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Frances Partridge

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Bloomsbury socialite, diarist, and translator

Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, but someone who outlived all the other major figures. She knew Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and she married Ralph Partridge after his first wife’s suicide. She also became a prolific diarist and a translator of novels from the original Spanish.

Frances Partridge

She was born Francis Marshall into a prosperous upper middle class family that already had its roots in Bloomsbury. Her father was a friend of Sir Leslie Stephen, and the family lived in a grand home at 28 Bedford Square, with the Asquiths and the literary critic Walter Raleigh as neighbours. There was also a second home in Hindhead, Surrey to which the family transferred in 1908.

At school she befriended Julia Strachey, through whose family she became acquainted with the Stephens – Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and their bothers. Both Julia and Frances transferred to the prestigious (and very expensive) Beadales public school by the start of the war in 1914.

Frances developed an interest in philosophy and actually met the author of her favourite textbook, Bertrand Russell. In the non-conformist ethos of the school, she became a pacifist, which given the jingoist fervour during the years of the First World War, was quite a radical attitude.

In 1918 she went to the all-female Newnham College Cambridge, where women students studied the same courses as men but could not be awarded degrees. [Cambridge was the last university in England to give women equal status in 1948.]

She studied English under I.A. Richards. Later she switched from English to philosophy, and eventually met Ludwig Wittgenstein who was teaching there at the time. She finished undergraduate studies with a 2:I and the same year her father died, leaving her a large inheritance, though she did not go to his funeral.

Her first job was as assistant in the bookshop run by David Garnett, who had become her brother-in-law by marrying her sister Ray (Rachel). The business was badly run, but was patronised by senior members of the Bloomsbury Group and its various connections, with all of whom Frances became friendly.

The closest of these connections were with Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, who lived in a curious menage a trois with Lytton Strachey in a country mill house in Tidmarsh (Berkshire). This was a trio which Carrington was in the dangerous process of turning into an even more complex quartet by having an affair with Ralph Partridge’s best friend Gerald Brenan at the same time.

Frances Partridge biography

Given the flagrant bed-hopping of the people with whom she was mixing, Frances’ behaviour seems more like that of a professional virgin. She kept three men dangling at once and even in her mid-twenties thought it would ruin her reputation if she was known to be alone in Paris at the same time as Ralph Partridge.

Eventually she went on a holiday alone with Partridge to Spain, relinquished her virginity, and on return expected him to show his commitment by setting up home with her. Instead, he behaved like the traditional cad who wants the pleasure of a mistress but pleads he cannot possibly leave his wife.

She kept her two other male admirers waiting whilst he negotiated with his housemates Lytton and Dora. After a lot of agonising they all finally reached a compromise. Frances and Ralph moved into James and Alix Strachey’s empty flat in Gordon Square, from which Ralph was free to visit his wife at weekends.

This move put Frances right into the heart of Bloomsbury – geographically, socially, and intellectually. But a sour note was introduced into the mix when after a while Lytton announced that they wanted to see less of her.

Social and emotional tensions continued to smoulder between the four individuals, but matters were eventually resolved by a tragic if very symmetrical sequence of events. First there was sudden death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer. Following this was Carrington’s reaction to it when she committed suicide. Ralph was suddenly left a widower with a substantial inheritance from his dead wife and ownership of the country house they had bought at Ham Spray (near Reading).

The following year Frances and Ralph had a low key marriage, and she had a miscarriage. These events were followed by the first of Ralph’s many extra-marital affairs, which Frances dealt with as if she were suffering from a headache or a heavy cold.

Her wifely patience was subsequently rewarded with the birth of her son Burgo who was immediately put into a nursery in an annex to the house and raised by hired help. The parents went off for an extended holiday with Gerald Brenan to Malaga.

In the period that followed, the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s incursions in middle-Europe put a strain on the political beliefs and the internationalism of the Bloomsbury Group – but Frances remained adamantly pacifist. For her, nothing could be worse than war.

During the war itself she seemed to suffer nothing worse than a lack of domestic help. Staff left to join the war effort, and she couldn’t cook. Fortunately, there were still oysters and plovers at the Ivy restaurant on excursions into town.

In the after-war years there were problems with her son Burgo who had persistent fears that his parents were dead (which was psychologically understandable). There was a failed project to write an encyclopedia of English botany. Both Frances and Ralph lived on inherited wealth, and neither of them had proper jobs – but Ralph eventually wrote a history of Broadmoor Prison, whilst Frances took up the task of indexing the English edition of Freud’s complete works, which was published by the Hogarth Press.

In 1950 Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack. Frances subsequently, but with great emotional difficulty, sold the house at Ham Spray and moved to a small flat in Belgravia. Her young son Burgo married the even younger daughter of David Garnett. This created a third generational link in the complex matrix of Bloomsbury inter-connections, but less than a year later the young man was dead, killed by an aortic aneurysm.

Frances dealt with these personal losses by a combination of writing and travel. She worked as a translator (including the novels of Alejo Carpentier) and visited Gerald Brenan in Spain on a fairly regular basis. She also spent a lot of time looking after Julia Strachey, who was falling victim to dementia.

In the years that followed, as one of its oldest surviving members, she became an unofficial but certainly unelected guardian of Bloomsbury reputations – most noticeably that of her former husband Ralph. She wanted to protect all her old friends from misrepresentation and vulgarisation. She had battles with the BBC and Ken Russell, but even more with Gerald Brenan, who was in the process of writing his autobiography.

In her eighties she entered on an amazingly productive phase – three books of memoirs in as many years, including the best-selling Love in Bloomsbury, In fact the success of this venture led to a spate of publications over the next decade.

She lived to be over a hundred years old, outliving her exact contemporary the Queen Mother, but as she characteristically insisted, ‘living alone, rather than being waited on hand and foot’.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Francis Partridge – Buy the book at Amazon UK

Frances Partridge – Buy the book at Amazon US

Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, pp.402, ISBN: 0297646737

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Franz Kafka biography

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life and times of a tortured literary modernist

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, at a time when it was the centre of Jewish, German-speaking Bohemia, in the heart of Czechoslovakia and a part of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire. His father ran a fancy goods shop, and bullied his children into improving their manners whilst remaining something of a peasant-like boor himself. The family moved restlessly from one flat to another in search of ever higher social status – but never out of the city. It was a habit that Kafka continued in his own adult life – though for different reasons.

Franz Kafka biography

Franz Kafka

Early years

Kafka was a timid, under confident child, and if you believe his own accounts from letters and diaries, the principal source of this meekness (and most of his neuroses) was the exaggerated awe in which he held his father. At school he did reasonably well, and in the specially strict gymnasium even better. He studied languages – Latin and Greek – as well as German literature and the elements of grammar. He took his Barmitzvah, though he regarded himself as an atheist, and at that time was fanatically opposed to Zionism and Judaism – though he became interested in both movements later in his life.

For someone so shy and retiring he surprisingly took an interest in the theatre and reading out loud in class. There were also annual theatricals at home to celebrate his mother’s birthday, for which he wrote the scripts. At university his options were limited – because the only professions open to Jews at that time were medicine and law. He opted for law, which had the distinct advantage of pleasing his father. He attended supplementary classes on philosophy and art history.

Around this time he made the first of what were to be many attempts to leave home and live independently. He also struck up what was to become a lifelong friendship with fellow student Max Brod, who was a year younger and eventually became Kafka’s literary executor. He started writing around this time, but kept the fact secret from everybody. He also had his first sexual experiences, which he described very characteristically as “vileness and filthiness”.

As his studies drew towards their conclusion he was struck down with one of the many periods of illness he suffered throughout the rest of his life, and he spent some time in a sanatorium. Nevertheless he passed the first of his examinations and started working in a lawyers’ office, drafting legal documents. He also passed the second part of his examinations and was awarded his doctorate.

Employment

In 1907 he started work for an Italian insurance company in the hope that he would be sent abroad, and he began a ‘relationship’ with Hedwig Weiler, a girl he had met whilst on holiday. It was the first of many which would be conducted almost entirely by correspondence. She lived in Vienna, and despite much discussion of meeting, the only time she visited Prague he made sure he was not available.

The following year his first published writing appeared in a magazine Hyperion alongside work by Rilke, Hoffmannsthal, and Heinrich Mann, His work in the office demanded long hours, and he felt he needed more time to himself – so he left after nine months and took up a job where he finished work at two o’clock in the afternoon.

He was still living at home with his parents, and he was finding a dubious antidote to his feelings of loneliness in the brothels of Prague. When his parents and grandfather became ill, he felt obliged to spend more time at home, helping in the family business. This put him under extra strain, and he eventually applied for time off from his new job in the Workers’ Insurance office. He spent the week swimming in Lake Garda and visited an aeronautical display which he recorded in The Aeroplanes at Bescia.

He felt uncomfortable in his own body, developed eating disorders, had his stomach pumped (“My feeling is that disgusting things will come out”) and became a vegetarian. Around this time he began keeping diaries, which were not so much a record of events in his life as sketchbooks, filled with fragmentary thoughts, images, and first drafts of stories that are composed of a mixture of narratives and reflections on states of being. He very often created fictions by writing about himself in the third person – “He would often awaken in a terrified condition …”.

Meanwhile his personal idiosyncrasies multiplied. He was compulsive about personal cleanliness and slept with his bedroom window wide open even in winter; he prided himself on always telling the truth, no matter how hurtful it was to his interlocutor; he was compulsively polite, but persistently late for work and meetings; and his self-loathing and sense of guilt continued unabated.

Friendship

He took a long summer holiday with Max Brod in Milan and Paris – a trip that incorporated visits to art galleries, the opera, and to brothels – Kafka all the time suffering from acute constipation, which he discussed freely with others. He also suffered from insomnia, which he discussed with himself, endlessly, in his diaries.

Round this time a group of itinerant Jewish actors visited Prague. Kafka enjoyed their performances so much he befriended the leader of the troupe, Jizchak Lowy, and the experience seems to have awakened his interest in Judaism.

At the age of twenty-eight he was still living at home, sleeping in the next room to his parents, separated only by a thin wall. He even found the sight of his parents’ pyjamas disturbing. There were endless arguments with his father, who thought his son was neurotic, an ineffectual time-waster, and feckless in not helping to run the family business, which now included an asbestos factory.

Letters to Felice

The year 1913 was significant for two reasons: Max Brod had introduced him to the publisher Rowahlt and to a young woman Felice Bauer. Kafka began putting together fragments of his writings for what was to become his first ever publication, Betrachtung (Meditations), and he began what was to become a love affair by correspondence with F.B. as he called her. He also sat down and wrote in one continuous burst of creation Das Urteil (The Judgement) one of his greatest stories and a masterful account of Oedipal conflict.

The relationship with Felice was curious. He seems to have settled immediately on becoming engaged to her as an escape route from the oppression of living with his family. The photographs prove that she was certainly not an attractive young woman, and yet he poured out thousands upon thousands of words in courting her. He wrote long letters that he didn’t bother sending; letters that were dispatched by express post cancelling the content of previous messages; and letters instructing her to stop writing to him. One of these letters was forty pages long.

The inner sequence of the letters follow the same pattern, over and over again. He would first propose a meeting with her at some time in the (somewhat distant) future. Then he would write excitedly about what they might do together when the day came around. This would be followed by detailed plans for the journey – including train times and alternatives in the event of any unforeseen problems. Then when the day actually arrived he would write torrents of apology for having to cancel the trip. The excuses for cancellation were usually trivial to an insulting degree, but they would be dressed up to seem vitally important. Finally he got round to proposing marriage – in a letter spelling out all the disadvantages and inconveniences she would be bound to suffer, including the insistence that his writing must always come first, leaving only one hour per day for contact between them.

First novel

Yet as though inspired by these developments he also started work on his first novel Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared, later renamed as Amerika by Max Brod) which like most of his other literary projects was left unfinished. At this period he was also to write what became his most famous story (really a novella) Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis).

In the autumn of 1913 Kafka went on an extended holiday to Venice and Lake Garda, from where he wrote to Felice that their relationship must end (whilst he was having a brief affair with a young girl he had just met). Felice sent her friend Greta Bloch to act as intermediary in the discussions. Kafka then began writing to Greta just as frequently as to Felice, and when an agreement was finally engineered, he suggested that Greta should come to live with them when he and Felice were married. This led, not surprisingly, to an affair with Greta, and shortly afterwards she bore a child (that died) and it is possible that Kafka was the father – but the evidence is rather ambiguous.

In preparation for the proposed marriage, Kafka was summoned to a ‘tribunal’ of Felice and her friends in Berlin where the details of their relationship were examined in what he described as a ‘law court’. where he was also expected to account for himself. The net result, again not surprisingly, was that the engagement was called off.

At the outbreak of the 1914-1918 war he finally moved out of his parents’ home, went to live in his sister’s empty flat, and began writing Der Prozess (The Trial). This change of location proved so successful that he decided to move into a flat of his own. On locating somewhere new the first thing he did was to stop his landlady’s clock in the hall because its ticking irritated him. He moved into another flat a few days later.

He and Felice finally managed to arrange a short holiday together in Marienbad, as a result of which their engagement was resurrected. There was a period of about two years during which he wrote almost nothing, but by 1917 he began again with a series of ‘stories’ based on surreal metaphors and the content of his dreams.

A turning point

Late in 1917 two events made a distinct change to Kafka’s life. First he had a terminal disagreement with Felice, and the engagement was called off again. Second, he developed tuberculosis and started coughing up blood. The result of these two events was that he immediately felt better and started sleeping better. The illness gave him a legitimate excuse not to be married, and it confirmed his neurotic belief that he was being punished.

Released from work on sick leave, he went to stay with his sister Ottla in the countryside, where he felt much better. He returned to Prague briefly to make the final decisive break with Felice, then after a few more months of rustication he was forced to return to work. But no sooner had he made a return to his normal life than he succumbed to the epidemic of Spanish flu which was sweeping through Europe in 1919. By the time he recovered from it, the entire Hapsburg empire had disintegrated and Czechoslovakia had declared itself a republic.

He went into yet another sanatorium where although his health did not improve he met Julie Wohryzek, a cheerful fellow patient. When their stay ended he returned with her to Prague, moved into a flat, and announced their engagement. Two days later he called everything off.

The following year he was contacted by Milena Jesensks, who wanted to translate some of his work into Czech. She was married to a rou^eacute; Ernst Pelack and was an occasional cocaine user. Writing from a sanatorium in Merano he began yet another passionate and intimate correspondence with a woman he had never met and only ever seen once – at a distance.

On leaving the sanatorium he spent four idyllic days with her in Vienna and then travelled back to Prague where the first thing he did was to tell Julie Wohryzek all about Milena. She demanded her rival’s address and threatened to write to her. At a second meeting with Milena she admitted she could not leave her husband – so there was no hope for the future, and Julie had meanwhile ended her relationship with him. So he wrote yet another long letter to Milena, bringing their correspondence to an end.

The Castle

He spent the next six months at yet another sanatorium at Mitliary, near Budapest, but it did very little to alleviate the effects of his worsening tuberculosis. He couldn’t sleep; his neuroses became worse; and all his attempts at self-analysis came to nothing because (since he rejected psycho-analysis) he felt his literary introspection was merely an escape into metaphor. These later desperate years were the period in which he began work on Das Schloss (The Castle) and Der Prozess (The Trial).

But at least he managed to solve the problem of the office. In June 1922 he was granted ‘temporary retirement’ from the Institute – with a pension. He never went back. His first step was to live with his sister Ottla in the countryside. She even moved herself and her husband into a small room so that Kafka could have their larger bedroom.

At first all went well. He produced several chapters of Das Schloss. But then there were noisy children outside, a nearby sawmill, and then a psychological ‘collapse’ about accepting somebody’s invitation to a meeting. He eventually returned to Prague, from where he sent Max Brod his testamental request that apart from already published books, all his writing should be burned, unread. Fortunately (for his readers) Brod ignored this request.

On a rare visit to the sea at Rostock he met Dora Dymant who was working in the kitchens of a Jewish children’s camp. She was to be the last woman in his life. They moved to Berlin, which was in the grip of hyperinflation of the Deutschmark (1923). Here he had another incident of uninterrupted creation when he wrote the long story Der Bau (The Burrow) in a single sitting.

The beginning of the end

But the end was now very near. He developed tuberculosis of the larynx and was transferred to a hospital. Unable to speak, he communicated by writing brief notes on slips of paper – almost like one of his own short stories. Swallowing was so painful that he couldn’t eat, so he was effectively starving himself to death – just like the character in The Hunger Artist. In the end he was begging for morphine injections, but they were not powerful enough to quell the pain. He died in June 1924, forty-one years old.

There have been many biographies of Kafka, ranging from the short and charming Franz Kafka: An Illustrated Life to the three scholarly volumes by Reiner Stach. The strength of Ronald Hayman’s account is that as a translator he accesses most of his prime source materials in German. He also incorporates a great deal of comment on Kafka’s fiction into the biography, and this will help those needing guidance in the complex and often contradictory world of one of the most original twentieth century modernists.

The weakness is that Hayman uses Kafka’s own letters, diaries, and notebooks as his primary sources – whilst showing little scepticism regarding the validity of the claims Kafka makes about himself. Kafka was a complex and often neurotic personality. He was the vegetarian ascetic and self-denying writer who was also a sartorial dandy; a puritan who regularly visited brothels; a passionate lover who avoided intimacy; a would-be husband who was terrified of marriage; and a master of self-loathing whose genius was remarkably similar to that of his near-contemporary and fellow Hapsburg quasi-mystic Ludwig Wittgenstein.

© Roy Johnson 2015

Franz Kafka biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka biography Buy the book at Amazon US

Ronald Hyman, K: A Biography of Kafka, London: Orion, 2005, pp.349, ISBN: 1898801657

Other works by Franz Kafka

MetamorphosisMetamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon US

 

The Man who DisappearedAmerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
Franz Kafka The Man who Disappeared Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Franz Kafka – web links

Kafka Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Franz Kafka video Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Franz Kafka web links Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

Franz Kafka web links The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Franz Kafka Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Kafka photos Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Red button Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

Red button The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Red button Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

© Roy Johnson 2015

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From Bauhaus to Our House

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cultural correctness and American designers

As a novelist, Tom Wolfe is something of a mixed blessing, but as an essayist and cultural historian he is invariably witty, entertaining, and amazingly well informed. From Bauhaus to Our House is his study which traces the influence of Bauhaus design on American architecture. His argument is that the USA (‘colonials’ as he calls them) was taken in by the revolutionary fervour and the empty slogans of the European cultural Left. It’s an essentially conservative view that claims native American design has been overwhelmed by a form of cultural correctness and a genuflection to False Gods. (His literary style is a bit infectious.)

From Bauhaus to Our HouseWhat could be a specialist report is made hugely entertaining by his ability as a writer. He pulls out fictional narrative devices and turns of style to take you into the Bauhaus where he gives a satirical account of what it was like to be there – full of tongue-in-cheek mock approval. The weakness of his argument is that he doesn’t take into account the disconnect between the theoretical arguments of artists and the work they produce. Painters, designers, and even architects are well known for making extravagant claims which are not substantiated in their work.

But Wolfe is well aware of the second part of this conundrum – and he pours ladle upon ladle of withering observation onto contradictions such as Mies van der Rohe’s claims to be designing for ‘workers’ – when he was producing the Barcelona chair which only rich patrons could afford.

Every Sunday, in its design section, The New York Times Magazine ran a picture of the same sort of apartment The walls were always pure white and free of moldings, casings, baseboards, and all the rest. In the living room there were about 17,000 watts’ worth of R-40 spotlights encased in white canisters suspended from the ceiling in what is known as track lighting. There was always a set of bentwood chairs, blessed by Corbusier, which no one ever sat in, because they caught you in the back like a karate chop

It’s certainly true that most of the Bauhaus pioneers emigrated to the USA and found influential positions in universities. Wolfe sees this as a baleful influence which squeezed out native talent. The heroes of his account are mavericks Edward Durrell Stone and Frank Lloyd Wright, and the villains are those who maintained the line of architectural orthodoxy – such as Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi.

In fact he goes on to argue that the dead hand of university-based modernism and academic theory also affected the other arts such as painting, music, and literature. His essay also becomes a critique of the obscurantism of structuralist and deconstructionist theory that plagued cultural debate in the 1980s and 1990s (and still has not been dispersed today).

He’s delighted to recount the disaster stories of public housing designs influenced by Le Corbusier (another villain) – the ‘Projects’ such as the famous Pruitt-Igoe complex in St Louis which was so uninhabitable that the people it was built for voted to blow it up. (A similar fate befell the Manchester slum-clearance ‘Crescents’ in the 1990s.)

He doesn’t come to any particular conclusion, partly because these cultural battles are still raging, but he is very astute in pointing to the origins of faux modernism – chairs which are too uncomfortable to sit in (Gerrit Rietveld) room designs based on theories (Corbusier again) and buildings nobody wants to visit (the Millennium Dome).

This is a very entertaining and thought-provoking text. It’s been around for some time now, but the ideas, the history, and the arguments in it are as fresh as the day it was first published.

From Bauhaus to Our House Buy the book at Amazon UK

From Bauhaus to Our House Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, New York: Picador, 2009, pp.128, ISBN: 0312429142

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Garsington Revisited

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Ottoline Morrell – her biography, house, and love affairs

Garsington Revisited is an updated and enlarged version of a study originally published in 1975 with the title Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell. The book’s original chapters have been revised in the light of recent research and supplemented by vignettes of how the book came to be written in the first place.

Garsington Revisited

The main outlines of Ottoline Morrell’s life are fairly well known. She came from the aristocratic Cavendish-Bentinck family and was raised at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Although the family were upper class, they aspired to be even more so, and artificial titles were created for all its members on the recommendation of Benjamin Disraeli.

Ottoline was a rather lonely and introverted child. She felt out of place in the aristocratic milieu she inhabited. She did not mix easily, and by the time she was a young woman, being almost six feet tall, she felt herself something of an outsider.

The first of many influential men in her life was the Archbishop of York, though his wife was not enthusiastic about their friendship. He encouraged her to try further education, but two attempts at Edinburgh and Oxford came to nothing. In 1896 she made her first (chaperoned) visit to Italy, which opened her eyes to visual beauty and a sense of personal liberty – very much in the spirit of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1902) and A Room with a View.

She was attracted to older men – the next two being the future prime minister Herbert Asquith and the Swedish physician Axel Munthe, to whom she lost her virginity. But the first serious contender for the hand of the Duke of Portland’s sister was a middle-class lawyer from a Midlands brewing family – Philip Morrell. Their wedding took place in 1907, and they remained married for the rest of their lives – despite what was to happen in the years that followed.

She assisted her husband in his political ambitions with the Liberal Party – which was then considered outrageously radical. She also started the first of her Thursday night ‘at home’ soirées in Bedford Square. Guests included a mixture of politicians and artists – Asquith and Max Beerbohm, Ramsay MacDonald and Henry James.

A year after her marriage she met the artist Augustus John and rapidly began an affair with him. Around this time she also met and befriended Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group who had their own ‘at homes’ in nearby Fitzroy Square. She also met the art critic Roger Fry (who became one of her many occasional lovers) and began to patronise young artists such as Jacob Epstein and Duncan Grant.

Augustus John’s mistress Dorelia sought to reclaim her position as dominant female by introducing Ottoline to the painter Henry Lamb – and the strategy worked. Ottoline went on to have a protracted dalliance with Lamb. When she took him to her country cottage in Oxford, this attracted the attention of Lytton Strachey, who had also fallen in love with Lamb.

In 1911, whilst her husband Philip was away in his new constituency seat of Burnley, she entertained Bertrand Russell to dinner – an evening that went on until until 4.00 am and ended in a burst of mutual passion. They agreed to reveal the affair to their respective spouses, both of whom reluctantly agreed to tolerate the situation so long as it was kept secret.

Garsington Revisited

Garsington Manor

All this took place at a time when the possibility of divorce was much more difficult, and even the threat of its being made public was enough to end a (man’s) career. Ottoline did not make her problems any easier by continuing her relationship with Henry Lamb at the same time.

The affair with Russell rumbled on, despite their fear of a public scandal. The social turbulence was eased somewhat by Russell establishing a love-nest apartment around the corner from the British Museum in the appropriately named Russell Chambers.

Meanwhile the Ballets Russes came and went, Russell’s latest book was savaged by his star pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Morrell bought the lease on Garsington Manor, a Jacobean house outside Oxford. These events were then punctuated by the onset of the First World War.

Because of their internationalist sympathies, the Bloomsbury Group was largely against the war and gave help to people who became conscientious objectors. Meanwhile the English monarchy was hurriedly changing its name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. But Ottoline’s ‘at homes’ continued, adding Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington to the regular guest list

She also invited D.H. Lawrence to stay in a cottage in the grounds at Garsington. Russell and Lawrence struck up a highly charged friendship – which predictably ended in tears and Russell feeling close to suicide. It is well known that Ottoline showered Lawrence with practical support, gifts, and money – all of which he repaid by satirising her as Hermione Roddice in his next novel Women in Love. This caused a rift between them that was never properly healed.

Eventually Russell grew more distant from Ottoline, but consoled himself by starting an affair with T.S. Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Garsington and Bloomsbury in general were busy arguing against universal conscription when it was introduced in 1916.

The following year was a bad one for Ottoline. She finally separated herself from Russell, who by then had moved on to an affair with the actress Lady Constance Malleson. Then Ottoline learned that her husband Philip had not one but two mistresses, both of whom were pregnant. He broke the news to her whilst she was in a nursing home. Ottoline was devastated by the news: she could not understand how her husband could violate their marriage by committing adultery.

She sought consolation with her new enthusiasm Siegfried Sassoon, seemingly unaware that he was primarily homosexual. Then she became embroiled with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and added Aldous Huxley to her list of slavish live-in friends.

In 1918 Russell was sent to jail for his pacifist views, and Lytton Strachey became a best-selling author with the publication of Eminent Victorians. Shortly afterwards Ottoline took up as occasional lover a young village stonemason working on the Garsington estate

In 1921 her protégé Aldous Huxley published em>Chrome Yellow, a satirical novel that lampooned Ottoline, her husband, and her Garsington friends, all of whom he had lived amongst – rent free. It was another cruel case of betrayal that led to a long-unhealed social rift. Nevertheless Ottoline continued to take an interest in her friends’ welfare and their often problematic marriages.

As the 1920s wore on the upkeep of Garsington became more costly, and Philip Morrell had been presented with a demand that he pay for the education of his two illegitimate sons. So, Philip and Ottoline elected to sell up and go back to London. They moved into what Ottoline described as ‘the dearest little doll’s house’ at 10 Gower Street.

Life there was more subdued, though she still employed five full time staff. When her old friend and antagonist Lawrence died, it was Philip Morrell who became legal advisor to Frieda Lawrence in her battle with the family as they contested his will. She won, but only after a long struggle.

In 1936 Ottoline lost two of her close friends. Lytton Strachey died of stomach cancer, and as a result his soul mate Dora Carrington (who was married to Ralph Partridge) shot herself. Sensing that the end of an era was approaching, Ottoline began writing her Memoirs. Despite failing health however, she found new protégés in Graham Greene and Stephen Spender. As her health failed she put her entire trust in a personal physician who treated her with a controversial new drug Prontosil. It killed her, and shortly afterwards he committed suicide.

Garsington Manor was taken over in 1981 by the Ingrams family who made the estate available as an annual centre for operas which were staged in the famous gardens that Ottoline had created. Complaints about noise were eventually made by local residents, and the opera festival was transferred to the nearby Getty-owned Wormsley Park.

The basic materials for this lengthy and thoroughly researched biography are the memoirs and the huge amount of correspondence that has been made available in recent years since interest in ‘The Bloomsbury Group’ became culturally fashionable. Sandra Dorroch offers a bibliography, an index, and a meticulous annotation of her sources; but ultimately this is an amateur work – in the best sense of that term. It is a labour of love rather than a professional biography. For instance, despite the critical apparatus, you would not know from this account that Lady Ottoline only took two baths a year.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Sandra Jobson Darroch, Garsington Revisited, John Libbey Publishing, 2017, pp.446, ISBN: 0861967372

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Twentieth century literature

Gerald Brenan biography

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his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan biographyGerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.

South from GranadaSouth from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.

Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.

The Spanish LabyrinthThe Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published

After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982

Gerald Brenan biography

Bloomsbury Group – web links

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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

Bloomsbury Group web links 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 Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014

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Gerald Brenan: A Personal Record

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second volume of autobiography 1920-1972

This is the second volume of Gerald Brenan’s autobiographical writings. The first, A Life of One’s Own covers the period 1894 to 1920, and deals with his childhood and education, up to the point of his emergence from (honourable) service during the first world war. This volume starts with an account of his arrival in Spain as a young man of twenty-six – a subject he treats in a more general and less personal terms in his classic travel book South from Granada.

Gerald Brenan Although it purports to cover five decades, most of the book is devoted to his bohemian wanderings in the 1920s, which he spent oscillating between Spain and the Bloomsbury Group – of which he is not uncritical. Much of his narrative is dominated by an emotionally turbulent affair with Dora Carrington, who just happened to be married to his best friend Ralph Partridge. It also includes his dabblings with shop girls and prostitutes, and his attempts to secure allowances and inheritances so that he didn’t have to work.

He decided he was going to become a writer, but it was to be more than two decades before he got round to anything substantial. Having established a home in southern Spain, he returned to London to continue his on-off affair with Carrington and started to write a biography of Saint Teresa. In this period of his life he also mixed with various bohemians of whom he gives vivid character sketches – Arthur Whaley, Boris Anrep, Beryl de Zoete – almost all of whom had personal relations as tangled as his own.

The anguish of his affair with Carrington continued for years and is spelled out in quite intimate detail. She was married to Ralph Partridge but in love with Lytton Strachey, who was also in love with Partridge – and they all lived together. This is the Bloomsbury Group writ large. But as soon a long-awaited inheritance from an aunt arrived, Brenan got married to almost the first girl he met.

He is amazingly frank about this marriage, the first part of which was passed knowing that his wife was still in love with Llewelyn Powys, with whom she had been conducting an affair. He sticks at it and makes the marriage work, but the pages devoted to it are outnumbered by those on Carrington by ten to one.

There’s a vivid first-hand account of the Civil War in Malaga, following the military revolt which had started in the Spanish protectorates of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. He stuck it out as long as possible, then retreated to England to serve as an air-raid warden during the war.

The strange thing is that once he reaches 1940, the last three decades of his life are written off in no more than a few pages. However, I was mindful of the fact that he wrote these memoirs in the late 1960s, and there might have been an element of recapturing his lost youth in the enterprise.

In the post-war years he was spending his time doing nothing more demanding than writing letters to the newspapers. His social life included such heterogeneous folk as Dylan Thomas and Diana Dors. He inherited yet again following death of his father – though not as much as he felt he was entitled to.

In 1953 he and his wife returned to Spain, to the house which had been vacated during the Civil War. Before long he was engaged in an amorous adventure with Dora Carrington’s young niece, and couldn’t wait to tell his wife all about it.

His wife died in 1967, but Brenan had already started a relationship with a girl forty years younger than him. He sold his house and built a new one further inland, from which point he composed this memoir.

I must say that my regard for him as a human being went down quite a few notches reading this account, but he is undoubtedly a good writer, with a good eye for character and an interesting line in anecdotes. His reflections on the Bloomsbury Group are valuable, and South from Granada and The Spanish Labyrinth remain well established as classics.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-1972, New York: Knopf, 1975, pp.381, ISBN: 0394495829

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Gertrude Stein

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art-collector, writer, modernist celebrity patron

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer and art-collector who went to live in Paris and became a celebrated figure in the European modernist movement between 1910 and 1930. She was personally acquainted with artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and at her soirees she entertained writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She wrote memoirs and novels, developed an avant-garde prose style, and had a famously lesbian relationship with her fellow expatriate Alice B. Toklas. She lived through two world wars, and had what is now seen as a very dubious attitude to the political events of her era.

Gertrude Stein

portrait by Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein – life and work

Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburg. Her parents were upper middle class Jews with holdings in real estate. When she was three the family moved to live in Vienna, then to Paris, before returning to America. They settled in Oakland, San Francisco. She was a voracious reader as a young girl. Both parents died whilst she was a teenager, and she moved to live with her brothers and sisters in Baltimore.

She attended Radcliffe College, which was then part of Harvard University. There she studied philosophy and psychology under William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. She conducted experiments in ‘automatic writing’ – which was later (incorrectly) compared to ‘stream of consciousness’ writing.

William James encouraged her to enrol for medical studies so that she could develop her interest in psychology. At Johns Hopkins Medical School two things happened: she quickly became bored with medicine, and she had a sexual awakening with fellow student Mary Bookstaver. The affair was later fictionalised in her first novel Q.E.D.

In 1903 she moved with her elder brother Leo to live in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank in an apartment with a studio attached. Leo had an introduction to the art dealer Vollard, through whom they encountered Cezanne, whose works they bought. This led to the acquisition of paintings by Gaugin and. Matisse, who became a personal friend.

She started a cultural salon, which met on Saturday evenings. When Leo bought his first painting by the up-and-coming Pablo Picasso, they were introduced to the twenty-four year old Spaniard, who was commissioned to paint the now famous portrait of Gertrude, a work that he rated very highly. This immediately preceded his cubist period.

Stein began writing in earnest, working on Three Lives which she regarded as her first book (having forgotten about the unpublished Q.E.D.). This was privately printed and considering the fact that she was an unknown writer it received good reviews, including one from H.G. Wells. The following summer in Fiesole near Florence she began work on The Making of Americans, a lengthy family history which was to become her major work.

Alice Toklas arrived in Paris in 1907 as a fellow American Jewish ex-patriate. She quickly became Gertrude Stein’s companion, amanuensis, cook, lover, and ‘wife’. Their relationship lasted forty years.

Meanwhile the art collection continued to expand at an extraordinary rate. It must be said that both Leo Stein and his sister Gertrude had an unerring eye for all that was new and of lasting quality in modern painting. Canvasses were stacked high on the walls of the studio in the Rue de Fleurus.

Th artists who frequented her salon constitute a roll call of modernism – many of them visitors long before they became famous. Regulars included Picasso, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Douanier Rousseau, plus writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Stein and Toklas became particularly friendly with the composer Eric Satie.

There was also contact with the world of English art. She was visited by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Jacob Epstein, and Wyndham Lewis. But as the war approached Leo Stein decided to live in Florence. He and Gertrude divided the collection of paintings between them. The separation was not amicable, and it proved to have negative repercussions later – particularly for Alice Toklas.

When the war broke out Stein was staying with Alfred North Whitehead in Cambridge. There she met Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. As soon as they obtained the necessary papers she and Alice Toklas returned to Paris. After despatching copies of her manuscripts to America for safekeeping, they went to stay in Palma de Mallorca.

Eventually they returned to Paris and joined the American Fund for French Wounded – Gertrude driving a car she had imported from America. They were sent to Perpignan and were later decorated for their services to the troops.

After the war she met Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Through this connection she made friends with Man Ray and Ezra Pound. There were also social contacts with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, the sculptor Lipschitz, Jean Cocteau, and Scott-Fitzgerald.

She and Alice Toklas spent a long time in St Remy de Provence where she developed her ‘experimental’ style of writing. There was also some theorising about the nature of vocabulary, grammar, sentences, and paragraphs – much of which was eventually published in How to Write.

She also had contact with musicians George Antheil and Virgil Thompson who became close friends. Stein provided the libretto for Thompson’s opera Four Saints. She was also introduced to the English poet and eccentric Edith Sitwell, a contact which led to speaking engagements in Oxford and Cambridge.

Her avant-garde work was published in various literary magazines, including the short-lived transition, which also presented the work of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. Then the ever-faithful Alice Toklas published her work in a privately-printed series called Plain Edition. Meanwhile, her reputation was being promoted by her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy patron of the arts.

In 1934 she returned to America after a thirty year absence for a lecture tour which was well publicised and resulted in a publishing contract with Random House. She settled in the south of France and befriended the French historian Bernard Fay, who was to have an important part to play in her later years.

Politically she was radical in a manner few would have expected. She believed that Adolf Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, and she supported General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Then, at a time when many radicals and persecuted minorities were fleeing the onset of Nazi Germany, she stayed stubbornly in Paris. Even when the second world war began, she simply sealed up her priceless art collection, and it remained untouched until her death.

She too remained untouched, whilst Vichy France deported 75,000 other Jews to the concentration camps – only three percent of whom survived. It is thought that she was being protected by the influence of Bernard Fay, who was a collaborator with the Nazis.

But Stein was herself also an active collaborator, a supporter of Marshal Petain, the head of Vichy France. She even translated some of his speeches, which she found ‘really wonderful … so extraordinary’. In 1944 whilst she was living in southern France, the entire population of Jewish children from her town were deported to Auschwitz. And she remained a supporter of Petain even after the war when he was being sentenced to death as a collaborator. Her friend Bernard Fay received a similar sentence, but he managed to escape to Switzerland, with money supplied by Alice Toklas.

In 1946 Stein died of stomach cancer at the age of seventy-two and was buried at Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris. She willed much of her estate to Alice Toklas, including the art collection, which had by then increased enormously in value. However, their relationship as two lesbians had no legal status at that time. The Stein family removed the paintings from Toklas’s residence during her absence and locked them in a vault. Toklas died in poverty at the age of eighty-nine and was buried next to Gertrude Stein in Pere Lachaise.

Gertrude Stein – study resources

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Penguin – Amazon US

The Making of Americans – Amazon UK

Gertrude Stein: Selected Writings – Amazon UK

Getrude Stein – biography

Gertrude Stein famously gave an account of her own life by writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). This is largely an account of their years together in Paris – but told as if from the point of view of her companion, amanuensis, and lover, Alice Toklas.

It is a curious book in that it relates the events of their partnership in a faux-naif manner, as if a child were trying to string together fragments of experience, and failing completely to give them chronological order or any sort of rational coherence.

It is difficult to say if Stein adopted this childish and clumsy style as an oblique attempt to humiliate Alice Toklas, or if she was merely exercising the flat and inelegant manner she made famous and which was later said to have influenced Ernest Hemingway. The text purports to be written by Alice Toklas, but it is Stein’s own creation, talking largely about herself as if from Toklas’s point of view:

Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein’s life long passion. And so she had then and indeed it lasted pretty well to the war, which broke down so many habits, she had then the habit of beginning her work at eleven o’clock at night and working until the dawn. She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer.

The literary ‘style’ is characterised by incessant repetition, non-sequiturs, and fractured syntax. And Stein does not shrink from writing flattering assessments of her own ‘genius’, disingenuously putting the words of praise into someone else’s mouth.

She [Stein] had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences. The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the symmetry of the musical fugue of Bach.

This commendation of her genius is so valuable, she repeats it several times throughout the work. When Stein rather hesitantly gave a written presentation at Oxford, she was pleased to report the audience response in similar self-congratulatory manner:

One of the men was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

As to her writing, there is no shortage of ambition or scope. This is what she says of her one thousand page ‘novel’ The Making of Americans:

And it was to be the history of a family. It was a history of a family but … It was getting to be a history of all human beings, all who ever were or are or could be living

As you can see see, she is not hampered by excessive modesty or self-doubt. The net result of this close attention to language and her claims to a passionate concern for the sentence and the paragraph was prose of this quality:

We happened to go to a show of pictures at the Galerie Bonjean. There we met one of the russian brothers, Genia Berman, and Gertrude Stein was not uninterested in his pictures. She went with him to his studio and looked at everything he had ever painted. He seemed to have a purer intelligence than the other two painters who certainly had not created the modern movement, perhaps the idea had been originally his. She asked him telling her story as she was fond of telling it at that time to anyone who would listen, had he originated the idea. He said with an intelligent inner smile that he thought he had. She was not at all sure that he was not right. He came down to Bilignin to see us and she slowly concluded that though he was a very good painter he was too bad a painter to have been the creator of an idea.

Just in case this might seem like selective quotation or biased, special pleading, here is the opening of one of her short stories from the collection Tender Buttons. The story is entitled Rooms.

Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation.

A whole centre and a border make hanging a way of dressing. This which is not why there is a voice is the remains of an offering. There was no rental.

So the tune which is there has a little piece to play, and the exercise is all there is of a fast. The tender and true that makes no width to hew is the time that there is question to adopt.

Gertrude Stein was a celebrated figure in her own circle of fashionable wealthy American expatriates, but it is not altogether surprising that her literary output now remains largely forgotten.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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GPO Design

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posters and propaganda for the post office 1930-1970

GPO Design is a very stylishly produced collection of posters and information graphics commissioned for the postal services between 1930 and 1970. It’s supported by a well-informed essay on the relations between government, propaganda quangos, and the world of what was then called ‘commercial art’. It has always been a mystery to me why a monopoly should feel the need to advertise its services. Mrs Average of Pinner, Middlesex has until very recently had no alternative but to use Royal Mail to deliver her birthday cards and letters to friends. The same has also been true for gas, water, and electricity. Nobody had access to alternative services, so why bother to advertise their virtues?

GPO DesignBut the GPO has from its earliest years made a habit of commissioning artists to design posters to promote its services and reminding us to post early for Xmas. In fact there has been a quite deliberate campaign to both educate the public and promote an impression of efficient, modern technology driving communications at a national level. This has been coupled ideologically with folksy images of the village postman delivering letters in all weathers, and at the same time promoting an empire of connectivity that embraced the globe.

But not all the postal service’s posters and advertising campaigns were corporate vanity. The campaign to advertise postage stamps in little booklets was apparently an attempt to reduce the waiting time spent queuing to buy a single stamp.

It’s not surprising that all decision making in matters of acceptability was in the hands of establishment appointees who despite their efforts to employ modern artists, generated an output that was pretty near indistinguishable from Soviet propaganda posters of the same era

Hans SchlegerThe range of artists and designers they did use included E.McKnight Kauffer, Graham Sutherland, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell. But the most artistically advanced was Hans (Zero) Schleger, one of the many European immigrants who fled to Britain during the inter-war years.

Paul Rennie suggests however in his contribution to the elegant Design series that their work was more successful politically and technologically than their Soviet and Nazi counterparts. He also points out that the GPO’s emphasis on the modern technology of communication – cars, boats, trains, telephones – was a distinctly progressive and modernist theme radiated into society by its educational and service-promoting publicity.

The examples in this collection from the award-winning series are drawn from the poster collection of the British Postal Museum and Archive in London. It sits very neatly alongside its recent fellow publications on David Gentleman, El Lissitzsky, and Alexander Rodchenko.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Paul Rennie, GPO: Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2010, pp.96, ISBN: 1851495967

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Granite and Rainbow

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essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

Granite and Rainbow (1958) is the third and final volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be collected, edited, and published by her husband Leonard Woolf after her death in 1941. She published two collections of essays in her own lifetime – The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932).

Granite and Rainbow

Leonard Woolf discusses the difficulties of locating and verifying these examples of her non-fiction writing in the editor’s notes which preface these collections. The problem of identification was exacerbated by the fact that many of them had been published anonymously. Until relatively recently for instance, essays and book reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were not attributed to any author. Another reason for essays remaining undetected was that some of the earlier examples had been published under her maiden name of Virginia Stephen.

Granite and Rainbow was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1958. Since that time, any further non-fiction prose writings by Virginia Woolf that have come to light have been published in the six-volume edition of her complete essays edited by the distinguished Woolf scholar Stuart N. Clarke.

Granite and Rainbow – critical commentary

The essays and reviews in this collection are arranged in two parts. The first is The Art of Fiction and the second The Art of Biography, and it has to be said that her richest and most profound observations come in the first half amongst her meditations on the nature and the future of fiction.

‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ explores reasons for the death of poetic drama. She argues that the poet cannot fully cope with the contradictions of modern life and that poetic ideas might be taken over by the novel. Speculating about the nature of what such a novel might be, she is in effect talking about her own work, which combines prose narrative with a poetical sensibility. But she does so without actually mentioning it – which is commendably modest.

‘Hours in a Library’ is a meditation on the relationship between classic and modern literature. She is urging modern readers to look sympathetically upon contemporary writing, but she knows that it will be judged against the standards of the past. Her argument is however cast in characteristically dialectical manner in which she sees a reciprocity of influence:

But if we need all our knowledge of the old writers to follow what the new writers are attempting, it is certainly true that we come from adventuring among new books with a far keener eye for the old.

This is not unlike the apparently paradoxical argument made by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges – that a contemporary writer can ‘create’ his own precursors. In other words, the work of modern authors can alter the way in which we view the writing of the past

Woolf finds qualities in apparent failures — such as DeQuincy whose ‘impassioned prose’ she offers as a positive model to other writers, even though his own work (with the exception of the Opium Eater) is now largely forgotten.

It’s interesting to note that she even makes efforts to see positive merit in George Meredith, a writer who had been a major literary figure during her own lifetime, but whose reputation had gone into decline. She notes his poetic style, his lavish metaphors, and his lack of ‘realism’ – but she realises that his time has passed.

The most ambitious essay in the collection is a long article from The Bookseller in 1929 called ‘Phases of Fiction’ in which she looks at a collection of novelists and categorises them as Truth-Tellers (Defoe, Maupassant, Trollope) Romantics (Scott, Stevenson, Radcliffe) Character-Mongers (Dickens, Austen) Comedians (Peacock, Sterne) Psychologists (James, Proust, Dostoyevski) and Poets (Meredith, Hardy, Bronte).

These studies offer what we might now call a ‘reader response’ type of criticism. She does not analyse the subject matter of their texts that makes them so valuable, but concentrates instead on what effect they have on her – which she generalises as ‘us’. She describes Henry James’s concentration on psychological states for instance:

By cutting off the responses that are called out in actual life, the novelist frees us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or the other. Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make patterns; by its power to bring out relations in things … It is a pleasure somewhat akin, perhaps, to the pleasure of mathematics or the pleasure of music.

The second section of this collection dealing with biography is mainly book reviews of biographies, letters, and memoirs. The subjects range from Walter Raleigh, via Laurence Sterne and Horace Walpole, to Thomas Coutts (the banker) and the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli – which was not her real name.

Woolf wrote biographies herself, and she sees the art of biography as a difficult choice between the ‘granite’ of hard facts and the ‘rainbow’ of the subject’s personality. Too many facts, and the account of someone’s life becomes boring (or even unreadable): too much rainbow, and the account becomes fiction. This is possibly why her own fictional biography Orlando (1927) is so dazzlingly successful, and her fact-heavy Roger Fry (1940) very dull.

She argues, quite justly, that Harold Nicolson held these two elements of fact and invention in successful equilibrium in his hilarious collection of biographical vignettes, Some People (1927):

he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as if they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction.

© Roy Johnson 2016

Granite and Rainbow – study resources

Granite and Rainbow Granite and Rainbow – Amazon UK
Granite and Rainbow Granite and Rainbow – Amazon US

Granite and Rainbow Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Granite and Rainbow Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

Granite and Rainbow The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon UK
Granite and Rainbow The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon US

Granite and Rainbow Granite and Rainbow – free eBook format – Internet Archive

Granite and Rainbow

Grantite and Rainbow – complete contents

Part I : The Art of Fiction

  • The Narrow Bridge of Art
  • Hours in a Library
  • Impassioned Prose
  • Life and the Novelist
  • On Rereading Meredith
  • The Anatomy of Fiction
  • Gothic Romance
  • The Supernatural in Fiction
  • Henry James’s Ghost Stories
  • A Terribly Sensitive Mind
  • Women and Fiction
  • An Essay in Criticism
  • Phases of Fiction

Part II : The Art of Biography

  • The New Biography
  • A Talk About Memoirs
  • Sir Walter Raleigh
  • Sterne
  • Eliza and Sterne
  • Horace Walpole
  • A Friend of Johnson
  • Fanney Burney’s Half-Sister
  • Money and Love
  • The Dream
  • The Fleeting Portrait:
    1. Waxworks at the Abbey
    2. The Royal Academy
  • Poe’s Helen
  • Visits to Walt Whitman
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

Granite and Rainbow 1925 — The Common Reader first series

Granite and Rainbow 1932 — The Common Reader second series

Granite and Rainbow 1942 — The Death of the Moth

Granite and Rainbow 1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

Granite and Rainbow 1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

Granite and Rainbow 1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words

by

Dictionary-cum-encyclopedia of all things Irish

If you parachuted onto the Emerald Isle, would you know what to do with a griffaun, a mether, or a dolmen ? Did you know that carrageen (Irish moss) can be used as food or as an HIV/AIDS preventative? And where would the taxi driver be taking you if he was going to TCD? Greenspeak is an interesting proposition if you’re interested in language, Ireland and its culture, or unusual dictionaries. Its a dictionary-cum-encyclopedia on all matters Irish, and it’s a beautifully illustrated.

Greenspeak: Ireland in her own wordsEntries run from ‘The Abbey Theatre’ and ‘absentee landlord’ to ‘ziggurat’ and the fact that there is no letter ‘Z’ in the Irish alphabet. Did you know that the words yes and no do not occur in the Irish language? Instead, the main verb in the question is repeated – as in ‘Did you see her?’ – to which the reply is ‘I did’ or ‘I did not’. Some of the terms explained are Irish language pure and simple; others are English words which have a particular or coded meaning in the context of Ireland; others are explanations of Irish history and institutions.

All of them are illustrated by examples drawn from genuinely Irish texts. So for instance, the entry for the apparently innocent-looking expression ‘big house’ runs as follows:

big house, Big House 1. Anglo-Irish country house, the principal house of the former landed Ascendency and often surrounded by a famine wall. Many were burned down in the 1920s. They feature in books, which became a literary genre, starting with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800). note: use ‘Irish Big House’ not ‘big Irish house’. Equates with standard English ‘manor’ or ‘stately home’. 2. (Ulster) may refer to mental asylum. 3. (US slang) penitentionary. [1823 (Letters from the Irish Highlands) < teach mor ‘big house’] See Baltimore Oriole.

There are over 2,000 entries covering every aspect of Ireland from food to folklore, and poetry to politics. The chronology and etymology of each word is given, and there is an index of people’s names, a glossary of abbreviations and acronyms.

There is understandably a recurrent strain of relations with neighbours ‘across the water’, but plenty of detailed entries on Ireland’s indigenous language, art, music, literature, history, personalities, and geography.

I get the impression of a huge labour of love and scholarship on Paddy Sammon’s part, and anybody with the slightest interest in Ireland or matters Irish is missing a treat if they don’t see this handsomely attractive book.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words   Buy the book at Amazon US

Paddy Sammon, Greenspeak: Ireland in her own words, Dublin: Town House, 2002, pp.240, ISBN: 1860591442

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