John Lehman: A Tribute 9780773595927

Citation preview

LdOHN HMANN

Carleton University Press Ottawa, Canada 1987

@ Carleton University Press, first edition only, 1987. ISBN 0-88629-063-5 (paperback) 0-88629-067-8 (casebound)

Acknowledgements Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: John Lehmann : a tribute Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-88629-067-8 (bound) ISBN 0-88629-063-5 (pbk.) 1. Lehmann, John, 1907interpretation.

-Criticism

Distributed by: Oxford University Press Canada 70 Wynford Drive DON MILLS, Ontario, Canada, M3C 1J9 (4 16) 441-2941 Printed and bound in Canada.

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For Bas, Cliff, Harvey, Jimmy and Peter from those Penguin New Writing days, and for Wallace Robson my tutor of those years

Other books by A.T. Tolley : The Early Published Poems of Stephen Spender: A Chronology The P o e of ~ the Thirties The Poetry of the Forties

Acknowledgements My first debt is to Roy Fuller for encouragement throughout the development of this book and for editorial assistance in the later stages. Michael Gnarowski of Carleton University Press was steadily helpful and supportive from the time when the book was merely a suggestion. We are grateful to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities for a grant in aid of publication, and to Mr. Peter Blaney of the Federation for his helpful interest in the book. We are also grateful to the Research Fund of the Arts Faculty of Carleton University and to Dean N.E.S. Griffiths for a grant in support of the initiation of the book. My thanks are due to Dr. Decherd Turner, Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, and to his staff for their very courteous and generous help during my study in the Lehmann archives. Dina Migoel typed some of the book. My wife, Glenda M. Patrick, read the whole volume and gave valuable advice. Martha Healey and Ruth Goldsteen prepared the text for the printer. My thanks are due to all of them. Thanks are also due to the John Lehmann estate, to his publishers, and to the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin for use of copyright material.

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Contents Introduction 1 A.T. Tolley

Memoirs Cutting O u t the Gangrened Roy Fuller

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Recollections of' John Lehmann Peter Yates

15

With The London ikfagazine 21 Charles Osborne A First Meeting 25 Thorn Cunn For John Lehmann Jeremy Reed

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The Reader at Night: A Memoir Paul Davies

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The Writer T h e Poetry of' John Lehmann 43 Christopher Levenson Appeals Fmm Across Some Frontier: T h e Novels of J o h n Lehmann Robert K . Martin Brave Old World: T h e Autobiographies of John Lehmann D.E.S. ikfuxwell

The Editor and Publisher J o h n Lehmann and Bloomsbury J.K.Johnstone

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T h e Metamorphoses of New Writing 99 George Woodcock T h e Age o f t h e Dragon: John Lehmann in Wartime Robert Hewison

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Letters from the Editor A.T. Tolley

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John Lehmann Ltd. 141 Alan Smitft

Appendix A: T h e New Hoprth Librdry - A Listing

160

Appendix B: Bibliography o f the Writings o f J o h n Lehmann Notes on Contributors 165

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Introduction Forty years ago John Lehmann was known to almost everyone with a serious interest in contemporary writing. Those were the days, at the end of the Second World War, when Penguin New Writing was selling tens of thousands of copies. Today, his lifetime of achievement in literature is largely unknown to readers under fifty. His death in April took from us one of the last survivors of that generation of the 1930s that left so indelible a mark on the literature of our time. The group of writers brought together here offer what they take to be the most sincere form of literary homage, a critical discussion of Lehmann's work. In so doing, collectively they provide a broad perspective of the many important phases of his literary activity. John Lehmann is remembered best for his founding and editing of New Writing and its associated periodicals - Folios of New Writing, Daylight, New Writing and Daylight, Penguin New Writing, and Orpheus. These periodicals held a dominant place in the literary life of England in the 1930s and 1940s; and, after the cultural doldrums that saw the disappearance of almost every literary periodical of any note around 1950, his founding of The London Magazine in 1954 was one of the first signs of renewed life. T h e mark of Lehmann's editing was his receptivity to new talent; and the first set of contributions are "Memoirs" from a selection of writers whom he encouraged over the years. Roy Fuller and Peter Yates were among the group of poets whom Lehmann published steadily in the 1940s and 1950s, while Thom Gunn and Jeremy Reed are poets of a younger generation who benefited from Lehmann's encouragement. Their recollections are complemented by those of Charles Osborne, who worked with Lehmann on The London Magazine, while Paul Davies gives us an account of publishing Lehmann's last volume of new poems, The Reader at Night, in 1974. These memoirs give testimony to Lehmann's stature and reveal some of the personal qualities that characterized his relationship to those he published. As Fuller, Yates and Osborne recall, the efficiency and parsimony of language with which the business was despatched still left room for personal warmth in terms of encouragement, establishment of acquaintanceships and even lasting friendships. Noteworthy are Yates's remarks: "It may seem odd to praise mere literary parties. Yet those gatherings, arranged and presided over by a skillful and unselfish host, were an oasis of intellectual light in the drabness of wartime London."

2 A.T. TOLLEY One of the compelling aspects of his person was his physical stature which seems always to have made a lasting impact. Jeremy Reed recollects taking in the older Lehmann: "Standing with the door ajar, by way of welcome, tall, slightly leaning on a stick in a manner that had been assimilated into a natural grace rather than a dependency, at once dignified and compassionate." His naturalness, grace and ease of manner were equally admirable characteristics that penetrated the consciousness of those he met, and which went along with an openness of mind. We see this in the encounter related by Thom Gunn, of which he muses in retrospect: "Luckily [Lehmann] took no notice of my surprising observation." It did not deter Lehmann from later being "the editor of all editors to whom I owe most." This openness is touched upon by Yates: "That his own work as a poet came to be over-shadowed by that of his famous friends was inevitable, but it did not bother him." Finally, the "Memoirs" point to Lehmann's personal sensibilities, as revealed by Fuller in his description of Lehmann's flat in SW7. "The continuing care for letters flourished on a compost of pictures, presentation copies, a signed menu of a celebratory dinner, a poster of historic publishing -to say nothing of family literary vestiges from the Victorian era." Likewise Jeremy Reed recalls: "The tumbler of whisky, my martini, the piles of books within easy reach, and the conversation. . . ." T h e cultural artifacts communicate a sense of reverence for the past with which Lehmann has been associated. There are reminders too of his empathy with nature - "the azaleas, madder-rose and shocking pink, brought up from John's cottage in Sussex to choreographize a vase on the table." The manner in which Lehmann transmitted his own sensitivities is most beautifully recalled by Davies in a correspondence which concludes: "The spring display here in the countryside round Atlanta is fantastic: dogwood, pink and white, great azalea bushes of every hue, flowering cherry -just wonderful - I revel in it." Lehmann's active life as editor came to an end when he left The London Magazine in 1961; and, in the years that followed, he gave an account of those earlier days through a series of volumes: The Whispering Gallev (1955); I Am My Brother (1960); and The Ample Proposition ( 1966). They are among the outstanding literary autobiographies of the century, evoking and recording in intimate detail British literary life from 1930 to 1960; and D.E.S. Maxwell's "Brave Old World: T h e Autobiographies of John Lehmann" gives a critical account of Lehmann as autobiographer, going behind the fascinating material to discuss Lehmann's treatment of it. During the decades

INTRODUCTION

3

that succeeded his departure from The London Magaxine, Le hmann also produced a large number of works of literary biography and literary criticism. Outstanding among these are his writings about Virginia and Leonard Woolf, with whom he was associated at the Hogarth Press in the 1930s and the 1940s. It is often forgotten that Lehmann also wrote two novels, Evil Was Abroad (1938) and In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) - the latter republished in 1985 as a "Gay Classic". T h e selection by Robert K. Martin "Appeals from Across Some Frontier: The Novels of John Lehmann" offers an insightful and revealing analysis of the personal philosophical concerns contained in these novels. It is, however, as a poet that Lehmann has the most lasting claim to attention as a writer; and it is for his poetry that he would have wished to be remembered. He was a part of the brilliant Cambridge of the late twenties and early thirties that included William Empson, Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, Ronald Bottrall, James Reeves and Charles Madge, along with Vernon Watkins and Kathleen Raine, two Romantics trapped in a prison of Positivism. This was the time of the outstanding undergraduate literary magazines, Experiment and Venture. Lehmann, perhaps characteristically, was associated with the more conservative Venture, edited by Michael Redgrave. After leaving Cambridge and joining the Hogarth Press, Lehmann, in collaboration with Michael Roberts, was instrumental in bringing together and publishing the collections New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933). In these anthologies, Lehmann's poetry appeared side by side with that of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and William Empson. However, after the appearance of his first books of poems, A Garden Revisited (193 1) and The Noise of History (1934), his poetry seems to have been interrupted by his work as editor; and he did not resume writing it until the middle of the war, when, like so many, he found himself thrown back on his own inner resources. Those wartime years were his finest period as poet; but later, again, his editorial work drew him away from his poetry. As he has said, "Poetry . . . is a hard master" and he too often allowed himself to be led away from it by "the easier calls of other endeavours". Nonetheless, the writing of poetry remained for him an abiding feature of his life. Lehmann's poetry is examined by Christopher Levenson who, like Lehmann, started out as a poet at Cambridge though two decades later. As Levenson puts it: "his best work makes use of but transcends the dominant manners of the age to produce a carefully crafted poetry that is quietly but unmistakably individual." T h e three selections by Maxwell, Martin and Levenson look at

4 A.T. TOLLEY

Lehmann "The Writer". From the critical accounts they give, we may discern possible relationships between the attributes of the man and the characteristics of the writer. As Maxwell points out in The Whispering Gallery, Lehmann recalls how the experience of editing New Writing gradually helped him formulate "the difference between a literature that is an interpretation of its time, and one that transforms it." Lehmann could be said, in the forties, to have moved from the view of literature as a means to social change back to one of literature as an interpretation of its time; and this could be seen to be reflected in the work that he supported as editor - and, to some extent, as publisher too. Yet, as Robert Martin points out in his discussion of Lehmann's novels, the "appeals from across some frontier" are finally those of the self. This conclusion is not without relevance to the final evaluation of Lehmann's autobiographies: the inner self is in a sense beyond outside reach, except through personal engagement. Notwithstanding the force of Lehmann's own writings, the dominant and consuming activity of his lifetime was as editor as well as publisher. In the late forties and early fifties, he ran one of the most distinguished publishing houses of those years, John Lehmann Ltd. The five concluding contributions are devoted to Lehmann "The Editor and Publisher". T h e first contribution in this section, that of J.K. Johnstone, deals with Lehmann's relationship to Bloomsbury and the Woolfs, a relationship which is pointed to by several of the essays. This essay provides an excellent historical and biographical context for the remaining selections. George Woodcock's "The Metamorphoses of New Writing" provides an overall view of his editorial activity and of the changes in direction in the kinds of writing he promoted. Woodcock was the editor of Now, a radical literary periodical of the 1940s, and one of the few that could sustain comparison with New Writing. Robert Hewison's "The Age of the Dragon: John Lehmann in Wartime" concentrates on a specific prolific period - the war years. As Hewison points out: "A strong feature of the pre-war New Writing had been documentary accounts of aspects of contemporary life that suited the sociological bent of the Thirties"; but by September 1942, in Penguin New Writing volume 14, Lehmann noted that "the centre of balance has shifted from a rather extrovert, documentary type of realism to something more introvert, with a great deal more reflection in it." Hewison examines in part the reasons for this change of thrust in Lehmann's publishing activity in this period. T h e selection "Letters from the Editor" complements the critical perspective with an analysis of Lehmann's correspondence as editor; it reveals the nature and

INTRODUCTION 5 direction of his critical judgements and his preference for writing that was controlled, and humanistic, muted in its rhetoric and grounded in personal experience. These were the qualities evinced by the work of the writers whom Lehmann encouraged and published. In conclusion, Alan Smith's 'yohn Lehmann Ltd." traces the rise and fall of John Lehmann's publishing house and provides a comprehensive listing of the books published, some of which have become classics of our time. Lehmann came of a literary family. His father, Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, came of the Scottish publishing family that founded Chambers Encyclopedia, and he was a regular contributor to Punch. Of Lehmann's three sisters, Beatrix was to become one of the outstanding tragic actresses of our time; while Rosamond was to become famous as the author of novels that included Dusty Answer, Invitation to the Waltz and The Ballad and the Source. His most important early friendship was with Julian Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. Bell's first book of poetry, Winter Movement, was hailed as one of the important new books of poems when it appeared in 1930. This was the seminal friendship for Lehmann, i n which he and Bell, as undergraduates, discussed the future of their chosen art. It led to a long association with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, principally through the Hogarth Press, in which Lehmann became a partner. Julian Bell was killed in the Spanish Civil War, a death that Lehmann found hard to forgive. Lehmann's other close friend in art also died young. Demetrios Capetanakis was a young Greek who came to England in 1939. He wrote in English, and the few poems that he left behind when he died in 1944 are among the more remarkable of the period. Capetanakis was a stimulus to Lehmann's renewed poetic activity in the early 1940s. In 1947, Lehmann edited and published a collection of Capetanakis's work. The early deaths of Bell and Capetanakis seem to have deprived Lehmann of the two people outside his family to whom he was extremely close. Although his literary work brought him into contact with a large number of people, he appears to have been an essentially private person. This quality may have had something to d o with his drifting from prominence in the literary world. So too had changes in literary fashions. In giving u p The London Magazine, Lehmann recognized that he could not respond to the new writers that were coming along with the immediacy with which he had responded to the writers of earlier decades. However, perhaps the most devastating cause of Lehmann's

6 A.T. TOLLEY dismissal and ultimate neglect by succeeding generations of readers was the cultural triumph in the fifties of the criticism associated with F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny. New Writing was seen by Scrutiny as an appendage of Bloomsbury, and as a party to the destruction of literary standards that Scrutiny felt to be the work of the current literary establishment. Indeed, the easy reception of the writers of the thirties by the literary establishment was seen at once as symptom and cause of the lowering of literary standards against which Scrutiny tirelessly fought; and, in the historical scenario offered by Scrutiny, the new writers had a vested interest in the absence of any standards that might call into question their easily won position. As the admirers of Leavis moved to dominance in the fifties, Lehmann's work was dismissed or ignored. One young critic of the period characterized Lehmann as a "middle-man of culture". Today more temperate views prevail. It is surely time for a fresh recognition to be given to a man who did so much to encourage new writing in the thirties and forties; a man who was the first to publish George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories", W.H. Auden's "MusCe des Beaux Arts" and Louis MacNeice's "June Thunder", and who brought to the public the work of Henry Green, Roy Fuller, Laurie Lee, William Sansom and many other young authors of the period. It is in this feeling that the contributors to this volume have come together. Sadly, John Lehmann did not live to see the publication of this book. It had been intended as a gift for his eightieth birthday on June 2, 1987. He died on April 7, 1987 while the text was with the printer.

A.T. Tolley

Memoirs

ROY FULLER

Cutting Out The Gangrened I date my first meeting with John Lehmann from the certain knowledge that my son, an only child, was on that occasion an infant in arms. My son (he, too, was called John, after my brother) was born on a conveniently reckonable-from date, January 1, 1937, so 1 knew John Lehmann a good forty-seven years. As a matter of fact, in my archives there is a letter dated November 30, 1936 on New Writing-headed paper, but this was written by Elizabeth Bone (whom I never knew) "for John Lehmann, Editor," acknowledging a submitted poem and saying she would "give it to Mr. Lehmann as soon as he returns" (presumably from one of the Wanderjuhren thus referred to in Part V of The Whispen'ng Gallery). T h e letter is addressed to me at 227a Faversham Road, Kennington, Ashford, Kent, my first matrimonial home, apart from a few weeks in digs. I was then a lawyer, aged twenty-four, not long in Kent from the even more provincial north-west, and on the dim outskirts, if that, of the literary world. I cannot stress too much my lack of any sort of reputation, and indeed of any talent except such as might have been detected by a sympathetic sibyl. O n January 24, 1937, John Lehmann himself wrote to me, a letter I think worth reproducing: Dear Mr. Fuller, I like your poem, and want to publish it, but with the first part, fi-om the beginning to ". . . become gangrened" cut out. It then becomes simply POEM,with no headings but stars where the headings were. I very much hope you'll agree. Are you writing a lot now? Sometime this Spring I'd like to meet you and discuss your poems.

Yours sincerely, John Lehmann.

This succinct letter has nevertheless several features utterly characteristic of John as an editor. I should think in those days I was both flattered and alarmed by the second paragraph. Few had ever

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ROY FULLER

cared before whether 1 was writing a lot, or at all (and in truth all through the pre-war years I was writing far too little, falling into bad writing habits I have never really thrown off). Was 1 capable of actually discussing my poems? Dubious. I see now that the two sentences encapsulate the romantic side of John's notion of the writing activity - its mysteriousness, inspired nature, and overwhelming importance. Undoubtedly this sustained him during his long years as editor and publisher (years full of checks and frustrations as well as of triumphs), and brought him to new writers, and the new work of old writers, with perennial energy. (It also, when his regular editorial years were over, enabled him to write with almost boyish enthusiasm his books on literary matters, such as Three Literav Friendships.) The first paragraph is also typical of John as editor. Everything to "become gangrened" to be cut out! I daresay that hurt somewhat the otherwise delighted youthful poet, who had then - still has - a taste for the macabre, the shocking, the sordid. T h e omitted part (which 1 have never come across among the bumf preserved in what north-westerners call the "cock-loft" of my house) was at least partly in prose, in the surrealist genre of section 111, I, of The Orators ("One charms by thickness of wrist.. . ") and no doubt sufficiently characterized by the word "gangrened". 1 can see now that leaving it out may well have benefited the piece - tailored it, brought it more into line. Again, this aspect of John's editing - mediating between the rawness of his discoveries and the readiness of his readers - was surely essential if he was to be more than a transient editorial phenomenon, like most, even the best. T h e poem was published in New Writing for Spring 1937, and it must have been round the time of its appearance that my first meeting with John took place. At that epoch my brother had a small flat in Marchmont Street, then a sort of Bloomsbury village thoroughfare of pubs and small shops and cafes. It was a flat the tenancy of which had been taken over by my brother from "Gilbert Waller", prominent character in my autobiographies. My wife and I and babe came u p from Kent for a night - perhaps more, and whether or not specially for the literary occasion I have forgotten and in the early evening John Lehmann called at the flat by an arrangement which may well have had its complexities, for there is no correspondence about it, and we were not on the telephone at 227a Faversham Road. John's greeting of my wife, brother and son would, of course, have been sans reproche, but I see us all as only quite briefly standing there (my son upright but supported in his mother's arms) before I was borne off. As I have emphasized in my autobiographies, John

CUTTING O U T T H E GANGRENED 11 Lehmann was of handsome appearance, quite matching a formidable will, unlikely to be resisted by someone like myself -all too capable of seeing both sides of a question, save at the last ditch. John and I went to a restaurant in nearby Woburn Place called Bogie's (or possibly Bogey's) Bar. I may myself have suggested this venue, though John himself could well have known of its existence, almost within spitting distance of the Hogarth Press premises in Tavistock Square. I was familiar with the emporium when I had lived in the district some three years previously, doing a spell with law crammers in Chancery Lane. It was not without slight pretensions, fitted out in the modern style (Heal's Thirties, straight lines and pale wood), and in those anterior days if I had entered its portals it would only have been for coffee, on account of cheaper eating-houses being available, notably Charley's, not many doors from the Marchmont Street flat. In Bogie's Bar, however spelt, we had bacon and egg. Could this have been so? Though early in the evening, other dishes must have been available, probably including Wiener schnitzel, for which John would by then have already developed his liking, through eponymous residence. Perhaps bacon and egg was my choice, or a concession to my northern origins, the repast of "high tea" being in mind (though we drank lager). Those few culinary details have stuck in my mind: what we talked about has gone. Did we "discuss" my poems? Never a great conversationalist, I would have clammed u p on that topic more than on most. Through ancestry, upbringing, and diurnal existence, our worlds then touched only at one common point - that literature should continue (if that is not being; too high-falutin*). Those few pre-war letters, lookedat for the first time for donkey's years, are confirmation of what I have said elsewhere more than once, that John's encouragement (with which I couple that of Julian Symons and Geoffrey Grigson) when there was little to go on, was vital - for one thing stopped me from possibly becoming a frustrated and cantankerous outsider. T o come was publication by the Hogarth Press of my two wartime books; subsequently, the three books of mine each in its different way strikingly turned out by John Lehmann Ltd.; followed by my regular contributions to the London Magazine. And collaboration was more recently renewed by our working together, at his suggestion, on an anthology from the Penguin New Writing. O n that last enterprise I journeyed from SE3 to SW7, for I was now the more mobile. In any case, his will-power was undiminished over the years: though his Wanderjahren had not entirely ceased, unthinkable that I should try to impose on him a trek across London. "I have to go to the Vatican," I might still be heard to remark en famille, a reference to John's eminence and authority, though the wide

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travelling of the present actual pontiff has possibly taken the edge off the now elderly jest. What rich activity of the past the flat in SW7 recalled! The continuing care for letters flourished on a compost of pictures, presentation copies, a signed menu of a celebratory dinner, a poster of historic publishing - to say nothing of family literary vestiges from the Victorian era. Each one of John's few pre-war letters to me, short though they are, evidences editorial concern. "1)o you ever write prose?" he asks. Again: "1 don't think we can use it [some unidentifiable poem of mine, no doubt tripe (IPIIIxP]. What about i.ijii ntrd I.rtto:v 7'0(1q [a not-bad magazine ofthe time]? 'I'hey are quite intelligent people. If you send it there, mention me if you like." And again: "We [the edito~.ial"we"] are very anxious to see your work as it develops, but 1 am afraid we don't think this particular poem quite comes off in its present version. [Possibly gangrenous touches.] 'The best part is, in our opinion, in the middle; I wonder whether you agree yourself. If you ever feel like rewriting it, do 1)y all means send us the revised version." 1did rewrite it (it is a poem still extant called "To MS, killed in Spain"), with the following response: "I think you have very definitely improved this, and it interests me enormously in its new form. I will confess that 1 am not quite sure I have followed the pattern and meaning of the whole poem, but I am going to publish it in the next number of NEW WKI'TING" -for Spring 1938. When one thinks he was dealing at the time with some of the cream of European and American writers, one's n~a~.velling is renewed. Then, in the autumn of 1938, I submitted to John, at the Hogarth Press, a collection of poems which eventually elicited from him on October 26 the following letter: Dear Fuller, We have read your poems with great interest. We think there are a number among them which have great beauty, but at the same time, to be frank, we don't feel that the collection comes off' as a whole. I feel that as a poet you have real promise, and it is just fbr that reason that I doubt whether you would be well advised to publish this volume as it stands. You may, of course, want to send them at once to another publisher. But if you don't, and if you write a batch of new poems during the Winter, we'd be very glad indeed to have another look at the book later on, though you will understand we can't make any definite promises. If you are u p in London at any time d o come and see me here. Yours sincerely, John Lehmann.

CUTTING OUT THE GANGRENED 13 Two things forcibly strike me now, copying out this letter: first, the utterly sound advice, and the future opportunity presented; second, the generosity of the words "great beauty" - words 1 think I would not have dared to contemplate myself, besides being, in those ideological days, foolishly chary of such a concept. As I remember, I did add slightly to the collection o r otherwise improve it a bit, but I feel sure 1 never resubmitted it, for on November 23, 1938, D.S. Savage wrote to me saying: "Is the Hogarth Press publishing your collection? If not, and if you would like to be in the Fortune Poets, with Julian, Gavin Ewart and myself (and I hope Herbert Mallalieu), d o please let me know quite shortly." I rather think it was Julian Symons who had discovered that Caton, proprietor even eager - to publish new, of the Fortune Press, was willing young poets, though Julian himself was a reluctant client. "I am doomed to the FP now -Cassell turned me down," he wrote to me in an undated letter of those days. I doomed myself: though the Hogarth Press was still open, I could not resist the certainty of Caton. It must be remembered I was twenty-six: Dylan Thomas had set the target for publishing first books of verse at a far, far earlier age. By the time my Fortune Press book was published, war had broken out and sent my verse on a somewhat more favourable tack. In early 1942 I had another collection ready, The Middle of a War, which John, still responsive, and presumably overlooking my questionable liaison with Caton, published at the Hogarth Press, to my inestimable benefit.

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Note For further discussion of Fuller's correspondence with Lehmann, see A.T. Tolley's essay in this volume.

PETER YATES

Recollections of John Lehmann In the summer of 1942 Chatto and Windus published my first book of poems, The Expanding Mirror. There were several encouraging reviews; and some months later 1 heard from Peggy Lammert of Chatto's that John Lehmann had rung up, "all agog", and was anxious to get in touch with me. It appeared he was a little puzzled that I had somehow managed to escape his notice, and would now like to see any new poems I might have in my drawer, with a view to publishing some of them in New Writing and daylight o r Penguin New Writing. This was, of course, good news; it was also a surprise, for I had never considered sending any of my poems to New Writing, where 1 imagined they would be found much too inward-looking and sombre. I rang John Lehmann, some correspondence ensued; and the result was that out of the six poems I submitted, he accepted four. One was a twenty-verse poem called "The Motionless Dancer"; this was to appear in the stiff-cover book-magazine New Writing and Daylight; the shorter ones in Penguin New Writing. 1 had recently been invalided out of the Army, and my wife and I were living in a small flat near Portobello Road. John Lehmann's letter accepting the poems included an invitation to visit him one evening for a drink. Carrington House, when I found my way there through the blackout during a minor air-raid, showed itself to be a tall block of modern flats, just off Park Lane, adjacent to Shepard Market. It was a locality of considerable Cclat, even in battered wartime London, and not normally associated with intellectual endeavour. It evoked for me the novels of Michael Arlen: the long Hispano-Suiza o r IsottaFraschini parked outside a fashionable Mews; and of course Bulldog Drummond's Bentley, throbbing away in nearby Half Moon Street. I suppose I had some kind of an image of the man I was about to meet. I remember I was very determined not to be impressed. Magazines of the period (encountered in dentists' and doctors' waiting-rooms) like The Taller, The Sketch, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, from time to time contained photographs of the handsome poet-editor, flanked by two of his famous sisters: novelist Rosamond Lehmann, and actress Beatrix Lehmann. As I remember it, these little groups often included a dog o r two.

16 PETER YATES The man who opened the door in answer to my ring was dressed in a pullover and grey flannel trousers. He was very tall: the kind of figure that has to stoop slightly going through doorways. The eyes were penetrating and very blue. The hair, beginning to recede a little, was fair. T h e general appearance was of a rowing blue or rugby full-back. "Rowing blue," as it happened, was a good guess; for although Lehmann gave up serious rowing after Eton, his father had been a famous oarsman in his day, and later a much sought-after coach, having once even travelled to America to coach the Harvard boat. It was apparent that in John Lehmann I had encountered a man of great charm. My doubts - nourished, perhaps, by "sour grapes" stories circulated by his less successful rivals - vanished. He had the rare gift of putting strangers at ease: an almost Edwardian courtesy. 1 don't remember any preliminary small-talk; it seemed we just began discussing contemporary poetry, airing our likes and dislikes, the conversation punctuated by loud bangs from the anti-aircraft battery in Hyde Park. T h e "mystery" of his interest in my own poetry was solved. It appeared that the very qualities that 1 had imagined would damn it in his eyes, were what attracted him to it. Austerity, tightness of form, an absence of the mawkish hysteria and verbal diarrhoea that alarmed him in certain publications of the "opposition". I suppose Lehmann's "star" poet at that time was Roy Fuller, whose fine war poems were to appear in successive numbers of New Writing and Daylight and Penguin New Writing. Lehmann had a great admiration for Fuller's work, and praised him to me highly, saying that he was curious how the poet would develop after the war. As it turned out, he need not have worried. Lehmann took his duties as an editor very seriously, and was deeply affected by trends he thought inimical to the true development of poetry. At that first meeting he told me he had just written an article for the next number of New Writing and Daylight attacking some recently published anthologies. One of these had an introduction by Herbert Read, in which the veteran poet and exponent of philosophical anarchism had found nice things to say about some of Lehmann's special abominations: these being, at the time, the more voluble members of a school calling itself the Apocalypse. As he spoke, I realized how passionately this editor cared about poetry; and how deep was his respect for those who practised the Art sincerely. I mentioned an early poem of his; I think it was one that had appeared in New Signatures: "To Penetrate That Room". This led him

RECOLLECTIONS O F JOHN LEHMANN 1 7 to speak of the difficulty of reconciling his life as a busy editor with his life as a poet; also of the difficulty of deciding where he stood, critically and philosophically, in a world where values seemed to be changing so fast. T h e famous triumvirate with whom he had been associated in the days of New Signatures had broken up, its members going their separate ways. T h e bonds of friendship remained; but he was, in a sense, on his own. T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding had just appeared; we talked about this, and the earlier long poems that were later to be published as Four Quartets. It struck me that Lehmann viewed them with respect -even awe - rather than admiration. He was attracted by a more sensuous, musical kind of poetry, especially the short lyric that unfolded its theme in vivid, physical images. He considered the story lyric the ideal form in which to express the emotional tensions of the war. It was this preference, no doubt, that caused him to publish the work of Terence Tiller and Laurie Lee. But his great love was the later poetry of W.B. Yeats. "Ancestral Houses", "Coole Park and Ballylee", "Lapis Lazuli" - these were particular favourites. Later I often heard him quote lines from "Coole Park and Ballylee": Another emblem there! That stormy white But seems a concentration o f the sky; And, like the soul, it sails into the sight And in the morning's gone, no man knows w h y . .

.

It had been a most enjoyable first meeting. I was almost sorry when the All Clear sounded, reminding me not to outstay my welcome. As I rose to leave, Lehmann told me that he had written something about The Expanding Mirror, and this - the Luflwafle permitting - would appear in the next number of New Writing and Daylight. John Lehmann enjoyed entertaining, and was always ready, when possible, to arrange small lunch and dinner parties that enabled a writer to meet someone he specially admired, o r with whom he felt a literary kinship. This was not the usual practice of editors during the worst days of the war, and it proved extremely helpful to young writers. Apart from these intimate affairs, it was his custom to give a series of large parties at Carrington House, these often marking the appearance of one of his publications. There would be fifty o r sixty guests, most of them past o r present contributors. One saw a variety of uniforms, for some of the youngest visitors were on short-leave from active service. I remember Roy Fuller in his "matelot's collar". Stephen Spender and William Sansom in the incongruous garb of fire-fighters. Alan Ross, Laurie Lee, Terence Tiller, Elizabeth Bowen, John Heath-

18 PETER YATES Stubbs. William Plomer, genial and smiling, would be there; and often Cyril Connolly, the "friendly rival", surrounded by a circle of awe-struck devotees. Sometimes one caught the sound of foreign voices: modern Greek, Hungarian, Polish, German; these were the writers and artists from invaded European countries, who had had the good fortune to escape in time the hospitality of the Nazi conqueror. T h e misery of their exile would often be made endurable through Lehmann's intercession. It was at one of these gatherings that I first met the young Greek poet and critic, Demetrios Capetanakis, whose tragic early death from leukemia in 1944 was to have such a deep effect on John Lehmann. Amazingly, Capetanakis was then writing in English, a language he had taught himself out of an intense love of our poets. He became one of Lehmann's closest friends; and was responsible, I think, for opening new doors in the Englishman's mind. I consider his short lyrics, together with the prose pieces he did on Stephan George, Rimbaud and Dostoevsky, among the most memorable things t o appear in New Writing and Daylight and Penguin New Writing. Perhaps the most dramatic guest was Edith Sitwell, with her white, powdered face, and hooded eyes. An arresting figure, 1 can see her now, "enthroned" on a high chair, wearing the full Sitwell rig: a costume that somehow suggested the robes of a Greek Orthodox archbishop. Newcomers would be led u p to this formidable lady, and presented as though to a Royal Personage. T h e "front" was intimidating, but once penetrated, many young writers were to discover a loyal and sympathetic friend. Attending those parties, caught up in the excited talk of Art and Literature, it was hard to realise that some of the guests had come straight from the decks of mine-sweepers and destroyers; that several of the youngest, so eagerly discussing the respective merits of Rilke and Pasternak, were soon to be casualties. It may seem odd to praise mere literary parties. Yet those gatherings, arranged and presided over by a skillful and unselfish host, were an oasis of intellectual light in the drabness of wartime London. They should not be forgotten in any assessment of John Lehmann's work as an editor and entrepreneur of the Arts. He saw it as his task to do much more than just select favourable manuscripts and send them to the printer. After the war John Lehmann gave u p his flat in Mayfaif, and took the lease of a house in South Kensington, 31 Egerton Crescent. There, in the basement of the house, he started a new and hazardous venture: his own publishing firm, John Lehmann Ltd. He had always been interested in design; and now, with the lessening of wartime

RECOLLECTIONS OF JOHN LEHMANN 19 restrictions, he was able to gratify his taste for fine book production. The two volumes of O l g h s , the anti-austerity book-magazine that succeeded New Writing and Daylight, are impressive examples of this. Both have become sought-after collectors' items. And speaking of design, how beautifully apt, later, was his choice of Edward Ardizzone's line drawing for the frontispiece of T h London Magazine. John Lehmann has detailed the triumphs and disappointments of his post-war publishing career in his Autobiography, so I shall not attempt to write of them here. Short of working capital, he nevertheless aimed for the best but this, alas, is seldom the desire of the literary market-place. T h e long list of outstanding books John Lehmann Ltd. published will not be forgotten: they remain as a splendid memorial to one man's courage and faith. Meeting him at the time of various crises, one would never have guessed there was anything amiss. I always think of him as having time to help and advise, never as harassed o r impatient. That his own work as a poet came to be over-shadowed by that of his famous friends was inevitable, but it did not bother him. Envy - that most pernicious of vices in a literary man - was alien to his nature. Readers who return to his collection of poems, The Age of the Dragon, will find much to reward them. T h e best poems are in the section "Poems in Wartime and After". Here are such successes as "The Sphere of Glass", "The Summer Story", and "A Death in Hospital", to name only a few. T h e fact that he was a practising poet gave him a special understanding of the writer's problems. Though never succumbing to ephemeral trends of the day, he was always in touch. As he grew older his interests widened. Four Qmrtets, that had once seemed to him "heavy-handed and rather prosy," came to be read with pleasure and deep understanding. Towards the end of his London Magazine period, he was publishing poems by writers who were in the cradle or not even born when the first New Writing appeared. Though, in the post-war years, I contributed to O r p k , the radio feature New Soundings, and The London Magazine, and attended a number of parties at Egerton Crescent, it is the wartime gatherings at Carrington House that I remember most vividly. And of all the writers I met there, it is the young Greek poet, Demetrios Capetanakis, who comes most often into my thoughts. He was Lehmann's very great friend, so I end these recollections with John's poem, "A Death in Hospital": On the first day, the lifted siege at last On starving hope: his spirit dropped its load,

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20 PETER YATES And turning once more to the world of friends Wept for the love they showed. Then on the second day, like a black storm Terror of death burst over him, and pain Pierced like the jagged lightning, in whose flash All he would never gain The wine-blue inlets of a home restored, Peace, and the growth of love in summer's field, And loaded baskets from a poet's tree Pitiless, stood revealed. The third night there was battle in the skies: The tongues of all the guns were hot with steel, The groaning darkness shuddered, but could add No wrench to his ordeal. The fourth day, when they came with daffodils And sea-borne fruit, and honey from his home, They seemed but shadows, where he choked and fought There was so little room. It was the fifth day explanation broke: There was no fear, nor human longing more, And all his life in that surprising dawn Appeared a dwindling shore Separate for ever from his tide-kissed boat, An isle with all its gardens fondly kept Complete and curious, that belonged to them, His friends, who stayed and wept.

Note For a discussion of Yates's correspondence with Lehmann, see A.T. Tolley's essay in this volume.

CHARLES OSBORNE

With The London Magazine Though I was not to meet John Lehmann until 1957, his name had been familiar to me since the early years of World War I1 when I, a school boy in Brisbane, Australia, first began to interest myself in the British poets of the thirties. Not that they were taught in Australian schools, where it was imagined that English poetry ended with Rupert Brooke: no, I had to discover Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day Lewis for myself, with the aid and guidance of a school-friend a year older than I. John Lehmann's was an important name because he was not only a poet but also an editor and publisher, and an encourager of new young voices in poetry and prose. During the war, he edited Penguin New Writing, which is why I wrote to him in 1945 when I was eighteen. 1 had begun to write and publish poems in Australia, and thought it was now time I attempted to introduce myself to European readers. So I sent a few of my poems to John Lehmann in the hope that he might like them sufficiently to publish some of them. He did, in fact, accept (1 think) three of them, but some time later his letter was followed by another from his assistant, Barbara Cooper, informing me that the magazine was to cease publication. There was such a backlog of accepted material that they would not be able to publish my poems which, with regret, she returned herewith. Ah, well! In 1953 I moved to London. Though I still wrote poetry, I had begun to, as they say now, diversify. For some years I had earned my living as a literary and musical journalist and broadcaster and as an actor. Poetry became a secondary interest, and I was too busy in other directions to spend any time promoting my poems. But I continued to keep u p with what other poets were writing, and when one day I saw on a bookstall the first issue of a new literary magazine, The London Magazine, edited by John Lehmann, I immediately bought it. That was in February 1954. From then on I acquired every issue, and I still have on my shelves a complete run of The London Mag from its first appearance to the present. I made no attempt to contact John Lehmann, however, and it was not until 1957 that we actually met. Jeremy Kingston, a young playwright who was acting as part-time secretary to John, discovered

22

CHARLES OSBORNE

in his employer's files the teenage photo I had sent for Penguin New Writing's "Notes on Contributors" page. He told John that I was now living in London. John expressed an interest in meeting me, and invited me to one of his parties. We got on well, and after that 1 lunched with him occasionally, or spent weekends in the country at Three Bridges, where he shared a house with the dancer Alexis Rassine. Through John I met such interesting people as John Gielgud, Graham Greene, Harold Acton, William Plomer, Henry Yorke (the novelist "Henry Green"), Gore Vidal, W.H. Auden, and John's sisters Rosamond, Beatrix and Helen. Early the following year, John offered me a job as one of his two editorial assistants on The London Magazine. (The other assistant was Barbara Cooper who had been with John since 1941.) 1 accepted, and began work in March 1958. 1 remained with the magazine for eight years working with John for the first three years, and then staying on to become assistant editor when Alan Ross became owner and editor of the magazine in 1961. I left in 1966, having accepted the offer of a job with the Arts Council. T h e magazine, a monthly, was at first edited from John's house in South Kensington. 3 1 Egerton Crescent was an elegant town house, and it continued for some years to be used for London Magazine parties, but at the beginning of 1957 the editorial office had been moved into the West End, to 36 Soho Square, where two rooms had been provided in the building which housed the publishing firm of Rupert Hart-Davis (and also housed, in a separate apartment, the amiable Rupert Hart-Davis himself). It was there that I began to work in 1958. Being an editorial assistant on The London Mag meant not only reading manuscripts but also making-up each monthly issue, reading and correcting proofs, selling advertising space, and, of course, any other duties the editor might see fit to allocate. These, however, were not arduous. "You wouldn't be an angel and get me a packet of cigarettes, would you, dear boy?" John's mellifluous voice would occasionally murmur. He was a delight to work with: urbane, witty, sympathetic, and with a deep core of unflappability which was rarely penetrated. The pale blue eyes could flash with anger, though, if John thought that was the best way to achieve results with a recalcitrant printer or an obstreperous distributor. We stayed in Soho, by courtesy of Rupert Hart-Davis, until the beginning of 1959 when we moved several hundred yards southeast to 22 Charing Cross Road, and we were still there in March 1961, when John, as he wrote in his final editorial, handed over his "worn blue biro with confidence and curiosity" to his successor Alan Ross

W I T H T H E LONDON MAGAZINE

23

"for refill and repair". Since then a quarter of a century has passed, but John Lehmann remained a good friend. He possessed all the virtues of his generation among which I would single out, for it is becoming an increasingly scarce attribute, the virtue o f loyalty.

THOM GUNN

A First Meeting By the end of World War 11, when I was fifteen, 1 had read and reread all the issues to date of John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing, and what was more, possessed one of the Folios of New Writing from the 1940s. T h e mysterious backgrounds to the work of Auden, Isherwood, William Sansom and Rex Warner were one with those I found in revivals of Hitchcock's films from the previous decade, fantasies of war-to-come blending with the events of the actual war in which I read them. T o say that I am grateful to John Lehmann for his New Writings is an understatement; they helped to form my taste and nourish my imagination. In the 1950s, when I was in my last year at Cambridge, I graduated from student magazines to John Lehmann's literary magazine for the radio, New Soundings. He was the first editor outside the university to take anything I had written. One day in 1954, after he had accepted several poems from me, he courteously proposed that on his next trip to Cambridge he should pay me a visit. Having conveniently blocked it from memory, I don't remember what we spoke about on that occasion, but he does. Apparently the awkward young man that I was suddenly blurted out, in the middle of talk about poetry, that being published nationally didn't mean I was going to have anything to d o with London homosexuals. Lehmann, understandably not recognizing this as a current tag from the followers of Leavis, was amazed. Could this be, he wondered, the latest way of propositioning someone? And what did I want or mean by it, I ttronder now, I itrho surely knew what I was about sexually by this time, in fact going about everywhere with my lover? . . . O h dear, those were curious times and I was a curious person. Luckily he politely took no notice of my surprising observation and went on to be the editor of all editors to whom I owe most. What a wonderful, triumphant, and selfless career he was able to look back upon.

JEREMY REED

For John Lehmann 85 Cornwall Gardens

After the sea, the aquamarine and turquoise skyline which had become the eye-piece I focussed into for so many of my poems, and indeed after an uninterrupted childhood and early youth spent familiarizing myself with the natural world, London came as a place of alienation, a seemingly dehumanized ethos in which I looked for cloud-breaks, a horizon to step off on, but instead found myself caught up in the city's maelstrom, its endless maze of streets. Not a field, not a wood affording retreat, and in their place one had to balance one's landscape in one's head, keep it there as a ship in a bottle, magnified, each particular evoked and reappraised in the writing of poetry. It was my friendship with David Gascoyne, and his concern to offer a young poet introductions that led to my initial visit to Cornwall Gardens in 1982. It was coming on Christmas, the towering elms and chestnuts were black skeletons in the gardens adjacent to John's flat, ice twinkled in crevices, a sharp beady blue, the stars were articulate hieroglyphs on the blue-black night sky. London? And then a refuge. You take the stairs u p and meet yourself perpendicularly in a mirror. Standing with the door ajar, by way of welcome, tall, slightly leaning on a stick in a manner that had been assimilated into a natural grace rather than a dependency, at once dignified and compassionate . . . I found myself in the presence of John Lehmann'whose novel In The Purely Pagan Sense I had brought with me for him to sign. I was to come here often in the next two years, and was always received with the same kindness, sympathy and conviviality of conversation. The tumbler of whisky, my martini, the piles of books within easy reach, and the conversation mostly that of poetry, of Rimbaud, Shelley, David Gascoyne's poems, (John had published the latter's book A Vagrant under his own imprint), and of course novels, Paul Bowles for whom we both expressed a mutual admiration, and whom John had published, books u p for review o r it could be Thomas Nas he's The Unfortunate Traveller. In the following spring I was to become John's secretary for a short period during the absence of his regular secretary. The sky-blue

28 JEREMY REED headed notepaper, the rickety typewriter I finger-fumbled on the round table, the window open on to the balcony, these days remain crystallized in my memory. And azaleas, madder-rose and shocking pink, brought u p from John's cottage in Sussex to choreographize a vase on the table. If I close my eyes they are here with me. I have the room detail by detail in a Proustian anamnesis. As John dictates I can see a chaffinch flicker the flamingo sun of its breast from branch to branch of an elm. My feet steady. There are ways after all of finding stepping stones across the arterial maze of a city. 1 can breathe in again the calm of Cornwall Gardens.

Vipers Bugloss A mistle thrush spots on to my vision, so magnified its breast's an ocelot's it seems a negative developed by the mist into a close-up, a detailed slow-exposure, too much of the moment to fly. My eye keeps trying to sensitise viper's bugloss into looking at me, the pink and blue flowers arresting bees, or the red speckled burnet moth's opening out of a Chinese juggler's sleeves, a dapper 20's Chanel tinted cloth. The cart track's white dust burnished by the heat, tall foxgloves stand their pikestaffs by the hedge, each bell's a nectar tunnel for the bee curled up in an astronaut's position the blue speedwell's shaped by a lapidary .

..

I dare a hand and feel the bristles smart, the strap-shaped leaves are stubbled, disattuned to intrusion in this solitary spot. I, warned off, that inimitable blue reproducing the sky in a waste-place is what I came for; the butterfly dots an ox-eyed daisy with a fan-shaped heart.

FOR JOHN LEHMANN Men Only It's signposted, you reach it by a path that runs circuitously to the sea. Today the clouds were placed there by Monet, the sea-gardens have flame-orange lillies, white agapanthus, red geraniums, the palm trees raise no stiff blade to the wind. Offshore the blue's a rubbed sapphire, you get out through steep gullies and then drop behind a rock that screens you from the shore. Out there men face dead centre to the sun o r turn to statues vitrifying in the blue. Each rock-seat is an incandescent urn cupped for the body, but white-hot lava1 . . T h e seaweed smells of iodine, the light's a concentrated magnifying-glass, a thrown stone puts a cormorant to flight.

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A boy, I was forbidden to come here, now I know each crevice, sea, sun and stone travel through my blood. I squat down o r sit. I needn't but I come and leave alone. A blond circle of light defines the bay, three men tread water and intrepidly strike out with flurried strokes, abandoned now to a suspended, cooling buoyancy,

I watch their heads pooled on a ruff of foam, and as they tire they grow less voluble. I look down from a height, each white body seems prismatically reflected double. One clambers out, and contemplates the two who race each other, and undried his tan still sheathes him in a crystalline turquoise he rubs off to revert to wholly man.

29

PAUL DAVIES

The Reader at Night: A Memoir On the 20th of May, 1974, I received a telegram from John Lehmann which read: "Warmest congratulations on poems which reached me today. In my opinion a unique example of beautiful book making. Am delighted." That morning the first copy of The Reader at Night, Lehmann's new book of poetry had arrived in the post from Toronto. In many ways the book was worthy of those congratulations. It had been painstakingly hand-set and hand-printed in four colours on hand-made paper and hand-bound. T h e product was both attractive and unusual. It had, however, been a very difficult job for everyone involved and 1 suspect the delight expressed in the telegram was not the only sensation he felt on the instant. Foremost among the others would have been a sense of relief mixed with apprehension, and, in some details, disappointment. When the Basilike publishing project was launched the previous winter I was nineteen years old, a two-year veteran of the antiquarian book business and interested in printing-types, letterpress printing, papermaking, and bookbinding. These interests prompted me to found a publishing company of my own. As well as producing books of distinctive quality, 1 wished to publish writers of established reputation - in particular, persons well-known in England during the 1920s and 1930s who were still living and could supply suitable material. On starting out, I gave little thought to the practical consequences or requirements of this ambitious plan. While I had sufficient knowledge to establish and understand exactly what I wished to achieve, I had no experience as an editor, and only an academic knowledge of typesetting and printing. As well, I had no capital funds whatsoever. T h e effort proceeded largely as these circumstances would predict. I feel certain there were many occasions when Lehmann would have preferred that he had prudently declined to submit a manuscript, although his courtesy, encouragement and helpfulness never faltered. And - I think - it seemed entirely worthwhile to both of us afterwards, although the company did not survive.

32 PAUL DAVZES I first contacted John Lehmann by letter in early January 1974. I had sent a somewhat awkward and formal letter to three o r four writers who were among the "survivors" of the 1930s (at least, whose names and addresses still appeared in Who's Who). Lehmann was the first to reply, by letter of January 23, 1974. He expressed interest in the idea of my preparing a book of his poems, and enquired what exactly it was I would like, and what terms I could offer. "I cannot conceive of being a good bookseller or a good publisher without having a true feeling for books and literature" he wrote "though I know it's just a business like selling soap to many." He said he had a dozen o r so new poems as yet unpublished in book form, which could well make up a small booklet, "about the size, I suppose, of Stephen Spender's 'The Generous Days', which was so beautifully printed by David Godine's press in Boston a couple of years ago." For my own part, it was only then that it dawned on me I had something tangible underway, and would now have to figure out what to d o and how to do it. I replied that something of the modest proportions he proposed rvould be entirely appropriate. I also proposed terms for royalties which, as a result of my inexperience, were unmanageably generous for a small press, and were the cause of significant self-torment and endless apologetic letters on my part after t h e book appeared. At the time, however, I was confidently crossing hurdles one at a 'time. Lehmann replied by letter of February 6, saying he had prepared a suitable collection of poems. "There are 14 in all. I find but one can be left out (or one can be added from my COLLECTED POEMS if it works out that way)." I had asked his opinion on the publishing imprint, to which he replied "I am very much in favour of the imprint being 'Printed and published by James Davies at etc.' rather than 'Privately printed'." He concluded by saying, "I will collect and recopy (wherever necessary) the typescripts just as soon as I can. I leave for Berkeley where I become a real (not a bogus) professor again, and stay for 3 months. When you get down to it I would immensely appreciate the sight of a specimen page." Now being committed, I focussed my attention to the problems of funding and production. Although the book business provided a marginal income, its cash flow and established credit were inadequate to both its own and the new publishing company's needs. So 1 acquired risk capital privately, volunteering almost usurious rates of interest (for 1974) instead. I still did not know how I was going to get the books printed. 1 experimented with various ways and means-of doing it myself, all of which were decidedly unrealistic. In the midst of these investigations, I had an unexpected call from Robert Mac-

THE READER AT NIGHT 33 Donald, proprietor of Dreadnaught, a small Toronto craft-printing shop. MacDonald was also employed at the University of Toronto Press at the time, and a mutual acquaintance at the Press had told him that I needed a printer. The Dreadnaught facilities were admirably suited to my intentions for the project. We came to an agreement whereby I would acquire all materials required for the book type, spacing, paper and ink -and Dreadnaught would retain the type and the surplus of other supplies in exchange for labour. Decisions as to design and format would be made jointly. The original cost estimates made this an attractive proposition, as my net expenses were prospectively quite low. These estimates proved to be reasonably accurate, in fact, although the total costs escalated in other quarters as the work proceeded. The typescript arrived from London during the third week of February together with a letter from Lehmann dated February 16. In it he confirmed our terms, as well as his willingness to sign the sheets when we came to that stage. With one exception, the poems were typed on a delicate onion skin paper with a manual typewriter, signed and dated in ink. It was clear by the dates which ranged from 1970 to 1972, that they were all recent work. One of the poems, "Dancer", had been published in the summer 1973 edition of The Goddad Journal, and an offprint was supplied. Lehmann inquired when he could expect galley-proofs. I had some regret in writing to explain that I would be unable to provide proofs, as we would only have enough type (when it was purchased) to set two pages at a time. Lehmann was terribly disappointed. He wrote, "You are right; when 1 read that you could not send proofs, a wail of dismay went u p that re-echoed over the Thames and startled the duck in St. James Park. What I suggest as a compromise is that you send me 1) photostats of your typescript for the printer; 2) a mock u p of the prelims. As soon as I have these, I will send you the 'Acknowledgements' and indicate where to put them in." I combined his suggestions and retyped his manuscript in folios, exactly duplicating the folded format of the book, including the prelims and colophon. This dummy, with his corrections, was used as a copy for the typesetters, and as a guide for printing. I was confident that this method would be effective. I was later proven wrong. Even as I prepared the facsimile, things went slightly amiss. I sent the copy to Lehmann, together with a list of enquiries, to which he replied "Apart from a number of corrections in the text, there are two important points to be made: 1) You have misunderstood the arrangement of the book. It consists of two sections, the first titled

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34 PAUL DAVIES

Dedications [I had thought he was reserving a dedication page], the second Thc Reader ai Night. I have made alterations to indicate this; 2) 1 d o not want the poems to be divided equally on the right and the left, but very much prefer them printed with a full page on the left and the lesser remainder on the right. . . I very much like the way you have arranged the text so that each poem falls in a double spread." Many of the decisions pertinent to this first book were also pertinent to the fledgling company; such as the name Basilike for which MacDonald prepared a logotype which appeared in most subsequent books. It was first used in March 1974, in a colourful prospectus announcing the forthcoming publicatidn of The Reader at Night, together with Jack Lindsay's Faces and Phces which was also getting underway. Lehmann had left London for Berkeley by this time, stopping over in Texas en route to California. On March 29 he wrote, "The prospectus was much admired here in Austin where, as you know, the University Press prides itself on fine printing. The only thing that gave me food for anxious thought was the price. It seems to me $20 will put this little book beyond the reach of any but libraries and collectors. I know how expensive materials are these days, but I had hoped for something nearer $10." While the prospectus was being distributed, work on the book itself had scarcely been started. The first major decision had been that of a typeface selection. I was quite keen to use an Eric Gill design, his typestyles generally being modern in temperament and distinctively English. MacDonald suggested Joanna, to which I enthusiastically agreed. Acquiring these types was a little more of a challenge. Ultimately, I telephoned the Monotype Corporation plant in Letchworth, England and spoke to their foreman, Mr. Norton. He actually seemed quite delighted to hear my request, remarking that it was a favorite of his and that the mats had not been out of storage to cast standing fonts for some time. I was impatient, and impressed an urgency upon him including having the consignment sent by air. Being a total of about 50 kilograms of lead in wooden shippingcrates, this was tremendously costly. As to text paper we acquired a German hand-made paper, Nideggin, through a local supplier. It was amongst the finest (that is, the most expensive) book papers available in the world at that time. With all the required materials in hand, the work of typesetting and printing commenced. It went quite well altogether, though it was an immensely lengthy job. The title page in particular was very successful. MacDonald prepared a four-colour design, with orna-

TIYE READER AT NIGHT 35 ments, which was very difficult to print with a hand-fed treadle press. There were other instances of costly logistical arrangements. The most notable of these was the drama which arose in getting the sheets signed safely. T h e difficulties in this case were two-fold. Firstly, that of transporting the sheets in such a way that they could also be conveniently and safely returned. Secondly, the Canadian Post Office union locals were on rotating strikes, and threatening a national walk-out. T o contend with the first problem, I fabricated an elaborate three-layer set of folding boxes in the middle of which were the colophone-page sheets wrapped in plastic. I dispatched this to Lehmann in California by mail from Toronto two days before the Post Office workers walked out in Ontario. When they later rotated back to work, I received a letter from Lehmann dated April 8, confirming arrival of the sheets and asking where exactly he should sign, and with what type of pen. He also lamented "Let me tell you that I have scarcely in my whole career done up a parcel [of this sort] by myself(!) I am terrified by the problem and the responsibility . . . but perhaps I can get help from the charming young ladies who direct the office of the English Department here." I was unable to reply by letter, as the Post Office closed again the following day, so I called Lehmann on the telephone to offer signing instructions as well as an alternative mailing address. He had already signed the sheet and had written to tell me on April 15, saying, "I have had no reply from you to my rather frantic letter about signing; so this afternoon I have signed all the sheets, in ink, and under your note (in red) about the printing. I pray that this is all right. . . . Let me say that I find the laid paper you are using extremely attractive, and have the highest hopes for the book." Although this letter was long delayed, I assured him on the telephone that this was the perfect position. My alternative mailing instructions were to an address in Calgary, Alberta, 3200 kilometres west of Toronto, where the Post Office staff was still working. Shortly thereafter I got on the train and travelled to Alberta (hoping) to receive the package. Lehmann wrote to Calgary, " . . . the parcel . . . went off to your address today. Unfortunately they had to go by parcel post, first class, special delivery, and not by airmail; as the official (who did not impress me at all by his grasp of regulations kept referring to one book after another making calculations he constantly corrected) insisted he would have to charge me an enormous sum, between 20-25 dollars if it was sent by air.. . . It seemed insane to spend so much money." Miraculously it arrived safely during a one-day window between the Alberta workers rotating

36 PAUL DAVIES back to work and the union declaring a national walk-out. While 1 had our package, I had spent several days and hundreds of dollars getting it, having travelled a distance roughly that of London to Moscow, fraying both of our nerves at the same time. The strike lasted about three weeks. Regardless, our work proceeded. Everyone involved had, I think, seriously underestimated the amount of time required to complete a book of this size. As well, Monotype is very soft, and the assets Dreadnaught were intending to acquire in exchange for their labour were rapidly wearing out. T h e stresses resulting from these factors, combined with my appalling lack of editorial experience, contributed to deteriorating relations between myself and Dreadnaught. After hundreds of hours of work, the printing job was, however, finished in early May. Bookbinding was something I was more experienced in, though I was not highly skilled in the craft by any means. I contacted Seamas McClafferty, who is now among the best hand-bookbinders in Canada, to see if he would help with the job. McClafferty dedicated over 200 hours to his portion of the binding work. I cannot recall what agreement we made as to payment. Whatever it was it could not have been enough. I had purchased a bundle of raw linen at a local dry-goods shop, which I cut into strips, sized and ironed for him. I also acquired a supply of French marbled paper from New York, which was cut into suitably sized sheets with the guillotine at the University of Toronto Library. Needless to say, I was not selling very many antiquarian books during this time, and had essentially no income. The Reader at Night would not have been completed, or possibly started, except for my common-law wife being willing and able to purchase our food and pay our rent. I did not appreciate at the time that this (in effect, the publishing project as a whole) resulted in a somewhat insecure environment, which contributed to an unhappy outcome between us. T h e book was published on o r about the 15th of May, 1974. It is remarkable to me now, particularly given the number of hours of hand-work involved, that it was all done, from first contact to finished books, in less than four and one-half months. Following his telegram, Lehmann wrote, "I was really delighted with what you had done; printing, design, paper, binding, all seemed to me quite exquisitely attractive, and I do congratulate everyone concerned most warmly. . . . There was one sri~allmisprint, which may have been in my typescript, undetected. It is in 'The Rules of Comedy', stanza 3, line 5, 'fashions' for 'passions'. I will correct it in all

THE READER AT NIGHT 37 my complimentary copies, but as 1cannot get u p to Toronto, perhaps you will correct it yourselves in the copies you send out for sale." This was not the final disappointment. On the 9th of June, Lehmann wrote, "I regret enormously to tell you that I have discovered another misprint. In the first line of stanza six of ROMAN LIFE, MODERN TIMES, 'All three we bi' should read 'All three were bi'. This error is all the stranger, as 1 seem to remember that we had an exchange of letters about the phrase. . . . These things will happen, of course, but I think proofs next time, don't you?"I While he also said that "all my friends here who have seen the book admire its beauty and elegance, . . ." I was shocked by the error. My letters over the next several months consisted largely of repeated apologies for these, and for being slow and inadequate with royalties, and of complaints for the extreme difficulty I was getting into otherwise with the publishing effort. These difficulties were very real and, unfortunately, tenacity ruled over common sense for some time to come. Lehmann's replies generally consisted of unfailing encouragement and assurances. During our exchange of letters, I naturally asked him about the poems in The Redder at Night, and about other aspects of his career. Regarding the former, he wrote on June 26th, 1974, "You are right in assuming that 'Roy' refers to Roy Fuller, with whom I have been associated as editor, publisher and fellow poet for nearly forty years. Again, you are right in supposing that 'William' is William Plomer, one of my oldest friends in the literary world, whose death last autumn (after the poem was written) has left an irreparable gap in my life. Photograph and Canyon Weather were indeed written about my stay in Texas. The Lady of Elvedon is, of course, Virginia Woolf (reference to The Waves), and I Love You I Love You I Love You is the caption to an illustration in the first edition of Dickens' Edwin Drood." Occasionally, he would mention something of his past more spontaneously, such as in his letter of March 22, 1975. "I am very interested to see from your catalogue that L.A.G. Strong's books are beginning to fetch high prices now. Is there any special reason apart from his fine qualities? H e was a Master at my preparatory school, and we grew very fond of one another." Lehmann had other projects underway at the same time, of course, which he often described. In his letter of March 22 he also wrote, "My own book on Virginia Woolf is going through the press, proofs are arriving. And I have also just completed work - that has lasted more than four years on and off - on a book called 'The Confessions of Jack Marlowe' and I shall probably be left without a friend in the

38 PAUL DAVIES world when it comes out." Towards the end of May he added in a second letter, "Jack Marlowe is in my agent's hands, and I am looking for news in the very near future. Of course it would be the greatest fun if you were able to do a limited edition, but I fear that doesn't seem to be in the cards - and I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that it isn't when you hear it's 90,000 words long!" We did, however, often discuss the possibility of our doing another book together. Lehmann was, rightly, very cautious, because I was clearly floundering. While I had asked him about other of his writings of various sorts, in his letter of the 26th of May he made a very good suggestion to me. "When I was 21 or so, I did some wood engraving myself, and, as I was trying to be a poet at the same time, I illustrated some of my poems with art, and prepared them as broadsheets. I do not value them at all highly, but they have become rather a rarity on the market, and all my spare copies (except my master set, about 10 broadsheets in all) have been snapped up. If you were interested in making a little booklet of them, which I doubt, as they are really juvenalia, there's one snag: I cannot find the original blocks, though I have a feeling they must be lying around somewhere. I could send you one or two surviving pulls, though. They have never been 'published', and I gave u p wood engraving because of the strain on my eyesight. An absurd idea, really." It was not an absurd idea at all, and I cannot remember why I didn't jump at it. It may have been that I had a certain fixation on letterpress printing at that time, and this would have required offset lithography. Regardless, I feel now that it was a mistake not to have gone ahead with it. Basilih was still a year away from its final insolvency. Our correspondence wound down in 1976. He wrote on July 6, on his receipt of the last Basilihe book, A Tower in Italy by Lascelles Abercrombie, "I have been . . . researching my book on Edward Lear, and the current heat wave is crushing, so I hope you will accept these part-excuses for not writing. . . to thank you for your gift. . . I must say that I think it is a beautiful piece of production, and does you great credit. It also seems to me an important service to our literature to have such an unpublished work by a distinguished poet in print at last. . . . Having said that, I have to admit that these belated attempts at pseudo-Jacobean drama by English poets of pre-1914 vintage are not especially sympathetic to me. Even Browning seems to me to be moving in the wrong direction in his attempts! Nevertheless, I do admit that there are many felicities in the writing, and a most interesting idea behind it." I last heard from Lehmann in the spring of 1977. He wrote from

THE READER AT NIGHT 39 Atlanta, Georgia, where he was visiting professor at Emory University. His concluding remarks were not of any particular substance, but, mysteriously, gave me a certain happiness after all we had been through making his book, "The spring display here in the countryside round Atlanta is fantastic: dogwood, pink and white, great azalea bushes of every hue, flowering cherry -just wonderful - I revel in it."

Acknowledgement T h e assistance and cooperation of Mr. John Charles and his staff at Special Collections of the University of Alberta Libraries is gratefully acknowledged. The letters and other documents cited in this essay are detailed in 'The Basilike Archives: Their Organization and Listing' by Rhona McAdam, Faculty of Library Science, T h e University of Alberta, Edmonton. Notes For a discussion of the relationship of The Reader at Night to the body of Lehmann's poetry, see Christopher Levenson's essay in this volume. 1. Lehmann had added the following note to my "enquiry sheet" sent with the dummy typescript: " 'bi' is slang (modern English) for bi-sexual; it would have been understood if the 'three' had been modern Londoners or Los Angelinos for that matter."

The Writer

CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON

The Poetry of John Lehmann Inevitably perhaps those who make their reputations as "men of letters" -editors, publishers, entrepreneurs -tend to find their own creative writing eclipsed by their other activities. This has certainly been the case with John Lehmann, for although his poetry has a representative quality, sharing much with Auden, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice and with the poets of the war years, his more overtly public roles have tended to distract attention from his poetry. In fact Lehmann has written poetry intermittently throughout his life. His first book was a collection of poems, A Garden Revisited, which appeared in 1931, not long after he left Cambridge. This was followed in 1934 by The Noise of History, his principal collection of the thirties, and one that reflects the left-wing idealism of those years. In the last years of that decade he wrote no poems, but returned to poetry during the war and produced one of his best volumes in 1944, The Sphere of Glass. This was followed by his first "collected poems", The Age of the Dragon in 1952. His period as publisher and as editor of The London Magazine was not the most fruitful poetically, though it was followed by the appearance of Collected Poems in 1963. He came back to poetry with a prose poem, Christ the Hunter, in 1965, and with one of his most attractive collections, The Reader at Night, published in 1974. This was followed by the retrospective New and Selected Poems in 1985. In part, no doubt, the very nature of his poetry has contributed to the lack of attention, for one can find in Lehmann's oeuvre no equivalents in terms of public acclaim to Auden's Spain for instance o r Spender's "Not palaces, an era's crown." Indeed, John Lehmann's early poetry is remarkably detached both in tone and subject matter. Consider the curiously literary title poem of his first volume, A Garden Revisited. Archer of the sun, still aiming through the pears, With shell-like helmet on your leaden curls, A leaden shaft that never leaves the bow Still levelled at the West, beside your pool The yellow flags have shrivelled, lily leaves Green as the stagnant water where they rise

44

CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON Press round the single flower, as they lay When those who pause before your pedestal Watched with white petals closing, years behind.

The garden seems to be an enclosed area of calm, even stagnation, and as the poem develops it is in terms of colour rather than of action, lit u p by such touches as the butterfly Memory's "peacock eyes, melodious tints/Dark purple, rust and blue. . . ." Both setting and atmosphere are self-sufficient, recalling, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the Lehmann family's garden at Fieldhead, and troubled only momentarily by the possibility of change. These for the most part autumnal scenes are immaculately constructed both in cadence and in their use of such devices as assonance and internal rhyme. Stephen Spender has spoken vaguely of Lehmann's pictorial quality as recalling "some later Victorian writers"; here, and in such poems as "In the Backwater" with its early Tennysonian richness of sensuous detail, one can appreciate what he means: The noiseless bows of the canoe slip by Where tangled weedstrings on the surface lie, Where from the crevices in the low wall The dark green ivy's trailing branches fall, Where the dank mosses and mauve blossoms grow, And sunbeams mirrored from the ripples flow . . .

But no less striking than the tapestry-like visual details of the "tangled weedstrings" and the "trailing branches" are the aural qualities, the way for instance that the "gr" of "green", partly submerged in "trailing" and "branches", re-emerges triumphantly in the stressed "grow"; o r the way "mosses" is echoed by "blossom", the vowel sound of "mauve" by "grow". "A Room with a View" offers similarly satisfying complex patterns of sound:

. . . the long crisp shadow of the lantern slid Over mown levels to the Eastern side, Where wreathing windows half-drawn curtains hid, White roses to the hot rays opened wide. Quiet they leaned, the last time they would see From that high sill hushed even crown the day, Locking the hoarded coin in memory Of shape, light, sound, before they turned away.

But in its self-containment, its lack of external referents -the setting, fairly clearly, is Great Court, Trinity College, a totally enclosed area the poem, both tonally and in its subject matter, seems more akin at times to the seventeenth than to the nineteenth century. And such an impression would only be reinforced by the irttellectuul wit of a poem such as "Meeting" where we are shown

T H E POETRY OF J O H N LEHMANN

45

Sleek crocuses pressed through the clay Like Christians waked at Judgement Day

even though this note succumbs in the poem's conclusion to imagery that is more romantically conceived: Oysters and wine . . . the tune she sang In memory transmuted rang, And meeting was a sudden rift T o r n open as high cloudbanks drift, Through which the Cevennes climber sees Day sheet with gold the Pyrennees.

However here, as also in "A Sleeping Passenger (the train from Venice)", the main, if not indeed the total, effect is atmospheric rather than, say, didactic o r intellectual. Granted, one can also find poems even in the first volume, that reveal Auden's influence. Take, for instance, the opening lines of "Not Those Long Vistas": Not those long vistas through the mountain pass, T h e panoramas wheeling from the train, New lands, new lakes you loved, but lawns and trees Electric with habitual charge of life, Dangerous to see, to touch, they could release Such high-powered current through the veins, recalling Voices at nightfall coming from the river . . .

It is in matters of phrasing, verbal mannerisms ("electric", "dangerous") and attitudes, especially the panoramic detachment, that they recall Auden. Where verse movement is concerned Lehmann is very different, less hortatory, syntactically more involved, the tone too more meditative and personal. At least in his manner of dealing with landscape, the more obvious connections are with C. Day Lewis. One cannot help noticing too, in those passages already quoted, the traditional nature of Lehmann's stanza forms and metres. Of the thirty poems in the first volume, five are composed in rhymed couplets, ten in rhymed quatrains and three in six-line stanzas, two are rather unusual sonnets, while one is in terza rima, so that only the remaining nine are in free verse, blank verse o r other irregular but often rhymed forms. Even Lehmann's frequent use of pararhyme fails to give the movement of his verse at this stage that urgently "modern" feel that we associate with the names of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and MacNeice. As for subject matter, few of these poems deal explicitly with any political reality, and when, as in "The Excellent Machine", they do,

46 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON the poem's propagandistic intentions upon us are too obvious. For the most part, however, the points that Lehmann is making are psychological rather than political. T h e sonnet "Shut", for instance, a reticent and almost allegorical poem, evokes the end of an affair. So too with "To Penetrate That Room" and "The Extreme Attic of the Mind", while "The Trench", despite the fact that it is concerned with one who once "travelled roads / That led to a p le cheeks and lovers' shade, / And roads to parliaments, the roar o crowds,/ A newsreel name and certain voice obeyed / By millions mesmerized . . . " deals not with public political power but rather with private inner hesitation and fear. In general, then, these early poems, even if at times they exhibit the required socio-political attitudes, are private and psychological rather than public and ethical. The next section' does indeed mark a change, as these concluding lines from "Calm as the Moon" make clear:

'k

. . . What shall be o u r signal for departure

From the habit and the self we have outgrown?

Wait, we shall come to it any time soon T h e crying of cocks in riverside farms, T h e flush of sunlight o n a March afternoon, T h e thunder of engines in a glass-roofed terminus, T h e advance out of shadow and the crowd of lifted arms.

This heroic, forward-looking rhetoric can be parallelled elsewhere, as for instance in the opening lines of "After Fever": Yet o n e day, waking, to emerge at last From prisons of' the brain, more iron than iron, All mass neurotic dreads, imposed ideas, T h e sick-bed nightmare;

or in the two final stanzas of "Evidence of Spring": Tanks and police-cars throw from year to year A huger shadow over branch and bloom, And spring-bathed eyes lose suddenly their light Appalled by still fantastic doom: Yet still the hour might clear the spirit's cloud And wake the millions shout their No to fear Waits, and death's lies grow strident to inflame Nerves tense for telegrams of war.

Despite their uncharacteristically cryptic syntax, such lines serve to remind us of Auden's all-pervasive influence at that period of English poetry, an influence that expressed itself not simply in the manner of the rhetoric, but also in the choice of types, situations, even sentiments. Thus in the third stanza of the same poem

THE POETRY OF JOHN LEHMANN

47

Policemen, too, put off their winter coats Eyeing the hungry with superb disdain, Flaunt bulwark torsos to the food-puffed features Glimpsed through the bar's class-conscious pane.

is all too reminiscent of Auden's vignette in "Consider this and in our time" from his 1930 volume, Poems, while "Waking from Snow" ends with the usual self-consciously declamatory gesture as he awaits the release of revolution, the piled chestnut flowers standing as symbol Of the explosion of men's lives released from snow The Spring of hand and heart and mind That still delays.

Similarly, attempts in such poems as "On with the Dance" to combine colloquial reportage on contemporary Germany or Austria with forays into slang strike one today as stiff, programmatic literary slumming. Certainly the ironic message of the discrepancy between mounting disorder and the official attempts to preserve an outward calm - "All's well, all's orderly, on with the dance!" - is as totally predictable as the pervasive imagery of spring. Yet "As Day Burns On", another proletarian mood piece (like "A Sleeping Giant", written to commemorate a strike marking the anniversary of "the February shootings") goes beyond the by now routine apotheosis of the workers - "They draw new strength from ringing advance to work/ T h e renewed challenge of arms and brains" (these poems are very adjectival, with hardly a noun escaping its epiphet) to convey an attractive sense of a representative but particular place: The eager stranger forgets those shaken hours Remarking the electric blaze of squares, Ovens for roasted nuts and sweet-smelling trays of' fruit, The posters of new circuses and films.

In general in this volume Lehmann writes with more conviction of weather and landscape than of more urban and political scenes. Sometimes, as in "A Marsh Way", the poet projects a guilty awareness of his own comfort and safety: the friend, dreaming of brave new futures, confides his plans "to me/ . . . who own a room where fire keeps hope from burning / Tables and chairs, a pass-book and a garden,/ And friends with yet more gardens for my calm,] A solid pavement his feet cannot tread." In fact, some of the most interesting poems here are again those that deal explicitly with love relationships and those that present a series of ambiguous images o r images that remain at least partly private. This is the case with "These three",

48 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON

which addresses three friends, Shawn, Pierre and Margaret, who are not further identified, as it is with "Like the wind" where, however random and desultory the mood, the images are suggestive: "the singers wandering before the door/ Come empty-handed from shut factories." Other poems, such as "The Door Flies Open", occupy an indeterminate nightmare area that could be either private o r public, though if private the terror certainly has enough public counterparts. Not that the natural world can provide any abiding escape. "In the Alps" is as close as one comes in this volume to a conventional nature poem:

. . . On meadow balconies we

pause to see, In drifting sun, the white, uncurtained peak Piled above gulfs of tree.

These night-green inasses in the scented air, The frail snow-roses, clustering as they climb The cold slope's bouldered stair, All this expanse o f noiseless growth, and rock

...

but even here the outer world intrudes, albeit conditionally, as the poem continues: Would hardly stir or change, though just beyond World reeled in war's first shock . . .

At this time, then, Lehrnann's poetry passively reflects, even where it does not overtly comment upon, the familiar political l a n d s ~ a p e . ~ In The Age of the Dragon the next section was entitled "Experiments in Prose" but by the 1963 Collected Poems these prose poems, together with others omitted previously, were diffused among two sections of the book and interspersed with regular lyric poems. Yet they deserve separate consideration. Tempting as it would be to compare these pieces with more recent examples of this sub-genre by Englishlanguage writers such as Margaret Atwood, Robert Bly or W.S. Merwin, it would probably be unfair, for at this time Lehmann was virtually on ,his own here.3 Whatever his motivations for the experiments, they are interesting both when they succeed and when they fail. Among the successes must certainly be counted his attainment of an almost Rilkean lyricism that relies for its effectiveness on the matching of keenly observed physical details with gestures of mood: From the balconies of houses now the last snow begins to drip, as the morning sun wheels round telescoping the shadows [my italics].

or from the same piece, "Spring Light":

T H E POETRY OF J O H N LEHMANN

49

After weeks of frost and storm, and the east wind's teeth on unprotected ears, the soft air, the spring light are like unexpected gestures of forgiveness.

or, finally, from "Morning": She hears the angry noise of history grow louder, like the noise of a landslide on an island coast.

What links all these passages is a directness that is among Lehmann's most engaging characteristics. Sometimes, it is true, by using the greater possibilities for qualifications that prose affords through subordinate constructions that poetry rarely employs, the rhythms and cadences of these prose poems become too much like those of fiction. The following sentence, for instance, from "No Retreat" might strike one as involuted: Nor is there retreat for us, we know with sudden conviction, as the guide recites the number of dead in an Imperial Victory, to our so precious summer mornings in dove-filled courtyards.

But at the very least sentences like these, or the almost filmcommentary-like questions and staccato statements of the three "Vigils", will serve to remind us of the importance of cadence in Lehmann's more traditional poetic oeuvre. If even before the war the mood of much of Lehmann's poetry was elegiac, occasions for such a mood could only be increased by the separations, dangers and deaths that war entailed, and this is indeed the case with most of the poems included in the fourth section, "Perturbations of War." But whatever their thematic similarities, these poems exhibit a considerable variety of approach; not especially in terms of metre, stanza form, etc., for there the tighter, though sometimes intricate, conventional forms abound, but rather in degree of directness or obliquity with which the subject matter is treated. Many of the poems concern love. Thus, "The Last Ascent" establishes a heroic metaphor of rock-climbing and quest in the first five stanzas, only to fall into anti-climax in the final eight lines where the climbers have returned: 'We did not guess, no angel warned How cruel the eagles and ravines!' Where had they wandered? What mirage Had lured beyond our farmland scenes? There was no mountain there, no snow, No glacier where the eagle hovers, No deep ravine of dizzy fall T o scar and shock: but they were lovers.

50 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON "The End", by contrast, does not rely on any clearly defined situation. In fact, the central situation is mystifying: what is "the darkness in that love", who are "they" that use the lamps, and what the "wounds/ No surgeon of today could heal"? This vagueness of reference, together with such similar attributes as the "scar", "our hurts" and "the fatal sequence", invest the poem with a sense of danger, isolation and misunderstanding. "Letter" which, like "The End", experiments attractively with half rhymes, is more substantial in that the situation, receiving a letter from a loved friend in the Forces, is clearly presented, if at times in a rather involved, even ambiguous syntax, and the imagery arises no less clearly from what has been presented. The directness and restrained colloquialism of the final stanza is impressive: They crack, the giant elms, from rooted shape The green cliff-gardens tumble; who shall turn From this, love's ravaged landscape, back to praise? Yet still we nerve ourselves to find the hope, While in a monstrous rhythm before our eyes The alien future, horrible, is born.

Apart from the fact that we find here the first notes of that foreboding that is to become a key element in much of Lehmann's post-war poetry, what strikes one in all three poems is the way that, as with the early poetry of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender (and before them such Georgian poets as Rupert Brooke) there are imposed upon war and the rumours of war many more personal anxieties about love. In this way warfare o r espionage for instance become interchangeable with the love relationships for which they were originally intended as metaphors. Some of these poems, then, seem almost as if written in code. Particularly in a poem such as "Before Dawn", this confounding of personal and universal leads to strident didacticism and vague rhetoric. Not that this coded quality need diminish their power: indeed, in "The Summer Story9*,it is hard not to admire, even while one smiles at, the adroit contrivance of the still unexplained concluding lines where the disappointed welcoming party disperses:

. . . Yet still goodbye, though few remained, Grew like a weed of rank despair, Till I was left alone to meet (As 1 had always known must be) In the damp house, at summer's end, The dark lieutenant from the sea.

Although Lehmann frequently throughout his work invokes a

T H E POETRY OF JOHN LEHMANN

51

rather generalized "Love" as arbiter, salvation, and the like, just as he does even bigger abstractions such as History, the rest of this section is preoccupied more with the atmosphere of the actual war and its specifically human effects. "The Sphere of Glass" in particular is a fine example of Lehmann's mature lyric gift. Here he describes a walk by brother and sister, both poets, "through the sun-laced woods" and along a Roman dyke: O n e bird among the golden-green Spangle of leaves was poised to sing: They heard the opening trill, and then Silence; as if its heart could bring No note so pure but would disturb T h e soundless fountain of the spring. Within the wood, within that hour It seemed a sphere of glass had grown T h a t glittered round their lives with power T o link what grief the dyke had known With voices of that vaster war T h e sun-shot bombers' homing drone, And make one tragic harmony Where still this theme, their hope, returned, And still the spring unchangeably In fires of its own sap was burned And poetry, from love and death T h e peace their human contest earned . . .

One notes for instance the adroit placing of the word "silence" followed by a caesura and the unobtrusive but effective internal rhymes or assonances formed by the sequence "bird . . . heard . . . disturb". Altogether, apart from the occasional too "literary" term such as "colloquy" in the final stanza, the poem maintains an attractively unforced naturalness. T h e same holds true for "At a Time of Death", subtitled "In Memory of J.D.A., killed in Italy": starting with relatively simple rhythms and elementary rhymes that are almost, one might think, too insistent, the poem modulates in the final stanza from the straightforward seashore imagery that has been established throughout the poem - sand, mist, shells, gulls - into a powerful and unexpected metaphor: Who walks by the shore? A boy who has seen Where the mist has just been Sudden end to the sands: For the tall headland looms Sheer in front, and the wave

52 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON Beats and boils where he stands; And he walks from the shore Where the sea-trumpet booms In whorls of its cave, And is known here no more.

Inevitably in such a context this is not the only elegy o r poem about dying; some, such as "Elegy", included in The Age of the Dragon but omitted from the Collected Poems, seem almost generic in their use of the standard issue imagery of ploughing, spring, seagulls and the like, but there are several others, such as "A Death in Hospital" that achieve a memorable eloquence of cadence, most notably in the final stanzas : It was the fifth day explanation broke; There was no fear nor human longing more, And all his life in that surprising dawn Appeared a dwindling shore Separate for ever from his tide-kissed boat, An isle with all its gardens fondly kept Complete and curious, that belonged to them, His friends who stayed and wept.

Nevertheless, where one does not detect a personal involvement, Lehmann's poetry can slip with alarming ease into a kind of "Parnassian" language, a seamless matching of appropriate sentiment with a vocabulary that, if not actually poetic diction, has certainly become deadingly conventional, as for instance here in "A London Terminus": In those far days when Egypt's rains Fell not so red from English veins Was innocence so wrong to hold Concord and joy earth's purest gold, That now, grown older, must admire T h e finer mist from battle's fire?

Here, as in "Invocation", the excessive smoothness and neatness is in part the result of the lack of any major rhythmic disturbances such as make themselves felt through inversions of stress o r the use of caesuras. Increasingly too we encounter another aspect of war that is to take on greater significance in Lehmann's later work, the idyllic references back to "boyhood dreams", "childhood's lost desires" or "the legend that your boyhood craved and lost", an elegiac sense above all of a past that has been effectively sealed off from the poet by war and is now irrecoverable. Interestingly, Lehmann does not reprint in the Collected

THE POETRY OFJOHNLEHMANN 53 Poem the poem "There is a House", which did appear in The Age ofthe Dragon. The main purpose of this almost Arnoldian evocation of longing and nostalgia for childhood and innocence seems to be to point up the postponement of plans for living, and even of personality, "for the duration". Despite Yeatsian echoes and the recapitulation of themes present already in the earlier poems, as also of techniques of cadence and internal rhyme that have by now become second nature to Lehmann, lines such as the following d o not deserve to be discarded: In that fierce hour, All secrets burn towards release. Then might the great bay windows blaze With all the evening's airy fire And through the wide-flung lattices We'd hear, like childhood's lost desire, T h e cou-rou o f the doves that hide In flowery branches starred with light, And watch the glancing swallows dart Through gardens long blocked out from sight.

Of this concern with irrevocable change the most striking example is "The House", subtitled "An Eclogue for the Air, on themes suggested by living in an age of transition." T h e thirteen page poem essentially juxtaposes two views of the narrator's "sheltered Eden", the big house by the river, on the one hand, that of the first questioner, possibly intended as a socialist, though a very simplistic one, who opposes sentimental brooding upon a privileged past - "progress is vital, leisured dreams are not"; and on the other a rather Yeatsian figure who stresses the values of the status quo and the importance of the will. Their viewpoints are moderated, though hardly reconciled, in the figure of the Gardener, who provides continuity but also joins in the philosophizing, thus countering the first voice of Progress's comment that "no one may hold to ancient privilege1 When time is pregnant in a stormy age" with the question "And yet what living witness can be sure/ If Justice or another is the sire?" and with memories that seem almost to resurrect, albeit on the level of haute bourgeoisie rather than aristocracy, the ideal of the big house that is projected in Ben Johnson's Penshurst or Yeats's Coole, the ideal of an organic community: I do not judge but I remember how In the old days between the high and low There was a two-way giving.

54 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON Ultimately the "see-saw dialectic" is not so much resolved as made irrelevant when the narrator encounters the children he remembers from his own childhood, who together with the gardener, impress upon him the individuality of all experience, the inevitability of change, and the inevitable differences too in the way in which each of us experiences. Like "Poem" ("Yes, we are desperate men . . . ") which starts with a quasi-Yeatsian resonance but immediately justifies it with a sharply conceived image of the boathouse and the smell of stored apples, so shifting the whole poem from rhetoric to personal affirmation, this Eclogue is most convincing when it recreates the personal and the familiar rather than when it attempts argument or generalization. An intervening section, "Adaptations and Vignettes", though it adds eight poems omitted from the earlier collection, does not signify any new direction for Lehmann's poetry. Although the act of translating can provide a valuable way for a writer to diversify his technical skills and to experiment with unfamiliar roles and attitudes, this was not so in Lehmann's case: most of the poems translated seem to fit into existing patterns within his own work. If the two poems from Erich Kaestner ("Know'st thou the land . . . " and "The Blind Man's Monologue") might have prompted a sharper satiric tone, most of the others - "Song of the Austrians in Dachau" and "Song of the 20th Century Man" by Jura Soyfer; "War" and "Bombardment" from the French of AndrC Chamson; and "The Guinea-Fowl", "Autumn in the Trenches" and "Night on the Alasan", from the Georgian of Georgi Leonidze, Galaktion Tabidze and 110 Masashvili respectively - are also characterized by a Romantic-heroic strain not unlike Lehmann's own in his more overtly political poetry. As for the four remaining "occasional" poems, they are well-turned but light and miscellaneous. It is rather to a poem such as "The Age of the Dragon" that we must turn, however, if we want to find in a darker register the foreboding quality mentioned earlier; a sense of unrestrained evil is again personalized by being set in a very specific landscape that at the same time possesses a built-in symbolism. As the bombers take off they cast their shadows across circles of ancient standing stones. T h e prayer that concludes the fourth and final section of this impressivelyconstructed poem is for "some vision" that will rein in the uncontrollable powers that war has released: 0 give us words as strong as the ringed stones That still outlast forgotten priest and name Counting the years by thousands on the downs, To cage the Dragon and transmute our shame.

THE POETRY O F J O H N L E H M A N N 55 Whether such vision was ever found must remain moot, for what the final section of the Collected Poems, "A Mediterranean Sequence", adds to the later poems is mainly in terms of setting, of a more exotic and often mythical atmosphere, though one that is by no means unique to Lehmann: the list of British poets of the '40s and '50s who exploited this setting is considerable, with Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer and Alan Ross, who took over the editorship of The London Magazine from Lehmann, prominent among them. Like such later poets as Anthony Thwaite, whose archeological training came in handy when he was teaching and living in Libya, Lehmann brings the requisite dry ironies to his perusal of classical relics. Thus we find "Among the Shards", which starts pedestrianly enough, Like many other lands where Greece Founded her cities in the sun T h e isle of Cyprus once excelled In all her architects had done.

rising at times to an almost Augustan facility of epigram, as here when he introduces the theme of cultural degradation by centuries of foreign collectors: And here and there a peasant boy Still points to a mosaic floor. Of course the earthquakes took their toll, And fire, and storm; but man took more.

and concluding with an excellent use of balance and timing: One cannot blame the villagers, They needed shelter, like the gods; And Kings must feed their retinues; And profits soar when conscience nods.

Most of the poems are not even gently satirical: rather, one finds a pleasantly hedonistic listing of olive trees, amphorae, grape vines, cicadas and the celebration of a still rather generalized love. Beyond this there are, however, a few poems or sections of poems that strike a darker note, one that shatters the illusion of innocent sensuousness with "intimations of decay". "Goodbye" for instance starts: Goodbye: there is no other word That can express the world today,

while in "The Road to Rhamnous" the "silence of the ruins" takes on a more universal significance for the post-war world as the tourists' journey assumes mythical overtones until finally they discover that "despite confident letters of introductions"

56 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON As at Eleusis, Aphaea, as at the Lion Gate T h e latch will not be lifted to their urgent ringing, At Rhamnous also it will be too late, T h e gods will not be at home.

Against a sense of impending doom Lehmann seems to set both an admiration of the peasants' "unflinching will not to be dispossessed" and, in more personal terms, a Ulysses-like determination to continue: "All life is hunting clues and never finding." Since the Collected Poems two further volumes of poetry have appeared, both in very limited editions. T h e first, Christ the Hunter, published in 1965, immediately raises difficulties of classification: is it in fact a sequence of prose poems o r is it, rather, poetic prose? O r are such distinctions merely academic pedantry? Surely not, for any experienced reader will, consciously o r not, bring certain expectations and preconceptions to an encounter with certain metres, stanza forms, etc. T h e work starts well: based on an archeological find at Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, a tomb carving of Christ as "a young hunter, a conqueror, a musician", the subject of the work is at once anonymous hunter, Orpheus and Alexander, "that Christ who summons to new spiritual endeavours, whose challenge is to the established values of a world without vision, who calls us all not to repentance but to thinking in a revolutionary way beyond the categories of conventional right and wrong, the master of Paradox, the Hunter of living truth through the forests of seeming." What follows, however, although indeed informed by this desire for openness, by much talk of love, and by an awareness that our five human senses are very limited, oscillates between meditation, sermon, and a eulogy of the painter John Minton, who is praised for love "beyond the cold puritanism of our northern shores." Not only is the work not consistent as narrative (at one stage the narrator takes on the persona of Mary Magdalene as she describes Christ's resurrection), it also does not display any clear line of philosophical exposition. Only a few passages attain the density, precision, even sometimes the rhythms, of poetry. One is reduced, then, to picking out "beauties", and there are indeed some attractive analogies. Thus, attempting to describe the "innumerable vibrations and rays penetrating the universe which our limited senses cannot report to our consciousness", he writes: "A sense beyond our senses can hear and receive it as our ears hear the passing of the swans high u p in their flight in the early dawn." At greater length, almost epic simile, is the train traveller analogy of the following paragraph:

THE POETRY O FJOHN LEHMANN 57 I am like someone who has been travelling in a train, from the window of which he has been able to watch an enchanted landscape, full of strange and beautiful flowers and trees, with half-concealed vistas, the bend of a river disappearing behind a hill, the glimpse of a farm through the branches of an encircling orchard, the roofs of a Palladian villa, the top windows of which catch the sun above the elms of its avenue. T h e train has carried him on, too fast for his liking, though every now and then it has stopped, he has been able to open the window, lean out, and breathe the pure air of this landscape, identify a detail here o r there; then the train has started again, once more changing the angle and the fall of light. And now suddenly he looks at his ticket - he could not read it before -and sees that the station the train is drawing into, is where he must get off at last. And the landscape lies all before him, to be explored in its incalculable richness, echoing with memory and promise. T h e landscape of poetry.

One could make collections of similar passages where he argues eloquently about cruelty whether to man in wars or to animals in experiments for the sake of scientific knowledge; where, recalling the Bloomsbury ethos of which he long formed part, he asserts a belief in the absolute value of personal relationships, where he transcribes a dream, o r where, instancing war-time bombers and the present-day possibility of unleashing nuclear war by turning a key, he laments the ever wider separation of act and consequence. But, however moving or thought-provoking some of these passages are, it is difficult to see how their divergences cohere into a work of art, let alone a work of poetry. With The Reader at Night, published in Toronto in 1974, no such problems arise: the book's attractiveness is precisely as a graceful consolidation of qualities already firmly established in Lehmann's oeuvre rather than as a departure in any new direction." T h e title sequence comprises a series of elegant literary footnotes: "The Rules of Comedy", for instance, deals with Christopher Isherwood's novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, while "Vampire and Child" launches a surprisingly outspoken attack on Lou Andreas Salome, the "mystic mistress", as he terms her, of both Nietzsche and Rilke, and in Lehmann's view afemme fatah, intent only on destroying genius. Most are lighter in tone than this, although one of those that one might expect to be slightest, "Puss in the Sky", about the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, has a more serious political twist in its tail: after acknowledging that it is no problem in Queen of Hearts fashion to execute a cat without a grin, he asks how one beheads a grin without a cat, and concludes

58 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON This quandary continues to confound New tyrannies that persecute in vain What neither axe nor firing squad can wound, And, like the Cat, will grin, and grin again.

T h e other sequence that makes up the book, "Dedications", is the more substantial, composed as it is of invocations of, o r dedications to, old friends. "To my faithful correspondents in England", for instance, in its well-handled but unheroic couplets, keenly evokes Lehmann's sense of temporary exile in the USA as "hired Professor" as also of his enduring affection for a cousin, a sister and two others identified only as "Roy" and "William" (Roy Fuller and William Plomer); while lines such as You who often in the waste of night I yearn for, loving, witty, sad, o r tight, Who catch my thought without a long digression T o Fowlerize a well-known John expression,

introduce an attractively relaxed and informal aspect to his verse. But it is in "The Lady of Elvedon", dedicated to Virginia Woolf, that Lehmann achieves not merely the best poem of this book but one of his best poems of any period. Starting with the familiar walled garden setting, the poem's carefully crafted quatrains move swiftly into invocation and compliment: T h e stable clock stands still, and tells no hour: Virginia, it is you I see, T h e Lady of Elvedon in that timeless air That knows of no mortality, And you become your image of the art You kept such faith with, that the frail Structure of tissue and nerve sustained a hurt Only the final peace could heal.

Half-rhyme, assonance, subdued alliteration, an easy interplay of sentence and stanza form, a measured informality of tone - all combine to produce a texture of speech that is both warm and meditative, a poem dispassionate and yet engaged. Without any of the lapidary and stoic airs he has sometimes adopted elsewhere, Lehmann has achieved here an effect of balanced, natural speech and elegant simplicity that is impressive and memorable. When one looks back over the whole of John Lehmann's relatively slim poetic oeuwe, the qualities that have developed and endured best are probably this informality of tone, his measured deployment of a wide range of metrical skills, and, controlling these, an acute architectural sense both within the line and in terms of the poem's

THE POETRY OF JOHN LEHMANN

59

overall structure: these are what characterize poems as diverse as "The Age of the Dragon", "The Sphere of Glass", "In Memory of J.D.A." and, finally, "The Lady of Elvedon". Nor is it by chance that they all share an elegiac or a warning mood. With the possible exception of his early use of the prose poem, Lehmann's work has not been innovative: rather, it has drawn upon a wide acquaintance with English literary tradition in order to cultivate its own walled garden of metrical resourcefulness and so to evoke those states of mind or heart that seemed of primary importance to the poet himself. True, there have been periods when his personal voice was drowned out by the literary strategies and mannersisms of a particular group, but never for long: like, say, Edward Thomas, his best work makes use of but transcends the dominant manners of the age to produce a carefully crafted poetry that is quietly but unmistakably individual, a small but important contribution to the texture of literature in our time. Notes 1. T h e sequence of poems discussed follows that of John Lehmann's Collected Poems (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1963) rather than that of the earlier selection The Age oftheDragon (Longmans, Green, London, 195 1) o r of the individual volumes. 2. See Robert Martin's discussion of this period in his essay on Lehmann's novels in this volume. 3. For a history and an attempt at definition of the 'prose poem', see Michael Benedikt's introduction to his anthology The Prose Poem, (Laurel Books, Dell Publishing, New York, 1976). 4. For a discussion of the evolution and production of The Reader at Night, see Paul Davies's essay in this volume.

ROBERT K. MARTIN

Apwals From Across Some Frontier: T& Novels of John Lehmann John Lehmann's two novels (Evil was Abroad (1938) and In the Purely Pagan Smse (1976)), although widely separated in time and apparently very different in subject matter, form in many ways a single composite work. The later novel's outspoken concern for its narrator's homosexuality and multiple sexual adventures provides the barely stated subtext of the earlier work, while the first novel's explicit concern with issues of politics and literature provides an intellectual context that is only hinted at in the later work. Together they offer a serious exploration of the significance of sexuality and of the ways in which a recognition of homosexuality may offer a means to an altered perception of all one's responses to life. John Lehmann's fiction, like the work of his friends W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, but even more clearly, insists on the impossibility, or the great artistic price, of a conception of art divorced from life. This is what Lehmann's narrator Jack Marlowe calls "the pursuit of illumination through sex" (Purely Pagan, 75), and represents as the breaking through of a "glass wall" between the historian and his subject. In other words, the novels' depictions of friendship and love between the English observer and his Austrian bedmates offer a means of undercutting the assumed objectivity of the reporter: they provide a privileged insight into a culture that would otherwise remain closed. The contrast between the reporter/historian and the poet/novelist is portrayed inEvil was Abroad through the interaction of Peter Rains and his friend Dick. Although Dick reminds Peter of the political realities, and is in Berlin on assignment during the Reichstag fire, Peter's emotional involvement with Rudi and.friendship with Bert1 have given him a personal knowledge the journalist can never have. For the victims of National Socialism are no longer the anonymous statistics of the newspaper, but the very real faces and bodies of friends and lovers. There is a very striking illustration of this capacity to render personal the political in the dramatic scene that concludes the Viennese episodes of In the Purely Pagan Sense. A year after the

62 ROBERT K. MARTIN Anrchlu/3,Jack returns to Vienna where he meets a young member of the Luftwaffe, his former sex partner from the Gaensehauefel, Robert: the two make love in the open, "in the midst of Nazified Vienna" (Purely Pagan, 107). This is Lehmann's idyllic depiction of the power of love or lust to overcome politics. T h e scene picks u p on a theme presented in the earlier novel, where it is handled with less sexual frankness but also with less optimism. As Peter and Rudi wonder if war will come, Peter realizes they would be on opposite sides and says, "I don't want to find myself aiming a gun at you". Although Rudi argues for the power to overcome the war by personal affection ("I'd exchange cigarettes with you on the sly"), Peter's response is more realistic: "They wouldn't let us. They'd shoot us themselves" (Evil was Ahoad, 120). While Peter's sexual experiences bring him to a heightened social and political awareness, there is no illusion of sex as a source of human brotherhood; it is merely the means to one person's aesthetic and personal transformation. Peter's transformation has two sources, which are artfully interwoven in the text. One is the experience with Rudi, which offers Peter an insight into the lives of the working class as well as a sense of his own failure of nerve. T h e other is the biography of a poet, the task that has brought him to Vienna. T h e theme of the biographer in search of the elusive artist and his mysterious past is borrowed in part from Henry James's The Aspern Papers (1888). T h e parallels between the texts are many: not only the biographer in search of the letters that will reveal the secrets of the poet's life, but the daughter of the poet's friend who is a potential lover for the biographer (and hence source of the secret). Lehmann's use of this material is largely ironic, for his novel is conceived in part as an anti-James statement, as a renunciation of the novel of ideas and of the hero as impotent observer. As he puts it at the end of the novel, "he must learn to feel as they [the people] felt, no longer watch, dreaming from the outside" (Evil was Abroad, 255); this is an awareness that "the publishing scoundrel" never comes to. Peter has allowed the life of art, the life of the sacred dead writers of the past, to replace an art of life. T h e encounter with Rudi is the first step toward the breakdown of this separation, and it is accompanied by similar pressures from his discoveries about his poet. At the same time the way in which Lehmann has structured his material into two separate novels -the first of them discreet and only hinting about the role of homosexual relationships, and the second of them devoted almost entirely to a chronicle of sexual affairs with little attention to politics or history - might suggest that the rift is not finally healed. However that may be, Evil was Abroad has as one of its

APPEALS FROM ACROSS SOME FRONTIER 63 principal themes the need to infuse art with a sense of personal experience and political involvement. In that regard it is very much a part of the Auden-Spender-Is herwood world, as it, like the "Berlin Stories", proclaims the centrality of personal engagement and the interconnections of sex and politics, and simultaneously proclaims its freedom from an older artistic world of irony and disengagement, represented by an apolitical reading of James.' The journey to Vienna thus brings the two crises together. Although Peter has believed in "a world inhabited by poets and artists of the past, illuminated by glowing heavenly bodies", he has now come to see "new aspects" of his poet's life. So too his humdrum life has been interrupted by "the meeting under the lamp-post" (Evil was Abroad, lo), with Rudi, whose "shock of yellow hair" provokes "a small shock of interest" in Peter (Evil was Abroad, 5 ) . What he discovers about his poet is inextricably linked with his own knowledge of Rudi. So close are Peter and the subject of his biography that one of the poet's letters seems to come alive in his mind, and across the neglected common of the outskirts of a city comes a figure, as if in "a film or a play . . . and the figure was unmistakably Rudi" (Evil was Abroad, 32). Much later in the novel these strands are interlaced once again, at the time of the Reichstag fire. Lehmann sees all three elements as connected: the fire, the yellow-haired boy, and the poet, "in the sun-barred glade" (Evil was Abroad, 178). T h e connection is apt, although the novel's discretion may conceal the extent to which this is so. The alleged arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was accused of homosexuality as well, and his arrest provided the occasion for the decisive wave of terror that ensured the permanent success of Hitler's government, with total censorship and violent attacks on all left and gay organization^.^ The "search for new values" (Evil was Abroad, 179) that his poet had undertaken must be echoed in a similar transformation in Peter. T h e recognition of these connections makes his book clear to Peter; at last he knows what he is writing and why. Peter's growing insight into his poet, based on his own personal growth, results in a number of shifts in his image of the unnamed poet, and hence of the artist's vocation. Through these changes Peter comes to recognize a more masculine and vigorous figure. Looking at a photograph with the poet's friend, Peter sees "an unexpected look of bold determination" rather than "the accepted, almost feminine dreaminess" of the poet's public image (Evil was Abroad, 99). It is striking that this change is expressed in partially sexual terms, since it amounts to a recognition both that art need not be decadent or "effeminate" and that homosexuality can be strong and virile. In both

64 ROBERT K. MARTIN ways Lehmann was significantly altering the dominant image, inherited from the fin-de-sikcle and Bloomsbury, of an effete, androgynous culture. Against that he poses the "new" image of an engaged art and an engaged sexuality, both of them infused with a new spirit of the working-class youth. As in the prose poems of The Noise of Hirtory (1934) there is praise for the power of a simple sexual encounter, "the friendship they will bargain for an hour [that] is closer in human warmth than many romances that stifle behind the windows of ornate bal~onies."~ Such a transformation must draw Peter away from his past world of a disengaged politics and a subliniatecl sexuality. His relationship with Dick and Juliet, based as it is on "double jealousy" (Evil was Abroad, 16), is unsatisfactory. In his musings he comes close to recognising why (Lehmann concludes with a discreet ellipsis): "Or was I really hankering after something else the whole time, something I only in the haziest way was conscious of, and even now am perhaps no nearer. . ." (Evil was Abroad, 17). If the relationship with Dick and Juliet is based on triangularity and a certain failure of sexual nerve, Dick's politics are also seen as flimsy and superficial: as Juliet writes, "[Dick has] been reading Marx lately, and his luggage is just bursting with fiery pamphlets and hammers and sickles" (Evil was Abroad, 15). While Dick plays at revolution, Peter's friends Rudi and Bertl live it. T h e shift is thus from the abstract idea to the concrete fact, and Rudi serves as the embodiment of the.fact. Friendship with him is not like the Oxford friendships Peter has known, and his needs for a job, food, and housing are not idle slogans. As Mann, via Plato, suggests in Death in Venice that beauty can only be apprehended in an object, so Peter comes to learn that politics and social realities can only be grasped in individual suffering and in the experience of individual love. We learn, in effect, to love others, by loving someone in particular. U p until his meeting with Rudi, Peter's understanding of social issues has been confined to "ideas in the void" (Evil was Abroad, 36). Even the awareness of slums near his uncle's house does not deeply alter him; what he needs, and receives through Rudi, are embodied ideas, knowledge "in the shape of an individual" (Evil was Abroad, 37). In the version of these years presented in In the Purely Pagan Sense, Jack has no difficulty acknowledging o r realizing his own sexual desires. O n his first meeting with Franzl (more o r less the Rudi o f ~ v i i ' was Abroad), the two wind u p in a thicket near the Prater where Franzl "flung his arms around me, and gave me a long, flickering tongue kiss", and "pulled out my cock which was already growing hard"

APPEALS FROM ACROSS SOME FRONTIER 65 (Purely Pagan, 62). The scene in its pornographic direciness is banal, and it is devoid of the spiritual and political issues that are central to the earlier work. For, in Evil was Abroad, Peter's hesitations and reticences are only partially concessions to the notions of the printable at the time; far more they are indications of Peter's need for growth, and his possibility of failure, precisely through his unwillingness to acknowledge the centrality of his relationship to Rudi. At one crucial point, on a visit to the Prater, Peter seeks "to get to the heart of the matter" with Rudi, but he leaves his statement unfinished, "You see, I've lived such a different life. I don't suppose you can understand me, either. I -" (Evil was Abroad, 125). Rudi is in an elated mood, enjoying his evening and his closeness to Peter, and Peter lets the moment for confession pass. This will remain a lack in their relationship, perhaps a fundamental one: "Peter was always to regret that the explanation had failed him, that there was this one thing in their friendship, that had never been said" (Evil was Abroad, 126). Peter betrays Rudi far more seriously than by his failure of verbal nerve; his trip to Prague amounts to an abandonment of Rudi when he is desperate. The trips comes just after Rudi has felt threatened by Peter's class (and perhaps heterosexuality) when he sees his friend in a smart cafk with two rich young women. Although Peter promises that his trip "won't be so terribly long" (Evil was Abroad, 152), Rudi senses that Peter will never return. T h e trip to Prague is a reversion to the past, as Peter rediscovers his old friends and moves away from participation in life to observation of it. Meanwhile the days become months, and Rudi is left on his own. Peter's betrayal is only partially compensated for by his later ardent search for Rudi. He has not been able "to protect at least this one human being from the opening gulf' (Evil was Abroad, 177). In the end Peter's recognition of his failure is also Lehmann's statement of aesthetic purpose, appropriately enough in a novel that begins as the story of a would-be biographer. Peter recognizes that a central flaw in his perception has been sentimentality; pity for the working class has blinded him to its reality and to Rudi's own presence. T h e novel concludes with a search for Rudi, the synecdochic presentation of the artist's search for his material in the things and people of the world, in embodied forms. It is a moving avowal of the place of human bonds of affection in political and artistic awareness, and of the impossibility of creating an art worthy of the name without such a living presence at its core. Peter is confronted with the frontier he "had half longed, half feared to cross" (Evil was Abroad, 253). His "coming out", his recognition of his sexuality, that

66 ROBERT K. MARTIN other land, is thus simultaneous with his artistic and political self-assertion. Frontiers are, in Le hmann's phrase from "After Fever", "the untrue thought dividing friendsW."f Rudi's disappearance is to have a legacy, it will be in the way it brings Peter to new life. T h e novel ends on an act of involvement that will end his isolation: "He made for the still concealed scene of the angry roaring and the shrill whistles" (Evil was Abroad, 256). They will be the stuff of his new art. T h e recasting of the Viennese material in Lehmann's second novel allows for much greater frankness about sexuality. There is no longer any doubt about the nature of the friendships with young men, for here they are consummated with relish. This new openness means that I n the Purely Pagan Sense has a documentary value that his early work lacks; it is a fascinating guide to sexual mores from the 1920s through the 1950s. Although it clearly provides a literal fleshing-out of the earlier work, its new frankness is not acquired without paying some price. If we know much more about Jack's sex life than about Peter's, we know very little about his spiritual life so little in fact that we sometimes wonder if he has one. Evil was Abroad is an important novel that deserves wide readership. It has been surprisingly neglected, getting not even a passing mention in Samuel Hynes's survey of the period. It is a crucial record of a major shift, a farewell to an art of observation and a pledge to create a new art out of the realia of everyday life. It is a moving tribute to a persistent search for love and the betrayal of that love by a lack of nerve. At the same time the art it points so clearly toward could not be realized in the English-speaking world of Lehmann's time. Telling the truth would have meant acknowledging the presence of Rudi in a way that Peter is unable to do, except in retrospect. T h e dilemma that is so movingly portrayed is one that persists to our day - how to bring together a celebration of sexuality, including homosexuality, with a politically and artistically serious theme. This was Isherwood's task as well, and he hardly succeeded better than Lehmann. T h e "appeals from across some frontier" (Evil was Abroad, 253) are finally those of the self.

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Notes 1. This view of James is largely a misunderstanding, but it is one that appears to have been dominant in the 1930s. See, for instance, Stephen Spender's discussion of James in The Destructive Element (1935). Lehmann also associated such aloofness with the dominant English poetic tradition: see his attack on "pessimism and intellectual aloofness" in the blurb for New Signatures (1 93 1). quoted in Samuel Hynes, The A d e n Generation: Literature and Polifics in England in the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1977), 76.

APPEALS FROM ACROSS SOME FRONTIER 67 2. For an account of the Reichstag fire and its place in the context of the Nazi attack on homosexuals and leftists, see Hans-Georg Stiimke and Rudi Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 198l), 148-62. 3. John Lehmann, "Under the Trees", in The Noise of History (London: T h e Hogarth Press, 1934), 47. For a further discussion of The Noise of History, see Christopher Levenson's essay in this volume. 4. Lehmann, Noise of History, 13.

Editions Cited John Lehmann. Evil was Abroad. (London: T h e Cresset Press, 1938), cited as Evil was Abroad. John Lehmann. In the Purely Pagan Sense. (London: Blond & Briggs Ltd., 1976. Rpt. London: GMP Publishers Ltd., 1985) Citations to 1985 ed., as Purely Pagan.

D.E.S. MAXWELL

Brave Old World: The Autobiographies of John Lehmann In Whispering Gallery John Lehmann recalls that the experience of editing New Writing gradually helped him to formulate "the difference between a literature that is an interpretation of its time, and one that transforms it." The intellectual consensus of the 1930s was that literature could and should be an agent of social change, enabling, specifically, a Marxist future, somewhat nebulously a p prehended. T h e revolutionary enthusiasm released by this commitment did not depend, for the most part, on any close study of Marxist theory, or of the niceties of Communist Party practice. Nor, however, was the choice enacted without misgivings. Liberal conditions addressed themselves uneasily to the Party Line. Aesthetic conscience demurred at the formal simplicities of propaganda. The entailments of "the Marxist solution," largely embraced, in fact generated, the dilemma (like "new", "action", and "frontier", one of the period's catchwords). John Lehmann came down from Cambridge still, by his account of it, a Waugh-like redoubt of aesthetes and philistines - in 1930. The period from then until the closing years of the Second World War occupies about half of his three volumes of autobiography. Throughout it, the special perplexity of his generation of writers whether to serve the impersonal Cause or the private Muse pigmented fiction, poetry, and criticism. Lehmann, as publisher, editor, and poet, went the way of most of his contemporaries, to "the communist attitude," in the malleable phrase of Michael Roberts's Preface to New Signatures (1932). At least initially, mere observation supplied the impetus. The iconography of blight was everywhere visible: "barns falling, fences broken," the dole queues and street-corner knots of the workless, abandoned docks and shipyards, the slums of decaying towns. Shockingly, and like a harbinger of final conflict, these still-life images erupted into factional violence on the streets, less in England than in Paris, Berlin, Vienna. It was there, on his Continental travels and residence, that Lehmann found his most compelling witness to the

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70 D.E.S. MAXWELL dynamics of Fascism and its divided opposition. His evocations of Berlin and Vienna, much the best of his writing here, are graphic embodiments of the metaphors latent in the scenes, released almost of their own volition: "bloody conflicts between the Nazis, the Communists and the Social Democrats were taking place almost every day in some part of the ice-bound city that was laid out like a patient without any anaesthetic at all"; "huge pictures of Hitler were displayed at night in windows illuminated by devout candles . . . like altars dedicated to some primitive demon-cult"; in Vienna, "the guns were bombarding Florinsdorf and the Karl Marx Hof, and Schutzbundler Karl's dream was smashed for ever into the rubble"; "the iron winter of Central Europe closed down, the desperate, rotting horror of their existence, without adequate food, or heating, or clothes, seemed to me to reach its climax; as I watched the first snow falling on the roofs and domes of the city from the windows of my new eyrie, only prison thoughts came to me." The views coalesce into the thirties view of Fascist evil and Marxist good, Germany and Russia, moving towards apocalyptic struggle. As Lehmann fully acknowledges, this visionlnightmare was a naive misreading of cynical Stalinist politics. Yet at the time action seemed the paramount obligation. Very much the innocent abroad, Lehmann determined that to alleviate his "rentier-guilt" "the best way I could serve was by making myself a channel of information from all the underground parties and sects in Austria." In his comfy Vienna flat he industriously "collected and sorted all the news that came to me from the underground parties." His activities were a good deal less clandestine than he unwarily supposed. He was questioned by the police and released. Lehmann was more fortunate than his Austrian informants, one of whom - an affecting story - was to die in Buchenwald. As Lehmann says, it is unlikely that his indiscretion caused the betrayal. Still, though he sees clearly enough the reality of government by terror, an odd, romanticizing make-believe - Auden's "Our hopes were set still on the spies' career" - softened the focus on his own adopted, conspiratorial role. T h e disjunction is a figure of his whole relationship to the Viennese among whom he lived. Because, he tells us, it "was not enough merely to be a watcher of other people's lives from the outside," he sought kinship with "the suffering, tension and bitterness the ordinary working men and women of the world were enduring." Settled in Vienna, he took on friends of his housekeeper's family to do odd jobs for him, and was thus able to "extend my knowledge of

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the working people of Vienna." They shared, it is true, some convivial times, but the well-meant patronage stereotypes its recipients: "We were" - a revealing simile - "like a pack of cards for Happy Families." It echoes the portrayal of Lehmann's childhood and youth at Fieldhead, the family home ("not really large") with its retinue of quaint servants. The assumptions of Lehmann's background - upper class, Eton, Cambridge - transmit their inadvertent signals. Australia, Canada, New Zealand are still "the colonies." While America escapes that diminishment, American attitudes are "brash". In France, a display of grief taken to be feigned characterizes a petite bourgeoise family, and earns a pat on the back for "John Bull". In England, charabancs carry their loads of "trippers" down lanes that were made for shepherd and farmer's cart." Threatening phone calls harass the Viennese housekeeper, the work of local Nazis, "disappointed wretches of the shop-keeper class." In wartime London a disastrous poetry reading, "patronized by Royalty, packed with celebrities from both the literary and social worlds . . . provided stories to dine out on for weeks after" (did that phrase still have meaning?). These accidental confidences create some doubt over the credentials of the dutiful seeker after political virtue. From them we infer an autobiographer with a partial sight of his self in the setting where he wishes to place it. In the thirties as a political arena, then, we encounter the public Lehmann, or rather, an aspect of his being, on that stage, which makes overtures to and finally adopts an attitude to public events. His story is a case history of his generation -"coterie" or "set" would be a more accurate term. His motives were humane and generous, though as hindsight shows us amenable to the particular political dishonesties of, and the self-deception encouraged by, the period. Lehmann is open about his susceptibility to both. He was more at home in his major public occupation, that of editor and publisher. New Writing, in its various manifestations, and Penguin New Writing gave him proper cause for satisfaction. Here too politics had territorial claims. Lehmann managed them without left-wing idolatry. He was much more of Bloomsbury than the Politburo, and would have sympathized with Yeats's "there is no propaganda save that of good art." Partly in the justified belief that reportage alone was propaganda enough, New Writing encouraged imaginative documentary, but Lehmann's judgement protected good against merely new o r modishly factional writing. His backward look relives persuasively the frustrations, anxieties, and gratifications of manoeuvring in the network of publishers,

72 D.E.S. MAXWELL printers, distributors, reviewers - and, the point of it all, writers. Lehmann solicited, cajoled, advised with impressive patience. He gave his periodicals a distinctive mark. During the war the appearance of Penguin New Writing was an event for a magazine of its kind an unprecedented 75,000 copies of each issue. One reason for its success was a breadth of appeal. Almost endearingly - I think it's endearing - Lehmann was taken aback to discover, in the thirties, that writers existed in Britain outside London, Oxford, and Cambridge;* New Writing drew on their work. Increasingly it covered all the arts. In its Penguin version its reflection of wartime Britain allowed iconoclastic ironies to bear on the to bureaucratic pettinesses of "total war". It looked abroad America, to the writers of continental Europe, an enthusiasm cultivated by Lehmann from the earliest numbers of New Writing. Lehmann's gift designed the assembly of work from so many of the most exhilarating writers of two decades. Celebrities attend these ventures. Lehmann's publishing career began in 1930 with Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. It was a connection which Lehmann entered rapt in awe. The feeling - for Virginia especially - persisted through all the starts and stops, vacillations, and hindrances. Initially Leonard was helpful. He became fractious, and even when Lehmann was his partner, uncooperative. Lehmann - anyone - as apprentice, subordinate, was perhaps a tolerable intrusion. It is more difficult to accept good ideas from a newcomer who has become an equal. Lehmann's narrative, however, records this progress with little of the brutality it must have had. That is embedded between the lines. He is Leonard's apologist. This graceful concessiveness strikes one in the end without looking for savaging resentments - as a kind of genteel falsification. The bitterness Lehmann confesses is not made real. Virginia, too, it is difficult to apprehend as a being particularized by Lehmann's perception of her. She is a venerated image, her presence most strongly declared in her own voice through quoted letters. The autobiographical observer has in a way retreated behind the objects of his report, deserted an angle of view which would impose a composition of his own: a reluctance, perhaps, to denigrate the hero. Of this there will be more to say. This was a time - 1932-45 - whatever its setbacks, of plans accomplished, professional experience garnered. It is arguable that nothing afterwards had just that favourable balance. Lehmann's own firm, established in 1946, published many distinguished writersB3But throughout most of the six years of its life Lehmann was on the

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BRAVE OLD WORLD 73 defensive against its financial sponsor, the Purnell printing business. Repeated negotiation failed to secure any acceptable division of responsibility o r agreement on intent. Purnell's Chairman, Wilfred Harvey - "used to quick success and big profits" (his criterion of success) - was a ruthless authoritarian. Unpersuaded he simply terminated the "partnership". Harvey is one of the very few people who rouses Lehmann to anger which, unmitigated, we can feel. It is quite refreshing. T h e final act of Lehmann's entrepreneurial career was his editorship of The London Magazine. His patron was Cecil King. King, so far as the story is taken, behaved with genial eccentricity, and Lehmann writes of him with a rather bemused affection. His seven years as editor (1954-61) were "full of stimulus and interest for me, if also bringing a share of vexation and discouragement." His chronicle of them has none of the zeal of the New Writing years. T h e "Daily Minor's machine" was geared to massive circulation. Lehmann did not want "to linger on as a grotesque from an earlier generation," superannuated. The literature of the period seemed to him - a corollary judgment - "humdrum", "parochial". He excepts the drama, and regrets that "such a review as mine" could not take u p its cause. There is not good reason why it should not, apart, we suspect, from the drama's belonging to a time which did not excite Lehmann's energies. A measure of his indifference is that In My Own Time dismisses the whole episode in four linesi Autobiography rightly passes sentence in such conclusive ways on the telling of its tale. It is an exercise in definition - of the self, and the self's relationships within and to its times. Disposing the facts, it claims something of the despotism of fiction. As Christopher Isherwood puts it, autobiography "presents a central character to whom all other characters and all events are directly related, and by whose mind all experiences are subjectively judgedeq George Moore's Hail and Farewell is an extreme but exemplary model. In Lehmann, the observer often fails us, as with the Woolfs. With the more fugitive characters we have smaller expectations. Nevertheless, there is an inadequacy in bare reference to "witty and penetrating comments," "perceptive and incisive remarks," "sharp wit," where they go unattested. But these are passers-by. T h e canvas of Lehmann's three adult decades admits the frequent company of illustrious names: E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Gide, Malraux, Auden, Isherwood, Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas. Their appearances are illuminating, in a confirmatory way. They fit in comfortably to our knowledge of them, undisturbed by a surprising

74 D.E.S. MAXWELL

lineament of a private face. It would be unfair, but not wholly unfair, to say that in Lehmann's presentation they retain their literary masks, contributors to be balanced in a periodical or anthology. Yet they must, recurrent figures as they are, have occupied quite special places in Lehmann's development, Julian Bell and Stephen Spender particularly. T h e inner dimensions, however, projected from Lehmann's consciousness of his circle, are absent. T h e cause is the imperfect disclosure of that consciousness. Some reserve defends its secrecies. For the reader, the point of view snaps shut at critical junctures. T h e concealments are at times inconsiderable. Holidays whose narrator is "we", companion(s) unidentified, leave no more than a slightly nagging curiosity. But we are also left on the edge of experiences whose intensity the narrative skirts, o r fails to substantiate with the particulars which establish the event and its participants, above all, its expositor. So, for example, we learn that Lehmann's good friend Demetrois Capetanakis, the poet, during his fatal illness, "went through a violent personal crisis." We are not told what this was, nor how it impinged on Lehmann. At another time his sister Rosamond was "deeply troubled in her personal life" and moved from her country home to London. Whatever the circumstances, they undergo no translation into an emotional actuality or communion of feeling. "I felt," he says, "extremely sad about" the move. T h e account of Lehmann's own "severe emotional and spiritual crisis" deploys a vocabulary of the emotions: "violent," "frightening," "agony of spirit," "suffering all but intolerable." Its causes were a n unhappy love affair and anxiety over a younger friend who had gone to sea in a mood of despair. It was a profoundly disturbing experience, as we are told. But because the protagonists, neither audible nor visible, are disembodied, the "intense meaning which was all that mattered" does not have "adequate images". The internal torment is shadowy because it lacks its sensible landmarks. As in all these episodes we see of Lehmann, really, only a penumbra, the depths eclipsed. Yet a measure of the quality of these autobiographies is that they invite us to consider them by the highest demands of the form. While they do not fully satisfy these demands, the narrator, within the bounds of familiarity he permits, vindicates his occupancy of the scenes of his report. These are memoirs which render very faithfully the moods of time and place - of the thirties particularly - the background caught to a lively tapestry of its inhabitants. "Gone are the days," Lehmann says in his concluding paragraphs.

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They were the days represented by his upbringing in a well-to-do and enlightened family secure both in their status and the certitude of liberal beliefs. Lehmann's share in that inheritance sets him at odds with some of his disheartening encounters. More important, it equips his scrutiny with an honesty and humaneness of judgment. He is of a "brave old world" reaching into its restless successors, part of them, but with a retrospective, questioning detachment. Notes The Whispering Gallery (London: Longmans, 1955); 1 Am ivy Brother (London: Longmans, 1960); The Ample Proposition (London: Eyre & Spottis\voode, 1966). Collected, "occasionally revised and with many passages omitted," asln M y Own Time (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969).

I . Roberts's gloss reads: "the recognition that oneself is no more important than a flower in a field; that it may be good to sacrifice one's own welfare that others may benefit; to plough in this year's crop so that next year's may benefit. . . ." Preface to New Signatures (London: Hogarth, 1932), 19. 2. The lesson did not entirely stick. In the fifties he enquired of "Mark Boxer from Cambridge and David Hughes from Oxford . . . if they knew of any young man from their university who would be ideally suitable, as assistant in The London Magazine." (The Ample Proposition, 24 1). 3. An Appendix to T h Ample Proposition lists its "European Library," which includes Chamson, Queneau, Sartre, and Malraux. See also Alan Smith's article and list in this volume. 4. The original version in The Ample Prosposition is about twenty pages. 5. Exhumations (Harmonds\vorth: Penguin Books, 1969), 7 1.

The Editor and Publisher

J. K. J O H N S T O N E

John Lehmann and Bloomsbury John Lehmann was separated from the Bloomsbury Group by a generation. He was born in the same year, 1907, that Bloomsbury's "Thursday evenings" began at Virginia and Adrian Stephens' house at 29 Fitzroy Square and the meetings of the Play Reading Society started at Vanessa and Clive Bell's at 46 Gordon Square. He was not a member of the Memoir Club, which began to meet in 1920 and to which, on 1 September 1940, Virginia Woolf read her paper on the Dreadnaught Hoax. Nor was he an intimate of the Group in its casual personal relationships. He was, however, an admirer and friend of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, an employee and then partner of Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, and a close friend of Vanessa and Clive Bell's son, Julian. His acquaintance with Bloomsbury began with his admiration for the writing of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and E.M.Forster, and through his friendships with Julian Bell and George "Dadie" Rylands, who had worked briefly at the Hogarth Press before he won his fellowship at Cambridge. Rylands, who shared interests with Lehmann in poetry and printing, recommended both Lehmann and his first book of poems to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lehmann was employed and his A Garden Revisited and Other Poems was published by the Press in 1931 in the Hogarth Living Poets series. So his association with two central members of the Bloomsbury Group began. That there was an affinity between Lehmann and the Woolfs that extended beyond their common interests in literature and publishing is particularly apparent from a passage in The Whispem'ng Gallery in which Lehmann describes his feelings and thoughts during his last term at Eton, in 1926. I was oppressed by the strange, despairing feeling of having been through huge cycles of experience without getting anywhere at all; but the cycles were in my own thinking and the experience was of the void. In that void neither conventional religion nor social attitudes nor moral values seemed to make any sense at all. If I was still an unhesitating Liberal in practice it was because I hated to see o r hear of other human beings in either physical or mental pain. That still rang solid in the darkness, as did the experience of friendship and the experience of

80 J.K. JOHNSTONE beauty. All the aims in life so passionately pursued by so many millions o f people seemed to me extraordinary illusions; all except one, the writing of poetry or painting of pictures, because in art there was something that stayed real, resistant to the remorseless inner questioning, when everything else that men made or did was dissolving. It was to art, therefore, that I was drawn more and more, and the conviction was growing in me that Cambridge and the future would be tolerable only if the pursuit of imaginative art took the chief place in my life, if necessary ousting everything else except the need to earn my bread and butter.'

This passage may in part describe a universal experience of sensitive and intelligent late adolescence, but its questioning of conventional beliefs and goals and its emphasis upon the value of art and friendship would have been applauded in Bloomsbury. There is no evidence that Lehmann had read G.E.Moore's Pn'mipia Ethica, but in that book Moore had questioned the validity of conventional "duties" and "virtues" and had asserted that "personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest, goods we can imagine [Moore's italic^]."^ In a paper read to the Memoir Club in 1938 and later published, Maynard Keynes, in a tone like Bernard's in his "summing up" in Virginia Woolfs T h Waves, claimed that Principia Ethica and the talk which centred on it at Cambridge formed "Habits of feeling [which] . . . still persist in a recognizable degree. It is those habits of feeling, influencing the majority of us, which make this Club a collectivity and separate us from the rest."3 Moreover, Mrs. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse would have understood Lehmann's intuition of a void. "With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that."' For both Lehmann and Bloomsbury, friendship and art were the main things that could be set against the void. John Lehmann, then, came to the Hogarth Press in 1931 with an outlook that had much in common with the views of Leonard and Virginia Woolf and with admiration, if not reverence, for their achievements and for those of their friends. He tells us in The Whispering Gallety of his respect for the editorial power that Desmond MacCarthy, another Bloomsburyite, displayed in the periodical Life and Letters. "I spent hours brooding on the problem of how the magic w ~ r k e d , " Lehmann ~ says, in a statement that reflects his own experience as an editor at Eton and Cambridge and that anticipates his extensive editorial work of the future. In his new job, Lehmann found "special pleasure" in exploring among the piles of Hogarth

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Press publications, finding Virginia Woolfs books, E.M. Forster's Pharos and Phrillon, Katherine Mansfield's Prelude, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and other admired title^.^ He met some of the writers through his work and others at gatherings at the Woolfs' and at Lady Ottoline Morrell's. He enjoyed the parties of the descendants of Bloomsbury and the parties and shows of the London Artists' Association, a group which had been organized by Maynard Keynes, and in whose studios, homes, and exhibitions Lehmann saw "the aftermath" of Roger Fry's "Omega Workshop enthusiasm."' His acquaintance with Lytton Strachey, established through Dadie Rylands and Lehmann's sister Rosamond, developed into a friendship, during which he "egged" Strachey on to tell him "many fond friendship with and malicious stories" of Leonard Woolf."hmann's Strachey was soon ended by Strachey's death in 1932. His friendship with E.M. Forster, with whom Lehmann shared similar social and political views and from whom he received encouragement as a poet and editor, endured throughout Forster's much longer life.g Great as his respect for the achievements of his employers and their friends was, Lehmann also brought with him to the Hogarth Press a healthy individuality. His comments in The Whispen'ng Gallery on his friendship with Julian Bell, "the most intimate intellectual friendship of my Cambridge years," though written in retrospect, suggest that admiration did not overwhelm his critical faculty. There is affectionate irony in his observation of Bell's "conviction that the arguments he defended had the authority of graven tablets of the law: the tablets of B l o o m ~ b u r y . "He ~ ~ finds Bell's attempts to revive neo-classical poetry in the twentieth century both wrong-headed and harmful to Bell's own poetry. He notes that Bell's lukewarmness towards the poetry of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis was "one of the causes of the friendly estrangement" that later developed between Bell and Lehmann. He declares Bell's social democracy to be "an unusual sort, an essentially Bloomsbury sort."ll He also discovered that his own increasing concern with Europe's past, continuing, and growing troubles "was out of tune with the mood of that powerful side of intellectual Cambridge which formed a kind of Bloomsbury-bythe-Cam."12 His confidence in himself must have been strengthened by his poetry, his engraving (which he had begun before he went u p to Cambridge and which led to an invitation from Anthony Blunt to contribute woodcuts to a new Cambridge magazine, The Venture), and his editing. Moreover, he was conscious of his own literary and artistic heritage. A great-grandfather, Robert Chambers, was the author of Vestiges of Creation and the founder, with his brother William, of the

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publishing firm of W. & R. Chambers. Two great-uncles, Henri and Rudolf Lehmann, were successful painters. Lehmann's father had been a Liberal M.P. and a regular contributor to Punch. Lehmann's sisters Beatrix and Rosamond were distinguishing themselves, Beatrix as an actress and Rosamond as a novelist. Lehmann was a confident, idealistic, and determined young man when he joined the Hogarth Press in January 1931. That differences might arise between Lehmann and Leonard and Virginia Woolf is hinted in a letter from Lytton Strachey to Roger Senhouse o f 27 December 1930: "The latest scandal is that the Woolfs (aided and abetted by Dadie, of all people) are trying to lure John Lehmann to join the Hogarth Press, and put u p all his capital as well as to devote his working hours to doing u p parcels in the basement. And the large ape is seriously tempted."13 In a letter to Clive Bell of 21 February 1931, Virginia Woolf speaks of Lehmann and of comments by Strachey about his family: "Our John is panning out well, in his doghole behind the W.C. Lytton says the Lehmanns are middle class -you can tell it by their eyes, and their ancles - I forget which, nor d o I know if there should be a c o r a k in ankles. H e John - touches on a very odd world: the Barry Pains, A.A. Milnes, Mrs. Hammersleys. . . . I gather they knew all the minor lights of 1900; and Lisa Lehmann who wrote drawing room melodies was an Aunt."14 In reading these remarks, one must allow for Virginia Woolfs desire to entertain Clive Bell, who was recovering in Zurich from an operation on his eyes; but a reservation by her remains. Strachey's pejorative "middle class" is echoed in her "very odd world" and "drawing room melodies." Lehmann himself had noted, he tells us in T h Whispering Gallery, the differences between a sense of formality at his family's home of Fieldhead and the "bohemian atmosphere" of Julian Bell's family home at Charleston, a contrast that he found agreeably stimulating.15 Later, in August 1938, Virginia Woolf would observe in her diary that "Mrs. Lehmann lives in far greater style than we do" and regret that she and Leonard had sold John Lehmann a half share in the Hogarth Press "very cheap".lt5 Affinities and differences: Lehmann's relationship with the Woolfs might have been easier if he had had either more o r less in common with them. As it was, he was caught between admiration and exasperation; and Virginia Woolf found during negotiations with him in May 1932 that his "mixture of emotionalism & grasping is so odd: as hard as nails, 8c then quivering."17 Lehmann's position in 1931 was that of apprentice to Leonard Woolf with the prospect of becoming the manager of the Hogarth

JOHN LEHMANN AND BLOOMSBURY 83 Press and later a partner." Aware of the already eminent contribution of the Press to contemporary literature and its nurture of new writers, he wanted to introduce other young writers to it. He was ambitious for the Press, the literature of the day, and himself. He came, however, to a press that had been developed and managed exclusively by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He believed that "both the Woolfs, but in particular Leonard, had an emotional attitude towards the Press; as if it were the child their marriage had never produced."lg Naturally, the Woolfs' view was different. "He craves influence and authority, to publish the books of his friends; wishes to start a magazine, is poor, . . ." Virginia Woolf reported in her diary.20 Of course, Lehmann and the Woolfs had other interests besides the Press. Leonard Woolf was active as a journalist, politician, and writer, as well as a publisher. He had been editor of the International Review, literary editor of the Nation, a writer for the New Statesman. In 1930 he was one of the founders of the Political Quarterly and soon became its joint editor. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society and of the New Fabian Research Bureau, and Secretary of the Labour Party Advisory Committee on International and Imperial Affairs. Among his works which affected policies of the Labour Party and sometimes of the British Government were International Government ( 19 16), Socialism and Cooperation ( 192 1) and Imperialism and Civilization (1928). In 193 1 he published the first of three volumes, After the Deluge, which attempted to examine the communal psychology that produces war. He had also published short stories and two novels, one of which, The Village in the Jungle, drew on his knowledge of Ceylon, where he had served in the Ceylon Civil Service from 1904 to 19 1 1. In 1939 he would publish a play, The Hotel, about the condition of Europe in the 1930s. It is not surprising that, influenced in part by Woolf and by pamphlets published by the Hogarth Press, Lehmann should turn from Liberalism to Socialism o r that, as a result of his experience in England and Austria during the thirties, he should move farther to the Left than Woolf himself, towards the Communist Party.21 Virginia Woolf, of course, devoted most of her energies to her fiction; but she also wrote book reviews and essays, read manuscripts for the Press, and did what she could in occasional talks, essays, and the books A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) for the cause of women's freedom. Of the three, John Lehmann perhaps devoted the most time, energy, and emotion to the Press, but this single-mindedness was troublesome to him. Like his friends Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, he felt the need to know more about the troubled continent of Europe, and he

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wanted to develop himself as a poet, a need that he felt most strongly during a visit to Austria, a country with which he became i n f a t ~ a t e d . ~ ~ As a result of these desires and of strains at the Hogarth Press, Lehmann left the Press at the end of August 1932 and took u p residence in Vienna. He could leave with some sense of achievement. T h e most notable publications with which he had been involved had perhaps been New Signatures, a collection, edited by Michael Roberts and published in the Hogarth Living Poets series, of work by some of the most important young poets of the day, including W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, William Empson, Stephen Spender, and Lehmann himself; Christopher Isherwood's novel The Memorial (which was followed, after Lehmann had left the Press, by the Hogarth publication of Mr. Nomi Changes Trains); and his collaboration with Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the launching of the Hogarth Letters series, in which Virginia Woolf s A Letter to a Young Poet, suggested by Lehmann and beginning "My Dear John," appeared in July 1932. From the autumn of 1932 to the spring of 1938 Lehmann lived mainly in Vienna, though he returned frequently to England and travelled a good deal in Europe, including visits to Germany and Russia, to learn more about contemporary European politics and literature. Politics and literature, indeed, became more closely related for him, as they did for many writers during this period. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he reports in The Whispem'ng Gallery, "1 think every young writer began seriously to debate with himself how he could best be of use, by joining the Brigade, o r driving an ambulance, or helping the active committees in England o r France, or in some other way."23Julian Bell was killed as an ambulance driver in Spain. In Vienna, as he tells us in his book Down River, Lehmann found in the achievements and hope of the Social Democrats, in the bloody suppression of their revolt in February 1934, in the assassination of Chancellor Dolfuss during the abortive Nazi Putsch of July 1934, and in the German invasion in the Anschluss of March 1938, "a convex mirror of a wider historical process."24 In 1936, a few months before the Spanish Civil War began, the first volume of the work for which Lehmann is perhaps most widely known, New Writing, appeared. He wanted it, he tells us in The Whispering Gallery, to serve a "triple purpose": to provide an outlet for English writers of his generation, to introduce foreign writers of the same generation to English readers, and to be "a rallying point for the so rapidly growing anti-fascist and anti-war s y m p a t h i e ~ . "Through ~~ his experiences in Vienna and his relationships with left-wing groups

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there and in London and Paris, he had become more keenly aware of "broader comradeships", of "an effective brotherhood born between ~~ he eagerly sought working-class victims of ~ p p r e s s i o n . "Therefore, writers who were likely to be overlooked by, o r were unlikely to approach, the intellectual, middle-class publishing establishment. 2 7 Though Lehmann had at first been somewhat sceptical of the affinity that Michael Roberts had found in the poets that he and Lehmann brought together in New Signat~res,~Qenow saw a "new 'revolutionary' awareness" as "the theme-song" of that New Writing was to further that awareness as "an international magazine that planned to reflect the revolutionary ferment of the time."30 Although Lehmann wanted it to be "a magazine in which literature came first, with the politics only as an undertone," he says that he was "inexplicably bewitched by the idea that writers and artists had a large role to play in the struggle to prevent [a new world war]."31 It is an irony of history that New Writing, in its various guises, including Penguin New Writing, attained its greatest popularity during World War I1.32 In Lehmann's activities from 1932 to 1938 an affinity with the Woolfs and with some of the other members of the Bloomsbury Group is again apparent. Leonard Woolfs Afler the Deluge took a longer, historical view of the causes of war than Lehmann's more contemporary and journalistic Down River, but the intention of each book, to understand the causes of conflict with the ultimate purpose of preventing war, was similar. Maynard Keynes's The Economic Conseqwnces of the Peace, written in 1919 immediately after he had observed the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles, is a celebrated book, written in anger and near despair, with the same intention. Leonard Woolf s editing of the Intwnational Review and the Political (luarterly and his work with the Fabian Society and the Labour Party's Advisory Committee was often similarly motivated. In the latter committee he at first urged that the League of Nations be strongly supported; then, in 1935, after observing the League's failure to halt aggression in China, Abyssinia, and the Rhineland, he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Advisory Committee to support a policy that would attempt to bring Britain, France, and, if possible, the U.S.S.R. together to deter any further aggression by Hitler.33 E.M.Forster, who worked in his sphere for civil liberty and against violence, contributed an ominous article to New Writing entitled "The Last Parade", on the Paris Exhibition of 1937. In the Exhibition he foresaw the last peaceful international orgy of the Europe of his day. Virginia Woolfs Three Guineas, associating the oppression of women

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with the same forces that produced fascism, demanded radical social change. Two years later, in an address to the Workers' Educational Association in Brighton in April 1940 that was published in the Autumn 1940 issue of Lehmann's Folio of New Writing as "The Leaning Tower," Virginia Wool f envisioned a classless society in post-war Britain and urged her listeners to prepare for entry to that fuller world (from which both workers and women had previously been largely excluded) by reading and writing so that the classless society might have the critics and writers that it would need. In this advice there is the same hopefulness and sense of "broader comradeships" that Lehmann had found among the Social Democrats of Vienna; and Virginia Woolfs statement of the need for writers from the working-class is consonant with Lehmann's search for working-class writers for New Writing. And of course the Hogarth Press had from its inception published new writing and polemical pamphlets, though Virginia and Leonard Woolf perhaps distinguished rather more sharply than Lehmann between the former and the latter, between art and politics. It was, in part, an awareness of these affinities that prompted Lehtnann to call on the Woolfs when he needed a new publisher for New Writing. T h e first three numbers had been published at the Bodley Head; Lawrence & Wishart had agreed to publish the next three, but that agreement would lapse in the spring of 1938. ". . . at the back of my mind was still the idea of making New Writing the centre of actual book publishing for the works of our generation," Lehmann tells us. "I had not succeeded in selling this idea to Lawrence & Wishart. Much more likely with the Hogarth Press, as before."34 The "as before" must refer to the attitude that Lehmann had found at the Hogarth Press in 1931 and 1932, since New Writing had, of course, not yet been published there. When Lehmann called on Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1937, he found them receptive not only to New Writing but to his own return to the Hogarth Press. They offered to sell him the Press for six thousand pounds. After Lehmann had found that he could not afford this sum, Leonard Woolf suggested that Lehmann, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender buy the Press and run it as a cooperative company, with Lehmann as manager. Lehmann a p proached the other three, but they were unable to afford the three thousand pounds that he suggested they raise and that he would match. Lehmann then offered to buy a half share of the Press himself, and the Woolfs accepted his offer. As a result, Lehmann bought Virginia Woolfs share for three thousand pounds and in April 1938

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became managing director of the Press and an equal partner with L e ~ n a r dEach . ~ ~ partner had "an absolute veto against the publication of any a clause in the agreement that Lehmann would find troublesome later. T h e partnership began happily enough. Lehmann started Poets of Tomorrow, a series of anthologies of new poems, and soon added T h e New Hogarth Library series of selections from more established poets, such as Cecil Day Lewis, Roy Fuller, and Robert Graves, in the tradition of T h e Hogarth Living Poets series, in which both Lehmann's own first book of poetry and New Signatures had appeared in 1931 and 1932. Numbers 1 and 2 of the new, Hogarth, series of New Writing appeared, though there was a brjef dispute with Leonard Woolf before the latter number was published.37 Henry Green's Party Going was published with success and promise for the future of this writer that reminded Lehmann of the publication of Christopher Isherwood's The Memorial during Lehmann's earlier stay at the Hogarth Press.3w T h e Press itself was moved in 1939 from 52 Tavistock Square to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. It again occupied the basement of the premises, but Lehmann was elevated to an office on the main floor. T h e move to Mecklenburgh Square had barely been accomplished, and neither Party Going nor the first volume of Poets of Tomorrow had reached the bookstores, when World War I1 began. It soon brought paper rationing and bombs to the Hogarth Press. Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square was bombed in September 1940, forcing the Press to withdraw to Letchworth, Hertfordshire, for the duration of the War, and the Woolfs to vacate their flat above the Press, and remain at their country home, Monk's House, at Rodmell, Sussex. Partly because of the distance between Rodmell, near the south coast, and Letchworth, north of London, partly because publication was restricted by the shortage of paper, and partly because of the influence of Virginia Woolf on the two partners, there was little friction between Lehmann and Leonard Woolf during the first years of the War. Indeed, both Lehmann and Woolf tell us that the running of the Hogarth Press was left almost entirely to Lehmann.Jg T h e paper ration was used to publish the series that have been mentioned, the work of Virginia Woolf, Henry Green's novels, and volumes of the International Psycho-Analytical L i b r a r ~ ,a~ ~series in which the translated works of Sigmund Freud are the centrepiece and which the Hogarth Press had begun to publish in 1924 as a result, Leonard Woolf says, of an interest in the Bloomsbury circle in Freud and psycho-analysis and the direct influence of Virginia Woolf s brother

88 J.K. JOHNSTONE Adrian Stephen and Lytton Strachey's brother James, both of whom were psycho-analysts.'" Leonard Woolf s search for the causes of war may also have played its part in his interest in p s y c h ~ l o g y . ~ ~ As the end of the War approached and the Hogarth Press prepared to return to 37 Mecklenburgh Square and to more normal operations, the moderating influence of Virginia Woolf having been lost in 1941, disagreements between Lehmann and Leonard Woolf became more f r e q ~ e n t . ' Woolf ~ opposed the publication of books that Lehmann wished to see on the Hogarth list, by some of the writers, including David Gascoyne, whom Lehmann had published in New Writing and Poets of Tomorrow. The "generation gap"'' between him and Woolf appeared to Lehmann to be wide at these times, and he wondered whether "Leonard was challenging the poetry of the younger generation as a whole, in which I had assumed he would allow me a fairly free hand."45 There were also prose works that Lehmann wanted to publish but that Woolf vetoed: Frank Sargeson's long short story "That Summer"; Saul Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man; translations of some of Jean-Paul Sartre's short stories and of his novel La Nause'e and plays Les Mouches and Huis Clos. 46 Disagreements such as these led to Lehmann's second departure from the Hogarth Press. He first asked Woolf, in September 1945, to release him from a clause in their contract that prevented either of them from being associated with another publishing firm. He hoped that he might remain Woolf s partner but perhaps set u p another small firm to publish authors whose work he was interested in but Woolf was not. Woolf refused to release him. In January 1946 Lehmann notified Woolf that he wished to dissolve their partnership. By the terms of their agreement Woolf then had three weeks in which to exercise an option to buy Lehmann's share of the Press. If he did not d o so, Lehmann had three weeks to exercise a similar option to buy Woolfs share. Woolf immediately reached an agreement with the publishers Chatto & Windus to buy Lehmann's share of the Press and advised Lehmann by return post that he would exercise his option." The divorce from Woolf and the Hogarth Press was painful to Lehmann and perhaps to Woolf also, who felt that Lehmann had put his pistol to Woolfs head "and at the heart of the Hogarth Press"48 when he gave notice of his termination of the partnership. "The whole business was not unlike a lovers' quarrel," Lehmann says; "in fact I have sometimes thought that our quarrels had something of the peculiar violence that erupts when two people are more emotionally involved with one another than they fully realize."49 T h e differences, however, were not merely the result of individual crotchets and

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foibles. They were differences between generations, in literary taste, in objectives, and in the willingness to take risks. One sees in Leonard Woolf, particularly in the later stages of his partnership with John Lehmann, a Daedalus trying to restrain his partner from flying too high, particularly at a time when paper was rationed. "I am against using our paper on this kind of thing," he writes to Lehmann about Terence Tiller's collection of poems, The Inward Animal, which was, however, published by Hogarth, after a prolonged argument. He rejects Sartre's books in somewhat similar terms: $'Surely there will be any amount of things old and new for which we shall require paper for a long time much more worth our while than translations from the French of extremely exotic stuff. . . ."50 Another concern of Woolfs ran deeper. He and his wife had developed the Hogarth Press as a cottage industry. He wanted it to retain its independence and financial health. Hence his parsimony, the basement rooms, and, during Lehmann's first sojourn at the Press at least, the parcelling of books by the principals of the Press. Hence, also, what appeared to Lehmann to be Woolf s extreme caution, if not cussedness. In the last volume of his autobiography, Woolf expounds on the dangers of expansion for a small publisher. "The road to bankruptcy is paved with overheads - and books which d o not sell," he says; and, "the John Lehmanns singing their siren song about expansion . . . can lure one so easily on to the Scylla of the take-over o r the Charybdis of ban k r ~ p t c y . " ~H e believes, perhaps rather simplistically, that the collapse in 1952 of John Lehmann Ltd., the publishing firm that Lehmann founded after he left the Hogarth Press in 1946, demonstrates his point. Woolf admits, however, that he was less venturesome in his later years as a publisher than he had been earlier: "I am content with the good fat fish in the net or the good young fish who swim into it, and I no longer go out on the high seas on the lookout for adventure and the unrecognized genius. This, of course, is the sclerosis which commonly attacks an established and successful p u b l i ~ h e r . "One ~ ~ is left with the conviction that Lehmann profited from his work at the Hogarth Press, that he contributed well to the Press, and that the Press would have been more interesting, and perhaps truer to its earlier tradition, if he had been able to continue in it as an effective partner. T h e question whether Lehmann's own development as a writer was injured-by his work at the Hogarth Press remains, and is largely unanswerable, because one cannot tell how his writing might have developed if he had devoted himself wholly to it. One may, however, conjecture. The four poems that Lehmann contributed to New

90 J.K. JOHNSTONE Signatures are unremarkable. T h e most interesting of the four, "Looking Within", which combines introspection with imagery drawn from an armed, post-war, totalitarian country, is effective, but it lacks the inventiveness of Auden's "Ode (To my Pupils)" in New Signatures or, to move forward a few years to other poems that have an affinity with "Looking Within", the tension and immediacy of Edwin Muir's "The Refugees" o r the suggestive power of Muir's "The Horses". The pleasant poems of Lehmann's A Garden Revisited remind one frequently of Keats and Wordsworth and occasionally of Eliot, but these recollections lead to comparisons that are detrimental to Lehmann's poems. The comments of the reaper as he watches bombers setting off for the Continent in the title poem of The Age of the Dragon are an uncomfortable mixture of the speech of a countryman and of poetic diction descended from the eighteenth century through Housman. Lehmann's autobiography is an invaluable account of literary and publishing life in London from about 1930 to 1960, but its content is more distinguished than its style, which is marred rather frequently by cliches and occasionally by intensive modifiers used so heavily that they sometimes weaken the sentences that bear them. Neither Lehmann's poetry nor his prose displays the fastidiousness, toughness, and originality that characterize a great writer. This essay is not, of course, the place for an extensive examination of Lehmann's qualities as a writer or as a publisher, but these brief comments may partly answer the question with which this paragraph began and which, as we learn from his autobiography, Lehmann often put, more broadly, to himself: Should he devote himself wholly to the creation rather than the publishing of literature? He answered the question after each of his departures from the Hogarth Press by his actions, by founding New Writing on the first occasion and John Lehmann Ltd. on the second. There can be little doubt that he was right; for though he is scarcely the peer of great writers, he may well be the peer of great editors and publishers. That he too was a writer must have helped him as he dealt with the work of his contributors. Lehmann reports that the break between him and Leonard Woolf was "total" for about six years after he left the Hogarth Press in 1946. Then their friendship was reestablished. "Like many divorced couples, we found we had too much in common not to want to resume relations eventually," Lehmann saysJ3 After his experiences with the chairman of the printing company that had financial control of John Lehmann Ltd., Lehmann appreciated Woolf the more. "Leonard Woolf was not a tycoon," he remarks. "He belonged to the same

JOHN LEHMANN AND BLOOMSBURY 91 intellectual .world as myself, and I had a great respect for him, even when I differed strongly from him in judgment or thought he was being unreasonable. Leonard liked long, wrangling arguments, and could always find time for them."54 It is fitting that the posthumous influence of Virginia Woolf was partly responsible for the renewed friendship between Lehmann and Woolf. Lehmann sent Woolf a copy of his book of literary essays, The Open Night. Woolf found the essay in it on Virginia Woolf to be Indeed, it is one of the best short "extremely good and intere~ting."~~ pieces about Virginia Woolf. Lehmann had always admired her and her work, and he continued to d o so, as this essay, his remarks in his autobiography and in Thrown to the Woolfs, his book Virginia Woolf and Her World, and his poem "The Lady of Elvedon" testify. Aspects of their relationship are also reflected in Virginia Woolfs A Letter to a Young Poet and "The Leaning Tower". As we have seen, Lehmann suggested that she write A Letter, and he published "The Leaning Tower" in Folios of New Writing. He also published, in the Spring 1941 issue of Folios of New Writing, after Virginia Woolf s death, responses to "The Leaning Tower" by Edward Upward, B.L. Coombes, and Louis MacNeice, with a postscript of his own. From these two essays by Virginia Woolf, and to some extent from the responses to them, one can see the literary relationship between Lehmann and Virginia Woolf more clearly. As its title suggests, and as Virginia Woolf makes clear within the essay, A Letter to a Young Poet is an informal letter addressed by an older "prose writer" to the poets of a new generation: "I shall treat you not as one poet in particular, but as several poets in one," the writer says. "Several poets in one" has a double meaning here; it means the English poets of Lehmann's generation and it means that they inherit the tradition of English poetry: "You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare: Dryden, Pope, Tennyson - to mention only the respectable among your ancestors - stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character. . . ."56 The main complaint that Virginia Woolf makes, through her prose writer, based mainly (it appears from evidence in A Letter itself and from an actual letter to LehmannS7)on her reading of Auden's Poems (1930), Lehmann's A Garden Reuisited ( 1931), New S i p t u r e s (1932), and C. Day Lewis's From Feathers to Iron (193 I), is that the young poets have not yet learned to assimilate "the actual, the colloquial," satisfactorily in their poetry. When they do introduce it, she finds that it shocks; it jars. The trouble, she believes,

92 J . K . JOHNSTONE is that each poet is too concerned with himself; he "is much less interested in what we have in common than in what he has apart." She advises her young poet never to think that he is singular, "to embark upon a long poem in which people as unlike yourself as possible talk at the tops of their voices," "to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment," to experiment, and to publish nothing until he is thirty.58 In another actual letter to Lehmann, she answered his complaint about this last piece of advice: "As for publishing, I don't see your point that it is salutary because it wipes clean the slate: I think, o n the contrary, it engraves the slate, what with reviewers and publicity."Sg In spite of her criticism of the work of the young poets, Virginia Woolf thinks that their future, and the future of English poetry, is promising. The new poets are not content with the old designs; their lines d o not "slip easily down the accustomed grooves," and they try "honestly and exactly" to describe subjective e x ~ e r i e n c e . ~ ~ In "The Leaning Tower", written about eight years after A Letter to a Young Poet, Virginia Woolf can no longer speak of the LehmannAuden-Day Lewis generation of poets as promising writers who should correct some faults, work seriously and steadily at their craft, and refrain from rushing prematurely into print. Instead, she considers them in the context of the tumultuous period of violent change into which they were born; she finds that they respond courageously to it, though their craft suffers from the strain. In short, she no longer speaks as a writing coach, as she did in A Letter, but as a literary historian. Since she hopes for a better, post-war, future for England and its literature, she is also partly a social historian and reformer. "The Leaning Tower" has some of the intimacy of A Letter to a Young Poet but none of the artificiality that the form of the imaginary letter produced. Speaking to neighbours from a nearby town and an adjacent class, Virginia Woolf gave the Brighton Workers' Educational Association one of her best talks. She begins by telling her listeners that theories about writers "are dangerous things. All the same we must risk making .one this afternoon since we are going to discuss modern tendencies. . . . But let us always remember - influences are infinitely numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive; each writer has a different sensibility." She warns her audience that her theory "is only a guess, and a rough guess."61 Perhaps unconsciously telescoping the second calendar year of World War 11, in which she spoke, with the same year of World War I, she contrasts the tranquillity of England "a hundred years ago," in 1815, with its turmoil in 1940.62Then wars were remote; now

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gunfire .could be heard in Sussex and an airman shot down in the afternoon might be interviewed on the B.B.C. that evening. Neither Jane Austen nor Walter Scott mentioned the Napoleonic Wars in their novels; only Thackeray described the Battle of Waterloo in fiction. "Of the poets, only Byron and Shelley felt the influence of the ~ for the nineteenth-century wars p r ~ f o u n d l y . " ~Tranquillity nineteenth-century writer was reinforced, as it had been for Chaucer, by accepted class divisions and supported by his middle-class position. He accepted his position and the position of others without much question, viewing the world from "a tower built first on his parents' station then on his parents' gold."64 H e therefore had the luxury of recollection in tranquillity, which, Virginia Woolf believes, is necessary for the writer. "Do we strain Wordsworth's famous saying about emotion recollected in tranquillity," she asks, "when we infer that by tranquillity he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious before he can create?" She defines unconsciousness, in this sense, as a state in which "the under-mind works at top speed while the upper-mind drowses," and she suggests that the creative power of the poet and the novelist may come from "a fusion of the two minds, the upper and the under."65 T h e comfortable situation of the writer endured, Virginia Woolf claims, until 1914. Then, she says, using another figure of speech, "like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came."66 The young men who had completed expensive educations before 1914 (by "young men" Virginia Woolf quietly acknowledges that few women have such opportunities) had their education "safe within them. They had known security; they had the memory of a peaceful boyhood, the knowledge of a settled civilisation." They could write "as if the tower were firm beneath them. In one word, they are aristocrats; the unconscious inheritors of a great t r a d i t i ~ n . "However, ~~ the tower had begun to tilt, causing the writers of Lehmann's generation to view the world from a different perspective. Moreover, they realized that the tower "was founded upon injustice and tyranny"; yet, they could not, and should not, throw their education and privileged position away. Hence, their tendency to seek scapegoats to attack and "the pedagogic, the didactic, the loud speaker strain that dominates their poetry. They must teach; they must preach. Everything is a duty even love."68She believes that their conscious minds are too active to allow the unconscious mind to do its proper creative work. However, as she had in A Letter to a Young Poet, Virginia Woolf does find some merit in the work of these poets. Because of the instability around them, they look within and write about themselves fearlessly,

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expressing unflattering truths, stripping off the facades that protected the status of their predecessors. She believes that the Victorians and she herself (in the only reference she makes to her own work in this talk) would have been much better writers if they had been as truthful about themselves. Echoing Matthew Arnold's famous lines, she says that the poets who began their careers between the two World Wars are dwellers "in two wortds, one dying, the other struggling to be born."69 Transitional writers in a transitional world, their work may prepare the way for better literature in the future. T h e dilemma they face may disappear, Virginia Woolf hopes, if the classless, towerless society that the wartime politicians promise is indeed brought about. As we have seen, Virginia Woolf urged her listeners to prepare for that world and to help bring it about by reading and writing. She urged them to trespass at once on the common ground of literature, which had improperly been made the domain of the privileged. B.L. Coombes, a miner and author whose work Lehmann had published, agreed with this advice in his comments on "The Leaning Tower" in the Spring 194.1 issue of Folios of New Writing. Whether or not one agrees with Virginia Woolf s analysis (she may have generalized too much, as she warned her listeners that she inevitably would; perhaps the life of the nineteenth-century writer was not as tranquil as she thought; her use of the word "unconscious" is sometimes slippery; she might have distinguished between novelists and poets more clearly), "The Leaning Tower" does cast light on differences in thought and outlook between her, and perhaps Leonard Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury circle, on the one hand, and John Lehmann, and perhaps other writers of his generation, on the other. Virginia and Leonard Woolf certainly reached maturity in a more stable age than did Lehmann, and although the Woolfs questioned tradition in both literature and society, they were also rooted in a liberal tradition that welcomed innovation within a stable framework and that had expressed itself, for them, in Fabian socialism. They were thus less divided within themselves than Lehmann was, at least in the 1930s. As we have seen, Lehmann began as a liberal, became a socialist after he met Leonard Woolf, and then moved further left, towards communism. A curious confirmation of Virginia Woolfs central image in "The Leaning Tower" is seen in Lehmann's account in The Whispering Gallery of his life in Vienna. Though his sympathies were with the working-class members of the Social Democratic party, and he drew his closest friends from among them, he settled for most of his stay "at the top of a big building in the Invalidenstrasse, that

JOHN LEHMANN AND BLOOMSBURY 95 belonged to a rich Czech mining concern." An architect remodelled for Lehmann what had been the firm's dining-room, with a panoramic view of Vienna. A housekeeper-cook arrived each morning to serve him; her son was Lehmann's secretary-chauffeur. Not long before he found this flat, Lehmann reports, "Recurrent as malaria, a serious bout of rentier-guilt, the characteristic malady of my class and generation, laid me low."70 Virginia Woolf s Fabianism in literature is seen both in her respect for the achievements of the great English writers of the past and her insistence on innovation in the present, expressed in her essays, including "Modern Fiction" and Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, and demonstrated in her fiction. Her social and political Fabianism is seen, on the one hand, in her warning in "The Leaning Tower" that bourgeois society should not be destroyed until there is something better to put in its place, and on the other, in her insistence in "The Leaning Tower" and in such works as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas that change is necessary. Associated with this Fabianism is an Arnoldian belief in the civilizing influence of great literature in the long run, not necessarily in the short run. This belief is quite different from the "commitment" demanded by socialist realism o r even, at times, by existentialism. It is a commitment to literature as an end, not as a means. This commitment is, in turn, associated with a theory of creativity, expressed in "The Leaning Tower", that has religious roots and is descended from the ancient belief in the divine inspiration of the writer, whether by the Muses o r some other God, expressed by Milton, and Shelley, among others, and given a psychological basis by such twentieth-century writers as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. Therefore, it is f o r Virginia Woolf, as she makes clear in such essays as "Montaigne," "Joseph Conrad," and A Room of One's Own, a desecration of art to attempt to use poetry or fiction for personal o r political purposes. Such purposes should be clearly stated and argued in polemical books or pamphlets. Ideally, the artist should be androgynous, without apartiplir or axe to grind. It was these beliefs that caused Virginia Woolf to object to what she found to be the strident pedagogical tone of some of the poets of Lehmann's generation, not, as Lehmann conjectures, the influence of Leonard Woolf, who, Lehmann reports, "distrusted the extreme left-wing attitudes many of these poets had developed in the years immediately before the war."71 Once again, in the 1930s at least, Lehmann is seen, understandably, to be more divided than were either of the Woolfs. In those urgent times it must have been exasperating to hear, in A Letter to a Young

96 J . K . JOHNSTONE Poet, that the poet should learn to assimilate the actual and colloquial in his poems so that they do not jar or shock, and that he should (as if he were Keats) "absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment," and not publish until he has done so. He may have felt that poems of the 1930s should jar and shock and that if the young poet did not publish soon, he might not have the chance to publish at all. We know that Lehmann wanted politics to play a part in New Writing. Yet, he also appreciated the values which Virginia Woolf expressed and respected the tradition from which they came. In New Writing, as we have seen, literature was to come first, "with the politics only as an undertone." After the Soviet Union had invaded Poland, and then Finland, Lehmann says in his autobiography, The moral, it seemed, could not be evaded: I discussed it with Stephen Spender again and again during these weeks, and with many others who had been associated with us. Nothing that had happened made us feel that we had been wrong to stand openly for the ideas of liberty and justice, to show that we stood on the side of those parties and groups that appeared to be championing them most effectively in the political struggles of a political decade. Our general position, we still felt, had been right: poets, and other creative artists, cannot, if they are to remain fully living people, if they are to fulfil their function as interpreters of their time to their own generation, fail to interest themselves in the meaning behind political ideas and political power. It was our particular position that had probably been wrong: in the heat of the battle, to give our specific assent to a particular set of slogans, even if we did not actually join a particular party.72

The crucial question that Virginia Woolf might have asked has not quite been answered in this statement: Where should the stand be taken, the advocacy occur? In poetry, fiction, or non-fictional prose? For her, of course, it should be in the latter. Yet, as we have seen, Lehmann had much in common with the Woolfs, and with some of the other members of the Bloomsbury group, in spite of their differences. Their affinities and differences kept him and the Woolfs together for several years in fruitful tension. T h e bedrock of their relationship was a common evangelical belief in the value of the creation and dissemination of literature.

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Notes 1. John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 122. 2. G.E. Moore, Pn'rdipia Ethica (1903; reprint, London: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 189. 3. Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 89. 4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: T h e Hogarth Press, 1927), 102. 5. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 162. 6. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 167-68. 7. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 184-86. 8. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 186. 9. John Lehmann, I Am My Brother (London: Longmans, Green, 1960), 101- 102 and 179-80; John Lehmann, The Ample Proposition (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966), 102-103 and 187. 10. ~ehman;, Whispering Gallery, 141. 11. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 275-76. 12. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 138-39. 13. As quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, vol. I1 (London: Heinemann, 1968), 656. 14. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, editors, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV (London: Hogarth, 1975-80), 293. 15. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 148. 16. Anne Olivier Bell, editor, The Diary of Virginia Woo& vol. V (New York: Hogarth, 1972-84), 162 (17 August 1938). 17. Diary of Virginia Woo& vol. I V, 102 (23 May 1932). 18. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 164-66. 1 9. John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), 33. 20. Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, 110 (18 June 1932). 2 1. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 177-79. 22. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 195-99. 23. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 274. 24. John Lehmann, Down River: A Danubian Study (London: T h e Cresset Press, 1939), 3. 25. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 232. 26. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 253. 27. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 26 1-63. 28. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 19. 29. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 253. 30. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 296. 31. Lehmann, Whispering Gallery, 231-32. 32. Lehmann, I Am My Brother, 105, 3 16-17. 33. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way (London: Hogarth, 1967), 242-48. 34. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 57. 35. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 58-9; Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, 1 16 (22 October 1937).

98 J.K. JOHNSTONE 36. Letter from Leonard Woolf to John Lehmann, 2 January 1938, as quoted in Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. VI, 20 1. 37. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 74. 38. Lehmann, Whispering Gallety, 329. 39. Lehmann, IAm My Brother, 111; Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arriual Matters (London: Hogarth, 1969), 108. 40. Lehmann, IAm My Brother, 153. 4 1. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way, 163-69. 42. See, e.g., Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way, 95-6. 43. Lehmann, IAm My Brother, 310-13. 44. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 140. 45. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 133. 46. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 132-39. 47. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 143-47; Leonard Woolf, Journey Not the Arrival, 110- 13. 48. Leonard Woolf, Journey Not the Arrival, 112. 49. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 133. 50. As quoted in Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 133 and 140. 5 1. Leonard Woolf, Journey Not the Anival, 110 and 126. 52. Leonard Woolf, Journq, Not the Anival, 122. 53. Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 150. 54. Lehmann, Ample Proposition, 179. 55. As quoted in Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, 150. 56. Virginia Woolf, A Letter to a Young Poet (London: Hogarth, 1932);

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

reprinted in Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1942), 135. Letters $Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, 383. Virginia Woolf, Death of t h Moth, 134 a n d 137-42. Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, 83. Virginia Woolf, Death ofthe Moth, 139-40. Virginia Woolf, "The Leaning Tower," in Folios of New Writing, Autumn 1940; reprinted in Virginia Woolf, The Moment (London: Hogarth, 1947), 106 and 108. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 107. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 107- 108. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 112. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 109- 10 and 120. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 111. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 113. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 115 and 118. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 119. Virginia Woolf, Moment, 220-23. John Lehmann, Virgznia Woolf and Her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 103. Lehmann, IAm My Brother, 27.

GEORGE WOODCOCK

The Metamorphoses of New Writing I never encountered John Lehmann face to face, and I entered into correspondence with him only in the 1950s, when he was editing The Lundon Magazine and published my critical views on contemporary French novelists. The literary world of the 1930s tended to become compartmentalised into sub-generations as well as class groups and ideological sub-grou ps, and the occasions when a late-coming grammar-school educated contributor to Twentieth Century Verse might encounter one of the public-school-and-university writers who set the tone for the decade were rare indeed. Nevertheless, I was strongly aware of Lehmann, and mostly of him as an editor. By any standards of comparison 1 found his poetry competent but uninteresting, and, belonging to a dissident (anarchist) fraction of the left, I distrusted his politics during the 1930s, when he seemed to stand almost as firmly with the communists as Cecil Day Lewis, and a great deal more firmly than either Auden or Spender. His politics were soon to change and shift to the centre. About his verse I have still not notably altered my judgement; indeed, out of its temporal frame it seems to me even less interesting than when one read it as presenting an aspect of the way 1930s poets thought. But looking back over the decades, his importance in the literary world as an editor, whose scope of interests and choices was far wider than his politics might have suggested, has remained undiminished; indeed, it seems to grow in perspective. In literary ways the writers of the 1930s were much more conservative than their predecessors of the classic modernist movement. They re-established the didacticism of nineteenth century radical writers and in their poetry they went back to traditional forms and even at times traditional moods; Lehmann himself, even into the 1940s, still showed in his verse the influence of Jack Squire's anthologies of Georgian poetry which were the early fare for so many of us at that time. But one thing these poets inherited from the modernist movement was its ardent neophilia, the idea of starting afresh, even though their eyes were set on changing society rather than changing literature. Just as many of the modernists appeared in

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A.R. Orage's prewar New Age, so now the representative organs of the dominant literary movement were anthologies like New S i p t u r e s and New Country and magazines like New Verse and New Writing. In three of these John Lehmann was closely involved. New Signatures and New Country, in which the best-known new poets of the early 1930s first appeared as a group, were actually edited by Michael Roberts, but it was Lehmann through his position at Hogarth Press who persuaded Leonard Woolf to publish them, and there is no doubt that he worked closely with Roberts, to the extent of influencing the choice of writers, and that his presentation of the books encouraged in the minds of readers the idea that here were the thinly disguised manifestos of a school of writers of similar literary and political aims. In fact, of course, there were great differences in aim and technique between the poets who appeared in both volumes and the prose writers who found their way into the second. William Plomer and Richard Eberhart were notably less politically engaged and A.S.J. Tessimond and Julian Bell notably more poetically romantic than the other writers in New Signatures, while among the prose writers of New Countty the most interesting was undoubtedly Christopher Isherwood, and his fiction, while documentary, was only very obliquely political. New Country contained fiction, essays and poetry, and in this way it was something of a precursor of New Writing, though New Writing, which was planned and edited by Lehmann alone, was even more prose-oriented. While it did print some notable poems, like Auden's "MusCe des Beaux Arts" and Louis MacNeice's "Meeting", and in its later issues introduced some of the younger poets of the decade like David Gascoyne and Kenneth Allott, it is still for its prose that one remembers it - for its prose and its explicit political intent, which was more extreme than that of any other literary periodical of the time except the Left Review and a few less-known Marxist-oriented journals like Fact. It was not a magazine in the ordinary sense, so much as a twice-yearly miscellany with a hard cover and almost 200 pages of text, a fact that somewhat diminished its populist intent, since it was more expensive than many young people in those years of the Depression could easily afford. It opened with a "Manifesto" intended to set the tone, and Lehmann began by declaring that: New Writing is first and foremost interested in literature, and though it does not intend to open its pages to writers of reactionary or Fascist sentiments, it is independent of any political party.'

THE METAMORPHOSES OF NEW WRITING 101 T o its critics at the time, the political slant of the prose which formed the greater part of each issue of New Writing was so obvious that such a statement seemed to them absurd, and T.S. Eliot's Criterion, which stood on the farther side of the political spectrum, caustically remarked: The fact that the editor finds it necessary to inform us of his comparative impartiality shows that he is aware of what may be said. That is, that New Writing is not concerned with literature, but with left-wing p r ~ p a g a n d a . ~

In fact one has only to compare New Writing with the more rigidly party-lining L e j Review, which was filled with inept "proletarian" writing included only for its political correctness, to realize how much importance Lehmann did accord to literary quality, and how hard he tried to get the best work from the writers who shared his view that they had a role to play in saving the world from war and fascism. His choices were often, in orthodox communist terms, distinctly heretical. I read Ignazio Silone first in New Writing - a story called "The Fox"; Silone by this time was detested in the Party as a renegade, though he remained a non-communist socialist. I also encountered George Orwell's work there for the first time, and it was one of the best pieces he ever wrote: "Shooting an Elephant". Lehmann had written to Orwell in the spring of 1936, not long after Keep the Aspidistra Flying had been published by the impeccably left-wing house of Victor Gollancz. Orwell had just returned, as Lehmann was doubtless aware, from his trip to the industrial north of England where he had gathered the material for what eventually became The Road to Wigan Pier. Gollancz had commissioned him to research and write the book, and intended to publish it through the Left Book Club, which by this time had already established its credentials as both a reliable front organization and a profitable publishing venture, so that to all appearance Orwell must have seemed a safe and solid man for Lehmann to approach. Orwell's reply was characteristic: gruff and a little suspicious. He remarked that he had been unable to lay his hands on a copy of New Writing, so had no idea "what sort of stuff it uses". I am writing a book at present & the only other thing I have in mind is a sketch, (it would be abt. 2000-3000 words), describing the shooting of an elephant. It all came back to me very vividly the other day & I would like to write it, but it may be that it is quite out o f your line. I mean it might be too low brow for your paper 8c I doubt whether there is

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anything anti-Fascist in the shooting of an elephant! Of course you can't say in advance that you would like it, but perhaps you could say tentatively whether it is at all likely to be in your line or not. If not, then I won't write it; if you think it might interest you I will do it & send it along for you to ~ o n s i d e r . ~

Fortunately Lehmann replied favourably, and Orwell produced what turned out to be the best of his writing u p to this time, an essay that was at once documentary and autobiographical, yet also made a timely political point. For though it may not have been overtly "anti-Fascist", it certainly struck deeply at the weaknesses of imperialism, and did so in the clear, vigorous, colloquial prose - the that Orwell developed and defended. "prose like a window pane" There is no record of what Lehmann may have thought when The Road to Wigan Pier revealed Orwell to be a highly maverick socialist, so embarrassing to the Left Book Club that Gollancz had to write a disclaiming preface to the book, or later, when Orwell came back from Spain in 1937, turned by his experiences there into a bitter critic of the Communist Party, whose Iberian misdeeds he denounced in H m g e to Catulonia. Perhaps, by the time Homage to Catalonia appeared, Lehmann's own devotion to the Party was growing thin. It had obviously dwindled away completely by 1940, when he reprinted "Shooting an Elephant" in the first issue of Penguin New Writing. T h e important point to make - since it reinforces one's sense of the left-wing catholicity of New Writing - is that Lehmann, even when Orwell was being bitterly denounced by the Communists, does not seem either to have joined in the partisan chorus or expressed any regret for having published "Shooting an Elephant". Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" exemplified one of the two features of New Writing that were most striking to those who read the miscellany for the first time and most beneficial for those who knew how to draw the right lessons from them in the right way; its emphasis on documentary, which in literary terms was distinctly innovative. Sometimes the documentary, as in the case of Orwell's essay or of T.C. Worsley's memoir of an event particularly meaningful to readers of New Writing, "Malaga Has Fallen", would take the form of autobiographical o r historic reportage; an actual incident objectively described even if the conclusions drawn from it are largely subjective. Sometimes, as in the case of the pieces which Christopher Isherwood later included in Goodbye to Berlin, it was fiction that seemed to be closely based on personal experience and observation and, because it lacked a well-made plot, appeared to be nearer to the reporting of facts than to the telling of a story; fiction had adopted the documentary style.

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During the 1930s, the decade when the documentary film came into its own, many writers were interested in developing reportage as a means of fulfilling the special duty they felt incumbent on the literary community - to say things that might lead to the action needed to change society. Another magazine of the 1930s, Fact, which its editors declared had been influenced by the ideas and practice of the French Encyclopedists, was devoted to documentary in an even more uncompromising way than New Writing. Writers like Stephen Spender and the novelist Storm Jameson were among its editors, but it was a singularly unliterary publication in its drive to report facts that were important to a radical criticism of existing society. T h e theory of documentary writing was never better put during the 1930s than by Storm Jameson writing in Fact her essay "Documents". Jameson was a good writer - no mere socialist realist hack - and she sought ways to create a socialist literature, not by fiat of some ruling state o r party, but by the self-denying act of the writer himself. The conditions for the growth o f a socialist literature scarcely exist. We have to create them. We need documents, not, as the Naturalists needed them, to make their drab tuppeny-ha'penny dramas but as charts, as timber for the fire some writer will light tomorrow morning. . . . Perhaps the nearest equivalent to what is wanted exists already in the documentary film. As the photographer does, so must the writer keep himself out o f the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact from a striking (poignant, ironic, penetrating, significant) angle.J

Storm Jameson cited the first part of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (the descriptive section as distinct from the second part whose polemics she like many other socialists found hard to swallow) as an example of the way documentary and factual writing might turn. And it is true that to the end of his life Orwell shared the idea that is implicit both in Storm Jameson's essay and in John Lehmann's practice as editor of New Wn'ting: that in a time of political urgency the writer must be willing to sacrifice his more personal literary ambitions and use his craft austerely in providing the basis of fact on which a socialist literature can eventually be built. Of course, even documentary writing depends, for its success, on the very literary qualities that theoretically it abnegates; on the imaginative arrangement of facts, without which they are mere data, and on the development of a lucid and expressive prose. Even Orwell admitted that in his reportages he habitually rearranged facts and episodes for better effect: "I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experien~e."~ And in a perceptive Daily Telegraph review of the second volume of New Writing (in which "Shooting an Elephant" appeared)

104 GEORGE WOODCOCK

,

John Brophy pointed out the difference between those who treat "documentation" "not as a means but an end in itself*and those who "use the documentary facts as a springboard, who leap from reality The distinction is important, and it is true that into imaginati~n."~ some of the pieces that appeared in New Writing were little better than vividly written candid journalism. Still, re-reading these pieces now, one gets some vivid recollections of how people actually lived in the 1930s, and even this antiquarian satisfaction is a tribute to Lehmann's editorial judgment, which could pick on so much that still interests one half a century later, in rather the same way as Henry Mayhew's classic London Labour and the London Poor interests one with its starkly intimate glimpses of an earlier age. More than that, however, comparing the "documents" of contemporary life in New Writing with those in more literalist rivals like Fact and Leji Review, one realizes how genuine was Lehmann's claim to be "first and foremost interested in literature." He did believe in documentary reportage of the kind that Orwell and in a different way Isherwood wrote as a valid literary form, with its own claims on the imagination, and not merely as a sophisticated form of journalism; in so believing he helped return to English writers the scope of interests and of forms of expression that had been available to them in the days of Swift and Defoe, when fiction was in fact emerging out of the document, and even pretended to literalness. T h e other aspect of New Writing that impressed younger readers at the time was the range of European writing it offered to an English public that was used to reading French and Russian novelists and to watching the plays of Scandinavian dramatists after they had become well established in their own country. Lehmann actually set out to introduce both new proletarian writers of British origin and unfamiliar foreign writers. T h e proletarians he coralled were few and unimpressive, doubtless because the few writers of this type who did emerge at the time were not anxious to feel they were being patronized by upper-middle class leftists, and tended to find their own ways to publication through less obviously political channels than New Writing, as D.H.Lawrence had done in an earlier generation. But the foreign authors Lehmann did publish were interesting and at the time unfamiliar, and they helped to broaden one's view of what was being written on the continent of Europe at a time when the English Channel still seemed to create a vast remoteness. T h e avant-garde European writers, as Orwell pointed out often enough around this time, were showing an awareness of the threats which the

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future offered that few English writers yet shared. As well as Ignazio Silone, I read Andre Chamson and Jean Giono, Jean-Paul Sartre and Anna Seghers for the first time in New Writing. Of the five, only Anna Seghers might have been regarded as a real Communist writer, and even she was somewhat heterodox. T h e rest were men of different radical visions, but each of them in his own way impressed on one's mind the way in which the situation of recurrent peril had, during the age between 1914 and 1939, helped to mould in a political way the European literary consciousness, so that failing to take sides was as difficult for a French or a Central European writer as taking sides still was for most British writers. T h e earliest issues of New Writing, when 1930s idealism was still at its height and when events in Spain presented a heartening rather than a disillusioning vision, were certainly the best. The change of character began to appear with No. 6, which marked a reorganization of the magazine, Spender and Isherwood coming in as joint editors. New Writing became more like an ordinary literary journal, albeit a rather fat one, for literary criticism and social commentary were added. But more important was the evident evaporation of the idea that writers and artists could d o anything significant in the situation of mounting world crisis, with the cause of the left declining in Spain, largely through the intrigues of the Communists, and the western democracies busily giving in to IJitler. Literature once again began to seem a means of retreat rather than of attack, an ivory tower o r perhaps a dugout rather than a tank. It is evident in the issues of New Writing which appeared in late 1938 and in 1939 that Lehmann and his fellow editors, as well as most of their writers, were beginning to see limits to their self-abnegation as writers in the face of political crisis. T h e traditional aesthetic values were being quietly reinstated. When the war came in 1939 there was a curious failure of will among the editors of the literary journals that had been prominent during the 1930s. T.S. Eliot had already closed down The Criterion before the war began. Geoffrey Grigson and Julian Symons, terminated New Verse and Twentieth Century Verse respectively before 1939 ended. Their places were taken by a new crop of magazines detached from 1930s preoccupations; Cyril Connolly's Horizon, Tambimuttu's Poetry (London) and my own Now were all in operation by the end of 1940. New Writing was actually the only one among the leading 1930s periodicals to gain a reprieve. Lehmann ha3 announced that No. 8 , which appeared at Christmas 1939, would be the last issue. Then Allen Lane, the paperback magnate who had created Penguin Books,

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came to him with an offer to create a mass circulation literary miscellany. At a time when supplies of paper were extremely restricted and many publishers were finding it difficult to maintain anything like their pre-war lists, Lane had access to supplies and was able to guarantee Penguin New Writing, as it became, as much paper as was needed to print the vast runs its wartime popularity eventually justified. It was wretched grey newsprint, but in five ton lots it enabled as many as 100,000 copies of some issues to be printed. According to the letter of wartime regulations, new magazines could not be launched after early 1940, but many of us succeeded in doing so -as 1 did with Now - by disguising the issues as occasional miscellanies and leaving them undated, and this is what Lehmann and Lane did, publishing the successive volumes of Penguin New Writing as titles within the general Penguin book lists. New Writing now started on a curious double existence. Instead of abandoning the Hogarth Press series, as he had originally contemplated, Lehmann decided to continue it parallel with the Penguin series, and it appeared intermittently in a relatively expansive hard cover form, under the changed title ofFolios of New Writing; somewhat later it was merged with another Hogarth Press venture and became New WTiling and Daylight. From these volumes the original political impetus had lapsed; the writing Lehmann tended to favour in them retained the Augustan rationality and poise that was one aspect of Thirties writing (an aspect highly developed by Auden in his later years), and he tended to choose younger writers, like Roy Fuller, Terence Tiller, Laurie Lee and Laurence Little, whose work was imbued with the same kind of lyrical gravity that characterized his own poems. But Cyril Connolly's Horizon, which had so much greater panache, captured the best of English mandarin writing after 1940, and Folios of New Writing lived in its shadow. Penguin New Writing was quite a different matter. It began by reproducing pieces that had already appeared in the eight issues of the original New Writing between 1936 and 1939. But the sudden popularity of these selections of work that originally had sold in the low thousands and was now moving into the high ten thousands revealed a kind of mass market that few people in the penurious years before the war would have deemed possible for writing so serious and even, despite its socialist pretensions, often so elitist in tone. Allen Lane, at least, must have had some inkling of what might happen and must have proceeded on the strength of his successful pre-war Penguin volumes, of which Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London was one, and Lehmann - however little he may have expected it by 1940 - must have regarded this unexpected success as a justification

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for his original act of faith in the possibility of achieving some genuine rapport between writers and the people to whom so many in the 1930s felt they were dedicating their lives and their gifts. T h e situation was in fact more complicated than that, and in some ways more banal. During the 1930s, the decade of the Depression, there was a great deal of unavoidable leisure, but the people unwillingly enjoying it did not have the means to make it intellectually o r culturally meaningful. New Writing and the orange-coloured limp volumes published by the Left Book Club were bought by the employed o r at least endowed members of the middle-middle and lower-middle classes. T h e war created an entirely new situation. Millions of people in the army and navy, in the civil defence services, were trapped in situations where they had vast periods of paid idleness, waiting for bombs in London, waiting for action in military camps scattered over the country. An enormous and hungry readership was created, at all levels of education, and the book industry profited from it. Even the shortage of paper played into the hands of those who were able to get their hands on it. Intelligent reading matter became so scarce in proportion to the demand that all those people who were printing magazines disguised as books found their productions unexpectedly selling out. My own journal, Now, which before the war would probably have sold 500 copies an issue and after the war declined to a bankrupting 700, was at this time selling between 3,000 and 4,000 copies, which was as much as I could produce with the small supplies of paper I could scrounge in black market deals from backstreet East End printers. Penguin New Writing with Lane's tons of paper, quickly rose in that unlimited market to sales of 75,000 and even, before the end of the war, to around 100,000. Lehmann had created, perhaps for the first time since Dickens, a genuinely popular literary publication, and I think he kept it selling by shifting its orientation from socialist to populist. Penguin New Writing appealed not only to the tens of thousands of bored potential readers wasting their hours and years in remote camps and in the ARP (air-raid precautions) posts of the cities; it also appealed to the hundred of potential writers with time at last on their hands. Lehmann's attention was directed no longer to proletarian writers, whom he had never really reached in the past, but to writers in the services, and since soldiers and sailors and air-raid wardens and fire fighters were drawn from all classes, all levels of education, all kinds of sensibility, he was able to draw on a vastly wider and deeper reservoir of talent. These writers, Lehmann found, were producing work that showed

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a clear shift from the values of the 1930s which New Writing had originally set out to represent. He himself tried to keep u p the tradition of reportage and even ran a regular feature, "Report on Today", in which matters of political and cultural interest were mingled together, but so far as his writers and readers were concerned he noted as early as 1942 that "the centre of balance has shifted from a rather extrovert, documentary type of realism to something more introvert, with a great deal more reflection and feeling in it."' He noted the sense of isolation, linked to the "absence of a generally accepted myth o r system of beliefs" from which it seemed to arise; he even, in what seems to have been a spirit of m a tuba, published articles from writers of a younger generation like Henry Reed, reproaching "the politically-conscious, overintellectualized writers of the early thirtie~."~ Such a change in the general attitude of writers and in the kind of material available meant also a change in the character of the magazine. It became less self-consciously political; less rationalistically oriented. Its writing was more introverted, more nostalgic, more fanciful, more romantic, more inclined to assuage present anxieties than to encourage eventual hopes: in sum, more conventional. Yet there were limits of change beyond which Lehmann would not step. He continued to sustain a left-liberal attitude of support for the war, and gave no encouragement to the many younger writers who for various pacifist, personalist and anarchist reasons were seceding from patriotism. He sustained the thirties view that writing - even poetry - should seem reasonable and comprehensible to the average educated man, and so he gave no place to the "dotty poets", as Roy Fuller called them, who entered the ranks of the New Romantic and Apocalyptic movements and joined with the pacifists and anarchists in magazines like Kingdom Come and New Road. Whatever its limitations -and it was never wholly representative of the writing of its time - Penguin New Writing was a deservedly successful magazine, and today it is perhaps the best publication to turn back to and get a feeling of what it was like to be a young man of literary ambitions during the disruptive decade of the 1940s. With the end of the war, the gradual lifting of restrictions on paper supply, and the return of publishing to more normal patterns, the sales for the literary miscellanies that had flourished in the early 1940s sharply declined, and their economic foundations collapsed. I published the last issue of Now in 1947. Horizon and Penguin New Writing continued until 1950; the last issue of Penguin New Wn'ting was its 40th. It was not merely a matter of publishing economics; it was

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also a lapsing of interest in the ideals such magazines shadowily represented. In Under Siege Robert Hewison quotes Alan Ross saying of the two magazines in 1961: T h e left-wing idealism of the thirties under whose honourable, if battered, banner both these reviews were launched, had disintegrated in the threadbare bureaucracies o f the Welfare State, the excitement of social revolution been deflated by fulfilment, as well as by the drab realities of post-war life.g

John Lehmann's editorial career did not end with the death of Penguin New Writing. In 1954 - taking up a long-established title he began editing The London Magazine, and did so with competence and what - as the years passed - began to seem a conservative sensibility. He gave up The London Magazine in 1961, and thus he completed a quarter of a century of editing, during which in many ways, but perhaps most of all in his emphasis on the importance of the document as a literary genre, he influenced the directions in which writing in English developed from the 1930s onward.

Notes 1. John Lehmann, "Manifesto," New Writing I (Spring 1936). 2. Frank Chapman, "Review of New Writing 1," The Criterion XVI, LXII (Oct. 1936): 163. 3. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalistn and Letters, vol. 1 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 22 1. 4. Storm Jameson, "Documents", Fact 4 (15th July 1937): 13. 5. George Orwell, "Why I Write," Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 196 l), 44 1. 6. John Lehmann, "Foreword," Penguin New Writing 14 (July-Sept. 1942): 7. 7. John Brophy, "New Fiction: 'The Need for More Imagination." Daily Telegraph 25th Oct. 1936, 10. 8. Henry Reed, "The End of an Impulse," New Writing &? Daylight (Summer 1943): 117. 9. Quoted in Robert Hewison, Under Seige (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977), 185.

ROBERT HEWISON

The Age of the Dragon: John Lehmann in Wartime On the day before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the New Statesman published a review by John Lehmann of Philip Henderson's recently published The Poet and Society. "There can be little doubt," he wrote, that somewhere between the Munich sell-out of last September and the defeat of the Spanish Republicans early this year, a significant change began to develop in the attitude of the literary and artistic "Left". There are signs, not merely of a bitter disillusionment about the real power and meaning of democracy in England, but also a revulsion from all political platforms. Many young writers and artists seem to be feeling now that they put too much trust in parties and catchwords, and that a withdrawal is necessary in self-defence, and in order to reconsider, not fundamental beliefs, but the ways and means of making those beliefs effective. Mr Henderson's new book shows this process at work.'

Henderson had argued "it is not primarily the business of the poet to be a politician, so much as to interpret imaginatively the crisis that is taking place in the mind of man."2 Lehmann accepted this conclusion, for it had become his own. His review, published at a pivotal moment in British history, marks a change of direction for a whole generation of writers, and in effect outlines Lehmann's programme of work for the years of war. Although his comments sum u p the sense of disillusion which Lehmann plainly shared with the literary and artistic Left, there were two further events, besides Munich and the collapse of republican resistance in Spain, which he did not care to mention in his review. T h e first was the Russian-German non-aggression pact of August 1939, which had so recently shattered the link between the resistance to fascism and sympathy for communism, a piece of Soviet realpolitik that was causing agonizing conflicts in the minds of British communists. The second, which was personally important to Lehmann, and of great significance to the literary Left, was the departure of W.H. Auden and Christopher lsherwood for America in January of that year.

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Isherwood had helped to plan the first numbers of New Writing in 1935; he and Auden were the leading voices of the generation that N m Writing was intended to represent. In public, Lehmann had to explain away their defection, which was being used by their enemies on the Right to attack the "defeatism" of those who in fact had been most critical of appeasement. Privately, Lehmann felt betrayed. He said in an interview in 1976 "it was all very well to say 'we must love one another or die' three thousand miles away when the bombs were dropping here."3 He continued to publish Auden and Isherwood throughout the war, but he also printed criticisms of their attitude, including his own remarks about "strange-seeming somersaults of belief and personality" in 1944.4 The loss of Auden and Isherwood was a severe blow to the confidence of those who remained behind. Though the war had been expected for some time, no one was prepared for the state of suspended animation that descended until the following spring, At 32, Lehmann was of military age, but his attempts to get a military appointment, or indeed to be of service of any kind to the war effort, were frustrated. (Lehmann attributed this to his Left-wing associations). On the other hand, his work at the Hogarth Press, where he had become General Manager in 1938, having bought Virginia Woolf s partnership, was in question, for the immediate effect of wartime controls was to impose paper rationing that severely limited their capacity to publish new work - if any new work was to be forthcoming, as seemed unlikely in the winter of 1939. The Christmas 1939 number of New Writing announced that "a chapter in its existence is now closed" and no one knew if a new one would open.5 The ending of the phoney war in May 1940 released some of the creative energies frozen in 1939, but the immediate effect of the Blitz that followed was disastrous for the Hogarth Press. At the beginning of September a land-mine in Mecklenburg Square damaged the offices of the press and made Lehmann's nearby flat uninhabitable. (Virginia Woolfs suicide in March 1941 was a further demoralizing blow.) T h e press moved for the rest of the war to offices loaned by their printers, the Garden City Press in Letchworth, and during the winter of 1940-41, at a time of the utmost difficulty for rail travel, Lehmann endured a peripatetic existence, moving between Cambridge, where he had a room through the help of Dadie Rylands, a fellow of King's; a flat in Athenaeum Court, Piccadilly; and his mother's house at Bourne End, neart Maidenhead, where he did weekend duty with the Home Guard. In the second volume of his autobiography, I Am My Brother,

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Lehmann records that this winter was also a period of deep personal crisis: an unhappy love-affair, an entirely new sense of death as nothingness in the midst of life and an almost unendurable anxiety about a younger friend who had gone to sea in a state, I knew, of despair. These three elements interacted to draw u p the tidal wave which engulfed me for some months. It was an experience of the deepest confusion and agony of spirite6

This crisis, which is reflected in his sequence of prose poems "Vigils", first published in Penguin New Writing 13 in June 1942, was partly the consequence of the strain placed on relationships in wartime (we can see another aspect of this in his homosexual novel In the Purely Pagan Sense7), but it was also the result of that bitter disillusionment and withdrawal he had alluded to in 1939. Lehmann did not reach a specifically religious solution to this crisis, for he had abandoned spiritual certainties, but we may conclude from his autobiography that by early 1941 he had abandoned political certainties as well: there are forces in life that defy our attempt to grasp them, and no construction was so certain that we could be justified in forcing it on others. Certainty, indeed, was a mirage; the desire for the absolute the most dangerous as well as the most useless of human pursuit^.^

In spite of the adverse conditions, however, Lehmann like many others at this time found a new urgency and significance in the very fact of being able to do creative work at all. T h e desire to write returned, and contrary to all expectations, publishing prospered. An early sign of renewal was the decision to launch a new poetry series, the New Hogarth Library, and to relaunch New Writing in an abbreviated form, as Folios of New Writing, the first number of which appeared in the spring of 1940. The Listener noted Now that all is quiet on the Popular Front, and the Fascist and the Communist are only with difficulty distinguishable, the literary school which used to give New Writing its most characteristic contributions has died a sudden death. New Writing itself, however, has managed to rise from its own ashes and reappear in a slightly altered form, not less Left but less Left Book Club, less strident and, on the whole, greatly impr~ved.~

This new direction was confirmed in Folios of New Writing 11, in the autumn of 1940, when articles by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Stephen Spender all criticized the previous submission of young writers and poets to political rather than imaginative imperatives.

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T h e most important development was an approach from Allen Lane, who had been the first publisher of New Writing, before he left the Bodley Head to found Penguin in 1936. Thanks to Penguin's prolific publishing programme in 1938 and 1939, the period which formed the baseline from which paper ration allowances were calculated, Lane had more paper than most at his disposal, and Penguin's unpretentious format was ideally suited to the new conditions. In January 1940 Lane commissioned Lehmann's critical survey New Writing in Europe (published as a Pelican in December 1940), and followed this up in May with a proposal to print a selection from the pre-war hardback series of New Writing. This became Penguin New Writing (volume I ) , also published in December 1940, but the growing demand for reading matter (demonstrated by the success of Cyril Connolly's magazine Horiron, launched in January 1940) caused Lane and Lehmann to agree that they had the basis for a new monthly magazine, and Penguin New Writing 2, while still carrying a considerable amount of reprinted material, was launched as such in lanuary 194 1. Penguin New Writing was an immediate success. T h e first number sold out after two printings, at 80,000 copies, numbers 2 and 3 sold out at 55,000 each. The demand surprised even Lane, and in mid-1941 a new agreement was reached by which Lehmann would be allowed 5 tons of paper for each issue, permitting a print run of about 75,000 copies. (The Hogarth Press's entire annual ration was 5 tons, which shows the relative scale of the enterprises.) Paper rationing was only one of the difficulties that wartime publishers faced. Lehmann wrote this witty editorial for number 8, in July 1941. First of all, the authors have to write their contributions; they promise them by a certain day; but in the meantime Fanfarlo's typewriter may have beeen put out of action by Mrs Greenbaum's land-mine, and Robert Pagan's beautiful hand-written manuscript may have met with Nazi fires on its way through the post, and arrive charred and soggy a week late. Next, the contributions have to be set u p in type and proofs corrected; enemy action may cause more delays here, and an Editor may even have to turn out with the Home Guard and be late with his own blue-pencillings. And when all the proofs are at last returned to the printer, our watchful solicitor may decide that one author has shown too great a levity towards a distinguished public figure o r worthy organ of government; cuts have to be made, but when the printer is hurriedly r u n g u p the Exchange suavely replies: ten hours' delay. Suppose, however, that all is ready to time, the great machines waiting to revolve: the boat with the paper from overseas may have been delayed, and while the machines are idle, the call-up may claim some of the printer's key- worker^.'^

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Penguin New Writing never managed monthly publication. In 1942, when the paper ration had shrunk to 37% percent of the pre-war baseline, it was decided that publication should become quarterly, and with number 13 a new layout was adopted to cram in as many words as possible. Even so, it was only possible to achieve three issues a year, until a further reorganization with number 2 1 in April 1944, when illustrations appeared for the first time. Penguin New Writing did not emerge from its "wartime chrysalis"," with a fresh layout and new typography until number 27, in April 1946. At the Hogarth Press, where Leonard Woolf left him largely in charge, Lehmann published such prose and poetry as he could find the paper for, notably Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts (1941), Henry Green's Caught (1943) and William Sansom's Fireman Flower (1944), and the poetry series, the New Hogarth Library. In 194 1, contact with one of the many European exiles in London, the Czech Jiii Mucha (son of the designer) led to the publication of a single number of Daylight, a hardback collection intended to serve as an international version of New Writing. It is likely that Mucha had access to paper supplies that made the project possible. However rivalry among the contributing nations made Daylight too problerriiitic a proposition; instead, Daylight merged with Folios of New writing to become New Writing and Daylight of which seven hardback numbers appeared between the summer of 1942 and Sept-ember 1946. These were deliberately more international and highbow than Penguin New Writing, though a number of contributions were later reprinted in the Penguin series. T h e last number has the imprint of John Lehmann's own publishing house, which he began after failing to buy Leonard Woolf out of the Hogarth Press in 1945. Following the end of the Blitz, and Russia's and America's entry into the war in 194 1, Lehmann writes in his autobiography that the literary world of London became, paradoxically, something like a stable society. There were not a great number of us; most of those who were destined to spend at least part of the war in uniform had already gone; nearly all of us who remained knew one another (or very soon got to know one another) personally, and living more o r less under siege conditions with very little opportunity of movement far afield, we were continually meeting to argue and discuss together, so that ideas were rapidly absorbed into the general bloodstream and hostile camps and intellectual schisms never lasted for long o r remained very serious. We were united in a this-has-got-to-be-seen-through attitude towards the war which was taken for granted, and also in a determination to guard the free world of ideas from any misguided military encroachment. We needed one another, and for purposes larger than o u r own security o r ambitions.'*

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Lehmann, together with his fellow editor at Horizon, Cyril Connolly, found himself among the central figures of the strange, blacked-out, dingy and often edgy literary world that established itself in the middle passage of the war. Lehmann moved easily between the drunken bohemia of the Fitzroy Tavern and the Right-wing salon of Lady Cunard at the Dorchester Hotel. Besides his editorial duties with the Hogarth Press and New Writing, Lehmann was also an advisory editor for the Geographical Magazine, and briefly in 1942 literary editor of Tribune, but his politics no longer suited its Left-wing line. He broadcast regularly on the BBC's burgeoning Overseas Service, and in German for the Austrian service. T h e Ministry of Information, which co-ordinated government propaganda, arranged for him to write a monthly article for Internationalnaya Likratura, until the Moscow magazine's sudden demise in 1943, after which the articles were published by the British propaganda review, gritanski Soyunik. He also published two volumes of his own verse, Forty Poems in 1942, and The Sphere of Glass in 1944. By far the most important work, however, was Penguin New Writing. These slim volumes, with pastel covers and fragile wartime paper, became emblems of survival which no Ministry of Information publication o r film documentary could manufacture. Tucked in battle-dress pocket, gas-mask holder o r factory overall, they created a link between the civilian and military worlds, and in the years of rationed poetry and imaginative confinement, it is no surprise that they sold out as soon as they appeared on the bookstalls. By any standards, they are a creditable editorial achievement. Lehmann's policy, like Connolly's, was simply to try to keep literature alive and provide at least some outlet for writers in uniform. T h e uncertainties of production made it impossible to function as a normal literary review: the critical commentary had to be more general, and Lehmann relied chiefly on Stephen Spender (having patched u p their quarrel following Spender's decision to join Horizon in 1940), on Walter Allen, and on himself, usually writing under the Chandleresque pseudonym, Jack Marlowe. As a good editor, Lehmann was anxious to include some humour, though outside his regular contributors William Plomer (as "Robert Pagan") and George Stonier (as "Fanfarlo" and 'tJoseph Gurnard") this proved difficult to find. A strong feature of the pre-war New Writing had been documentary accounts of aspects of contemporary life that suited the sociological bent of the thirties. Essentially, this was continued, only in uniform, under the successive banners "The Way We Live Now" (numbers 2 to

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12), "Report on Today" (numbers 13 to 24) and "The Living Moment" (numbers 25 to 35). These provided the setting for the many - intensely felt but often undeveloped - records of wartime experiences that many unknown contributors felt impelled to send to the magazine. It is an indication of the post-war atmosphere that the feature was dropped in 1946 because the flow of contributions submitted had tailed off. T o begin with, Lehmann also drew on the pre-war New Writing circle for longer stories and articles, but gradually fresh names begin to appear: Alun Lewis, William Sansom, John Sommerfield, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dan Davin, Fred Urquhart, Denton Welch. All of these had published elsewhere, and the demand for good writers was such that they were never conceived of as exclusively a New Writing group, but they do represent some of the best writers in the short-story genre, which seemed to blossom in the artificial climate of wartime. It is interesting to note single contributions by writers who were to have quite different post-war reputations: J.E. Morpurgo (future colleague and biographer of Allen Lane, in Penguin New Writing 22), Alec Guinness (in Penguin New Writing 27), Erik de Mauny (Penguin New Writing 18 and 24), Raymond Williams (in New Writing and Daylight 2). At first, Lehmann was, like many people, hoping to see the war imaginatively transformed in the shape of new novels, but it soon became clear that only short fiction and the lyric were practicable undertakings so long as the war lasted. Lehmann's brief editorials trace the rise and fall of expectations. In Penguin New Writing 14 (September 1942) he noted that "the centre of balance has shifted from a rather extrovert, documentary type of realism to something more introvert, with a great deal more reflection in it."13 Although he simultaneously and paradoxically insisted that there was also a hardness and precision about contemporary writing, by 1943 Lehmann had become enthusiastic about the revival of neo-romanticism that was taking place in the visual and performing arts. This shows most clearly in his choice of artists to reproduce in the illustrations that appear from Penguin New Writing 13 onwards: Keith Vaughan (who had first contributed as a prose writer), Leslie Hurry, Michael Ayrton, John Piper, Graham Su therland, John Minton, Rex Whistler, John Craxton, but his editorial for Penguin New Writing 16 (March 1943) links "a new depth of feeling, the development of a new consciousness" that he found in the poetry of Roy Fuller and others with "painters like Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. If one can extend the pattern to include the musicians, then we are indeed on

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the verge of exciting developments in our twentieth century artistic life."14 This enthusiasm stopped short of the so-called Apocalyptics, whose bias towards both anarchism and pacifism did not suit the New Writing editorial line. Lehmann dismissed their "tediously inflated verse" in his autobiography15 and attacked them in New Writing and Daylight (winter 1943), although he did publish Donald Bain (in nonApocalyptic mode) and Alex Comfort. At first, Lehmann published relatively little poetry, and as with prose, began by relying on New Writing contributors, Auden, Spender, and C. Day Lewis, but it was Louis MacNeice, and especially Roy Fuller, whose two wartime collections The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944) were published by the Hogarth Press, who made the most impressive development during this period. In mid-1943 with Penguin New Writing 13, he began a series of "Poetry Supplements". In part he was forced to do so, to accommodate the fact that "more poetry is being written by the generation under forty than anything else."'6 The poets of the 1940s - many of them reluctant war poets -that appeared in Penguin New Writing is again a creditable list: Alan Ross, Hamish Henderson, Bernard Gutteridge, Alun Lewis, Keidrych Rhys, H.B. Mallalieu, Henry Reed, Laurie Lee, Terence Tiller, Norman Nicholson. The fortunes of war meant that Lehmann did not publish two poets who were never able to realize their potential: Sydney Keyes, killed in 1943, whose editorial contact was the pro-romantic Herbert Read at Routledge; and Keith Douglas, killed in 1944, who was published by Tambimuttu in Poetry (London). Although Lehmann's editorials and articles emphasized the "new depth of feeling" in many writers, today the contributions in prose and poetry which seem most impressive are those that keep a certain distance between the writers and their material. Donald Bain's "War Poet" in Penguin New Writing 21 We only watch, and indicate and make our scribbled pencil notes. We do not wish to moralise, only to ease our dusty throats." sums u p the tone of many poems and stories that have stood the test of time. Yet, as his review of September 1939 shows, Lehmann felt an earnest desire to moralize, in order to come to terms with the disillusionment and subsequent shift of political position at the end of the 1930s. The "new depth of feeling, the development of a new c o n ~ c i o u ~ n emeant s ~ ~ ' for Lehmann, as he wrote in "The Heart of the

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Problem", an essay for Daylight reprinted in Penguin New Writing 18, "an implicit appeal for a return to human values . . . our age is destroying itself by too great a belief in material power and dogma."'" His series of essays "The Armoured Writer" in New Writkng and Daylight shows him more and more clearly associating dogma with Marxism, and, while rejecting religion as such, struggling to evolve what one might call an aesthetic humanism that would take dogma's place. Regrettably, Lehmann never gave a clear explanation of what this humanism was, during the war, o r when specifically asked about this in an interview in 1976. Its negative aspects - the revulsion from all political platforms and the rejection of all dogma - became increasingly identified with hostility to the Soviet Union. His essay "State Art and Scepticism" in Penguin New Writing 24 (mid 1945) rightly criticizes the orthodoxies imposed upon contemporary Russian writers and celebrates the way the British have "held passionately to our right to be critical, to be antinomian, to be gloomy when we should have been enthusia~tic,"'~ but this is also a retreat from, if not political commitment, then political responsibility, an attitude which was to contribute to the stifling atmosphere of the Cold War. This is not simply a matter of unfortunate but inevitable developments in international relations; domestically, the Cold War encouraged a negative nostalgia and conformism which hampered post-war reform and reconstruction. In particular, the post-war atmosphere pervades the first two volumes of Lehmann's autobiography, published in 1955 and 1960, and obscures the radicalism of the 1930s. T h e nearest Lehmann came to a positive description of the "evolutionary humanism"20 which he embraced was not in his own writings, but in Edwin Muir's essay "The Natural Man and the Political Man", first published in New Writing and Daylight (summer 1942) and significantly reprinted in Penguin New Writing 26 in 1945. Muir argued that materialist philosophies had exchanged an organic image of man for that of a machine governed entirely by external, amoral forces. Human life thus became a thing completely contained in an environment, and therefore a thing to which the imagination of the writer could give no ultimate significance, since there was not in it even the pretence of choice, even the day-dream of freedom. If the life of the individual is a development, then that development is simple and inevitable. If the life of the individual is a conflict, then that conflict implies a choice, and the choice, complexity, and complexity, the

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existence of more in human life than can be compressed into a form~la.~'

Muir is describing the absence of a myth, a unifying myth that would restore moral significance to mankind. Ultimately, it was the lack of spiritual values, not their rediscovery, that became Lehmann's theme. Early in 1944, in his editorial for Penguin New Writing 19, he reflected on the way the war had affected people's attitudes, especially those of his service contributors. "One had been changed by the war - like the man who found he was an insect one morning in Kafka's horrible and prophetic story - into something alien to one's old self." This sense of division and loneliness, which the poem and the story can most powerfully reveal, and which are thus themselves with extreme sharpness divided from the pep-reports and grin-records of so much of the reading matter supplied by the popular press, emerges niore and more, as the war goes on, as one of the most acute symptoms of the sickness of o u r time. These stories show us that it is from the absence of a generally accepted myth o r system of beliefs that it arises; a myth whose wholeness would heal the wound between war and peace-time occupation, between the past and present, between one class and another; a myth which we in England felt we were about to recapture for one moment of astonishing intensity in 1940, when everything seemed to be falling into place and which, if it were the gain of the whole of humanity and not merely of o u r own English-speaking peoples, ivould surely make impossible such a savage, irreconcilable mutual tearing as has gone on now for half a decade between ourselves and the Nazis.'"

In part, this despondency reflects the emotional attrition of that struggle. When questioned about this passage in 1976 Lehmann said "well of course in 1944 we were all very tired."23 But the truth is that the myth "that we in England felt we were about to recapture for one moment of astonishing intensity in 1940" was never fully articulated. It may be that such a myth is beyond expression. Few did more to defend the values of creativity, imagination and independence in wartime than Lehmann, and his achievement must be respected. Yet Lehmann could frame his thoughts no more easily than the bomber crews he describes in the last verse of "The Age of the Dragon". "0 give us words, as strong as the ringed stones T h a t still outlast the forgotten priest and name Counting the years by thousands o n the downs, T o cage the Dragon and transmute o u r shame."24

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Notes 1. New Statestnatl 2 September 1939, 349-50. 2. P. Henderson, T ~ Poet P and Society (London: Secker & M1arburg, 1939) 242. 3. Author's interview with John Lehmann, 1 1 February 1976. 4. Penguin New Writing 2 1 ( 1 944): 137. 5. New Writing new series 3 (Christmas 1939): editoriitl. 6. J. Lehmann, I Am ~MJBrother: Aulobiography II (London: Longnlans, 1960) 136. 7. J. Lehmann, 111 The Purely pa gat^ Sense (London: Blotld 8s Briggs, 1976). 8. Lehmatln, Autobiograplly 11, 138. 9. The Listener, 16 M a y 1940, 983. 10. Penguin New Writir~g8 (July 1941): 7-8. The passage continues with a description of' the dif'flculties of distribution. 1 1 . Penguin New Writing 27 (April 1946): 7. 12. Lehmann, Atrtobiograp/t~11, 165. 13. Penguin New Writing 14 (September 1942): 7. 14. Penguin New Writing 16 (March 1943): 140-4 1. 15. Lehmann, Autobiogmphy 111, 197. 16. Penguin New Writing 17 (April-June 1943): 7. 17. Pengzrin New Writing 21 (1944): 150. 18. Penguin New Writing 18 (July-September 1943): 166. 19. Penguin New Writing 24 (1945): 159. 20. New Writing and Daylight ( 1945): 1 3. 2 1. Penguin New Writing 26 (1945): 143. Muir's essay is reprinted in J. Lehmann and Roy Fuller, editors, The Penguin New Writing (Lo~ldotl: Penguin, 1985), 439-47. 22. Penguin New Writing 19 (Ja~luary1944): 7-8. 23. Author's interview ivith John Lehmann, 1 1 February 1976. 24. J. Lehrnann, Collected Poerns 1930-1 963 (London: Eyre ant1 Spottiswoode, 1963), 84.

A.T. TOLLEY

Letters from The Editor John Lehmann seems destined to be remembel-ed primarily as one of the outstanding literary editors of the twentieth century in Britain. His work in this capacity covered the years from 1936, when he began New Writing, to 1961, when he gave u p the editorship of The London Magazine. T h e public face of this activity is a series of periodicals of sustained and lasting interest that contributed at every stage to the life of British culture of their day. Yet there inevitably lies behind this a hidden activity of reading manuscripts, discussing them, seeing them through the press - a life described very fully in Lehmann's three volumes of autobiography. Out of this came a submerged literary product - an immense body of correspondence between the editor and his authors. This correspondence has been preserved. T h e files of New Writing, Folios of New Writing, New Writing &f Daylight, Penguin New Writing, Orpheus and The London Magazine have been deposited in the Lehmann archive at the Humanities Research Centre of' the University of Texas at Austin. T h e catalogue of' the letters occupies close to ten drawers in the card index. About half of the letters are by Lehmann, while the other half are by his correspondents. Among the correspondents are over 300 authors, mainly contributors o r would-be contributors to Lehmann's periodicals. T h e majority are from Great Britain; but there are letters fro111 American and European writers, and a few from other parts of the world. Among the more famous are: Louis Aragon, W.H. Auden, George Barker, Saul Bellow, Earle Birney, Berthold Brecht, Albert Camus, Cyril Connolly, C. Day Lewis, Lawrence Durrell, T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Roy Fuller, Robert Graves, Henry Green, Graham Greene, C.M. Grieve ("Hugh MacDiarmid"), Barbara Hepworth, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Andre Malraux, Henry Miller, George Orwell, Victor Pasmore, John Piper, Sylvia Plath, William Sansom, George Seferis, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas, John Wain, Angus Wilson, and Virginia Woolf. T h e authors range from the early makers of modern literature to writers just emerging in Lehmann's final years as editor of The London ~Mngazine.

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Naturally enough, the individual collections of correspondence vary very considerably in size - from a single form letter of rejection to somewhere in the neighbourhood of fifty letters on either side. Among the largest are the correspondences with Leonard Woolf, Louis MacNeice, the mineworker/author B.L. Coombes, and the artist Keith Vaughan. T h e extent of a correspondence is not necessarily a measure of what it has to offer. Some o f the collections of letters to more established authors are of little interest: they send in their stuff, and Lehmann replies that he will be happy to use it. Just such a correspondence is the one with Henry Green, a Hogarth Press author and a frequent contributor to Lehmann's periodicals. A good part of that extensive collection consists of notes of acceptance o r regret from those invited to the dinner that Green arranged for Lehmann when his publishing house was forced to close in 1952. Indeed, much of the correspondence is inevitably routine and repetitive - letters of acceptance o r polite letters of refusal: I enjoyed reading them, as I always enjoy reading your poems, but I d o not think I will keep any this time. I seem to have terribly full drawers of' poems awaiting publication. [Letter t o Donald Bain, 1 January 19471

It is not clear whether Lehmann wrote (or typed) all these letters. There are one o r two that exist both in his hand-writing and in typescript - suggesting possibly that he did not type them all. Many letters from contributors bear pencilled notes from Lehmann's assistant, Barbara Cooper, who seems, in the heyday of New Writing €3 Daylight and Penguin New Writing, to have been the first reader oi' submitted manuscripts. There are often pencilled responses to her remarks by Lehmann; and among them one encounters comments such as "I agree. Don't take - but nice letter." These notes are, indeed, often more candid than the somewhat stylized letters to which they give rise. One is left wondering whether they are for Lehmann's own guidance, o r whether they constitute instructions as to what sort of letter should be prepared. There are extensive collections of letters between Lehmann and some of the writers whom he most strongly encouraged in the 1940s - the years of Penguin New Writing and New Writing @ Daylight: Roy Fuller, Denton Welch, Laurie Lee, Peter Yates, William Sansom, Henry Reed, and Terrence Tiller. These prove to be the most interesting for the insight they give into Lehmann's work as editor. T h e correspondence with Roy Fuller provides a good example of'a continuing exchange with a young, successful writer. It begins with Fuller sending in a poem early in 1937, to which Lehmann suggests amendments. In the remaining years of the decade, Lehmann made a

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few requests for changes to poems submitted; but in the 1940s he took almost all the poems, for which he had space, in the form in which he received them. H e also took most of the stories that Fuller sent in, but rejected critical articles on George Eliot, Bulwer Lytton and George Meredith. By the 1950s most of the letters are about the arrangements for Fuller's doing pieces of writing for The London Magazine. Indeed, from 1940 on, Lehmann's letters are, in the main, purely businesslike, and offer few comments on the work he was seeing. Fuller's own letters are more rewarding: "My trouble is I don't write unless I am in front of a fire in an easy chair listening to music" (28 September 1941); o r "I feel more and more that 1 ought to develop in some way those simple things that I was writing in England9' (6 July 1942). As with a number of other writers, the correspondence in the mid-forties was inhibited by the fact that letters had to be confined to what could be contained in a n airgraph - the letter forms that were then microfilmed (a new process) and flown to England (in Fuller's case, from Africa). Sometimes a poem was too long for an airgraph, and had to be divided into two - a n unfortunate arrangement if the two airgraphs arrived at different times. T h e number of airgraphs allowed to each writer was limited, so that much of the correspondence concerning Fuller's work was carried on at secondhand by his wife Kate, who remained in England.' T h e correspondence with Denton Welch is brief enough to give almost complete, yet not so brief as to be of no interest. Indeed, Welch was one of the young writers whose work Lehmann valued and to whom he tried to give helpful advice. T h e first surviving letter is from Lehmann (26 May 1943): Dear Mr. Welch,

I read your sketch The Barn with considerable interest, and likecl it. It is, perhaps a little lacking in shape, and here and there I believe you could improve the writing if you went over it once more but I ~vould certainly like to try and publish it in a forthcoming number o f Penguin New Writittg or iVew Wrifirlg and Daylight. I am so glad your book has had such a success. I shall be very interested to hear what your future plans for writing are: Yours sincerely, Uohn Lehmann]

Welch replied o n May 27th: Dear Mr. Lehmann,

I am so glad you liked 'the Barn'. I would be very willing to improve it

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if I could, but, although it niay not look like it, I have alreacly rewritten it twice! However, if you'd really like me to do something more to it, I'll certairlly try. Do you think its lack of very perceptable [sic] shape is due to its being almost completely a plain statement of' fact? Whether this is a good thing to attempt or not, I tried very hard to keep only to this; and co~~sequently 1 may have been a little more inept in sotile passages than I \vould otherwise have been. [Welch then goes on to speak of the success of' his first book, with its introduction by Edith Sitwell.] Sincerely, Denton Welch

Welch followed this with an undated card: I'll read through r t ~ ycopy of'the 'Barn' and think about it, and then let you kno~vwhat conclusions I come t o , within a fortnight.

Lehmann responded on June 2nd: Thank you for your letter. I do not \\..ant you to do anything to The Bar11 unless you fkel convinced yourself that you can improve it. There is n o very great hurry so think it over during the next week or two, and let me kuow. I t is very iriteresting to hear that you are at \vork on a new book.

Welch returned "The Barn" on June 18th: I have been reatlirig this ancl pondering on it fi)r the last few days, and here is another copy with the alterations 1 have made. They are chiefly, as you will see, eliminations. I ciid not like one or two sentences and acljectives. 'Ihey did not express my true feeling. I thirik it is better without them; I hope you \\?ill too. 1 have also done a little to the punctuation. I t may be rather over stopped 1101\~, but 1 have no objection to changes being made here if'they are thought desirable. I hope that you will feel satisfied with the story as it now stands. I could, of course. have changed it a great deal more, but I resisted this temptation, as I knew that 1 ~\voulci make it into something quite different and perhaps worse if I persisted. There is one typist's rnistake which 1 am glad I saw. She had put "bad" where lily original M.S. has 'hard'.

T h e correspondence concerning "The Barn" concludes with a card from Welch on August 25th, asking when the story would appear, and a letter dated 28 February 1945,acknowledging a cheque for five guineas.

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It seems clear, from Lehmannis reference to the story as a "sketch" in his first letter, that he did not at first see what Welch was trying to d o in his avoidance of an imposed "plot", even thotrgh Lehmann undoubtedly appreciated the sensitivity of observatiot~ that was a mark of Welch's writing. As a new writer, Welch attempts to oblige with some modifications, but in fact resists Lehmann's suggestion that the story is "a little lacking in shape": h e points out that this is because the story is "almost a complete statement of fact" a n d he offers only minor adjustments. O n 28 September 1944, Welch, a little cautiously, submitted another story: Dear J o h n Lehmann,

I tvondet. if this will interest you at all. 1 hope so, hut perhaps you may not like it. Sincerel!. yours, Denton Welch

P.S. Perhaps I should change the title. Do you dislike it? L1.M'.

Lehmann, somewhat characteristically, was harder on the second story. O f course, a n editor does not want to publish too much by any o n e author. Dear Denton Welch,

10.10.44

T h a n k you very much f i ~ ryour new story. We read i t t\.ith great interest. T h e r e a r e some very goods things in it, which as usual shot\, that you have a natural feeling for tvords; but I don't think it is nearly as successf~tlas the other story I published. It somehot\. hasn't got its significance. You may think we are quite ~ v r o n gbut , I shoulcl leery rnuch prefer to wait until I call see some other story. Yours sincerely, Uohn Lehmann]

Shortly thereafter, Welch tried Lehmann with another story with no more success (29 October 1944):

- but

You probably won't like this any better t h a ~ the i last story 1 sent you, but I thought you tnight just like to see it. T h e r e is a similarity of theme, but it is better, I feel. I will send you something different later.

Lehmann replied, rather more openly than before (22 November 1944):

128 A.T. TOLLEY It was very nice of you to let m e see The Sourd, and I am damned sorry to have to say again that I don't really like it - that is, in comparison with many other things of yours which I have admired. 1 a m sending it back to you, but would like to emphasize that 1 always look forward t o reading your work, - anci also look forward o n e day to making your acy uaintance.

On 15 April 1945, Welch tried again with "The Judas Tree", with a brief covering note - "I thought you might perhaps like to see this new story." Lehmann evidently did (29 May 1945): I have been away o r I ~\.ouldhave written earlier. I like your new story Tlre Judas Tree and will be very glad to publish it i11 New W~z'tingand Duylight o r Perlguirr New Writitig. I hope to be able to send you the proofs in t h e not too distant future.

Welch responded (30 May 1945): I a m so glad you liked the 'Judas Tree' [sic] & think o f using it. I shall look forward to seeing it in 'New Writing'.

In 1946, Lehmann evidently asked Welch to draw some "tailpieces" for Penguin New Writing. Lehmann had, as an undergraduate. produced woodcut decorations for the Cambridge periodical, The Venture, and he introduced such incidental decoration in Penguin New Writing after the war. Welch agreed; and, shortly afterwards, on 1 March 1947, sent Lehmann some of his poems: 1 am ~\.onderingif you would like to use any o f these poems. If you did like any of them, I could d o a decorated page with the poem o r poems in the middle. I find it difficult to choose lily poems, so I have sent you, chiefly, the ones I have tvritten in bed lately - that will explain to you ally preoccupation there may be with hearts a n d dreams - but if you would rather see others, 1 shall certainly try to select another batch for you. ['The letter conclutles with a paragraph about the pen cIra\vings a n d t h e possibility of a visit from the painter, Keith Vaughan.]

Lehmann evidently did not particularly care for the poems (2 April 1947): I a m sorry t o 11ave kept you so long about your poems. I must frankly say that, attractive though many are, I do not find them nearly as effective as your stories and sketches. 'I'he o n e that appeals to me most is Whptr Dnrkrzess Co~tres,a n d I think that if you were to do decorations for it, it would make a very attractive page in New Writing.

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At the same time, I wonder whether you have anything in prose, which you could illustrate in the same way? [There is a final paragraph o n the difficulty of' making a visit.]

O n e cannot resist the feeling that Lehmann took one of the poems merely as a gesture, and that he was much better pleased by the prospect of a decorated page. One sees in this exchange of letters the combination of criticism, encouragement and tact that was characteristic of much of Lehmann's correspondence with younger writers. In the account of this exchange in his second volume of autobiography, I Am My Brother, Lehmann remarks that Welch "had a passion for exact accuracy about thoughts and feelings, and therefore he was always u p against the problem of accommodating the artistically feasible to this strict conscience about his own experience."' Even with hindsight, Lehmann seems not to have considered that the problem might not have presented itself to Welch in quite those terms, o r that Welch's art implies a different sense of the artistically feasible. Laurie Lee was one of Lehmann's major "discoveries": he was hardly known until Lehmann started to bring out his poems in the 1940s. A selection of his poetry appeared in the third volume of Poets of Tomorrow from the Hogarth Press in 1944; and that same year his first book, The Sun My Monument, was number 13 in Lehmann's "New Hogarth Library". In 1947, Lee's second book of poetry, The Bloom of Candles, was brought out by the John Lehmann publishing house. T h e first letter is from Lee on 3 October 1940 in response (it would seem) to having had something accepted for Folios of New Writing;and in that letter he indicated that he would welcome criticism of his work. In June 194 1, Lehmann evidently criticized Lee's prose piece, "Light in Castelleja" (which he took for Folios of New Writing) for having "a third of a page of cliche", and Lee was grateful for the comments. In October, Lehmann responded to a new set of poems: "I'm not sure . . . whether I like the new batch quite as well except for T H E ARMOURED WRITER. There seemed to be a little too much Dylan Thomas in them. . . ." (Lee, in reply, contended that he had read very little of Dylan Thomas.) T h e following September, Lehmann took the poem "Village of Winter Carols"; and his letter to Lee is a fine example of the helpful, perceptive criticism he could offer to writers whose work he valued: Thank you very much fbr your prompt answer to my letter. I have already chosen o n e o f the poems, and sent it off to press: it is the o n e

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heginning 'Village of' winter car-01s'. I like it very much. -1'Iie only criticism I havc is that in the last ttvo lines, r he ~ v o r d s'last' ;~ncl'final' a r e rat her redundant. Coilld~i'tyo11 change o n e of' them i l l proof? As 111- as the others go, I think they look as if'they are going to be very nice when the\'re finished. At present, I f'eel that the o n e that begins 'All rinsed with sun' is the most proniising; hut I cion't \.el-\ rnuch like the phrase ' j u t ~ g l eofetnergency', and I think that 'fatalities' in the same verse is rather a weak and vagiie word. I also feel that in the fourth verse, you might f'ind something else for 'anatomy of despair', - it is a little bit hackneyed as a phrase isn't it? I also like Port of' Faniagusta a lot, but feel that the last line is surprisingly \\.eak: I'm sure 'ennui' is \\*I-ong.But there a r e sorile i v o n d e r h i lines in it. Do ler r11e see them again when you have finished theni.

I n July 1943, in response to receiving three more poems ("The Wild Trees", "Milkmaid" a n d "Guest of Honour") Lehmann wrote: " . . . I should like to keep these. . . . My criticisms . . . a r e only that you still let your verse d r o p too easily into prose - as in some passages o f Guest of Honour and are apt to keep a rather narrow range of words and images. But I wouldn't bother to say even that if I didn't like them very much" (30 July 1943). T h e following month h e wrote to say that he had decided to use "h4ilkmaid" a n d "Guest of Honour" in Penguin New Writing number 18, a n d elaborated o n his criticism: "The line I a m a little uncertain about in Guest of Honour is the o n e about 'coincidence of disaster'. T h e idea is excellent, but it sounds to my e a r a little harsh, a n d it also seems to me to lack a n image of the sort which you use so well to fix your ideas poetically in the bulk of your work. While I a m o n the subject, there is a line which seems to m e still slightly dead wood in 'The Wild Trees* poem, - 'I have become removed'. What d o you say? Tell me if I an1 wrong" (20 August 1943). Lehmann was evidently very willing to take time over the work of writers whom he felt had a future. A writer of fiction whom Lehmann discovered and steadily published was William Sansom. T h e correspondence seems to have begun with Sansom sending his story "The Inspector" to Lehmann, though it is rather difficult to place the letters in order, as there a r e no dates o n Sansom's early letters, a n d no years on Lehmann's earlier ones. Lehmann was pleased with Sansom's work from the beginning, but often had suggestions for change - though he nearly always took something from any group o f work that Sansom submitted. Sansom seems to have accepted many of the suggestions and frequently to have felt that his stories were the better for them. Early o n Lehmann saw that there was a danger of monotony in Sansom's allegorical pieces. H e liked the Kafkaesque "The Maze", but concerning "The Water Junction" Lehmann wrote: "I may be quite

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wrong but I d o wish you would now try your hand at something else in a slightly different genre. I fear that this particular kind of allegory may soon become a little monotonous.. . . I wish you would d o something with characters" (20 July 1943). Lehmann published Sansom's first book, Fireman Flower, from the Hogarth Press in January 1944, but he reverted to the topic of allegory in a letter soon after: "Leonard [Woolf) has now read your two long stories . . . he is a little uncertain whether the core o f meaning under your allegory has the subtlety o r novelty which the (fascinating) elaboration of it led one to expect" (25 January 1945). T h e criticism was a telling one. O n e of Sansom's most celebrated stories was "How Claeys Died". When Lehmann saw it in October 1945, he asked Sansom to come round to discuss a few points. Sansom evidently took u p some of Lehmann's suggestions, because, in a P.S. to an undated letter returning the story, he wrote: "I have altered Claeys' way of thinking, shortened his thoughts. Rut retained much by putting it into the straight narrative, assuming his dictation [?I from a more formal point of view." Lehmann fbund it much improved (5 November 1945). Concerning the story "On Stony Ground", Lehmann wrote: I eti~joycdyour new story On S ~ o ~ Grortntl, rj its wit, its gaiety and its feeling. I think it's perhaps a little too long, anct 1 also think that in the first third or so i t could cio with a little simplification in the actual writing. That is not \-el-). irnportant; but I have ;i slightly more serious criticism, ivhich is that when the narrator eventually tlieets the 'gang' in Desircc's flat a great opportunity is missed; their conversation should have been created - not half-heal-teclly 'reported' [2 1 October 19481.

It is clear that Sansom responded to these suggestions, much to Lehmann's pleasure: "I think you have made the changes brilliantly - the conversation is even more delicious than I hoped it would be" (22 November 1948). Peter Yates was a "discovery" that Lehmann sensed he had missed. In 1942 Chatto and Windus brought out Yates's first book of poems, The Expanding Mirror, to some acclaim, and Lehmann evidently told the publishers that he would be interested in seeing some of Yates's work. On October 30th Yates sent five poems. Yates's side of the correspondence tended to be brief a n d breezy. Typical letters (generally undated) were "Dear John,/I enclose a couple of poems fbr you to read./With all best wishes,/Peter" (No date); o r "Something you might like - Peter" ( J u n e 18th [no year]). H e missed a party that Lehmann arranged for him with Stephen Spender and David Gascoyne, and asked Lehmann to lend him ten pounds (twice a working man's weekly wage in 1942). O f the first poems he received, Lehmann took three, but found

A.T. TOLLEY "The Impure Rose" "rather overwritten and to have a vagueness about it which the others conspicuously avoid" (10 November 1942). In contrast with the detailed criticisms he had offered of Laurie Lee's poems, his criticisms of poems Yates sent him in 1943 point with perceptive judgment to general shortcomings of Yates's poetry at that time and indeed of the whole of his second book, The Motionless Dancer (1943): "For a person of such talents as yourself, they seem to me too 'much of a muchness', and the feeling in them becomes rather dissipated when each poem is using imagery and rhythms so like every other'' (20 January 1943). Concerning a poem, "The Fall of Man", Lehmann wrote: "It seems to me to lack the consummating image and intensity that such a poem should have." Yet these criticisms were not a dismissal of Yates's poetry, which Lehmann went on publishing until Yates was prevented from writing by a near fatal accident in the 1950s. Lehmann's comment elicited very little response from Yates - partly, one supposes, because Yates had neither the time nor a taste for writing at length. However, it may be that Yates had a sense that he and Lehmann were rather far apart, so far as poetry was concerned. In reply to the criticisms of "The Fall o f Man", Yates for once came out of the woods: "It has always seemed strange that you should have liked some of my poems; I should have thought they revealed an attitude inimical to all you stood for. But perhaps we have both misunderstood each other?" (no date).3 Lehmann did not take work from many poets of the brilliant Oxford of the early 1940s. His only correspondence with Sidney Keyes is a brief letter returning a piece of prose. In September 1943 he asked John Heath-Stubbs for poems. H e accepted some that were sent; and he continued to publish poems and other work by Heath-Stubbs throughout his career as editor. However, in taking this first batch Lehmann wrote (10 September 1943): I particularly like the movement and music o f it. My criticism is that too many epithets and images are taken from the usual romantic stock. They are not new, nor sharply enough imagined. One result is that though the general eff'ect is pleasing and sensitive, the impact is not as strong as it should be. I should say that the future of'your work depends on keeping your imagination at a rather higher temperature.

We see here how Lehmann's initial criticisms could sometimes epitomize what later came to be regarded as a writer's weaker side. William Bell, whose poetry Heath-Stubbs edited in 1948, after Bell was killed mountaineering, twice had poems rejected by Lehmann: in September 1944 ("There is much in them that I like, and you are certainly on the right lines; and at the same time I don't feel you have

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quite brought it off yet"); and in December 1944 ("1 thought there were some very good things in the poem, but I don't feel it quite comes off all the same.") On both occasions Lehmann uses some of his favourite phrases of rejection - reserved, one senses, for work he wished neither to discourage nor actively encourage. David Wright sent poems in 1947, 1948 and 1949. All were politely rejected; and it is clear from Lehmann's pencilled notes that he did not like them. T h e two Oxford poets whom Lehmann published and encouraged were Norman Hampson and Alan Ross. Both wrote in a manner that derived from the poetry of Lehmann's own generation of the 1930s. Hampson, now largely forgotten, appeared to be one of the most promising poets at Oxford in 1940. In October 1941 he wrote to Lehmann asking for help in getting writers for the magazine Phoenix, which he was editing. Lehmann evidently asked to see some poetry; and he published a number of poems by Hampson during the war years - among them the notable "Assault Convoy" in Penguin New Writing number 18. In 1942 Hampson and Lehmann met; and they undoubtedly discussed Ham pson's poetry. This would account for the fact that the exchange of letters itself contains little of interest: "I read your new poem and liked it. May I keep it, and use it as soon as possible?" (31 August 1943) is typical. No doubt literary problems were discussed face to face with several other correspondents; and this would account for the absence of such discussions in some exchanges of letters. T h e association with Ross, which began with his sending poems to Lehmann, was to be a long one. Ross was later to succeed Lehmann as editor of The London Magazine. Right at the beginning Lehmann pointed to what he felt was a general weakness in Ross's poetry: "I find that in nearly all the poems the words become a forest which hides the meaning . . ." (8 April 1943). Shortly thereafter Ross and Lehmann met and evidently hit it off. Lehmann published poetry by Ross regularly throughout his life as editor, and published his first commercial collection, The Derelict Day, in 1947. Yet, as late as 1956, when Ross submitted two poems, "Basra Experiment" and "Kurdish Shepherds", for The London Magazine, Lehmann came back with a remark not unlike his original criticism: "I think they still suffer from the curious dominance of your visual imagination: an image, it seems to me, means so much to you, that you believe that if you just record it in words it makes the poem beautiful by itself. . ." (20 July 1956). Lehmann, who had been u p at Cambridge in the late twenties, found himself spending a good deal of time there in the early part of the war. He cultivated the young poets there, and in 1940 brought out

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the second of his series Poets of Tomorrow, subtitled Cambridge Poetry 1940. T h e contributors were John Baternan, Stephen Coates, Alex Comfort, Maurice James Craig, Mark Holloway, Nicholas Moore, George Scurfield, Gervase Stewart, E. V. Swart and Terrence Tiller. Tiller had already left Cambridge and was at King Faud University in Cairo, where he remained throughout the war. H e was a poet whom Lehmann published throughout his career as editor, bringing out the first three volumes of his poetry in the New Hogarth Library. There are many letters between Lehmann and Tiller, a large number of which are airgraphs devoted entirely to the text of poems. Perhaps the fact that the whole correspondence was conducted at a distance and under restricting circumstances accounts for the fact that there is almost no comment o n either side on what was submitted. T h e other contributors to Cambridge Poet? 1940 did pretty thinly with Lehmann. Maurice James Craig had one poem in Penguin New Writing and Donald Bain had two. Lehmann politely excused himself when Stephen Coates (whose second book Tambimuttu published) sent in poems in 1944; while, o n a letter accomparlying some poems by George Scurfield, Lehmann wrote in pencil: "They just aren't poetry." Nicholas Mooi-e and Alex Comfort, who had helped Lehmann get the anthology together, did little better, From Comfort Lehmann took a satirical piece "Saturday Night" for Folios of New Writing in 1941 and "Elegy Three" for Pertguin New Writing. In 1947 he wrote with some accuracy: "1 have been reading your last batch of poems with very great interest. There is a great deal in all of them that 1 like, as usual, but I hope you won't mind if I say quite frankly that no single one of them seems to me quite u p to your highest standard. There is to my mind something unresolved, o r unassimilated to art in them which just spoils the effect" (23 January 1947). T h e reference to "your highest standard" (carefully avoiding any commit~nentas to how high it might be) may have seemed odd, coming from one who rejected most of what was sent. Nicholas Moore had sent Lehmann poetry as early as 1939, announcing that he was "20 . . . son of a professor of philosophy at Cambridge" [G.E. Moore] and adding that he edited "a magazine called SEVEN" (3 August 1939). Lehmann replied that New Writing was in abeyance, but added: "I like your poems so much that I hope you will let me keep them a little longer" (19 August 1939). In July 1940 he asked Moore to help him to get in touch with Mark Holloway, George Scurfield and Gervase Stewart (who was killed in 1941). Moore got into hot water by sending poems to Lehmann and to other editors at the same time: "What a cool fellow you are", Lehmann

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retorted ( I January 194 1). Moore sent Lehmann more poetry in 194 1, but Lehmann did not take it, remarking with some justification: "the general impression is of something that is only just on the verge of becoming poetry" (1 I April 1941). By that time Moore had got involved with the Apocalypse movement, for which Lehmann had no time. Lehmann presumably decided that, except for Tiller, his Cambridge swans were mainly ducklings. However, in giving them all a chance in his Poets of Tomorrow series, he acted in a manner that exemplified one of his strengths as an editor. He was ready to give the encouragement of publication where he saw promise, but acted more guardedly when a writer came back with more. T h e reply could then very possibly be something like: "not u p to your previous high standard"; "read with very great interest but didn't like them as well as the last batch you sent me"; o r "does not come off' as well as the piece I published." Only a few like Fuller, Lee, Tiller and Sansorn made it to finding a welcome fbr everything they sent in. During the 1930s, under the influence of' the Marxist view that it was the historical destiny of the proletariat to be the instrument of change, left-wing literary editors dreamed of discovering a working class writer of genius. Lehmann, in his editorship of New Writitzg, corresponded with b u r writers of working-class origin: Albert Brown, a rather conventional poet who had been in the army and was in and out of' mental homes; George Taylor, a writer of' plays who had organized a prize-winning drama group; Robert Waller, a selfeducated poet who had had a poem in The Criterion and a selection of whose poems Lehmann included in the first volume of Poets of Tomorrow; and B.L. Coombes, a colliery worker. T h e correspondence with Waller and Taylor is of little interest; and that with Brown is more interesting as a social than as a literary document. However, in Coombes Lehmann had found a writer of talent and power whose work derived its strength from its working-class background. Coombes sent Lehmann some stories in June 1936, after seeing a copy of New Wnti~tg:"38 years old; son of a small farmer in lovely Herefordshire; but have been for over ten years in a large colliery as repairer and underground ambulance man . . . have been writing for three years. I specialise in short stories and plays of the working class because 1 believe that the only true drama is found in their sufferings and struggles" (14 October 1936). Lehmann seems early to have suggested that Coombes write an autobiography. Coombes at first spoke of 100,000 words; and in July 1937 asked for Lehmann's advice, explaining - rather pathetically by today's standards of

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leisure - that he had "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of the Holidays and the Saturday, Sunday and Monday follo\ving" and adding "I have never had so much free time before and I fancy it a great opportunity" (26 July 1937). Lehmann offered a detailed, painstaking discussion of the book (26 July 1937): Now some criticisms and suggestions about the book. First of all I think 100,000 words is quite long enough; in fact I should recommend you to keep it a little below that if possible. All your experiences as a writer, in mental hospitals, blind institutions, and as a musician could be kept for a future volume if this one is a success. Nor should I bother much about family life or the training centre and forestry; but I think the unemployment struggles and the fight for pit-head baths and any dramatic events of mining life you have not included could well go in. The best part of your book is undoubtedly the end, chapter 15 and onwards. There you adopt a tense and vivid style which grips the reader's attention at once, and doesn't allow it to wander as some of your more discursive passages earlier on in the book do. I think it is this discursiveness ~vhichis the chief danger at the moment. . . . I think you could improve it by cutting out quite ruthlessly all sentences and paragraphs which seem to you 011 second reading not to have any direct bearing on the theme of whatever chapter it may be.

T h e book, These Poor Hands, was published by Gollancz in June 1939 in a Left Book Club edition. It was dedicated to Lehmann. Coombes was then earning three pounds a week - not a bad wage for a working man in 1939. He asked Lehmann if he thought that he could earn fifty pounds a year from writing (14 May 1939); and during the ensuing year considered the possibility of giving u p mine work. However, he felt that "My trouble is that if I went clean out of mining I would lose the close contact I value as a writer . . . " (9 January 1941). H e was by then writing for the New Statesman, Reynolds News and Picture Post; and by 1943 he had notepaper with the printed head "B.L. CoombesIMiner - Authorlover 1,000,000 words published". His book, Those Clouded Hills, was'chosen to be issued as a n Ambassador Book, and A Miner's Day appeared as a Penguin Special in 1945. Lehmann took several pieces from Coombes for Folios of New Writing, New Writing & Daylight and Penguin New Writing, and got Coombes to contribute to an exchange between Virginia Woolf and writers of the 1930s generation concerning her article "The Leaning Tower" in Folios of New Writing in 194 1. During these years, Coombes was attempting to revise his first unpublished book, an autobiographical novel, The Singing Sycamore, which had been marred by the introduction of a purely fictional

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137

romantic plot. Lehmann again read the book and made some solicitously detailed suggestions for rewriting it: I don't think you have made a successful design of the book even with this second shot. The result is, that the general impression is rather blurred and the full impact of the really important things you have to say is lost by being dispersed and also mixed up with rather less significant diary notes. I do, however, believe that I could make a fairly successful surgical operation on the book, if you will let me. I t might take some time, and I might want you to re-write or enlarge certain passages, particularly the final stuff about the war, but meanwhile I would like to suggest that the first section, slightly re-designed, should be published in Folios of New Writing ( 19 May [ 194 1?I).

During the late 1930s, Lehmann took most of what Coombes sent, without comment. During the early 1940s he took some pieces, but returned others. In 1945, he sent stuff back, with the comment that it was "a little bit too much of a tract for me" (20 February 1945). In the following year he returned the two pieces Coombes submitted; and after that, there are only two more letters by Lehmann in the correspondence - one in 1950, and the other in 1960. Time had passed by the ideological concerns that had given a special interest to Coombes's writin . In reviewing a t o d y of correspondence directed on the one hand to unsolicited offers that may not be welcome, and on the other hand to submissions from writers whom one wishes to cultivate, allowance must be made for the reserve essential in either circumstance. There is no point in being frank with people whose work one does not intend to take; while there is every reason for tact concerning work one does not like by people whose writing one is usually pleased to publish. T h e set phrase is inevitably drawn on time and again "read with considerable interest . . . but at the same time I don't think you have quite brought it off'; "I do not feel they were quite suitable for New Writing"; "I'm not sure . . . whether I like the new batch quite as well. . . ." If indeed Lehmann himself wrote all the letters of rejection (as opposed to indicating to Barbara Cooper the sort of letter he would like) he became, as perhaps was inevitable, something of a prisoner of his phrases. Yet, for a man who was personally private and restrained, he did sometimes speak out rather plainly, often to indicate to writers features of their work that, over the years, have come to be recognized as characteristic shortcomings. It is usually to the writers whom he wished to encourage and to publish on a regular basis that he expressed - though still tactfully his sense of how they might improve their writing. This is true of the

138 A.T. TOLLEY

correspondence with Laurie Lee, William Sansom, Peter Yates, John Heath-Stubbs and B.L. Coombes. In the case of established authors, his letters are generally routine acceptance or carefully phrased expressions of regret. Concerning some writers - and particularly the bad ones - his true opinion is to be found only in the notes he wrote on the letters of submission - sometimes for himself, sometimes for his assistant. These include some of the best things to be found in the correspondence: "not really my cup of tea"; "Mr. Treece is like an obscene marriage between Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Dylan Thomas"; "B.C. [Barbara Cooper] Please read this. 0 dear. . . ." Lehmann seldom allows himself to be drawn into controversy in the correspondence. T h e one topic that seemed to get a warm response from him was criticism of the relationship of his upper-middle class literary associates to the Left-wing movements of the 1930s. Lehmann was disturbed by B.L. Coombes's answer to Virginia Woolf s criticism of the 1930s writers, "The Leaning Tower", in 1941, and wrote to him: As far as intellectuals are concerned, this question of poverty doesn't quite work out by class; 1 have known a large number of writers and artists of 'middle-class origin' who have been much poorer than the average worker. . . . They have chosen to remain so, because they felt that for creative work leisure, at whatever cost, was necessary. . . . It is, I feel, absurd to say that the only reason why workers-writers don't get recognition is because middle-class profit hunters won't let him [sic] into the charmed circle [17 November 194 I].

A more extensive interchange of this kind was with Henry Reed, whose poetry Lehmann published regularly. He had asked Reed to write an article which eventually became "The End of an Impulse", printed in New Writing and Daylight for Summer 1943. Reed criticized Auden and Spender, particularly for their more recent work. Lehmann's response was: My criticism can, I think, be summarised as follows. 1. That your general principles . . . are admirably sound, but . . . marred by extreme particular prejudices; which leads you to attack . . . Spender exclusively for faults shared by others, certainly by MacNeice, and certainly one or two of the oddly exclusive little band of younger poets you praise. 2. That there is a certain dry cantankerousness running all through the essay which I find very disappointing in a critic as young as yourself. . . . 3. That a great deal has changed since you began to plan the essay, and therefore you find . . . that the general thesis of decay you wanted to develop has been invalidated by, for instance, Day Lewis's latest work . . . [7 March 19431.

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Lehmann seldom argues in this way with a contributor; and a measure of how keenly he felt concerning the argument of the essay is that it remains one of the pieces of lasting interest from the period and hardly warranted such aggressive criticism. What Lehmann published as editor of course reflected his own tastes in literature. His preference was for writing that was controlled, humanist, muted in its rhetoric, grounded in personal experience, perceptive and sensitive. These were the qualities evinced by the work of the writers whom he encouraged, a n d especially by that of Roy Fuller, Laurie Lee, Henry Reed, Alan Ross, William Sansom and Denton Welch. Within his framework of expectation, Lehmann encouraged and advised with notable perspicacity. We are fortunate that his letters have survived to record that process of editorial nurture. They will remain valuable and illuminating literary documents, unusual in their extent. Notes All quotations from letters are from originals (or carbon copies) held in the Lehmann Archive at the Humanities Research Centre at the University o f Texas at Austin. 1. See also Roy Fuller's essay in this volume. 2. J. Lehmann, I Am M y Brother (London: Longmans, Green, 1960). 24 1. 3. See also Peter Yates's essay in this volume.

ALAN SMITH

John Lehmann Ltd. T h e battle-axe in the mailed fist - the early logo of the John Lehmann imprint - was brandished for the first time in October 1946. During the next six years Lehmann published well over two hundred books, and the imprint was showered with Book Society accolades, design awards and critical approbation. But the crusade that had started with fervour and zeal was to end in defeat and bitterness. Lehmann has provided a personal account of those years in the third volume of his autobiography, The Ample Proposition (1966).The present introduction is intended to be a brief contemporary assessment of his work as publisher and, in passing, to be a guide to the erstwhile collector. Already there are several "almost complete" collections in existence, and many individual items are sought by admirers of particular authors o r artists. No other mainstream publisher of that time has been accorded as much retrospective interest and admiration. Lehmann served his apprenticeship with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press; but by 1945 Lehmann had become impatient with Woolfs cautious policy - a policy conditioned partly by the paper shortage and the desire to keep the works of Virginia Woolf in print; and partly by his belief that there were commercial dangers in an expansionist policy. Lehmann broke with Woolf and set u p his own publishing house with modest financial backing from family and friends. Most of the established authors were attached or committed to other publishers. Lehmann had to seek, cajole and commission. He was able to take advantage of the contacts made during his earlier work as editor of New Writing and Penguin New Writing, and in a relatively short time he was able to put together an attractive list of titles. Getting a supply of paper was another matter entirely, but eventually he forged an agreement with Purnell - one of the largest printers in the country, and the parent of several outstanding publishing houses. Purnell wanted a financial stake in the enterprise, but Lehmann was determined to keep complete control of the business that bore his name.

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Those were the days of austerity, material shortages, production delays and "Economy Standards". For the most part Lehmann surmounted these problems, and his productions have a lasting visual appeal. Keith Vaughan (later Val Biro) was in charge of design and production, and he was encouraged to produce books to a high artistic standard. Many of the books had jackets commissioned from major artists and designers, and collectors may have to pay a stiff premium for a "fine in dj" copy of many of the titles. T h e irony is that the jacket needs to be removed to appreciate the splendid work that Vaughan and Biro did on the covers. Elaborate blocking and panelled spines in contrasting colours were not usually in the repertoire of commercial publishers in the late 1940s. In the early years, at least, Lehmann was able to commission designs, drawings and lithographs from artists such as Vaughan, John Minton, Edward Burra, Michael Ayrton, Lynton Lamb and others, and the illustrated books are much sought after. A collection of Lehmann books really does "furnish a room". T h e list was particularly strong in fiction by American and European authors. First English appearances by Saul Bellow and Paul Bowles were counterpointed by translations of Sartre, Kazantzakis and Malraux. But Lehmann was much less successful with the younger English novelists. In hindsight it could be argued that the English novel was in a bad way, and that Lehmann's sponsorship was exemplary but misplaced. Many of the established classics had gone out of print during the war, and Lehmann decided to publish new editions in a series called "The Chiltern Library". Such authors as Henry James, Mrs. Gaskell and Herman Melville were given a new lease on life; and, in itself, the series presents a stiff challenge to the collector - particularly if copies with the later "remainder" bindings are eschewed. With his other "series" Lehmann was less successful. "The Holiday Library" and "The Library of Art and Travel" were reprints of titles that had been in vogue in the 1930s. T h e choice of books reflected Lehmann's personal enthusiasms, but, in some respects he was out of touch with the tastes of the times and the books had only minority appeal. It was not long before Lehmann needed an injection of fresh capital, and again he approached Purnell. This time he had to relinquish his independence and John Lehmann Ltd. became a Purnell subsidiary. Lehmann himself reverted to the position of General Manager, and although he had complete responsibility for the literary policy and the day-to-day activities, he had ultimately to justify the financial performance to the Purnell directors.

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143

By the late 1940s Lehmann was producing thirty titles a year. Most were enthusiastically received by the literary establishment, and there were many superbly packaged books by noted authors. But the books did not sell in the quantities that could produce a reasonable return on investment. O n average only five of the thirty titles reached a second impression; and over the whole of Lehmann's output only ten titles reached a third impression. Lehmann struggled to find the life-saving "best seller", but the closest that he came to that was with the steady sales of Elizabeth David's cookery books. Some of the later publications were not u p to Lehmann's standard, and gave the impression of a desperate search for profit. "Succes d'estime" carried little weight with the Purnell chairman, and although some of the other directors were more sympathetic to Lehmann's aims and ideals, the chairman remained unimpressed, and in 1952 matters came to a head. Lehmann argued that some of the problems were not of his making. Print runs were set to maximise the efficiency of the printing company at the expense of the stock-holding costs of the publisher. As a last resort Lehmann tried to buy back his "name". But Purnell put an unrealistic price on the transaction and Lehmann had no option but to resign. His bitterness overflowed into public print, and his friends made the proper sympathetic responses. John Lehmann Ltd. was gradually absorbed into Macdonald (another Purnell publishing subsidiary). Although several more titles were issued under the Lehmann imprint, by 1955 the name ceased to exist, even on the Elizabeth David reprints. Perhaps Lehmann should have heeded Woolfs dictum - paraphrased "small is beautiful". Lehmann went for expansion; and for a period his imprint dazzled and impressed. But Lehmann's taste, background and circle of intimates were specialist and narrow in outlook, and his attempts to court the general public were not successful. By himself, he could not provide the breadth of vision necessary to meet the commercial and financial demands of a publishing operation of that size. It has to be said, albeit in retrospect, that failure - although glorious - was inevitable. Note for the Collector

After Lehmann resigned, the residual stocks of unbound sheets were put into shoddy cases, and the books were effectively remaindered. Thus there are two "issues" of some forty titles. Most of these disreputable productions are in the "Chiltern" and "Holiday" series,

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but there are others - in particular, some of the books produced for children. Perhaps this is of little moment, except to the fastidious collector. However, one of the most sought-after Lehmann productions is The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower, with jacket, pictorial boards and illustrations by John Minton. The second "issue" is a complete travesty. The margins are ruthlessly cropped, and the plain case even lacks a title on the spine. There may be other books, as yet unnoticed, that also suffered a like fate.

A List of Books Published by John Lehmann Ltd.

October

December

January

February

April

June

1 John Lehmann (ed) New Writing and Daylight (VII) Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 2 Roy Fuller Savage gold Illustrations and jacket design by Robert Medley 3 Frank Sargeson That summer Jacket design by John Minton 4 Saul Bellow Dangling man Jacket design by Robert Medley 5 John Lehmann (ed) Poems from New Writing Jacket decoration by John Minton

6 William Adlington (tr) The golden ass of Ajuleius Introduction by Louis MacNeice Jacket decoration by Robert Medley Series: Chiltern Library 7 Herman Melville Billy Budd Introduction by William Plomer Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 8 John Heath-Stubbs (tr) P o e m from Giacomo Leopardi Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 9 Jacques Lemarchand Genevieve Jacket design by Edward Bawden Series: Modern European Library 10 Harold Acton / Lee Hi-Hsieh (trs) Four cautionary tales Jacket design by Derek Hill 11 Ivan Bunin The well ofdays Jacket design by Humphrey Spender 12 Demetrios Capetanakis A Greek poet in England Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 13 Norman Marshall The other theatre Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 14 Henry James Roderick Hudson With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library

146 ALAN SMITH 15 Edith Sitwell The shadow of Cain 16 Eric Walter White Stravinsky 17 Mrs Gaskell Mary Barton July Introduction by Lettice Cooper Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library 18 John Sommerfield The survivors Jacket design by Molly Moss September 19 Henry James What Maisie knew With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 20 Sheridan le Fanu In a glass darkly Introduction by V.S. Pritchett Jacket decoration by Leonard Rosoman Series: Chiltern Library 2 1 Alan Ross The derelict day Jacket design by John Minton 22 Andre Chamson A mowntazn boyhood Jacket design by Keith Vaughan Series: Modern European Library 23 John Lehmann (ed) Shelley in Italy Jacket decoration by Keith Vaughan Series: Chiltern Library 24 Ernst Juenger On the marble cliffs October Jacket design by Leonard Rosoman Series: Modern European Library 25 P.H. Newby The spirit of Jem Illustrations and jacket design by Keith Vaughan 26 Odo Cross The snail that climbed the Eiffel Tower Illustrations and jacket design by John Minton 27 Laurie Lee The bloom of candles November 28 Mrs Gaskell The life of Charlotte Bronte Introduction by Margaret Lane Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library December 29 Conrad Aiken The kid Jacket design by Robert Medley

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147

30 Mrs Gaskell Cranford a d Cowin Phyllis Introduction by Elizabeth Jenkins Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library 3 1 Henry James The spoils of Poynton With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 32 John Lehmann (ed) French stories from New Writing Jacket design by Keith Vaughan January

February

March

April

33 William Morris On art and socialisnz Introduction by Holbrook Jackson Jacket decoration by Michael Middleton Series: Chiltern Library 34 John Lehmann (ed) Orpheus: 1 Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 35 Serge Lifar Carlotta Grisi Edition limited to 1,175 numbered copies Introduction by Doris L.angley Moore 36 A. A. Brill Psychoanalytic psychiatry 37 Edward Mandinian The fairy queen Jacket design by Michael Ayrton 38 Thomas de Quincey Recollections of the Lake Poets Introduction by Edward Sackville-West Jacket decorations by John Aldridge Series: Chiltern Library 39 Henry James The lesson of the master With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 40 Thomas Nashe The unfortunate traveller Illustrations and jacket decoration by Michael Ayrton 41 Henry James Ten short stories Introduction by Michael Swan Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library

148 ALANSMITH 42 Edgar Allan Poe The tell-tak heart Introduction by William Sansom Jacket decoration by Edward Burra Series: Chiltern Library

May

43 Laurie Lee The voyage of Magellan Illustrations and jacket design by Edward Burra 44 Herman Melville The confidence man Introduction by Roy Fuller Jacket decoration by Ronald Searle Series: Chiltern Library 45 Raymond Queneau A hard winter Jacket design by Keith Vaughan Series: Modern European Library 46 George Seferis The king of Asine Introduction by Rex Warner Jacket design by Keith Vaughan

June

47 Saul Bellow The victim Jacket design by Edward Bawden 48 Rosamond Lehmann A note in music Newly revised for this edition Series: Holiday Library 49 Rose Macaulay Going abroad Newly revised for this edition Series: Holiday Library 50 Julius Meier-Graefe Vincent Series: Holiday Library 5 1 Robert Westerby Wide boys never work Newly revised for this edition Series: Holiday Library 52 Mrs Gaskell Wives and daughters Introduction by Rosamond Lehmann Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library

September 53 John Buncle Jnr. (ed) Of wives and wiving 54 Pierre Herbart Halcyon Illustrations and jacket design by John Harrison 55 Sacheverell Sitwell and Francis Bam ford Edinburgh Series: Library of Art and Travel

J O H N LEHMANN LTD.

October

November

149

56 Roy Fuller With my little eye Illustrations by Alan Lindsay Jacket design by Ronald Searle 57 Merle Miller That winter Jacket design by Ronald Searle 58 William Congreve The comedies Introduction by Norman Marshall Jacket decoration not attributed Series: Chiltern Library 59 Benjamin Disraeli Coningsby Introduction by Walter Allen Jacket decoration by Charles Stewart Series: Chiltern Library 60 James Curtis They drive by night Series: Holiday Library 6 1 Susan Ertz Julidn Probed Series: Holiday Library 62 Anthony Powell From a view to a death Newly revised for this edition Series: Holiday Library 63 Edith Sitwell I live under a black sun Series: Holiday Library 64 J.F. Powers Prince of darkness 65 Humphrey Slater The conspirator Jacket design by C. W. Bacon 66 Nimrod The lfe of a sportsman Introduction by John Moore Jacket decoration by Robert Hunt Series: Chiltern Library 67 Lawrence Sterne Tristram Shandy Introduction by Peter Quennell Illustrations and jacket decoration by Cruikshank Series: Chiltern Library 68 Alan Ross and John Minton Time wm away Illustrations and jacket design by John Minton 69 William Chappell Studies in ballet Illustrations and jacket design by the author 70 Tennessee Williams The glass menagerie Jacket design by Biro

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December

7 1 Hamish Henderson Elegies for t h dead in Cyrenaica Also exists in a later issue in wrappers Jacket design by Biro

January

72 Robert Byron The station

February

March

April

Introduction by Christopher Sykes Series: Library of Art and Travel 73 Gavin Douglas Seamanship for passengers 74 Lord Byron Don Juan Introduction by Peter Quennell Jacket decoration by Keith Vaughan Series: Chiltern Library 75 Henry James The American With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 76 Ernest J. Simmons Leo Tolstoy 77 Percy Coates The world is wide enough Jacket design by Biro 78 C.R. Leslie The life of John Constable Introduction by Benedict Nicolson Jacket decoration by Michael Middleton Series: Chiltern Library 79 Jean-Paul Sartre The diary of Antoine Roquentin Jacket design by George George Series: Modern European Library 80 Aubrey d e Selincourt Sailing: a guide for everyman 81 Eleanor Lothrop Throw me a bone Jacket design by Evadne Rowan 82 Eric Berne The mind in action 83 Ivan Bunin Dark avenues Jacket design by Humphrey Spender Series: Modern European Library 84 A.W. Kinglake Eothen Introduction by P.H. Newby Jacket decoration by Robert Medley Series: Chiltern Library

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151

85 Gore Vidal The city and the pillar Jacket design by Biro 86 Henry James Washington Square Introduction by Valentine Dobree Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 87 C.H.B. Kitchen Death of my aunt Series: Holiday Library 88 Sacheverell Sitwell All summer in a day Series: Holiday Library 89 James Spenser Thefive mutineers Series: Holiday Library 90 John Lehmann (ed) Orphew: 2 Jacket design by John Minton June 9 1 Frances Dale The practical cook Jacket design by Biro 92 Tobias Smollett Travels through France and Italy Introduction by Osbert Sitwell Jacket decoration by Keith Vaughan Series: Chiltern Library 93 John Dos Passos The grand design Jacket design by Biro 94 Eric Harrison Riding September 95 James Boswell The conversations of Dr Johnson Introduction by Raymond Postgate Jacket decoration by Michael Middleton Series: Chiltern Library 96 Jocelyn Brooke The wonderful summer Illustrations and jacket design by Ley Kenyon 97 Edward Whymper Travelr amongst the Great Andes Introduction by F.S. Smythe Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library 98 Ernest Frost The dark peninsula Jacket design by John Minton 99 Theodore Roethke The lost son 100 Kay Smallshaw How to run your home withotd help 10 1 Paul Bowles The sheltering sky Jacket design by Fred Uhlman

152 ALAN SMITH 102 Nicolai Gogol Tales of good and evil

103

October

104

105 106 107 108

109

110 111 November 1 12 1 13

1 14 115

116

December 117

January

Introduction by David Magarshack Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library Tennessee Williams 27 wago'mfull of cotton Jacket design by Biro Ennio Flaiano Mariam Jacket design by Edward Bawden Series: Modern European Library P.H. Newby The loot runners Jacket design by Guy de Selincourt Frank Sargeson I saw in my dream Nicholas Blake The beast must die Series: Holiday Library Hugh Kingsmill Frank Harris Newly revised for this edition Series: Holiday Library Delmore Schwarz The world is a wedding Jacket design by Keith Vaughan May Sinclair Mary Olivier: a life Series: Holiday Library Anthony Thorne Delay in the sun Series: Holiday Library Jim Elgard Snow dog Jacket not seen Geoffrey Gorer Africa dances Revised, and with a new introduction by the author Series: Library of Art and Travel Nora Wydenbruck Rilke: man and poet Roy Fuller Epitaphs and occasions Jacket design by Biro Christopher Kininmonth Children of Thetic Tennessee Williams A streetcar named desire Jacket design by Biro

1 18 Susan Ertz Now East, now West

Series: Holiday Library 119 Harold Russell Victory in my hands

J O H N LEHMANN LTD.

February

120 Merle Miller The sure thing

March

12 1 Peter Viereck Consematism revisited 122 Denton Welch A voice through a cloud

153

Jacket design by Ronald Searle

Jacket decorations by the author 123 Julia Strachey Cheegul weather for the wedding

April

May

June

August

Series: Holiday Library 124 Fyodor Dostoevsky A gentle creature Introduction by David Magarshack Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 125 Ernest J. Simmons Dostoewsky 126 Sacheverell Sitwell The Cothick North Series: Library of Art and Travel 127 Lydia Avilov Chekhov in my life Illustrations and jacket design by Lynton Lamb 128 Arthur Rimbaud A season in hell Original text, with a new translation by Norman Cameron Illustrations and jacket design by Keith Vaughan 129 Robert Merle Weekend in Zuydcoote Jacket design by Bateson Mason Series: Modern European Library 130 John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright (eds) The forsaken garden Jacket decoration by Biro Series: Chiltern Library 13 1 Frances Dale Bon voyage Illustrations and jacket design by Biro 132 Elizabeth David A book of Mediterranean food Illustrations and jacket design by John Minton 133 John Swift Adventure in vision 134 Susan Yorke The widow Jacket design by Biro 135 Henry James The Princess Casamassima With the author's preface Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 136 E.M. Delafield Thank heaven fasting Series: Holiday Library

154

ALAN SMITH 137 Gore Vidal Dark green, bright red

Jacket design by Leslie Wood September 138 George Barker The dead seagull Jacket design by Humphrey Spender 139 Charles Dickens The mystery of Edwin Drood Introduction by Michael Innes With the original illustrations by Luke Fildes Series: Chiltern Library 140 Robert Byron The road to Oxkna Introduction by David Talbot- Rice Series: Library of Art and Travel 141 John Dos Passos U.S.A. Jacket design by Biro October 142 Paul Bowles A little stone Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 143 William Faulkner Pylon Series: Holiday Library 144 Roland Camberton Scamp Jacket design by John Minton 145 J. Gunston Profitable smallholdings 146 Raymond Queneau Piewot Jacket design by Marie Laure Series: Modern European Library 147 Rex Warner Views of Attica November 148 Ernest Frost The lighted cities Jacket design by John Minton 149 David Gascoyne The vagrant Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 150 Jean-Louis Curtis The forests of the night Jacket design by Biro Series: Modern European Library December 15 1 Tennessee Williams The Roman spring o f Mrs Stone Jacket design by Biro 1951 January

February

152 Marguerite Caetani (ed) The new Italian writers

Also exists in a "Special Edition" Jacket design not attributed 153 John Lehmann (ed) English stories from New Writing Jacket design by Keith Vaughan

JOHN LEHMANN LTD. 154 Peter Medd The long walk home

Jacket design by Bateson Mason 155 Edith Sitwell (ed) The American genius

Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 156 Ivan Bunin Memories and portraits March Jacket design by H.H. Hagedorn 157 Stendhal The green huntsman Jacket design by H.H. Hagedorn April 158 Aubrey d e Selincourt The schoolmasttr 159 Elizabeth Pollet A family romance Jacket design by Elizabeth Hepworth 160 Jean Dutourd A dog's head Jacket design by the author Series: Modern European Library 16 1 Eric Walter White The rzie of English opera Jacket design by Biro 162 Denton Welch A last sheaf Jacket decorations by the author 163 Rose Macaulay Orphan island Series: Holiday Library 164 Herman Melville Billy Budd and other stories Introduction by Rex Warner Jacket decoration by Ronald Searle Series: Chiltern Library 165 Norman Nicholson William Cowper 166 Paul ValCry Dance and the soul Translated by Dorothy Bussy Jacket decoration by Duncan Grant 167 Eric Harrison To own a dog June 168 Jeb Stuart The objector Jacket design by Leslie Wood 169 John Dos Passos The prospect before us August Jacket design by Biro 170 Christopher Kininmonth Rome aliue September 17 1 Julia Strachey The man on the pier Jacket design by Elizabeth Hepworth 172 Conrad Aiken Skylight one 173 Gerald Sykes The nice American Jacket design by John Minton

155

156 ALAN SMITH

174 Elizabeth David French country cooking Illustrations and jacket design by John Minton 175 Jacques Laurent Goribon'sfolly Jacket design by George George Series: Modern European Library 176 Balzac Lost illusions October Newly translated by Kathleen Raine Jacket design by Philippe Jullian 177 Kay Boyle P h p d by the nightingale Series: Holiday Library November 178 Roland Camberton Rain on the pavements Jacket design by John Minton 179 John Dos Passos Manhattan transfer Jacket design by Biro 180 Dunstan Thompson The phoenix in the desert 18 1 J .C. Hall The summer dance 182 Stendhal The tzlegraph Jacket design by H.H. Hagedorn 183 Ronald Mason The spirit above the d w t 184 H.L.V. Fletcher The water garden

January

February

185 John Lehmann (ed) Pleasures oj New Writing Jacket design by Keith Vaughan 186 Calder Willingham End as a man Jacket design by Roy Sanford 187 Henry James The Bostonians Introduction by Lionel Trilling Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 188 Henry James The Europeans Introduction by Ed ward Sackville-West Jacket decoration by Philippe Jullian Series: Chiltern Library 189 David Magarshack Chekhov the dramatist 190 Betty Martin Miracle at Camille Jacket design by Biro

JOHN LEHMANN LTD.

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191 Mrs Gaskell North and South Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen Jacket decoration by John Minton Series: Chiltern Library 192 A.B. Hopkins Elizabeth Gaskell 193 Cesare Pavese The moon and the bonfire Jacket design by John Minton Series: Modern European Library 194 Andrk Malraux The walntd trees of Altenburg April Jacket design by Biro Series: Modern European Library 195 Paul Bowles Let it come down Jacket design by John Minton 196 Edmund Wilson The triple thinkers Newly revised and enlarged edition 197 John Dos Passos The chosen country May Jacket design by Biro 198 Frances Dale and John Cradock Around Britain with June Bon Viveur Jacket design by Biro 199 Irma Rhode The Viennese cookery book Jacket design by Biro 200 Henry Channon The Ludwigs of Bavaria August Series: Library of Art and Travel 20 1 Basil Collier How to take photographs 202 Herman Melville White jacket Introduction by William Plomer Jacket decoration by Ronald Searle Series: Chiltern Library September 203 Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek Jacket design by Stein Series: Modern European Library 204 Stendhal To the happy few 205 Nora Wydenbruck Placidia's daughter Jacket design by Biro 206 Frances Dale The ambitious cook 207 Mario Soldati The commander comes to dine Jacket design by John Minton Series: Modern European Library

March

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ALANSMITH

208 Susan Yorke Naked to mine enemies Jacket design by Elizabeth Hepworth 209 Jean-Louis Curtis Lucifer's dream October Jacket design by Biro Series: Modern European Library 2 10 Tennessee Williams Summer and smoke Jacket design by Biro 2 11 Chandler Brossard Who waUl in darkness Jacket design by Robert Medley 2 12 Benjamin Constant Cecile Jacket design by Philippe Jullian November 2 13 Hallam Fordham John Gielgud 214 T.C. Worsley The fugitive art Jacket design by Biro February

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215 Robin Jenkins Happy for the child Jacket design by John Minton 2 16 Michel Mourre In spite of blasphemy Not contracted by Lehmann Jacket design by Biro 2 17 Nathan A. Scott Rehearsals of discomposure Not contracted by Lehmann 2 18 Edith Wharton The age of innocence Jacket decorations by Christopher Corn ford 2 19 Edith Wharton The house of mirth Jacket decorations by Christopher Cornford 220 Ernest Frost A short lease Jacket design by John Minton 22 1 Maria Lo Pinto The New York international cook book Not contracted by Lehmann Jacket design by Biro 222 Paul Morand The flagellant of Sevilie Jacket design by Biro

223 Edith Wharton The custom of the country Jacket decorations by Christopher Corn ford

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224 Ernest Juenger African diversions Not contracted by Lehmann Jacket design by Roy Sanford 225 Fransois Gorrec The seventh moon Not contracted by Lehmann Jacket not seen

Books Announced, but not Published by John Lehmann Ltd. Bernard Denvir Modem British painting Calder Willingham Geraldine Bradshaw Dorothy Hartley Food in England Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky The village $ Stepanchikoua C.V. Wedgwood (ed) The Baroque muse Edith Sitwell (ed) William Blake Charles Kingsley At last: A Christmas in the West Indies Nimrod The life of John Mytton

APPENDIX A

The New Hogarth Library No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

1 Selected Poems by William Plomer 2 Selected Poems by C. Day Lewis

3 Selected Poems by R.M. Rilke 4 Selected Poems by V. Sackville-West 5 Poems by Terence Tiller

6 Work in Hand by Robert Graves, Norman Cameron, Alan Hodge 7 Selected Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud 8 The Middle of a War by Roy Fuller 9 Forty Poems by John Lehmann 10 Selected Poems of Herman Melville 11 Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca 12 T h e Inward Animal by Terence Tiller 13 T h e Sun My Monument by Laurie Lee 14 A Lost Season by Roy Fuller 15 From the Shiffolds by R.C. Trevelyan 16 Unarm, Eros by Terence Tiller

The New Hogarth Library, under the editorship of John Lehmann, was published from 1940 to 1947.

APPENDIX B

A Bibliography of Books Written and Edited by John Lehmann (compiled by A. T . Tolley )

Poetry The Bud, Burial, Dawn, Grey Days, The Lover, The Mountain, Ruin, The Gargoyles, Turn Not, Hesperides. Privately printed, 10 broadsheets, 1928. A Garden Revisited and Other Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 193 1. The Noise of History. London: Hogarth Press, 1934. Forty Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1942. The Sphere of Glass and Other Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1944. The Age of the Dragon: Poem 1930-1951. London & New York: Longmans, Green, 195 1; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Collected Poems 1930-1 963. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963. Christ the Hunter. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965. Photograph. London: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 197 1. The Reader at Night and Other Poems. Toronto: Basilike, 1974. New and Selected Poems. London: Enitharmon, 1985.

Fiction Evil Was Abroad. London: Cresset, 1938. I n the Purely Pagan Sense. London: Blond and Briggs, 1976.

Other Prometheus and the Bolsheviks. London: Cresset, 1937; New York: Knopf, 1938. New Writing i n England. New York: Critics Group Press, 1939. Down River: A Danubian Study. London: Cresset, 1939. New Writing in Europe. Harmondsworth & New York: Allen LaneIPenguin, 1940. The Open Night. London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1952; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

162 APPENDIX B Edith Sitwell. London & New York: Longrnans, Green, 1952; revised edition, 1970. The Whispering Gallery. London & New York: Longmans, Green, 1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. The Secret Messages. Stamford, Conn. : Overbrook Press, 1958. I Am My Brother. London: Longmans, Green, 1960; New York: Reynal, 1960. Ancestors and Friends. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962. The Ample Proposition. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966. A Nest of Tigers: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell in Their Times. London: Macmillan, 1968; republished as A Nest of Tigers: The SitweUs in Their Times. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. In My Own Time: Memoirs of a Literaly Lijk. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969; revised and condensed version of The Whispering Gallety, I Am My Brother, and The Ample Proposition. Holborn: A n Historical Portrait of a London Borough. London: Macmillan, 1970. Lewis Carroll and the Spirit of Nonsense. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1974. Virginia Woolfand Her World. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975; New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Edward Lear and His World. New York: Scribners, 1977; London: Thames & Hudson, 1977. Thrown to the Woolfs: Leonard and Virginia Woolfand the Hogarth Press. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979. Rupert Brooke: His Life and Legend. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980; republished as The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981. The English Poets of the First World War. London: Thames & Hudson, 1981; New York: Thames & Hudson, 1982. Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987 (expected).

Books Edited by John Lehmann Fox, Ralph. A Writer in Arms. Edited by Lehmann, C. Day Lewis and T.A. Jackson. London: International, 1937. The Year's Poetry. Edited by Lehmann, Denys Kilham Roberts and Gerald Could. 3 vols. London Lane, 1934-36. P o m s for Spain. Edited by Lehmann and Stephen Spender. London: Hogarth Press, 1939.

BIBLIOGRAPHY I63

Poems from New Writing, 1936-1946. London: Lehmann, 1946. French Storiesfrom New Writing. London: Lehmann, 1947; republished as Modern French Stories. New York: New Directions, 1948. Demtrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England. London: Lehmann, 1947; republished as Shores of Darkness: Poems and Essays. New York: Devin- Adair, 1949. Shelley in Italy: An Anthology. London: Lehmann, 1947. English Storiesfrom New Writing. London: Lehmann, 195 1. Pleasures of New Writing. London: Lehmann, 1952. Modern French Stories. London: Faber, 1956. The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1 955. Edited by Lehmann and Cecil Day Lewis. London: Chatto and Windus, 1956. The Craft of Letters in England: A Sym#osium. London: Cresset Press, 1956; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Coming to London. London: Phoenix House, 1957. Italian Stories of Today. London: Faber, 1959. Sitwell, Edith. Selected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1965. Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell 1919-1 964. Edited by Lehmann and Derek Parker. London: Macmillan, 1970. The Penguin New Writing 1940-1950. Edited by Lehmann and Roy Fuller. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Periodicals Edited by John Lehmann New Writing, ( 1936- 1939). Folios of New Writing, ( 1 940- 194 1). Penguin New Writing, (1940-1950). Daylight, ( 1 94 1 ). New Writing and Daylight, ( 1942- 1946). Orpheus, ( 1 948- 1949). The London Magazine, ( 1954- 196 1).

Notes on Contributors Paul Davies

published John Lehmann's book of poems, The Reader at Night from his Basilike Press in Toronto in 1974.

Roy Fuller

is well known as poet, novelist and critic and is a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

Thorn Gunn

is known internationally for his poetry.

Robert He wison

is the author of a number of studies of British culture, among them Under Seige: Literary Life in London 1939-45.

J.K. Johnstone

is the author of The Bloombury Group. He teaches at the University of Saskatchewan.

ristopher Levenson

is well known as a poet both in England and Canada. He began his career at Cambridge in the 1950s in the company of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He teaches at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is editor of Arc.

Robert Martin

teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

D.E.S. Maxwell

is the author of Poets of the Thirtks and a number of other critical works. He teaches at York University in Toronto.

Charles Osborne

worked with John Lehmann on The London Magazine and was later with the Arts Council.

Jeremy Reed

is a well-known poet. His most celebrated book to date is By the Fisheries.

Alan Smith

is a noted bibliographer and book collector. He has made an exhaustive study of the publications of John Lehmann Ltd.

166 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

A.T. Tolley

is the author of The Poetry of the Thirties and The Poetry of the Forttes. He teaches at Carleton University in Ottawa.

George Woodcock

is the well-known author of many critical and historical studies. He was editor of Now in London in the 1940s.

Peter Yates

was one of the poets who appeared regularly in New Writing €3 Daylight, Penguin New Writing and The London Magazine between 1940 and 1960. An accident in the 1950s incapacitated him, but he returned to poetry in 1983 with the volume Petal and Thorn.