My feelings about the prevailing mood of the previous issues of Penguin New Writing have been borne out by the Foreword in this issue of autumn 1947, by John Lehmann himself.
‘Your Editor has had a dream. A mad, fantastic dream, not to be credited at all. [there follows a paragraph of escalating impossibilities] That Eton thought Harrow would do, and Manchester Grammar School decided to adopt top-hats out of respect to Eton?
No, none of these things. Something far more extraordinary. I dreamt that a brilliant new young writer had arisen and sent me in an MS. A funny writer.’
So there we have it. John Lehmann himself realised that the post-war issues were appallingly gloomy, and was looking for humour to leaven the weight of the post-war world in his pages. I find that very encouraging, because the sheer misery of the stories in this and the last few issues has been grim. Let us hope that Lehmann’s plea was heard, and that future issues have something funny waiting for us.
While waiting for Lawrence Durrell to discover his inner satirist, though, we shall do our duty and read some modern fiction for the good of our health. William Sansom’s ‘Various temptations’ is an assured, meticulous story of a man who strangles women he picks up, and how he does it. It’s frightening, not just because of the author’s assured use of tension, but because he expended so much effort in getting the details of this misogynist story exactly right. He’s written about murdering women in Penguin New Writing before.
Annabel Farjeon’s ‘San Spirito’ is the only piece in this issue that allows women to have opinions and not also suffer at the hands of men because of these. Though they do suffer. Two nurses in Italy with a day’s leave absentmindedly open a bottle of peach brandy while they enjoy the sunset and the peace around them. Before the brandy is finished we have learned that Hannah’s Jewish family have all died, and that Adina’s sister is in danger in Romania from their mother. At least they get to enjoy the brandy by themselves. Male authors, I venture to speculate, would invade the scene with lecherous doctors or patients and reduce the women to objects. Farjeon does not, and I am grateful for it.
William Plomer’s ‘The Naiad of Ostend, Or, A Fatal Passion’ is a sequence of delicate pastiches describing the difficult position of an early Victorian maiden at the seaside when she is consumed by a passion for swimming at all hours, and Neptune is consumed with a passion for her. Charming and dark.
James Stern’s ‘Solitaire’ tells the events that follow an Irish doctor’s ill-advised phone call to a girl he once met, and his invitation to take her out to lunch. The doctor is married, with a child, but chooses to live rather dangerously for a few hours in a New York restaurant with Stella, who knows his eight letters to her by heart and has been carrying the torch of all torches for him in all the years since they last met. A knife is waved, there is much being drunk, and one wonders why the idiot ever put himself in such a ridiculous and selfish position. Because, of course, the poor obsessed young woman gives him up all over again. She should have burnt the letters and had a life instead.
Dorothy Baker’s story ‘A little white cat’ also has an oppressed woman, the mother of Cyril, a fatherless child of the war who bullies her and his teachers and rules the roost because he knows no other way to behave. A colder, more unpleasant child I have never read. He loves a stray white cat, though, and pours all the affection of which he is capable over this oblivious animal, until he encounters a man who is tougher than he is.
Gwyn Williams’ two translated poems from medieval and Tudor Welsh are absolutely delightful.
There are two extremely long and not very interesting (to me) articles about poetry, by E Martin Browne (about whose wife’s book on wartime theatrical productions I wrote here), and Dame Helen Gardner. I ought to be more pleased to read Gardner’s writing, for she is a critical genius, but I’m not interested in Matthew Arnold at all. Sorry. Henry Reed’s essay about W H Auden in America is similarly erudite and important, I’m sure, but it’s not very readable.
Barry Hicks’ photographs of Eliot’s The Family Reunion, produced at the Mercury Theatre by Browne, are classically stagey, serious tableaux.
The photographs of productions of Mardi Gras and The Vagabonds at Sadlers’ Wells are similarly attractive for recording staging and costume.
Ghika’s pre- and post-war paintings are glorious. I think he must be the Greek artist Nikos Ghika.
‘Lieut Z’’s ‘Military Detention’ is a long piece of reportage, on being in military detention, detailing the brutality and ill-logic of the system and the men placed in command of others. I hope the War Office read this piece carefully.
Sid Chaplin’s ‘The Cage’ is a tense vignette about miners ascending from the pit, when their cage gets stuck and the strands of wire begin to fail. It’s a thriller in miniature, unbearable to read.
Jocelyn Brooke’s ‘Blackthorn winter’ is cruel and unforgiving, and hopelessly, scrupulously true to human nature. It’s wartime, and a soldier is waiting to be sent abroad, and is missing his home and garden. He offers gardening help to a woman in the village, and a relationship develops, and it is so sad, and completely believable. The subtle shift from his to her perspective twists the knife decisively.
This issue of Penguin New Writing, from spring 1947, has a depth that the previous issues reviewed don’t seem to have achieved. John Lehmann goes all-out in his Foreword by saying that the fires that decimated London’s publishing offices and warehouses in the bombing in December 1940 did ‘the book-trade — and the authors who live from it — a notable service; it cleared off hundreds of thousands of third-rate books that had been clogging the market for years, and led to an astounding revival in sales for the intelligent novelist and critic’.
Looking at the contents page, Lehmann’s roster of ‘highbrows’ does indeed contain a slightly higher number of authors who are still being read, or have a recognisable name, in 2017: Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, Boris Pasternak, V S Pritchett and John Lehmann himself. Others might be for specialists only, but they are still known, some of them even in print: Julian Maclaren-Ross, Henry Reed, Donagh MacDonagh, Tom Hopkinson (for his journalism) and Norman Nicholson. But so many of these names are poets, and only Greene (possibly also Pasternak for one famous novel) could ever be described as a best-seller.
Edward Burra’s ‘Miracle in the Gorbals’: all soft colours and bulbous figures, with pencilled character names attached to the grotesque portraits.
Leslie Hurry’s ‘design for the ballet Hamlet’ looks very commedia dell’Arte, with skull and a skullcap.
John Gielgud as Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment. Those eyebrows, that nose!
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.
Oliver Messel’s ‘Design for the film Caesar and Cleopatra’: simply gorgeous.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 