Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

Flush a biography

March 24, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet Spaniel

Flush a biography (1933) is a work that combines fictional biography with Virginia Woolf’s love of ‘letters’ and her interst in writers’ lives. And of course it also encompasses the fanciful side of her imagination, being the life story of a dog. But it’s a famous dog – the pet spaniel of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s a short piece of work — a jeux d’esprit — and it’s written with a witty lightness of style which nevertheless touches on important themes.

Virginia Woolf was interested in writing life histories throughout the whole of her career. She was the daughter of a professional biographer (Leslie Stephen) and some of her earliest work featured sketches of famous cultural figures, some of whom were visitors to her home. In her middle period she produced the magnificent fantasy biography Orlando, and one of her last full length non-fictional works was Roger Fry, a portrait study of her friend and fellow Bloomsbury artist.

Woolf pokes fun at ancestral snobbery in this fantasy by describing Flush’s family history as if it were recorded in the same way as yhat of nobles and aristocracy – to the detriment of humans. In fact the dog’s biography is used as an excuse for conjouring up a picture of upper class London in the early nineteenth century – the solidity of Wimpole Street, and the interior of the famous Barratt house at number fifty. The description is from a dog’s point of view – smells first and foremost, furniture no more than blurred shapes, and rooms over-decorated to the point where nothing is quite what it seems.

In a sense, Woolf is using the story to describe her own Victorian childhood home at Hyde Park Gate which she found so atmospherically oppressive. Of course the story of Elizabeth Barrett’s constricted life as a semi-invalid is well known, and the central conceit of the tale is that since Flush has to endure imprisonment in the claustrophobic bedroom, he learns to suppress his instincts for movement and freedom in the outside world in the same way his mistress has done herself.

The very eventlessness of this existence is grist to Woolf’s creative mill. She is not at all fazed by the lack of plot or dramatic events. Her interest is in the way consciousness deals with the passage of time. The texture of a day is relayed through its sounds and smells, and the manner in which events outside the “cushioned and firelit cave” are suggested by subtle shifts in household routines. This is an account written, after all, by someone who produced the long essay on life in stasis, On Being Ill

But then the monotony is broken by the arrival of “the hooded man” – Robert Browning, who comes to pay court to the invalid. Flush takes a couple of bites at the great man’s trousers, but then rather whimsically decides to love him after all. However, the mood of the story takes a sombre then quite sinister shift when Flush is kidnapped by dog thieves. Woolf conjures up a Dickensian vision of a Whitechapel populated by vicious criminals, beggars, and prostitutes – “a world that Miss Barratt had never seen, had never guessed at”.

These scenes make a profound impression on Elizabeth Barrett, and this edition is packed with evidence that they featured in her later poetry, as well as proof that many of the dramatic incidents of the biography are based on descriptions which occur in her daily letters to Robert Browning.

The two poets eventually marry in secret and then elope to live in Italy, where Flush discovers that a more free and democratic spirit prevails than in gloomy London. Indeed he is happy to grow old there, dozing in the sun of Florence, and reflecting on human foolishness when he becomes surrounded by the mid-Victorian craze for spiritualism. Poets, statesmen, and Lords gather at the Browning’s table in the Casa Guidi to gaze into a glass ball which purports to offer “spirits of the sun”.

It is a light and witty piece of writing which has been an unjustly neglected part of Woolf’s oeuvre. But despite the fanciful subject, it is quite clear that she is offering readers a critique of class snobbery, human foibles, social stratification, and the ‘unexamined’ life of a female poet.

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Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.132, ISBN: 0199539294

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Frances Partridge

January 15, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury socialite, diarist, and translator

Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, but someone who outlived all the other major figures. She knew Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and she married Ralph Partridge after his first wife’s suicide. She also became a prolific diarist and a translator of novels from the original Spanish.

Frances Partridge

She was born Francis Marshall into a prosperous upper middle class family that already had its roots in Bloomsbury. Her father was a friend of Sir Leslie Stephen, and the family lived in a grand home at 28 Bedford Square, with the Asquiths and the literary critic Walter Raleigh as neighbours. There was also a second home in Hindhead, Surrey to which the family transferred in 1908.

At school she befriended Julia Strachey, through whose family she became acquainted with the Stephens – Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and their bothers. Both Julia and Frances transferred to the prestigious (and very expensive) Beadales public school by the start of the war in 1914.

Frances developed an interest in philosophy and actually met the author of her favourite textbook, Bertrand Russell. In the non-conformist ethos of the school, she became a pacifist, which given the jingoist fervour during the years of the First World War, was quite a radical attitude.

In 1918 she went to the all-female Newnham College Cambridge, where women students studied the same courses as men but could not be awarded degrees. [Cambridge was the last university in England to give women equal status in 1948.]

She studied English under I.A. Richards. Later she switched from English to philosophy, and eventually met Ludwig Wittgenstein who was teaching there at the time. She finished undergraduate studies with a 2:I and the same year her father died, leaving her a large inheritance, though she did not go to his funeral.

Her first job was as assistant in the bookshop run by David Garnett, who had become her brother-in-law by marrying her sister Ray (Rachel). The business was badly run, but was patronised by senior members of the Bloomsbury Group and its various connections, with all of whom Frances became friendly.

The closest of these connections were with Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, who lived in a curious menage a trois with Lytton Strachey in a country mill house in Tidmarsh (Berkshire). This was a trio which Carrington was in the dangerous process of turning into an even more complex quartet by having an affair with Ralph Partridge’s best friend Gerald Brenan at the same time.

Frances Partridge biography

Given the flagrant bed-hopping of the people with whom she was mixing, Frances’ behaviour seems more like that of a professional virgin. She kept three men dangling at once and even in her mid-twenties thought it would ruin her reputation if she was known to be alone in Paris at the same time as Ralph Partridge.

Eventually she went on a holiday alone with Partridge to Spain, relinquished her virginity, and on return expected him to show his commitment by setting up home with her. Instead, he behaved like the traditional cad who wants the pleasure of a mistress but pleads he cannot possibly leave his wife.

She kept her two other male admirers waiting whilst he negotiated with his housemates Lytton and Dora. After a lot of agonising they all finally reached a compromise. Frances and Ralph moved into James and Alix Strachey’s empty flat in Gordon Square, from which Ralph was free to visit his wife at weekends.

This move put Frances right into the heart of Bloomsbury – geographically, socially, and intellectually. But a sour note was introduced into the mix when after a while Lytton announced that they wanted to see less of her.

Social and emotional tensions continued to smoulder between the four individuals, but matters were eventually resolved by a tragic if very symmetrical sequence of events. First there was sudden death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer. Following this was Carrington’s reaction to it when she committed suicide. Ralph was suddenly left a widower with a substantial inheritance from his dead wife and ownership of the country house they had bought at Ham Spray (near Reading).

The following year Frances and Ralph had a low key marriage, and she had a miscarriage. These events were followed by the first of Ralph’s many extra-marital affairs, which Frances dealt with as if she were suffering from a headache or a heavy cold.

Her wifely patience was subsequently rewarded with the birth of her son Burgo who was immediately put into a nursery in an annex to the house and raised by hired help. The parents went off for an extended holiday with Gerald Brenan to Malaga.

In the period that followed, the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s incursions in middle-Europe put a strain on the political beliefs and the internationalism of the Bloomsbury Group – but Frances remained adamantly pacifist. For her, nothing could be worse than war.

During the war itself she seemed to suffer nothing worse than a lack of domestic help. Staff left to join the war effort, and she couldn’t cook. Fortunately, there were still oysters and plovers at the Ivy restaurant on excursions into town.

In the after-war years there were problems with her son Burgo who had persistent fears that his parents were dead (which was psychologically understandable). There was a failed project to write an encyclopedia of English botany. Both Frances and Ralph lived on inherited wealth, and neither of them had proper jobs – but Ralph eventually wrote a history of Broadmoor Prison, whilst Frances took up the task of indexing the English edition of Freud’s complete works, which was published by the Hogarth Press.

In 1950 Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack. Frances subsequently, but with great emotional difficulty, sold the house at Ham Spray and moved to a small flat in Belgravia. Her young son Burgo married the even younger daughter of David Garnett. This created a third generational link in the complex matrix of Bloomsbury inter-connections, but less than a year later the young man was dead, killed by an aortic aneurysm.

Frances dealt with these personal losses by a combination of writing and travel. She worked as a translator (including the novels of Alejo Carpentier) and visited Gerald Brenan in Spain on a fairly regular basis. She also spent a lot of time looking after Julia Strachey, who was falling victim to dementia.

In the years that followed, as one of its oldest surviving members, she became an unofficial but certainly unelected guardian of Bloomsbury reputations – most noticeably that of her former husband Ralph. She wanted to protect all her old friends from misrepresentation and vulgarisation. She had battles with the BBC and Ken Russell, but even more with Gerald Brenan, who was in the process of writing his autobiography.

In her eighties she entered on an amazingly productive phase – three books of memoirs in as many years, including the best-selling Love in Bloomsbury, In fact the success of this venture led to a spate of publications over the next decade.

She lived to be over a hundred years old, outliving her exact contemporary the Queen Mother, but as she characteristically insisted, ‘living alone, rather than being waited on hand and foot’.

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Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, pp.402, ISBN: 0297646737

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Franz Kafka biography

July 7, 2015 by Roy Johnson

life and times of a tortured literary modernist

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, at a time when it was the centre of Jewish, German-speaking Bohemia, in the heart of Czechoslovakia and a part of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire. His father ran a fancy goods shop, and bullied his children into improving their manners whilst remaining something of a peasant-like boor himself. The family moved restlessly from one flat to another in search of ever higher social status – but never out of the city. It was a habit that Kafka continued in his own adult life – though for different reasons.

Franz Kafka

Early years

Kafka was a timid, under confident child, and if you believe his own accounts from letters and diaries, the principal source of this meekness (and most of his neuroses) was the exaggerated awe in which he held his father. At school he did reasonably well, and in the specially strict gymnasium even better. He studied languages – Latin and Greek – as well as German literature and the elements of grammar. He took his Barmitzvah, though he regarded himself as an atheist, and at that time was fanatically opposed to Zionism and Judaism – though he became interested in both movements later in his life.

For someone so shy and retiring he surprisingly took an interest in the theatre and reading out loud in class. There were also annual theatricals at home to celebrate his mother’s birthday, for which he wrote the scripts. At university his options were limited – because the only professions open to Jews at that time were medicine and law. He opted for law, which had the distinct advantage of pleasing his father. He attended supplementary classes on philosophy and art history.

Around this time he made the first of what were to be many attempts to leave home and live independently. He also struck up what was to become a lifelong friendship with fellow student Max Brod, who was a year younger and eventually became Kafka’s literary executor. He started writing around this time, but kept the fact secret from everybody. He also had his first sexual experiences, which he described very characteristically as “vileness and filthiness”.

As his studies drew towards their conclusion he was struck down with one of the many periods of illness he suffered throughout the rest of his life, and he spent some time in a sanatorium. Nevertheless he passed the first of his examinations and started working in a lawyers’ office, drafting legal documents. He also passed the second part of his examinations and was awarded his doctorate.

Employment

In 1907 he started work for an Italian insurance company in the hope that he would be sent abroad, and he began a ‘relationship’ with Hedwig Weiler, a girl he had met whilst on holiday. It was the first of many which would be conducted almost entirely by correspondence. She lived in Vienna, and despite much discussion of meeting, the only time she visited Prague he made sure he was not available.

The following year his first published writing appeared in a magazine Hyperion alongside work by Rilke, Hoffmannsthal, and Heinrich Mann, His work in the office demanded long hours, and he felt he needed more time to himself – so he left after nine months and took up a job where he finished work at two o’clock in the afternoon.

He was still living at home with his parents, and he was finding a dubious antidote to his feelings of loneliness in the brothels of Prague. When his parents and grandfather became ill, he felt obliged to spend more time at home, helping in the family business. This put him under extra strain, and he eventually applied for time off from his new job in the Workers’ Insurance office. He spent the week swimming in Lake Garda and visited an aeronautical display which he recorded in The Aeroplanes at Bescia.

He felt uncomfortable in his own body, developed eating disorders, had his stomach pumped (“My feeling is that disgusting things will come out”) and became a vegetarian. Around this time he began keeping diaries, which were not so much a record of events in his life as sketchbooks, filled with fragmentary thoughts, images, and first drafts of stories that are composed of a mixture of narratives and reflections on states of being. He very often created fictions by writing about himself in the third person – “He would often awaken in a terrified condition …”.

Meanwhile his personal idiosyncrasies multiplied. He was compulsive about personal cleanliness and slept with his bedroom window wide open even in winter; he prided himself on always telling the truth, no matter how hurtful it was to his interlocutor; he was compulsively polite, but persistently late for work and meetings; and his self-loathing and sense of guilt continued unabated.

Friendship

He took a long summer holiday with Max Brod in Milan and Paris – a trip that incorporated visits to art galleries, the opera, and to brothels – Kafka all the time suffering from acute constipation, which he discussed freely with others. He also suffered from insomnia, which he discussed with himself, endlessly, in his diaries.

Round this time a group of itinerant Jewish actors visited Prague. Kafka enjoyed their performances so much he befriended the leader of the troupe, Jizchak Lowy, and the experience seems to have awakened his interest in Judaism.

At the age of twenty-eight he was still living at home, sleeping in the next room to his parents, separated only by a thin wall. He even found the sight of his parents’ pyjamas disturbing. There were endless arguments with his father, who thought his son was neurotic, an ineffectual time-waster, and feckless in not helping to run the family business, which now included an asbestos factory.

Letters to Felice

The year 1913 was significant for two reasons: Max Brod had introduced him to the publisher Rowahlt and to a young woman Felice Bauer. Kafka began putting together fragments of his writings for what was to become his first ever publication, Betrachtung (Meditations), and he began what was to become a love affair by correspondence with F.B. as he called her. He also sat down and wrote in one continuous burst of creation Das Urteil (The Judgement) one of his greatest stories and a masterful account of Oedipal conflict.

The relationship with Felice was curious. He seems to have settled immediately on becoming engaged to her as an escape route from the oppression of living with his family. The photographs prove that she was certainly not an attractive young woman, and yet he poured out thousands upon thousands of words in courting her. He wrote long letters that he didn’t bother sending; letters that were dispatched by express post cancelling the content of previous messages; and letters instructing her to stop writing to him. One of these letters was forty pages long.

The inner sequence of the letters follow the same pattern, over and over again. He would first propose a meeting with her at some time in the (somewhat distant) future. Then he would write excitedly about what they might do together when the day came around. This would be followed by detailed plans for the journey – including train times and alternatives in the event of any unforeseen problems. Then when the day actually arrived he would write torrents of apology for having to cancel the trip. The excuses for cancellation were usually trivial to an insulting degree, but they would be dressed up to seem vitally important. Finally he got round to proposing marriage – in a letter spelling out all the disadvantages and inconveniences she would be bound to suffer, including the insistence that his writing must always come first, leaving only one hour per day for contact between them.

First novel

Yet as though inspired by these developments he also started work on his first novel Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared, later renamed as Amerika by Max Brod) which like most of his other literary projects was left unfinished. At this period he was also to write what became his most famous story (really a novella) Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis).

In the autumn of 1913 Kafka went on an extended holiday to Venice and Lake Garda, from where he wrote to Felice that their relationship must end (whilst he was having a brief affair with a young girl he had just met). Felice sent her friend Greta Bloch to act as intermediary in the discussions. Kafka then began writing to Greta just as frequently as to Felice, and when an agreement was finally engineered, he suggested that Greta should come to live with them when he and Felice were married. This led, not surprisingly, to an affair with Greta, and shortly afterwards she bore a child (that died) and it is possible that Kafka was the father – but the evidence is rather ambiguous.

In preparation for the proposed marriage, Kafka was summoned to a ‘tribunal’ of Felice and her friends in Berlin where the details of their relationship were examined in what he described as a ‘law court’. where he was also expected to account for himself. The net result, again not surprisingly, was that the engagement was called off.

At the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war he finally moved out of his parents’ home, went to live in his sister’s empty flat, and began writing Der Prozess (The Trial). This change of location proved so successful that he decided to move into a flat of his own. On locating somewhere new the first thing he did was to stop his landlady’s clock in the hall because its ticking irritated him. He moved into another flat a few days later.

He and Felice finally managed to arrange a short holiday together in Marienbad, as a result of which their engagement was resurrected. There was a period of about two years during which he wrote almost nothing, but by 1917 he began again with a series of ‘stories’ based on surreal metaphors and the content of his dreams.

A turning point

Late in 1917 two events made a distinct change to Kafka’s life. First he had a terminal disagreement with Felice, and the engagement was called off again. Second, he developed tuberculosis and started coughing up blood. The result of these two events was that he immediately felt better and started sleeping better. The illness gave him a legitimate excuse not to be married, and it confirmed his neurotic belief that he was being punished.

Released from work on sick leave, he went to stay with his sister Ottla in the countryside, where he felt much better. He returned to Prague briefly to make the final decisive break with Felice, then after a few more months of rustication he was forced to return to work. But no sooner had he made a return to his normal life than he succumbed to the epidemic of Spanish flu which was sweeping through Europe in 1919. By the time he recovered from it, the entire Hapsburg empire had disintegrated and Czechoslovakia had declared itself a republic.

He went into yet another sanatorium where although his health did not improve he met Julie Wohryzek, a cheerful fellow patient. When their stay ended he returned with her to Prague, moved into a flat, and announced their engagement. Two days later he called everything off.

The following year he was contacted by Milena Jesensks, who wanted to translate some of his work into Czech. She was married to a rou^eacute; Ernst Pelack and was an occasional cocaine user. Writing from a sanatorium in Merano he began yet another passionate and intimate correspondence with a woman he had never met and only ever seen once – at a distance.

On leaving the sanatorium he spent four idyllic days with her in Vienna and then travelled back to Prague where the first thing he did was to tell Julie Wohryzek all about Milena. She demanded her rival’s address and threatened to write to her. At a second meeting with Milena she admitted she could not leave her husband – so there was no hope for the future, and Julie had meanwhile ended her relationship with him. So he wrote yet another long letter to Milena, bringing their correspondence to an end.

The Castle

He spent the next six months at yet another sanatorium at Mitliary, near Budapest, but it did very little to alleviate the effects of his worsening tuberculosis. He couldn’t sleep; his neuroses became worse; and all his attempts at self-analysis came to nothing because (since he rejected psycho-analysis) he felt his literary introspection was merely an escape into metaphor. These later desperate years were the period in which he began work on Das Schloss (The Castle) and Der Prozess (The Trial).

But at least he managed to solve the problem of the office. In June 1922 he was granted ‘temporary retirement’ from the Institute – with a pension. He never went back. His first step was to live with his sister Ottla in the countryside. She even moved herself and her husband into a small room so that Kafka could have their larger bedroom.

At first all went well. He produced several chapters of Das Schloss. But then there were noisy children outside, a nearby sawmill, and then a psychological ‘collapse’ about accepting somebody’s invitation to a meeting. He eventually returned to Prague, from where he sent Max Brod his testamental request that apart from already published books, all his writing should be burned, unread. Fortunately (for his readers) Brod ignored this request.

On a rare visit to the sea at Rostock he met Dora Dymant who was working in the kitchens of a Jewish children’s camp. She was to be the last woman in his life. They moved to Berlin, which was in the grip of hyperinflation of the Deutschmark (1923). Here he had another incident of uninterrupted creation when he wrote the long story Der Bau (The Burrow) in a single sitting.

The beginning of the end

But the end was now very near. He developed tuberculosis of the larynx and was transferred to a hospital. Unable to speak, he communicated by writing brief notes on slips of paper – almost like one of his own short stories. Swallowing was so painful that he couldn’t eat, so he was effectively starving himself to death – just like the character in The Hunger Artist. In the end he was begging for morphine injections, but they were not powerful enough to quell the pain. He died in June 1924, forty-one years old.

There have been many biographies of Kafka, ranging from the short and charming Franz Kafka: An Illustrated Life to the three scholarly volumes by Reiner Stach. The strength of Ronald Hayman’s account is that as a translator he accesses most of his prime source materials in German. He also incorporates a great deal of comment on Kafka’s fiction into the biography, and this will help those needing guidance in the complex and often contradictory world of one of the most original twentieth century modernists.

The weakness is that Hayman uses Kafka’s own letters, diaries, and notebooks as his primary sources – whilst showing little scepticism regarding the validity of the claims Kafka makes about himself. Kafka was a complex and often neurotic personality. He was the vegetarian ascetic and self-denying writer who was also a sartorial dandy; a puritan who regularly visited brothels; a passionate lover who avoided intimacy; a would-be husband who was terrified of marriage; and a master of self-loathing whose genius was remarkably similar to that of his near-contemporary and fellow Hapsburg quasi-mystic Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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Ronald Hyman, K: A Biography of Kafka, London: Orion, 2005, pp.349, ISBN: 1898801657

Other works by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

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Amerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
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Franz Kafka – web links

Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

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Franz Kafka: an illustrated life

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

charming study with period illustrations and photos

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Kafka’s tragically short life and the formative influences on his work. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Kafka’s own story is fairly well known. As he himself points out, he was born, went to school and university, then lived and worked within the radius of a few miles all his life. He had a passionate desire for independence, but lived most of the time even as an adult with his parents or his sister.

He had a love-hate relationship with his father which dominated his life, and he took very little interest in the publication of his work, even though he was regarded by others as the most important writer of his generation. Many other seminal figures in the modernist movement leave their traces in passing through Kafka’s life – the writer Karl Kraus, philosopher Rudolph Steiner, artist-writer Alfred Kubin, and even Albert Einstein. Prague in the early years of the last century was at the heart of European developments in art, literature, and music.

He had a lifelong friendship with the writer Max Brod, who was instructed to destroy all Kafka’s writing on his death. He reneged on his promise to do so, published Kafka’s work, and made him famous throughout the world.

Adler’s portrait humanises Kafka, making him seem less neurotic than other accounts – even including Kafka’s own version of himself in his diaries and notebooks. He emphasises Kafka’s skills as a lawyer, his professional experience in commerce and industry, and his active travelling as a risk assessor. He even points to Kafka’s fascination with clothes – described by a friend as ‘the best dressed man I ever met’.

Kafka captured like no other writer before him the angst and isolation of the individual confronted by the arbitrary and unjust forces of society. And yet in his personal life (despite the anguish he wrote about so eloquently) he enjoyed modern novelties such as the cinema, aeroplanes, and motor-cycles; he went swimming and followed the vogue for nudism; he had his fair share of sexual affairs, and he supplemented those with visits to brothels.

Adler traces Kafka’s tortured relationships with Greta Bloch, Milena Jesensksa, and Dora Dymant through to the tragic year of 1924 when the devaluation of the German Mark, the cold winter, and coal rationing left its mark on everyone and contributed to his death. Kafka even recorded the coal rationing in a small piece called ‘The Bucket Rider’. In typical Kafka-esque contradiction, he died just as he found his first taste of real happiness.

I was also glad to see that Adler records in an endnote the fact that so many of Kafka’s intimates, including his three sisters, were murdered in the Holocaust. It puts things into modernist perspective.

Adler offers en passant light readings of the major works in the light of Kafka’s life without plunging into the rather over-simplified biographical interpretation which affects so much Kafka criticism. But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a pleasing experience. The images of old Prague streets which inspired so much of Kafka’s work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere – except this excellent compilation on YouTube.

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Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka, Woodstock NY: Overlook Press, 2001, pp.164, ISBN 0715632957

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Gerald Brenan: A Personal Record

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

This is the second volume of Gerald Brenan’s autobiographical writings. The first, A Life of One’s Own covers the period 1894 to 1920, and deals with his childhood and education, up to the point of his emergence from (honourable) service during the first world war. This volume starts with an account of his arrival in Spain as a young man of twenty-six – a subject he treats in a more general and less personal terms in his classic travel book South from Granada.

Although it purports to cover five decades, most of the book is devoted to his bohemian wanderings in the 1920s, which he spent oscillating between Spain and the Bloomsbury Group – of which he is not uncritical. Much of his narrative is dominated by an emotionally turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, who just happened to be married to his best friend Ralph Partridge. It also includes his dabblings with shop girls and prostitutes, and his attempts to secure allowances and inheritances so that he didn’t have to work.

He decided he was going to become a writer, but it was to be more than two decades before he got round to anything substantial. Having established a home in southern Spain, he returned to London to continue his on-off affair with Carrington and started to write a biography of Saint Teresa. In this period of his life he also mixed with various bohemians of whom he gives vivid character sketches – Arthur Whaley, Boris Anrep, Beryl de Zoete – almost all of whom had personal relations as tangled as his own.

The anguish of his affair with Carrington continued for years and is spelled out in quite intimate detail. She was married to Ralph Partridge but in love with Lytton Strachey, who was also in love with Partridge – and they all lived together. This is the Bloomsbury Group writ large. But as soon a long-awaited inheritance from an aunt arrived, Brenan got married to almost the first girl he met.

He is amazingly frank about this marriage, the first part of which was passed knowing that his wife was still in love with Llewelyn Powys, with whom she had been conducting an affair. He sticks at it and makes the marriage work, but the pages devoted to it are outnumbered by those on Carrington by ten to one.

There’s a vivid first-hand account of the Civil War in Malaga, following the military revolt which had started in the Spanish protectorates of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. He stuck it out as long as possible, then retreated to England to serve as an air-raid warden during the war.

The strange thing is that once he reaches 1940, the last three decades of his life are written off in no more than a few pages. However, I was mindful of the fact that he wrote these memoirs in the late 1960s, and there might have been an element of recapturing his lost youth in the enterprise.

In the post-war years he was spending his time doing nothing more demanding than writing letters to the newspapers. His social life included such heterogeneous folk as Dylan Thomas and Diana Dors. He inherited yet again following death of his father – though not as much as he felt he was entitled to.

In 1953 he and his wife returned to Spain, to the house which had been vacated during the Civil War. Before long he was engaged in an amorous adventure with Dora Carrington’s young niece, and couldn’t wait to tell his wife all about it.

His wife died in 1967, but Brenan had already started a relationship with a girl forty years younger than him. He sold his house and built a new one further inland, from which point he composed this memoir.

I must say that my regard for him as a human being went down quite a few notches reading this account, but he is undoubtedly a good writer, with a good eye for character and an interesting line in anecdotes. His reflections on the Bloomsbury Group are valuable, and South from Granada and The Spanish Labyrinth remain well established as classics.

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Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-1972, New York: Knopf, 1975, pp.381, ISBN: 0394495829

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Gertrude Stein

May 26, 2018 by Roy Johnson

art-collector, writer, modernist celebrity patron

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer and art-collector who went to live in Paris and became a celebrated figure in the European modernist movement between 1910 and 1930. She was personally acquainted with artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and at her soirees she entertained writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She wrote memoirs and novels, developed an avant-garde prose style, and had a famously lesbian relationship with her fellow expatriate Alice B. Toklas. She lived through two world wars, and had what is now seen as a very dubious attitude to the political events of her era.

portrait by Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein – life and work

Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburg. Her parents were upper middle class Jews with holdings in real estate. When she was three the family moved to live in Vienna, then to Paris, before returning to America. They settled in Oakland, San Francisco. She was a voracious reader as a young girl. Both parents died whilst she was a teenager, and she moved to live with her brothers and sisters in Baltimore.

She attended Radcliffe College, which was then part of Harvard University. There she studied philosophy and psychology under William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. She conducted experiments in ‘automatic writing’ – which was later (incorrectly) compared to ‘stream of consciousness’ writing.

William James encouraged her to enrol for medical studies so that she could develop her interest in psychology. At Johns Hopkins Medical School two things happened: she quickly became bored with medicine, and she had a sexual awakening with fellow student Mary Bookstaver. The affair was later fictionalised in her first novel Q.E.D.

In 1903 she moved with her elder brother Leo to live in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank in an apartment with a studio attached. Leo had an introduction to the art dealer Vollard, through whom they encountered Cezanne, whose works they bought. This led to the acquisition of paintings by Gaugin and. Matisse, who became a personal friend.

She started a cultural salon, which met on Saturday evenings. When Leo bought his first painting by the up-and-coming Pablo Picasso, they were introduced to the twenty-four year old Spaniard, who was commissioned to paint the now famous portrait of Gertrude, a work that he rated very highly. This immediately preceded his cubist period.

Stein began writing in earnest, working on Three Lives which she regarded as her first book (having forgotten about the unpublished Q.E.D.). This was privately printed and considering the fact that she was an unknown writer it received good reviews, including one from H.G. Wells. The following summer in Fiesole near Florence she began work on The Making of Americans, a lengthy family history which was to become her major work.

Alice Toklas arrived in Paris in 1907 as a fellow American Jewish ex-patriate. She quickly became Gertrude Stein’s companion, amanuensis, cook, lover, and ‘wife’. Their relationship lasted forty years.

Meanwhile the art collection continued to expand at an extraordinary rate. It must be said that both Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude had an unerring eye for all that was new and of lasting quality in modern painting. Canvasses were stacked high on the walls of the studio in the Rue de Fleurus.

Th artists who frequented her salon constitute a roll call of modernism – many of them visitors long before they became famous. Regulars included Picasso, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Douanier Rousseau, plus writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Stein and Toklas became particularly friendly with the composer Eric Satie.

There was also contact with the world of English art. She was visited by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis. But as the war approached Leo Stein decided to live in Florence. He and Gertrude divided the collection of paintings between them. The separation was not amicable, and it proved to have negative repercussions later – particularly for Alice Toklas.

When the war broke out Stein was staying with Alfred North Whitehead in Cambridge. There she met Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. As soon as they obtained the necessary papers she and Alice Toklas returned to Paris. After despatching copies of her manuscripts to America for safekeeping, they went to stay in Palma de Mallorca.

Eventually they returned to Paris and joined the American Fund for French Wounded – Gertrude driving a car she had imported from America. They were sent to Perpignan and were later decorated for their services to the troops.

After the war she met Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Through this connection she made friends with Man Ray and Ezra Pound. There were also social contacts with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, the sculptor Lipschitz, Jean Cocteau, and Scott-Fitzgerald.

She and Alice Toklas spent a long time in St Remy de Provence where she developed her ‘experimental’ style of writing. There was also some theorising about the nature of vocabulary, grammar, sentences, and paragraphs – much of which was eventually published in How to Write.

She also had contact with musicians George Antheil and Virgil Thompson who became close friends. Stein provided the libretto for Thompson’s opera Four Saints. She was also introduced to the English poet and eccentric Edith Sitwell, a contact which led to speaking engagements in Oxford and Cambridge.

Her avant-garde work was published in various literary magazines, including the short-lived transition, which also presented the work of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Then the ever-faithful Alice Toklas published her work in a privately-printed series called Plain Edition. Meanwhile, her reputation was being promoted by her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy patron of the arts.

In 1934 she returned to America after a thirty year absence for a lecture tour which was well publicised and resulted in a publishing contract with Random House. She settled in the south of France and befriended the French historian Bernard Fay, who was to have an important part to play in her later years.

Politically she was radical in a manner few would have expected. She believed that Adolf Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and she supported General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Then, at a time when many radicals and persecuted minorities were fleeing the onset of Nazi Germany, she stayed stubbornly in Paris. Even when the second world war began, she simply sealed up her priceless art collection, and it remained untouched until her death.

She too remained untouched, whilst Vichy France deported 75,000 other Jews to the concentration camps – only three percent of whom survived. It is thought that she was being protected by the influence of Bernard Fay, who was a collaborator with the Nazis.

But Stein was herself also an active collaborator, a supporter of Marshal Petain, the head of Vichy France. She even translated some of his speeches, which she found ‘really wonderful … so extraordinary’. In 1944 whilst she was living in southern France, the entire population of Jewish children from her town were deported to Auschwitz. And she remained a supporter of Petain even after the war when he was being sentenced to death as a collaborator. Her friend Bernard Fay received a similar sentence, but he managed to escape to Switzerland, with money supplied by Alice Toklas.

In 1946 Stein died of stomach cancer at the age of seventy-two and was buried at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris. She willed much of her estate to Alice Toklas, including the art collection, which had by then increased enormously in value. However, their relationship as two lesbians had no legal status at that time. The Stein family removed the paintings from Toklas’s residence during her absence and locked them in a vault. Toklas died in poverty at the age of eighty-nine and was buried next to Gertrude Stein in Pere Lachaise.

Gertrude Stein – study resources

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon US

The Making of Americans – Amazon UK

Gertrude Stein: Selected Writings – Amazon UK

Getrude Stein – biography

Gertrude Stein famously gave an account of her own life by writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). This is largely an account of their years together in Paris – but told as if from the point of view of her companion, amanuensis, and lover, Alice Toklas.

It is a curious book in that it relates the events of their partnership in a faux-naif manner, as if a child were trying to string together fragments of experience, and failing completely to give them chronological order or any sort of rational coherence.

It is difficult to say if Stein adopted this childish and clumsy style as an oblique attempt to humiliate Alice Toklas, or if she was merely exercising the flat and inelegant manner she made famous and which was later said to have influenced Ernest Hemingway. The text purports to be written by Alice Toklas, but it is Stein’s own creation, talking largely about herself as if from Toklas’s point of view:

Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein’s life long passion. And so she had then and indeed it lasted pretty well to the war, which broke down so many habits, she had then the habit of beginning her work at eleven o’clock at night and working until the dawn. She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer.

The literary ‘style’ is characterised by incessant repetition, non-sequiturs, and fractured syntax. And Stein does not shrink from writing flattering assessments of her own ‘genius’, disingenuously putting the words of praise into someone else’s mouth.

She [Stein] had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences. The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the symmetry of the musical fugue of Bach.

This commendation of her genius is so valuable, she repeats it several times throughout the work. When Stein rather hesitantly gave a written presentation at Oxford, she was pleased to report the audience response in similar self-congratulatory manner:

One of the men was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

As to her writing, there is no shortage of ambition or scope. This is what she says of her one thousand page ‘novel’ The Making of Americans:

And it was to be the history of a family. It was a history of a family but … It was getting to be a history of all human beings, all who ever were or are or could be living

As you can see see, she is not hampered by excessive modesty or self-doubt. The net result of this close attention to language and her claims to a passionate concern for the sentence and the paragraph was prose of this quality:

We happened to go to a show of pictures at the Galerie Bonjean. There we met one of the russian brothers, Genia Berman, and Gertrude Stein was not uninterested in his pictures. She went with him to his studio and looked at everything he had ever painted. He seemed to have a purer intelligence than the other two painters who certainly had not created the modern movement, perhaps the idea had been originally his. She asked him telling her story as she was fond of telling it at that time to anyone who would listen, had he originated the idea. He said with an intelligent inner smile that he thought he had. She was not at all sure that he was not right. He came down to Bilignin to see us and she slowly concluded that though he was a very good painter he was too bad a painter to have been the creator of an idea.

Just in case this might seem like selective quotation or biased, special pleading, here is the opening of one of her short stories from the collection Tender Buttons. The story is entitled Rooms.

Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

A whole centre and a border make hanging a way of dressing. This which is not why there is a voice is the remains of an offering. There was no rental.

So the tune which is there has a little piece to play, and the exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender and true that makes no width to hew is the time that there is question to adopt.

Gertrude Stein was a celebrated figure in her own circle of fashionable wealthy American expatriates, but it is not altogether surprising that her literary output now remains largely forgotten.

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Hallelujah Junction

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

John Adams’ personal biography and musical Odyssey

John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. All of these cultural influences have been reflected in his later work.

Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. There he threw himself into the cultural experimentalism which was then in vogue. This included the upsurge of jazz and blues music, and the American literary cult of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets, William Burroughs, and of course drugs of all kinds.

He stuck with the experimental music and the dafter tendencies of modernism for quite some time. I was quite surprised how respectful he is to John Cage, who always strikes me as completely bogus. But he’s very generous in his appreciation of his fellow composers and contemporaries. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Ingram Marshall are all given warm encomiums. There are also, en passant positive sketches of artists such as Dawn Upshaw, Kent Ngano, Peter Sellers, and Conlan Nancarrow.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work as perfect in its own genre as any that Mozart composed in his, was the product of a supremely confident twenty-four year old who got everything right in one stroke. Its signature motif, the ‘blue note’ flattened seventh, is a rendering on the piano of the keening style of singing from the Negro South. Gershwin threads that motto into a harmonic web of delicious stepwise modulations that take every advantage of the discoveries from fifty or even sixty years earlier. But here, the mood is New World, high energy, with a jubilant lyricism that gives the impression of an irresistible spontaneity. In the hands of Gershwin, the ambiguity and restlessness of those potent Romantic chords is reborn to a new life, not morbidly self-aware and shaded toward the dark end of the emotional spectrum, but full of fresh optimism, busy and brash and thoroughly at ease with itself.

But gradually he began to find his own voice and the techniques which would help him to articulate it. This development was assisted by his moment-of-truth decision to leave atonality behind and embrace tonal harmony as the rockbed for musical expression. It was also accompanied by his determination to stick by his enthusiasm for electronic musical instruments.

Anyone interested in the development of synthesisers, modulators, and multi-track recorders, right up to the computer-programmed methods of sound generation which are now possible will be delighted by the enthusiastic joy in all these gadgets and gizmos that he expresses. At times it’s like reading Popular Mechanics.

He’s also quite prepared to share the downsides of a composer’s life: productions which are badly mauled by critics and audience alike; fallow periods and creative blocks; the political controversies in which he becomes involved because of the contemporary nature of his subject matter.

The central portions of the book describe the genesis and execution of his large scale works – the Harmonielehre, Nixon in China, and The Death of Klinghoffer, yet strangely enough, when it comes to accounts of his more recent works he goes into great detail concerning the religious ideas in El Nino and the scientific and political history behind Doctor Atomic but he says very little about the musical ideas in either opera.

He’s a widely read and cultivated man with a social conscience, and he’s prepared to discuss culture and ideas at a serious level. Just occasionally he skirts dangerously close to a note of self-importance, but this is offset by his willingness to discuss his obvious artistic failures, such as the premiere of The Dharma at Big Sur and his song cycle, the clumsily titled I was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky.

Although it’s a personal record, this is an important book on contemporary American classical music – which sits as a useful companion piece to Alex Ross’s recent The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. John Adams’ official web site is at www.earbox.com

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John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, London: Faber, 2008, pp.340, ISBN: 0571231152

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Harold Nicolson biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was born into an upper middle-class family in Tehran, where his father (Lord Carnock) was the British ambassador to Persia. as it then was. He was educated at Wellington College then Balliol College Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class degree. He entered the diplomatic service in 1908 and was posted to Constantinople where he became a specialist in Balkan affairs. In 1910 he met Vita Sackville-West and despite her reservations about his diplomatic career (and her parents’ about his social status) they married in 1912 and had two sons.

He published biographies of the French poet Verlaine and studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Saint-Beuve. His first major success (and still probably his best book) was Some People (1927), a witty collection of short stories and character sketches based on people he had met in the diplomatic service.

He and his wife were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as visitors to Ottoline Morrell’s weekend parties at Garsington in Oxfordshire. Whilst Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis, he had liaisons with a series of men, including the literary critic Raymond Mortimer. They had a rather unusual marriage in which they lived separately a lot of the time, wrote to each other on almost a daily basis protesting their undying love to each other, and continued to have affairs with members of their own sex. All of this was recorded by their son in his Portrait of a Marriage.

After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). At the end of 1929 he left the diplomatic service and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard. Despite (or maybe because of) his literary skills, he hated journalism: “It is a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”.

In the 1930s, he and his wife bought Sissinghurst Castle, in the rural depths of Kent, the county known as the garden of England. There they created the renowned gardens that are now run by the National Trust. However, during the week he lived at the Albany, the famous bachelor chambers just off Piccadilly in London. He flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament.

He turned to broadcasting and returned to journalism as an occupation. He was personally acquainted with a wide variety of figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures. His Diaries provide a rich source of information on the world of diplomacy and politics in the years 1910-1960, and record meetings with Picasso, Diaghilev, Matisse, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape what he felt as his ‘plebeian’ surname. He spent the latter part of his life writing and developing the gardens at Sissinghurst.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

January 4, 2018 by Roy Johnson

young, modernist, Vorticist sculptor

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was one of the most dynamic and innovative sculptors of the modernist period. He was French, but produced his most important works in England in an incredibly short space of time – between 1911 and 1915.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

He was born Henri Gaudier near Orleans in France – a talented schoolboy who won scholarships that took him to London and University College, Bristol. He was supposed to be engaged with business studies, but spent his time sketching antiques in the Bristol Museum. After this he travelled to Nuremberg, Munich, then Paris, where he met Sophie Brzeska in a library.

This was a decisive turning point in his life. She was Polish, had literary aspirations, and was twice his age. They formed an immediate bond that was to last until the end of his tragically short life – and hers, since she died soon afterwards. Yet it was not a conventional romantic and sexual attachment – more of a mother and son relationship..

They were both in ill health and desperately poor. However, when they travelled into the countryside as an economy measure, even the innocent visits of a young single man to an unmarried woman staying in a rented house were enough to enrage the prurient provincial farmers, who called in the police.

Gaudier became eligible for military service, but passionately wished to avoid it. He described the French as ‘slaughterers of the Arabs’. So they moved to London. At this point they unofficially joined their surnames to form the compound Gaudier-Brzeska as a sign of their commitment to each other.

They plunged into further poverty and ill health. He made a pittance at various menial office jobs. She paid for his visits to prostitutes at five shillings a time – since they had been recommended by a doctor as conducive to his well-being.

She made efforts to establish an independent existence by seeking work, and he started to learn Polish. He was sketching whenever he had the chance, but amazingly he had still produced no sculptures, even though he only had a few years left to live. When Sophie found temporary work as a governess in Felixstowe he wrote enormously long letters (addressed to ‘Adorable Maman’) explaining his ideas about art and reproaching her for having different opinions.

In 1911 they set up home together in Chelsea. She bought a bug-infested bed: he slept in a deck chair. There is conflicting evidence about the exact nature of their relationship. She claimed they were like brother and sister: he claimed they were not. But he also confessed that he often lied.

Henri wrote to the author of an article in the English Review which led to his selling some of his posters. He also began to model in clay and secured his first poorly paid commissions. He was also introduced to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, both of whom were rather irritated by Sophie. Henri contributed sketches to their magazine Rhythm but the relationship eventually foundered on incompatible personalities.

Bird Swallowing a Fish 1913

When Sophie went to work in Bromsgrove it gave him more free time for his art work, but they also spent a lot of time having lovers’ tiffs via letter. He worked on paintings, drawings, plaster busts, and a scheme for producing painted tiles. All of this was what we would now call cottage industry, and the most he was ever paid for a single work was twenty pounds.

It is interesting to note that his most successful commissions around that time were for portrait plaster busts. His fellow immigrant Jacob Epstein was doing the same thing at the same time – and the two men did eventually meet. At one point he was even touting for the job of making decorative mascots on motor car radiators.

In 1913 he established himself in a leaky and cold artist’s studio in the Fulham Road and started working with stone blocks. He made friendships with Frank Harris (author of the notorious My Life and Loves, and Wyndham Lewis, with whose coterie he founded the Vorticist movement.

Living the full Bohemian life in London, it is not surprising that he eventually met Nina Hamnett, who introduced him to Roger Fry. He also sold two statues to Ezra Pound. Yet despite these early signs of success, it was Sophie’s personal savings that that put a roof over their heads and food on the table.

In 1914 when war broke out he rather surprisingly returned to France, where he was immediately jailed for twenty years as a deserter. He managed to escape and return to London. Yet later he went back to France again, serving on the front line, where he was promoted to corporal and then sergeant in recognition of his bravery. In 1915 he was killed during an attack on Neuville Saint Vaast. He was just twenty-four years old.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska biography – Buy the book at Amazon US

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Henry James illustrated life

November 8, 2015 by Roy Johnson

biography with period illustrations and photographs

Henry James illustrated life is a biography of the great writer in Thames and Hudson ‘s Literary Lives series. It features a scholarly but accessible account of his career surrounded by lavish illustrations and photographs that capture all the amazing cultural depth of his experience, plus a visual record of the literary modernism which he helped to bring about. When I bought my brand new copy from Amazon recently, it cost me the princely sum of one penny.

Henry James came from a distinguished American family. His grandfather had been a poor Irish immigrant who as an energetic businessman made himself into one of the first American millionaires. James’s father wanted nothing to do with commerce, and became a religious philosopher instead (whilst living on the family’s money). James junior was born in New York in 1843 near what is now Washington Square. The family travelled to England and Germany, setting up a pattern of transatlantic allegiances that James was to maintain throughout his life.

He was educated in New York and in what was to become the state capital, Albany. Friends of the James family included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and William Makepeace Thackery. The young James read Dickens and was delighted by further visits to London and Paris. He was educated by private tutors, but his somewhat erratic father suddenly decided that American schools were better than European, so the family moved back home and settled in Newport, Rhode Island (where a number of James’s early short stories are set).

A year later James pere decided the exact opposite, and the family went to live in Geneva, where James attended a local technical school. But when he and his elder brother William decided they wanted to study painting they all returned to Rhode Island. By that time the American Civil War had broken out, but neither of the two elder James brothers were to see service. William went back to Europe to study medicine, and Henry after a brief spell at Harvard studying law, gave it up and began to publish his first short stories.

In 1869 he made his first solitary trip to Europe (paid for by his family) and visited London, Florence, and Rome. While he was there he met a number of contemporary artists – William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Ruskin. He was also introduced to George Eliot whom he described as a ‘horse-faced bluestocking’. On outward and return journeys, he took the waters at Malvern for his ailment of persistent constipation.

He returned home, but was so enamoured with Europe that he immediately arranged to go back again as escort to his sister and her aunt on what for him became an extended two year visit. He repaid his expenses on this trip by writing travel essays for the Nation. These were later published as Transatlantic Sketches (1875).

There was an experimental period of living in Europe with his brother William, but the elder James decided to commit himself to America, whilst Henry made what he called his ‘Great Decision’ and stayed there, taking up residence on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. His novel Roderick Hudson (1875) was a big success, and through it he met Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant.

Despite these attractions and being lionised by the literary establishment in general, James felt he would always be an outsider in Paris, so in 1876 he moved to live in London, which eventually became his permanently adopted country of residence.

Settled there, but with annual excursions to France and Italy, he began to produce the string of successful works of his early and middle period – The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), and Washington Square (1880). He also wrote his first undisputed masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). His literary output (stories, tales, novels, criticism, and travel books) was so prodigious around this time that Macmillan in England brought out a fourteen volume collection of his works.

Harry Moore’s biography speculates tactfully about James’s ‘private life’ if also rather inconclusively. We now know that James avoided the possibilities of marriage with myriad sophistical excuses, and only very late in life did he allow his latent homosexual tendencies to surface with anything like free rein.

The next major event in his life was his flirtation with the theatre. He spent enormous amounts of time, effort and his own money trying to create a success on the stage. It was all to no avail. He wrote several plays, but none of them were successful either critically or commercially. His final throw of the dice came in 1895 when he put everything into his latest production, Guy Domville. But when he appeared for a curtain call at the end of its opening night, he was booed off the stage.

Following this catastrophe, and disappointed with London society, he moved to live in Rye, Sussex. He also returned to his first love, the novel, producing The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Masie Knew (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899). He also capitalised on some of his unsuccessful plays by turning their plots into the substance of novels such as The Other House (1896) and The Outcry (1911) – but it has to be said that these compositions are not amongst his most successful works.

The period that followed after 1900 is generally known as James’s ‘major phase’. In it he produced a series of hugely impressive novels, all of them written in his now-famous but rather demanding style of elaborately rich and often very convoluted sentences exploring the psychological subtleties of his characters and the dramatic situations in which he placed them. The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) are now widely regarded as the high-points of his achievement and masterpieces of modern literature.

And yet following this artistic zenith James plunged into a prolonged despair. The twenty-four volume celebratory New York edition of his collected works did not sell well. Even though his lifestyle was quite lavish he was seriously short of money. His friend and fellow-novelist Edith Wharton secretly arranged an advance of $8,000 through their publisher (Scribners) and put his name forward for the Nobel Prize – but it was rejected.

At the outbreak of the First World War he became a British citizen as a gesture of solidarity with his adopted country. But the following year he suffered a series of strokes which affected his mind, and he spent his final days dictating letters which were almost word-for-word copies of Napoleon’s correspondence that he had read many years before. He instructed his secretary to sign them in the Corsican manner – Napoleone.

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Harry T. Moore, Henry James, London: Thames and Hudson, 1974, pp.128, ISBN: 050026032X

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.

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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

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