Biography Archives - Page 11 of 13

The Platform of Time

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

This is a new collection of largely unfamiliar memoirs, edited by the Bloomsbury scholar S.R.Rosenbaum (who also edited The Bloomsbury Group). It includes the first ever publication of Woolf’s long sought-after and newly recovered talk on her role in the famous (and infamously silly) Dreadnought Hoax which she delivered to Rodmell Women’s Institute in 19940. The Platform of Time collection also includes the complete version of her memoir of her nephew Julian Bell, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

The Bloomsbury Group were very fond of writing memoirs. They even had a Memoir Club where members read out their compositions for each others’ amusement. And Virginia Woolf’s family was also much given to written records of their relationships. Her own father Sir Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph albumn and wrote an epistolary memoir to commemorate the death of his wife Julia in 1895. It’s now available as The Mausoleum Book.

The Bloomsberries also wrote sketches of their relatives and friends, on some occasions to reinforce the friendship network, and on others to provide an obituary for the Times. There are examples of both in this collection: two very warm sketches Woolf wrote in memory of her father, recounting the cheerful way he read to his children, taught them each morning, and played with them sailing toy boats in Kensington Gardens. These recollections counteract the rather severe portraits of Leslie Stephen given elsewhere

Many of Woolf’s memoirs ooze with the sort of confident generalisations of the post-Victorian era celebrating itself in the coterie of what they would call the national press, but which was in fact a tiny minority, talking to itself. Speaking of her aunt, the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf writes:

Mrs Cameron had a gift for ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself on the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society.

There is quite a sympathetic portrait of Ottoline Morell, who during her own lifetime had to endure the affront of writers who accepted her generous hospitality at Garsington and Bedford Square, then went home to write spitefully satirical accounts of her.

The collection also includes what are called ‘fantasy memoirs’ – fanciful inventions based loosely on the lives of Saxon Sydney Turner and John Maynard Keynes. These are witty, allusive sketches which explore the outer limits of biography – something she was to bring to a stunning climax in Orlando, her meditation the life of her then lover Vita Sackville West.

In fact many of the sketches reveal more about the author than they do about their ostensible subject. For instance, you would never guess from her encomium to the celebrated war poet and ‘hero’ Rupert Brooke that he in fact never saw military action, and died of a mosquito bite.

One of the longest pieces is her account of attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, along with her husband Leonard Woolf. Life as We Have Known It is a thoughtful and reflective meditation on the women of the co-operative movement in the 1930’s, a very practical piece of feminist sympathising, and a paean for social-democratic values which foreshadows the arguments she was to develop in Three Guineas a few years later.

This is a useful collection from the Hesperus Press, which produces reprints and updated compilations which are given a scholarly editing and are elegantly designed and printed. If you don’t have these pieces in other forms, this is an excellent edition.

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Virginia Woolf, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, London: Hesperus, 2008, pp.262, ISBN: 1843917114

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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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

Twentieth century literature
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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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Thomas Hardy biography

September 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life and major writings

1840. Thomas Hardy born in Dorchester – father a bricklayer, later a builder, musical easy-going; mother hardworking, ambitious, and very literate. Both parents, despite later prosperity, shared class anxiety and fear of being pulled back down into poverty. Dorset at this period still had remnants of pre-industrial revolution. Hardy therefore witnessed first-hand the death of old pastoral traditions and the rise of industrialisation.

1848-. Educated in Dorset schools – including Latin and French, plus applied mathematics and commercial studies. Strong auto-didactic impulse. Influenced by schoolmaster Horace Moule – a classicist and dipsomaniac.

1856. Articled to Dorchester architect – then employed as an assistant. Hardy witnesses the hanging of a young woman – a scene he was to use thirty years later in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

1862. Travelled to London to seek work – employed as a architectural draughtsman. Prizewinner in competitions and elected to the Architectural Association. He explores the cultural life of London, visiting museums, attending plays and operas, and begins writing poetry in earnest.

1863. Literary ambitions begin – begins to write poetry and continues studies. Poems rejected.

1866. Gradual loss of religious faith.

1867. Returns to Dorset and writes first novel – The Poor Man and the Lady, which is rejected by publishers.

1869. Disappointed by literary rejections – returns to work as an architect in Weymouth. Re-writes first novel as Desperate Remedies.

1870. Hardy travels to St. Juliot to work on the restoration of the church. He meets Emma Gifford in Boscastle, Cornwall – marries her four years later.

1871. Desperate Remedies published at Hardy’s own expense – then remaindered.

1872. Under the Greenwood Tree – copyright sold for £30. Hardy’s first success as a writer. Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) commissions writing for the Cornhill Magazine.

1873. A Pair of Blue Eyes is published in three volumes. Hardy now relinquishes architecture as a career to write full-time. Horace Moule, his close adviser and friend, commits suicide in Cambridge.

1874. Far from the Madding Crowd begins as serial in the Cornhill Magazine. Hardy marries Emma Gifford – honeymoon in Paris – then returns to live in Tooting, London. Lives the life of a literary lion.

1875. The Hand of Ethelberta serialised in the Cornhill Magazine. The Hardys return to live in Dorset.

1878. The Return of the Native serialised in Belgravia and then published in three volumes – to which Hardy attached a map of ‘Wessex’ to show the novel’s locations. With the success of this novel, he begins to experience life as a celebrity. He joins the Saville Club.

1879. Began to write short (and long) stories with ‘The Distracted Young Preacher’.

1880. The Trumpet Major. Hardy begins to design and supervises the building of his own home at Max Gate in Dorset.

1881. A Laodicean is written mostly in bed, where Hardy is recovering from a serious illness.

1882. Two on a Tower is serialised in the Atlantic Monthly then issued in three volumes.

1884. Hardy is made a Justice of the Peace and begins to receive visits from aristocracy.

1886. The Mayor of Casterbridge is serialised in the Graphic then brought out in two volumes the same year.

1887. The Woodlanders is issued in three volumes. The Hardys visit France and Italy – but the marriage is not very successful. When they return, he begins habit of visiting London for ‘the season’. Hardy actually discourages Emma’s own literary ambitions.

1888. Hardy’s first collection of stories published as Wessex Tales – and Hardy publishes the first of three essays on the theory of fiction – The Profitable Reading of Fiction.

1889. Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau commissions a novel (Tess) but then rejects it on grounds of blasphemy and obscenity. It is also rejected by other publishers.

1891. Tess of the d’Urbervilles serialised in the Graphic. Copyright Bill passed in the United States – which turns out to be financially beneficial to Hardy.

1892. Hardy’s father dies. The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved is serialised in the Illustrated London News

1893. Meets Florence Henniker in Dublin – the subject of his most intense romantic attachment to artistic ladies. He writes The Spectre of the Real in collaboration with her.

1894. The third volume of short stories – Life’s Little Ironies – published in one volume.

1895. Osgood-Mcilvaine begins bringing out the first collected edition of Hardy’s works. The set includes the first edition of Jude the Obscure. The novel receives harsh criticism, prompting Hardy to give up novel writing.

1898. Hardy’s first collection of verse published as Wessex Poems – comprising work from the 1860s and 1890s, and illustrated by Hardy himself.

1899. Boer war begins. Growing physical separation between Hardy and Emma.

1901. Another collection of verse – Poems of the Past and Present – is published.

1903. Part One of The Dynasts appears. This is Hardy’s extended verse-play about the Napoleonic wars which he intends as his masterpiece.

1905. Meets Florence Dugdale, who is forty years younger than Hardy and becomes his secretary.

1908. The Dynasts is completed. Death of George Meredith and Swinburne leave Hardy most celebrated English writer.

1910. Awarded the Order of Merit – having previously refused a knighthood. Receives the freedom of Dorchester. Relationship with Florence Dugdale deepens.

1912. A ‘definitive’ edition of Hardy’s works, the Wessex Edition, is published by Macmillan. It is a chance for Hardy to thoroughly revise his body of work. Emma suddenly dies in November.

1913. Hardy visits Cornwall in search of his and Emma’s youth, and begins to write poems about her. Awarded a D.Litt at Cambridge University and became an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College – fulfilling partially one of his early aspirations.

1914. Marries Florence Dugdale [who is forty years younger]. Burns all his notebooks and private papers. Hardy’s pessimism strengthened by the outbreak of First World War.

1917. Moments of Vision Hardy’s fifth collection of verse published. Begins work on dictating to Florence what was to become The Life of Thomas Hardy.

1923. Visited by the Prince of Wales, friendship with T.E.Lawrence. Second marriage as disappointing as the first.

1924. Hardy adapts Tess for the stage, and become romantically attached to Gertrude Bugler, who plays the title role.

1928. Hardy dies – and is buried with full honours in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. However, his heart, which had been cut out of his body first, was put in a biscuit tin and buried alongside his first wife in Stinsford churchyard, Dorset.

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy is a good introduction to Hardy criticism. It includes a potted biography of Hardy, an outline of the stories, novels, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early influential full length study by D.H. Lawrence to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Hardy journals.

More on Thomas Hardy
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Thomas Mann life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1875. Thomas Mann born in Lübeck, northern Germany. His father was from a prosperous merchant family – head of the company and twice Mayor of Lübeck. His mother was artistic, with foreign blood. Five brothers and sisters. Rivalry with elder bother Heinrich, who was also a novelist. Two sisters commit suicide. Mann dislikes school, study, and discipline.

1891. Death of father. Family moves to Munich, south Germany. [North/South = Business/Pleasure]. Brief spell working in insurance office. Mann dislikes work. One year of classes at university studying journalism.

1896. Moves to Rome and Palestrina for one year with brother Heinrich – ‘biding time’ on financial allowance.

1898. Moves back to Munich. Spends one year as editor of satirical magazine Simplicissimus. German philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer early influences. Records in his diary that he is ‘close to suicide’. First stories published – Little Herr Friedmann.

1900. Starts military service, but invalided out with psycho-somatic illness after three months.

1901. Publishes Buddenbrooks, his first novel, at twenty-five. This long saga of ‘the decline of a family’ brings him instant fame.

1903. Publishes ‘Tonio Kröger’.

1905. Marries Katia, daughter of well-to-do middle-class family. They have six children. Mann has very conservative political views. Begins a novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (based on memories of Manolescu) which he abandons. (He picked it up forty years later, and continued writing, exactly where he left off.)

1913. Publishes Death in Venice, a novella. Records in his diary ‘nothing is invented in Death in Venice‘.

1912. Spends three weeks in a sanatorium in Davos with his wife. Begins The Magic Mountain as a short story.

1914. Outbreak of First World War. Mann takes very conservative political line, supporting Germany. Writes essays, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, and almost in spite of himself, his political views change. Unable to write Magic Mountain during the war.

1922. Mann’s political views become more radical in the face of rising fascism.

1924. Finishes writing The Magic Mountain.

1925. Begins a series of foreign lecture tours.

1929. Awarded Nobel prize for literature. records in his diary – ‘It lay, I suppose, upon my path in life’. Starts work on Joseph and His Brothers

1930. Mario and the Magician – short novel symbolising the rise of fascism. begins lecture tours in America.

1933. Hitler seizes power in Germany. Mann moves to Zurich. Begins political debates with fellow emigrées on how best to combat fascism and maintain the humane basis of traditional German culture.

1936. Mann’s son Klaus, a writer and theatre critic, publishes Mephisto, a novel dealing with the relationship between art and politics, the dangers of compromising with evil, and which uses the Faust theme – all of which prefigure Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

1938. Moves to Princeton (USA) – then to California, joining fellow emigrés Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Adorno, Bruno Walter, and Igor Stravinski.

1943. Begins writing Doktor Faustus.

1944. Becomes a US citizen.

1947. Doktor Faustus

1949. Suicide of Mann’s son Klaus from drug overdose.

1952. Mann returns to Europe, but refuses to choose between the divided Germanies. Settles in Zurich

1955. Dies, leaving Felix Krull unfinished.

Thomas Mann: a life This exploration of Thomas Mann’s life by Donald Prater describes his relationship of intense rivalry with his brother Heinrich, who was also a novelist, his (much-concealed) homosexuality, his career as a prolific essayist, and the vast achievement of his novels. Particular attention is paid to Mann’s opposition to Nazism, and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. It traces Mann’s political development from the nationalistic conservatism of his younger days, to the humanistic anti-Nazim of his maturity. Buy the book here

Uncommon Arrangements

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a “a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.” But the truth is that many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called ‘experiments in living’, or less politely, ‘having your cake and halfpenny as well’. In Uncommon Arrangements Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty – particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose.

Her examples include H.G.Wells whose wife Jane tolerated his long string of mistresses, including Rebecca West, the one featured here. Katherine Mansfield gave as good as she got from her faithless husband John Middleton Murry. The feisty Elizabeth von Armin (Katherine Mansfield’s cousin) clung masochistically to Earl Russell, even whilst he treated her with disdain and physical violence. Vanessa Bell lived with her lover Duncan Grant, who was a homosexual. Una Troubridge performed a slavish role as wife and helpmeet to her lesbian ‘husband’ Radcliffe Hall, whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year affair with a young Russian Evguenia Souline.

The examples might reflect only the author’s tastes and enthusiasms, but in all of them the men come out worst as monsters of egoism, opportunism, double standards, and worse.

H.G. Wells treated his wife like a doormat, pleading that she could not meet his sexual needs, and all the time protesting that he loved her dearly. John Middleton Murry left his wife Katherine Mansfield on her own when she was suffering a terminal illness, and wrote endless letters saying how much he missed her. And Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) engaged not one mistress alongside his marriage, but two. The same was true of Philip Morrell, who announced to his wife Ottoline that both his mistresses were pregnant, in the hope she would help him out of an embarrassing scrape – which she did.

The one exception she explores is Vanessa Bell, who managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry co-existing as friends together under the same roof without any overt friction.

Katy Roiphe reveals the facts and recreates dramatic episodes of these people’s lives in a successful journalistic manner, but when it comes time to analyse contradictory behaviour she often retreats behind rhetorical questions. Why did X tolerate this? Why did Y never leave him/her?

Her evidence for these accounts comes from what they left behind in letters and diaries. This is a slightly risky procedure, because what they said needs to be placed in its context. The motivation for saying something needs to be taken into account, and contradictions with other evidence noted.

But there’s a more obvious and serious weakness in her approach: it’s that she fails to recognise the legal and economic basis of marriage, and (to quote Frederick Engels) its relationship to the family, private property, and the state. She is more interested in comparing these social pioneers with the plight of contemporary relationships. As she rightly observes

Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in.

Of course, as Victoria Glendenning has observed, “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes” – which is true, so long as the all-important conventions of inheritance are not disturbed. The niceties and social concerns of who couples with whom are something of a smokescreen; they are the superstructure of which concern for preserving inherited capital are the base. And as soon as we look at the economic foundations of these relationships, many of the mysteries evaporate immediately.

Jane Wells tolerated her husband’s flagrant infidelities because he was rich and kept her in economic security. Elizabeth von Armin kept the receipts for items she purchased for her own home, so as to be able to prove ownership in the event of a dispute with her husband Earl Russell – a dispute which did eventually take place in the courts of law.

Una Troubridge clung to her humiliating position as Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian ‘wife’ for nine years, and was rewarded by being made Solo Executrix to Hall’s will – whereupon she took economic revenge on her former rival.

In fact these cases of strange arrangements could have been made more acutely with other examples. She could have included Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, both of whose marriages tolerated sexual plurality (though Virginia’s tolerance was never tested) as well as the most extraordinary union between Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge, who lived together with the man they both loved, Lytton Strachey.

It might be that the solution found by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvill-West was easier to tolerate. They both had lovers of the same sex. Does this leave people less existentially threatened? (to sound for a moment like Katie Roiphe). But when Vita ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis, Nicolson and Dennis Trefusis chartered an airplane and flew across the Channel to bring them back.

This book raises a number of contentious issues which are still of interest today. Ho does one reconcile the desire for sexual freedom with the comforts and protection of pair-bonded monogamy? Can women ever have the same sort of freedoms as men unless they have economic independence?

It’s a readable and very stimulating narrative, but it lacks a serious theoretical underpinning – though she does in the end show that many of her chosen examples, no matter how radical they appeared to be on the surface, were at a structural level clinging to the Victorian conventions they thought they were rebelling against. After all, the Bloomsbury radicals were still summoned to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner by bells rung by servants at fixed times throughout the day.

But readers who don’t already know the shenanigans and the apparently ‘curious arrangements’ of this sub-group will be very entertained. This book doesn’t pretend to answer any of these questions, but it presents examples of pioneers who thought the struggle worth fighting for.

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Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, London: Virago, 2008, pp. 343, ISBN 1844082725

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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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