Lost Years (74 page)

Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950).
American journalist and author; a radical advocate of feminist, communist and nationalist causes. She was involved in Margaret Sanger's birth control movement and was jailed for her role in trying to organize an overseas Indian independence movement. During the 1920s she lived in and wrote about Weimar Germany. Smedley was helpful to Isherwood and W. H. Auden when they met her in Hankow in March 1938. She spent nearly a decade there organizing medical supplies for Mao's Eighth Route Army, writing a book about the army, and writing for German and American newspapers about the antifascist struggle in China. She had many Chinese contacts and she was also a willing go-between for the U.S. government; she was frequently at the U.S. Embassy and was friendly with American officials. Smedley died under the accusation of being a Soviet spy.

Snow, Edgar (1905–1972).
American author; born and educated in Missouri. Snow began his career as a reporter. He went to China in 1928 and became correspondent there for several U.S. and British papers. In 1936 he was the first correspondent to interview Mao Tse-tung. During World War II he covered Asia and later Europe, and he was the first correspondent to enter liberated Vienna. Afterwards he travelled widely as a special correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. Snow wrote a number of books about Chinese and Soviet communism; among the best known is
Red Star Over China
(1937). He also made a documentary film about China at the end of the 1960s. Isherwood and W. H. Auden mention Snow in their foreword to
Journey to a War
because he helped them with information and introductions for their China trip.

Sorel, Paul (b. 1918).
American painter, of midwestern background; his real name is Karl Dibble. Sorel was a close friend of Chris Wood, and lived with him in Laguna in the early 1940s. He moved out in 1943 after disagreements about money and in 1944 went to New York for a time, then intermittently returned. Chris Wood continued to support Sorel for the rest of Wood's life,
though they did not live together at all after 1953. Sorel is also described in
D1
.

Sorokine, Natasha.
White Russian intellectual, raised in France where she and her parents were officially stateless. At her lycée, she was taught by Simone de Beauvoir, befriended her and became part of de Beauvoir and Sartre's intimate circle during the war. De Beauvoir described their friendship in her memoirs
La Force de l'âge
(1960) and
Tout compte fait
(1972), thinly disguising Natasha as “Lise Oblanoff.” (In fact, de Beauvoir and Sartre called her Nathalie and, according to Ivan Moffat, also addressed her as Sarbakhane—after a West African trumpet of great length and exotic design.) According to de Beauvoir, Sorokine's interest in philosophy led her to pursue a degree at the Sorbonne during the war. During the same period, she became romantically involved with a student of Sartre's, a young Spanish Jew who was arrested and killed by the Nazis near the end of the war, leaving her devastated. Not long afterwards, she met and married Ivan Moffat, joining him in California. They had a daughter, Lorna Moffat, but the marriage did not succeed, and Sorokine struggled to make a living. She wrote, taught French, worked in a kindergarten, waitressed, and studied law. Her fiction was never published. She married a second time, to a physicist Sidney Benson, with whom she had a son and adopted a daughter, but she was plagued by ill health and mental instability. She died in the late 1960s.

Speaight, Robert (1904–1976).
British actor and writer; educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. He established a stage reputation by the start of the 1930s and began publishing novels around the same time. Among his many stage roles was Becket in T. S. Eliot's
Murder in the Cathedral
in 1935. During the later part of his career he published scholarly books on Shakespeare and a number of biographies.

Spender, Humphrey (b. 1910).
English photographer and designer; brother of Stephen Spender. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk; at the University of Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and at the Architectural Association School, London. During the 1930s he worked as a portrait and commercial photographer from his own studio in London, was a staff photographer for the
Daily Mirror
newspaper, and became the official photographer for Mass Observation. Before the war he moved to
Picture Post
magazine. He trained in the Royal Army Service Corps (Tanks) in 1941, worked for the Ministry of Information, and became a War Office Official Photographer and afterwards a Photo Interpreter for Theatre Intelligence Service. When the war ended, he returned to
Picture Post
, but gradually gave up photography to paint and to design textiles. He had many individual shows in these media during the 1940s and 1950s, and also taught design at the Royal College of Art and at several other schools in London until the mid-1970s. From the late 1970s, a revival of interest in his photographs led to numerous exhibitions of his 1930s work. Spender married twice (his first wife died of Hodgkin's disease) and had one son with each of his wives.

Spender, Natasha Litvin.
English concert pianist; she married Stephen Spender in 1941 and had two children with him, Matthew and Lizzie.

Spender, Stephen (1909–1995).
English poet, critic, autobiographer, editor. W. H. Auden introduced Isherwood to Spender in 1928; Spender was then an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, and Isherwood became a mentor. Afterwards Spender lived in Hamburg and near Isherwood in Berlin, and the two briefly shared a house in Sintra with Heinz Neddermeyer and Tony Hyndman. Spender was the youngest of the writers who came to prominence with Auden and Isherwood in the 1930s; after they emigrated, he cultivated the public and social roles they abjured in England. He worked as a propagandist for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the National Fire Service during the Blitz. He was co-editor with Cyril Connolly of
Horizon
and later of
Encounter.
He moved away from his early enthusiasm for communism, but remained liberal in politics. In 1968, at the request of Russian dissident Pavel Litvinov and with the combined support of various celebrated intellectuals (mostly personal friends) and of Amnesty International, Spender helped to found
Index on Censorship
to report on and publicize the circumstances of persecuted writers and artists throughout the world. His 1936 marriage to Inez Pearn was over by 1939, and in 1941 he married Natasha Litvin with whom he had two children. Spender appears as “Stephen Savage” in
Lions and Shadows
and is further described in
Christopher and His Kind
and in
D1
. He published an autobiography,
World Within World
, in 1951, and his
Journals 1939–1983
appeared in 1985.

Stafford, Jean (1915–1979).
American novelist and short-story writer. Her much-praised first novel,
Boston Adventure,
appeared in 1944 and her second,
The Mountain Lion,
in 1947, followed by other novels and numerous short stories. She worked on
The Southern Review
and occasionally taught college. In 1966 she published an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald's mother,
A Mother in History
. Her
Collected Stories
(1969) won the Pulitzer Prize. When Isherwood met Stafford in 1947 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, but this first marriage (for both) ended in 1948; later she was married to A.J. Leibling.

Stern, James (1904–1993) and Tania Kurella Stern (1906–1995).
Irish writer and translator and his wife, daughter of a German psychiatrist. He was educated at Eton and, briefly, Sandhurst. In youth, he worked as a farmer in Southern Rhodesia and as a banker in the family bank in England and Europe, then travelled until settling for a time in Paris in the 1930s, where he met Tania Kurella. They married in 1935. She was a physical therapist and exercise teacher, exponent of her own technique, the Kurella method. She fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution for the left-wing political activities of her two brothers, already refugees. Isherwood met the Sterns in Sintra, Portugal in 1936 through William Robson-Scott and introduced them to W. H. Auden with whom they became close friends, later, in America. James Stern's books include
The Heartless Land
(1932),
Something Wrong
(1938)—both story collections—and
The Hidden Damage
(1945), about his trip with Auden to survey bomb damage in postwar Germany for the U.S. Army. Tania Stern collaborated on some of his translations. Eventually they returned to England and settled near Salisbury.

Stern, Josef Luitpold (1886–1966).
Viennese poet, journalist, and editor; identified throughout his career with the cause of the workers. Stern reformed
the workers' library in Vienna and was a high-ranking administrator in workers' education both before and after the war. He arrived as a refugee at the Quaker hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood volunteered during the war, and Isherwood records in
D1
that they met there in the autumn of 1941. Stern returned to Vienna after the war. He published nearly twenty volumes, including
Klassenkampf und Massenschulung
(1925),
Zehn Jahre Republik
(1928),
Lyrik und Prosa aus vier Jahrzehnten
(1948), and
Das Sternbild, Gedicht eines Lebens
, a collected works in two volumes (1964–1966).

Steuermann, Eduard.
Polish-born concert pianist; Salka Viertel's brother and briefly a member of her extended household during the war. He re-established his career in the USA, achieving wide recognition as an interpreter in particular of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Among his students was Alfred Brendel. Steuermann married twice, and had three daughters. His second marriage was to his student, Clara Silvers, thirty years his junior.

Steve, also Stevie.
Steve Conway; see index and see also
D1
.

Stevens, George (1904–1975).
American film director. Early in his career, Stevens directed Laurel and Hardy. He made a number of successful films in the 1930s and early 1940s, and had a special touch for comedy. His prewar films include
Alice Adams
(1935),
Swing Time
(1936),
Gunga Din
(1939),
Woman of the Year
(1941)—in which he introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn—and
Talk of the Town
(1942). During the war, Stevens headed the Sigma Corps Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe, where, among other disturbing scenes, he filmed Dachau soon after it was liberated. Although he made some of his best-known films after his return, his work became heavier and, eventually, less successful. Later films include
I Remember Mama
(1947),
A Place in the Sun
(1951, Academy Award),
Shane
(1953), and
Giant
(1956, Academy Award).

Stokowski, Leopold (1882–1977).
English-born conductor. He studied at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Music. Stokowski began as a church organist in London and then in New York and settled in the USA, becoming a citizen in 1915. He conducted many celebrated orchestras in his long career, in particular the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1938, for which he established a superlative international reputation and where he introduced important European works to U.S. audiences—such as Mahler's 8th Symphony, Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring,
and works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Rachmaninoff—as well as performing new American music. He conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for Walt Disney's
Fantasia
(1940) and was also involved in several other movies. Afterwards, he conducted leading orchestras all over the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony, finally returning to London in 1972 where he often appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Strasberg, Lee (1901–1982) and Paula.
Lee Strasberg was an American theater director and acting teacher; he derived his approach from Stanislavsky. In 1931, he helped to found the Group Theater (in New York), and in 1950 he became a director of The Actors Studio, where he made his reputation as a leading proponent of Method acting. Paula Strasberg, his wife (Isherwood's
landlady on East Rustic Road), became Marilyn Monroe's acting coach.

Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971).
Russian-born composer; he went to Paris with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1910 and brought about a rhythmic revolution in Western music with his
The Rite of Spring
(1911–1913), the most sensational of his many works commissioned for the company. In youth he was greatly influenced by his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, but Stravinsky's originality as a composer derived partly from his ability to borrow and rework an enormously wide range of musical forms and styles. He remained continuously open to new ideas, even into old age. Many of his early works evoke Russian folk music, and he was influenced by jazz. Around 1923 he began a long neoclassical period during which he drew on and responded to the compositions of his great European predecessors. After the Russian revolution, Stravinsky remained in Europe, making his home first in Switzerland and then in Paris, and turned to performing and conducting to support his family. In 1926 he rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church, and religious music became an increasing preoccupation during the later part of his career. At the outbreak of World War II, he emigrated to America where he settled in Los Angeles and eventually became a citizen in 1945. Although he was asked to, he never composed for films. His first and most important work to English words was his opera,
The Rake's Progress
(1951), for which W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto. During the 1950s, with the encouragement of Robert Craft, Stravinsky began to compose according to the twelve-note serial methods invented by Schoenberg and extended by Webern—he was already past seventy. There are many passages about Stravinsky in
D1
.