Kate Macdonald

Comic books and Spider-Woman: a little rant

I heard an episode of the Double X Gabfest podcast the other day in which Noreen Malone of New York Magazine claimed that superhero movies were only made for teenage boys, or nerdy men, and that women didn’t go to see them. (Even though she lives in Brooklyn! That just seems improbable.) Superhero movies are for everyone, and I for one have never stopped loving them.

On the other hand, I’ve lost touch with superhero comics, because the flood of titles is too bewildering to make sense of in a crowded basement comic-book shop full of teenage boys and aggravating booming-voiced hipster idiots bent on impressing their rolling-eyes female companion with their dudey-frood bearded sneery nonsense about ‘all that Wonder Woman shit’ (I paraphrase). I visit Forbidden Planet periodically to browse the shelves but rarely buy comics, because most of their cover art all looks much as it did when I sold the things in Aberdeen’s first comic-book shop in the 1980s.

spider-woman-oldlook I’m also put off by the incessantly pneumatic mammary glands that have been de rigueur for comic book cover art since the 1950s, when the Marvel artists saw Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell on screen and thought, ‘that’ll bring the boys in’. In that respect, yes; most comic-books are drawn for those attracted by flimsily-covered bouncing female secondary sexual characteristics. The rest of us: BORED. Look at the old 1972 Spider-Woman costume, which is basically a naked woman in body paint. It makes me irritated, especially as it was drawn by a woman, whose brief must have been ‘breasts’, not ‘action hero’. Don’t these artists realise how much cantilevering these female superhero costumes must need to support so much weight? And how impossible it must be to run, swing, thwack, rebound, and leap with a double weight of monstrously outsized cannon-balls suspended from the chest by straining muscles and spandex? Asking for logic in a superhero world feels pointless, like wondering how Banner finds his trousers again when the green guy disappears.

spidey 4 So, if the cover art doesn’t pull me in, the story doesn’t stand a chance. I look for the clear-line style that Hergé invented, which continued all the way to the Hernandez Brothers with Love and Rockets, and in the new Spider-Woman series. I love what Javier Rodriguez and Veronica Fish do with the new(ish) Spider-Woman universe to make it clean, frightening, compelling and focused. I also love Spider-Woman’s new look, originally designed by Kris Anka: neat, practical, washable, undistracting, and unsexualised. Obviously she fills it with curves, but they’re in proportion, there’s nothing to get in the way of vigorous, physical crime-fighting activities, or swinging from skyscrapers.

spidey-2 The uniform also comes in a maternity version, because Jessica Drew – for it is she – is a single mother crime-fighting superhero. I’ve written about her here and here on Vulpes Libris. Go take a look. And then write to Kevin Feige and ask him when Spider-Woman can join the Avengers on screen.

Penguin New Writing: Autumn 1946

New Writing, John Lehmann’s influential British literary magazine, first appeared in 1936, and fostered politically Left writers and artists. It stopped publication in 1950, with issue 40, just as Tennessee Williams and John Wain (for example) joined the contributors. I found issues 27 to 40 in an Oxfam shop, and bought them for a fiver. I’ll be reviewing each issue each week: you’ll find links to the other issue reviews at the end.

There’s an unsettling mood of repressed sexuality emanating from this issue’s contents, as if the lid was being held down, but not quite tight enough. William Sansom’s ‘Murder’ is a meditation on letting your imagination get carried away with what the chimney sweep is doing to your wife behind closed doors while you’re making a mess of repainting a chair in the next-door room. The wife is a servant or a possession in all but name, and can only be imagined sexually.

Neal suddenly felt the presence of the next-wall room, of its separation, of the two people enclosed in it alone: and he felt a sense of evil, of the perpetration of things not right. But – what exactly could not be right? Something against his orders? … Nonsense … he gave no orders … Then something opposed to his views of behaviour … again, what? He had few such views, except on some violences, some extreme familiarities. Such as Elsa flirting with the sweep?

Such an unpleasantly possessive narrative character makes this a compelling story, if only because I want to root for the sweep.

Patrick Greer’s ‘The Woman and the Dog’ is another story set (see issues 27 and 28) in godforsaken agricultural struggle, populated by unsuitable unhappy people. Townies shouldn’t farm because they’ll only make a mess of it, and the younger women can only think miserably of the men who ignore them. Older women are simply horrible: where did such a mood of hatred and failure come from? Did no-one come to farming and enjoy it, after the war?

John Ward’s ‘Ill Wind’ continues to park the woman in the nurturing, sexualised role, but at least she’s given a robust voice and thoughts that indicate an independent spirit. Class consciousness among Lake District hikers, and an authentic echo of the war that shocks like an unexploded bomb.

In the criticism section, Julian Maclaren-Ross’s regular survey article tackles ‘British feature films’ with impressively strong knowledge of the genre that also ensures that we know what a highbrow he is. He fervently praises Brief Encounter as a triumph for Noel Coward, and very welcome after his ‘glorification of poker-faced naval captains and middle-class stolidity’.

A long article on D H Lawrence, and an even longer one of Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee are followed by an extraordinarily long commentary by Helen Gardner on the Four Quartets. This needs the poems in front of you to be properly appreciated, but Gardner was a practised teacher of the sublime to the under-educated, and this is probably the most accessible essay on T S Eliot I have ever read.

The war creeps in again with beautiful lithographs or pen-and-ink works by Edward Bawden and Anthony Gross.

Angus McBean‘s photographs of Peter Brook’s production of Love Labour’s Lost sit beside a melodramatic scene from J B Priestley: British theatre of the period.

James Stern’s ‘A Peaceful Place’ is narrated by an American working in immediate post-war Germany, who comes across a US Army war cemetery in the middle of a bombed forest near Nurnberg. The grass is impeccably mowed, the white headstones are militarily arranged in an aesthetically satisfying way, and the custodian keeps his tools in an old German sportsplatz. But the inhabitants of the graveyard are not the victims of battles: there are other causes of death for the Americans trapped in Europe for three long years.

After all this nervous dark trauma of a post-war world, I read Jocelyn Brooke‘s story ‘The blanket’ expecting horrors. Would the roaming servicemen brutalise the Italian children while the padrone was at the fields? Would the faunlike eldest son avenge his mother’s indignity, or would the soldiers lose their sense of propriety or good sense, and take more than they could drink, or pay for? Would the sergeant throw them in clink for crawling back to camp blind-drunk? Would anyone notice the theft of an army blanket? Could anything worse than these things happen?

Other issue reviews:

Issue 27

Issue 28

Laura Riding’s Progress of Stories

Here’s a conversation I had with Brad of The Neglected Books Page, about Laura Riding’s short story collection Progress of Stories (1935). This American author is most well-known for her marriage to the poet Robert Graves, and for her own poetry.

KM: I didn’t like them. Well, I did like quite a lot about quite a lot of them, but her style did not work for me. The book was republished with an additional 13 stories in 1994, with not one but two prefaces by the author, both largely incomprehensible. And that’s the problem; you have to really buy into Riding’s reputation and oeuvre to enjoy these stories. They are modernist, surrealist fairy tales, written in a flat, disassociated style that hides wonders and makes the remarkable ordinary. Leonora Carrington did something similar with her collection The Hearing Trumpet (1960), but her prose is magnetic. I didn’t find that reading Riding. Her style is mannered and determined to keep the reader off-balance. At least, that’s what I thought.

BB: Like you, I have mixed feelings about this book. There are a handful of stories that I consider just stunning in their refusal to be like anything else I’ve ever read (I must confess that I’ve not read Leonora Carrington’s stories). Certainly there is that deliberately abstract and absurdist approach that we all know from Kafka, where a man transformed into a cockroach overnight is taken at face value. But unlike Kafka, Borges, and others, Riding has no problem inserting herself into the story, commenting upon the narrative, at times almost poking at it like some odd specimen she’s examining with her magnifying glass.

I’m thinking in particular of the long story, ‘Reality comes to Port Huntlady’, where she interrupts her narrative with such asides as:

Exactly what the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady was, then, is a matter standing in the way of your ultimate enjoyment of this story as a thing of your own. It is—how shall we say—the pious tediousness of the author, who, in telling a story, must always observe the fiction that to tell a story is to persuade people of something entirely true, or publicly actual; this side of a story is called its verisimilitude.

It is, of course, obvious that to tell a story is to persuade people of something almost false. We are all aware that there is no such place as Port Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case. And this is why some matters secondary to the story must be brought in, such as the business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady, to make the story seem true as well as, quite frankly, a story.

I find these asides rather marvelous and funny. On the one hand, Riding is both reminding us that we are engaged in an illusion – reading about these characters in this strange town called Port Huntlady – and shattering that illusion. It’s a bit like telling yourself you are speaking while you are speaking: many people find this quite disconcerting, sometimes so much that they can’t go on speaking. On the other hand, it’s also in the fine tradition of Sterne in Tristram Shandy, where the author provides a running criticism of his own work.

The many prefaces and other commentaries by Riding that clutter up the collection are truly awful, though – or perhaps I am insufficiently abstract in my reasoning to reach whatever ethereal plane she was operating on. I found, however, by coincidence, something she wrote in the mid-1950s for her entry in Twentieth Century Authors that may offer a clue to what she was trying – and help explain why it’s unlikely that it would make sense to anyone but herself:

We did not fully understand the character of the mental operation required for definitions of the kind we wished to make until we perceived that we must liberate our minds entirely from the confused associations of usage in which the meanings of words are entangled – and that, for us, the act of definition must involve a total reconstituting of words’ meanings. Much of our work has been done upon our minds, rather upon words directly: and we have proceeded very slowly, in consequence.

I would imagine that this would be a particularly difficult challenge when one has chosen writing as one’s profession.

Did you manage to extract any sense from the prefaces or did you skip them entirely, as I quickly decided to?

KM: I could not be bothered after the fifth page of garbled nonsense in the first preface. It didn’t tell me anything other than she had a lot of mixed feelings about the process and intent of writing, but neither preface was interesting enough to try to untangle.

I have to say that I don’t share your amusement at ‘Reality comes to Port Huntlady’: that was the first story I gave up on. I quite liked the fable about Miss Banquett creating the world in her own image, but it palled. I liked ‘Socialist pleasures’ a lot, and found ‘Schoolgirls’ very interesting, but less enjoyable. ‘Three times round’, about the extraordinary life of Lotus which the narrative voice is deathly bored by, is a story you have to read by effort of will.

It’s Riding’s narrative style that kills the pleasure for me. It’s determined to BE stylised, and uninterested in the fiction. Aggravating and irritating, saved from complete annoyance by the brilliance of the subjects and small things slipped in unexpectedly, like fireworks during a boring play at the theatre. So the effect is to make the reader sit up and ask ‘Wait, what was that?’, and then IGNORE the reader’s needs. It’s a contemptuous way to tell stories.

Brad will be posting a more detailed post on Progress of Stories sometime next week. I don’t have anything left to say!

Penguin New Writing 28: Summer 1946

The stories in this issue of John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing are pretty grim, but the photographs and artwork lighten the mood. In his introduction Lehmann talks about the ‘young men and women who for six years had lived on dreams of devoting their time and energies to writing … I would take a bet that most of them have the notes for a war book or an escape book in their pockets‘. This issue is drenched in wartime experiences interpreted by male writers: no women authors were chosen, unless they are some of the poets published here under their initials, and only one woman artist. Women are the subjects, however, of most of the short stories: sexualised, sex-obsessed or objects for sexual transaction. It’s depressing, as I said.

Nigel Heseltine’s ‘Break away if you can’ is a horrible and powerful story about a not-so-young woman struggling to get away from her mother’s Welsh tenant farm, existing on dreams of having once been kissed, before the war began. The girl’s experience is bitter, the setting and other characters are uniformly hopeless and trapped, the social codes are relentless, and it reads as a wallow in the awfulness of being a girl left behind by life because she is denied the chances that men have and take, and oppressed by the emotional demands of older women. It is more or less sympathetic, but also sub-Lawrentian, and somehow also gives the impression of taking Cold Comfort Farm seriously. If a woman had written this it would be less pompous and good deal more practical.

Oliver Messel’s ‘Design for the film Caesar and Cleopatra’: simply gorgeous.

Oliver Walker’s ‘Kaffir truck’ is the story of the end of Robert Ncgobo’s life, when he goes to Pretoria to meet his brother who has a job for him. He doesn’t have the right pass, is thrown in jail, and dies at the hands of a hungover prison guard. Nonetheless, this is a beautiful story, uplifting and resolute in the face of South African apartheid. Walker must have been one of the first novelists to write about apartheid as a political system of repression from the perspective of black Africans: it succeeds on every level.

William Chappell’s ‘The Sleeping Beauty‘ is a summary of all that is wrong and right with the way dance is taught and executed in Britain by one of the leading dancers and (later) a designer and director of British ballet. ‘No-one admired Markova more than I.’ It’s accompanied by some glorious photographs of Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann and other cast members performing in The Sleeping Beauty.

Clifford Hornby’s ‘The Tin Box’ tells of an encounter between a French prostitute in London and a man who has survived a Japanese internment camp. He tells her what has happened to him, and why he was searching on the pavement for the tin box he’d thought he’d seen, and why it was so important for him to be scavenging the streets. The narrative is desperate, and heartbreaking. I would have guessed that this author would be the one most likely to have gone on to greater things after this issue, though he seems to have become a film director rather than a novelist.

Denny Mackintosh in collaboration with Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Eel and the Whiskers’. All my Mitchison books are in another country so I can’t check up on this story, but she and Denny Mackintosh were close friends, possibly occasional lovers, and lived in Carradale where Naomi and her husband Dick Mitchison were the owners of the ‘Big House’ of the estate. Denny was a fisherman and occasional actor, and a powerful influence on Naomi’s understanding of the Highland culture and history she had reclaimed (her father was a Haldane) on moving to Carradale from London in 1939. This story is told in direct speech, about the night fishing fleet going out after herring with an unwanted passenger whose request to accompany them they feel they can’t refuse out of politeness. The story is about town-rural relations, as well as the contrast between summer seaside visitors and working fishermen. There is an eel, and the whiskers are drawn on in kettle-black while the visitor is asleep.

Other issues reviewed:

issue 27

Pilgrim Story

Here’s a bit of Second World War literary and theatrical history I had no idea existed. T S Eliot’s main theatrical collaborator was the actor and director E Martin Browne, who was the first to produce Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of Thomas à Becket, and The Family Reunion (1939) with Michael Redgrave in the leading role. Browne and Eliot worked together for twenty years, with Browne being most famous for his revival of ‘poetic drama’, with a strongly religious leaning.

During the Second World War Browne and his wife, the actress and playwright Henzie Raeburn, led a touring company called the Pilgrim Players around Britain, presenting religious plays in village halls and pubs. Henzie’s book about those years, Pilgrim Story (1945), is the most unusual account of war work I’ve ever read, so soused is it in the theatrical culture of the day, exuding the spirit of Larry Olivier in the blackout. Henzie wrote this memoir after the war was over, but the Pilgrim Players continued to tour until 1948, while Henzie seems to have tried out screen acting, in film and, later on, TV.

The actors were paid very little on the road (each member of the company was paid the same democratic amount, with an emergency fund for essentials like a new warm coat). Henzie’s descriptions of their war work are coloured by green-room earnestness, struggles with rations, eccentric land-ladies and unreliable cars, and the company’s practical Christianity. This seems to be a kind of High Anglican staring into the middle distance while intoning, draped in elegant austerity curtaining to denote medieval costumes.

Henzie’s narrative voice is rather grand, as was the norm for her profession (the kitchen sink style didn’t become mainstream drama until the 1950s). She and Browne clearly had some private income, as their sons stayed at school at Marlborough College while they worked their way up and down the UK on the same basic wage as their Pilgrim Players colleagues. Their social background offered compensations while on the road, such as being able to stay in many comfortable houses of ‘old friends’ when the company was passing through the area, rather than roughing it in horrible lodgings. There are so many of these ‘lovely’, ‘charming’ visits in the memoir as to give the impression that either the tour was designed from the Brownes’ address-book, to follow a route that ensured them good digs from their personal circle, or that many less happy visits have been left out of the narrative. The book has an overwhelming air of a patriotic theatrical cocktail party, though there is also a great deal about the work of rehearsals and devising props and costumes from basically nothing, made harder than usual while that ‘nothing’ was rationed.

P1010455 — Making up, and a company meeting

This stiff upper lip suggests fairly strongly the Brownes’ natural conservatism. The theatre critic Peter Billington calls them reactionary and conservative, as no doubt they were. Small remarks by Henzie, such as having to overcome the group’s ’mixed political views’, reinforces this impression. The endeavour of the Pilgrim Players, as an artistic experiment to fulfill a genuine social need and to contribute to the war effort by raising morale, is admirable, but I distrust the clipped establishment narration that filters out a lot of the experience. I’m also left puzzled by the assumption that the reader knows all about the Pilgrim Players from the outset, and the economics of a travelling theatrical company: maybe contemporary readers did, but this is such an unusual example of travelling theatre, I wish Henzie had felt able to explain how wartime rationing and shortages worked with a shoestring budget.

An important secondary theme of this memoir shows rural and isolated communities enduring the war under privation, desperate for distraction. It dovetails neatly onto the middlebrow-woman-at-war memoirs that were so popular a few years ago. Those memoirs usually have the leading character staying in one place because it was simply too difficult to move around wartime Britain, what with travel permits and petrol rationing and restricted areas. This memoir shows us what it was like to negotiate all those hurdles, even with the goodwill of the authorities. Henzie makes sure we know – and with good reason – when the County Commissioner or other regional bigwig bestows approval on the Pilgrim Players for keeping his villages and barracks entertained and educated by hearty, solid Christian theatre that no-one could get upset by. The underlying inference, that isolated communities needed such distraction badly, is under-explored, and begs the question of what might happen if order was not maintained, if local orders were not obeyed.

Henzie and E Martin Browne, Pilgrim Story (London: Frederick Muller, 1945)

Wonder Woman, screenplay by John Buchan

JL_Wonder_Woman I saw Wonder Woman last night, and have things on my mind (there will be SPOILERS if you read on). There were only seven people in the cinema (Tuesday night, 17.40 showing, my own private cinema), but by god the Dolby surround was loud, we needed more bodies to absorb the boom.

The Themiscyra parts were epic and idyllic, but the Amazon civilisation seemed only to consist of a warrior elite and ruling class: where were the farmers? stonemasons? armourers? weavers? bakers? brewers? (Though, no-one is actually seen eating or drinking: did they not need sustenance?) They may have been self-sufficient for most things (silk-worms?) but where did they get the twelve books that told Diana all she wanted to know about sex? Written on the island? There was a suggestion that some applicants for the soldiery might be rejected if not good enough, but we weren’t seeing much more than a Bronze Age hierarchy. Fantastic workmanship from their leather-working tradition, by the way.

The Amazons fighting, training, performing their military exercises were epic. I read a snatch of an Entertainment Weekly article about how the Amazons were played by real-life police officers, soldiers, stuntwomen, athletes and so on, and how much fun they had training to be an elite fighting force. It shows: those women were magnificent, and totally believable.

Then Steve Trevor crashes into the sea, followed quickly by the Germans in hot pursuit. What sea, exactly, is Themiscyra in? I’m happy to accept that it’s protected by a gods-given dome of opacity that lets the sunlight in to create a Mediterranean climate, so if Steve stole the notebook from a location in the Ottoman Empire (I will come back to geography), and then flew away with it in a stolen plane (with a fuel range of what?), it’s the Adriatic. (Updated after correction in the comments, below.)

At this point Reason raises her head and says ‘It’s a story. Diana is a god. She’s fighting Ares. Does it matter where the bloody plane crashed?’. Yes. Yes, it does. The film is set in an alternative history of the world, so gods and mortals can walk the earth together. But if the First World War is part of that alternative history, with all its domestic detail and the social codes of the period (there will be much more on this), then that’s a part of alt hist that needs grounding, to be attached to the mythic elements. And it’s fuzzed over.

Diana and Steve leave Themiscyra (can she ever go back? options for sequels abound) and next morning are sailing up the Thames underneath London Bridge, because they ‘caught a ride’. If the Adriatic is where they started sailing, it would take DAYS to get to the Thames. It’s also not explained from whom they ‘caught’ (horrible anachronistic vocab) a ride: or whether the fishermen boggled at seeing an American in German uniform and a black-cloaked woman in leather armour on a Greek ship in their waters.

Diana is met by a helpful woman (the very funny and tonally perfect Lucy Davis) who shows her how to buy suitable clothes for 1918 England. Very good scene, but why did no-one in the shop notice, laugh, object, or gather in crowds to see this strange woman with a sword? Also, women of the class that Diana is placed in did not try on clothes openly in public view. Her eventual outfit is pretty good, on the whole, as an approximation of what might be worn at the time, though the collar would not have been open, but buttoned high. Her glasses are wrong (‘you’re … too distracting’), but they’re soon to be crushed in a fight.

Diana arrives at a high-level military meeting, and goes into the room as if by right, which is fine characterisation, but astonishing: soldiers would have been on duty, far more people would have prevented her getting in. I don’t know what rank Steve was (Captain?) but he is too low on the military ranking to have attended meetings with generals, let alone be allowed to walk about the room berating them. I did like the repeated line ‘There’s a WOMAN in the room’, but this was one of the few historically plausible details.

At this point I was powerfully reminded of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), in which the lone hero addresses the military bigwigs about his secret mission. Bells began to ring. When Steve and Diana gather a group of trusted colleagues to go on a secret mission behind the Front, I was reminded of John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle (1916), in which exactly this happens, German disguises and all, AND Buchan’s heroes foregather in Constantinople and have much to do with the forces of the Ottoman Empire. Their mission is to find the secret German laboratory that is creating a deadly poison gas: see John Buchan’s novel Mr Standfast (1919), in which EXACTLY the same plot point, deployed on the eve of the Armistice, creates the thrilling end to that excellent novel of British and American espionage. Wonder Woman‘s script-writers clearly knew their Buchan, usefully long out of copyright, but it’s quite astonishing that no-one else has noticed. Perhaps I can help writing the next First World War action thriller.

Geography and linguistics time. Diana is taken to a Flemish part of the Western Front, and speaks perfect Flemish to a distressed civilian in the trenches (no civilians would have been allowed anywhere near the trenches, or would have been blown up trying to get there). She has already shown off her language skills, but this was very pleasing: a war film that acknowledges geographic reality, that the Western Front was not all francophone. The photographer in the village has a French accent: again, perfectly plausible, the Belgian professional and upper classes used French habitually. But the Germans have thick German accents when they’re speaking to themselves, whereas the Flemish speak Flemish when they’re in their own village. Where’s the consistency there?

ww3.0 By this time, as Steve and Diana and friends weave their way through the trenches, I’m beginning to wonder whether, as a god, Diana simply isn’t noticeable by mortals, whether she assumes invisibility. Otherwise why is no-one groping or whistling at her, why aren’t officers and sentries forcing her back to the supply lines, and how did they get to the trenches in the first place? One does not simply walk into Passchendaele. And then she magically appears in full leather short-skirted kit (where did the nice grey clothes go?) and climbs the ladder over the top into No-Man’s Land (good reasoning, Eowyn). It’s magnificent, the most splendidly heroic part of the film, but really? She isn’t ripped apart by massed machine-gun fire and mortars because she’s got a shield? Reason throws up her hands and stalks away.

The summit, the pre-Armistice gala thing that gets Diana into a blue evening dress with the sword shoved down the back of the dress like an ornate jewel: where did that come from? And why were women allowed so near the Front? German women in stealable frocks too? What part of Belgium are we now in, close enough to allow German civilians to arrive in evening clothes, all the way from, ooh, let’s say Aachen to Antwerp, to attend a party, in a war zone?

Other historical niggles: I was dubious about the four-engined bomber that Steve flies at the end, because I thought they only came in during the Second World War, but I’ve been corrected in the comments, below. Diana is given an ice-cream on the station, in a cone, from a station vendor. The ice-cream cone was in existence at the time, but ices were generally taken in glasses and eaten with spoons, ladies didn’t eat food in public while walking along, and women always wore hats in public too. When Diana loses hers she doesn’t bother with a replacement, and consequently breaks a major sartorial rule in society for that time. Even girls wore hats in public, if they had them.

However, Diana is a god, she’s fighting a god (David Thewlis’ ‘tache is perfect for the period, a superb Adolfian nod to the further future, but looks totally stupid on a Transformer-like Greek god), and none of this matters. It’s a film, it’s a fabulous fantastical creation, Patty Jenkins deserves many more film projects, and I’m almost tempted to see that Superman Batman film that everyone hated so I can see more of Gal Gadot, who is the best thing in Wonder Woman by light years. She is the most well-rounded authentic superhero character in cinema for years, certainly the best female hero since Imperator Furiosa. Go see it.

Penguin New Writing 27: Spring 1946

Issue 27 was the first issue to be published after the Second World War. The design was changed: new format, new typography, new paper, new picture-cover, new colour inset. Lehmann wrote a short but exuberant Foreword celebrating the magazine’s survival, and welcoming old and new contributors and readers. He is particularly nice about contributors’ patience, reliability and loyalty, and he is grateful to the readers who write to tell him what they liked and didn’t like. And there is a joyous outpouring of snark:

A special bouquet must go to the military gentleman (retired) who burnt us in his back garden in 1941 as German propaganda; to the German censor who refused us entry into the POW camps as Bolshevist propaganda; and to the unknown gentleman on the ‘bus who said we were the best British propaganda. Nor can we omit Mr James Agate, who obliges so unfailingly by finding us too highbrow for him, or Miss Olivia Manning of Jerusalem , who, like our little spaniel bitch Carlotta, gets her teeth into us whenever she finds us lying about.

James Agate had been a leading literary and theatrical critic for the daily and weekly press since the 1920s, so was a fixture on the scene that Lehmann couldn’t do anything about. I admire tremendously (but do not condone) the way Lehmann innocently puts ‘bitch’ and ‘Miss Olivia Manning’ into the same sentence, almost the same line.

You can see from the contents page that a great deal of the material was published in New Writing for the first time in the UK. Some were absolute standouts for me.

‘How Claeys died’, William Sansom’s dark story of an oblivious Belgian civilian touring post-war Germany, showing off his language skills. One of the many pieces in this issue that dwell on the aftermath of the war as a test of endurance, and festering tension.

‘Second-Lieutenant Lewis’, J Maclaren-Ross’s account of meeting Alun Lewis in camp, and how they maintained their friendship as writers and civilised men despite the military apparatus that regarded them with deep suspicion, since they continually broke the rules on inter-rank fraternisation.

‘Life Line’, by Jim Phelan – a remarkable Irish writer who lived a nomadic ‘tramping’ life – is a compelling but slight story, ostensibly about turf-cutting in an Irish peat bog, but is also about paternal expectations, the options for an adolescent’s escape, and the difference one child can make to a family’s economic survival.

‘Radio Critic’ reviews recent radio and media gossip from the past 6 months, and is an excellent corollary to other contemporary radio criticism, in The Listener and in Time and Tide, for example, if you’re interested in such things.

Osbert Sitwell’s long essay on Wilfred Owen is tremendous, and very Sitwellian: a rare resource for Owen scholars that apparently isn’t easy to find. I can send a pdf scan if you want it.

Roger Furse’s drawings, of ‘Newcastle Geordie’ in a sailor’s uniform, and ‘The Admiral’s Walk HMS Agincourt’: the detail of the crazy twisted staircase, the massive anchor chain and the lifeboat suspended from spindly metal arms remind me of illustrations by Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan was also published in 1946).

Sculptures by Gordon Herickx. On looking him up I see that he taught at Walsall School of Art, destroyed any of his work he considered imperfect, died the day after the opening of his first solo show, and that he was put into a poem by Louis MacNeice. There’s a LOT of scope for a thoroughly dreary masculine middlebrow novel there.

John Melville’s portrait of Henry Reed, one of the very few British poets of the war to be regularly anthologised. His ‘The naming of parts’ from Lessons of the War is a superb satire on military education and killing.

John Hampson’s Movements in the Underground 1: this is the first of a two part study on books and authors that your mother wouldn’t like, from Oscar Wilde onwards. Hampson was the author of Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931), one of a group of Birmingham artists and writers (see also Melville and Herickx) who depicted working-class life. This survey is revealing evidence of what was considered socially and morally contentious in the 1940s, and why. Many interesting titles for the curious to research in the privacy of their own browser.

‘My right leg was Germany’ by Bernard Evslin is a compelling short story from a hospital ward full of amputees. It’s an early extract from a novel then in progress by this American author, who is now best known as a playwright and screenwriter, largely told in dialogue or first-person narrative. I see Emmet hitch himself out of bed and hump toward the latrine. He always manages to get out of the ward when Carruthers’ dressing is to be changed.

‘All this is ended’ by Norman Swallow is his first short story, an account of the obliteration of the battalion, told with a shocking combination of immediacy and neutrality, moving in an unsettling way from personal stories to impersonal reportage. Swallow became a leading documentary film-maker and editor for the BBC.

There isn’t much representation of women in this issue (I didn’t like the Farjeon story so didn’t mention it), so I’ll be keeping an eye on that, as well as looking for how the war maintained a presence in the magazine as it drew further away in time.

Other issues reviewed:

issue 28

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