Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

Stanley Spencer

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

visionary English modernist painter

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter from the early modernist period. He was the youngest child of a large middle-class artistic family who lived in Cookham, a small village on the Thames. The cultural ambiance in the household was one of music and church-going. Spencer had very little formal education, since his father had snobbish doubts about the local council school, but could not afford the fees for a private education. He ran his own private school in a shed in next door’s garden.

Spencer’s talent for drawing was encouraged by the wife of the local landowner. She suggested the Slade School of Art (where she had studied herself) and he was admitted and at his father’s insistence that he should not be subjected to any examinations, was allowed to bypass the written entrance requirements. He studied under Wilson Steer and the formidable Henry Tonks, and he was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg.

self-portrait 1923

Being small, wearing glasses, and having the general appearance of a young boy, it was not surprising that he became something of a scapegoat and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow students, many of whom developed a life style that combined upper class raffishness with what we now think of as art school bohemianism. Nevinson called him ‘Cookham’, the village to which he travelled home by train every day. It was a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his days at the Slade.

By the end of his first year Spencer had won a scholarship prize – though it was initially withheld from him on the technical objection that he had not taken the initial written entrance examination. Although he received very little instruction in painting whilst at the Slade, around this time he began to produce his now famous paintings of everyday life in Cookham village that also included religious figures and scenes from the bible (Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem).

Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade, he was not touched by the fashionable influences of the post-Impressionists, but continued painting in the same style as he had always done – a combination of realistic depiction with visionary subject matter. He also steered clear of all the intellectualising and theorising about the nature of Art that was rife amongst his fellow artists.

By 1912 he had twice won Slade prizes despite the fact that sometimes he had to work on the kitchen table at home, surrounded by his parents and brothers and sisters. He left the Slade in the same year, but was included in the second Grafton Gallery exhibition of post-Impressionists, alongside works by Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne. Even though he behaved like a bucolic recluse, his work became sought after by collectors such as Eddie Marsh and Lady Ottoline Morrell, who bought his works both for her own collection and on behalf of the Contemporary Arts Society.

At the outset of war in 1914 he felt ambivalent about enlisting, but eventually joined the medical service and was posted to a recovery unit in an old lunatic asylum just outside Bristol. He hated the long hours, the drudgery, and the military discipline – but whilst there his painting The Centurion’s Servant caused a stir at the London Group exhibition in November 1915. He then volunteered for an overseas expeditionary posting, and was sent to Macedonia, which he found strangely exciting and exotic.

Swan Upping at Cookham (1915)

Spencer was pinned down in the Balkans whilst suffering from the irony that he had been asked to contribute to a war memorial. When the conflict finally ended he was given rapid transit back home – only to find that plans for the memorial had meanwhile been scrapped. However, he threw himself into the completion of one of his masterpieces, Swan Upping at Cookham which had been left unfinished at his conscription.

In 1925 his life changed quite dramatically. First he suddenly married a fellow Slade student Hilda Carline and he discovered a new subject for some of his later works – conjugal sex. The sudden change to his normally puritanical lifestyle presaged major disruptions. He moved back to live in Cookham trying (unsuccessfully) to recapture some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, another former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer became obsessed with Patricia and eventually proposed a menage a trois with his wife Hilda, but she refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who as a lesbian equally refused to consummate their marriage or even live in the same house. However, since she controlled his finances, when he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his new wife forced him out, so he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. Perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown.

This period was also the source of one of his most controversial paintings – the Leg of Mutton Nude or to give the work its more correct title Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937). This is an overtly sexual (though not erotic) portrait of Spencer and Patricia, with a joint of lamb in the foreground. It was never exhibited in his lifetime. Later, the outgoing president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings initiated a police prosecution against Spencer for obscenity. The irony in all this is that the portrait shows the bespectacled Stanley looking down longingly on the naked body of Patricia, the wife with whom he never had sex.

He undertook the enormous project of a decorated chapel at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, designing the chapel himself and modelling it on Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua. This work consisted of sixteen huge paintings depicting everyday scenes of shell-shocked troops in England and Macedonia, but with an emphasis on everyday events rather than the horrors of war. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde which are now in national collections. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died of cancer in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon US

Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon US

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Sylvia Beach

September 14, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was an American-born bookshop owner and publisher who emigrated to Paris and became a central figure in the expatriate community between the first and second world wars. She is best known as the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and as the publisher of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

She was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the grand-daughter of missionaries. At birth she was christened Nancy Woodbridge Beach, but she adopted the name Sylvia later. In 1901 the family moved to France when her father was appointed a minister at the American Church in Paris.

Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach (left) with Adrienne Monnier

She spent the next few years living in Paris until the family moved back to America when her father became a minister in Princeton. However, she made return trips to France, then lived in Spain and later worked for the Red Cross in Serbia.

During the later years of the First World War she went back to Paris as a student of French literature. She had very little formal education, though by the time she finally settled in Paris in 1916 she could speak three foreign languages – French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 1917, at the age of thirty, she entered Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, joined the lending library, and found the woman who became her lover and life partner. She also discovered her vocation and in 1919 opened her own bookshop as Shakespeare and Company in a nearby former laundry. The business functioned as both a bookshop and a lending library. Both women’s enterprises were financed by their parents.

“My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company”

Primed with customers from Monnier who were interested in English literature, the new bookshop was an immediate success. One of her first loyal customers was Valery Larbaud who later became a translator of James Joyce’s work. Other early subscribers included Andre Gide, Eric Satie, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Joyce himself. Sylvia Beach formed an immediate bond with Joyce, who was then in the middle of writing Ulysses.

As far as the business was concerned, she was astonishingly inefficient. She kept almost no records, and didn’t even put prices on the books she was trying to sell. Hours were spent chatting to people who just happened to have called by – but she was well liked for being so receptive.

Beach took up the crusade on behalf of Joyce’s unpublished novel Ulysses when his principal benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver failed to find people who would even set up the book in print.. It was considered ‘indecent’ by everyone – including Virginia Woolf.

When she decided to publish the novel herself she sent out publicity leaflets which had the interesting effect of attracting more American writers to visit her shop, eager for news of a work that was considered scandalous even before it was published. The visitors were also encouraged by a collapse of the Franc, which made living cheaper against the dollar.

Sylvia Beach poured all her time, money, and emotional resources into the production of Ulysses. Joyce sponged off her mercilessly – as he did off everyone else. The novel’s early years are now quite well known. It was vilified as ‘obscene’ and its author branded a ‘lunatic’. This only increased sales.

But not everyone was pleased. Gertrude Stein thought Shakespeare and Company was lowering the tone of the Left Bank by publishing indecent material. She also believed that the true genius of literary modernism was none other than her good self. She studiously avoided both Beach and Joyce at all cultural events.

Sylvia Beach

James Joyce

Beach stayed out of these social squabbles and concentrated on the task in hand. She began a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who wished to supress Joyce’s work. Copies of Ulysses were smuggled to America and England, and occasionally the customs officers would confiscate her parcels and destroy their contents. [My ‘old’ copy of the Bodley Head edition has this shameful record of prurient vandalism reproduced as a preface.]

She befriended more Americans in the next wave of expatriates – writer Ernest Hemingway and composers George Antheil and Aaron Copeland. In 1926 she brought out a fourth edition of Ulysses, which was printed with copies of revisions and corrections to the original text. Meanwhile Joyce had begun work on his next book Finnegans Wake which was to take him seventeen years to complete.

The cross-cultural fertilizations that took place in this period are well illustrated in the figure of John Dos Passos. He was a visitor to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at the time he was writing Manhattan Transfer. He was naturally influenced by Ulysses, but he also met Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein with whom he discussed the techniques of collage, fast-cut editing, and montage, all of which he incorporated into his literary style.

Sylvia Beach

John Dos Passos

There was a small cloud on this endlessly sunny horizon when Ford Maddox Ford threatened to open a rival bookshop offering lower prices. Sylvia simply removed all his works from her own shop, his sales dropped, and his plans collapsed.

Whilst the fast sets of the Hemingways and the Scott Fitzgeralds passed their summers in month-long parties in Pamplona and Antibes, Sylvia and Adrienne retreated to an isolated farm in the Savoy mountains, living on fresh milk and sleeping in a hayloft.

By 1926 the American influence on Paris was in full spate. Josephine Baker was a succes de scandale in Le Revue Negre. Beach made her contributions to this fashion by organising a Walt Whitman exhibition and helping to promote the sensational performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique that ended in a riot.

But the American connection was not all sweetness and light. Samuel Roth, a notorious publisher in New York, brought out a pirated copy of Ulysses. The novel was not protected by copyright at this time because America had not signed the Bern agreement.

Sylvia Beach orchestrated an international protest, and meanwhile supported Joyce through gritted teeth when extracts from Work in Progress (which became Finnegans Wake) began to appear, much to general bewilderment. Harriet Weaver, his principal benefactress predicted that it would eventually become a ‘curiosity of literature’. History might prove her right.

In 1927 Beach’s mother was arrested in Paris on a charge of shoplifting in Galleries Lafayette. Rather than face the public humiliation of a trial, she committed suicide. Sylvia was devastated and, exhausted by her efforts to fight the Roth piracy, she put a little more distance between herself and Joyce.

Sylvia Beach

Ulysses – first edition

Around this time Samuel Beckett appeared and was added to the roster of unpaid ‘assistants’ to Joyce, who continued to cadge, borrow, and even steal money from anybody who had any.

This decade of license and excess – ‘The Roaring Twenties’ – came to an abrupt halt in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. But not everyone suffered: Joyce continued to fund his lavish lifestyle with other people’s money and started the new age of austerity by biting the hand that had fed him for the previous ten years. He cheated Sylvia Beach out of the rights to Ulysses which she had gone to so much trouble to publish for him.

Yet with the burden of Ulysses removed, her financial position at the shop at first actually improved. But on the other hand, many of her expatriate American customers began returning to their homeland. The value of the dollar was falling, and European stormclouds were gathering. She was forced to sell off some of her precious first editions and manuscripts, and a ‘friends of Shakespeare and Company’ fund was established to keep the shop alive.

In 1936 Beach paid her first visit to America for twenty-two years. On return to Paris she found that a rival had moved in to live with her lover Adrienne. The political uncertainties of the late thirties were no good at all for business, and she only kept the shop going thanks to generous gifts from friends and a series of sponsored internships.

At the outbreak of war and the occupation of Paris by the Germans, Sylvia opted to stay put and keep the shop open. But when a Nazi officer threatened to close the business because she would not sell him a copy of Finnegans Wake, she hid her entire stock in an attic at the top of the building, where it remained throughout the war.

She was arrested in 1942 and interned at Vitell, later to be released following the influence of a friend in Vichy. At the liberation in 1944 she did not, contrary to popular myth, re-open the shop after it was ‘liberated’ by Ernest Hemingway. Instead, she organised help for her friends and began to write her memoirs.

Adrienne, her mentor, mother-figure, and lover committed suicide in 1955 to escape the double pains of rheumatism and Menieres disease. Beach lived on to establish a permanent home for her archive of Joyce materials at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she died in her beloved Paris in 1962.

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Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, London: Penguin, 1985, pp. 447, ISBN:

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The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.

Alma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.

One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’.

This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting – on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.

She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It’s perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband’s professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.

Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure’. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]

Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma’s musical interests – but it was too late. He died shortly after this.

Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold – and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer – then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.

Their’s was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.

Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.

If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It’s interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka’s great paintings were produced around this time.

However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.

Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.

There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma – but she refused to choose between them as husband and lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.

Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.

Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation’.

She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology – an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.

Fortunately, all these dubious goings on are surrounded in this biography by some first rate political mise en scene. There’s a very readable account of the collapse of Austria and Vienna in particular amidst the competing factions of fascists, social-democrats, monarchists, and communists.

Despite her right-wing sympathies, when Austria was threatened by Germany in 1938 Alma had the good sense to transfer her money to Zurich, and she escaped with Werfel, ending up in the south of France along with many other European refugees at that time. Their escape route was the now familiar one of Marseilles to Perpignon on the Spanish border; over the Pyrenees in secret; then from Spain to Portugal, and a boat journey to freedom. It was a route travelled by many others, including Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin (who did not survive the suicide capsule he shared with Arthur Koestler), André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp.

After a rapturous reception in New York Alma settled in California. As her fellow refugee Arnold Schoenberg put it she was ‘exiled to paradise’. A comfortable home with a strictly Ayrian butler was established, from which she deemed the Allied forces fighting in Europe were ‘weaklings and degenerates’. She thought Hitler was a ‘superman’ and claimed that the Red Cross facilities in the concentration camps were ‘excellent’. When her husband died in 1945 she didn’t even go to his funeral.

Yet after Werfel’s death she seems to have lost her sense of purpose and direction. She sorted out his papers and wrote her own self-justifying autobiography And the Bridge is Love, and went to live in New York. There were some attempts to retrieve her property in post-war Austria, but when she visited her old home in Vienna it was in ruins. Even the marble had been ripped out to furnish nearby houses.

There was a quasi-reconciliation with her daughter Anna, who was so disoriented she didn’t even know who had won the war. They were like characters at the end of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. She lived until 1964, still drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, then at the age of eighty-six the light went out on her life – and on the end of an era.

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Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991, pp. 346, ISBN: 0670805130

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The Life of Jimmy Scott

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

I have to confess that I only heard of Jimmy Scott quite recently. Understandably so, it turns out. He’s one of the best kept secrets in the world of jazz and ballad singing. I heard his voice on a radio broadcast, was intrigued, bought a couple of CDs from Amazon – and was completely blown away. He’s completely unlike any other male singer you’ve ever heard of – mainly because he sounds like a woman. This is the result of a congenital disease which denied him puberty.

But that isn’t all: he has a style which is stripped bare to a minimum and yet very mannered at the same time. Like all good jazz musicians, he pays attention to song lyrics and sings them as if he means them. The most interesting things about him are his voice quality – high falsetto, big vibrato – and his delivery, which is laid back to a point where you think he might fall over. But he never does. The nearest style I can think of is Billie Holliday – one of his early fans and an influence. As David Ritz puts it in this very readable biography:

The rhythms he creates are wholly original. He does more than take his time. He doesn’t worry about time. Time disappears as a restraint or a measure. As a singer, his signatures are idiosyncratic phrasing and radical, behind-the beat syncopation. His career, like his singing, has lagged far behind the beat.

Scott’s life was full of personal heartbreak: from a dysfunctional family; orphaned as a teenager; married four times; duped by record producers; constantly on the move; scorned as an outsider; drink, (soft) drugs. He lived, as David Ritz accurately puts it, the jazz life.

Oddly enough, he claims that his early influences were Paul Robeson and Judy Garland two singers who you would think were at opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

The amazing thing, for someone who is still alive and singing now (I heard him with a German tenor player only a few weeks ago) is that he cut his musical teeth with people such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Tadd Dameron. His working life spans the last half-century.

Much of the racy vivacity of Ritz’s narrative comes from the fact that he transcribes the accounts of people he interviewed in his research. There are also some very entertaining vignettes along the way – such as life on the road in the high-octane Lionel Hampton band in the late 1940s.

His biggest fans were the people who matter musically – Bird, B.B.King, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horn. Later on he was championed by Lou Reed and Madonna.

And his own musical taste is impeccable – as in his perceptive observation that Stan Getz got better as he got older “Whatever he learned from Lester—and he learned a lot—he expanded on the lessons until he became a master himself”

He started out promisingly enough, but every time he tried to make his breakthrough record albumn, an old producer would surface to block his ambition with a ‘cease and desist’ order straight out of a nineteenth century melodrama. Scott remained unembittered – though it has to be said he took out a lot of his anger on the people closest to him.

The 1970s and 1980s are like waste years, with Scott working as a hotel lift attendant and a shipping clerk to make ends meet. Then there are a succession of failed enterprises which left him living off social security. But then he finally got some recognition and success in the 1990s when largely white audiences began to catch on to him. By then he was sixty-eight years old.

So the story has a reasonably happy ending – but he had to wait almost half a lifetime for it. This is an enthralling account of a real survivor, recounted with genuine but not uncritical admiration, and supported by a scholarly apparatus of bibliography and discography which left me yearning to read and listen to more of this truly remarkable artist.

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David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002, pp.270, ISBN: 0306812290

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The Play of the Eyes

July 5, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Vienna – Strasbourg – Paris – Prague

The Play of the Eyes is the third volume of the memoirs of Elias Canetti, a trilogy which I have read with a growing sense of frustration. He was an amazingly clever, talented, and well-connected writer who at only twenty-six produced what has become a European modernist classic novel (Auto-da-Fé) he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, and he was personally acquainted with some of the most prestigious artists of the modernist period of the early twentieth century – Karl Kraus, Bethold Brecht, Georg Groz, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Alban Berg – and yet he tells you almost nothing about them. Every attempt at a character sketch or an artistic evaluation is shrouded by either abstract generalizations, his own egoism – or both.

When Hermann Broch is given a chapter of his own we are presented with nothing except Canetti’s own reactions to him, including the quite ridiculous notion that Canetti was able to detect Broch’s secret method for penetrating insights into other people through his manner of breathing. When introducing the conductor Hermann Scherchen he ends up talking about his own play The Wedding, how powerfully moving it is, and how talented must be the writer who can create such moving effects. It is not surprising that he is somewhat unloved by most commentators.

He moves on to describe Alma Mahler (the composer’s widow) and falls in love with her daughter Anna, a sculptor, through whom he meets her tutor Fritz Wotruba, who was considered one of the more avant-gard artists of the Vienna Sezession movement. He doesn’t bother explaining what his wife Veza thought about his affairs with other women.

In fact there is very little by way of personal revelation of the kind you might normally expect in someone’s memoirs. He makes no mention of his emotional life, which was very complex; there’s nothing about his family, which was very important in the first volume, The Tongue Set Free; and it’s not at all clear how he earned his living – or even if he earned it at all.

The most moving chapter is a description of the funeral of Manon, Alma Mahler’s daughter from her second marriage to the architect Walter Gropius. Manon died of polio at the age of only eighteen, and the occasion was immortalized in the violin concerto Alban Berg wrote and dedicated ‘To the memory of an angel’. Canetti manages to combine a heartfelt tribute to the girl with a fulsome picture of her grieving mother which is tinged with satire (Alma Mahler was well known for very theatrical public displays).

Even after his marriage and the publication of Auto-da-Fé in 1935, the long-running conflict with his mother continues just as intensely as it is described in the first two volumes. On a visit to her in Paris she predicts what will happen to him with amazing critical zeal and foresight:

She saw me surrounded by women, who would worship me for the ‘misogyny’ of Auto-da-Fé and long to let me chastise them for being women. She saw a fast-moving procession of bewitching beauties at my home in Grinzing, and in the end she saw Veza [his wife] banished and forgotten in a tiny apartment just like her own in Paris.

And sure enough, the very next chapter is a self-indulgent description of a nineteen year old girl fan throwing herself at him in a night club.

The general picture he creates of Viennese artistic circles is one of snobbery, one-upmanship, rivalries, and undisguised private enmities. This is mixed in his own case with a marked degree of self-loathing that seems to be endemic in Austrian culture (one thinks of the extreme case of Thomas Benhard).

He makes a laughing stock out of the biographer Emil Ludwig. Robert Musil cuts him dead for daring to mention the very name of Thomas Mann. Heimito von Doderer is reduced to a vain fool. No doubt all these people had character flaws: writers are not renowned for being models of virtue – but Canetti seems to relish negativity, just as he elevates his personal heroes into saints.

The book ends with his mother’s death in 1937 – which is another quite moving chapter. Two years later he moved to live in Hampstead, London, a story which is taken up in the continuation to this grizzly but fascinating memoir, Party in the Blitz

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Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.329, ISBN: 1847083552

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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The Tongue Set Free

May 23, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Ruschuk – Manchester – Vienna – Zurich

The Tongue Set Free is the first volume of Elias Canetti’s memoirs. Although he is best known (though not widely) for his novel Auto-da-Fe (1935) he was a prolific writer in a number of literary genres. Crowds and Power (1960) is a sociological study of human behaviour in masses; Voices of Marrakesh (1968) is a collection of travel essays; Kafka’s Other Trial (1969) is a combination of literary criticism and a study of Kafka’s troubled relationship with his lover Felice Bauer. Canetti’s memoirs document the social and cultural life of Europe as well as his own intellectual development in the first half of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981.

His story constitutes an extraordinarily rich pan-European cultural history. He was raised in a Sephardic Jewish family of Spanish origin in Bulgaria, speaking Ladino, but with parents who spoke to each other in German. As a child he was taken to live in Manchester where English quickly became his adoptive language. On the early death of his father he was then taken to Switzerland where his mother drilled him in German, in preparation for school in Vienna, where he also learned to read Hebrew.

Living in Zurich, his neighbours include Busoni, and his mother points out Lenin in a caf&eacute. As a matter of fact James Joyce and Tristran Tzara were there at the same time, but they were less well known.

There are three central links joining together the short chapters of reminiscence: the passionate and intense relationship with his mother; his love of words and languages; and his insatiable appetite for learning and knowledge.

His father died very suddenly when quite young, and left an obviously attractive wife with one elder and two younger sons to be raised. She put Elias, the eldest, under tremendous pressure to replace his father as an intellectual companion, and he took to the role very enthusiastically.

She drilled him relentlessly to learn German, the language of love she had shared with her husband. She discussed books and ideas with her son. He became jealous whenever suitors came in sight – and drove them away. She told him that she had sacrificed her life to raise him, and expected total devotion in return. She even imposed a total prohibition on all knowledge of sexual matters.

He piles on page after page of admiration for his mother’s charm, intelligence, passionate devotion to literature, and her firm opposition to the war. It’s a well known psychological scenario – and a wonder he didn’t become homosexual – though there are hints of misogyny creeping through by the end of this first volume. Women are associated with bad smells – apart from his mother of course – and his negative attitude to women emerges despite all his efforts to conceal it in the second and third volume of this autobiography. .

His love of books and learning are unstoppable, and he has the grace to reveal that it made him into a somewhat priggish know-it-all at school, where he was subject to anti-Semitic prejudice.

The latter part of this first volume ends in a catalogue of character sketches of his ever-changing schoolmasters, who very typically range from petty martinets to the sort of Dead Poets Society and Jean Brodie favourites who treat their students as ‘equals’ – and end up being fired.

What comes through most admirably is a strong sense of internationalism. He knows his ancestors came from Spain; he was born in Bulgaria, but he also lived in Manchester, Vienna, and Zurich, with loyalties during the first world war (largely directed by his mother) towards those who had suffered most.

The struggle between him and his mother reaches a tremendous emotional climax when after encouraging his every cultural interest, she suddenly decides to jerk him out of what she sees as his complacent intellectualism, cosseted in the Zurich gymnasium, and drag him unwillingly to an inflation-struck Germany where he would have to live amongst people who were suffering, and learn to face ‘real life’. This takes him to Frankfurt – where the story is continued in the second volume of these remarkable memoirs..

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Elias Canetti – biographies

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

Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.268, ISBN: 1847083560

Twentieth century literature
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The Torch in My Ear

July 2, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Frankfurt – Vienna – Berlin

The first volume of Elias Canetti’s remarkable memoirs ended in early 1920 when his mother plucked him out of what she regarded as his self-indulgent intellectual reveries in Zurich, and dragged him into inflation-torn Germany to face ‘real life’. That’s where the story is taken up here – in a Frankfurt boarding house in 1921. The Torch in My Ear continues the very Oedipal relationship with his widowed mother and reaches the point where he must decide on a career. He shifts again to Vienna and begins to study Chemistry, quite clearly without any genuine appetite for the subject.

In all his activities there’s a remarkable degree of similarity with the life which Franz Kafka was leading in nearby Prague – restless moving from one temporary home to another, outdoor swimming and walking, psychological struggles with a dominant parent, and aesthetic aspirations as an antidote to the tedium of daily life.

These similarities are intensified in one or two completely bizarre scenes where Canetti stumbles upon an elderly woman flogging a housemaid who is stripped to the waist in a kitchen, and then later encounters his landlady late at night licking the backs of paintings of her late husband. Later in the memoir he makes friends with a young man who is completely paralysed, but with whom he has conversations about philosophy. These scenes might have come straight from a work by Kafka.

A major influence on his life in Vienna was Karl Kraus, author of the one-man newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch) which gives this volume its title in German – Die Fackel im Ohr – though he does not give an account of Kraus’s ideas, so much as his charisma as a public speaker.

Canetti’s personal life is dominated by a deeply literary friendship with a young woman called Veza, but it is characteristic of his approach to autobiography that his account of the relationship is completely intellectualized. He reveals absolutely nothing about the state of his feelings for the girl, and she disappears from the narrative without trace, as does even his mother.

You would never guess from this volume of the memoirs that Veza developed a literary career of her own, and eventually became his wife. Neither would you guess that she also had a relationship with his younger brother Georges – or that she only had one arm.

On the 15 July 1927 in Vienna (known as Black Friday) the police shot dead eighty-four protesters in a demonstration against the government. The Palace of Justice was set alight, and there were riots in the streets – in all of which Canetti was caught up. This he depicts as one of his life-forming experiences, and he devoted the next thirty years or more to the study of mass psychology that resulted in his book Crowds and Power (1960).

Given that he wrote these memoirs fifty years and more after the events described, he has an astonishing memory for names, places, and the fine details of everyday life. Characters are brought into being on the page almost as if they were people he had encountered the day before. The downside of this approach is that the memoir becomes predominantly a series of anecdotal sketches – a boastful dwarf; a one-legged Mormon; a beautiful Russian girl who lives via Dostoyevski. But he doesn’t bother to relate any of these characters to any larger social or artistic issues.

When he does escape from describing characters to presenting general reflections on life, he often drifts into a sort of rambling which seems to combine narrative via metaphor with a form of German metaphysics:

Far more important was the fact that you were simultaneously learning how to hear. Everything that was spoken, anywhere, at any time, by anyone at all, was offered to your hearing, a dimension of the world that I had never had any inkling of. And since the issue was the combination—in all variants—of language and person, this was perhaps the most important dimension, or at least the richest. This kind of hearing was impossible unless you excluded your own feelings. As soon as you had put into motion what was to be heard, you stepped back and only absorbed and could not be hindered by any judgement on your part, any indignation, any delight. The important thing was the pure unadulterated shape: none of these acoustic masks (as I subsequently named them) could blend with the others For a long time you weren’t aware of how great a supply you were gathering.

His account moves up a gear when he visits Berlin in 1928 at the invitation of poetess Ibby Gordon. He meets most of the major artistic figures of the period – the montage artist John Heartfield (real name Helmut Herzfeld) his brother Wieland, the playwright Bethold Brecht, artist George Groz, and his favourite character the Russian writer Isaac Babel.

Some chapters are based on small incidents described in a puzzling degree of detail. At one point a conversation in a tavern with a group of criminals is expanded for several pages into minute descriptions of a burglar’s face and longwinded accounts of Canetti’s thoughts and feelings during the conversation. He has a personal theory of memory to explain this unusual approach – but it’s hard to know if this is just an excuse to cover his tracks:

I had seen many things in Berlin that stunned and confused me. These experiences have been transformed, transported to other locales, and, recognisable only by me, have passed into my later writings It goes against my grain to reduce something that now exists in its own right and to trace it back to its origin. This is why I prefer to cull out only a few things from those three months in Berlin—especially things that have kept their recognisable shape and have not vanished altogether into the secret labyrinth from which I would have to extricate them and clothe them anew. Contrary to many people, particularly those who have surrendered to a loquacious psychology, I am not convinced that one should plague, pester, and pressure memory or expose it to the effects of well-calculated lures; I bow to memory, every person’s memory

This seems to be a convoluted way of saying that he is only going to write about things that suit him, and there is certainly no attempt here to create a continuous picture of either his own intellectual development, or the artistic current of the times through which he lived. Indeed, as Clive James has argued in his own excellent review of this volume, Canetti’s ego was so overwhelming that it actually prevented him empathising with other people.

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Elias Canetti, The Torch in my Ear, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.384, ISBN: 1847083579

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

Twentieth century literature
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Vanessa Bell a biography

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa’s early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father’s death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.

When their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him – yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.

As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:

Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive

She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell’s painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.

Despite Frances Spalding’s efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist – quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit – which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?

When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell’s for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell’s family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.

Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It’s is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.

In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d’Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.

It’s often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding’s pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant’s gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).

Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia’s suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.

But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.

Despite my reservations about the picture created here, this is a thorough and a scholarly biography, with all its sources fully documented. It’s simultaneously the complete account of a life, a rich documentary on the Bloomsbury Group, and a historical account which begins in the Victorian era and ends in modern post-war Britain.

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Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.399, ISBN 0333372255

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Varian Fry

January 7, 2013 by Roy Johnson

secret refugee escape co-ordinator Marseilles 1940-1941

Varian Fry saved the lives of hundreds of refugees during the second world war in what was virtually a one-man rescue operation. He’s been called the ‘American Schindler’, and the list of people he helped to escape from the Nazis (and from the French Vichy government) ranges from Hannah Arendt, via Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, to Arthur Koestler, Wanda Landowska, Jacques Lipchitz, and Max Ophuls. His story reads like the script to a Hollywood thriller, with romantic heroes perilously outwitting spies, double agents, and the police.

Andy Marino sprints through the early years of Fry’s biography, but emphasises his scholarly background in classics at Harvard and his left-wing sympathies. Fry seemed destined for an academic career, but as a result of an undergraduate prank he ended up in journalism, working for various liberal political causes. Then at the age of only thirty-two he was recruited into a job that would change his life.

Fry was despatched from America as the agent of an Emergency Rescue Committee which was set up in New York. His task was to co-ordinate efforts to help prominent artists and intellectuals to escape along the various routes which led from the south of France to the Atlantic and onward transit to America. The money that funded the Committee was coming from wealthy sponsors in the United States, and they drew up lists of those who were deemed worthy of assistance.

The story is one of Fry’s selfless devotion to a righteous cause, assisting those in danger – yet what is most astonishing is the fact that the Committee had right from the start an overtly elitist ethos. Only the most ‘important’, famous, and favoured individuals were to be helped in their attempt to escape. Not for one moment was a general concern for refugees considered.

But it is to Fry’s credit that when faced with the task of distributing assistance, he broadened his remit. He was in something of a cleft stick, because the Americans would only grant entry visas to ‘people of exceptional talent’, but he found other countries in Latin-America, North Africa, and the middle East who would accept those who were not famous writers and Nobel Prize winners.

There is a useful account of the events leading up to the outbreak of the second world war, reminding us of Hitler’s ruthless progress to dictatorship, Stalin’s equally corrupt power-mongering, and the apathy of western European democracies. When France collapsed abjectly before the Nazi onslaught, millions of refugees were squashed into the parts of south-east France which were not (at first) occupied.

After the preliminaries, the story switches to the lives of those who were being threatened – people such Fritz Werfel and his mercurial wife Alma Mahler, Walter Mehring, and Walter Benjamin. They are surrounded by refugees suffering poverty, deracination, and persecution – many of them driven to the point of suicide.

The first part of Andy Marino’s account provides a kaleidoscopic vision of (largely German) refugees fleeing in all directions to escape the persecution of the Nazis. A number of refugee biographies are woven into the story, which backskips into the 1920s and 1930s to show the intellectual and social pedigree of writers such as Werfel, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann.

Set against the collapse of France in 1940, he sketches the debacle with the verve of a good novelist:

As their train made its way south the Werfels would have seen from their window a fair proportion of the ten million French people on the move. Most went on foot, and the rest were inching their way forward on anything that had wheels—bicycles, carts, tractors, autos, trucks, buses, prams, even resurrected tumbrels from an earlier age. They were ladened and barnacled to within a straw’s weight of collapse with bodies and possessions—those pathetic keepsakes of lost domesticity—which were both discarded as they lost their relevance to the new reality of unending heat, hunger, and danger. The roadsides were festooned with an honour guard of abandoned vehicles, their doors hanging open like the mouths of dead men.

All of these characters eventually converge in Marseilles, where Varian Fry arrives with $3,000 taped to his leg and lists of people to save, but no clear idea of the task he has undertaken. He thought he would be there for about three weeks.

The Nazis in France did not have to do all the dirty work of pursuing these refugees and anti-fascists. The appallingly anti-semitic French Vichy government was eager to do its work for it. Many people were hunted down and handed over to the Gestapo under Article 19 of the Armistice ‘agreement’ (‘surrender on demand’) and the government even introduced emergency laws revoking people’s citizenship. People could become stateless overnight, with no ‘papers’ to protect them.

The unknown refugees of the early pages of this account begin to re-emerge in the second part of the book as assistants to Fry – like the characters in a large scale well-plotted Victorian novel. Fry ran his operations from a room in the Hotel Splendide in Marseilles, supplying false papers and passports which were printed in Bordeaux under the very eyes of the Nazis. He was acting illegally, and was even rebuked by his own US diplomatic services for doing so. However, he lied to them that everything was in order – and carried on with his mission.

He was assisted by Dr. Otto Albert Hirschmann, a young multilingual Jew from Berlin who had changed his name to Albert Hermant, but who was known to Fry as ‘Beamish’ because of his smile and irrepressible good spirits. Beamish’s principal role was to mix with Marseilles gangsters and to launder money at illegally high rates to avoid official scrutiny. Another helper was Charlie, a roguish young Virginian who ‘married’ several Jewish women in order to gain qualification for an American exit visa – to save them from the many concentration camps dotted along the coast.

It is amazing to think that what are now major French tourist resorts – Agde, St Cyprian, Argeles – were only seventy years ago an area where the French government imprisoned its own citizens along with refugees. Even children had their own concentration camp at Rivesaltes. In the camps the inmates would either die of starvation, be handed over to the Gestapo for execution, or packed off in trains to the gas chambers in Auschwitz and elesewhere.

Fry personally escorted the distinguished group of Heinrich Mann’s family, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler across the border into Spain. The refugees had to walk over the Pyrenees: Fry took Alma Mahler’s mountain of luggage which contained music scores by her dead husband Gustav, the original manuscript of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, and her third husband’s latest novel.

Despite all his meticulous planning, there were terrible setbacks for Fry. Some of his earliest ‘customers’ actually wrote back to him on postcards, thanking him for arranging their escape – and thereby betrayed all the secrets of his operations to the police.

Shortly after the disaster of a mass escape of refugees on a boat that turned out to be a fictitious scam, Fry took over the spacious Villa Air-Bel on the outskirts of Marseilles. Unfortunately, this had the effect of attracting the Dada poet Andre Breton, Russian novelist Victor Serge, and art collector Peggy Guggenheim where bohemian parties and loose behaviour attracted the attention of the police.

Fry and his team made detailed inspections and reports on many of the one hundred and twenty concentration camps the Vichy government created in the unoccupied zone, but their evidence of atrocious conditions was ignored. He appealed to the authorities in Vichy, but he was turned down. Even his own government regarded him as a troublemaker at a time when America was making diplomatic efforts to stay out of the war.

Fry’s problems were intensified when the rescue committee in New York sent a blundering and arrogant Ernest Hemingway-like figure to replace him. Fry dug in his heels and resisted the move, carrying on with his work. With all land borders closing down, he established new escape routes via sea to Casablanca, Dakar, and even Martinique.

Meanwhile relations with his wife Eileen back in America were becoming strained. She was defending him to an ever more critical Relief Committee, but complaining to him that his letters were rather practical and unloving. She also hinted that she had fears he might be involved in gay liaisons – of which there were clear signs in his weekend trips with younger male colleagues. She wittily alluded to these as possible Death in Venice episodes. But he reassured her that there was no time for that sort of thing, and that he had merely visited brothels a few times. It is hardly surprising that the marriage did not survive the war.

As 1941 rolled on and the Vichy regime became more overtly pro-fascist, some of the first refugees to reach America only brought fresh worries to Fry and the Committee. Walter Mehring for instance had immediately on landing in New York secured a well-paid job in the Hollywood film studios, but instead of repaying the 31,000 Francs he had been lent for living expenses, he bought a flashy new Packard Roadster and drove up and down Sunset Boulevard, showing off.

The Vichy clampdown intensified and finally resulted in Fry being arrested and expelled from France. By October 1941 he himself was back in New York – and there was no hero’s welcome waiting for him. The Rescue Committee rapidly dissociated itself from him, and his marriage fell apart. He took up the position of editor on The New Republic where he wrote articles warning America about what we now call the Holocaust.

And curiously enough, the remainder of his life tailed away in a series of failures. He tried journalism, did some spells of teaching, and went into psycho-analysis. He even bought a television production company and ran that for a while – but it went bankrupt. He ended up working for Coca Cola – until he was eventually sacked. A second marriage produced three children, and appeared to be successful – but that too ended up in divorce, followed by a confused reconciliation, shortly before his early death in 1967.

The tragectory of Fry’s life was a steep arc, peaking in this extraordinary period of just over a year in which he felt himself living to full capacity twenty-four hours a day. He helped countless numbers of people to escape the gas chambers, and he worked tirelessly for no profit to himself except the feeling that he had done the right thing. Amazingly, it has taken the intervening half century for his story to become more widely known.

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Andy Marino, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp.403, ISBN: 031220356X

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Vera Mrs Vladimir Nabokov

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a biography of the ultimate amanuensis

Russian literature is rich in examples of famous writers whose wives have acted as unpaid secretaries and copyists. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and (I suspect) Alexander Solzhenistyn. But Vera Slonim, who married Vladimir Nabokov, took the tradition to unprecedented extremes. They met as Russian exiles in Berlin in 1923 – both dispossessed of fortunes – and she gave up the rest of her life to acting as Nabokov’s secretary, typist, business manager, translator, research assistant, chauffeur, and even standing in for him as a lecturer. Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov is a biography of the wife, but it tells us a lot about the husband too.

His output as a writer was large – but as an author still given to writing in pencil on small index cards, then handing them over to her to copytype on an old portable, it’s inconceivable that he would have produced half as much without her self-sacrifice. And it’s a sacrifice she was very willing to make. She promoted and protected his literary reputation throughout his life – and after his death. She did this at the expense of losing friends and making enemies of family alike.

In fact the portrait Stacy Schiff creates is of a clever, proud, but ultimately rather cold and brittle woman who nursed grudges and ‘spoke her mind’ in a way which seemed to be a cover for rudeness and cruelty. If there’s a weakness in her approach as a biographer it’s that she often takes the evidence she gathered from the Nabokovs themselves at face value. She also assumes that scenes from Nabokov’s novels are accurate transcriptions of not only his own life, but even his wife’s life before they met. Both of these are serious methodological weakness.

However, given the unalloyed marital rapture in which they both claimed to live, I was glad to see that she did not skate over Nabokov’s seriously disturbing love-affair with Irina Guadanini – the one event which threatened the idyllic nature of the relationship. Yet in the course of tracing its dramatic denouement she casually reveals several earlier affairs – none of which she had mentioned at all. This is almost like applying the rules of fiction to the genre of biography, where they do not belong.

The big narrative is one of permanent exile – first from Russia to Berlin (the first centre of exile) then to Paris (the second) and finally to the USA, before the world fame of Lolita allowed them to return to Europe. It was eventually for tax reasons that they settled at the Montreux Palace Hotel. They needed a fixed address from which expenses could be claimed.

Throughout this Odyssey, Vera is depicted as a woman who is aristocratic in spirit (though not in fact) who was prepared to sacrifice herself entirely to the needs of her husband – even to the extent of protecting his social reputation when evidence of his sexual peccadilloes and predilections surfaced when teaching young women at Wellsley College. “He liked young girls. Not just little girls” observed one of his dalliances. Vera ended up sitting in on all his lectures, just to keep an eye on him.

She comes across as a curious mixture of hauteur and self-abasement, a Jewish immigrant who nevertheless supported McCarthy in the 1950’s show trials, and a rabid anti-communist who carried a gun in her handbag.

They were a tight-knit double act, who eventually hid behind each other. She wrote letters in his name and on his behalf. He replied to letters in a similar vein – pretending to be her. They had a joint dairy, and they edited their past to present each other in the best possible light. When discrepancies were brought to light, they simply denied them.

Lolita was the turning point in their lives. Nabokov gave up his teaching job, and they became financially comfortable for the first time in their adult lives. And yet in another sense, nothing changed at all. Vera carried on being his full time personal assistant, translating him to the world, and he carried on writing. When he wasn’t producing new novels, he was translating his back catalogue into English and other languages with the help of his wife and his son.

Nabokov was well known for his magisterial pronouncements and his seeming incapacity for the slightest self-doubt. But anyone who has read his work and pronouncements carefully will know that he was given to misleading his readers and omitting the truth (a characteristic Vera shared). In his introduction to Lolita he claims that the first idea for the novel came to him on seeing the painting of a chimpanzee in the Jardin des plantes – when in fact he had already written an entire novella on exactly the same theme in 1939 – The Enchanter. Once again it seems we should ‘trust the tale, not the teller.’

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Stacy Schiff, Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp.456, ISBN: 0330376748

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