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.
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:
I was in two minds about this book all the way through, and I’m still unclear how I feel about it. It’s certainly compelling, but it is three stories bundled into one narrative, and sold under the bookshelf-friendly title of yet another memoir from the Sackville-West / Nicolson dynasty. (The full title, A House Full of Daughters. Seven Generations. One Extraordinary Family rather forces this aspect on the reader.) It uses the Nicolson surname to suggest that the author is a literary personality (this memoir is her fourth publication) who wants her life to be interesting to the public, like that of her father Nigel Nicolson, the former Member of Parliament and co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and possibly also of her brother Adam Nicolson the historian, about whose books I have written 
These ‘bargains’ are hardly a new phenomenon: women living in a patriarchy have always had to bargain with their bodies and domestic service to make their lives work out as best they can. For this memoir, access to surviving documentation is the real value (though I’d like to know where Nicolson found the intimate thoughts and feelings of her otherwise totally obscure Spanish great-great-great grandmother). The very private family documents that Nicolson quotes from, for example, that reveal the details of her great-grandparents’ exuberant sex life, are indeed a privilege to read, because Nicolson (with her brother) is the administrator of the estate. By using her access to reveal more of the Sackville-West / Nicolson story, Juliet Nicolson does an excellent job of conveying the human predicament of an Edwardian first-time mother determined never to be pregnant again, and of the ‘sexual desertion’ of the young husband suddenly denied access to his wife in every way.
The last story is the very personal one of Juliet Nicolson’s life to date, and dwells on her loving relationship with her father (who seems to have manipulated her just as he did her mother) and her rejection of her mother in favour of the Sissinghurst connection. It is heartfelt, and not comfortable reading. I am also uncomfortable with the way Nicolson joins her own life’s details to the historically documented and well-published accounts of her forebears’ lives, since one will automatically expect comparable accomplishments and achievements, not just a connection by birth. But Nicolson does not inform us about any of her own writing, we hear almost nothing about her professional life, and far too much about her emotional travails, which have meaning only for her personal circle.
I posted a double review of Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies 
I found these four short novels with a squeal of triumph in an Aberdeen second-hand bookshop, and bought them for £3. That’s right: the four books that are one of Garner’s greatest creative accomplishments, in a pristine box set, for barely more than they cost the original buyer in the late 1970s. I could barely contain my excitement, and gobbled all four stories over the next two evenings.
Joseph is Mary’s son, and she is the stout-hearted daughter of Robert, the stone mason of The Stone Book. She climbs a ladder all the way to the top of Saint Philip’s steeple, carrying her father’s baggin in a knotted cloth between her teeth. Once she’s got over the dizziness she’s quite happy, and climbs the weathercock to be whizzed round and round by her delighted father. She wants to learn to read, but the squire doesn’t like his kitchen-maids to read, so Robert tools and knaps her a prayer-book from green flint, with a fossil fern on the back. There is also one more wonder in the story, that only Mary can see: she’s the bravest of all the characters in this quartet.
We go back in time to uncover that awkward bit between the fields, in The Aimer Gate, in which young Robert is put to work to move the stones and rubble by his uncle Charlie, back from France on leave in the First World War. Charlie is a sniper, his leave nearly up, and he has the shadow of death around him. Faddock Allman is the legless Boer War veteran now breaking stones in the road, sitting in his trolley. Charlie treats Faddock kindly, and with respect, one soldier to another. Faddock was the boy who threw stones through his own cottage window when he was working for the team who broke it up for the vicar’s wife’s garden wall, which is why Robert’s father William won’t speak to him. The ruins of the Allmans’ cottage make the ridge in the field boundary that smashes the unwary sledges, and will blunt the scythes of Charlie and the Leah brothers if young Robert doesn’t clear it out. Charlie’s last job is to shoot the rabbits and other creatures escaping from the field portion ever shrinking beneath the scythes. His sniping skill is his route out of farming, and stonework, and metal crafting, but his own plans may include something more drastic than that.
There’s a photograph of the Garners in First Light, with Joseph and Charlie and Mary and old Robert. We don’t really need to know that all the stories are true, or near enough. They are marvellous. Harry Lupton, again in First Light, said it best: ‘They are of such a distilled precision, they are so layered, so finely observed, so pregnant with what lies under their surfaces’. They wear like stone, with stories in every layer.
This time in the 
This is such an engrossing novel because it reads as if history is just unrolling in front of you. In my day job I’ve been using 
In another episode of unexpected emotional pleasure, Sir Ralph the priest goes in search of a hawk (since all medieval priests may fly a hawk as a symbol of their gentility). He meets the recently widowed Dame of Brocton who wants to read him the Lay of Mamillion, which her young husband, recently dead, had composed. This is Sir Ralph’s first encounter with medieval literature, and from the snatches Warner invents for our entertainment it seems to be very like Gawain and the Green Knight, thought to have been written around this time. Thus important developments in English art are connected to the history of this nunnery, but the nuns themselves, being enclosed and very wary of change, don’t know anything about them.
In a way, The Corner That Held Them is more like the ‘naturalist realism’ of the nineteenth-century historical novel, which was as plain and historically accountable as it could be, to be real, and natural. Warner’s interjections and abrupt summaries of a year – ‘In 1208 came the Interdict. In 1223 lightning set fire to the granary’ – sound very like proper medieval chronicles, when there wasn’t very much to remember, or nothing much happened that was important enough to write, on calfskin vellum, which was expensive. The same thing happens to the nuns’ collective memory. They can only work out when the daylight owl began to hoot by thinking back to other events: when the pear-tree blossomed, when the refectory was whitewashed, when Dame Amy had a whitlow. They know about Sundays, but every other day flows past in a nameless stream. This vagueness anchored with memorable events is a familiar habit, we all think of our own personal histories like this. But when history goes into a written narrative, it can do two things. It can become the kind of historical fiction called the ‘felt past’, in which the emotions of characters are up front and palpable, the history illustrating their story of love, or adventure, or revenge.
I loved the film. I died for the costumes. I was delighted with the actors, the cinematography, the sound, the script. Janelle Monae killed it playing an engineer in NASA’s obligatory high heels, though she did not convince me as a mother or wife. Taraji P Henson was stupendous as Katherine Goble, then Johnson, and nearly convinced me as a mathematician. Octavia Spencer just glowed, especially when she stole so righteously from the library. I also liked the book that sparked the film, 
This time, in the 
Another category of non-Roman citizen were the captured children of enemy nobles, who were brought up as fosterlings in nice Roman homes, until the day came when they needed to be put out of the way, perhaps into the army, or married off to someone who would be grateful. The novel begins in a sultry post-coital scene between Beric, a captive Gaulish prince who has grown up in the house of Flavius Crispus, who has just been doing what he’s been told to by his foster sister Flavia, a beautiful, spoiled and very nasty young woman, who hasn’t yet told the besotted Beric about her betrothal, to be announced that evening. Thus the novel begins with an uneven demonstration of power, between the Roman citizen and the non-citizen, between the emotionally cold and the hopelessly dreamy, and between a young woman with a very assured manner and young man who doesn’t know how shaky the certainties of his life are becoming. We can sense his vulnerability right from the first page, and can tell that things are not going to go well.
Every narrative voice in the novel belongs to a character. There is no third-person omniscient narrator, no authorial voice who knows more than the characters or the readers. It’s an egalitarian way to tell a story, which fits beautifully with the Christian ethos that the story illustrates, that everyone is equal and that every person is as important as each other. It’s also a technical tour de force, brilliantly executed, because it’s hard to spot the seamless change in perspectives from one character to another, when – zip – you’re out of Eunice’s bakery and back into Crispus’s house, or into the cellar where the Church meets to worship and receive strength from their beliefs. For a 1930s novel it is also egalitarian in gender and sexuality. Some characters love each other and happen to be men, and also love women: later fans of Mary Renault would have appreciated the delicacy of Mitchison’s touch, who wrote this novel when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Women too have equal status in the Church. A dancing girl called Lalage is a deacon alongside Manasses, because those who are strongest in the spirit become leaders, and she is strong.
I mentioned that The Blood of the Martyrs is a philosophical and theological thriller. Many of the conversations are between characters trying to explain to each other what Christianity is, and what you do when you are one. In the third part of the novel Paul is in prison with the other characters, and is arguing with them about what needs to be done, and how baptism should be performed. He dictates his letters to other churches to Luke, the doctor who does his best for the prisoners after their torture, but really there is very little he can do for a raped woman who is about to be torn apart by tigers. Stoics and Epicurian characters are also present in the prison, political prisoners lofty in the knowledge that their intellectually superior beliefs do not let them in for such degrading and brutal treatment. But they are shaken by their inability to watch another person suffer and remain unmoved. By witnessing the deaths in the arena, people begin to be converted, and the seed of belief is transmitted by example and by loving kindness. It is a very moving image, drenched with sadness.