MANTEX - Key Persons
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that's her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying "I only marry geniuses". He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn't even go to his funeral.
He moves on to describe Alma Mahler (the composer's widow) and falls in love with her daughter Anna, a sculptor, through whom he meets her tutor Fritz Wotruba, who was considered one of the more avant-gard artists of the Vienna Sezession movement. He doesn't bother explaining what his wife Veza thought about his affairs with other women.
Andy Marino sprints through the early years of Fry's biography, but emphasises his scholarly background in classics at Harvard and his left-wing sympathies. Fry seemed destined for an academic career, but as a result of an undergraduate prank he ended up in journalism, working for various liberal political causes. Then at the age of only thirty-two he was recruited into a job that would change his life.
Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull' and generally moaned about everything - the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.
The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin's complete correspondence - and it is so selective that there's a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.
For instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself - she who played such a significant role in Larkin's erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection - Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest' but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic - written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.
The relationship between them was complex and emotional. Russell regarded Wittgenstein as his intellectual successor in the study of philosophy, but quickly tired of his self-obsessed rantings and his neurotic behaviour. As a recognised ‘genius' ( though still only twenty-four and an undergraduate student) Wittgenstein was immediately proposed as an Apostle - but he resigned the honour just as immediately, despite the support and continued sponsorship of the prestigious John Maynard Keynes.
Wittgenstein formed a close bond with fellow student David Pinsent - and given what we know of his later homosexuality it is difficult to escape the suggestion that a great deal of his lacerating self-criticism and worries about ‘sin' and ‘one great flaw' are attributable to repressed homo-eroticism. They took a holiday together in Norway which was full of emotional scenes, fallings-out, and reconciliations.
Meanwhile, Russell's work on the fundamentals of logic was abandoned because of Wittgenstein's criticisms. Russell handed over the baton to his student, his own confidence completely shattered. Wittgenstein developed the neurotic idea that he was shortly going to die, and that in order to complete his great work he must cut himself off from society and live alone like a hermit. This also included leaving Cambridge, so he went to live in a remote Norwegian village for a year, submerged himself in logic, put his relationship with Russell on a cooler footing, and immediately started paying court to G.E. Moore, who was a central figure at Cambridge following the success of his Principia Ethica in 1903.
However, when he discovered that his work on logic could not be submitted for his B.A. degree (because it entirely lacked a preface, structure, examples, and critical aparatus) he took out his anger on the unsuspecting Moore, and the two of them did not speak again for fifteen years. Following this disappointment he returned home to Vienna and gave large sums from his personal fortune to literary artists and painters whose work he did not know at all.
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf
Author David Boyd Haycock's approach is to present the biographical sketches like a relay race. With one artist profile under way, he passes on to the next, until they are all at work simultaneously. This makes the book eminently readable and it also reinforces the fact that the members of this group, though from very different backgrounds, were all developing their talents in the same artistic environment, and at the same time.
Dora Carrington (1893-1932) was an artist and bohemian who loved and was loved by both men and women. She was born Dora de Houghton Carrington in Hereford, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. As a somewhat wilful youngster, she found her family background quite stifling, adoring her father and loathing her mother. She attended Bedford High School, which emphasized sports, music, and drawing. The teachers encouraged her drawing and her parents paid for her to attend extra art classes in the afternoons. In 1910 she won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London and studied there with Henry Tonks.
The Slade at that time was a centre of what we would now call radical chic. She embraced the bohemian opportunity it offered - going to live in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and immediately becoming entangled in romantic liaisons with fellow painters Paul and John Nash, Christopher (‘Chips') Nevinson, and Mark Gertler, who had a very strong influence on this first phase of her life as an artist.
She also teamed up with fellow artists Dorothy Brett and Barbara Bagenal, and they started a new fashion at the school by cutting their hair into the shape of pudding-basins and wearing plain, deeply unfashionable clothes. They were called the ‘crop heads'. She did well at the Slade, winning several prizes and moving quickly through the courses. Despite her bohemianism however, her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade at that time.
She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry‘s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. Her personal life was dominated by the tempestuous relationship she conducted with Gertler and Nevinson which resulted in a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.
Gertler introduced her to the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, and thus into the Bloomsbury Group. In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, then joined Roger Fry's new artists' co-operative, the Omega Workshops, where was moderately successful in her decorative art work. It was while visiting Morrell at Garsington Manor in 1915 that Carrington made a connection that was to change the rest of her life.
She was introduced to the writer Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler at the time). Gertler felt that since Strachey was a confirmed homosexual, he could safely encourage their friendship. When Strachey made a sexual pass at her, she retaliated by going to his room at night with the intention of cutting off his long red beard. He awoke on her approach, and she immediately fell in love with him. It was a love that would last for the rest of her life and would even cause her to follow him from life into death.
Possessed of a remarkable personal fascination, she seemed to cast a spell on those around her. She figures in a number of novels, among them D.H. Lawrence‘s Women in Love (as Minette Darrington); Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God (as Betty Blythe); Rosamund Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets (as Anna Corey); and Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow (as Mary Bracegirdle). However, Carrington's behaviour was viewed rather critically by another regular visitor to Garsington - D.H.Lawrence:
"She was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She wanted passive maleness."
She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime as she painted only for her own pleasure, did not sign her works, and rarely exhibited them. She painted and made woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, which was founded by Leonard Woolf as a therapeutic exercise for his wife Virginia.
Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset - then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. But in 1917 Carrington ended her relationship with Gertler, and went to live with Strachey in a rented mill house.
Dora Carrington was a painter, an early feminist, and a figure who flits in and out of the lives of several members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which she was a significant member. This is the (so far) definitive biography of her troubled existence, which covers her day-to-day life in great detail - much of it based upon her voluminous correspondence. She grew up in a stiflingly conventional home in Bedford, loving her father and hating her mother.
With a talent for art, she was glad to get away from home at seventeen and spread her wings at the Slade, living in Gordon Square, right in the heart of Bloomsbury. Her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade.
She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry's famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. She cut her hair short in a style which became famous (‘crop head') and two of her fellow students, ‘Chips' Nevinson and Mark Gertler, promptly fell in love with her. This resulted in the first of her many love triangles, plus a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.
In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, joined Roger Fry's Omega Workshop, and was moderately successful in her decorative art work. Then in 1915 she spent a weekend amongst the Bloomsbury Group at Asheham which was to change her life. Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler) made a sexual pass at her, and she immediately fell in love with him.
Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset - then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. [Remember - this is Bloomsbury.] Eventually she set up home with Strachey at Tidmarch Mill House and found her first sustained period of happiness.
Dorothy Eugenie Brett was born November 10, 1883. She was the eldest daughter of the second Viscount Esher, Reginald Baliol Brett, who was the Liberal MP for Penryn and Falmouth. Her mother was Eleanor van de Weyer, the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the court of St. James and a close advisor to Queen Victoria. She was called ‘Doll' by her family, and like many upper class children of the Victorian era she was raised separately from her parents, receiving little formal education. She went to dancing classes with members of the royal family at Windsor Castle under the supervision of Queen Victoria, but had little contact with other children her own age, apart from her two elder bothers and younger sister sylvia who scandalised the family by becoming the Ranee of Sarawak.
This state of being secluded persisted until she was in her early twenties, and was exacerbated by a progressive deafness following an attack of appendicitis. Her attempts to make relationships were met with disapproval by her parents. She was packed off to their summer house in Scotland. But whilst she was there some of her drawings were seen by Sir Ian Hamilton, a friend of the family who persuaded her parents to send her to art school.
She was accepted into the Slade School on a provisional basis in the autumn of 1910, which turned out to be good timing and a propitious move. She was taught by Henry Tonks, and came into contact with a talented coterie of fellow students who like her were throwing off the shackles of the Victorian age and forging a new form of Bohemianism. She met and befriended Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer, and Isaac Rosenberg. It was a tradition at the school to refer to everyone by their surname, so she became ‘Brett' to everyone but her family, in the same way that Dora Carrington was addressed simply as ‘Carrington'.
Duncan Grant came from a privileged upper class family in Scotland where he spent childhood holidays with his cousins the Stracheys (including Lytton Strachey who later became his lover) amidst a family whose eccentric behaviour reads like the events of a PG Wodehouse story. He went to Rugby School with Rupert Brooke and then lived with Lytton Strachey at Lancaster Gate. Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group concentrates on his life and work amidst this illustrious collection of aesthetes.
Edith Wharton is a writer whose life and work spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - rather like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and even Thomas Hardy. Most of her published output was produced after 1900, yet she represents the mores and values of ‘old money' upper class America confronted by the economic and social challenges of the New Century. Not that she had to endure any of its hardships and uncertainties. She was born into a very rich family and when the dollar lost value after the end of the Civil War she spent much of her childhood living in France and Italy .She learned foreign languages, inherited a keen visual memory and an appreciation of sense of place from her father, whose private library of classics provided the materials of her education.
Most of her younger life was spent oscillating between lavish homes in New York and fashionable retreats on the Eastern seaboard in summer months. She was a precocious youngster, and had poetry and stories published whilst still in her teens. As a popular Young Thing of her very privileged set, she was quickly successful in acquiring a rich and handsome husband. However, Teddy Wharton was an outdoor pursuits type who did not share her intellectual aspirations. They set up home in New York, but when she came into a very generous inheritance she immediately bought a huge ‘summer house' at Land's End, Newport. She commissioned architect Ogden Codman to refurbish the house, then co-wrote with him what became the first of her many best-sellers - The Decoration of Houses.
She lived a rather independent life and had friendships with a number of men and women. However, when she met the London Times journalist W. Morton Fullerton in Paris, she felt for the first time in her life she had located a soul mate. They became lovers, even though he was bisexual and had a rather disreputable past. The affair lasted three years, after which she divorced her husband and began to travel regularly in Europe with her friend Henry James, who was an admirer of her writing. She published her first major novel The House of Mirth in 1905, and thereafter produced a healthy output of travel writing, novels, and short stories.
Edith Wharton's house - The Mount
She established an American expatriate salon in Paris and mixed with a cosmopolitan selection of artists and intellectuals, including Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Andre Gide, and Walter Sickert. When the first world War broke out she quickly threw herself into providing employment for working-class French women whose husbands had been conscripted. She toured the front lines of battle in her chauffeur driven limousine and wrote accounts supporting the French war effort - for which she was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1916.
After the war she established two houses and their gardens - one on the outskirts of Paris, and the other at Hyéres, in southern Provence. These properties were used as bases from which she continued to tour Europe and the Mediterranean. She became an expert on garden design (rather like Vita Sackville-West) although she never did any of the actual gardening herself. She continued to publish novels, novellas, and her memoirs right up to her death in 1937.
Eleanor Dwight's account of Wharton's life isn't a biography in the conventional sense of tracing her movements in chronological order. Instead, it takes main issues and places - New York, Italy, the motor car, and the war - as a framework on which to build the larger picture. Indeed, Wharton's affair with Fullerton is mentioned in three brief lines between several pages of rapture about her garden designs.
Dwight also takes the common liberty of paraphrasing and interpreting Wharton's fiction as a guide to understanding the conflicts in her life - a very dubious practice which also omits to point out how funny her writing can be. But on balance it makes for a very readable narrative, and as a lavishly illustrated study, the period photographs add both charm and depth to her study.
Eric Gill (1882-1930) was a sculptor, a typographist, a wood engraver, and an influential artist-craftsman in the early years of the twentieth century. He is probably best known for his typeface Gill Sans which became ubiquitous from the 1920s onwards, but he was also famous in his own day for his radical views and eccentric appearance.. He took a highly moralistic, quasi- religious attitude to his work in art, but he has become the subject of bemused attention in recent years because of revelations about bizarre practices in his sexual life.
Beach stayed out of these social squabbles and concentrated on the task in hand. She began a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who wished to supress Joyce's work. Copies of Ulysses were smuggled to America and England, and occasionally the customs officers would confiscate her parcels and destroy their contents. [My ‘old' copy of the Bodley Head edition has this shameful record of prurient vandalism reproduced as a preface.]
She befriended more Americans in the next wave of expatriates - writer Ernest Hemingway and composers George Antheil and Aaron Copeland. In 1926 she brought out a fourth edition of Ulysses, which was printed with copies of revisions and corrections to the original text. Meanwhile Joyce had begun work on his next book Finnegans Wake which was to take him seventeen years to complete.
The cross-cultural fertilizations that took place in this period are well illustrated in the figure of John Dos Passos. He was a visitor to Sylvia Beach's bookshop at the time he was writing Manhattan Transfer. He was naturally influenced by Ulysses, but he also met Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein with whom he discussed the techniques of collage, fast-cut editing, and montage, all of which he incorporated into his literary style.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Bloomsbury Group
Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, but someone who outlived all the other major figures. She knew Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and she married Ralph Partridge after his first wife's suicide. She also became a prolific diarist and a translator of novels from the original Spanish.
She was born Francis Marshall into a prosperous upper middle class family that already had its roots in Bloomsbury. Her father was a friend of Sir Leslie Stephen, and the family lived in a grand home at 28 Bedford Square, with the Asquiths and the literary critic Walter Raleigh as neighbours. There was also a second home in Hindhead, Surrey to which the family transferred in 1908.
At school she befriended Julia Strachey, through whose family she became acquainted with the Stephens - Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and their bothers. Both Julia and Frances transferred to the prestigious (and very expensive) Beadales public school by the start of the war in 1914.
Frances developed an interest in philosophy and actually met the author of her favourite textbook, Bertrand Russell. In the non-conformist ethos of the school, she became a pacifist, which given the jingoist fervour during the years of the First World War, was quite a radical attitude.
In 1918 she went to the all-female Newnham College Cambridge, where women students studied the same courses as men but could not be awarded degrees. [Cambridge was the last university in England to give women equal status in 1948.]
She studied English under I.A. Richards. Later she switched from English to philosophy, and eventually met Ludwig Wittgenstein who was teaching there at the time. She finished undergraduate studies with a 2:I and the same year her father died, leaving her a large inheritance, though she did not go to his funeral.
Her first job was as assistant in the bookshop run by David Garnett, who had become her brother-in-law by marrying her sister Ray (Rachel). The business was badly run, but was patronised by senior members of the Bloomsbury Group and its various connections, with all of whom Frances became friendly.
The closest of these connections were with Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, who lived in a curious menage a trois with Lytton Strachey in a country mill house in Tidmarsh (Berkshire). This was a trio which Carrington was in the dangerous process of turning into an even more complex quartet by having an affair with Ralph Partridge's best friend Gerald Brenan at the same time.
Given the flagrant bed-hopping of the people with whom she was mixing, Frances' behaviour seems more like that of a professional virgin. She kept three men dangling at once and even in her mid-twenties thought it would ruin her reputation if she was known to be alone in Paris at the same time as Ralph Partridge.
Eventually she went on a holiday alone with Partridge to Spain, relinquished her virginity, and on return expected him to show his commitment by setting up home with her. Instead, he behaved like the traditional cad who wants the pleasure of a mistress but pleads he cannot possibly leave his wife.
She kept her two other male admirers waiting whilst he negotiated with his housemates Lytton and Dora. After a lot of agonising they all finally reached a compromise. Frances and Ralph moved into James and Alix Strachey's empty flat in Gordon Square, from which Ralph was free to visit his wife at weekends.
This move put Frances right into the heart of Bloomsbury - geographically, socially, and intellectually. But a sour note was introduced into the mix when after a while Lytton announced that they wanted to see less of her.
Social and emotional tensions continued to smoulder between the four individuals, but matters were eventually resolved by a tragic if very symmetrical sequence of events. First there was sudden death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer. Following this was Carrington's reaction to it when she committed suicide. Ralph was suddenly left a widower with a substantial inheritance from his dead wife and ownership of the country house they had bought at Ham Spray (near Reading).
The following year Frances and Ralph had a low key marriage, and she had a miscarriage. These events were followed by the first of Ralph's many extra-marital affairs, which Frances dealt with as if she were suffering from a headache or a heavy cold.
Her wifely patience was subsequently rewarded with the birth of her son Burgo who was immediately put into a nursery in an annex to the house and raised by hired help. The parents went off for an extended holiday with Gerald Brenan to Malaga.
In the period that followed, the Spanish Civil War and Hitler's incursions in middle-Europe put a strain on the political beliefs and the internationalism of the Bloomsbury Group - but Frances remained adamantly pacifist. For her, nothing could be worse than war.
During the war itself she seemed to suffer nothing worse than a lack of domestic help. Staff left to join the war effort, and she couldn't cook. Fortunately, there were still oysters and plovers at the Ivy restaurant on excursions into town.
In the after-war years there were problems with her son Burgo who had persistent fears that his parents were dead (which was psychologically understandable). There was a failed project to write an encyclopedia of English botany. Both Frances and Ralph lived on inherited wealth, and neither of them had proper jobs - but Ralph eventually wrote a history of Broadmoor Prison, whilst Frances took up the task of indexing the English edition of Freud's complete works, which was published by the Hogarth Press.
In 1950 Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack. Frances subsequently, but with great emotional difficulty, sold the house at Ham Spray and moved to a small flat in Belgravia. Her young son Burgo married the even younger daughter of David Garnett. This created a third generational link in the complex matrix of Bloomsbury inter-connections, but less than a year later the young man was dead, killed by an aortic aneurysm.
Frances dealt with these personal losses by a combination of writing and travel. She worked as a translator (including the novels of Alejo Carpentier) and visited Gerald Brenan in Spain on a fairly regular basis. She also spent a lot of time looking after Julia Strachey, who was falling victim to dementia.
In the years that followed, as one of its oldest surviving members, she became an unofficial but certainly unelected guardian of Bloomsbury reputations - most noticeably that of her former husband Ralph. She wanted to protect all her old friends from misrepresentation and vulgarisation. She had battles with the BBC and Ken Russell, but even more with Gerald Brenan, who was in the process of writing his autobiography.
In her eighties she entered on an amazingly productive phase - three books of memoirs in as many years, including the best-selling Love in Bloomsbury, In fact the success of this venture led to a spate of publications over the next decade.
She lived to be over a hundred years old, outliving her exact contemporary the Queen Mother, but as she characteristically insisted, ‘living alone, rather than being waited on hand and foot'.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, at a time when it was the centre of Jewish, German-speaking Bohemia, in the heart of Czechoslovakia and a part of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire. His father ran a fancy goods shop, and bullied his children into improving their manners whilst remaining something of a peasant-like boor himself. The family moved restlessly from one flat to another in search of ever higher social status - but never out of the city. It was a habit that Kafka continued in his own adult life - though for different reasons.
Kafka was a timid, under confident child, and if you believe his own accounts from letters and diaries, the principal source of this meekness (and most of his neuroses) was the exaggerated awe in which he held his father. At school he did reasonably well, and in the specially strict gymnasium even better. He studied languages - Latin and Greek - as well as German literature and the elements of grammar. He took his Barmitzvah, though he regarded himself as an atheist, and at that time was fanatically opposed to Zionism and Judaism - though he became interested in both movements later in his life.
For someone so shy and retiring he surprisingly took an interest in the theatre and reading out loud in class. There were also annual theatricals at home to celebrate his mother's birthday, for which he wrote the scripts. At university his options were limited - because the only professions open to Jews at that time were medicine and law. He opted for law, which had the distinct advantage of pleasing his father. He attended supplementary classes on philosophy and art history.
Around this time he made the first of what were to be many attempts to leave home and live independently. He also struck up what was to become a lifelong friendship with fellow student Max Brod, who was a year younger and eventually became Kafka's literary executor. He started writing around this time, but kept the fact secret from everybody. He also had his first sexual experiences, which he described very characteristically as "vileness and filthiness".
As his studies drew towards their conclusion he was struck down with one of the many periods of illness he suffered throughout the rest of his life, and he spent some time in a sanatorium. Nevertheless he passed the first of his examinations and started working in a lawyers' office, drafting legal documents. He also passed the second part of his examinations and was awarded his doctorate.
Yet as though inspired by these developments he also started work on his first novel Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared, later renamed as Amerika by Max Brod) which like most of his other literary projects was left unfinished. At this period he was also to write what became his most famous story (really a novella) Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis).
In the autumn of 1913 Kafka went on an extended holiday to Venice and Lake Garda, from where he wrote to Felice that their relationship must end (whilst he was having a brief affair with a young girl he had just met). Felice sent her friend Greta Bloch to act as intermediary in the discussions. Kafka then began writing to Greta just as frequently as to Felice, and when an agreement was finally engineered, he suggested that Greta should come to live with them when he and Felice were married. This led, not surprisingly, to an affair with Greta, and shortly afterwards she bore a child (that died) and it is possible that Kafka was the father - but the evidence is rather ambiguous.
In preparation for the proposed marriage, Kafka was summoned to a ‘tribunal' of Felice and her friends in Berlin where the details of their relationship were examined in what he described as a ‘law court'. where he was also expected to account for himself. The net result, again not surprisingly, was that the engagement was called off.
Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka's masterpieces - a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It's the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka's manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel - complete with podcast.
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod's papers released by Israeli library.
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.
Vita Sackville-West is best known these days as the woman who had an affair with Virginia Woolf, and maybe also as the woman who ‘eloped' with Violet Trefusis. She's also famous for being one half of a doubly bisexual relationship with her husband Harold Nicolson - recorded by their son in Portrait of a Marriage. What's not so well known is the fact that she was also a best-selling author, and that in the post-1940 era she made herself a doyenne of writing on the English garden.
The first part of Victoria Glendenning's account of Vita's life is dominated by her equally unconventional parents, both of whom maintained barely-concealed love affairs. Sackville-West pére moved his lover and her own husband into the family home at Knowle. Mrs Sackville-West seemed to have kept her 25 stone admirer Sir John Scott more at arm's length, but sufficiently close that she inherited from him a large capital sum, houses, and a Paris flat full of antique furniture.
Vita's youth was a mixture of foreign travel (and languages) romantic crushes on the Renaissance, and life at the top of the social ladder. Many readers will be surprised by one thing for sure - her enormous application and productivity where writing was concerned. Youthful novels poured from her, plus poems and plays, some written in languages other than English.
Her Sapphism began early, with both Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel, though she finally did the expected thing and married Harold Nicolson. They quickly produced two children, who were housed in a separate building at their first home in Long Barn.
When Harold Nicolson announced that he had veneral disease, she switched her attentions back to Violet Keppel. Vita dressed in men's clothing as ‘Julian' and they booked into hotels together as man and wife. Wot larks!
But when Violet married Denys Trefusis, things started to go wrong. For a start, Vita was jealous, and forbad Violet to have sex with her new husband. She even intercepted Violet on her honeymoon, took her to a hotel, and had sex with her to make the point. The two women eventually eloped to France and were only brought back home when their husbands flew out in a small plane to stop them, and the affair then gradually fizzled out.
Only to be replaced by one with the architect Geoffrey Scott. She shared these problems with her mother, who was meanwhile having an affair with another archtiect, Edwin Lutyens. There were also trips to Persia to visit husband Harold who was posted there - at the same time as he was also visited by his lover Raymond Mortimer.
Her well-known love affair with Virginia Woolf appears to be a sincere enthusiasm on both their parts, but when Virginia shied away from making their relationship a full-blown adventure (a la Violet Trefusis) Vita turned her attentions to Mary Hutchinson, the wife of South African poet Roy Campbell. Meanwhile, she won the Hawthornden prize for her long poem The Land.
She followed that up with best-selling novels The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, bought a near-ruined castle in Kent, and set up her husband with his own flat in London.
There were many other lovers, but then gradually, following the death of her mother in 1936, she started to become something of a recluse. She poured her creative energy into the development of Sissinghurst and its now-famous gardens.
She and Harold continued to live separately, take holidays separately, and wrote to each other every day saying how much they missed each other. Sissinghurst survived the war, and she continued writing in a number of genres, but gradually, as she got older, she focussed all her attention on horticulture and became quite well known as the gardening correspondent of The Observer.
However, it would be a mistake to imagine that her physically demanding nature was curbed in any way. As Gelendenning observes, a propos one of her later passions:
Vita was never without love or the physical expression of love. Her great adventure was never over.
Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.
He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination - an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra'.
South from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.
However, this somewhat unusual domestic arrangement seemed to work for all three parties. Carrington divided her time between looking after Strachey and her own art work. She painted on almost any medium she could find including glass, tiles, pub signs, and the walls of friends' homes. Meanwhile, she had an affair with Gerald Brenan, who was an old army friend of Ralph Partridge.
Job Titles:
- Life and Work
- Writer
- Writers
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer and art-collector who went to live in Paris and became a celebrated figure in the European modernist movement between 1910 and 1930. She was personally acquainted with artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and at her soirees she entertained writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She wrote memoirs and novels, developed an avant-garde prose style, and had a famously lesbian relationship with her fellow expatriate Alice B. Toklas. She lived through two world wars, and had what is now seen as a very dubious attitude to the political events of her era.
Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburg. Her parents were upper middle class Jews with holdings in real estate. When she was three the family moved to live in Vienna, then to Paris, before returning to America. They settled in Oakland, San Francisco. She was a voracious reader as a young girl. Both parents died whilst she was a teenager, and she moved to live with her brothers and sisters in Baltimore.
She attended Radcliffe College, which was then part of Harvard University. There she studied philosophy and psychology under William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. She conducted experiments in ‘automatic writing' - which was later (incorrectly) compared to ‘stream of consciousness' writing.
William James encouraged her to enrol for medical studies so that she could develop her interest in psychology. At Johns Hopkins Medical School two things happened: she quickly became bored with medicine, and she had a sexual awakening with fellow student Mary Bookstaver. The affair was later fictionalised in her first novel Q.E.D.
In 1903 she moved with her elder brother Leo to live in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank in an apartment with a studio attached. Leo had an introduction to the art dealer Vollard, through whom they encountered Cezanne, whose works they bought. This led to the acquisition of paintings by Gaugin and. Matisse, who became a personal friend.
Gertrude Stein was a celebrated figure in her own circle of fashionable wealthy American expatriates, but it is not altogether surprising that her literary output now remains largely forgotten.
Gertrude Stein famously gave an account of her own life by writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). This is largely an account of their years together in Paris - but told as if from the point of view of her companion, amanuensis, and lover, Alice Toklas.
It is a curious book in that it relates the events of their partnership in a faux-naif manner, as if a child were trying to string together fragments of experience, and failing completely to give them chronological order or any sort of rational coherence.
It is difficult to say if Stein adopted this childish and clumsy style as an oblique attempt to humiliate Alice Toklas, or if she was merely exercising the flat and inelegant manner she made famous and which was later said to have influenced Ernest Hemingway.
Sentences not only words but sentences and always sentences have been Gertrude Stein's life long passion. And so she had then and indeed it lasted pretty well to the war, which broke down so many habits, she had then the habit of beginning her work at eleven o'clock at night and working until the dawn. She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was one of the most dynamic and innovative sculptors of the modernist period. He was French, but produced his most important works in England in an incredibly short space of time - between 1911 and 1915.
He was born Henri Gaudier near Orleans in France - a talented schoolboy who won scholarships that took him to London and University College, Bristol. He was supposed to be engaged with business studies, but spent his time sketching antiques in the Bristol Museum. After this he travelled to Nuremberg, Munich, then Paris, where he met Sophie Brzeska in a library.
This was a decisive turning point in his life. She was Polish, had literary aspirations, and was twice his age. They formed an immediate bond that was to last until the end of his tragically short life - and hers, since she died soon afterwards. Yet it was not a conventional romantic and sexual attachment - more of a mother and son relationship..
Henry James came from a distinguished American family. His grandfather had been a poor Irish immigrant who as an energetic businessman made himself into one of the first American millionaires. James's father wanted nothing to do with commerce, and became a religious philosopher instead (whilst living on the family's money). James junior was born in New York in 1843 near what is now Washington Square. The family travelled to England and Germany, setting up a pattern of transatlantic allegiances that James was to maintain throughout his life.
He was educated in New York and in what was to become the state capital, Albany. Friends of the James family included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and William Makepeace Thackery. The young James read Dickens and was delighted by further visits to London and Paris. He was educated by private tutors, but his somewhat erratic father suddenly decided that American schools were better than European, so the family moved back home and settled in Newport, Rhode Island (where a number of James's early short stories are set).
A year later James pere decided the exact opposite, and the family went to live in Geneva, where James attended a local technical school. But when he and his elder brother William decided they wanted to study painting they all returned to Rhode Island. By that time the American Civil War had broken out, but neither of the two elder James brothers were to see service. William went back to Europe to study medicine, and Henry after a brief spell at Harvard studying law, gave it up and began to publish his first short stories.
In 1869 he made his first solitary trip to Europe (paid for by his family) and visited London, Florence, and Rome. While he was there he met a number of contemporary artists - William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Ruskin. He was also introduced to George Eliot whom he described as a ‘horse-faced bluestocking'. On outward and return journeys, he took the waters at Malvern for his ailment of persistent constipation.
He returned home, but was so enamoured with Europe that he immediately arranged to go back again as escort to his sister and her aunt on what for him became an extended two year visit. He repaid his expenses on this trip by writing travel essays for the Nation. These were later published as Transatlantic Sketches (1875).
There was an experimental period of living in Europe with his brother William, but the elder James decided to commit himself to America, whilst Henry made what he called his ‘Great Decision' and stayed there, taking up residence on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. His novel Roderick Hudson (1875) was a big success, and through it he met Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant.
Despite these attractions and being lionised by the literary establishment in general, James felt he would always be an outsider in Paris, so in 1876 he moved to live in London, which eventually became his permanently adopted country of residence.
Settled there, but with annual excursions to France and Italy, he began to produce the string of successful works of his early and middle period - The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), and Washington Square (1880). He also wrote his first undisputed masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). His literary output (stories, tales, novels, criticism, and travel books) was so prodigious around this time that Macmillan in England brought out a fourteen volume collection of his works.
John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. All of these cultural influences have been reflected in his later work.
Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. There he threw himself into the cultural experimentalism which was then in vogue. This included the upsurge of jazz and blues music, and the American literary cult of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets, William Burroughs, and of course drugs of all kinds.
He stuck with the experimental music and the dafter tendencies of modernism for quite some time. I was quite surprised how respectful he is to John Cage, who always strikes me as completely bogus. But he's very generous in his appreciation of his fellow composers and contemporaries. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Ingram Marshall are all given warm encomiums. There are also, en passant positive sketches of artists such as Dawn Upshaw, Kent Ngano, Peter Sellers, and Conlan Nancarrow.
John Lehmann (full name Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) was born in Buckinghamshire in 1907 into a wealthy family. His father was Rudolph Chambers Lehmann, an English writer and Liberal Party politician. His elder sisters were the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the actress Beatrix Lehmann.
John Lehmann was educated at the prestigious public school Eaton, and went on to study modern languages at Trinity College Cambridge, where he began writing poetry and forming gay relationships. Whilst at university he became a close friend of Julian Bell (Vanessa Bell's son) which provided him with an introduction to the Bloomsbury Group.
His first collection of poetry A Garden Revisited (1931) was published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, with which he formed a close attachment. He brought his contacts with the new young generation of poets to the press. The result was the groundbreaking collection New Signatures (1932) which included work by William Empson, Julian Bell and Lehmann himself from Cambridge, plus W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis from Oxford.
He worked as an assistant-cum-manager at the Press (described in his amusing memoir Thrown to the Woolfs) until differences of opinion with Leonard over the policy of publishing young writers caused a temporary rift between them.
John Lehmann left Britain and worked as a journalist, travelled to the U.S.S.R. (as it was called at that time) and wrote poetry in Vienna from 1932 to 1936. He then returned to Britain to launch the journal New Writing. This published the work of his contemporaries Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, V.S. Pritchett, and Stephen Spender.
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a celebrated African-American dancer and entertainer. She became famous in the Parisian Follies Bergeres, made friends with artists and intellectuals, and eventually renounced the US to become a French citizen. Her reputation was based on the fact that in addition to her being a talented singer and dancer, she also had an effervescent personality and she performed in states of near nudity on stage. However, she was also active in the Civil Rights Movement, refused to perform to segregated audiences, participated in the French Resistance, and was awarded the Legion d'honneur by Charles de Gaul after the war.
Job Titles:
- Bohemian Writer
- New Zealand Writer
When Katherine Mansfield moved to live in France with Ida Baker, Murry began a dalliance with Princess Bibesco - the daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Mansfield hurried back to London in order to squash the liaison.
In 1922 Murry published what was to be his most popular and influential work, The Problem of Style. He also began an affair with Mansfield's house-mate Dorothy Brett which resulted in a pregnancy and a miscarriage.
Following Mansfield's death in 1924, Murry edited her stories, her journals, and her diaries. This was done with the intention of promoting her literary reputation, the success of which generated a considerable income for Murry in royalties. But in the time that has passed since these publications he has been criticised for watering down her more radical views.
Following the death of Lawrence in 1930, Murry began a brief affair with his widow Frieda. He married for the third time in 1931 and also began a brief phase as a Marxist. He then moved from a socialist to a radical Christian, pacifist, and communalist ideology.
In 1942 as a conscientious objector he bought a farm in Thelnethan in Sussex and set up a commune for fellow objectors to be run on co-operative lines. The experiment had mixed results, and it ended up with Murry managing it as a conventional farm on commercial lines.
He maintained his pacifist views consistently through the Second World War and became the editor of Peace News from 1940 to 1946. He also published biographical studies of Keats, John Clare, and Jonathan Swift.
Later he renounced pacifism and advocated a preventative war against the Soviet Union. He became a Conservative voter, an anti-feminist, and died in 1957 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.
Katherine Mansfield has the rare distinction of being regarded as a major writer, even though she only ever published short stories. In fact her entire oeuvre is available in just one volume. There are two other biographies by Jeffrey Myers and Anthony Alpers, but Claire Tomalin's is a fairly straightforward and very readable account of her life. She portrays her talent sympathetically, but does not disguise her weaknesses and her occasional unkindnesses, though she does seem either squeamish or even purblind where sexual matters are concerned. However, she is very well informed and spares us none of the medical details of gonnorhoea and tuberculosis which helped to bring KM's life to a premature end.
Mansfield's talent blossomed as soon as she was sent from her privileged but stiflingly conformist upbringing in New Zealand to be educated at Queen's College in Harley Street. These important years - from fourteen to seventeen - confirmed her taste for artistic matters, and it was on return from there to New Zealand that she had her first success as a writer.
But in 1908 she was back in London, ready to throw herself into full scale Bohemianism. She quickly became pregnant, then tricked another man into marrying her without telling him about her condition, and left him the same night. Within the next few months she suffered a miscarriage and acquired a new Polish lover, from whom she contracted gonnorhoea.
She recovered in the company of her life-long partner Ida Baker, whom she regarded as her ‘wife', then since she was short of money she tricked her way back into free lodging with her lawful husband and began publishing with A. R. Orage's New Age, which was later to become the New Statesman.
More literary success followed. She published her first collection of sketches In a German Pension, then was introduced to John Middleton Murry, who became her lover then her second husband.
In structure, the book is almost one chapter per year from 1907 onwards of Mansfield's tragically short life. Tomalin does not disguise the fact that she thinks much of the earlier work is self-indulgent, sentimental, and quite weak - which it is. But there would be greatness to come.
Whilst he was building a city for a government, he constructed for himself a holiday home in the south of France. It was a simple and box-shaped structure that on the outside looked like a log cabin. But the interior was lined with coloured plywood, which created a modernist statement. The single room construction was even made contiguous with the local restaurant whose owner he had befriended. This provided Yvonne with company during his many absences.
His national masterpiece, L'Unite d'Habitation was finished and opened in 1952. It housed three hundred families, had built-in shops and recreational areas, and a roof garden with nursery and swimming pool. A Second version was commissioned for Nantes, and he began work on what was to become one of his signature buildings - the chapel at Ronchamps.
This was a project designed to replace a simple church that had been destroyed by German bombs during the very last days of the war. It has become famous for its stark simplicity and its bizarre roof that has been described as ‘ a mix of partially crushed sombrero, a ram's horn, and a bell-clapper'.
Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.
The first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.
You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner - no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore's ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.
Occasionally he's quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important - a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.
Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.
The first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.
He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.
This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 - engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day - H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.
Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.
He's very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess - how much they make from their writing.
In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He's probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.
However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.
As an autobiography, it's long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover' Trekkie Parsons.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born into an aristocratic and fabulously wealthy family in Vienna at a time when it was the epicentre of the Hapsburg empire. The family was Jewish, but had largely converted to Christianity. It provided a very rich cultural and intellectual environment - Brahms, Mahler, Klimt and Schiele were family friends. Ludwig was the youngest of eight very talented children but was regarded in comparison as not very bright. He studied at the same secondary school in Linz as Adolf Hitler, did poorly in most subjects, lost any scraps of religious belief. and came under the influence of Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, and the anti-Semitic misogynist work Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, a homosexual and Jew who became a cult figure following his suicide at the age of twenty-three.
Even though Wittgenstein's first thoughts about philosophy began in his late teenage years he continued his studies in engineering (under his father's influence) and in 1908 went to Manchester to study the very young discipline of aeronautics. He invented an early form of jet engine and even patented the design for a propeller - but his real interest had been piqued by reading Bertrand Russell's The Principles of Mathematics. In 1911 he introduced himself to Russell at Trinity College Cambridge - a meeting which was to be decisive for both of them. He gave up engineering and the following year became Russell's student.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) - full name Jorge Francisco Isodoro Luis Borges Acevedo - was born in Buenos Aires Argentina into an educated middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and a teacher of psychology who was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English. His mother was Uruguayan of Spanish descent. They lived in a lower-class suburb famous for its cabarets, brothels, knife fights and the tango.
He grew up in a house speaking both English and Spanish (as a child he thought they were the same language) and was he taught at home until he was eleven years old. The family lived in a large house with over one thousand volumes in English in its library. Despite the raffish nature of the neighbourhood, Borges reflected later in life that the two principal features of his childhood were his father's library and a large garden - both of which feature prominently in his writing.
When he was only nine years old Borges translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends all thought it was the work of his father.
In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where his father was seeking treatment for his failing eyesight. Borges attended school, learned French, read Carlyle in English, and began to study philosophy in German. The family travelled to Spain, and because of political unrest in Argentina at the time, decided to stay in Switzerland during the war.
Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalauréate from the College de Geneve in 1918. The family stayed in Europe after the war, living in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. Whilst in Spain Borges became attracted to the avant garde Ultraist literary movement inspired by Appolinaire and Marinetti. He also published his first poems.
In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires, where Borges published his first collection of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) a sixty-four page booklet paid for by his father and with a cover designed by his sister Norah. There was no profit made from this enterprise: he simply gave the book away to anybody who was interested. He produced journalism, essays, and book reviews, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.
The family returned to Switzerland in 1923 so that his father could resume treatment for his eyes, and when they returned to Argentina the following year, Borges discovered that he had developed a reputation as poet on the strength of his first book. In 1929 his book Cuaderno San Martin won a Municipal Prize, the prize money for which he spent on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
In 1931 Borges began publishing in the literary journal Sur established by Victoria Ocampo, which helped him to establish his literary reputation. He wrote works including parodies of detective stories with another Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares under the name H. Bustos Domecq. He also began to explore existential themes in his work, drawing a great deal of his inspiration not from his own personal life, but from his experience of literature.
He was appointed editor at the literary supplement of newspaper Critica in 1933 where he published works that were a blend of non-fictional essays and short stories. These were later collected under the title of A Universal History of Infamy (1936). The collection explored two types of writing. The first used a combination of the essay and the short story to tell what were really true stories. The second were literary spoofs or forgeries - texts which he passed off as translations of little-known works, but which were in fact his own inventions.
In 1935 he published the prototype of what is now considered a typical ‘Borgesian' short story - ‘The Approach to Mu'tasim - a review of an imaginary novel. He had been influenced by his reading of Thomas Carlyle's Sator Resartus, a book comprised of reflections on the work and life of an imaginary German philosopher. It is a mark of Borges preference for shorter literary genres (and what he jokingly called his ‘laziness') that rather than creating complete imaginary works, he thought it was more inventive to conjure up their existence by writing reviews of them as if they actually existed.
Between 1936 and 1939 he wrote a weekly column for El Hogar, and in 1939 found work as an assistant in the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His duties were so light he could complete them in the first hour. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing and translating the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner into Spanish. His first volume of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) collected work he had previously published in Sur.
His eyesight began to fade in the late 1930s and, unable to support himself as a writer, he began giving public lectures. He lived with his widowed mother, who became his personal secretary. Although he relied a great deal on his imaginative responses to literature, he never learned to read Braille. He became completely blind by the late 1950s.
When Juan Peron came to power in 1946 Borges was ‘promoted' to the job of Inspector of Rabbits and Poultry in the Public Markets, a post from which he immediately resigned. He was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Writer's Society in 1950 and given the job of director of the National Library in 1955, even though he was by that time completely blind.
Some of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s, but his international reputation dates from the early 1960s when he was awarded the International Publisher's Prize, the Prix Formentor - which he shared with Samuel Beckett. He was appointed for a year to the Chair of literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to give lecture tours in America and Europe.
Two major anthologies of his work were published in 1962 - Ficciones and Layrinths - which further enhanced his international reputation. In 1967 Borges embarked on a five year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni which helped to make his work better known in the English-speaking world.
Then in 1967 Jorge Luis Borges married an old friend Elsa Astete Millan who had become a widow, but the marriage only lasted three years. Borges went back to his mother, with whom he lived until her death at the age of almost one hundred. He travelled extensively on lecture tours, and published further collections of his work - The Book of Sand, Dr Brodie's report, and The Book of Imaginary Beings.
In 1986, a few months before his death, he married his literary assistant Maria Kodama, who thereby gained control of his literary estate and the considerable income from it. Despite international protests, she rescinded all publishing rights for the existing collections of his work and commissioned new translations.
Mark Gertler (1896-1939) was born in Spitalfields in London's East End, the youngest son of Jewish immigrant parents. When he was a year old, the family was forced by extreme poverty back to their native Galicia (Poland). His father travelled to America in search of work, but when this plan failed the family returned to London in 1896. As a boy he showed a marked talent for drawing, and on leaving school in 1906 he enrolled in art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, which was the first institution in the UK to provide post-school education for working people.
Once again, because of his family's poverty, he was forced to drop out after only a year and take up work as an apprentice in a stained glass company. However, he continued with his interest in art, and after gaining third place in a competition he submitted his drawings to the Slade and was granted a scholarship by Sir William Rothenstein.
His contemporaries during four years at the Slade included David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer. More fatefully for his private life, he also met and fell in love with Dora Carrington. They had a turbulent and anguished relationship which lasted a number of years.
Meanwhile, he won prizes and scholarships, then left the Slade in 1912 to paint full time. He was patronised by Lady Ottoline Morrell who introduced him to Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and the Bloomsbury Group. He became moderately successful as a society portrait painter, but suffered in such company because of his relative poverty, his working-class origins, and his Jewishness.
In 1914 he was also taken up by Edward Marsh an art collector who was later to become secretary to Winston Churchill. Even this relationship became difficult, since Gertler was a pacifist, and he disapproved of the system of patronage. He broke off the relationship, and around this time painted what has become his most famous painting - The Merry-Go-Round.
In 1915 he became the love object of Lytton Strachey, but he continued his own pursuit of Dora Carrington for five years before she finally agreed to have a sexual relationship with him. For a time, he shared her with Strachey, with whom Carrington had meanwhile fallen in love. When she eventually left him to set up home with Strachey, Gertler was crushed and mortified.
As a young man, he projected a personal magnetism which fascinated many of his contemporaries. He is the model for the sinister sculptor Loerke in D.H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love, the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, and the egotistical painter of Katherine Mansfield's story Je ne parle pas Francais.
The first symptoms of tuberculosis appeared in 1920, and he was forced to enter a sanatorium. Nevertheless, despite his poor health, he continued to have yearly exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street.
In 1930 Gertler married Marjorie Hodgkinson, and they had a son in 1932. Their marriage was often difficult, and Gertler suffered from the same feelings of ill-ease that undermined relationships with his patrons. Edward Marsh continued to buy Gertler's paintings, even though he admitted that he no longer liked or understood them. But in order to supplement his intermittent income from painting, Gertler was forced to become a part-time teacher at the Westminster School of Art .
Throughout the 1930s he had difficulty in selling his paintings, even though he had a few loyal supporters such as J.B. Priestly and Aldous Huxley. But depressed by what he saw as his own failure, his ill-health, and the fear of another imminent world war, he committed suicide in June 1939. He is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery.
Mark (Max) Gertler was the youngest son of poor Jewish immigrants who settled in London's East End. He left school early and worked in a stained glass studio to pay his tuition fees at Regent Street Polytechnic. Via social connections he was fortunate enough to meet fellow painter Isaac Rosenberg and the gallery owner William Rothenstein, through whose influence he was admitted to the Slade.
Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother's study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn't cover.
It's not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending' on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope' to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn't have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn't love or desire.
Nina Berberova (1901-1993) was a prolific Russian writer who chronicled the lives of her fellow countrymen living in exile in Berlin, Paris, and New York. She was a contemporary of Vladimir Nabokov, who she greatly admired and who followed the same route of exile. Her memoir traverses three continents and three different cultures, and she was both sympathetic to and critical of them all.
Job Titles:
- Artist, Modernist, and the Queen of Bohemia
Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) was heiress to the Anglo-American Cunard shipping line. She was a glamorous and notorious figure in fashionable society of the 1920s and 1930s in both London and Paris. She flouted convention by taking multiple lovers, including in particular one black American jazz pianist. She also espoused left wing causes, was close to the Communist Party, supported anti-racist movements, and ran her own publishing company which produced the works of modern poets.
She was born in 1896 at Neville Holt in Leicestershire, a country house that dates back to the thirteenth century. Her family were super-rich anglicised Americans, owners of the Cunard shipping company. Her father pursued a traditional country gentleman lifestyle, with a favourite hobby of metalwork. Her mother hated the countryside, and covered the Tudor oak panelling of her husband's walls with white paint.
Nancy's childhood was typical for the upper class - forty servants in the house and her parents completely absent. When her mother was at home she filled the house with musicians and writers, including the Irish novelist George Moore, who it was thought might have been Nancy's genetic father. Nancy had a precocious taste in literature and read widely in English and French.
In 1910 her mother began an affair with the conductor Thomas Beecham, left her husband, and moved to London, taking Nancy with her. They lived in Cavendish Square in a grand house rented from Herbert Asquith when he moved into 10 Downing Street as prime minister.
Nancy was a gifted student who finished off her education in Munich and Paris. In 1914, on the eve of war, she befriended Iris Tree and was presented at Court as a debutante. She and Iris set up their own studio in Bloomsbury, and Nancy began writing poetry. She met Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and became a much-admired figure at the Cafe Royal.
During the following year she suddenly got married to Sydney Fairbairn, a handsome young soldier of whom her mother disapproved. The marriage lasted twenty months, which she later described as the unhappiest of her life. Nancy went to live with Sybil Hart-Davis, who was to have a strong influence on her. She fell in love with another soldier, but he was killed in 1917.
In London she lived an aimless, dissipated life and became a regular at the Eiffel Tower in Fitzrovia where she got ‘buffy' with various drinking companions. She began preparations to separate herself legally from her husband, then in 1920 emigrated to Paris.This marked a turning point in her life and was the start of her becoming the archetypical ‘Bright Young Thing'. She was vividly attractive, dressed well, smoked and drank to excess, and exercised her sexual independence with gusto.
Her first major conquest around this time was Michael Arlen (real name Dikran Kouyoumdjian) the Armenian writer who was to make his name shortly afterwards with his novel The Green Hat. The next of her many lovers was Aldous Huxley, though she found him physically repellent. Being in bed with him, she said, was like being crawled over by slugs.
In 1921 she published (at her own expense) her first collection of poems - Outlaws. It received favourable reviews, largely written by her friends or by her mother's influential contacts. She moved restlessly between England, the south of France, and Venice, where she had an affair with Wyndham Lewis, which he described in distinctly unflattering terms in his own memoirs.
She made friends with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and English travel writer Norman Douglas, and eventually set up her own flat in Paris. In 1925 she produced a long narrative poem Parallax which was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,
The following year the next of her amorous conquests was the French surrealist and communist Louis Aragon. His influence reinforced her natural rebelliousness and she began to espouse a number of popular left-wing causes.
When her father died he left her all his money. She bought a house in Normandy sixty miles from Paris. There she set up her own printing press which was dedicated to producing modern poetry in limited editions - though she also published some pornography.
In 1928 she met Henry Crowder in Venice. He was the pianist in an all-black American jazz band led by the violinist Eddie South. At the end of the ‘season' she took him back to Paris, at the same time adding the English poet and novelist Richard Aldington to her roster of lovers.
She re-established the Hours Press in Paris and published her first real literary discovery - Samuel Beckett. On a trip back to London she organised a private viewing of Bunuel's surrealist film L'Age d'Or, which at that time was considered shocking to the point of illegality.
Meanwhile Nancy's mother Lady Cunard was incandescent with rage, having learned that her daughter had a black lover. There were all sorts of anguished racist enquiries regarding the degree of his blackness. In fact Crowder had an African-American father and a Native American mother. There was a rift between mother and daughter, and Nancy's allowance was reduced, but she spent the rest of her life (as she had spent the first part) living off her parents' money.
Following this rupture she paid for Crowder's ticket back to America and went to live in Cagnes with her latest lover, the nineteen year old Raymond Michelet. In 1931 her sympathy for the black cause was fired up by the Scottsboro Boys case, and when Crowder reappeared in Europe she persuaded him to take her to America. She stayed in Harlem for a month and met figures such as Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
On return to Europe she wrote an essay Black Man and White Ladyship which was partly an apologia for what would later be known as ‘negritude' and partly a savage attack on the racism of her mother. She had the work privately printed and sent copies to everyone she knew - including her mother's friends. It caused a sensation and tarnished her reputation, though many would now see it as a brave and prescient work.
In 1932 she conceived the idea of publishing an anthology celebrating black culture and history called Negro (a perfectly acceptable term at that time). More trans-Atlantic crossing were made for ‘research' and there was controversy wherever she went with the project. She was joined in this endeavour by the young English communist writer Edgell Rickword.
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress - though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side' of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 - putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn't understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor' side of the family.
The first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends - Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.
They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous - Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway - all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as "one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known"
There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.
Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington's fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.
In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One's Own, and A Personal Record.
The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan's personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published
After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint - St. John of the Cross - joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people's home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped' him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:
Carrington's father died in 1918 leaving her a small inheritance that allowed her to feel more independent. The following year she met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, who assisted Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Both Carrington and Lytton Strachey fell in love with Partridge, who accepted that she would not give up her platonic relationship or living arrangements with Strachey. She married Partridge in 1921, and Strachey with characteristic generosity paid for their wedding. All three of them went on the honeymoon to Venice. Strachey wrily observed:
Richard Nevinson - (1899-1946) was an English artist of the early modernist period, the second child of Suffragette-supporters and Christian Socialists who lived in Hampstead. His mother was a teacher and his father (an Oxford classics graduate) was a war correspondent with the Daily Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. Nevinson was generally unhappy and often ill as a child, and was particularly undistinguished at school. When he was thirteen his father made the disastrous decision to send him to a low-ranking public school, where he endured three pointless years of learning virtually nothing and which left him emotionally scarred, with an enduring hatred of ‘the national code of snobbery and sport'.
After leaving the war as invalids, both Nevinson and Nash were recalled to military service, and only with great difficulty managed to secure positions as war artists, but this helped them both to stay away from the slaughter in the front lines. Meanwhile Carrington finally gave in to Gertler's sexual demands, yet at the same time established her curious sexless menage with Lytton Strachey. They moved into a large mill house at Tidmarsh in Berkshire.
Job Titles:
- Adviser to the Monotype Corporation
He was also taken up by Stanley Morison, adviser to the Monotype Corporation, and the typefaces he designed for him - Perpetua (1925), Gill Sans (1927), and Solus (1929) - are probably his greatest claim to fame as a designer. Doing so gave him the urge to move on once again, so he uprooted his entire household from Wales and went to live on an estate called Pigotts, near High Wycombe.
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter from the early modernist period. He was the youngest child of a large middle-class artistic family who lived in Cookham, a small village on the Thames. The cultural ambiance in the household was one of music and church-going. Spencer had very little formal education, since his father had snobbish doubts about the local council school, but could not afford the fees for a private education. He ran his own private school in a shed in next door's garden.
Spencer's talent for drawing was encouraged by the wife of the local landowner. She suggested the Slade School of Art (where she had studied herself) and he was admitted and at his father's insistence that he should not be subjected to any examinations, was allowed to bypass the written entrance requirements. He studied under Wilson Steer and the formidable Henry Tonks, and he was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, Richard ‘Chips' Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg.
Stanley Spencer was from a small village in Berkshire on the Thames. He had virtually no formal education, and was introduced to the world of art via the patronage of a local landowner's wife. His drawing skills were so developed that he was allowed to skip the Slade's formal entrance requirements of a written exam.
One interesting feature (which might be worth further exploration) is that none of these people were particularly gifted in an academic sense. Spencer had almost no formal education, Nevinson went to a public school, from which he emerged with nothing but contempt for its values, Paul Nash was an educational duffer, Gertler left school at fourteen, and Carrington's education didn't begin until she arrived at the Slade.
Stanley Spencer was pinned down in the Balkans whilst suffering from the irony that he had been asked to contribute to a war memorial. When the war finally ended he was given rapid transit back home - only to find that plans for the memorial had meanwhile been scrapped. However, he threw himself into the completion of one of his masterpieces, Swan Upping at Cookham which had been left unfinished at his conscription.
After the war Carrington managed to complicate her life even further by marrying Ralph Partridge, with whom her partner Lytton Strachey was in love. It was her way of keeping them all together. She also went on to have an affair with her new husband's best friend, Gerald Brenan, then passed on to relationships with women. She continued painting but did not exhibit, and was generally depressed. Her suffering came to an end when Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and she shot herself, unwilling to go on living without him.
Gertler's life after the war (or in his case, after Carrington) was a series of ups and downs. He was penniless one minute, successful the next. He married a former Slade student and they had a son, but the marriage was not a success. By the late nineteen-thirties, feeling that his personal and his professional life were failures, and learning that Hitler was persecuting Jews, he gassed himself in his studio.
Stanley Spencer was the longest-lived of this group. In 1925 he suddenly married a fellow Slade student Hilda Carline and he discovered a new subject for some of his later works - conjugal sex. The sudden change to his normally puritanical lifestyle presaged major disruptions. First he moved back to Cookham trying to recapture (unsuccessfully) some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, a former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.
Spencer proposed a menage a trois with Patricia, but his wife refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who equally refused to cohabit or to have any sexual relations with him. So he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. When he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his wife forced him out, and perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.
Stanley Spenser missed out on these late afternoon life classes because he had to catch the train back home. His fellow student Richard ‘Chips' Nevinson satirised this provincialism by calling Spenser ‘Cookham' - the name of his home village. It was a nickname which stuck with him throughout the rest of his time at the Slade.
Stephen Walsh begins by clearing the ground between himself and Robert Craft - the man who made himself Stravinsky's amanuensis, secretary, helpmate, and collaborator towards the end of his life. Craft wanted to control the Stravinsky estate (including the money) as well as his critical reputation, but Walsh is having none of that. He insists on factual accuracy, backed up with hard evidence.
Yet even though it's quite clear that he knows everything there is to know about the details of Stravinsky's life, and can justify every claim with a fully referenced source, he has problems constructing a logical and readable narrative of the composer's life. For instance Stravinsky's brother Roman dies three times within as many short chapters at the start of the book, and Stravinsky is abruptly announced to be twenty years old and has completed his first piece of music on page fifty. Most of the previous forty-nine have been devoted to describing the Russian countryside.
Walsh is exceptionally good at recreating the social and historical context in which Stravinsky was raised - from the lack of sanitation in late nineteenth-century Petersburg to the fact that the composer didn't even go to school until he was nearly eleven.
The story of Stravinsky's life is already fairly well known, so what does Walsh offer that's new? Well, quite apart from his claim to accuracy in interpreting textual evidence, it's quite clear that he is an authority on Russian cultural history. Every time a friend, relative, or acquaintance enters the story, his narrative swells out for pages on end with their biographical details - to the extent that (especially in the earlier part of the book) Stravinsky himself becomes a indistinct figure, hovering indistinctly like some half-forgotten ghost.
This is a feature of Walsh's approach which you would expect to diminish as Stravinsky becomes more successful - largely because he is endlessly on the move from one city and country to another - Petersburg, Brittany, Switzerland, Paris, Cote d'Azur. This is the material of a biographer's dream. But Walsh is more interested in scouring correspondence to apportion exact responsibility for the plot development of the early masterpieces (Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring) The composer's dramatic private life is left relatively unexamined - despite his meeting with such luminaries as Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Schoenberg, and Manuel de Falla.
And this avoidance of the personal has some serious repercussions. When Diaghilev throws an enormous tantrum on hearing of Nijinsky's marriage, Walsh still can't bring himself to mention the fact that they had been lovers. Diaghilev shunned The Rite of Spring because of its close connection with his ex-favourite - and this immediately affected Stravinsky's ability to earn a living from its success - for a personal, not a musical reason.
But we do gain benefits from his thoroughness, as well as having to endure its longeurs. On Stravinsky's first visit to Spain, an affair with the ballerina Lydia Lopukhova is followed up biographically to record that she later married Diaghilev's financial manager, and then later after eloping from London with a Russian general, she eventually married John Maynard Keynes.
Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa's early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father's death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.
When their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him - yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.
As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:
Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive
She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell's painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.
Despite Frances Spalding's efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist - quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit - which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?
When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell's for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell's family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.
Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It's is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.
In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d'Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.
It's often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding's pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant's gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).
Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia's suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.
But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.
Virginia Woolf An Introduction is yet another study that combines a biography with comments on her major writing. There have been several biographies of Virginia Woolf in the last few decades. John Lehmann's illustrated memoir is still very popular. Quentin Bell's official biography is detailed and scholarly but in common with other accounts by Bloomsbury insiders (he was her nephew) it contains sins of omission to protect relatives and friends. Lyndall Gordon's A Writer's Life bases much of its account of Woolf's life on her fiction, supposing much of it to be thinly veiled autobiography. The weaknesses in these productions mean that Hermione Lee's more serious recent study is now regarded as the ‘standard' biography.
So what does a new account by Alexandra Harris have to offer - published as it is very quickly on the heels of her award-winning Romantc Moderns? Well - it turns out not to be a biography in the conventional sense, but an introduction to Woolf and her work in general, compiled from readings of her novels, diaries, and letters, strung together in a chronological sequence.
The first few chapters deal with life in the Stephen household at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, but once Woolf starts writing it is the prodigious flow of her creative work which forms the spine of the narrative - from her first book reviews and the early major task of The Voyage Out through to the last flourish of Between the Acts.
For readers new to Woolf it performs the useful function of emphasising the amazing scope of her work - for she was expressive and accomplished in all the literary genres with which she engaged. Her diaries are as interesting as Kafka's; she excelled in the novel; her short stories are amongst the most advanced experiments in modern literature (with the possible exception of some by Nadine Gordimer); her essays and literary criticism will stand comparison with the work of any professional literary critic; and even her letters are worth reading - though she tends to recycle the same anecdotes to multiple correspondents.
As an introduction to Woolf's major novels, it's very successful. Harris's impassioned account of Orlando is guaranteed to make anyone who has not read the novel dash out and buy it immediately. But at times she becomes so caught up with giving an account of the novels that her commentary becomes an act of interpretation. She switches from biography to literary criticism.
One minute for instance she might be dealing with well known details of the biography, and then at the merest mention of the book Woolf is currently writing, the narrative slides off into plot summary and a discussion of its characters as if they inhabited the same world. This will probably seem very attractive to general readers, encouraging them to engage with the fiction. But it's likely to irritate any serious Woolf enthusiasts.
The pace is not always even. There are occasional lurches forward in chronology which are quite disconcerting. Whilst discussing the early writing in 1910, she suddenly invokes Rhoda in The Waves, which wasn't written until twenty-one years later.
Quite surprisingly, there is very little about the lifestyle bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group, even when it is directly relevant. Her descriptions of Virginia's relationship with Leonard Woolf give the impression of a blissfully idyllic marriage. You wouldn't guess from her account that it was virtually a mariage blanc. All the rich gossip and fruity anecdotes are available elsewhere of course, but the picture of Bloomsbury life that comes across is distinctly pasteurised.
One of the most interesting chapters is her last, in which she traces the development of Woolf's posthumous reputation. Leonard Woolf, acting as executor and publisher at the Hogarth Press, slowly released the letters, diaries, and essays (only recently completed) in well edited scholarly editions. And as he did so, Woolf's critical stock rose accordingly to the point where she is now regarded as one of the great modernists of the early twentieth century.
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.
Virginia Woolf was interested in writing life histories throughout the whole of her career. She was the daughter of a professional biographer (Leslie Stephen) and some of her earliest work featured sketches of famous cultural figures, some of whom were visitors to her home. In her middle period she produced the magnificent fantasy biography Orlando, and one of her last full length non-fictional works was Roger Fry, a portrait study of her friend and fellow Bloomsbury artist.
Woolf pokes fun at ancestral snobbery in this fantasy by describing Flush's family history as if it were recorded in the same way as yhat of nobles and aristocracy - to the detriment of humans. In fact the dog's biography is used as an excuse for conjouring up a picture of upper class London in the early nineteenth century - the solidity of Wimpole Street, and the interior of the famous Barratt house at number fifty. The description is from a dog's point of view - smells first and foremost, furniture no more than blurred shapes, and rooms over-decorated to the point where nothing is quite what it seems.
In a sense, Woolf is using the story to describe her own Victorian childhood home at Hyde Park Gate which she found so atmospherically oppressive. Of course the story of Elizabeth Barrett's constricted life as a semi-invalid is well known, and the central conceit of the tale is that since Flush has to endure imprisonment in the claustrophobic bedroom, he learns to suppress his instincts for movement and freedom in the outside world in the same way his mistress has done herself.
The very eventlessness of this existence is grist to Woolf's creative mill. She is not at all fazed by the lack of plot or dramatic events. Her interest is in the way consciousness deals with the passage of time. The texture of a day is relayed through its sounds and smells, and the manner in which events outside the "cushioned and firelit cave" are suggested by subtle shifts in household routines. This is an account written, after all, by someone who produced the long essay on life in stasis, On Being Ill
But then the monotony is broken by the arrival of "the hooded man" - Robert Browning, who comes to pay court to the invalid. Flush takes a couple of bites at the great man's trousers, but then rather whimsically decides to love him after all. However, the mood of the story takes a sombre then quite sinister shift when Flush is kidnapped by dog thieves. Woolf conjures up a Dickensian vision of a Whitechapel populated by vicious criminals, beggars, and prostitutes - "a world that Miss Barratt had never seen, had never guessed at".
Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.
Alma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father's artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.
One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her'.
This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting - on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.
She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It's perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband's professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.
Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure'. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]
Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma's musical interests - but it was too late. He died shortly after this.
Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold - and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer - then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.
Their's was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.
Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.
If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It's interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka's great paintings were produced around this time.
However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.
Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.
There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma - but she refused to choose between them as husband and lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.
Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.
Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation'.
She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology - an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.
Wyndham Lewis was a controversial figure in English modernism between 1912 and 1954. He was both a graphic artist and a novelist, and he collaborated with some of the most influential creative figures of the period - the American poet Ezra Pound, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and the British painter Augustus John. He is credited as the co-inventor of Vorticism - the one native English movement in modern art.
Lewis was born in 1882 in Amhurst, Nova Scotia to an American father and an English mother. His full name included ‘Percy', but as an adult he tried to discourage its use. In 1888 the family moved to England and his parents separated. Percy was raised by his mother in Norwood, south London, whilst his father settled in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His father was a licentious and improvident character who lived on money supplied by an older brother.