Cultural history Archives - Page 9 of 23

Larkin’s Jazz

September 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

4-CD boxed set compilation of Larkin’s favourite music

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he used to write regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth he even harboured aspirations to become a jazz drummer. Larkin’s Jazz is a 4-CD box set compilation of his favourites.

A poet famous for his gloom (he called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’) he confessed in later life that jazz had provided him with some of the happiest moments of his life. And his enthusiasm for the foot-tapping, life-enhancing spirit of jazz music lasted from his boyhood in pre-war Coventry to his death in 1985. This multi-disc compilation of his favourite music was created as a tribute to the poet and critic on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing.

The vast majority of these tracks are what used to be called ‘hot’ jazz – upbeat and spirited music – from his first record purchase of ‘Tiger Rag’, through Lionel Hampton, to Earl Bostic’s ‘Flamingo’ (which I remember buying as a teenager in the 1950s to dispel the tedium of Family Favourites, and Those You Have Loved.

The contents of the four discs are arranged in a sequence that reflects the order in which Larkin experienced the music. The first CD brings together the recordings that he collected as a youth in the 1930s. These include Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, The Chicago Rhythm Kings, and Count Basie. These might strike contemporary listeners as decidedly old-fashioned, but it should be kept in mind that jazz music at that time was regarded generally as a risque and corrupting influence, and the only music (apart from classical) broadcast by the BBC was of mind-numbing banality.

The second disc collects some of the music he experienced at University, along with fellow student Kingsley Amis who became a lifelong friend. Outstanding names here include Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, and Gene Krupa. You might be tempted to conclude from this that his taste was mainly for white musicians, but to his credit Larkin was an early enthusiast for blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

The third represents the music he reviewed during his stint for the Telegraph, and appears to cast the appreciative net a little wider. Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and Duke Ellington are featured names here. Not that Larkin’s reviews were confined to such a narrow historical period. But it’s well known that he was no lover of modern jazz, and the compilers have probably more accurately reflected Larkin’s tastes rather than including music by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and even John Coltrane that Larkin had reviewed but did not like.

Most of these recordings were originally issued on 78 rpm records, which constrained performances to about three and a half minutes maximum. But the fourth CD features more extended items taken from long playing records that Larkin used to listen to with friends in the 1970s and 1980s.

These Proper Box productions are tremendous value at four CDs for less than ten pounds, but this one has the additional bonus of an accompanying booklet that offers not one but two essays of appreciation, plus commentary notes, photographs and a full discography of every track. This scholarship is shared by Trevor Tolley, an authority on Larkin and John White, a colleague of Larkin’s at the University of Hull, biographer of Artie Shaw, and co-editor of Larkin: Jazz Writings. No wonder it’s already at the top of the best-seller lists.

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Larkin’s Jazz, London: Proper Box Records, 2010, ISBN: B003LZ38IW

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Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

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Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875

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Le Corbusier

August 29, 2018 by Roy Johnson

his life, loves, and works

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edward Jeanneret in 1887 in the Swiss Alps into a modest middle-class family with a culture of hard work, music, and exploration of the countryside at weekends. Although he was not as academically talented as his older brother Albert, he rapidly developed skills in drawing and painting.

He enrolled at the Ecole d’Art and then, without any formal training, began to practise architecture, designing his first house at the age of seventeen. Influenced by his reading of Ruskin, he travelled to Italy, where he was inspired by the cathedrals of Milan, Pisa, and Florence. His trip ended in Vienna, where he hoped to find work. All of these destinations at the time were within the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Vienna was a disappointment: ‘if it weren’t for the music, one would commit suicide’. Despite protests from his family and teacher, he then moved to Paris in 1908. There he encountered something that was to change his life – reinforced concrete. He worked in an architect’s office in the afternoon and continued his own self-generated curriculum of study in the museums and art galleries each morning.

Despite this early success he suddenly decided to go to Germany. There he had the good fortune to be commissioned to write a study on contemporary design developments. This resulted in travel to Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Weimar, and the publication of two reports. He also managed to talk his way into an internship with the Peter Behrens practice.

This was followed by a period of acute Weltschmerz from which he emerged with a desire for further travel. He sailed from Vienna down the Danube with a friend to Constantinople, then journeyed on to the monasteries of Mount Athos, which had an inspirational effect on him. As did the Parthenon, which he visited every day for almost a fortnight. He was recalled from this orgy of Mediterraneanism by the offer of a job back home.

Feeling depressed at returning to what he regarded as a provincial backwater, he nevertheless threw himself into teaching theoretical and practical design at the Ecole d’Art. This was something like a precursor to the Bauhaus. He also opened an official office as a practising architect, even though he was completely without professional qualifications.

La Maison Blanche 1912

His first major project was the design and construction of a palatial villa for his parents. The house was a triumph of modernist design, even though he almost ruined the family financially by a budget overspend. A few years later the house had to be sold off at a huge loss, which wiped out his parents’ savings.

During the First World War he designed a cheap and modular system of building to re-house homeless people. He travelled to France and met the artist Maillol, who at that time was considered the world’s leading sculptor. He continued to work on small design projects, but as the war ended he decided to make a new beginning for his life. He moved to live in Paris.

He set himself up in a studio apartment in the rue Jacob, visited prostitutes, and was at the notorious first night performance of Parade in 1917. He also entered his first major architectural competition, which was to design a large scale industrial slaughterhouse for Nevers in central France.

At a social level he befriended his neighbour, the artist Amedee Ozenfant. He also rather bizarrley established a business for the manufacture of reinforced concrete bricks. He and Ozenfant collaborated on the publication of their artistic manifesto – After Cubism – and they exhibited paintings together. At this time he regarded his commercial enterprises and design work as merely sources of income to support his ambition to be a painter.

In 1920 he changed his name from Charles-Edouard Jenneret to Le Corbusier, and together with Ozenfant launched the avant gard magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. He designed another form of modular shoebox-shaped housing called Citrohan, using concrete, steel, and glass. His objective was to make buildings of Spartan simplicity that were filled with light.

Villa Guiette 1927

He met and began to live with Yvonne Gallis, an earthy Mediterranean-style woman whom he kept more or less secret from his family. (There are unconfirmed rumours that they met in a brothel.). He built a modernist palace for the banker and art collector Raoul La Roche and in 1923 published a major series of theoretical essays as Towards a New Architecture.

A partnership with his younger cousin Pierre Jenneret flourished and they were forced to employ more and more assistants. Le Corbusier still spent his mornings painting, but from this point onwards kept this side of his life almost secret, so that it didn’t dilute his growing reputation as an architect. He complained about being exhausted by the demands of his profession, but in fact his office hours were in the afternoons between 2.00 and 5.00 pm.

His ideas were mocked by critics and the general public because his designs put functionality before all else. The house of the future was given features we now take for granted: built-in wardrobes and storage, open plan rooms, plain walls, large industrial-sized windows, and furniture which he chose from the manufacturers of hospital equipment. Yet despite the criticisms he was becoming a celebrity architect, with requests from Princess de Polignac and the writer Colette. He also designed a very successful villa for Michael Stein, the brother of the American writer Gertrude Stein.

Corbusier engaged with design at all levels of scope and size. For interiors he designed arm chairs and occasional tables; for social housing he created multi-storey residential blocks; and at city level he wanted to re-shape urban areas – to admit light and space where once there had been narrow, crowded streets. For these ambitions, and because he theorised about them, he was widely (but incorrectly) regarded as a communist.

Nevertheless he did visit Moscow in 1926, where he won a commission to design new offices for the Centrosoyuz. He felt his visit was a big success, though some of his ideas were criticised (quite intelligently) by El Lissitsky. He was also invited to South America, where he lectured on urban planning and designed a house for Victoria Ocampo – a friend of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

He prepared his lectures in advance, then delivered them without notes, illustrating his arguments with fluidly produced diagrams and sketches whilst speaking. On the lecture tour he met the singer Josephine Baker, for whom he was to design a house in Paris. He also took the opportunity to have an affair with her during their ten day transatlantic journey back to France.

Villa Savoye 1928

In 1930 he made two decisive steps in his public life: he took out French citizenship, and he married Yvonne. Two years later he submitted his plans for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, confident that his ideas would be accepted by a regime that had earlier produced the forward-thinking designs of the Constructivists. What he didn’t realise was that Joseph Stalin (like other dictators) had already decreed that all architecture for the proletariat must be Greco-Roman in style. He had more success a year later with the Cite de Refuge – a purpose-built hostel for children and the homeless he built for the Salvation Army in Paris.

When he visited America for a further lecture tour he felt that the skyscrapers were too small and too close together, but he did find a new client – the socialite divorcee Tjader Harris, who also became his lover. However, he was disappointed that no grand schemes in urban projects resulted from his contact with the New World.

When war broke out in Europe he was recruited as advisor to the war ministry (with the rank of colonel). He worked on designing a modular munitions factory, but when the Germans invaded and occupied Paris he fled to Petain’s headquarters in Vichy. It was at this point that his ideas concerning ‘modernity’. ‘The machine age’, and urban planning meshed all too easily with fascist ideology, and he collaborated with people who eventually deported eighty thousand Jews from France to the death camps.

His participation with the regime was in no way passive or accidental. He actively sought the support of Petain himself, and was eventually rewarded with a post on the committee for ‘Habitation and Urbanism’ of Paris. Here he worked alongside racists, eugenicists,and people who advocated euthanasia for ‘cleansing’ the capital’s population. Plagued by bureaucratic indecision and in-fighting, the committee never achieved anything, and Corbusier ended back in Paris running a sort of private college of architecture.

When France was liberated by the Allies in 1944 (and ten thousand collaborators had been executed) Corbusier merely made himself available to the De Gaul government and ever after whitewashed his collaborationist record of the war years. He was given a dream project – to construct a huge modernist apartment block in Marseille..

L’Unite d’Habitation – roof terrace 1952

He was working on several projects simultaneously when invited to join the scheme for a new United Nations headquarters in New York. He jumped at the chance, assuming that he would be its lead architect, even though he did suggest that Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe should join the team. The American venture boosted his already supercharged reputation – and ego. It enabled him to re-establish contact with his lover Tjader Harris; and it left his wife back home sinking deeper and deeper into alcoholism.

From time to time he flew back to check on the Marseille project which was coming under criticism from local bureaucrats for what they considered its outlandish design. They objected to kitchens in the same space as dining areas – something considered revolutionary at the time. As soon as he was absent in France, other people took over his design for the UN building, which was eventually attributed to the American architect Wallace K. Harrison.

But Corbusier had compensations – notably a commission to design a new mini-city in the Colombian capital, Bogota, and a new lover in the shape of journalist Hedwig Lauber. There was also an offer to design a new government headquarters in Chandigarh, India, a project personally endorsed by its leader, Pandit Nehru. This was his dream of total urbanisation come true. He was in his element, travelling first class between three continents.

Le Cabanon 1951

Whilst he was building a city for a government, he constructed for himself a holiday home in the south of France. It was a simple and box-shaped structure that on the outside looked like a log cabin. But the interior was lined with coloured plywood, which created a modernist statement. The single room construction was even made contiguous with the local restaurant whose owner he had befriended. This provided Yvonne with company during his many absences.

His national masterpiece, L’Unite d’Habitation was finished and opened in 1952. It housed three hundred families, had built-in shops and recreational areas, and a roof garden with nursery and swimming pool. A Second version was commissioned for Nantes, and he began work on what was to become one of his signature buildings – the chapel at Ronchamps.

This was a project designed to replace a simple church that had been destroyed by German bombs during the very last days of the war. It has become famous for its stark simplicity and its bizarre roof that has been described as ‘ a mix of partially crushed sombrero, a ram’s horn, and a bell-clapper’.

Notre Dame du Haut 1955

His wife continued to neglect her health, continued drinking, and eventually died in 1957. Shortly afterward Corbusier developed a multi-media installation for the Universal Exhibition at Brussels. This involved projected films and avant gard musical scores by Edward Varese and Iannis Xenakis, who at that time was working in Corbusier’s practice as an architect.

When his mother died at the age of ninety-nine, Corbusier had lost the two women underpinning his emotional life. He soldiered on alone, supported by a plethora of public accolades. He was showered with so many honorary degrees, he started turning them down.

Yet there continued to be professional frustrations and setbacks. Two major developments in Paris and New York came to nothing. In the face of these setbacks he fought back even more cantankerously than he had done before – until he eventually died doing what he had done all his adult life – swimming in the sea at his beloved gite at Roquebrune-cap-Martin.

Since then his longer term reputation as an architectural genius has been somewhat mixed. Open any architectural or interior design magazine today and you will see that his visual style is ubiquitous. The new norm is for minimalist decoration and open plan living. But some of his ideas on urbanisation now seem to smack dangerously of social engineering – and just as a by-the-way, the roofs on many of his buildings leaked.

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Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, pp.848, ISBN: 0375410430

Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol I

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

The first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner – no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore’s ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important – a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The next part (a whole volume in its original publication) deals with a part of his life of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally associate with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; eliminating outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking through jungles; and issuing certificates for celebrity big game hunters.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

See volume two of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v. 1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890

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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol II

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

politics, life, and literature 1911-1969

The first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 – engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He’s probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.

However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.

See volume one of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1911-1969 v. 2, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.536, ISBN: 0192812904

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Leonard Woolf biography

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lifeline, literature, publishing, politics

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf. When his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at the Arlington House School, a preparatory school near Brighton. From 1894 to 1899 he studied on a scholarship as a day student at St. Paul’s, a London public school noted for its classical studies. In 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Woolf became part of a youthful group of intellectuals who were elected to an elite group called ‘The Apostles’. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, who were students, and Bertrand Russell, who was a Fellow. These people eventually formed the core of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1902 Woolf earned his B.A. degree but stayed on at Cambridge for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination. He left Trinity College in October 1904 to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. His professional progress was rapid. In August 1908 he was appointed an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, assigned to administer the District of Hambantota.

As part of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf met Virginia Stephen, Thoby’s sister, and twice proposed marriage to her. He was twice refused. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year’s leave, expecting to return to Ceylon later. In July, however, he proposed to Virginia yet again, and this time she accepted him.

Partly because he chose to marry Virginia and partly because of a growing distaste for colonialism, Woolf resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service early in 1912 (as George Orwell was to do over a decade later). It was at this time that the Bloomsbury Group began to gain momentum as an intellectual and artistic force, and Leonard Woolf was at the centre of it.

In 1913 Woolf published his first novel, The Village and the Jungle, based on his experiences in the colonial service. This was followed by The Wise Virgins in 1914.

Like most other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf was a pacifist and an opponent of Britain’s involvement in the First World War. However, he was spared becoming a conscientious objector, because he was rejected by the military as unfit for duty.

With the outbreak of the war, Woolf turned his attention to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva. Woolf was later active in the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union.

During the war years Woolf spent a lot of his time caring for his wife Virginia, who was then suffering extreme manic-depression. To provide her with a relaxing hobby they bought a small hand printing press in 1917 and set up the Hogarth Press – named after their home in Richmond. Their first project was a pamphlet containing a story by each of them, printed and bound by themselves.

Other small books followed, written by their friends including T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster. Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers, which were translated into English by Julian Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

After the war, Leonard Woolf occupied himself more and more with political work. He became editor in 1919 of International Review, and edited the international section of Contemporary Review from 1920 through 1922. He was literary editor of Nation Athenaeum from 1923 to 1930 and joint editor of Political Quarterly from 1931-1959. Woolf also served during the period between the wars as secretary of the Labour Party’s advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

Leonard looked after his wife Virginia through all her periods of depression, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. They remain a couple who typify the Bloomsbury Group through their personal lives and their prodigious creative output. What is less well known about Leonard Woolf however, is that the latter part of his life was no less radical at a personal level. Love Letters reveals the whole story of this extraordinary episode.

During the Second World War he began an affair with a painter and book illustrator Trekkie Parsons, who was married to a publisher – at that time on active military service. Leonard was 61, Trekkie 39. He wanted her to get a divorce and marry him, but instead she persuaded him to move into the house next door to her in London and she spent the weekends with him at Monk’s House in Rodmell.

When her husband came back from the war, their lives not surprisingly became more complex. She spent the weekends with her husband and the week with Leonard. She took holidays with the two men separately, and acted as hostess for them both. This arrangement worked smoothly for the next twenty-five years.

When Trekkie and Leonard were not together they talked through the post. Trekkie sealed up their correspondence, and it was only opened after her death. Linked by excerpts from her diary, the letters shine with details of daily life: of gardens and glow-worms, books and plays; of Leonard’s publishing and politics; of Trekkie’s struggle to balance her professional and personal life. This remarkable exchange of letters tells the story of two contrasting personalities, their love for one another and their unusual and creative domestic arrangement.

Among Woolf’s most important writings are After the Deluge (1931-51), a multi-volume modern political and social history, and his five-volume autobiography, Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All The Way (1967) and The Journey Not The Arrival Matters (1969). He died August 14, 1969.

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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Leonora Carrington

October 8, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a surrealist painter and writer whose life spanned two centuries and two continents. She was born in Chorley, Lancashire to wealthy parents in textile manufacturing.
Educated by private tutors and nuns, she was a rebellious and disobedient child who was expelled from more than one school. Her father disapproved of her interest in art, but her mother encouraged her cultural ambitions.

As the daughter of an upper-class family she was expected to be a debutante, and was actually presented formally at the court of King George V. But when she continued to rebel, she was sent to study art in Florence, where she was impressed by medieval painting and architecture. On return to London she was enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and then at the academy run by expatriate cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant.

The year 1936 was something of an annus mirabilis for the nineteen year old student. She attended the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries, and she read Herbert Read’s influential book Surrealism. She was attracted to the blend of realism and fantasy that the new artistic movement promoted. It also allowed her to blend the human with the animal world which is one of the striking features of her work.

Shortly afterwards she met Max Ernst, the German-born leader of both the Dadaism and Surrealism movements. He was forty-seven and married, she was twenty and single. They fell in love immediately, and the following year he dissolved his marriage and took her to Paris. He introduced her to other surrealist artists such as Joan Miro and Andre Breton. Their shared interests were reflected by the presence of birds and animals in their work.

Self-portrait 1936

Following this they moved to a small town in the Ardeche region of southern France, where they supported each other in painting and sculpture. She also experimented with automatic writing, which at that time was an integral part of surrealism. It was thought possible to tap into the unconscious mind by removing the critical, censoring element from the process of composition.

However, tragedy struck their idyll with the outbreak of war. Ernst was arrested by the French government for being a ‘hostile alien’. He was later released following the intercession of friends. But when the Germans occupied France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo who had him on their list of ‘degenerate artists’. He managed to escape to America with the help of Varian Fry and Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married.

Leonora was devastated by the separation. She was forced to sell everything in France and escaped to Spain, where she suffered from paralysing anxiety attacks and delusional episodes. She was eventually hospitalised and subjected to the barbaric ‘convulsive therapy’ and anti-psychotic drug treatment that was thought necessary at that time for people with mental disorders. She was traumatised by this experience, and eventually sought refuge in the Mexican embassy in Lisbon. The whole of this ghastly period is recorded in her memoir Down Below.

She made the experience of all this distress the source of inspiration for many of her works – both in fiction and graphic art. This was not unlike her contemporary the artist Frieda Kahlo. In 1941 she married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc whom she had met at the embassy. Like many marriages contracted around that time, it was one of convenience, enabling them to escape Europe. They went to New York, travelled down to Mexico, and divorced two years later. She remained in Mexico City for the rest of her life.

Her life was one of domestic seclusion – although she did become something of a cultural celebrity in the capital city. She met the Franco-Russian writer Victor Serge who was also living there in exile at the time. Later she married the Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz with whom she had two sons, Pablo and Gabriel.

In the 1940s and 1950s her work became an interesting blend of her own fantasy and surrealism, Mexican folk lore and myth, and a growing sense of what we would now call ‘women’s liberation’. She wanted to explore the relationship of women’s bodies and sexuality with their psychological experiences of erotic life, of motherhood, and of domesticity.

She was completely unknown in Europe at that time, and remained so until she was ‘discovered’ in the early twenty-first century. But she exhibited in Mexico and had a certain following in New York. She had a close relationship with the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo, who also lived in Mexican exile in the same neighbourhood. They even wrote collaboratively and attended meetings held by the Russian occultists Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

In the 1960s she collaborated with other members of the Latin-American avant-garde such as the writer Octavio Paz and the film maker Luis Bunuel. She was also honoured with a major retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. During the latter decades of her life she turned increasingly to three-dimensional works, producing bronze sculptures of humans and animals, as well as figures that combined both. She died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of ninety-four. Her house in the Roma district has since been turned into a museum.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon UK
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon US

Down Below – Memoir – Amazon UK
Down Below – Memoir – Amazon US

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon UK
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon US

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Letters to Monica

March 4, 2015 by Roy Johnson

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

Philip Larkin first met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in the autumn of 1946 when they were both twenty-four. He was the newly appointed Assistant Librarian and she was a Lecturer in English. In 1950 he moved to Belfast, and then on to Hull, while she remained at Leicester. She started as a correspondent and friend, became his lover and confidante, and spent forty ears as his sometime muse and psychic nursemaid until his sudden death in 1985.

This is a selection from the almost two thousand letters he wrote to her – though he wrote double that number to his mother. Unfortunately, her side of the correspondence is embargoed in the Bodleian Library until 2035.

They were rather an oddly matched couple. He was shy, reserved, and socially very conservative. She was a flamboyant blonde who was given to wearing short skirts, fishnet tights (sometimes with holes) and high-heeled shoes. He was assiduous in his attitude to work (even though he didn’t like it): she on the other hand never published a word in her whole career as a university lecturer

The letters begin as Larkin, newly appointed as assistant librarian at Queens University Belfast, is seeking estimates for a privately printed edition of his poems. Given his later fame, this is a salutary lesson for any would-be writers. He also begins what was to become a long series of equivocations when setting up meetings with Monica.

They tested the temperature of the other’s enthusiasm from the tone and content of their letters. Yet his hesitation and contradictions regarding their planned assignations are amusingly reminiscent of Kafka. Timetables, routes, hotels, and dates are discussed in excruciating detail, potential excuses for a no-show are set up in advance, and penny-pinching attention to the cost are flagged up in a clear display of his ambivalence about the relationship.

Larkin’s complex romantic life is now quite well known, but what the letters reveal is very much a meeting of minds. They had similar literary tastes and similar isolationist tendencies – though the editor of this volume Anthony Thwaite puts it differently, saying that “e;they fed each other’s misery”e;.

Larkin comes across as breathtakingly pompous and arrogant when lecturing Monica on how she should modify her style of conversation – though it should be said that first-hand accounts report her as hectoring people in general, and paying no attention to what they said in reply – which were precisely his criticisms.

There are persistent complaints and self-criticism about his lack of productivity, and yet sadly thirty volumes of his personal diaries were destroyed after his death. The request was his own; it was enacted by Monica as his literary executor; and the journals were shredded in Hull library by his secretary.

There is an enormous amount of moaning, complaints about illnesses (real and imaginary), disgust at his own ineffectuality, and endless reasons for not getting married, which Monica was clearly expecting him to propose. Indecision and a stolid bachelor inertia dogged his every step. In one single letter he goes into a rage about the noise from a neighbour’s radio, then turns down the opportunity of renting a spacious flat because it would be too big and ‘No sound would ever have penetrated its walls’.

The year 1955 should have been a high point in his life: he had secured the job at Hull on a good salary (£1,500 pa) and the first volume of his poems was being published to some acclaim. Yet his letters are full of self-loathing and despair:

I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving [address] again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different than my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I am going to endure it, it’s all so frightful

This is the sort of volitional paralysis and neurasthenia (to say nothing of the hypochondria) which reinforces the comparison with Kafka – another literary bachelor who was riven by contradictions, moved from one set of rented lodgings to another, and agonized endlessly about his fear of marriage.

What makes the letters bearable and very entertaining amidst all the misery is their fluidity and inventiveness, his gossipy wit, adoption of comic personae, abrupt variations in register, his heterogeneous topics, and his cultivated intelligence.

Larkin is voracious in his reading and not at all snobbish in taste – everything from renaissance poetry to contemporary fiction. He championed Barbara Pym and helped to restore her reputation. His essential favourites are classics, and his enthusiastic notes on Bleak Housemake you feel like reading it again, as do his observations and deep feelings for Hardy’s poetry.

It’s easy to see why Monica was so exasperated by his failure to ‘commit’. When he was taken into hospital following a collapse, she rushed from Leicester to his bedside, yet he wouldn’t let her stay in his (empty) flat in case she read his diaries. And when she raised the question of money and inheritance, he claimed to have a phobia about making a will.

He makes hardly any effort to visit her – even though she lived only a few miles from his mother, who he visited regularly. Or he would ‘call in’ for just an hour on his way back from London. Even when he had two sabbatical terms as a fellow at All Souls Oxford, he found all sorts of reasons not to make the make the short journey up to Leicester, including not wishing to drive at night.

There is quite an excruciating series of letters in 1964 and 1965 where he tries to wish away her wounded feelings when she found out about his parallel affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in the Library at Hull. He admits his culpability, but doesn’t feel he can do anything about it, and admits he would be ‘shattered’ if she were to do the same from her independent base in Leicester. It’s perhaps as well that Monica never seems to have realised at the time that there was a ‘third woman’ with whom he shared sexual comforts – his matronly secretary Betty Mackereth.

Later in their tortured lives, the tensions between them were eased somewhat by the arrival of ill health. Monica fell downstairs, then afterwards developed shingles. Larkin took her into his house and looked after her, finally acknowledging that they were a ‘couple’. He made her his literary executor, then following his own sudden demise, Monica stayed living in the house until her own death in 2001.

He was an amazingly acute observer and a sound judge of character. One of Monica’s favourite students (and would-be swain) went on to become a lecturer at Manchester University, where he was renowned for his idleness. Larkin pins him down in a single sentence: “e;[he] will will get on up to a point – the point at which has to do some work”e;. This makes his sketch of F.R.Leavis (then at the height of his fame) all the more amusing:

Well, Leavis … what a ghastly little man! … one of the bores of the century, I’d say — and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. And what a bore. ‘I live on my nerves’, he told me .. I don’t wonder that Cambridge, or Downing, can’t stand him at any price … I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. No, a typical don, one who likes being a don … I’ve not met a sillier man for many a long day … I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book.

These are a very welcome addition to the successful volume Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, and they seem to cry out for a future collection in which Larkin’s letters are placed alongside those written in reply by Monica Jones. But we will have to be very patient: her correspondence is locked in the Bodleian Library for the next twenty years.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Letters to Monica, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 475, ISBN: 0571239102

Literacy and the Politics of Writing

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

This book examines some of the fundamental questions about writing. What is it? What is it for? How is it related to literacy? It’s also about the philosophy of information storage and transmission. A great deal of what Albertine Gaur has to say centres on the historic development of different writing systems. She shows how they emerged from numbering systems and pictographic records. She covers numeric as well as pictorial and non-linguistic forms of writing in a historical and cultural range which is simply breathtaking.

It’s a scholarly book, pitched at a fairly high intellectual level [well, I found it so] in which terms are left unexplained and you have to keep up with a compact and rapid manner of delivery. She admits that her particular approach of posing questions about the nature of writing raises problems rather than supplying answers, but in identifying gaps in our knowledge she challenges some widespread assumptions.

For instance, she raises a serious criticism of the UK’s current National Literacy Strategy based on what she sees as a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the phoneme – the supposed smallest possible unit in the sound system of any language.

Equally tenuous is the connection between language and writing. Speculation, for example, about how well (or how badly) the alphabet represents the English language is more or less spurious for the simple reason that the alphabet was never meant to write English in the first place. The present alphabet goes back some three thousand years via Etruscan and Roman forms of writing to a Greek alphabet which was, in turn, simply an adaptation of the Phoenician consonant script, to a time when the English language did not even exist.

The part of the book I found most interesting was the account of how contemporary writing systems (the Roman alphabet) developed historically from a common Proto-Semitic script. This leads into a consideration of why certain writing systems succeed (the rather difficult Chinese for instance) whereas others don’t. It usually comes down to politics.

Some people used to believe in a monogenesis theory of writing, rather like the monotheistic religious belief – one source, one author, one instant moment of creation. She comprehensively debunks this myth, but then very broadmindedly goes on to discuss examples of people who have actually invented scripts to fit spoken languages.

There are fascinating reflections which arise from asking such apparently simple but profound questions as ‘What is a book?’ The answers to this question, which involve the long transition from the scroll to the collection of separate pages called a codex reveals the origin of much of which we now take for granted: titles, tables of contents, pages, and page numbers.

It’s beautifully illustrated with pictures of rare texts, unusual scripts and printings, and examples of writing systems from all over the globe, Albertine Gaur was formerly head of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books at the British Library. It’s quite clear that she knows these objects intimately, and this book is her attempt to share her knowledge and enthusiasm for them. Anyone who is interested in the philosophy of writing or the book as a physical object will profit from the encounter.

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Albertine Gaur, Literacy and The Politics of Writing, Bristol: Intellect, 2000, pp.188, ISBN 1904705065

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Literary Criticism – a new history

September 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

Gary Day’s main argument in his impressive study Literary Criticism – a new history is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs. At one moment it emphasizes the text, and at the next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism.

He takes the history of both literature and literary criticism through the distinct phases of its historical development, starting with the classics, then looking successively at Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern phases. His emphasis on the whole is on English criticism, though it does not preclude an occasional consideration of other cultures.

His examination of criticism relating to the earlier periods has the instructive effect of condensing their ideas and ‘theory’ into digestible chunks. He points out that in the medieval period for instance there was no concept of either literature or criticism as we know them – only ‘commentary’ on sacred texts. The Greco-Roman classics for instance were interpreted as guides to (Christian) moral behaviour. The medieval period also gave rise to the concept of the auctor (author). It also saw, towards its end, the rise of the written vernacular. Latin was the language of learning, but as trade between nations increased there was more reason than ever for people to use and learn each other’s native language.

In the Renaissance period Day argues that a crucial issue was the Protestant-inspired translation of the Bible into English. This gave the common man both access to divine scripture and the right to its interpretation – previously only in the remit of the church itself. The introduction of printing and the establishment of a vernacular English that pushed out Latin and French as the lingua francas of official discourse led to the publication of books for readers’ pleasure. This in turn gave rise to a literature of the popular marketplace and a need to make distinctions between such products and a canon of revered classics. It is easy to see the point that Gary Day makes several times throughout this study – that many of the critical issues debated with such recent ferocity were evident in literary history centuries ago.

His chapter on the English Enlightenment draws interesting parallels between criticism and finance. If the intrinsic value of a paper five pound note was certainly not five pounds, because there was not a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, so the value of a work of literature could not be determined by the accuracy of its correspondence with some value in the real world.

There is a strong period of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century that Day attributes to a desire for order, proportion, and rule-based authority after the uncertainties created by the Civil War. However, he argues that it failed to take permanent root and only sprang back into life now and again during politically reactionary phases.

In his chapter on the Romantic period he argues that the cult of individualism, ‘sensibility’, and nature was a reaction to the industrial revolution which reduced man to a mere part in the economy of mass production. Thus the literary criticism that emerged emphasized the possibilities of individual response to and interpretation of a text. This tendency reached its apogee in the art for art’s sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century when all connections between art and moral improvement were finally denied completely.

When it comes to the twentieth century he understandably sees Freud, Max Plank and Picasso as exemplars of revolutionary thinking, though the literary critics he first considers are the very unfashionable Walter Orage and G.K. Chesterton. But in fact the main focus of interest in his final chapter is the establishment of English Studies in the UK university system – a surprising phenomenon both in its recency and the controversy that surrounded it.

Fortunately, he does finish by looking at three major figures critics who were influential from the mid-century onwards – I.A.Richards, William Empson, and F.R.Leavis. He explains their critical methods and their significance, and finally lets himself off the leash to take a few well-aimed swipes at Catherine Belsey, who is obviously his bete noir.

This is not simply gratuitous rival-bashing however, for one of Day’s habits that I found quite entertaining was his demonstrating links between debates held centuries ago with those of the last two or three decades – to show that there is very little that is totally new under the sun. And he is also much given to taking pot shots at the current academic culture of ‘skills’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have come to replace a serious interest in the subject of literature and literary criticism.

He has very little to say about contemporary forms of literary criticism which range from feminism, postcolonialism, post-Modernism, and queer theory – except to conclude somewhat radically that

the sheer variety should not distract us from one fundamental truth: that the demands of bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency are making the study of literature ever more prescriptive for students while the Research Assessment Exercise has distorted it for academics. Criticism is better off outside the academy.

This sort of writing could signal the beginnings of a long overdue and very welcome change in the practice of academic literary criticism.

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Gary Day, Literary Criticism: a new history, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.344, ISBN: 0748641424

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