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’.
This is a fairly astonishing iconoclastic stance: booksellers and book historians have universally regretted the losses of archives, editions and plates in those fires, so it is bracing, and rather challenging, to read Lehmann expressing relief only a few years later that because of the need for new books ‘British booksellers no longer turned a lacklustre eye upon the so-called “highbrow” author’. Lehmann’s idea of such ‘highbrow’ survivals is disputable: ‘the kind of author whose work lives and is read when all the best-sellers of the day have been swirled away in Lethe’s waters’. He then ventures to hope that the present issue will be rich in this quality.
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.
However, let us not wallow in the hubris of 1947, but enjoy what it had to offer. Julian Maclaren-Ross’s piece of memoir, ‘Monsieur Félix’, is about beggars, exploring Marseilles as a child, and a master of Grand Guignol. Maclaren-Ross is better than a raconteur, he’s an artist in description who pulls you in. It doesn’t matter that this short piece may or may not be complete invention, it is story, good and proper.
Tom Hopkinson, more famous for his editorship of Picture Post and championing of documentary photographer Bert Hardy, ‘wrote several novels’ according to his online record. This is one of the most accomplished and readable short stories so far read in Penguin New Writing, a thriller crossed with a seduction narrative, and a masterclass in story construction.
Graham Greene’s ‘Across the Border’ is advertised as ‘an unfinished novel’. Not knowing his oeuvre well, I don’t know if this fragment was reused after 1947 by adding it to something else to become a real full-length novel. It’s certainly gripping, and drenched with anticipatory misery. A weak good man returns from a mining enterprise in Africa to report the evils wrought by his superior, to find that the company doesn’t care because they have faith in the bad man. And then we backtrack to read exactly how the bad the bad man is, and how weak and corrupt the whole bally enterprise is too. Is it classic Greene? It’s certainly grim, and would have been eminently expandable, had the war not intervened to wreck this world of 1930s colonial extortion.
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.
The author of ‘Growing up in Chad Street’, A C Wann, seems not to have left any online trail, so I can’t say anything more than I’d like to read more of their writing. It’s a story of how a small English town reacts to the woman who moves in next door to Peter and his family, when she starts carrying on with the itinerant pedlar and ex-bank employee. The men are envious, the women are furious, and she has what seems like a baby a year. It’s a remarkable portrait of the vicious responses to social transgression, the events seen through the eyes of an innocent and uncomplicated ten year old boy.
John Gielgud as Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment. Those eyebrows, that nose!
Sacha Carnegie’s ‘Snow’ is a haunting return to the brutality and horror of war. A soldier is reconnoitreing on skis, aware that the recent retreat by the enemy has left slaughtered and burnt-out villages all over the territory. Near dusk, he comes to a village where he thinks that no-one has survived, but hears the unearthly cries of a mother holding her dead baby in the snow, surrounded by her family and neighbours in a scene of true war atrocity. When the soldier returns next day with help, she has died, and the unit bury the village. Horrifying. The war is still a relentless memory in 1947.
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.
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 
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 
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.
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.
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.