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Even in his seventies in one year 1985 he published three major books - a

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Even in his seventies, in one year (1985) he published three major books - a compilation drawn from his massive private journal, the latest recension of his Collected Poems, and his condensation into one play of the Oedipus/Antigone trilogy of Sophocles, this last being one of his most audacious and successful ventures.Spender did not escape some of the unpleasant consequences of his combination of celebrity and longevity. He worked hard to the last: performing, reviewing and editing. Ever the internationalist, he continued to travel the world, attending conferences and inspiring generations of students In 1983, he was knighted. More impressive than the many honours which marked his approach to the status of Grand Old Man was Spender's unabating concern for the stuff of writing itself. It is difficult to see why this mattered, given that the fiction and poetry was never asked to toe any line, but some of Spender's closest colleagues, including Frank Kermode, resigned with him and stressed that none of them had known of the CIA's involvement.In 1970 Spender was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at University College London.

Indeed, Encounter in his days was an open forum for writers of all kinds and, if its tone was robustly anti- Communist and its pages were sometimes over-full of Kremlin-watchers, nevertheless it was against witch-hunts and willing to print the writings of experimenters and consolidators alike.Spender resigned from the magazine when an American leak revealed that funds for Encounter had come from the CIA. He remained a liberal, as did Auden, but unlike Auden he did not lose patience with newer forms of poetry and art. At the time of the founding of Encounter, Spender contributed a chapter to Richard Crossman's The God That Failed (1949), an anthology of articles describing intellectuals' disillusion with Communism, but his own disenchantment never turned him into a right- wing fanatic or professional apologist for capitalism. An early member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, he founded Encounter, which he edited jointly, first with Irving Kristol and later with Melvin Lasky.This was a period of the testing of loyalties when literature was seen as a weapon in the war of ideology. In the Second World War he firewatched in London and helped Cyril Connolly edit Horizon, a literary and cultural journal dedicated to a way of life which Connolly remembered from before the war.After 1945, in the years of austerity, Spender plunged back into literary politics, now orientated to the dominant culture of the time, the United States. His vulnerability was always one of Spender's strengths.As a child of a political decade, Spender's literary progress was tied up with the fight between Communism and Fascism.

After Oxford, he spent years in Europe's trouble spots - Dollfuss's Vienna and the Spain of the Civil War particularly. This is one of the 20th century's great biographies: in it Spender's endearing Boswellian honesty about himself and his motives enables him to present a portrait of a generation and a country unrivalled even in the works of such great truth-tellers as Orwell and Koestler. In Spender's Journal, Auden is recorded as returning to talk to him in his dreams. It was Spender who started Auden's publishing career, with a small collection of poems partly printed on a hand-press in 1928.A touching and witty account of the undergraduates Auden, Isherwood and Spender makes up the first third of Spender's autobiography, World Within World (1951). Auden was his close friend and remained so till Auden's death in 1973.

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