Those Who Were

Randall Jarrell wrote snippy comments about Stephen Spender's poem title, "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," but I can’t find them now. While I was in college, Stephen Spender was a writer in residence for a semester. I heard Jarrell's name for the first time when at a poetry reading another student I barely knew but whose sophistication I was jealous of read "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" as an example of imagism. I'd never heard of imagism either.

A year or so earlier, the day before my eighteenth birthday, the year I graduated from high school and started college, Jarrell had let himself be jacklighted by a speeding car.

Twenty years later I had dinner with Stephen Spender and a friend of a friend of Spender’s at Big Jim's Restaurant in Sumter, South Carolina. According to the alumni newsletter, the sophisticated student was now a newspaper reporter. He had learned to write clear, compact prose. A kindly, modest man, Spender spoke of fracturing a tendon in his knee. He ate un-self-consciously and was amiable if not voluble. After his reading he invited me and the friend to visit his apartment in Columbia, an hour away, where he was writer in residence. On the way he said he didn’t understand what Jimmy Merrill was doing with his ouija board poems, and asked me if I did. I didn’t. Now that I’ve read the poems, I think The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece.

In Spender's dark apartment on campus, we sipped scotch. It was late for a school night. We glimpsed his wife (was her name Natasha?) in a peignoir, sleepily greeting him from the dark hallway and, unintroduced, returning immediately to bed.

Nearly a decade after that I moved to North Carolina, where Jarrell lived and died. And thirty years after Jarrell's death, before Spender died, he became Sir Stephen, a nice short title.