Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

Nina Hamnett memoirs

January 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the autobiography of ‘the Queen of Bohemia’

Nina Hamnett memoirs is the record of a an artist, a Bohemian, a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, and towards the end of her life a woman who was more-or-less professional alcoholic. This is her interim life story, written around two thirds the way through her career when she was forty-two. Don’t expect chronological coherence or a disciplined narrative. She adopts a scatter gun approach, with famous names coming off the page in rapid succession. And she seems to have known (or met) just about everyone who was anyone in the birth of modernist art 1910-1930.

She was born in Wales in 1890 into an upper middle-class army family, and was educated at public – that is, private schools. She seems from the outset to have rebelled against the strictures of convention, and her account of her largely unhappy childhood emphasises the tomboy nature of her early years – in a way that reads like a girl’s version of Just William crossed with Adrian Mole. She only encountered the world of art when her father (who she disliked) was posted to Dublin. In her teens she attended a variety of art schools, and very rapidly began to establish contact with the people who were to form an entrée into the world of Bohemia where she felt free to breathe. Arthur Ransome, Hugh Walpole, and Aleister Crowley were early (and slightly dubious) influences.

After inheriting fifty pounds she set herself up in Fitzrovia, and from that point onwards her connections with the artistic world developed at an astonishing pace. Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were all friends by the time she was in her early twenties. They bought each other’s paintings, often shared food, clothing, and shelter – and certainly didn’t stint themselves on whatever drinks were available.

She made a conscious effort to lose her virginity, and ended up doing so in the same rooms in Bloomsbury where Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had lived in the 1870s. Her life at this stage appears to have been permanently blessed with good fortune. A friend gave her thirty pounds, which paid for a trip to Paris, where she met Modigliani on the first night out. There followed fancy dress parties, all night drinking, and naked dancing. Zadkine, Archipenko, and Kisling flit through the pages, and she eked out her savings by working as an artist’s model – which seems to be almost an excuse for taking her clothes off, which she was given to doing at the end of a night’s drinking.

Suddenly the indulgence of la vie boheme was shattered by the outbreak of war. She limped back home with just twopence to spare for the final tube fair. Yet after what seems like a miraculous escape from danger, she rather perversely returned to Paris to be with the man she loved – who she calls Edgar but whose real name was Roald Kristian. They returned to England, got married, and joined Roger Fry in his Omega Workshops. The subsequent war period is an odd mixture of the first bombing raids on London, Zeppelins bursting into flames, and scrounging drinks in the Cafe Royal. Her husband was arrested as an unregistered alien, spent time in jail, and was then deported to France, from which he never returned.

She moved into Fitzroy Square and befriended Walter Sickert. At this point her class of patrons and admirers seems to go up a notch: she met and painted portraits of the Sitwells, and yet all the time she was tempted to return to Paris, which she felt to be her spiritual home. For a time she took over Sickert’s old position of teaching at Westminster Technical Institute, but as soon as she had been paid at the end of the term and had enough for the fare, she returned to Paris.

There she rejoined her old friend Marie Wassilieff, who had become Leon Trotsky’s mistress during the war. She dined with Brancusi (a good chef) and fell for a romantic Pole who absconded with all her money and her best friend (who was better-looking). Then it was off to the south of France, staying with another Pole and visiting Tsuguharu Foujita, the Japanese artist. There were trips to Collioure, Cerbère, and Port Vendres, an illegal excursion to Port Bou in Spain, picnics, a little painting, and a lot more wine. But strangely enough she felt that the work she produced there was amongst her weakest and she concluded that she and the south of France were not truly compatible.

It’s difficult to tell the exact year or even the rough period in which many of these events take place – but the drinks are recorded with never-ending enthusiasm – including cider laced with Calvados, stout with champagne (at that time known as ‘Turk’s Blood’) and a mixture of absinthe, gentian, and brandy which sent one of her friends into a catatonic spasm and even she admits she could not choke down. Despite the all night parties and the rivers of champagne, the element of bohemianism continues with living in unheated flats where the water freezes in the sink at night.

Dolores Courtney by Nina Hamnett

At one point Aleister Crowley introduced a new cocktail containing laudanum, and Hamnett fills in his background, including the practice of Black Magic on a Greek island. For this accusation he sued her in court when the memoirs were published – and lost his case. The resulting scandal sent sales of the book soaring. She met Ford Maddox Ford and Gertrude Stein, then smoked hashish with Cocteau and Raymond Radriguet who opened a new restaurant called Le Boeuf sur le Toit (immortalised by the Darius Milhaud composition).

Parties start off late in the evening, go on from one night club to another, and end up in Les Halles around 8.00 am with breakfast and more drinks. There was another more successful visit to the south of France – St Juan les Pins and Nice which was then becoming fashionable where she sang with Rudolph Valentino (full name Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla) who she later introduced to James Joyce. As the memoirs go on, the characters become more and more eccentric – including a lady acrobatic dancer who travelled with two pet monkeys and a snake. Feeling an exhibition coming on, Hamnett returned to London, where her travelling companion managed to set fire to a friend’s flat. The exhibition was a disaster, but she returned to Paris and ended up singing to an audience of Stravinsky and Diaghilev.

The memoir ends with a quite moving account of the funeral of Raymond Radriguet (Cocteau’s lover) who died at only twenty years old, and an idyllic further stay in Grasse in the south of France where she sang songs for fellow guest Francis Poulenc. The account stops abruptly some time around 1926, when she returned from France to take up residence permanently in Fitzrovia, where she became known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’. There is actually a follow-up volume to these memoirs entitled Is She a Lady? published in 1955, a year before she threw herself out of the window of her flat and was impaled on the area railings below. She lingered painfully in hospital for three days, where her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”

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Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso, London: Virago Press, 1984, ISBN: 860686507

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Party in the Blitz

July 26, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Canetti amidst English modernists during the war

The first three volumes of Elias Canetti’s memoirs cover the period 1905 to 1937. The Tongue Set Free traces his precocious childhood in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna, and Zurich; The Torch in my Ear describes his years in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin as he mixed with German modernists and established his reputation as a writer; then The Play of the Eyes details his affair with Alma Mahler’s daughter as well as his friendships with writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. This fourth volume Party in the Blitz takes up the story when like many other European refugees he sought asylum in England (London, Hampstead) during the war.

He is very grateful to England and the protection it offered him, and some of the better pages of this volume are devoted to an appreciation of English history and culture. There’s very little in the way of a continuous argument or a well-planned chronology – because the memoir is put together from journal entries, diaries, and fragments he left behind on his death in 1994. The lack of coherence can sometimes be disconcerting – William Empson’s parties and Margaret Thatcher’s Argentinean war policy discussed on the same page for instance.

Basically he takes a character or a topic and dredges up his ideas and impressions from fifty years previously. He seems to have known everybody who was anybody around that time – Dylan Thomas, Roland Penrose, Vaughan Williams, Herbert Read, Arthur Waley, Bertrand Russell, and J.D. Bernal.

The most amazing thing is that there’s no account of his own development as a writer or an intellectual. He doesn’t say what he was reading or writing; there is no sense of work completed that would lead to the Nobel Prize in 1981; and nothing he says is related to either his own cultural heritage or the development of European modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

He is largely concerned with anecdotes and character sketches of completely inconsequential upper-class toffs and their servants amongst whom he seems to have spent his time. For a man who was supposed to be an intellectual and a writer, it’s amazing to note that the bulk of these pages are taken up by either attacking his contemporaries or driving round Britain in fast cars with dissolute members of the fallen aristocracy – people who he is pleased to relate, can trace their ancestry back to the Norman conquest.

He seems to be most sympathetic to people like himself – the self-confessed misogynist Arthur Waley; the womanizer Bertrand Russell; and a young Enoch Powell, smarting with anguish at the loss of India as part of the British Empire.

London in the war years was a centre for European emigres of all kinds – Kurt Schwitters and Oskar Kokoschka mingle with native artists Stevie Smith, Henry Moore, and Katherine Raine. There are pitilessly cruel portraits of Iris Murdoch, Katherine Raine, and Veronica Wedgewood – all of whom were his former lovers.

You could call Iris Murdoch the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and incessantly listening: in the pub, in bed, in conversation with her male or female lovers … She invited me to Oxford, and met me at the station. She was wearing grotesque sandals, which showed off her large flat feet to terrible disadvantage … she would always come in slovenly academic gear, graceless in her wool or sacking dresses, never really seductive, sometimes in the wrong colours (she didn’t have the ghost of an aesthetic sense where her own clothes were concerned)

What he doesn’t take into account or ask himself is why if he found these women so repugnant, he should become sexually involved with them – as he was, with the full knowledge of his wife. Whilst he fills pages listing the shallowness and failures of his lovers, he says nothing whatever about his wife Veza, the woman to whom he was married throughout all these years. You would never know from these pages that she was a novelist in her own right, and that she had sacrificed much of her time to help him finish Crowds and Power.

But he reserves his most concentrated vitriol for T.S. Eliot, who he berates for embracing English traditions, working in a bank, and writing plays for money.

An American brings over a Frenchman from Paris, someone who died young (Laforgue), drools his self-loathing over him, lives quite literally as a bank clerk, while at the same time he criticises and diminishes anything that was before … and comes up with the end result: an impotency which he shares around with the whole country; he kowtows to any order that’s sufficiently venerable … tormented by his nymphomaniac of a wife …

And for all that Canetti obviously considers himself the great “Dichter”, the only two books he mentions in the four volumes of these memoirs are Auto-da-Fe which he had written by the time he was twenty-six, and Crowds and Power, a study that took him thirty years to bring to completion – a study that in the words of Clive James ‘advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title’.

These are memoirs written in spleen and resentment, and it’s possible that there might be even more to come. Canetti put a twenty-two year embargo on his diaries and personal writings that will not expire until 2024. But it seems unlikely that further revelations will endear him to a new generation of readers, even if that Nobel committee did give him a prize.

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Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, New York: New Directions, 2005, pp.249, ISBN: 0811218309

Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

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Paul Nash

October 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

painter, engraver, war artist, and English modernist

Paul Nash (1889-1946) was a British painter and a war artist who was strongly associated with the development of Modernism in the visual arts in the early part of the twentieth century. Although he has always been associated with a bucolic vision of England, he was actually born in Kensington in the heart of London. But his relatives were all from the countryside and the family eventually moved to live in Buckinghamshire – largely because of his mother’s fragile mental health.

Wood on the Downs (1929)

Nash was generally a failure at formal schooling, but because he had a gift for sketching he enrolled at Chelsea Polytechnic, then went on to the London School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, off Fleet Street. He was advised by his friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley, and by the artist William Rothenstein, that he should attend the Slade School of Art at University College, London.

His early influences were the Pre-Raphaelites and William Blake, and his first paintings were visionary works. These were admired by William Rothenstein, who encouraged him to study formally. Unfortunately, his father had no money, having been ruined by medical expenses for his wife, who died in a mental asylum in 1910. But Nash earned enough that year from his work as an illustrator to pay for twelve months’ tuition.

He enrolled in October 1910, though he later recorded that on his first meeting with the Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, ‘It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, were likely to derive much benefit’. Nash’s fellow students included Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Dora Carrington, Richard Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Nash struggled with figure drawing, and spent only one year at the school. Like his contemporary Stanley Spencer he travelled in by train every day to attend classes.

Discouraged at first, he made rapid progress after the first few weeks. His main friendship during the year was with the young Ben Nicholson. He also fell in love (as did so many others) with one of the year’s intake – the raffishly attractive Dora Carrington.

Like a number of his contemporaries, he left the Slade early, feeling it had nothing more to offer him. Paradoxically, he moved away from his home in the home counties to live in London, yet simultaneously discovered his love of the English countryside. He produced a series of works celebrating Nature and had a critically acclaimed show at the Carfax Gallery, near Piccadilly.

The year 1913 was a significant step in Nash’s career. He had a two man show with his brother John at the Darien Leigh Gallery in South Kensington at which several collectors bought his work and he was praised by Roger Fry. Success also came at a personal level. He met Margaret Odeh, an Oxford graduate and a full time worker in the women’s movement. They became engaged almost immediately, although at first they didn’t have enough money between them to get married. By the summer of 1914 Nash was enjoying some success and during that year he worked briefly at the Omega Workshops under Roger Fry.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 he was the first of the Slade students to enlist for military service, albeit reluctantly, observing ‘Personally I am more in favour of mending men than killing them’. He was posted on guard duty at the Tower of London, which allowed him time to continue painting and drawing. Then in 1916 he began officer training. His company was eventually involved in the disastrous Big Push’ of 1917 which was supposed to bring a quick end to the war. He had the ‘good luck’ to break some ribs in a fall a few days before, and was sent back to London as an invalid. Most of the men in his company were slaughtered in the attack.

Nash managed to organise a successful one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1917, but as the war ground on towards its horrendous climax, he was recalled to service. Fortunately he managed to secure a commission as a war artist – complete with batman and a chauffeur driven car. However, he was horrified by the spectacle of the war-ravaged battlefields in which Nature had almost been extinguished. He captured what he saw in a series of pen and ink drawings which were later used as the basis for an exhibition of masterful oil paintings he showed at the Leicester Galleries in 1918. They were also used as the basis for his most important work – The Menin Road.

The Menin Road (1919)

After the war he emerged with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder and became ‘a war artist without a war’. He was unsure how to develop his sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. He also began producing wood engravings and was for a while a teacher at the Royal College of Art, where his students included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. There was also a brief period in the nineteen-thirties when he produced abstract and surrealist works.

At the onset of World War Two, Nash was appointed to a full-time salaried post as war artist, attached to the Royal Air Force. But the works he produced did not meet with the approval of the Air Ministry, because they wanted heroic portraits of pilots and their air crew. In fact the works he painted managed to combine successfully his interests in landscape, realism, abstraction, and a form of visionary allegorical painting which is now generally recognised as the finest art work to come out of 1939-45.

After the war he suffered from a number of periods of bad health – most notably from asthma – he had difficulties painting, and he turned increasingly to photography, producing some collages. He spent the remaining eighteen months of his life encased in what he himself described as ‘reclusive melancholy’, and he finally died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash paintings and watercolours – Amazon UK
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Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon US

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Peggy Guggenheim

October 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

The first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

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Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609

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Philip Larkin letters

October 5, 2014 by Roy Johnson

witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’ and generally moaned about everything – the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.

The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin’s complete correspondence – and it is so selective that there’s a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.

For instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself – she who played such a significant role in Larkin’s erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection – Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest’ but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic – written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.

Of course the letters also reveal what were considered inappropriate character traits when they were first published – his penchant for soft pornography, his tendency to smut and behind-the-bike-sheds swearing – particularly in his correspondence with Kingsley Amis. But it’s worth bearing in mind both the stifling mediocrity of much British culture in these post-war years, against which these attitudes were a healthy antidote, and the fact that a fellow son of the midlands (Joe Orton) was revving up by writing in exactly the same manner a few miles down the road.

What underlies a great deal of the correspondence from a sociological point of view is that once having established himself at Oxford there is ever afterwards a network of relationships, employment, and social connections which has the British university system at its core. It emphasises Oxbridge as a system which provides a three year membership that lasts a lifetime.

Yet despite his persistent gloom and claims of being neglected, he was well connected with Faber & Faber, the BBC, and prestigious journals such as The Spectator, The Listener, and New Statesman. But to do him credit, a great deal of his early work was published by small independent presses by whom he sometimes wasn’t even paid.

The year 1955 appears to have been something of an annus mirabilis for him – first a series of publications edited by admirers such as Robert Conquest and D.J.Enright which were followed by good reviews. Then there was the move to Hull. His first impressions were not very favourable: ‘It’s a frightful dump … The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish … Life here varies from dreary to scarcely-bearable’. Yet in the end it turned out to suit him well enough (‘It’s very nice & flat for cycling’) though his regard for the University might have shocked his colleagues had they known at the time:

But in the main this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia … That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.

He also had no time for the business of ‘lit crit’ and the pampered existence in university academic departments. Commenting in a letter to Barbara Pym he observes: ‘If you were in university life you would be familiar with the phrase ‘crushing teaching load’ — i.e. six hours a week six months a year’.

In terms of literary development it’s interesting to note that he started in the realm of fiction, and even produced two novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter – before disenchantment set in following an unfinished sand abandoned third and fourth novel. He then settled to poetry alone, which seemed better suited to his temperament.

Yet before he had even reached the age of forty he was writing: ‘I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’ and on reaching fifty he thought it was a miracle he was still alive. As if to confirm his own sense of the sands running out, he produced less and less poetry as he got older, and yet perversely devoted huge amounts of time and effort into compiling the badly-received Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which he referred to satirically as ‘really the Oxford Book of Nineteen & Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse.

Even though he was writing in a number of different linguistic registers to people who reflect quite distinct relationships in his life – friends, lovers, publishers, public figures – he had an amazing gift for throwing off witty epigrammatic statements:

I don’t think I write well — just better than anyone else

Personally I should need only 2 words to describe English poetry since 1960 — ‘horse-shit’

I should like to change my address in Who’s Who from ‘c/o The University of Hull’ to ‘c/o Faber & Faber , 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AU’, and I hope this will be acceptable to you. My reason is to make it even more difficult for people to get at me.

This attitude even extends into the darker areas of his life. After travelling regularly at weekends for years to the nursing home in Leicester where his mother was confined, he mentions to a friend:

My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.

He was fiercely loyal to old friends such as Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Thwaite; he helped other writers notably Barbara Pym and his old school friend Colin Gunner locate publishers; and he was amazingly diligent, well-informed, and persistent over the rights of published writers to their royalty entitlements and re-publication fees. He even registered himself for VAT when it was introduced.

In many respects he was a figure of contradictions – which these entertaining letters bring out very well. He was the recluse who (within the UK) traveled widely and socialised regularly; the confirmed bachelor who maintained sexual relationships with a number of women – often at the same time; the radical anti-establishment figure who accepted public honours by the bucketload; the prolific writer who produced only a handful of well-known poems; and the anti-materialist who was much-depicted with an old-fashioned bicycle but who actually drove a four litre Rolls Royce Vanden Plas.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp.791, ISBN: 057117048X

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Portrait of a Marriage

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother’s study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn’t cover.

It’s not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending’ on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope’ to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn’t have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn’t love or desire.

It’s an amazing story, and most instructive in class terms. Husbands colluding with their wives’ lovers for the sake of money to keep estates solvent, whilst paternity suits raged to the tune of £40,000 (this in the 1900s).

I was also very struck by how much of Sackville-West’s literary style is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. She is a great fan of the stream of immediate memory, and a narrative couched in extended metaphors and rhapsodic interludes. There are lots of schooners breasting silvery waves with the wind full in their sails, and that sort of thing.

There’s nothing here that will be remotely shocking in the sexual sense to modern readers. ‘I had her’ is about as explicit as it gets. But the behaviour – duplicitous, self-seeking, naive, and hypocritical – is breathtaking. Vita Sackville West finally broke off the relationship with Trefusis because she thought she might have had some sexual connection with Denys Trefusis – the man she had recently married – whilst West had two children with Harold Nicolson. Actually, Violet Trefusis hadn’t had any such connection, having made it a condition of her marriage contract.

There’s a lot of utterly snobbish ancestor-worship to get through and Nicolson’s chapters are written in a creakingly old-fashioned manner: ‘She permitted him liberties but not licence’. In fact Nicolson fils seems as wrapped up in snobbery as his mother:

her real friends were souls, but real souls who had some breeding and a gun, who could make a fourth at bridge, and who knew the difference between claret and burgundy

I found it quite hard to keep my rage down when reading of the almost unbelievable concern for money, status, and class. The events are only just over a hundred years ago, and this account of them was written in the 1970s, but it was like reading about social dinosaurs.

The latter part of the book outlines West’s affairs with Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf – both of which she recounted in detail to her husband. Their son makes the case that the bond between them was strong enough to outlast these affairs – which it did, though on the basis that they had no sexual relationship with each other.

Of course you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise why a child would want to portray his bisexual and adulterous parents in the best possible light, but I must say all this is sometimes difficult to accept calmly.

As time went on the affairs petered out and the Nicolsons settled down to a quieter life, the major part of which they spent separately – he in London, she in their house at Sissinghurst – which might account for the longevity of the union.

These were people who seemed to have separated out sex from marriage, who obviously cared for each other, and yet spent most of their time apart, writing endless letters saying how much they missed each other. They also made sure their children were kept out of the way at all times. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere?

However, there is one very good thing to say for this memoir-cum-history. Anyone who wants a vivid, living example of the social values and the bohemian behaviour of the Bloomsbury Group need look no further. It’s all here.

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Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Orion Books, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 1857990609

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Princess Bibesco

August 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Princess Bibesco (1897-1945) was a marginal but interesting figure of the modernist period – a rich socialite and writer. She was born in 1897 as Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Asquith by his second wife. The family lived in Cavendish Square, but when Asquith became liberal Prime Minister in 1908, Elizabeth was raised in the PM’s official residence at 10 Downing Street. (Nancy Cunard and her mother moved into the Cavendish Square house.) Elizabeth was a spirited and gifted child who during the First World War organised fund-raising events to support servicemen.

Elizabeth Bibesco in 1919

At the age of nineteen she appeared on stage at the Palace Theatre in a sketch she wrote herself, and she organised an exhibition of portraits by the American artist John Singer Sargent at the Grafton Galleries. In 1918 she played small roles in two silent movies by D.W. Griffith, Hearts of the World and The Great Love.

At nineteen she fell in love with an American diplomat, which caused a scandal in her family. Sister-in-law Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary: ‘This really is too much. To marry an American is bad enough – but a poor American …’. Shortly afterwards in 1919 Elizabeth married Prince Antoine Bibesco, a Romanian diplomat who had been posted to London as first secretary to the embassy. He was twenty-two years older than her.

After the marriage she lived in Paris in a house on the Ile St Louis, overlooking Notre Dame. Her husband was a great friend of the French writer Marcel Proust, who used the Prince as a model for his character Saint-Loup in Remembrance of Things Past. The Princess (as she now was) became part of his circle, and Proust was eventually godfather to her daughter Priscilla.

In the early 1920s she met members of the Bloomsbury Group and began an affair with John Middleton Murry. He was married at the time to Katherine Mansfield, who rapidly put a stop to the relationship. She wrote to the Princess: ‘I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of those things which is not done in our world’. This was completely untrue, but it had the intended effect.

John Middleton Murry

Between 1921 and 1940 Elizabeth published three collections of short stories, four novels, and a book of poetry. Her literary style is lyrical and allusive, with a lightness of touch that skims across her narratives (and it has to be said, is quite like that of her ‘rivals’ Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf):

Poor Miss Wilcox! She had tried brightness and common-sense, Milton and lawn-tennis, the arch and the aloof. She would have liked to have been seductive and a little wicked, but she had found it easier to be dignified and very good. Easier but no more satisfactory. Evidently charm was a strange, mysterious thing, for which there was no recipe. A dangerous force governing many things and subject to no law.

As an adult she struggled with alcoholism, but travelled with her husband in his capacity as a diplomat to Washington and Madrid. Whilst in the Spanish capital she met and befriended Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the fascist Falange and eldest son of the military dictator. There is some evidence of an affair between them. He was executed by the Republicans during the Civil War, but Princess Bibesco dedicated her last novel The Romantic to him in 1940.

She lived in Romania during the Second World War, dying there from pneumonia in 1945 at the age of forty-eight. She was buried in the Bibesco family vault in Bucharest.

Balloons – Gutenberg.org

I Have Only Myself to Blame (1921)
Balloons (1922)
The Fir and the Palm (1924)
The Whole Story (1925)
There Is No Return (1927)
The Romantic (1940)
Haven (1951)

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Richard Nevinson

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

English modernist painter and war artist

Richard Nevinson – (1899-1946) was an English artist of the early modernist period, the second child of Suffragette-supporters and Christian Socialists who lived in Hampstead. His mother was a teacher and his father (an Oxford classics graduate) was a war correspondent with the Daily Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. Nevinson was generally unhappy and often ill as a child, and was particularly undistinguished at school. When he was thirteen his father made the disastrous decision to send him to a low-ranking public school, where he endured three pointless years of learning virtually nothing and which left him emotionally scarred, with an enduring hatred of ‘the national code of snobbery and sport’.

La Mitrailleuse (1915)

The only thing for which he had any aptitude was art, so in 1907 he was sent to St John’s Wood School of Art. This opened up the world of bohemian culture to him, and although his painting and drawing were still undeveloped he spent time drinking in the Cafe Royal in Regent Street with Arthur Symonds who was a friend of his father.

He was supposed to be preparing for entry into the Royal Academy Schools, but when he saw a publication of drawings by artists at the Slade, he knew that this was where he wanted to be. The Slade School of Art was part of University College, London and his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington.

However, when he got there he felt lonely and isolated, but became close friends with Mark Gertler – both of them ‘outsiders’ and both fond of the music halls. But whilst Gertler progressed rapidly and had some remarkable early success, Nevinson had yet to find his own n distinctive style. He painted scenes of railway sidings, factories, and gasometers in the north London suburbs.

Nevinson and Gertler began exhibiting with some degree of success in 1911. They discussed art together all the time, but their friendship was ended not by theories of art but by Dora Carrington. Both of them were paying court to her at the same time, and she (terrified of any possible sexual contact at that stage of her life) was playing one off against the other. Nevinson was older and more experienced, Gertler was better looking and more successful. In the end she chose Gertler – not that it brought him much satisfaction.

After Nevinson’s first year, and following the Dora Carrington problem, he felt that the Slade had nothing more to offer him, and he moved north to Bradford where he felt better painting pictures of mills, factories, and coal mines. But the triangular struggle with Gertler and Carrington continued nevertheless. He then moved to Paris and studied for a while at the Academie Julien. He copied paintings in the Louvre, shared a studio with Modigliani for a while, and met Lenin who at that time was living in exile.

Returning to London in 1913, Nevinson was plunged back into despair by his jealous obsession with Carrington, and eventually had a complete breakdown. He recovered in a health spa in Buxton, after which he was something of a changed man. He threw in his lot with Wyndham Lewis and the other English futurists who set themselves up as an alternative to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops.

Unfortunately, this move only cut him off even further from the artistic success he sought. The Vorticists (as they called themselves) became mired in factional disputes, they lost their patron, and disappeared rapidly into obscurity, despite issuing Manifestos and calling for revolutions. Their timing couldn’t have been worse or more ironic, because just across the English Channel real wars and revolutions were going on.

Paths of Glory (1917)

Nevinson joined the Ambulance Brigade and worked with his father in the makeshift field hospitals of northern France. The scenes of horror he encountered there were so bad that he returned to England in January 1915 and never went back into combat. He transformed these experiences into what was to become his greatest work, La Mitrailleuse, and the success of this work alone led to a one man show at the Leicester Galleries which was a sell out.

However, his shattered nerves were not bad enough to prevent his being re-conscripted. Various wires were pulled and people of influence contacted, and he was returned to the conflict as a war artist – but with no status and no salary. However, many of the paintings which came out of these experiences were criticised and even censored because they were not considered sufficiently patriotic.

After the war Nevinson (like Paul Nash) became ‘a war artist without a war’. His post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated. He reverted to painting in a realistic style, and produced some dramatic cityscapes of New York, Paris, and London which were well received. During the Second World War he worked as a stretcher-bearer in London throughout the Blitz, in which time his own studio and the family home in Hampstead were hit by bombs. He suffered a stroke which paralysed his right hand, and even though he taught himself to paint with his left hand he died somewhat embittered in 1946.

Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon UK
Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon US

A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon UK
A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon US

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Roger Fry a biography

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

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Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523

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Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Life

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

short biographical study – with rare archive photos

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Samuel Beckett and his amazingly difficult and rather bohemian life, which was unrelenting devoted to creativity no matter what his circumstances. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Beckett is a well-known author, but not much is generally known about his personal life. He avoided interviews and shunned publicity – even sending his publisher to collect his Nobel Prize.

This short book isn’t an attempt to deliver a full scale biography (that has already been done by Deirdre Bair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson) but it offers a potted account of his life accompanied by the most original set of photographs that I have ever seen – some from his personal life, and others from stage productions.

Beckett was from a fairly well-to-do family; he had a privileged, well educated upbringing, and by the time he graduated with first class honours from Trinity College Dublin it looked as if a standard academic career was his natural progression route.

But he had won a lectureship at the Ecole Normale Superieure – and during his time in Paris he fell in with fellow Dubliner James Joyce. This experience led him to give up his work as an academic and to embrace the Bohemian life of being a poet, a critic, a translator, and a novelist – from which activities he made no money at all. He lived on allowances from his family until he was middle-aged.

The 1930s passed in a flurry of Bohemianism, occasional publication in obscure magazines, and a fair amount of hardship. He suffered from a number of what seemed to have been psycho-somatic ailments, and even spent some time in psycho-analysis. He also had a rather complex personal life – a wife whom he married for ‘testamentary’ reasons, and overlapping and simultaneous relationships with other women which required ‘timetabling’.

Samuel Beckett’s bookshelves

The war years were a period of hardship and bare survival. He spent time hiding from the Nazis (and fighting with the Maquis) in southern France, then working with the Red Cross. After the war he returned to live in Paris and began to write in French.

The period immediately after the war he called ‘the siege in the room’, where he shut himself away and produced an enormous amount of writing – none of which was immediately published. This period lasted for about four years. And then in the early 1950s he had his first successes – novels published in France, followed by a big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot.

From that point on, his star rose, and yet his work was always surrounded by controversy. People found his writing difficult to understand; theatre directors weren’t sure how to stage his plays; he had different publishers for the three or four genres in which he wrote; and rather like Vladimir Nabokov he spent a lot of time translating his work from one language to another – and sometimes back again.

As he got older his works got shorter, more compressed, and eventually reached the point of silence as he produced mimes and silent films. However, it’s quite possible that his oeuvre will continue to grow, even after his death, because he wrote so much which never got into print. This is a short but very attractive publication that’s worth it just for the photographs.

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Gerry Dukes, Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press, 2004, pp.161, ISBN 1585676101

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Canetti amidst English modernists during the war

painter, engraver, war artist, and English modernist

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