John Lehmann Archives

poet, editor, publisher, biographer, memorist

John Lehmann (full name Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) was born in Buckinghamshire in 1907 into a wealthy family. His father was Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, an English writer and Liberal Party politician. His elder sisters were the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the actress Beatrix Lehmann.

John Lehmann was educated at the prestigious public school Eaton, and went on to study modern languages at Trinity College Cambridge, where he began writing poetry and forming gay relationships. Whilst at university he became a close friend of Julian Bell (Vanessa Bell’s son) which provided him with an introduction to the Bloomsbury Group.

His first collection of poetry A Garden Revisited (1931) was published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, with which he formed a close attachment. He brought his contacts with the new young generation of poets to the press. The result was the groundbreaking collection New Signatures (1932) which included work by William Empson, Julian Bell and Lehmann himself from Cambridge, plus W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis from Oxford.

He worked as an assistant-cum-manager at the Press (described in his amusing memoir Thrown to the Woolfs) until differences of opinion with Leonard over the policy of publishing young writers caused a temporary rift between them.

John Lehmann left Britain and worked as a journalist, travelled to the U.S.S.R. (as it was called at that time) and wrote poetry in Vienna from 1932 to 1936. He then returned to Britain to launch the journal New Writing. This published the work of his contemporaries Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, V.S. Pritchett, and Stephen Spender.

The magazine featured new writing from Europe and beyond mixed with photographic essays and examples of modern art, and it also included recent poetry. Its editorial line explicitly supported internationalism (especially the republicans in the Spanish Civil War) and it was politically ‘committed’ to the left at a time when the English establishment was dithering in the face of fascism.

It lasted for fourteen years, first under the aegis of the Bodley Head, then Lawrence and Wishart, before eventually being taken on by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. A cheaper version was launched as Penguin New Writing in 1939.

In 1938 Lehmann returned to favour with the Hogarth Press and joined it again as a full working partner, buying out Virginia Woolf’s fifty percent share in the company. He was an editor and general manager at a time when in addition to works by Virginia Woolf such as Between the Acts, A Haunted House, and The Death of the Moth, he oversaw the publication of works by Henry Green, George Orwell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

However, the partnership foundered again 1945. Lehmann wanted to introduce modern business practices, raising share capital, and employing publicists and agents. But Leonard had always run the press as a streamlined independent enterprise, with a minimum of overheads – a policy which had been enormously successful and had brought in considerable profits.

So Lehmann understandably left and in 1946 set up his own publishing company, John Lehmann Limited with his sister Rosamond. He published books by young poets Thom Gunn and Laurie Lee, as well as the celebrated cookery writer, Elizabeth David. He also edited the paperback series Penguin New Writing between 1946 and 1950. After the collapse of his own company in 1952 he took over at the London Magazine and edited until handing over to fellow poet and critic Alan Ross in 1961.

In the late 1960s and 1970s he was a frequent visitor on the American lecture circuit. He subsequently wrote biographies of Rupert Brooke, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf, as well as three volumes of autobiography. He also wrote about his gay relationships in the persona of a fictional character Jack Marlowe. The late confessional novel In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) offers an account of his promiscuous life in Berlin, Vienna, and London.

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

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

John Lehmann joined the Hogarth Press as a trainee manager in 1931 when it was in the full flush of its first success. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse had just been published, as well as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land and Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. This was to be the first of two periods of engagement with the Press, the second of which lasted until 1946. Thrown to the Woolfs his account of publishing and the literary world of the 1930’s is dominated by the figure of Leonard Woolf, whose own account of the Hogarth Press in his Autobiography confirms almost all of what Lehmann says – though they differed over issues of policy.

It’s a rather unglamorous world of working strict office hours in crowded basement rooms, with “a ramshackle lavatory, in which old Hogarth Press galley proofs were provided as toilet paper”. He was delighted to be mixing with some of the major figures of the modernist period, as well as the up-and-coming writers of the day. There are sketches of writers of the period with whom Lehmann dealt: Michael Roberts, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood, whom he introduced to the Press as the Great Hope of English Fiction (which people believed at the time).

He does his best to be fair to Leonard Woolf, and his portrait corresponds accurately to that which one gains from other accounts, including Woolf’s own:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

It’s quite obvious from his account that although he was being employed in commerce as a publisher’s assistant, to write adverts, promote sales, and check proofs, his heart was set on being a ‘poet’ himself. The tensions he felt with Leonard Woolf became more serious, and within two years of securing what he at first thought of as his dream job, he gave in his notice and left under a very dark cloud.

He then gives an account of his wanderings in central Europe, inspired by Rilke’s notion that “In order to write a single verse, one must see many cities” (not having read Emily Dickinson, it would seem). Much of this part of the story revolves around Christopher Isherwood and Lehmann’s efforts in publishing the collection New Writing. But in 1938, having made up with the Woolfs, he bought out Virginia’s share of the Press and rejoined it as manager and full partner.

The theme then becomes ‘How does one run a publishing company during a war?’. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, despite being bombed out of its premises in Mecklenburgh Square, and despite having to transfer the Press and its business to Letchworth, sales rose, because of general shortages:

Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between them grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

When the final split between them came about, Leonard solved the problem by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so as well as sharing a wife, they became business partners.

John Lehmann eventually went on to found his own publishing company, and the Hogarth Press was absorbed into Chatto and Windus on Leonard’s death in 1969. This is an interesting account of their joint efforts – partisan, but reasonable and humanely argued.

For literary historians it’s an interesting account of English culture and letters in the 1930s and the war years. And it’s also a fascinating glimpse into the world of commercial publishing. Anyone who wants to make judgments about the rights and wrongs in the disputes between the principals should also read Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography.

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John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp.164, ISBN 0030521912

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John Lehmann biography

poet, editor, publisher, biographer, memorist

Thrown to the Woolfs

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

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