SOURCE: An interview in Partisan Review, Vol. LV, No. 1, 1988, pp. 45-54.

[In the following interview, which was conducted on February 14, 1978 and later edited for inclusion in Partisan Review, Spender discusses his relationship with W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and other literary figures, and remarks on his career as a poet, critic, and teacher.]

[Rubin]: You published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951. Are you working on another to bring that one up to date?

[Spender]: I don't quite want to bring it up to date, because I think that people's lives get very boring in autobiographies at the point of their becoming famous figures; the latter half of that sort of "life" tends to be a list of your accomplishments and the places you've been to—a kind of travelogue, almost. I might avoid that by cutting up the original autobiography and putting in new material. But I'll...