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 a young bloke with adoring eyes * 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.
*as corrected by eagle-eyed reader who knows his Marlowe better than I know my Shakespeare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 posted a double review of Frank O’Connor’s autobiographies 