A friendly poet

In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted at any moment. He had one of the nicest voices I’ve ever heard, a voice which might have been made for poetry: impossible to imagine it raised in anger. In conversation Spender would bow his head, blink slowly and say ‘yes’ a lot, even if he wasn’t in accord with what was being said; this gave his interlocutor the agreeable (and strangely rare) sensation of being truly listened to. He spoke with openness and sincerity; he could also be conspiratorial and prone to giggles, although he wasn’t really a funny man. He was a generous host. He had a boyish smile. You couldn’t not like him.

I say ‘in real life’, but perhaps I mean in person. For where is a writer’s real life? Is it on the page, on the podium or in private?  Such questions are always to the fore, with Spender.