sir Stephen Spender31:06

I hope that I'll just drop dead.

Sir Stephen Spender31:09

My uncle rather brilliantly described at the age of a hundred said to me, well, you know, I'm like an automobile in which everything has fallen to bits except the engine. The engine goes on running beautifully, and his mind went on running beautifully, but all the sort of wheels have stopped working, the mud guards have fallen off, and I don't want to be in that condition. He didn't want to be in that condition.

Presenter31:37

Cyril Connolly said of you that you were two people. One was an inspired simpleton, a bit of a silly goose, he said, and the other was an ambitious and ruthless intellectual. Do you recognise either of those descriptions?

Sir Stephen Spender31:50

I I do I recognize the descriptions, of course. He thought I was ruthless uh because anyone who worked seriously he thought of as being ruthless and trying to steal an advantage over him.

Presenter32:05

And you take issue with the inspired simpleton description.

Sir Stephen Spender32:08

Well, I I think it's rather flattering, as a matter of fact. I would replace simple minded or single-minded perhaps for simpleton.

Sir Stephen Spender32:17

But again, it goes back to the Dostoevsky idea of the holy fool, the Alyosha. Well, I wish I was that or had been that.

Presenter32:27

Your last record, please.

Sir Stephen Spender32:29

Well, my last record is one of the supreme

Sir Stephen Spender32:34

Heights of song, as I suppose Yeats would call it, which is the final scene of the Goethe Demerung, The Twilight of the Gods, by Wagner, in which Siegfried goes back over his whole life, and the most wonderful moment of this is when he remembers breaking through the flames to the rock on which Brunhilde is sleeping and awakening Brunhilde to his love for her.

Presenter34:08

Part of the final act of Wagner's Goethe Demerung, sung by Wolfgang Wintgassen with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter34:18

Now, Sir Stephen, which of those pieces of music must you have on your island more than any of the others?

Sir Stephen Spender34:24

Well, I think the Beethoven A minor quartet

Sir Stephen Spender34:28

Of course, I've liked that since I was twenty years old, which so has passed the test of a very long time in my life.

Presenter34:36

And then you can take a book in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare.

Sir Stephen Spender34:40

Yes, well I've been thinking a lot about that. I'm divided between A Christmas Garland by Max Bierbaum, which has the most wonderful parodies of s several of the writers I most like, Henry James, for instance, and Marcel Proust. I think I'd take the Proust on the whole because it's a longer read. I'm afraid the Christmas Garland one could read in about half an hour.

Presenter35:05

And a luxury, what can we supply you with?

Sir Stephen Spender35:07

going back to my family again, I think I'd like to p

Presenter35:10

Yeah.

Sir Stephen Spender35:10

take either a painting or piece of sculpture by my son Matthew Spender, so that I can look at that every day and think and if if I'm allowed perhaps I could stick at the back of it a photograph of my daughter Lizzie.

Presenter35:25

Stuck on the back. Well, pretend you haven't told us that.

Sir Stephen Spender35:28

What the b

Presenter35:30

Mr. Stephen Spender, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 235:42

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 436:31

Uh