Cultural history Archives

A Boy at the Hogarth Press

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Adrian Mole meets Bloomsbury

Richard Kennedy started work at the Hogarth Press when he was sixteen. He had been a complete failure at Marlborough School, and was fixed up with the job through a family connection as a special favour, starting work at one pound a week. His memoirs (and atmospheric line illustrations) were produced many years later, and they take great delight in contrasting the youth’s naive enthusiasm and his bewilderment with the sophisticated milieu into which he had been transported.

Leonard Woolf ran an enterprise in the Hogarth Press which was commercially very successful, and Kennedy joined it at a time in the 1920s when the work of Virginia Woolf (particularly Orlando) and Vita Sackville-West (All Passion Spent) were virtually best-sellers. But his approach is to depict these intellectual giants as they were seen by a sixteen year old boy. He was far more interested in learning how to chat up girls than the lofty aspirations of his employers. He contrives to present an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ approach to all things Bloomsbury, and the result is a sort of Adrian Mole version of events.

The saintly Virginia Woolf, who at that time was producing some of the most advanced texts of literary modernism, is pictured as she would appear to a young teenager:

She looks at us over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles, her grey hair hanging over her forehead and a shag cigarette (which she rolls herself) hanging from her lips. She wears a hatchet-blue overall and sits hunched in a wicker armchair with her pad on her knees and a small typewriter beside her.

His employer, the indefatigable Leonard Woolf, who ran the whole enterprise with rigorous efficiency, is cut down to size in a similar fashion:

After lunch we all straggled home over the Downs. LW stopped to have a pee in a very casual way without attempting any sort of cover. I could see that this was a part of his super-rational way of living.

But for all the naive self deprecation, you know that Kennedy is well connected. He is in fact from the same social milieu as the people he describes, as he reveals in a throwaway remark on a visit to St Ives::

The picnic over, we returned to Talland House – curiously enough, the scene of Virginia Woolf’s first successful novel, To the Lighthouse. Her parents had rented the house from my aunt’s parents .

The book is decorated by spidery but very evocative drawings which capture the mood of the era and the spirit of the text. Amazingly, they were drawn from memory in the 1970s, yet capture both the period and the principal characters very well.

It’s a slight book to say the least, but it’s very amusing and it throws light onto the workings of what was a very successful publishing business – and for Bloomsbury Group enthusiasts it has some delicious thumbnail sketches of the principals, as well as even floor plans of the rooms at the Hogarth Press, showing who was cooped up where. Full marks to Hesperus Press for bringing this delightful book back into print.

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Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.90, ISBN 1843914611

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A Brief History of the Future

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

readable account of computer and Internet development

This is a fascinating history of the Internet – but given a personal spin. Journalist and academic John Naughton describes the technology of the digital revolution from a user’s point of view. What are the concerns of the average person? How does it all work? At each stage he explains the significance of each development. This approach will be very reassuring for beginners. A Brief History of the Future starts with potted biographies of Vannevar Bush, Norbert Weiner, and J.C.R Licklider as his version of ‘fathers of the Internet’, but it is Paul Baran and Vint Cerf who he tips as most important of all – because they came up with the ideas which pulled it all together.

Naughton is good as explaining the details of the technology and engineering, and he puts his professional journalism skills to good use. Whenever necessary, he uses analogies with practical, everyday matters – such as packet-switching being like moving a house and its contents in separate trucks which take different routes to their destination, and then are re-assembled at the other end. He also writes amusingly about the pleasures and perils of email, and takes a refreshingly tolerant view on the issues of censorship and control.

There are some parts of the hard technical developments which he leaves out of his account – politely admitting that he has done so. This seems to me a wise choice, because the type of popular readership at which the book is aimed will welcome his focus on the personal achievements and his own enthusiastic account of engineering history.

Some of the other accounts of the Internet such as Hafner and Lyon’s Where Wizards Stay up Late and Robert Cringley’s Accidental Empires occasionally tax the non-specialist reader in this respect.

Like these other books, his narrative becomes chronologically scrambled at times, maybe because this reflects the disparate locations, enterprises, and time schemes [not to mention funding and government enterprises] involved in the enterprise. Naughton goes out of his way to be scrupulously fair to them all – including even monopolies such IT & T – which like British Telecom put a brake on the development of the Internet for a long time.

There is a particularly interesting chapter on the development of the UNIX operating system, and an explanation of how and why the Usenet News system evolved from it. He also provides interesting introductions to topics such the development of Linux and the Open Source movement which belives that software should be available free of charge.

He is at his best when describing the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web – perhaps because the story flows in an unbroken chronological sequence from Vannevar Bush, via Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, through to Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesson. He ends with a brief glimpse at the current dangers of the commercialisation of the Net and the reasons why it is almost impossible to predict its future.

Naughton offers a very readable, humane, and contagiously enthusiastic account of the Net and its major features. This is a perfect book for anyone who wants to know the background to this major technological revolution.

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John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, London: Orion Books, 2000, pp.332, ISBN 075381093X

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A Crisis of Brilliance

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of five early English modernist painters

A Crisis of Brilliance is a study of five talented British painters in the early modernist period who were contemporaries at the Slade School of Art – Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Richard Nevinson, and Paul Nash – a generation which their Professor of Drawing Henry Tonks described in the phrase which gives the book its title.

Author David Boyd Haycock’s approach is to present the biographical sketches like a relay race. With one artist profile under way, he passes on to the next, until they are all at work simultaneously. This makes the book eminently readable and it also reinforces the fact that the members of this group, though from very different backgrounds, were all developing their talents in the same artistic environment, and at the same time.

Stanley Spencer was from a small village in Berkshire on the Thames. He had virtually no formal education, and was introduced to the world of art via the patronage of a local landowner’s wife. His drawing skills were so developed that he was allowed to skip the Slade’s formal entrance requirements of a written exam.

Mark (Max) Gertler was the youngest son of poor Jewish immigrants who settled in London’s East End. He left school early and worked in a stained glass studio to pay his tuition fees at Regent Street Polytechnic. Via social connections he was fortunate enough to meet fellow painter Isaac Rosenberg and the gallery owner William Rothenstein, through whose influence he was admitted to the Slade.

The students of this generation graduated from sketching plaster casts in the Antiques Room to the Life Class where they were allowed to draw nude models (women) for the first time. It is interesting to note that conversation between male and female students was frowned upon by the School, and any discussion with the models strictly forbidden.

Stanley Spenser missed out on these late afternoon life classes because he had to catch the train back home. His fellow student Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson satirised this provincialism by calling Spenser ‘Cookham’ – the name of his home village. It was a nickname which stuck with him throughout the rest of his time at the Slade.

Stanley Spencer – self-portrait 1923

The next arrivals in 1910 included Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington. Nash was another educational tragedy whose only talent was drawing. He paid his own fees for the one year he spent at the Slade, and made rapid progress despite the caustic tutorial method of Henry Tonks.

Carrington too was someone whose background almost inhibited any form of intellectual development, but her skill at portraiture gave her access to the premier art college in England and the bohemian life in Bloomsbury that she craved. She had her hair cropped, wore men’s clothes, and became quite avant garde in her behaviour if not in her style of painting.

One interesting feature (which might be worth further exploration) is that none of these people were particularly gifted in an academic sense. Spencer had almost no formal education, Nevinson went to a public school, from which he emerged with nothing but contempt for its values, Paul Nash was an educational duffer, Gertler left school at fourteen, and Carrington’s education didn’t begin until she arrived at the Slade.

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

Nineteen hundred and ten was a good year to be there, because as Virginia Woolf later observed ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’. The occasion to which she referred was the exhibition of post-Impressionist paintings organised at the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair by her friend Roger Fry, the newly appointed Professor of Art History at the Slade.

The exhibition was enormously controversial. Henry Tonks actually pleaded with students to stay away from the Galleries altogether lest they be ‘contaminated’. However, although the Slade group were enthusiastically modern in their behaviour, the post-Impressionists did not greatly affect their style of painting – with the exception of Carrington, who felt that her whole life had been changed at this point. Stanley Spencer carried on painting as before and was more enthusiastic about the early Italian masters than ever.

Nevinson and Gertler became involved in a triangular relationship with Carrington – one that continued long after they had all left the Slade. Paul Nash discovered his visionary appreciation of the English countryside, Spencer retired to Cookham to produce allegorical works such as John Donne Arriving in Heaven and Gertler was the envy of his colleagues, earning £1,000 a year painting society portraits.

In addition to the painters, Haycock also includes studies of the patrons who bought and collected their works. The most outstanding amongst these was Eddie Marsh, personal secretary to Winston Churchill (at that time First Lord of the Admiralty) who inherited money paid in compensation to the family of his relative Spencer Percival, the only British prime minister to be assassinated. Marsh called it ‘the murder money’ and used it to buy paintings.

When war broke out in 1914 the responses of the Slade group varied from Paul Nash immediately enlisting (for Home Guard duties) to Gertler’s absolute refusal to countenance the conflict in any way. Gertler escaped into the countryside with fellow refusenik D.H.Lawrence, later moving to Hampstead where he became friendly with Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Dora Carrington followed suit via a different route, and ended up falling in love with Lytton Strachey in a famous incident when she crept into his bedroom at night to cut off his long beard with a pair of scissors. Strachey was completely homosexual, but that did not prevent them going on to have a lifelong relationship, living together.

As the mass slaughter of the war continued unabated into 1916, more bodies were required to fill the trenches. The Conscription Acts meant that any male between eighteen and forty-one was obliged to enlist for service. This led to people registering as conscientious objectors, and their reactions to the war were summed up by Gertler in what was to become his most famous painting, Merry-Go-Round. Nevinson had a similar success with his painting La Mitrailleuse.

Richard Nevinson – La Mitrailleuse (1915)

After leaving the war as invalids, both Nevinson and Nash were recalled to military service, and only with great difficulty managed to secure positions as war artists, but this helped them both to stay away from the slaughter in the front lines. Meanwhile Carrington finally gave in to Gertler’s sexual demands, yet at the same time established her curious sexless menage with Lytton Strachey. They moved into a large mill house at Tidmarsh in Berkshire.

Stanley 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 war 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.

After the war Carrington managed to complicate her life even further by marrying Ralph Partridge, with whom her partner Lytton Strachey was in love. It was her way of keeping them all together. She also went on to have an affair with her new husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan, then passed on to relationships with women. She continued painting but did not exhibit, and was generally depressed. Her suffering came to an end when Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and she shot herself, unwilling to go on living without him.

Gertler’s life after the war (or in his case, after Carrington) was a series of ups and downs. He was penniless one minute, successful the next. He married a former Slade student and they had a son, but the marriage was not a success. By the late nineteen-thirties, feeling that his personal and his professional life were failures, and learning that Hitler was persecuting Jews, he gassed himself in his studio.

Nevinson and Nash became ‘war artists without a war’. Nevinson’s post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated, and he died embittered in 1946. Nash on the other hand emerged from the war with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was unsure how to develop any further sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. There was a brief flirtation with the surrealists, but that came to nothing. Unlike Nevinson, he did become a war artist again during 1939-45, but his health gave out and he died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash – Wood on the Downs (1929)

Stanley Spencer was the longest-lived of this group. In 1925 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. First he moved back to Cookham trying to recapture (unsuccessfully) some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, a former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer proposed a menage a trois with Patricia, but his wife refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who equally refused to cohabit or to have any sexual relations with him. So he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. When he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his wife forced him out, and perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Haycock’s elegant study quite rightly got rave reviews when it was first published. It is well structured and written, beautifully illustrated, and like all successful studies of this kind leaves you with a desire to know more about this cultural period and these quasi-tragic figures who contributed so much to English visual culture.

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David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance, London: Old Street Publishing, pp.386, ISBN: 1906964327

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A History of Dictionaries

October 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

compilation, theory, use, and language change

A History of Dictionaries is a brief account of how the recording of language has changed over time. Many people believe that except in terms of size, all dictionaries are more or less the same. But in fact they vary according to who compiles them, when they are compiled, and what purpose they are designed to serve. Lynda Mugglestone’s study of the history and techniques of creating dictionaries deals with what information can be presented in printed form and the difficulties of choice for accuracy and efficiency in covering the spelling of a word, its pronunciation, stress, etymology, and use in various contexts. The challenge of squashing all this into a small space is the reason why dictionaries are printed in narrow double columns, usually in a small font size.

Some people want a dictionary to offer guidance on acceptable usage and notions of grammatical correctness. But the current trend towards descriptive approaches to use (what is, rather than what should be) confounds these expectations. It also has the knock-on effect of meaning that new dictionaries are required at an increasing rate, to keep up with changes in language use.

The earliest dictionaries (from 2000 BC onwards) were not necessarily organised alphabetically, but in themes or topics – and were primarily used as explanations of ‘difficult’ words used in religious documents – not as repositories of language in common speech and writing.

And the first dictionaries in English were largely explanations in English and French of Latin terms – because all three languages in the early period of Renaissance Britain were in use at the same time for different purposes – religion, political administration, and commerce. In fact multi-language dictionaries were the norm at that time.

The Dutch writer Noel de Berlaimont’s Vocabulare would, for instance, become a topically organised work in four languages (French, Flemish, Latin, and Spanish) by 1551, and six languages by 1576 when English and German were added.

Any mono-lingual dictionaries that existed were compiled solely in order to explain unusual terms or words which people found difficulty in understanding. Indeed, the idea that a dictionary should include all words in common use is a relatively recent development from the nineteenth century – and almost all dictionaries still exclude the words most commonly in use – swear words.

Next Mugglestone considers how a dictionary is made – the whole range of questions about what is to be included and how it is to be shown on the page (or screen). She examines the work of possibly the world’s best known lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, revealing both his very subjective choices and the strength of his method in choosing quotations from printed sources as his supportive evidence.

More recently, the use of computers working on corpora (huge databases of language in current use) mean that dictionary compilation is far less subjective, can include both the spoken and the written word in their source material, and most importantly can include word definitions decided by the actual context in which they are used:

This also throws up what she calls the etymological fallacy, which is the mistaken notion that a word’s meaning is principally determined by its origins. But alternative (which comes from the Latin ‘the other one of two’) can now mean any one of a number of options. The same applies to media used as a singular grammatical concept.

I was glad to see that she touches on issues of political correctness and the ideology of dictionary compilation. This covers not only archaic definitions such as that for canoe – ‘a kind of boat in use among uncivilized nations … Most savages use paddles instead of oars’, and loaded definitions such as Christmas – ‘The day on which the nativity of our blessed Saviour is celebrated’.

Following the logic of her own historical trajectory, she concludes by looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the (apparently) ultimately democratic dictionaries – Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. The latter is strong on innovation and slang, the former is more traditional. Both are free – but they have not displaced printed versions – for which the demand continues unabated.

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Lynda Mugglestone, Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.140, ISBN: 0199573794

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A New History of Jazz

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

Do we really need yet another weighty ‘history of jazz’ in what is already a crowded field? When the author (also a bass player) has already produced excellent biographies of (among others) Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller, and regularly presents ‘Jazz Profiles’ on Radio 3, the answer must be in the affirmative. In this expanded version of his award-winning study, Alyn Shipton offers an encyclopaedic account of ‘a music created mainly by black Americans in the early twentieth-century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.’ Throughout, he contends that up-the-river-from-New Orleans ‘histories’ of jazz distort and oversimplify what was a complex series of accidents, interactions, borrowings and innovations.

Part One contains an extended consideration of the ‘Precursors’ of jazz – including the blues and vaudeville, the classic jazz of New Orleans and Chicago, stride and boogie woogie piano, the advent of big bands (Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson and early Ellington) – and bands and combos of the Swing Era. Some readers will consider that Paul Whiteman and Cab Calloway receive more than their fair share of attention. There is also a survey of developments in jazz in the UK, France and Germany up to World War II.

Part Two, ‘From Swing to Bop’ covers Dizzy Gillespie’s early orchestra, the West Coast scene and a (very good) summary of jazz on film. Among other topics treated are impresario Norman Granz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) phenomenon. Granz is properly commended for presenting and recording such disparate players as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, J. J. Johnson, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins together in concert and on record (where they also backed Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald), helping to popularise jazz and ‘heal some of the more damaging aspects of the modern versus trad split of the 1940s.’

Elsewhere, Shipton discusses the early work of Miles Davis, the emergence of Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, the contributions of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis’s crossover into Jazz Rock, and ‘Jazz as World Music’ – in Latin America, India, Africa and Europe.

One of the many strengths of the book is an extensive use of oral histories and personal interviews with such luminaries as Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani, Sam Rivers and Cassandra Wilson. Shipton discusses little-known (but pioneering) performers, and displays an enviable familiarity with the lesser-known records of Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman, Gerald Wilson and Miles Davis.

He is particularly well informed and incisive on jazz pianists. The late Michel Petrucciani ‘overcame his lack of stature and strength to become one of the most ferociously talented pianists in jazz,’ with ‘a touch as delicately forceful as that of either [Bill] Evans or [Keith] Jarrett.’ Brad Mehldau and Martial Solal also receive honourable mention, but Jessica Williams is absent from the roster of ‘cutting edge’ pianists (a cliché Shipton overuses).

Jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Helen Merrill, Betty Carter, Carmen McCrae and Abbey Lincoln receive more extended coverage than in the first edition. Lincoln is identified as ‘the most accomplished social and political commentator in the history of vocal jazz.’ Yet despite his refreshing catholicity of taste, not all jazz singers receive the Shipton seal of approval. He is underwhelmed by Nina Simone who ‘lacked the jazz improviser’s spontaneous ability to play off her musical colleagues.’ The currently ubiquitous Norah Jones is dismissed as a purveyor of ‘jazz-inflected pop, with no improvisational edge and no profound exploration of emotion or meaning.’

In a concluding section on Postmodern Jazz Shipton argues that up to the 1970s, ‘the story of jazz is a straightforward narrative.’ But thanks [sic] to advances in technology, aspiring jazz musicians no longer sit at the feet of their idols, engage in informal jam sessions or serve apprenticeships in big bands – although college orchestras in the UK and the US serve a similar function.

Jazz artists in the twenty-first-century, Shipton suggests, are either forward or backward looking. Two popular singers resident in Britain illustrate the point: Claire Martin performs mainly original compositions, while Stacey Kent sticks to ‘the standard repertoire.’ In America, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra perpetuate the Ken Burns approach to jazz with recreations of the work of Ellington, whereas saxophonists Sam Rivers, and Joshua Redman hone and polish the ‘cutting edge’ of the jazz tradition.

A New History of Jazz is a massively detailed and well-documented interpretation of a musical form ‘inextricably bound up with the development of popular music as a whole.’ It can also be consulted as a series of discrete essays on its major (and minor) forms and practitioners. A good selection of photographs, a list of recommended CDs, and an extensive bibliography (which surprisingly does not include the late Whitney Balliett or Gary Giddins) add to the authority of a magisterial if over-weight volume. And a more attentive editor might have pruned Shipton’s always engaging but sometimes repetitive prose.

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Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz: Revised and Updated Edition, New York & London: Continuum, 2007, pp.804, ISBN: 0826417892

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Accidental Empires

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Amusing history of computers and the Internet

This book has two sub-titles: ‘The Triumph of the Nerds’ and ‘How the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can’t get a date’. You can see that Robert Cringely takes an irreverent attitude to his study of Internet history and computer development in the US. He looks at it in terms of business enterprise, scientific development, and as a collection of extraordinary and eccentric characters who were once skipping classes and are now running the shop.

His account is written in a breezy, amusing, self-deprecating style. He jumps around from one topic, one character sketch, and even one decade to another. One minute he’s tracing the history of software development, the next it’s business methods and biographical sketches of entrepreneurs. Much of his energy is spent on critiques of Chairman Bill and figures such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

It’s a sort of history of how it all happened – but rendered via a cubist form of narrative in which you have to reassemble the chronology yourself. Cringley is a computer magazine gossip columnist, and I’m afraid that ultimately, it shows.

What he offers is popularised science, via sound-bite journalism: “it takes thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life”. These little aphorisms are sometimes amusing, but they’re just as often slightly silly, as in the basic statements on which he bases his claims for the entire book.

First, that the Internet happened more or less by accident. Second, that the people who made it happen were amateurs. Neither claim is actually true, but it suits his purpose to amuse. However, the moment you stop to think about these propositions, they evaporate immediately.

And yet for all that he takes a jokey line, he offers lots of interesting insights – such as the reasons why some software lasts, unlike hardware which on average is replaced every three years. It’s a shame, because he is clearly well informed and at some points has interesting things to say about technological developments and even the philosophy of the internet – but his efforts are dissipated by a lack of focus. He throws off ideas and sketches topics every few pages which warrant a book in themselves, but he can’t quite make up his mind if he’s a historian of technology or a commentator on business methods.

The last two chapters are a 1996 update [made for a successful TV adaption] in which he admits the rise to power of Microsoft – but this is more business management history than an account of technological development.

The good side of Cringeley’s approach is that he offers a bracingly irreverant account of the US computer business which might encourage readers to take a sceptical view and not be overawed by Big Names. The downside is that his analytic method is anecdotal, and hit-and-miss. There is here the beginning of what I think will eventually make a fascinating study – the history of software development. Perhaps he ought to get together with a disciplined co-author [or an editor with Iron Will] and he could produce something more coherent and persuasive.

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Robert X Cringley, Accidental Empires, Addison-Wesley/Viking, 2nd edition, 1996, pp.358, ISBN 0140258264

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Adrian Stephen

February 4, 2013 by Roy Johnson

lesser-known young member of the Bloomsbury Group

Adrian Stephen was born in 1883, the younger son of biographer Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. His elder brother Thoby Stephen (b. 1880) died of typhoid in 1906, His elder sister was the artist Vanessa Bell (b. 1879), and his younger sister was the novelist Virginia Woolf (b. 1882).

His mother was the niece of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and she had previously been married to the publisher Herbert Duckworth, As a consequence Adrian had as half brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, both of whom were part of the large family that lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. His father had also been married before – to the daughter of William Makepeace Thackery.

Adrian was thought to be the particular favourite of his mother, and he was very distressed when she died suddenly in 1895 following an attack of influenza. He was very much the baby of the family, and felt overshadowed by his charismatic elder brother. Even when he suddenly grew to become six feet five inches tall in his teens, he developed a chacteristic stoop, as if he could not cope with his height.

He was educated at Westminster, the famous public school attached to Westminster Abbey in the centre of London. From there he went on to Trinity College Cambridge, and like his brother began to train to be a lawyer. But he gave this up, hoping to become an actor instead.

When their father Sir Leslie died in 1904, the old Victorian family house in Kensington was sold and the Stephen children moved to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, which at that time was considered a distinctly unfashionable part of London. The four Stephen siblings enjoyed living a slightly bohemian life, and Adrian had the advantage of meeting the celebrated friends of his elder bother who were invited to discuss art, literature, and philosophy on Thursday evenings.

He met E.M.Forster, Clive Bell (who married his sister Vanessa) and David Garnett, plus the artist Duncan Grant. Among other visitors were the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, who married his other sister Virginia. This was the collection of friends which eventually became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1910 Adrian took part in what became known as the ‘Dreadnought Hoax’. A group of people that included Adrian and his sister Virginia dressed up in Arab clothes and passed themselves off as a party of royal Abyssinian visitors making an inspection on board the warship HMS Dreadnought. Adrian acted as ‘interpreter’ to the group, who spoke to their hosts in a gibberish mixture of Latin and Greek.

When the prank was uncovered, there was a scandal and calls were made for the ringleaders to be arrested – but it was discovered that they had not broken any law. It is an interesting footnote to history that one invented phrase they used to express vigorous approval of the military equipment they were shown was “Bunga! Bunga!” – which became popular thereafter.

In 1909 Adrian began an affair with Duncan Grant, who was Lytton Strachey‘s cousin, but shortly before the first world war he married Karin Costelloe, a philosophy graduate from Newnham College, Cambridge. As conscientious objectors, they spent the war years working on a dairy farm.

They were friends via the Bloomsbury Group with another branch of the Strachey family – James Strachey and his wife Alix, who were the first translators of Freud into the English language, and the first professionally qualified and practising psychoanalysts in Britain. This enthusiasm rubbed off onto Adrian and Karin, and after the war they both decided to become analysts, an ambition fulfilled for Adrian in 1926 after completing a medical degree.

Like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Adrian had been a pacifist during the first world war, but sickened by the brutality of the Germans during the second, he changed his stance and volunteered for medical service. He served actively as an army doctor at the age of sixty. He died in 1948, after which his wife committed suicide.

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

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Bloomsbury Group – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

wife, mistress, muse, and hostess to the arts

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.

The Bride of the Wind

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 a 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 Perpignan 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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An Introduction to Book History

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

authorship, writing, printing, publishing, and reading

Book history is one of the most recent and interesting branches of literary studies. It asks questions such as ‘What is a text?’, ‘What is a book?’, and ‘How do we read?’ The answers to these questions are much more complex than you might imagine. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery start An Introduction to Book History by outlining the main theories and critical debates that have informed book history studies over the last hundred years.

It’s amazing how many different fields of study this leads to – the physical production of texts; how accurate they are; what they ‘mean’; and how they are interpreted by readers. These same questions of authorship, textual integrity, and the unique nature of a work also apply in other art forms.

In cinema, music, theatre, and television there may even be interventions from other hands. But it is writing and especially printing which are at the heart of the most important intellectual developments of the modern world, and to which they devote their first two introductory chapters. Much of their argument rests on the work of previous historians of the book and literacy, writers such as Walter Ong, Henri-Jean Martin, and Elizabeth Eisenstein.

They trace the changing role of the writer – from anonymous religious copyist in the early Renaissance, and authors working under systems of courtly patronage, to the modern concept of a creative independent working in the free commercial market supplying literary products and services.

Next comes a consideration of the practical aspects of what happens after a manuscript leaves the author. Printers, book distributors, publishers, readers, and even agents. All of these, they argue, can all affect a text; and they should certainly be seen as part of the context out of which the text arises.

Then they move on to consider what has been described as the ‘missing link’ in book history – the reader. For as many theorists have argued, the text exists in a state of potential whilst it remains as words printed on a page: it only springs into a life of real meaning when it is interpreted in the reader’s mind.

Why therefore aren’t there as many different interpretations of a text as there are different readers – all equally valid? Well, the answer to this conundrum is supplied by Stanley Fish when he comes up with the notion of ‘interpretive communities’. People sharing cultural values are likely to interpret the text in the same way.

They end by looking at the future of books and readers, An interesting detail here is that despite all the prophets of doom, a greater number of books are being read than ever before – but by fewer readers.

I was hoping for a little more on the book as a physical object, and I think longer consideration of digital literature on line might have informed their arguments. But they provide a comprehensive critical introduction to the development of the book and print culture.

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David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An Introduction to Book History, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp.160, ISBN: 0415314437

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Art Nouveau

April 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

short-lived but influential design from the Belle Epoque

Alastair Duncan points out in his introduction to this beautifully illustrated study, that Art Nouveau was not a style but a movement which was a reaction against the stuffy over-decoration of the nineteenth century. It took its early inspiration from the work of William Morris, Arthur Mackmurdo, and Walter Crane, and fused these with an enthusiam for Chinoiserie and Japonisme. And as a movement it errupted very suddenly in the 1890s, spread throughout Europe and even top the USA – and then ended just as abruptly in the first decade of the new century.

It was known by a variety of names in different countries – Jugendstil in Germany, Art Nouveau in English-speaking countries, Stile Liberty in Italy (after the famous London store) Modernista in Spain, and Style Metro in France, after Guimard’s Underground entrances.

The main features of Art Nouveau were the adoption of flowing, organic forms and the use of floral or vegetable decorative motifs. Even those who followed the severely vertical forms of a designer such as Mackintosh nevertheless chose tulips, poppies, and dragonflies as their embellishments.

After a general introduction, separate chapters of this study are devoted to the manifestation of Art Nouveau in architecture, furniture, graphics, ceramics, jewellery, and sculpture. In architecture, many of the commissions gained by Guimard, Van der Velde, Mucha, and Gaudi are still visible in the Parisian storefronts, the Metro entrances, and of course Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona – plus the enormous Sagrada Familia which is still under construction (and currently giving town planners headaches).

The furniture that was created at the same time was supposed to be matched in its decorative detail with the buildings for which it was designed – to demonstrate an organic and integrated aesthetic. But most of the tables, cabinets, armoires, and sideboards tend to be illustrated in isolation from their surrounds. Too much ornamentation in a room tends to take it back into the Victorian excess from which Art Nouveau was supposed to be an escape.

Strangely enough, there was no Art Nouveau school of painting, mainly because it constituted an approach to design. It was in the realm of posters, woodcuts, illustrated books, and typography that it made its greatest impact, and there are excellent examples of posters by Lautrec, Mucha, and Bonnard. These were works which gave birth to the figure that came to symbolise fin de siecle Paris and la Belle Epoque – a young woman with serpentine hair, clad fashionably in jewelled or feathered headgear and wearing immense sweeping skirts, all of which flowed abundantly to fill the frame of the picture. It’s amazing to realise that these romantically stylised images were being used to advertise such mundane objects as bicycles, wine, household soap, and cigarette papers.

The field of decorative glassware was dominated by two figures – Gallé in France and Louis Comfort Tiffany in the USA. The American developed new techniques from his foundry on Long Island:

By mixing up to seven colours, trown together from different ladles, his staff could produce a giddy range of blended hues, many mottled or deeply veined to simulate nature’s ever-changing moods and palette. The sheets obtained were often treated with an iridescent surface finish created in a heating chamber, where an atomised solution of metallic vapours was sprayed onto the final piece. The process gave a kaleidoscopic lustre to the glass, which became a principal characteristic of the firm’s domestic wares.

In ceramics the the novelty elelment was in the application of subtle and complex glazes, but the vases, plates, and jugs are still recognisable Art Nouveau from the curvilnear plant forms and decorative leaves and tendrils cast into their surfaces.

The jewellery section is dominated by the French master of jouillerie, Lalique. He brought the setting of precious stones to a high art by the intricacy of his decorations and the inventiveness of his symbols.

There’s a good bibliography and index, but a future edition might usefully include a glossary of terms for the general reader. It’s not always easy to work out the differences between a selette, a guéridon, and an étagère.

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Alastair Duncan, Art Nouveau, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.236, ISBN 0500202737

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Adrian Mole meets Bloomsbury

readable account of computer and Internet development

biographical studies of five early English modernist painters

compilation, theory, use, and language change

encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

Amusing history of computers and the Internet

lesser-known young member of the Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group – web links

wife, mistress, muse, and hostess to the arts

authorship, writing, printing, publishing, and reading

short-lived but influential design from the Belle Epoque

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