Some time ago in Penguin New Writing John Lehmann asked for funny stories to print. He also suggested that both women and men would be leaping to their desks at the end of war to write the fiction they’d been bottling up during the war years. None of this is showing in what he’s publishing in Penguin New Writing. There is no humour at all, and several male authors are becoming regular, repeat contributors, while the women authors published so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In his Foreword for this first issue of 1948 Lehmann rails against National Service, and the impossible hoops that authors have to jump through to gain exemption. Given that only male authors feature in this issue, and only men were conscripted in peacetime, it’s pretty obvious that Lehmann doesn’t consider post-war women as authors, or have much interest in publishing what they might write. With editors like him, who needs enemies?
However, with authors like P H Newby, the woman’s perspective is not wholly ignored. ‘Crowning Glory’ is about the cutting off of a teenage girl’s long hair, at her mother’s instructions, against her father’s wishes. The barber’s hands are delicately intrusive, and the gypsy’s warning comes true. Newby is one of the few authors that Lehmann publishes who writes about women as fully and perceptively as he does about men.
A short story by the well-known literary critic Lionel Trilling — ‘Of This Time, Of This Place’— was unexpected but jolly good, positing the question of what an American professor can do when presented with madness in the classroom. How to grade incomprehensible brilliance, and how to suppress uncomprehending entitlement?
I was cautious about the critical essays, the last few issues having produced very little that was readable, but this issue has A D B Sylvester’s ‘A Chapter of Revelations’, a splendid report on the fuss and outrage caused by the National Gallery’s move to clean some of its paintings. Their account of conservation techniques, the physics of colour, pigment weirdness and the revealing huffery of eminent critics of the day is seriously entertaining.
Pause here to admire the emotion shared by Alec Guinness’s Richard II and Harry Andrews as Gaveston, in the Old Vic’s 1947 production.
The magazine’s enforced black and white reproductions of paintings don’t do much for the smudgier, blotchier styles, but John Minton’s Corsican landscapes come across beautifully. Crisp and solid.
In lengthy succession we have Andre Gide’s essay on Paul Valéry and Lehmann himself on James Joyce. Both are undoubtedly important but I could not summon the interest to read them. Penguin New Writing seems to have a tediously instructive element which is beginning to annoy me. However, William Sansom’s essay on Edgar Allen Poe explains much about his alarmingly gothic fiction that we’ve read in earlier issues: this was worth ploughing through.
This issue ends with reportage, so much more enjoyable and interesting to read than pompous criticism. Alan Ross’s ‘From a Corsican Notebook’ offers pretty much what it says on the tin: bar scenes, girls glimpsed sunbathing, traditional male fierceness, and buses with steering wheels on both sides. Keith B Poole’s ‘The Gift’ is an expertly crafted snippet of memoir from the war, shaped to fit a story’s outline and its tensions, but presented as fact. Which makes the box of severed human ears, presented to a squaddie as a gift at the end, all the more unnerving.
John Lehmann opens this issue’s Foreword by apologising for the sudden disappearance of the coloured plates. They’d vanished in issue 31, presumably a last-minute or force majeure decision, because in this issue the reasons are discussed. All the good colour printers in Britain are booked up for months at a time, so there is no room in the queue without unacceptable delays, affecting the whole magazine’s schedule. It’s a pity, but I expect that readers would have preferred reliable delivery and black and white photographs, rather than uncertain and unpredictable beauty.
P H Newby’s ‘Khamseen’, however, isn’t about predictable English privilege, but unaccountable and alien privileges. Fawzia is sold to the Widow Hamed as a child, and after a week of eating well is revealed to be a child of twelve rather than a scrawny seven or eight. She is the servant-of-all-work, but she comes to dominate the household, and her estranged mother begins to haunt the street outside, aware now of a daughter’s value as a very saleable trained beauty. The men in the story seem to be ineffectual and hated: the three women prowl around each other’s spaces, debating ownership.
Modern French tapestries by Saint-Säens and others are sparkling, like crisper, more colourfully precise Chagalls.
Angus McBean’s photographs of Twelfth Night at Stratford upon Avon (starring Beatrix Lehmann: another sister, John?), Paul Scofield and Walter Hudd show a sturdy, primary-coloured production with some odd hats.
The best contributions appear at the end of the issue, by which time people will be flicking through the pages sleepily. Dunstan Thompson’s ‘A traveller to Deptford’ is reportage of a journey he took by train to Deptford. He was advised to get a train to New Cross and then to walk, since it would be faster than the direct train an hour later. Having once lived in Brockley I know exactly how long it takes to walk to Deptford from New Cross, so this intrigued me. Turns out he was ill-advised, and enters a foreign land. His account of a bombed-out and desolate urban wasteland teeming with savage children is so close to Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness as to corroborate all her descriptions of the devastated City churches. Thompson is looking for St Nicholas, Deptford, and Marlowe’s grave, and finds it a ruin. The vicar lives ‘very far away’, nowhere near this milling bombsite of graffiti, broken tombs, chapel alcoves used by prostitutes and ruined stonework. The curate is exhausted, with no hope of restoring the site. ‘His voice was passionless with the weary right accent: he was from some university. There was nothing to be done, he said. Everything that had not been bombed had been stolen. “They have taken the last of the timber for firewood.” I asked “Can no one stop the children from breaking into the graves?” This is post-war London, very far away from Mayfair and the servant problem. This is also post-war Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.