Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

Igor Stravinsky: 1882-1934

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

part one of the definitive biography

This is the currently definitive biography of Igor Stravinsky – master of European modernism whom many consider to be the greatest composer of the twentieth century. It’s a consummate and magisterial piece of work – superbly referenced and annotated; and just about every claim made within it is backed up with evidence. The notes to the text itself run to 113 pages.

Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft – the man who made himself Stravinsky’s amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.

Yet even though it’s quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky’s life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer’s life. For instance Stravinsky’s brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.

Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised – from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn’t even go to school until he was nearly eleven.

The story of Stravinsky’s life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that’s new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it’s quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details – to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.

This is a feature of Walsh’s approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful – largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another – Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d’Azur. This is the material of a biographer’s dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer’s dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined – despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.

And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky’s marriage, Walsh still can’t bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite – and this immediately affected Stravinsky’s ability to earn a living from its success – for a personal, not a musical reason.

But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev’s financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.

Another thing which emerges instructively from all the background commentary on Stravinsky’s work (and that of his collaborators) is what utter rubbish many of the so-called critics wrote about the music. Jacques Riviere on the Rite of Spring for instance:

The Rite of Spring … has no juice to dull its brilliance, no cookery to rearrange or spoil its contours. It is not a “work of art”, with all the usual palaver. Nothing blurred, nothing reduced by shadows; no veils or poetic softenings; no trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and untreated…

As he becomes more successful, the 1920s are passed in the swirl of a quasi-bohemian, quasi-aristocratic milieu. Oedipus Rex was a collaboration with opium-addicted Jean Cocteau, whose detoxification cures were paid for by Coco Chanel, with whom Stravinsky had a brief affair.

But the dominant figure in this first volume is certainly Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky collaborated on almost all his early major works. The two men had their differences, especially over money; but they respected each other as artists, and seemed to bring out the best in each other.

The other problematic leitmotif in Stravinsky’s life is that of copyright, which had not been internationally agreed at the time of his early works. There were also very complex arrangements whereby some people ‘owned’ works because they had paid a commissioning fee, and others held the rights to performances for a limited period. This resulted in erratic income for the composer – though a man who could buy a large chauffer-driven automobile in the 1920s was not in financial difficulties.

Stravinsky also had the expense of keeping two ‘families’. For his life was divided permanently between his lover Vera Sudeykina, with whom he lived in Paris and took on concert tours, and Katya, his wife and the mother of his four children, whom he left at home and visited when required.

It’s interesting to note how fond Stravinsky was of any technical developments which would assist him in both making a record of his own work and exploring the possibilities of new sounds. He made piano rolls, bought a player-piano, learnt to play the cimbalom, and eagerly recorded his work on both mechanical and electrical equipment.

Serious musicologists will be glad to learn that Walsh puts a lot of effort into tracing the developments in Stravinsky’s musical style. This goes (in this volume) from the expressive force of the Rite to the neo-classicism of Apollo. This is done in an all-round manner by looking at the original ‘idea’ (often the result of a commission) then the musical material from which he took his inspiration, through to the actual conditions (and possible limitations) which surrounded the first performance.

Despite some of the negative effects of Walsh’s writing, I found this a fascinating account of the artist and a well-informed glimpse into a rich period of cultural history. Volume one ends in 1934 with the Nazis in the ascendant and Stravinsky sharing musical chit-chat with Mussolini, for who he had a high regard. In this climactic year Stravinsky took out French citizenship and moved his entire extended family into a fifteen-room apartment near the Place de la Concorde – in the arrondissement next to his lover Vera. Stravinsky’s main worry about this proximity was that his eighty-year-old mother should not find out about his not-so-secret other life.

See part two of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – A Creative Spring: Russia and France 1882-1934, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.696, ISBN: 1845952219

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

Igor Stravinsky: 1934-1971

September 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

second volume of the definitive biography

The first volume of this masterly biography ends in 1934 with the death of Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky’s composition of Persephone, his adoption of French citizenship, and his no less important decision to move his extended family from the south of France to take up residence in Paris – in the next arrondissement to his lover, Vera Sudeykima.

To give some idea of the complexities of these arrangements, Stravinsky not only made it known to his wife that he paid Sudeykima an allowance, but as if this was not enough he heaped onto it the additional humiliation that in his absence she should hand over the money to her in person – which she did.

The second volume opens with the darkening years of the mid-1930s, and Stravinsky remaining as politically naive as ever in the face of rising fascism and anti-Semitism. The only thing which seemed to disturb him was a general assumption that he was Jewish – which was not the case. He continued to give his moral if not practical support to Mussolini and Franco, and he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1938 with the somewhat disingenuous excuse that he needed the money to pay his daughter’s medical bills.

As the 1930s progressed Stravinsky’s personal life seems to have become worse and worse. There were problems with his four children, all of whom had difficulties creating independent destinies for themselves, permanently overshadowed as they were by the fame and the rather dictatorial manner of their father. His wife Katya became ill and was confined to an Alpine sanatorium, run along similar lines to the Berghof in Thomas Mann‘s The Magic Mountain. Her daughter accompanied her on the journey, and was also kept there as a patient.

Then in 1938 fate struck a double blow. First Stravinsky’s daughter died, then his wife. Yet so many people rallied to help him that within a short time he had secured a teaching post at Harvard, married Sudeykima, and he ended up living in California – like Arnold Schoenberg ‘expelled into Paradise’.

This was a period in which he tried without much success to find work composing for the film industry. He knew all the right people, and Hollywood was happy to adapt his earlier works, but none of the big projects mooted came to fruition. Instead, he produced such miniatures as the Circus Polka for dancing elephants and the Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s band. However, he came back in full force with the composition in 1946 of the Symphony in Three Movements.

Interestingly enough the copyright issue crops up yet again (just as it did in the first volume) – but with a new twist. Stravinsky and his advisors hit upon the ruse of his revising earlier pieces of work. If they could be made sufficiently distinct from the originals, they could be re-copyrighted. Moreover, if Stravinsky took out US citizenship (which he promptly did) he would have full protection and ownership of the new versions – which could be translated into hard cash.

The war in Europe had one good effect on Stravinsky: it caused him to re-think his reactionary political views – rather as it did for his fellow-exile Thomas Mann. He became a Trueman-supporting democrat.

If Diaghilev was the presiding secondary figure in Volume One, the equivalent figure in Two is Robert Craft. He was a young American student of composition and conducting who managed to inveigle himself into the Stravinskys’ affections to such an extent that he became a combination of amanuensis, secretary, manager, advisor, and even domestic help. He also had close access to Stravinsky’s manuscripts – which was to cause a lot of trouble later.

Musically, the centrepiece of this second volume is the composition of The Rake’s Progress which took three and a half years. He worked with Auden and Chester Kallman as librettists. This was followed by Agon and the premiere of Canticum sacrum in St Mark’s, Venice. From this point on, his compositions became increasingly influenced by a Schoenbergian twelve-tone scale form of writing, even though he had kept himself at a very long arm’s length during his rival’s own lifetime.

Since Stravinsky’s personal life had settled into an almost conventional marriage with Vera, Walsh’s account now begins to focus on a concert-by-concert account of his professional life: (Stravinsky maintained that he earned his living as a conductor). Walsh records every possible detail of the choice of programme, the fee paid, the musical rehearsals, and the roles played by agents, go-betweens, and performers.

The latter part of the book traces Stravinsky’s last (and serial) compositions, but it is really a detailed examination of just how much Robert Craft controlled, contributed to, or even created works which were published under Stravinsky’s name. He also began writing letters and memoirs which were attributed to the man who was in a roundabout way his employer.

As Stravinsky declines into ill-health approaching death, the story becomes an almost nineteenth-century inheritance drama of tax lawyers, relatives, Craft, and various hangers-on vying for control of Stravinsky’s assets and archive with a view to lining their own pockets. And when he did eventually expire the conflict between warring parties became pure Jarndyce Vs Jarndyce, with the widow Vera eventually paying out $200,000 to retain control – and even that was only an interim measure. The dispute continued even after her death; the relatives died off in their turn; and even the eventual purchaser of the archive, Paul Sacher, was duped out of almost two million dollars by the lawyers.

Fortunately for us, the music lives on.

See part one of this biography

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky – The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp.709, ISBN: 0712697950

More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle

Italo Svevo biography

February 24, 2016 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the Austro-Italian writer Aron Ettore Schmitz. He was born in 1861 in Trieste, which at that time was part of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian empire – and remained so until the end of the first world war. His mother was Italian, and his father a German Jewish businessman. He was educated with his brothers at a commercial school in Wurzburg, Germany, where he became fluent in the language. Italian was actually his second language, the first being the Triestine dialect which was used at home.

After two further years of business studies in Trieste, he was forced to abandon his studies when his father’s glassware business went bankrupt. He took up employment as a correspondence clerk in the Viennese Union Bank, where he stayed for the next twenty years. During this time he produced his first novel, Una vita (A Life) (1893). Like all his other books, it was published at his own expense.

Following the death of his parents he married his cousin Livia Veneziano, the daughter of a wealthy Italian who manufactured specialised industrial paints used on warships. In 1897 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s business and was quite successful in commercial activities, making profitable excursions to France and Germany, and setting up a branch of the company in England.

In 1898 he published his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older). Both of these novels were largely ignored at the time, but in 1907 Svevo was enrolled at the Berlitz School of Languages to learn English, where his tutor was a twenty-five year old James Joyce, who had taken up exile in Trieste. Joyce read the novels and championed Svevo’s work. The two men became great friends.

However, Svevo was discouraged by his lack of literary success, and appears to have given up writing completely around that time. He devoted the next twenty-five years to his work as a representative for the family paint business in which, despite his cultural and intellectual interests, he was successfully enterprising. He lived for some time in the borough of Greenwich in south London, documenting the differences he encountered in Edwardian English culture in a series of letters he wrote to his wife: This England is So Different: Italo Svevo’s London Writings.

In 1925 when Svevo published La Conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), Joyce arranged for the work to be translated into French and published in Paris. The work was critically acclaimed and marked his first major success. He entered into a second phase of creativity and produced a number of stories, a novella, and an unfinished novel. He spent the last years of his life lecturing on his own work and writing Further Confessions of Zeno, which was never completed. In 1928 he was involved in a motoring accident in Trieste and he died a few days later from his injuries.

Italo Svevo – principal works

1893 – Una vita (A Life)

1898 – Senilità (As a Man Grows Older

1925 – La conscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno)

1926 – La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla

1926 – Una burla riuscita (A Perfect Hoax)

1927 – La madre (The Mother)

Italo Svevo – study resources

A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

More on Italo Svevo
More on biography
More on literary studies
More on the arts

Jacob Epstein

January 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was a sculptor who became a controversial pioneer in the world of modernist British art. He was born in New York’s Lower East Side to Jewish immigrant parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.

Rock Drill

In 1902 he travelled to France, enrolling at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and visiting Rodin’s studio. He was a fan of his fellow countryman Walt Whitman, and there is a distinct element of homo-eroticism in his early works that parallels the celebration of the human body (largely Male) that features in Whitman’s poems. This is an element of his vision that became important in later works and his battles with censorship and even the mutilation of his statues and carvings.

In 1905 he transferred to London and quickly made contact with people such as George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John. Even more surprisingly he secured a large public commission at the age of only twenty-seven. This was for a series of decorative statues for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in the Strand.

The nude figures he produced depicting maternity and Hygieia (goddess of health and cleanliness) became the target of outraged prudish hostility, and a press campaign was mounted by the Evening Standard. The project was completed, but it was twenty years before he received another architectural commission.

He was supported and befriended by Eric Gill, who had similar ambitions to bring primitive elemental forms into public art. They planned to build a private temple in Sussex where they could express their enthusiasm for nudity and sexuality without hindrance. The project was never completed, but the celebration of human physicality pervaded almost everything they went on to produce.

Epstein’s next major work was the now-famous tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. This was admired by the young fellow-immigrant artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, but the French authorities protested against the winged figure’s nakedness and ordered its genitals to be obliterated. They were later hacked off by protesters more than once.

Meanwhile his domestic life was no less controversial. He was married to Margaret Dunlop but at the same time he had a number of lovers who his wife not only tolerated but allowed to live in the family home, along with the children who were conceived by them as a result.

Epstein isolated himself in a Sussex coastal village and produced a number of excellent abstracted figures of pregnant females and copulating doves, clearly influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi who he had met in Paris. It has to be said that the works of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier-Brzeska became almost indistinguishable around this period.

Just before the outbreak of war, in 1913 Epstein produced the first drawings for what was to become his most important work – Rock Drill. In its first version the dramatically modelled figure of a quarry worker was mounted astride a tripod, handling a real drilling machine.

Nothing could have better symbolised the Vorticist movement which championed his work in the second (and final) edition of its magazine BLAST. But Epstein refused to join the group founded by his supporter Wyndham Lewis. In fact Epstein was so appalled by the mechanised slaughter of young soldiers in the conflict of 1914-1918 that he removed the drill and tripod from the original sculpture.

This turned out to produce a much more aesthetically pleasing result – the futuristic head and torso which seemed to symbolise the machine age. Yet following this success his activity more or less split into two parts. The first was producing traditional bronze portrait busts for celebrities in a style that could have come from any time in the previous two-hundred years. The second was his far more interesting series of monumental carvings and sculptures that expressed something of the modern age. The first part provided him with an income; the second with continued notoriety.

Femaile Figure

It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941) – though this has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951) but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick. He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London.

He was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. Epstein himself died in 1959 at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington – next door but one to the birthplace of Virginia Woolf.

Jacob Epstein biography – But the book at Amazon UK

Jacob Epstein biography – Buy the book at Amazon US

More on art
More on media
More on design

John Lehmann biography

February 5, 2013 by Roy Johnson

poet, editor, publisher, biographer, memorist

John Lehmann (full name Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) was born in Buckinghamshire in 1907 into a wealthy family. His father was Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, an English writer and Liberal Party politician. His elder sisters were the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the actress Beatrix Lehmann.

John Lehmann was educated at the prestigious public school Eaton, and went on to study modern languages at Trinity College Cambridge, where he began writing poetry and forming gay relationships. Whilst at university he became a close friend of Julian Bell (Vanessa Bell’s son) which provided him with an introduction to the Bloomsbury Group.

His first collection of poetry A Garden Revisited (1931) was published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, with which he formed a close attachment. He brought his contacts with the new young generation of poets to the press. The result was the groundbreaking collection New Signatures (1932) which included work by William Empson, Julian Bell and Lehmann himself from Cambridge, plus W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis from Oxford.

He worked as an assistant-cum-manager at the Press (described in his amusing memoir Thrown to the Woolfs) until differences of opinion with Leonard over the policy of publishing young writers caused a temporary rift between them.

John Lehmann left Britain and worked as a journalist, travelled to the U.S.S.R. (as it was called at that time) and wrote poetry in Vienna from 1932 to 1936. He then returned to Britain to launch the journal New Writing. This published the work of his contemporaries Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, V.S. Pritchett, and Stephen Spender.

The magazine featured new writing from Europe and beyond mixed with photographic essays and examples of modern art, and it also included recent poetry. Its editorial line explicitly supported internationalism (especially the republicans in the Spanish Civil War) and it was politically ‘committed’ to the left at a time when the English establishment was dithering in the face of fascism.

It lasted for fourteen years, first under the aegis of the Bodley Head, then Lawrence and Wishart, before eventually being taken on by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. A cheaper version was launched as Penguin New Writing in 1939.

In 1938 Lehmann returned to favour with the Hogarth Press and joined it again as a full working partner, buying out Virginia Woolf’s fifty percent share in the company. He was an editor and general manager at a time when in addition to works by Virginia Woolf such as Between the Acts, A Haunted House, and The Death of the Moth, he oversaw the publication of works by Henry Green, George Orwell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

However, the partnership foundered again 1945. Lehmann wanted to introduce modern business practices, raising share capital, and employing publicists and agents. But Leonard had always run the press as a streamlined independent enterprise, with a minimum of overheads – a policy which had been enormously successful and had brought in considerable profits.

So Lehmann understandably left and in 1946 set up his own publishing company, John Lehmann Limited with his sister Rosamond. He published books by young poets Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee, as well as the celebrated cookery writer, Elizabeth David. He also edited the paperback series Penguin New Writing between 1946 and 1950. After the collapse of his own company in 1952 he took over at the London Magazine and edited until handing over to fellow poet and critic Alan Ross in 1961.

In the late 1960s and 1970s he was a frequent visitor on the American lecture circuit. He subsequently wrote biographies of Rupert Brooke, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf, as well as three volumes of autobiography. He also wrote about his gay relationships in the persona of a fictional character Jack Marlowe. The late confessional novel In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) offers an account of his promiscuous life in Berlin, Vienna, and London.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts

John Maynard Keynes

March 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

economist, philosopher, politician, and statesman

John Maynard Keynes Is a one-volume condensation and updated version of Robert Skidelsky’s monumental three-volume biography of the economist, political philosopher, and statesman which was originally published between 1983 and 2000.

Maynard Keynes was born and raised in Cambridge, the seat of intellectual and political power, even more so then than now. He was also educated at Eaton – and yet his social origins were quite modest. One grandfather John Brown was an apprentice printer from Lancashire who later graduated from Owens College (Manchester University) and went on to become a preacher. The other grandfather made his fortune from cultivating dahlias and roses. His father John Neville Keynes went to University College London and then to Cambridge where he briefly became a lecturer and where he met Keynes’ mother, who was a student at Newnham Hall. However, Neville (the family used their middle names) did not feel suited to the life of a don, and became instead an administrator in the examinations board.

Keynes was raised in a fairly prosperous middle-class household, where he was coached by his parents and learned German from a governess. As a youngster he was tall, clever, rather sickly, and very under-confident regarding his own appearance. He proved to be particularly good at mathematics and algebra, but even so he was often taken out of various schools and educated at home. Nevertheless he succeeded in winning a scholarship to Eton in a competitive examination.

At Eaton he was at the top of an intellectual elite which existed in the heart of a social elite, and he thrived in the cultural ambiance, winning countless prizes. Yet remarkably, despite a mastery in classics and mathematics and his sensitivity to subjects such as medieval poetry, his favourite sport was the almost imbecilic Eton Wall game. Nevertheless, by the age of nineteen he went out in a blaze of glory to take up a scholarship he had won at King’s College Cambridge.

King’s is a ‘sister institution’ of Eton going back to its foundation in 1441 by Henry VI. Keynes threw himself into its many debating societies and clubs, and was almost immediately invited to join the semi-secret group of ‘Apostles’ (membership was for life) where he met Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and E.M. Forster – through whom he was introduced to Thoby Steven and Clive Bell. This placed him centrally as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which was later formed out of these friendships.

Like many others of his generation he came under the influence of G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) gave a theoretical rationale to their philosophy of ‘friendship. art, and the pursuit of happiness’. It also served as a moral justification for the practice of homosexuality which was common amongst public schoolboys and undergraduates at that time, despite the then recent conviction of Oscar Wilde which still cast its shadow over them.

As a postgraduate however, he abandoned the very subject for which he later became famous (Economics) in favour of preparation for the Civil Service examinations. On successfully completing these, he became a junior clerk in the India Office (hours 11.00 to 5.00 pm) a job with which he rapidly became bored. When he was offered a lecturing job back at Cambridge, he took it.

At this point Keynes’s personal life became quite complex, with cross-connections that have since made the Bloomsbury Group famous. He was a friend and ex-lover of Lytton Strachey, who had fallen in love with his own cousin Duncan Grant. However, Grant was involved in an affair with fellow Apostle, Arthur Hobhouse, a former love-object of Keynes. When that affair came to an end Keynes and Grant became lovers – much to Strachey’s chagrin. None of George Moore’s abstract theorising about ‘the good’ and ‘the beloved person’ offered them any protection against the emotional ravages of jealousy, possessiveness, and sexual rivalry.The amazing thing is that they all remained friends.

Back in his spiritual (and actual) home Cambridge, Keynes devoted himself to lecturing on money, applying his talent for mathematics to the very inexact pseudo-science of economics. He also pursued journalism, meanwhile working on a major thesis on probability theory, supporting the Liberal cause and resolutely defending free trade. Whilst all this high-minded ethical philosophising and fiscal theorising was going on, Keynes was meanwhile cruising London parks and public baths, picking up rent boys, and recording his sexual encounters in his private diaries.

When the Bloomsberries began to meet in Fitzroy Square, this introduced the novelty of female company, where newly liberated women (such as the Stephen sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) were free to mix safely with their brothers’ friends – since they were largely non-threatening homosexuals. Keynes gave group members advice on investments, and in some case even took over their financial affairs, as well as gambling on the stock exchange himself.

However, this mixing with Bloomsbury also brought him personal distress. Duncan Grant started an affair with Adrian Stephen, which left Keynes having to console himself with a succession of Cambridge dons, though the two men continued to write to each other as friends. Keynes moved into Virginia Woolf’s menage in Brunswick Square, produced his study Indian Currency and Finance at high speed, and attended the Ballets Russes where he admired Nijinsky’s legs.

Suddenly this Edwardian bliss was shattered by two events – the advent of war in 1914, and an associated banking crisis. Keynes did not participate in the conflict, but he was drafted into the Treasury where his recommendations were accepted by Lloyd George and a banking collapse was averted. As a result, he rapidly became a secretary and adviser to the cabinet. At a personal level, he finally ‘lost’ Duncan Grant, who went to live with his lover David Garnett and Vanessa Bell in a ménage à trois.

When the war got worse, Keynes refused to be called up for service, and when summoned by the conscription tribunal sent them a letter saying he was too busy to attend. But he was put under pressure by his friends (particularly Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell) to resign from his work which they described as ‘finding ways to kill Germans more cheaply’.

However, Keynes rationalised his position to himself, and during the war he became the focal point of the Bloomsbury Group’s London base in the role of landlord at Gordon Square. He worked at the Treasury during the week and at weekends sojourned either with Ottiline Morrell at Garsington or with Vanessa Bell at Charleston.

Professionally he operated at a high level in Britain’s financial and political exchanges with its allies in the war effort – which founded the basis of his later success as a diplomatic ‘persuader’. The cultural high point of his mixing with the great and good came when he persuaded the prime minister to let him buy paintings from the collection of Degas for the National Gallery. His loyal Bloomsbury friends despaired of this social climbing, but then suddenly the end of the war changed everything.

Keynes played an important part in the Paris peace conference in 1919 and the economic base of the German war reparations – though his suggestions for a just solution were rejected. But out of this experience came his best-selling study The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a publication that made him internationally famous. He argued that the harsh reparations would leave Germany unable to pay – which proved to be the case, and resulted in the catastrophic devaluation of the Deutschmark in the early 1920s.

In the years that followed he divided his time between academic work in Cambridge and financial-political work in London. He also made a lot of money from investments and journalism, and spent it buying paintings by European modernists. He formed a syndicate to speculate on foreign currency exchanges, and even when it collapsed into bankruptcy, he immediately formed another – and made yet more money. Meanwhile his secretary Naomi Bentwick had fallen desperately in love with him. Despite their professional proximity, she seems not to have noticed that he was having an affair with his fellow Apostle, Sebastian Sprott.

In the early 1920s Keynes was actively involved in solving the lingering problem of post-war reparations, something in which he participated as an economist, a government advisor, and (secretly) as an unofficial diplomatist. At the same time he formed a group to take over the liberal journal Nation and Athenaeum of which he made Leonard Woolf the editor. Then, in the midst of all this, he surprised everyone by falling in love with the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, who stayed in England when Diaghilev de-camped to Monte Carlo.

The problem for Lydia was that she ran foul of Bloomsbury Group snobbishness, and was shunned by them as a feather-brained outsider. Fortunately, she was warmly welcomed by Keynes’s parents as a prospective daughter-in-law. After she received a decree nisi (from her bigamous husband Rodolpho Barocchi) she and Keynes got married in 1925, and were visited on their honeymoon by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had to borrow the money for his train fare, having given away the millions of his inherited fortune.

Inspired by the public interest in ‘new economies’, Keynes visited the Soviet Union more than once, where he saw through the intellectual sham of Stalinism. Around this time he got to befriend fellow travellers Sydney and Beatrice Webb who swallowed whole the bogus statistics they were fed in Russia to produce Societ Communism: A New Civilization?, a book which famously shed its question mark between editions. Later he became friendly with the Fabians (and puritans) George Bernard Shaw and H.G.Wells.

For all his fame as a guru of economic trends, the Wall Street crash of 1929 took Keynes by surprise, and he lost heavily on his own investments. Nevertheless, he was invited to play a key role in the Economic Advisory Committee and thereby developed an insider knowledge of banking and exchange rates. The committee also involved him in a great deal of energy-sapping infighting amongst his fellow economists. But as the slump of the 1930s went on, his views became less popular. Keynes thought that Britain should spend its way out of the depression, a view which many observers thought was counter-intuitive.

Despite all Keynes theorising, he changed his mind on a number of economic fundamentals. He believed in a classical free trade policy, but embraced protectionism when it suited his purposes. He both supported the gold standard – and then opposed it. He was prepared to change his mind (and theories) to suit the facts – indeed he believed that economics was a form of ‘intuition’, which looks suspiciously like ‘make it up as you go along’.

In the early 1930s he lost a lot of personal friends – such as fellow Apostles Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, and he also lost influence in the public sphere. He used the quiet period to complete his major opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. At a time when Cambridge was enthusiastically embracing Marxism, he dismissed it as a ‘hocus-pocus’ system of economics, and meanwhile his own investments recovered to increase their value by twenty-six times. A great deal of this money he spent on collecting valuable books, and on his pet project, a Cambridge Arts Theatre for King’s College.

In the late 1930s he had a period of ill health, and was admitted to a sanitarium in Wales for several weeks. And just as his health declined, so did his investments in London and on Wall Street, losing two thirds of their value, largely because he believed that ‘good’ investors should remain faithful to their original commitments, even during bad times.

When the war started Keynes was not given any official role, but he nevertheless devoted himself to the national economy and developed his thoughts in what was eventually to be published as the influential How to Pay for the War. He advanced a system of compulsory savings, which proved very unpopular. However, he fought hard to defend his ideas and was eventually re-admitted to the Treasury – though in the very ambiguous role of unpaid, part-time adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Keynes’s next major task was to negotiate with Washington over Britain’s repayments to the USA under Roosevelt’s ‘lend-lease’ scheme. He embarked on this against a backdrop of American mistrust and even hostility towards the British. Unfortunately his first efforts were regarded as arrogant and presumptuous, confirming the American view of Britain as an arch-Imperialist power. His protracted negotiations were largely unsuccessful.

Even though he was never a member of Churchill’s wartime government, he dined regularly with the prime minister at his club (the Other Club), and Keynes was made a life peer in 1942. Throughout the war he acted as a bridge between the Treasury and the various committees created by the war cabinet.

Even whilst the war was still under way Keynes had started to think about the problem of how it would be financed when it eventually came to an end. First he came up with the idea of an International Clearing Bank (ICB) a notion he borrowed from the Germans. But meanwhile the Americans were devising a rival notion of their own – spearheaded by Harry White, an anti-British communist sympathiser. The two sides compared notes. Whilst all this was going on, Keynes was appointed to the board of the Bank of England, invited to chair a committee for the promotion of the arts (to become the Arts Council) and was supporting William Beverage in his revolutionary proposals for social security.

Keynes was deeply involved in lengthy negotiations with the Americans, but even when they reached a compromise agreement he had the problem of persuading the British government to accept the outcome. Against a backdrop of the Normandy landings in June 1944 Keynes and White presided over an international assembly of economists and diplomats at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Between them they hammered out and established the workings of what was to become the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

As the war with Germany drew towards its end Keynes was busy with plans for surviving the post-conflict period of austerity which would inevitably be necessary. This boiled down to seeking a long term low interest loan from the USA to pay for Britain’s war debts. Taken on as adviser to the new Labour government of 1945, Keynes was despatched yet again to the USA to negotiate. The meetings were long-winded, tedious, and unproductive, with Keynes’s health deteriorating rapidly throughout. The result (because of London’s intransigence) was a failure. The delegation was forced to accept a loan on America’s terms.

The following year Keynes travelled to Savannah for the inauguration of his brain-child, the IMF. As ever there were differences between the UK and the US on how things should be run, but Keynes had done his great work in creating the institution. He celebrated just in time, because he became ill on his return shortly afterwards, but had the satisfaction of dying in his own beloved home at Tilton in Sussex.

This is a masterful biography which has been widely praised – with very good reason. It rests on a profound degree of scholarship and is the result of something like twenty-five years’ research. The bibliography and critical apparatus at the end of the book alone comprises almost two hundred pages. Only a professional historian or economist will need the full three volumes from which it is drawn.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, London: Penguin, 2013, pp.1056, ISBN: 0143036157

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’.

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts

John Middleton Murry

January 31, 2018 by Roy Johnson

poet, critic, pacifist, publisher

John Middleton Murry (1889)-1957) was an influential and prolific writer in the English modernist period. He is probably best known for his problematic marriage to fellow writer Katherine Mansfield and his association with D.H. Lawrence. He produced over sixty books plus countless essays on literature, social issues, and religious topics.

Murry (without the ‘a’) was born in Peckham, the son of a clerk in the Inland Revenue. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital (‘Bluecoat School’) before winning an exhibition scholarship and going on to Brasenose College Oxford to study classics. He finished with a first class degree in 1910.

Whilst still an undergraduate he founded the magazine Rhythm, which was thought at the time to be a daringly suggestive title. Interestingly it was later re-named in 1914 as The Blue Review.

Around the same time Murry met the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who he made an associate editor of his magazine, which published some of her short stories. They embarked on a stormy relationship that included infidelities by both parties.

Murry was judged unfit for military service during the First World War, but he did work for the political intelligence service in the War Office as editor of the confidential Daily Review of the Foreign Press. He spent some time with pacifists and conscientious objectors who assembled at the home of Philip and Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor in Oxford.

There he became close friends with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Von Richthofen. The relationships between the two couples were used as fictional material for Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love. Murry and Mansfield went to live as their neighbours, first in Buckinghamshire, then at Zennor in Cornwall. There was an attempt at communal living which collapsed fairly quickly.

In 1915 Murry and Lawrence established a new magazine called The Signature. Like many other small minority-interest publications it folded quickly – after only three issues. In 1918 Murry married Katherine Mansfield and they settled near Hampstead Heath, together with Ida Baker, one of Mansfield’s former lovers.

Murry was appointed in 1919 as editor of the literary magazine Athenaeum. It featured writing by Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Two years later it became The Nation and Athenaeum. Murry moved on to become founding editor of The Adelphi. This magazine featured a rather curious mixture of literature, quasi-Marxist politics, and a return-to-the-land ethos.

Katherine Mansfield

When Katherine Mansfield moved to live in France with Ida Baker, Murry began a dalliance with Princess Bibesco – the daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Mansfield hurried back to London in order to squash the liaison.

In 1922 Murry published what was to be his most popular and influential work, The Problem of Style. He also began an affair with Mansfield’s house-mate Dorothy Brett which resulted in a pregnancy and a miscarriage.

Following Mansfield’s death in 1924, Murry edited her stories, her journals, and her diaries. This was done with the intention of promoting her literary reputation, the success of which generated a considerable income for Murry in royalties. But in the time that has passed since these publications he has been criticised for watering down her more radical views.

Following the death of Lawrence in 1930, Murry began a brief affair with his widow Frieda. He married for the third time in 1931 and also began a brief phase as a Marxist. He then moved from a socialist to a radical Christian, pacifist, and communalist ideology.

In 1942 as a conscientious objector he bought a farm in Thelnethan in Sussex and set up a commune for fellow objectors to be run on co-operative lines. The experiment had mixed results, and it ended up with Murry managing it as a conventional farm on commercial lines.

He maintained his pacifist views consistently through the Second World War and became the editor of Peace News from 1940 to 1946. He also published biographical studies of Keats, John Clare, and Jonathan Swift.

Later he renounced pacifism and advocated a preventative war against the Soviet Union. He became a Conservative voter, an anti-feminist, and died in 1957 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts

Jorge Luis Borges biography

December 6, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) – full name Jorge Francisco Isodoro Luis Borges Acevedo – was born in Buenos Aires Argentina into an educated middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and a teacher of psychology who was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English. His mother was Uruguayan of Spanish descent. They lived in a lower-class suburb famous for its cabarets, brothels, knife fights and the tango.

He grew up in a house speaking both English and Spanish (as a child he thought they were the same language) and was he taught at home until he was eleven years old. The family lived in a large house with over one thousand volumes in English in its library. Despite the raffish nature of the neighbourhood, Borges reflected later in life that the two principal features of his childhood were his father’s library and a large garden – both of which feature prominently in his writing.

When he was only nine years old Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends all thought it was the work of his father.

In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where his father was seeking treatment for his failing eyesight. Borges attended school, learned French, read Carlyle in English, and began to study philosophy in German. The family travelled to Spain, and because of political unrest in Argentina at the time, decided to stay in Switzerland during the war.

Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalauréate from the College de Geneve in 1918. The family stayed in Europe after the war, living in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. Whilst in Spain Borges became attracted to the avant garde Ultraist literary movement inspired by Appolinaire and Marinetti. He also published his first poems.

In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires, where Borges published his first collection of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) a sixty-four page booklet paid for by his father and with a cover designed by his sister Norah. There was no profit made from this enterprise: he simply gave the book away to anybody who was interested. He produced journalism, essays, and book reviews, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.

The family returned to Switzerland in 1923 so that his father could resume treatment for his eyes, and when they returned to Argentina the following year, Borges discovered that he had developed a reputation as poet on the strength of his first book. In 1929 his book Cuaderno San Martin won a Municipal Prize, the prize money for which he spent on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1931 Borges began publishing in the literary journal Sur established by Victoria Ocampo, which helped him to establish his literary reputation. He wrote works including parodies of detective stories with another Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares under the name H. Bustos Domecq. He also began to explore existential themes in his work, drawing a great deal of his inspiration not from his own personal life, but from his experience of literature.

He was appointed editor at the literary supplement of newspaper Critica in 1933 where he published works that were a blend of non-fictional essays and short stories. These were later collected under the title of A Universal History of Infamy (1936). The collection explored two types of writing. The first used a combination of the essay and the short story to tell what were really true stories. The second were literary spoofs or forgeries – texts which he passed off as translations of little-known works, but which were in fact his own inventions.

In 1935 he published the prototype of what is now considered a typical ‘Borgesian’ short story – ‘The Approach to Mu’tasim – a review of an imaginary novel. He had been influenced by his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sator Resartus, a book comprised of reflections on the work and life of an imaginary German philosopher. It is a mark of Borges preference for shorter literary genres (and what he jokingly called his ‘laziness’) that rather than creating complete imaginary works, he thought it was more inventive to conjure up their existence by writing reviews of them as if they actually existed.

Between 1936 and 1939 he wrote a weekly column for El Hogar, and in 1939 found work as an assistant in the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His duties were so light he could complete them in the first hour. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing and translating the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner into Spanish. His first volume of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) collected work he had previously published in Sur.

His eyesight began to fade in the late 1930s and, unable to support himself as a writer, he began giving public lectures. He lived with his widowed mother, who became his personal secretary. Although he relied a great deal on his imaginative responses to literature, he never learned to read Braille. He became completely blind by the late 1950s.

When Juan Peron came to power in 1946 Borges was ‘promoted’ to the job of Inspector of Rabbits and Poultry in the Public Markets, a post from which he immediately resigned. He was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Writer’s Society in 1950 and given the job of director of the National Library in 1955, even though he was by that time completely blind.

Some of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s, but his international reputation dates from the early 1960s when he was awarded the International Publisher’s Prize, the Prix Formentor – which he shared with Samuel Beckett. He was appointed for a year to the Chair of literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to give lecture tours in America and Europe.

Two major anthologies of his work were published in 1962 – Ficciones and Layrinths – which further enhanced his international reputation. In 1967 Borges embarked on a five year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni which helped to make his work better known in the English-speaking world.

Then in 1967 Jorge Luis Borges married an old friend Elsa Astete Millan who had become a widow, but the marriage only lasted three years. Borges went back to his mother, with whom he lived until her death at the age of almost one hundred. He travelled extensively on lecture tours, and published further collections of his work – The Book of Sand, Dr Brodie’s report, and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

In 1986, a few months before his death, he married his literary assistant Maria Kodama, who thereby gained control of his literary estate and the considerable income from it. Despite international protests, she rescinded all publishing rights for the existing collections of his work and commissioned new translations.

More on Jorge Luis Borges
Twentieth century literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Josephine Baker

October 15, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a celebrated African-American dancer and entertainer. She became famous in the Parisian Follies Bergeres, made friends with artists and intellectuals, and eventually renounced the US to become a French citizen. Her reputation was based on the fact that in addition to her being a talented singer and dancer, she also had an effervescent personality and she performed in states of near nudity on stage. However, she was also active in the Civil Rights Movement, refused to perform to segregated audiences, participated in the French Resistance, and was awarded the Legion d’honneur by Charles de Gaul after the war.

She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St Louis, Missouri. Her mother was a descendant of black slaves, and it is thought that her biological father was white. As a child she lived in near poverty and had very little formal education. By the age of eight she was working as a live-in domestic servant for white families. She dropped out of school, became a waitress, and for a time lived on the street, sleeping in cardboard boxes.

By the age of thirteen she was married – and divorced a year later. She began singing and dancing in a street performance group. The area was rich in vaudeville, night clubs, and brothels. At fifteen she married Wille Baker, whose name she kept and used professionally for the rest of her life. But in 1925 she left him when her dancing group was booked in to a New York City venue.

The 1920s in New York was a period of what became known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. There was an artistic and intellectual explosion that took place in Harlem, NYC. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, plus musicians such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton became not only popular but fashionable.

The birth of the Civil Rights Movement gave new confidence to black Americans as an expressive force. And Josephine Baker fitted within this ambience very comfortably, performing at the Plantation Club and in the chorus lines of popular Broadway revues. Around this time she also had a relationship with the blues singer, Clara Smith.

In 1925, still only nineteen years old, she got her first big break – opening in La Revue Negre in Paris at the Theatre de Champs Elysees. She moved on to the Folies Bergere and became famous for her erotic dancing, sometimes appearing almost nude except for a cluster of artificial bananas around her waist. To this exoticism, she added the novelty of a live cheetah in her act.

She met a Sicilian Pepito Abatino who passed himself off as a count: he became her lover and manager, developing her singing skills. Her reputation became international, and she toured in South America, taking the opportunity to have an affair with the architect Le Corbusier who was designing a house for her in Paris.

She also repatriated her fame back in the United States, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936. But the reception back home was less than enthusiastic, so she returned in disappointment to Paris the following year, marrying an industrialist and becoming a French citizen.

At the outbreak of the Second World War she was recruited by the French Deuxieme Bureau (French military intelligence) as an ‘honourable correspondent’. Her role was to mingle with foreign diplomats and embassy officials (particularly the occupying Germans) picking up information on troop locations and military intelligence. She also worked for the Red Cross and entertained troops in Africa and the Middle East.

After the war she bought a chateau in Sarlat near the Dordogne and began adopting children from all over the world. She accumulated twelve orphans in all, which she called her ‘rainbow tribe’. In 1947 she married for the fourth and final time, to Jo Boillon, a French orchestra leader. Like her other formal liaisons, the marriage did not last long.

In the 1950s she returned to America, where her public reception was much better than before. She performed to sell-out audiences from Miami to New York. However, when she challenged the famous Stork Club in Manhattan for refusing to accept mixed races, she was attacked by the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. He accused her of being a Communist sympathiser, she lost her work visa as a result, and she was forced to return to France.

But her fight on behalf of racial equality did not go unrewarded. She was recognised by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). The Association declared May 20 Josephine Baker Day in her honour. And at an individual level she was befriended by the film actress Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco).

In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington rally, alongside Martin Luther King. Later, when he was assassinated, his widow Coretta Scott King invited Baker to take his place as leader of the civil rights movement. She turned down the offer in order to look after her children. But in 1968 she was declared bankrupt over unpaid debts, and she lost occupancy of the chateau, which is now open as a museum in her memory. Grace Kelly gave her financial assistance and the loan of a villa in Monaco.

In 1975 she starred in a retrospective revue celebrating her fifty years in show business. The revue in Paris was financed by Prince Rainier of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It was attended by an international array of celebrities – but four days later she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died at the age of sixty-eight. At her funeral she was given full French military honours, and the Place Josephine Baker was named after her in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris.

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon UK

Josephine Baker in Art and Life – Amazon US

More on biography
More on literary studies
More on the arts

Katherine Mansfield biography

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography of a literary bohemian

Katherine Mansfield has the rare distinction of being regarded as a major writer, even though she only ever published short stories. In fact her entire oeuvre is available in just one volume. There are two other biographies by Jeffrey Myers and Anthony Alpers, but Claire Tomalin’s is a fairly straightforward and very readable account of her life. She portrays her talent sympathetically, but does not disguise her weaknesses and her occasional unkindnesses, though she does seem either squeamish or even purblind where sexual matters are concerned. However, she is very well informed and spares us none of the medical details of gonnorhoea and tuberculosis which helped to bring KM’s life to a premature end.

Mansfield’s talent blossomed as soon as she was sent from her privileged but stiflingly conformist upbringing in New Zealand to be educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street. These important years – from fourteen to seventeen – confirmed her taste for artistic matters, and it was on return from there to New Zealand that she had her first success as a writer.

But in 1908 she was back in London, ready to throw herself into full scale Bohemianism. She quickly became pregnant, then tricked another man into marrying her without telling him about her condition, and left him the same night. Within the next few months she suffered a miscarriage and acquired a new Polish lover, from whom she contracted gonnorhoea.

She recovered in the company of her life-long partner Ida Baker, whom she regarded as her ‘wife’, then since she was short of money she tricked her way back into free lodging with her lawful husband and began publishing with A. R. Orage’s New Age, which was later to become the New Statesman.

More literary success followed. She published her first collection of sketches In a German Pension, then was introduced to John Middleton Murry, who became her lover then her second husband.

In structure, the book is almost one chapter per year from 1907 onwards of Mansfield’s tragically short life. Tomalin does not disguise the fact that she thinks much of the earlier work is self-indulgent, sentimental, and quite weak – which it is. But there would be greatness to come.

Lots more of La vie Boheme follows: constantly on the move; short of money; living promiscuously in every sense; and writing for small literary magazines which either don’t pay or go out of business.

She leaves Murry and travels to northern France in the middle of the First World War for an assignation with fellow artist Francis Carco, then goes back to Murray, and by 1916 is in deep with The Bloomsbury Group, even moving into a house in Gower Street with painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington.

When the first signs of the tuberculosis which was to kill her appeared, she went to live in Bandol with her ‘wife’ Ida, then when her health temporarily improved, she returned home to London and married Murray, with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda as witnesses.

She had a spasmodic but very close relationship as fellow authors with Virginia Woolf. Both of them were working on the development of the short story and the possibilities of a more elliptic prose style at the same time. Both regarded each other’s work highly, even though they knew that they were ‘rivals’.

Tomalin gives a very clear-headed critique of the patchiness of KM’s writing, as well as a persuasive account of the biographical basis for much of its content – but she does not say much about what made her writing and the development of the post-Checkhov short story so original.

KM’s last years were a restless search for a cure for her illnesses, combined with an outpouring of her greatest works. She zigzags back and forth across northern Europe, finally dying outside Paris in 1923. She was just thirty-five years old.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, London: Penguin, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0140117156

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

part one of the definitive biography

second volume of the definitive biography

his life, writings, and cultural context

Italo Svevo – principal works

Italo Svevo – study resources

controversial Anglo-American modernist sculptor

poet, editor, publisher, biographer, memorist

economist, philosopher, politician, and statesman

Bloomsbury Group – web links

poet, critic, pacifist, publisher

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

biography of a literary bohemian

Get in touch