Derek Stanford: Poet and critic who became Muriel Spark's lover

He was a poet to watch, a prolific and versatile critic, and then he met Muriel Spark. The author or editor of more than 30 books, Derek Stanford is doomed to be remembered as a hapless protagonist in the biography of the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – and the original of the appalling Hector Bartlett in one of her late novels, the "pisseur de copie".

Her lover and collaborator in her days of slender means and lodgings in Kensington, he became ill, she said, when she became successful. He had met her as a fellow poet, the Secretary of the Poetry Society and the Editor of The Poetry Review. Nine years later, she was a published novelist and their ways brutally parted.

The Comforters (1957) was Spark's Gilbert Pinfold, based on hallucinatory experiences she suffered as a result of taking the appetite suppressant Dexedrine. Her health had collapsed, and it was Stanford who organised a support fund, petitioning help from T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene. But this couldn't save him. Spark had extremist views of friendship. "In her own private scale of values," Stanford later wrote, "loyalty to her own person stood first. About this, she was both tremendously susceptible and enormously demanding."

Loyalty troubled Stanford less.In March 1962, four months after the triumphant publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, he presented Jon Wynne-Tyson of the Centaur Press with a 22,000-word "biographical and critical study" of the author. When in September 1963, edited and expanded, Muriel Spark appeared, its subject was furious. "I wish it to be known," she wrote imperiously to The Times Literary Supplement, "that if Mr. Stanford had applied to me, I would have advised against this undertaking."

The book was candid, but respectful. The TLS's anonymous reviewer (Marigold, wife of Paul, Johnson) enjoyed the odd personal vignettesit offered, if she was disappointedby his appreciation of Spark's fiction or treatment of Roman Catholicsubjects. What irked Spark herself most, the author said, was Stanford's "inaccuracy".

Fourteen years later he took a second stab at her in Inside the Forties: literary memoirs 1937-1957, a book setting out to be a portrait of the "Neo-Romantic" generation of poets with which Stanford identified himself, a world of little magazines and much pub-going. Robust, self-serving, perhaps, occasionally relentless, it makes a valuable record though not as vivid a one as that of Julian Maclaren-Ross's Memoirs of the Forties (1965), from which it avowedly borrows. But its principal interest is in revisiting the subject of Muriel Spark.

"His later memory," wrote Spark, "untutored and unsupported by anything so trivial as evidence or documents, now ran wild. I give Derek Stanford full marks for bright colours. Some of his inventions are truly exotic." She deplored the book's "cheap overtones" – the "touch of the sniggering schoolboy".

She also deplored the fact thathe had disposed of all the letters that she had sent him, some 70 of them, to an American manuscript dealer, Lew D. Feldman of the House of El Dieff, who, in July 1963, tried to sell them back to her for a then hefty $1,500. She, by contrast, had retained all Stanford's letters to her, more than 500 of them, so many, she said, that some she hadn't even opened. The tenor of them, she observed cattily in her 1992 autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, a book largely motivated, it seemed, by the desire to amend Stanford's version of history, was hypochondriacal. "My doctors say I must avoid the night air." Or, "The worst has happened. I am in bed with a cold."

Spark felt plagued by Stanford, as was the "beautiful writer" in A FarCry from Kensington (1988), EmmaLoy, by Hector Bartlett. Loy has a "morbid dependence" on Bartlett, the author later of "ridiculous old-age memoirs" ("the falsities . . . the vaunted revelations . . . the pathetic inventions . . .") subtitled "Farewell, Leicester Square". "Pisseur de copie!" says the novel's narrator, the publisher's editor Mrs Hawkins. "Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it."

Derek Stanford was born in Lampton, Middlesex, in 1918, and went to Upper Latymer School, Hammersmith, where his best friend was a future fellow poet, John Bayliss, and he was taught English by A.E.M. Bayliss, John's father. John went on to Cambridge to read English; Derek stayed at home and became an articled clerk, but the law didn't suit him and after a year he took rooms in Cambridge and borrowed a university life, writing for Granta and attending lectures and parties.

When war broke out, both Bayliss and Stanford were objectors. Since Stanford's objections were technical – he said he was an anarchist – he was assigned to the NCLC (later NCC, the Non-Combatant Labour Corps, known by the regular army as "Nancy Elsie"), where he edited a magazine, Bless 'Em All, which was banned after one issue for being seditious and obscene. As his unit traversed England, he had books posted to him from the London Library and hawked Poetry London pamphlets and issues of Poetry Quarterly round the bookshops. With John Bate, he edited the periodical X6 (later Oasis). Among those serving with him were the playwright Christopher Fry and the artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay.

His first book, shared with Bayliss, was A Romantic Miscellany, poems written in 1944 but published, by the unorthodox R.A. Caton's Fortune Press, in 1946 – the same year as the Fortune Press published the 24-year-old Philip Larkin's novel Jill. In 1946, too, with David West, he edited a "social-literary magazine", Resistance, to attack the "Aesthetics of Bare Fact" and the "Cult of Abstract Dullness". It lasted one issue.

His second book, The Freedom of Poetry, a study of the "post-Auden-and-after" poets, David Gascoyne, Sidney Keyes and others ("adequate", said Alan Ross, anonymously, in the TLS), appeared in 1947 from the imprint of the Falcon Press, run by the Conservative MP (later imprisoned) Peter Baker, the original of Martin York in A Far Cry from Kensington.

The TLS liked better his first solo book of poems, Music for Statues (1948). The anonymous reviewer (Gavin Ewart) hailed Stanford as "entertaining and original". Emboldened, Stanford went to Muriel Spark at the Poetry Society to ask for work.

Spark's reign at the society was turbulent and short-lived. It was, wrote Stanford, "rather like an old folks' home for retired Georgian poets". They forced her out in 1949. A photograph shows a poetry reading held in protest at the house of the Buddhist barrister Christmas Humphreys, poets in pinstripes, among them an anxious and already very bald Derek Stanford (his friend Charles Wrey Gardiner compared him in appearance to the portraits of Shakespeare).

The collaboration between Spark and Stanford in the years 1949-57was intense. In 1949-50 they co-edited a magazine, Forum. In 1950 they co-edited a centenary Tribute to Wordsworth. A biography, Emily Brontë, followed in 1953, then editions of the letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, My Best Mary (1953), and Cardinal Newman (1957: Stanford editing the Anglican letters, Spark the Catholic). Stanford claimed that he had introduced Spark to religion: she became a Catholic in 1954.

The "pisseur de copie" was nothing if not industrious. Before their split he had written books on Christopher Fry (1951 and 1952) and Dylan Thomas (1954). After it he wrote on John Betjeman, T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He also increasingly wrote on, and anthologised, the writers of the 1890s, notably Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson. He subsisted by reviewing and teaching (in a girls' school and at the City Literary Institute) – and selling books and manuscripts. "He kept absolutely everything," remembers the bookseller David Edrich, who would visit him at his home in Seaford. Items would arrive in the post. "Send me what it is worth," said Stanford.

Poets rarely get rich "professing the Muse", as Stanford would put it. But they hope for recognition. Stanfordis largely excluded from poetry reference books. Promoted by Geoffrey Grigson in his 1949 Poetry of thePresent, he hardly appears in anthologies. Yet he had powerful advocates. Robert Nye, reviewing his 1980 selected poems, The Traveller Hears the Strange Machine, in The Times, wrote: "Derek Stanford is a minor poet . . . [but] within his limits . . . a very good poet indeed." He compared him to Ernest Dowson.

"He has never won a literary prize," said Nye. "He will never be famous. He's written a few dozen linesquite likely to survive and give pleasure as long as English poetry is read, that's all."

James Fergusson

Derek Stanford, poet and critic: born Lampton, Middlesex 11 October 1918; FRSL 1956; married; died Brighton 19 December 2008.