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THE NORTHERN REVIEW OF BOOKS
RUNNING COMMENTARY: THE CONTENTIOUS MAGAZINE THAT TRANSFORMED THE JEWISH LEFT INTO THE NEOCONSERVATIVE RIGHT by Benjamin Balint. Reviewed by Jim Burns - October 2010 Public Affairs.
290 pages. $26.95. ISBN 978 1 58648 749 2
Keeping a magazine alive for 65 years is something of an achievement, especially when the magazine in question is devoted to intellectual evaluations of political, literary, and cultural matters. Many publications of this kind often close down when they think they've achieved whatever purpose they had in mind when they started, or when the energy runs out, or someone of key importance to their existence dies or moves on to other things. The noted New York publication, Partisan Review, ceased operations in 2003 when falling sales, the death of William Phillips, and changes in the social, political and intellectual mood in America combined to remove its relevance. One report said that it had "become obsolete." I’ve mentioned Partisan Review because one of its major rivals was Commentary, currently still alive and the subject of the book under review. And it's a book that could be seen as contentious in its claims that the Jewish left has been transformed into the neoconservative right. You only need to read Dissent or the New York Review of Books to realise that a large number of Jewish intellectuals continue to adopt a liberal position on social and political matters. But let me go back to the beginning. The American Jewish Committee in 1945 asked Elliott Cohen to edit their new monthly magazine, Commentary, which they envisaged as "a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues." Cohen had a good track record as editor of an earlier publication, Menorah Journal, and jumped at the opportunity to be in control of a magazine that he could shape to his liking. The only snag was that he "edited his authors exactingly, even intrusively, even if they happened to be Thomas Mann or John Dewey." Cohen himself was a blocked writer who fulfilled his needs by rewriting other people's work. Not everyone reacted kindly to this and Balint quotes the art critic Harold Rosenberg as saying, "Listen Elliott, if you want to write, write under your own name" Still, there's no doubt about the fact that, in its early days, Commentary was responsible for publishing some brilliant writing. And Cohen's staff included some talented young Jewish intellectuals who brought their own ideas to the magazine and helped shape its contents. Clement Greenberg, then just starting to make his name as an art critic, was one of them, and another was Robert Warshow, an early advocate of -paying serious attention to aspects of popular culture. It's worth noting that, at this stage, contributors to Commentary also wrote for Partisan Review on a fairly regular basis. Elliott Cohen, like many other Jewish New York intellectuals had been attracted to communism in the 1930s, with Trotskyism being of particular interest, but he later turned against it and closely inspected contributions to Commentary for anything that might be seen as soft on communists. He rejected Robert Warshow's essay on Charlie Chaplin because the famous film-star was "a fellow-traveller of Stalin." Warshow then gave it to Partisan Review where it was published and praised. As the Cold War developed Commentary frequently ran articles critical of Russia and its actions. By the early-1950s, with Senator McCarthy on the prowl and fear and suspicion rife in American society, there were attacks on liberal intellectuals because they seemed to be too sympathetic towards left-wingers who had fallen foul of blacklists and purges. Irving Kristol thought that the rise of McCarthyism was due to liberals not taking a firm enough anti-communist position. McCarthy may have been a "vulgar demagogue," but everyone knew where he stood in relation to communism, whereas the public were confused about whether or not too many liberals were sincerely opposed to it. To be fair to Cohen he did always aim for a high intellectual content in Commentary and its writers were prepared to say that they didn't care for the kind of populist anti-communism that McCarthy represented. But other New York intellectuals thought that the magazine seemed increasingly to be trying to persuade them to fall in with the status quo and not question it too closely. This was particularly seen as a problem for Jews because of their desire to be assimilated into the wider American society. The anti-semitism that had previously stopped many Jewish intellectuals from obtaining positions in universities was breaking down, and while this was obviously a good thing some writers worried that it might lead to conformity. Sociologist David Riesman asked, "Were not intellectuals of more use to this country when they had less use for it?" And Irving Howe was so disturbed by what was happening that he started Dissent, which by its very name indicated where it wanted to be in relation to the general situation in America. So far I've looked mostly at the political aspects of Commentary, and the magazine also printed literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, though when Norman Podhoretz took over as editor he upset poets by saying that he would edit their work as rigorously as he edited that of prose writers. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, and Delmore Schwartz all published fiction in Commentary, though Balint doesn't delve too deeply into their work. One novel that does receive some attention, though none of it appeared in the magazine, is Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage From Home. It was reviewed by Irving Howe, who, praised it, and Daniel Bell described it as "a parable of alienation." The alienation factor was something .that intrigued American Jewish writers and intellectuals because of the discrimination that they often experienced and their consequent sense of apartness from the concerns of many other Americans. As noted above, this was changing but was still evident when Rosenfeld's book was published in 1946. It could be argued that Rosenfeld was something of a special case in that he made a point of rejecting attempts to absorb him into bourgeois society. He thought of the Jewish writer as "a specialist in alienation" and lived a life that could best be described as bohemian. Attitudes were altering, however, as opportunities for advancement opened up for Jews. In time the noted critic Leslie Fiedler could say, "if the system has been this good to us, it can't be as bad as we thought it was." Elliott Cohen committed suicide in 1959 and control of Commentary passed to Norman Podhoretz who was astute enough to see that its previous obsession with communism was largely irrelevant as the paranoia of the Fifties declined. The times were changing and Podhoretz began to publish critical pieces about race, poverty, welfare, the developing Vietnam War, and brought in writers like Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, and Staughton Lynd to open up dialogues about these and other matters. Podhoretz could be seen as someone who wasn't afraid to admit that he was desperate to succeed in the New York intellectual hot-house. His book, Making It, unashamedly acknowledged that he wanted to be respected and to make a place for himself among people he admired (he was born in 1930 so was younger than them and hadn't been involved in the political turbulence of the 1930s). Making It wasn't liked by established figures such as Lionel and Diana Trilling, who considered it "crudely boastful," and one of Podhoretz's friends even thought he was going insane and ought to be committed. Podhoretz was intellectually tough enough to ride the storm and Making It is still worth reading for its account of a man scrambling up the ladder of success and for its picture of the New York intellectual scene of the 50s and 60s. What had appeared to be a swing towards the left didn't last too long and the magazine soon began to react against what it saw as the excesses of the 60s. Podhoretz had, perhaps, shown his innate conservatism some years earlier when he wrote a piece for Partisan Review called "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" which was a savage attack on the Beats. And the rise of Black Power, feminism, gay rights, and the activities of the New Left, came under attack. In a way it's easy to see what bothered Podhoretz and his supporters. They weren't the only ones suspicious of many of the motives and actions of student activists and others. Their anti-intellectualism was hard to take if you were used to the intellectual rigour of Partisan Review and Commentary, or indeed to any kind of literary or intellectual experience that demanded more than a passing glance at slogans and crude gestures. Balint rightly points out that, "unlike the 1930s, the 1960s did not produce much in the way of a body of radical literature." This reaction may have had its virtues but it was only the start of an increasingly right-wing swing that included, among other things, almost-hysterical outbursts against gays, support for Ronald Reagan, a militant pro-Israel policy, enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq, and much more of that nature. I'm not suggesting that such topics shouldn't be discussed in an intellectual magazine, but as even Balint (who worked for a time at Commentary) admits, the tone was often too shrill and there was a tendency to dismiss anyone with a different opinion as either misguided or motivated by a hatred of America. It's little wonder that, as the magazine became a mouthpiece for neoconservatives many of its one-time contributors drifted or were driven away. George Steiner was of the opinion that his work was ignored by Commentary because of his "doubts about Vietnam and my deepening fear about the development of Israel's policies and society." And Irving Howe said, "I contributed to Commentary when it was the natural voice of liberal Jewish debate." Balint points out that, along with its right-wing politics, its coverage of the arts declined. Podhoretz had denounced "critics of the Left to whom art was a weapon, and who acclaimed or condemned novels for their positions on political and ideological matters," but he adds that "Podhoretz's own literary judgements - and by extension, the magazine's - had become ever more ideological." And he "began to see every product of the mind as something that reflected a political allegiance." Podhoretz, though, had achieved his ambition of "Making It" and in 2000, when George W.Bush was elected President, he wrote in enthusiastic terms about the dawn of a new day in American politics. His support for Bush didn't go unnoticed and in 2004 he was given the Presidential Medal of Honour, the nation's highest civilian award. For someone born in a poor part of Brooklyn to East European working-class Jewish parents it really must have seemed that he had made it. I noted near the start of this review that the sub-title for this book is misleading, and Balint more or less admits it when he remarks that "from Franklin Roosevelt, who garnered 90 percent of the Jewish vote in 1940 to Barack Obama, who got 78 percent in 2008, Jews remained the most consistently liberal group in the country." And he goes on to say that the neoconservatives clustered around Commentary have never been able to come to terms with the fact that their fellow Jews can't or don't want to see that, according to the neoconservatives, they're not acting in their own self-interest. Perhaps they don't think that self-interest is the only reason for deciding which way to vote. This is an informative book, tidily written and well-documented, and it adds to our knowledge of the New York intellectual scene.
THE POST-HOLOCAUST GENERATIONS
RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS
BERNARD KOPS DANCING IN THE SUNLIGHT
This Room in the Sunlight: Collected
Poems by Bernard Kops
AMONG the greatest events of British
literature this decade is the publication of the collected poems of Bernard
Kops, the doyen of contemporary European verse.
THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His last major work was Christmas in Auschwitz: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of András Mezei (Smokestack, England, 2010).
BRYAN WYNTER by Michael Bird Reviewed by Jim Burns
By chance this book arrived for review while I was in Cornwall to see the Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St Ives. Lanyon and Bryan Wynter both belonged to that almost-legendary group of artists (Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, John Wells, and Patrick Heron were others) who for a time made St Ives into a world-class centre for abstract painting, Their work, paralleling but not imitating that of the American Abstract Expressionists, attracted the attention of critics and cultural commentators, though sometimes inviting ridicule from the public. The 1961 Tony Hancock film, The Rebel, probably summed up the typical attitude of many people when faced with a large abstract canvas. Let's laugh at it or dismiss it as a gigantic con trick. I don't want to extend these comments into an investigation of the value of abstract art. Nor do I want to try to evaluate what was produced by the St Ives group as a whole. It's obvious that, as in any period, there was good, bad, and indifferent work done. But my viewing of the Peter Lanyon exhibition convinced me that he was a major artist, and what I've seen of Bryan Wynter's work over many years, together with reading Michael Bird's book, has persuaded me that he was perhaps the most significant of the painters now known as the St Ives School. Bryan Wynter was born in 1915, the son of a successful businessman who saw him as his natural successor as manager of the family firm. Wynter had different ideas, though, and possibly picked up influences from his grandfather who, even though he'd started the family laundry business, had always been interested in other matters, such as the activities of the Swedenborg Society, science, and travel. Wynter also had an aunt who encouraged him to take an interest in painting and poetry. His father reluctantly agreed to Wynter attending evening classes in art and eventually a full-time course at the Slade. Teaching there in the 1930s was traditional in its approach and students were expected to become skilled in academic drawing and painting. It was often an accusation hurled against abstract artists that they painted that way because they lacked the skills to do otherwise but examples of Wynter's early work in Bird's book indicate that he was a good draughtsman.
While Wynter was studying he had encountered the work of the surrealists. There had been a large surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 which Wynter saw and was impressed by. According to Bird, his interest was aroused by surrealism's "debt to Freudian psychoanalysis and its left-wing assertively anti-bourgeois stance" because he wanted to assert his own individuality against "the claims of upbringing and convention." I think it should be noted that Wynter's interest in politics doesn't appear to have been strong. His "personal philosophy was based, in any case, on a perception that sought-for freedoms had more to do with his own state of mind and way of life than with a desire for political or cultural change." The onset of the Second World War disrupted Wynter's studies and, as a conscientious objector, he was sent to work as an assistant in laboratories in Oxford which were using animals to test the effects of bomb blasts. It's probably fair to say that his wartime experiences were less onerous that they might have been in different circumstances. He could still draw and paint, even if there were difficulties obtaining materials, and he met a variety of interesting people linked to the theatrical, literary and artistic world of Oxford. He could also visit his family, though relations were not always easy. In a letter to a woman friend in 1945 he said of his father and mother: "to live trivially is bad enough but to do it on such a vast and expensive scale is utterly dismal. Materially they have gained all they ever wanted and all it has brought them is disappointment and a constant round of fatuous occupations." There's a pointer here to Wynter's later attitudes towards domesticity and its routines. Wynter had visited St Ives briefly in 1942 but was suspicious of its bohemian reputation and the talents of its then-resident artists. Away from the town was a different matter and the area around Zennor appealed to him. In 1945, freed from his wartime obligations, he went again, intending to stay for a short period but settling there for 30 years. And it's at this point that his identification with St Ives began, at least in the eyes of other people. He was never convinced that he was a member of a group. His need to feel free of all ties played a part in this, but he wasn't an unsociable type of person. He had friends and seems to have been well-liked, and he mixed easily with other artists and with local people when he had to. But his artistic influences were somewhat different to those of many of his associates in the artistic world of St Ives. I've already referred to his interest in surrealism and another influence was the English Neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s. Herbert Read had, in the 1930s, declared that "Surrealism in general is the Romantic principle in art," and had cited Blake, Shelley, and Samuel Palmer as proto-surrealists. Wynter's early work had affinities with that of 40s artists like Cecil Collins, John Minton, John Craxton, and Graham Sutherland. With the United Kingdom cut off from foreign influences and artists unable to travel except in uniform there was a turning inwards and a renewal of interest in the local landscape. I'm not sure that Wynter really identified totally with Neo-Romantic ideas, though he spoke enthusiastically about individual members of the movement, but his early work can be seen as sharing certain themes relating to the natural world and its impact on the imagination. In 1983, when the Barbican mounted a large exhibition called A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-1955 it included Wynter's "Landscape with Skull," which can be seen as combining a fascination with landscape with the dark mood of wartime.
Wynter had found an old cottage at Zennor and soon established himself there. It had no electricity, telephone, or running water, but it suited his temperament and he told his mother that the lack of amenities didn't bother him: "The Carn provides me with my own particular brand of amenities, an enormous access to & experience of this wild corner of England which still holds out against the slow insidious invasion of garden suburb and slum." He established contact with writers and artists in the area and Sven Berlin became a friend as did the poet, W.S.Graham. For a time some of his closest neighbours were the Moors Poets, a shifting group which included George Barker, David Wright, John Heath-Stubbs and John Fairfax. Some of them occasionally stayed with Wynter, but as Bird notes: "For all his rejection of social convention and consumer comforts, Wynter liked to maintain a certain order in his living and working arrangements," and he wasn't too happy when visitors left clothes and other things lying around in an untidy way. Money was a problem during these early days at Zennor. Wynter had a small allowance from his father which covered some basic needs, but success and sales didn't come easily or early to him and other St Ives artists of the post-war years. He had been moving towards a more-abstract style in the early -50s, though the impulse that drove the paintings still came from the world he could see around him. It's easy to identify a house, a hill, and other objects in the 1951 "Blue Landscape," for example. But there's no doubt that a year or two later his work was less concerned with representing what his eye could see. Was he heading in the same direction as the American Abstract Expressionists? It's unlikely that Wynter had seen many, if any of their paintings other than in magazines, though this changed in the mid-1950s when the Tate in London put on a large exhibition of American modern art. And it was around this time that he met Mark Tobey and Bradley Walker Tomlin who both seem to have had an influence in terms of how paint was applied to the canvas. There was certainly a change in Wynter's conception of what a painting should do, and Bird neatly describes the key 1954 "Dark Landscape" when he says, "the landscape of the title has crossed the border into mindscape."
Various other factors came into play. Wynter experimented with mescalin, something that he did in a deliberate and systematic way. He was familiar with Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and its account of his experiences with mescalin, and Wynter was, according to Bird, "an artist for whom the life of the mind was at once a continual, self-renewing source for his art and a side of his personality that he was forever trying to outwit in the quest for 'true seeing.' In this game of psychological hide-and-seek, art abetted the unconscious in its attempts to avoid being swamped by the rational mind." Mescalin was a way of expanding his mind and his art, and it does appear to have worked in that way for several years, at least. It wasn't that he produced anything of great value when actually under the influence of the drug but rather that the experience of taking it fed into his subconscious and helped shape a new approach to painting. It was in the five or so years following 1956 that he created what many people consider his most significant work. Wynter was well-read and very intelligent but didn't care to talk too much about art. His brother recalled that he "would talk about inventions, people, jazz, poetry, about underwater, about discoveries on walks," but "he didn't talk much about art at all." This shouldn't be seen as evidence of inarticulacy when it came to his own work. He said, "I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, something that generates imagery rather than contains it. Obviously it is I who have put into them what they contain but I have done so with as little conscious interference as possible, allowing them at every stage in their growth to dictate their own necessities." This is an illuminating statement in relation to the sort of paintings that Wynter was producing in the late-1950s. Bird backs it up in his own way when he says that the earlier works had an abstract tendency but still seemed "to refer to something he could touch," whereas with the later work, "it was the painting that came first, generating the viewer's experience without direct reference to anything else." By this time Wynter was well-known and his work was exhibited around the world and written about in major art journals. Some serious commentators saw him as the only possible rival to the leading painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. But, as Bird makes clear, he was never an "action painter," in the sense of someone like Pollock who dripped paint onto a canvas and indulged in spontaneous gestures. Wynter claimed to keep "conscious intention at bay while he worked," but "skilful construction" was always a necessity for him. Canvases were often worked on over a period of weeks or months, and it's mentioned that the dazzling "Wolf Country" was started in 1957 but not finished until 1961. The initial idea for a painting may well have been something that originated in the subconscious, and its first expression may well have been made without "conscious intention," but its final realisation necessitated a more-considered application of paint. Tastes in art had started to change in the early-1960s, with aspects of figurative art becoming more important. And Pop Art captured the imagination of young artists and audiences and lent itself to being publicised in newspapers and magazines. It seemed in touch with the mood of the 1960s. Interest in the St Ives artists waned. Wynter had a heart attack in 1961(he was a heavy smoker and liked large fry-ups) and this may have slowed him down, but his restless and enquiring mind was also leading him into other areas of artistic activity. He'd always been interested in kinetic art and constructed a number of IMOOS (Images Moving Out Onto Space) which were exhibited but didn't sell too well. His paintings also changed as the Sixties developed. Bird's book reproduces a number of works from the late-1960s and early -1970s and I can't help thinking that they lack the power and subtleties of the late -1950s canvases. I can reach into those and can draw emotionally from what they offer but can only see shapes and colours without real depth in the later work. This may imply some shortcomings in my analysis of the paintings and Michael Bird writes enthusiastically about them. He refers to a "meander motif" in them and stresses how Wynter's fascination with the patterns that water makes was a key influence behind the paintings. Wynter had read Theodore Schwenk's book, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, and already had an interest in the work of Jacques Cousteau and in activities such as canoeing and kayaking. According to Schwenk, "naturally flowing water always follows a meandering course," and he added that the meander "is an archetypal principle of flowing water that wants to realise itself, regardless of the surrounding material." It's obvious why Schwenk's theories appealed to Wynter and translated into his paintings. And it's also possible to see how the meander paintings had affinities with his experiments with kinetic art, the ripple effect being common to both.
It has been suggested that Wynter's later work, with its intensity of colour and lighter impact, was partly shaped by his awareness of the possibility of a second major heart-attack. He suffered from angina and Bird refers to "the kind of serene final phase so often seen in artists' careers," and which comes with an acceptance of the inevitability of death. In February 1975, Wynter did have another heart-attack which killed him. There is little doubt that, at the time of his death, Wynter's reputation in the art world had declined, along with most of the other members of the St Ives School of the 1950s. Changing fashions had pushed their work into the background. But Wynter never had been the kind of artist who went in for self-promotion and his ideas about artistic integrity and his reluctance to get involved with a consumerist society put him at odds with those who thought of artists as fashion-icons who convinced people of their talents by making lots of money. Someone described him as a "natural outsider," and Bird says that even his involvement with the "artistic factions and rivalries in St Ives was largely tangential." He was represented in the large Tate exhibition, St Ives 1939-1964;Twenty Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, in 1985. Is it too much to hope that, following the recent Peter Lanyon retrospective, Tate St Ives will now focus attention on Bryan Wynter? BROTHER-SOULS: JOHN CLELLON HOLMES, JACK KEROUAC, AND THE BEAT GENERATION by Ann Charters and Samuel Charters. University Press of Mississipi. 441 pages. $35. ISBN 978-1-60473-579-6 Reviewed by Jim Burns Feb 2011
It's doubtful if many of the enthusiasts for Beat writing have paid much attention to John Clellon Holmes. There are numerous books about Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, and most of their work is in print. A few anthologies include something by Holmes, and general histories of the Beat movement usually mention him and his novel Go which has fictional portraits of the aforementioned trio and some of the other writers and characters who were around in the late-1940s. But Go is probably the most accurate and honest account we have of that period, and offers a darker picture of the people and events than Kerouac ever came up with. People like their bohemianism to be colourful and entertaining and that may be part of the explanation why Go has never been a widely-read novel whereas On the Road has. There are other reasons, of course, which have to do with the different styles of writing the two novelists used and the publication dates of their books. John Clellon Holmes was born in 1926 in Holyoke, Massachusetts, into a family with roots going back to the early days of colonial America, and links to such people as the Civil War General John Mclellan and the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes. Later, Kerouac sometimes imagined that Holmes had a privileged upbringing, which was far from the truth and caused Holmes to say in response: "Somewhere you seem to have gotten the idea that I'm landed gentry. This is amusing when you consider that very probably your father made more money during his life than mine." And he went on to refute Kerouac's assertion that Holmes was a "man of inherited wealth." In reality, Holmes had a more chaotic and financially unstable young life than Kerouac, though the latter because of his working or lower middle-class background in a small town developed a much less-sophisticated understanding of the world he lived in. Brother-Souls says that, "Kerouac's writing remained consistently personal, parochial, always focused on a small group of friends or a brief relationship with someone in that group, while Holmes in his books continually attempted to draw parallels between his own world and the larger American traditions and literary culture that he considered his own." Holmes never had a extended formal education. He dropped out of school when he was sixteen and picked up routine clerical jobs. But he was conscious of wanting to be a writer and enrolled in an evening class at Columbia University, studying composition and reading James T.Farrell and Ernest Hemingway. In 1944 he was conscripted into the navy and spent a year working as a medical orderly. He never left the USA but did come into contact with many severely wounded men, an experience that had a profound effect on him. He recalled: "Anti-fascist though I had been since 12, the experience ended war for me. Fifty boys my own age died while I watched, helpless to help. A hundred more were crippled forever, and no June night would promise them anything but bitterness. I feel a solidarity with them still." The reference to an early awareness of fascism points to his interest in politics, an interest which developed when he met a fellow-sailor who was a Marxist. Later, when living in New York with his first wife, he read the Daily Worker every day and frequented the Worker's Bookshop. And he began to find his way into the world of would-be writers and intellectuals in Greenwich Village, arguing about politics but finding it increasingly hard to come to terms with post-war developments. The onset of the Cold War, and in particular the Communist seizure of control in Czechoslovakia, were determining factors in his disillusionment with communism. But he never became like Kerouac who, despite some youthful expressions of vaguely left-wing opinions, was always a conservative at bottom and as he got older and drunker raged against "Jews, communists and intellectuals." Holmes had met Alan Harrington, another aspiring novelist, in 1948 and it was through him that he got drawn into Beat circles. He had also started to appear in print, though as a poet, and his work was in such well-regarded magazines as Poetry, Partisan Review, Harper's, and the Saturday Review of Literature. Any young poet would have been happy with being seen in these publications, but his main ambition was to write a novel. He was having problems, though, partly because of his intense approach to writing prose. He believed that a novel "should dramatise ideas" and be part of a "continuing intellectual debate," whereas Kerouac thought of novels as "a free expression of personal experiences" and places to capture "moods." I've got to admit at this point that my personal interests incline me to look on Holmes's involvements and experiences during this period as the most interesting in his career. The account in Brother-Souls brings out some of the frantic atmosphere and the excitement among the shifting crowd of writers, drifters, hangers-on, oddball characters, and others that Holmes encountered. His journals, his novel, and his later reminiscences are full of references to wild parties, marital problems, heavy drinking, and differences of opinion about writing, all of it with the background of bebop, the music that had surfaced in the immediate post-war years and influenced both Holmes and Kerouac. It wasn't all just partying and hangovers, and there was work being done. Kerouac published his first novel, The Town and the City, in 1950 and was working on others. Ginsberg was writing his early poems. Alan Harrington was busy with the book that would later be published as The Revelations of Dr Modesto, and Holmes was beginning to realise, partly thanks to his wife's prompting, that he ought to write about what was directly in front of him rather than trying to create totally fictional characters to carry ideas. It would take a little time, and he would struggle with it, but he did eventually complete the novel that came out as Go in 1952. If Holmes had hoped that Go would bring him success he was soon disappointed. It was reviewed here and there but didn't sell particularly well, nor did its subject-matter arouse a great deal of interest. Holmes was asked to write an article for the New York Times to explain what was meant by the book's talk about a Beat Generation, but the time wasn't ripe for the kind of response that greeted the publication of On the Road in 1957. There was a nervousness in the air in America in the early-1950s, with Senator McCarthy and others like him on the prowl and any sort of deviant behaviour looked on as suspicious and un-American. Interestingly, Brother-Souls suggests that Holmes was too interested in his writing to formulate any strong opinions about what was happening. It does occur to me, though, that bearing in mind his early flirtations with communism, he may have decided that it was best to keep his head down until the anti-communist hysteria subsided. Kerouac had been generally supportive of Holmes's attempts to write a novel based on the activities of their Beat friends, though he wasn't happy about the book's dark vision, nor with the way certain actions were ascribed to the character based on him. There was, too, a degree of hidden resentment about the fact that Holmes seemed to be acting as a kind of chronicler and spokesman for the Beat Generation, though Holmes always acknowledged that Kerouac had coined the term. They were friends but a further rift began to develop when Holmes let it be known that he was working on a jazz novel. Kerouac himself had the same idea, though he never actually completed his book, whereas Holmes was already hard at work on his and an excerpt from it appeared in Discovery in 1953. By this time, however, the New York Beat community, if it can be called that, had broken up as people died, moved away, got involved with other things, and so on. Holmes was locked into a marriage that was falling apart, with his wife rebelling against his moods, his refusal to work at anything other than his writing, his heavy drinking, extra-marital affairs, and the crowd he mixed with. She'd never been impressed with Ginsberg's antics, for example, and her view of Neal Cassady was that he was just a con-man and not "some kind of prophet of the new life." Wives and other women associated with the Beats often had a tough time. Kerouac relied on his mother for financial support, and both of Holmes's wives worked hard at dull jobs while he wrote. There's a revealing passage in which his second wife describes her situation: "He does nothing in terms of shared responsibility for the daily details of human living. His meals are bought, cooked, cleaned up after, his clothes washed and pressed, along with my own, the bills are paid, the phone handled, the cats fed, the house cleaned, his mother placated with time spent with her. I work some of the time and worry all of the time and am worn out the rest of the time."
Very few writers make a living from their writing and Holmes was no exception. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he struggled with his novels, wrote articles for magazines to earn money, and took on part-time teaching jobs. He drank a lot and, at one low point, was arrested for stealing food that he couldn't afford to buy. Two novels were published, The Horn, his jazz book, in 1958, and Get Home Free in 1964, but neither made a great impression either in terms of sales or critical acclaim. Some jazz writers did say that The Horn was one of the better jazz novels. There is, incidentally, a close analysis of the book in Brother-Souls which shows how carefully Holmes constructed it and how it reflected his idea that "the jazz artist was the quintessential American artist - that is, that his work hang-ups, his personal neglect by his country, his continual struggle for money, the debasement of his vision by the mean streets, his ofttimes descent into drugs, liquor, and self-destructiveness," and Holmes related all this to the problems experienced by various 19th Century American writers like Poe, Melville, Hawthorn, Whitman, and others. I think it's obvious that Holmes saw the jazz experience as being not dissimilar to his own struggles to create in a hostile environments It's perhaps interesting to wonder what Kerouac's jazz novel, had it ever appeared, would have been like. The passages that he wrote about jazz, in On the Road and in a few short articles, suggest that he would have followed a looser and less-intellectual line. It was clear to Holmes that, as he got older and literary success evaded him, he would have to find another way of earning a living. As with so many writers before him he turned to teaching and eventually landed a job at the University of Arkansas. He continued to work on his novels, though none of them were published, and started to write poetry again but in a more-open form than the poems which were published in the 1940s. It was in the 1970s that I contacted him and he responded with several poems that appeared in Palantir, a little-magazine I was then editing. I had only a brief correspondence with him but he seemed friendly and relaxed about the fact that I couldn't pay him anything for the poems. It wasn't a problem, he said, and added, "We're all in the same boat, bailing together." His main achievements during these years were the essays he wrote, many of them dealing with personalities of the Beat Generation, such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, and others with people like Gershon Legman, Jay Landesman, and Nelson Algren, who weren't Beats but operated outside the mainstream of American culture. And there were some superb evocations of particular periods, such as the 1940s and 1930s, and of the films of the 1930s. I'm picking out just a few pieces and there were many more, including some engaging travel articles, though Holmes was never a conventional writer in this genre. His approach was much more idiosyncratic and often related more to the people he met than to the places. Always a heavy smoker, Holmes died of cancer of the jaw in 1988. Was he a failure as a writer? I don't think so, and his novels, if not works of the highest order, do have much to recommend them. Go has obvious documentary value and Kenneth Rexroth rightly remarked, "If you want to understand what Allen Ginsberg called 'the best minds of my generation, Go is the book." But it's unfair to rate it solely for its documentary aspect and it has qualities as a novel that are worth taking note of. The Horn was a worthwhile attempt to write a serious jazz novel, one that would go beyond the sensationalism of other books and show how and why the music was created. Get Home Free was flawed but the section called "Old Man Molineaux" can stand on its own and is a marvellous description of a small-town drunk and the area he lives in. There are poems by Holmes that deserve to be remembered, and I've already referred to his essays which, some critics suggest, may be what he will most be remembered for. He once wrote, "my Beat Generation, like the Lost Generation before it, was primarily a literary group, and not a social movement; and probably all that will last out of our Beat years are a rash of vaporous anecdotes, and the few solid works that were produced." If that's the case then something that Holmes wrote is sure to be among those works. I've concentrated on Holmes in this review, but Brother-Souls closely ties in his activities with those of Kerouac. It seemed to me to be right to do this because Kerouac's life and books have been written about in more than one biography and academic study, whereas Holmes has been neglected for the most part. Ann Charters and Samuel Charters deserve credit for drawing attention to Holmes and their way of doing it makes complete sense. Anyone unfamiliar with Holmes will be able to see how he was an important member of the Beat movement and how his friendship with Kerouac affected both men. It was, admittedly, a friendship that had its problems, many of them resulting from Kerouac's paranoias and resentments, not to mention his alcoholism, but it finally survived over the years until Kerouac's death. If anyone wants to know how much Holmes cared for Kerouac they should read his "The Great Rememberer" or "Gone in October," two moving essays in which he celebrated his friend. KEEPER OF THE FLAME: MODERN JAZZ IN MANCHESTER 1946-1972 by Bill Birch. 328 pages. £25 plus postage. ISBN 978-0-9566670-0-7 Reviewed by Jim Burns March 2011
Jazz histories tend to focus on a few major cities and the musicians who worked in their clubs and recording studios. In the United States, New York and Los Angeles tend to get most of the attention when modern jazz is discussed, with occasional references to Chicago and San Francisco. I have also seen books which chart jazz developments in Seattle, Detroit, and a few other places. In Britain the only place written about is London and other cities are more or less ignored. So, when a book comes along that looks closely at personalities and events in one of the cities outside London it's worth devoting some time to it. It's possible that several British cities could lay claim to an early interest in modern jazz. I recall a brief correspondence many years ago with someone who was trying to get together material relating to the first days of bebop in Birmingham, though I don't think his project ever got off the ground. And other locations like Glasgow and Liverpool surely had a small pool of musicians and enthusiasts with an interest in bebop. But Manchester seems to have been the city where there was a thriving scene from the mid-1940s onwards. Were there specific reasons for this? I have seen it suggested that the strong brass band tradition in the area had an influence in terms of providing a pool of trained musicians. And the large number of bands and groups working in the dance-halls and clubs across the city and in neighbouring towns could also have been a determining factor. Bebop required a fair amount of skill and understanding for it to be played properly, and numbers of reasonably proficient musicians would have been available in and around Manchester. Still, it's not easy to pinpoint exactly why it became a place with, for a time at least, a concentrated modern jazz community. Bill Birch's Keeper of the Flame places a man called Tony Stuart at the centre of the liking for the new sounds that were starting to filter through around 1945. He was involved with various clubs and musical, activities, and Birch says: "The famed Club 11 founded in London by tenor-saxist Ronnie Scott and other jazz musicians opened in December, 1948. Tony Stuart always claimed to have brought and played bop sounds to Manchester long before that date. He certainly advertised a jazz quintet as playing within his own 14-piece band in March, 1945, and as stated earlier, dozens of G.I.s turned up at the Astoria from Burtonwood every weekend, some bearing the latest bop 78s once the U.S. recording ban was lifted on November 11, 1944." Burtonwood was a large American air base (around 20,000 service personnel were stationed there) within easy reach of Manchester. I suppose it's debatable just how modern the jazz being played in Manchester really was. Were the musicians playing bebop? The problem is that no recorded evidence seems to exist. Early examples of British bop on records were mostly, if not all, from sessions in London studios. It's almost impossible to know what the music in Manchester actually sounded like, and even if it did indicate an awareness of bebop it's likely that it was played by only a few musicians. Interest in bebop, even in London, was still limited to a handful of jazzmen and a small coterie of informed fans. Later in the 1940s there were visits to Manchester by many of the leading lights of the expanding British bop movement. Musicians associated with Club 11 (Ronnie Scott, Hank Shaw, the ill-fated pianist Tommy Pollard, and Johnny Dankworth) made the journey north, as did Kenny Graham's Afro-Cubists, Tito Burns's bright little bop group, and the Vic Lewis orchestra which specialised in the music of Stan Kenton. By 1950 or so bebop had become an acknowledged (if not always accepted) part of British jazz and the situation in Manchester had opened up in many ways. Keeper of the Flame provides a great deal of information about local musicians who were playing modern jazz. Some - the fine trombonist Ken Wray is just one example - soon moved on to the national scene and worked with top big-bands like those led by Jack Parnell, Oscar Rabin, Vic Lewis, and Ivor Kirchin. Others were employed in the city's clubs and dance-halls. A non-musician who provided much of the impetus for the development of modern jazz was Eric Scrivens, whose Club 43 opened in 1951 and carried on at various locations for many years. In time, when restrictions were lifted and American jazzmen could play in Britain, Club 43 played host to Dexter Gordon, Zoot Sims, Johnny Griffin, and Lee Konitz, to name just a few of them. The club continued to bring in most of the top British modernists from London. Visiting jazzmen, both British and American, were often backed by local players like the excellent pianists Joe Palin and Eric Ferguson. The breakdown of the ban on Americans working in Britain meant that major concerts could be staged in Manchester. Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, and Duke Ellington brought their bands to the city, and Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic allowed fans to see and hear Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Peterson, and Sonny Stitt, while in 1958 another outfit, touring as Jazz from Carnegie Hall, starred J.J.Johnson, Kai Winding, Zoot Sims, and Kenny Clarke. There were also concerts featuring Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and a Miles Davis group. It was truly an eventful period, what with the visiting Americans, modern jazz stars from London frequently in Manchester clubs, and local modernists in venues (sometimes short-lived) across the city. There were also several record shops which catered to jazz fans. Inevitably, much of the activity was based in the city centre and it's noted that attempts to present modern jazz in clubs and pubs in the outlying areas often failed after a few weeks. If you lived in one part of Manchester and wanted to get to another part it wasn't always easy. And smaller clubs tended to feature lesser-known musicians who, no matter how good they were, couldn't pull in enough people to make a venue viable. It's also probably true to say that regular visits by American jazzmen and major London modernists inclined audiences to listen to them rather than local musicians in small places in the suburbs. Bill Birch records that by the late-1960s "the city's modern jazz scene was fading." No explanation for this decline, though it's fairly obvious that the rise of rock music in the 1960s had its effect. And many of the people who'd flocked to hear modern jazzmen were now older and had family and other responsibilities that limited their capacity to go out a lot. A few scattered locations continued to spotlight modern jazz, though not always with any success. The book refers to an appearance for a couple of nights by bop pianist Joe Albany at the Black Lion pub in Salford, and claims that the two performances were "sold out in advance." Well, I was present on one of those nights and only a handful of people listened to Albany who played brilliantly in less than sympathetic circumstances. He played with such intensity that a musician friend, thinking of the pianist's days with Charlie Parker and other boppers, whispered to me, "My God, can you imagine what a quintet of these guys must have sounded like?" Keeper of the Flame is a fascinating book with only a few minor errors (Bob Gordon for Joe Gordon, the trumpeter with Shelly Manne's group at the Free Trade's Hall in 1960). Its interest isn't limited to those who were around in the period concerned, even if it can be used as an exercise in nostalgia. It has much more to offer. I've mostly mentioned a few well-known names, but one of its real achievements is the way in which it draws attention to numerous Manchester-based musicians. They perhaps never established reputations outside their immediate localities and often seem to have sunk from sight after a few years. Nor did they appear on records. In fact, it's doubtful if any of their work survives unless there are tapes in private hands, but they contributed to the musical life of the city, sometimes by providing backing for visiting jazzmen and sometimes through their work in the clubs. It's worth mentioning that modern jazz didn't completely die out after 1972. The Band on the Wall later brought in many excellent musicians and I can remember hearing Dexter Gordon, James Moody, Billy Mitchell, Al Haig, Red Rodney there. And there was a lively scene for a time at a pub in Stockport (yes, I know that isn't Manchester, but it's just next door) called the Warren Bulkeley, I think. Warne Marsh, Art Farmer, Kai Winding, and others whose names escape me, appeared there. Local modernists, too, continued to play when and where they could. It's only right to add a note about the book itself. It's beautifully produced, with dozens of rare photos, illustrations of programmes, posters, and other memorabilia, and masses of information about who played where and when. It's a labour of love and isn't being sold in shops for a good reason. Bookshops take far too big a cut for themselves. As it is the £25 that is being charged will only cover production costs so no-one will make a profit from Keeper of the Flame. To order a copy contact Bill Birch, 6 Square Road, Todmorden, Lanes., OL14 7SU. Telephone number 01706 816229.
MISSING A BEAT: THE RANTS AND REGRETS OF SEYMOUR KRIM edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Syracuse University Press. 236 pages. $30. ISBN 978-0-8156-0948-3 Reviewed by Jim Burns March 2011
Seymour Krim's reputation suffers from his not being easily placed in a convenient pigeon-hole. Was he a Beat? Well, he did have some links to that group through editing The Beats, one of the liveliest anthologies of their work and generally speaking positively about them. Was he a New York Jewish Intellectual? He was certainly Jewish and an intellectual, and when he was younger wrote for publications associated with the Manhattan critical community. Was he a creative writer or a journalist? He started his writing life wanting to be a novelist but most of his published work appeared in newspapers and magazines and can best be described as journalism. Was he one of the New Journalists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, grabbed the limelight as they combined reportage with accounts of their personal involvements in the situations they reported on? He did write very much in that style once he broke free of the restrictions encountered in his early career, and there have been suggestions that, in some ways, he almost pioneered the methods of New Journalism. The problem is that Krim always seemed to be on the fringes of these various groups, with the consequence that when they're written about he often rates only a passing mention, if that. There are several major Beat anthologies, for example, but most of them ignore his work. The same can be said about books devoted to the New York Intellectuals. I have ten on my shelves but only three of them mention Krim, and then only briefly. As for the New Journalism, most of the attention is paid to Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and others like them. Krim is considered a minor player in the game. It's easy to see why he's often a forgotten figure. He was born in 1922 into a well-to-do Russian-Jewish immigrant family. His father died when Krim was seven and his mother soon began to show signs of mental instability and committed suicide in 1932. According to a sister quoted by Mark Cohen, there was "a pattern within the family of mental aberration, "and an older brother had problems and died when he was lobotomised. Krim himself later had a breakdown which affected his life and literary activities. Although, like many good writers, he never completed a university education, he did read widely when in high school and was particularly impressed by many of the writers of the 1930s, such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and John Dos Passos. Mark Cohen notes that Krim felt that "as a Jew and the child of immigrants he stood, in Alfred Kazin's words, "outside America,"" and Krim himself thought of the novelists he admired as representing "the America OUT THERE and more than anything I wanted to identify with that big gaudy continent and its variety of human beings who came to me so clearly through the pages of these so-called fictions." He did enrol at the University of North Carolina but dropped out after a year and moved to Greenwich Village in 1943. He missed out on military service through bad eyesight and other problems, but worked for the Office of War Information as a writer and by 1947 was reviewing books for the New York Times. By 1951 he had broken through to prestigious intellectual publications like Commentary, Commonweal, The American Mercury, and the Hudson Review, though mainly with criticism. A couple of short stories did appear in New Directions anthologies, and a fragment from a novel-in-progress was published in The Tiger's Eye, but it was obvious that, despite his desire to be a writer of fiction, Krim had the kind of mind that was more inclined to different areas of writing. Some years later, when he wrote the brilliant "What's This Cat's Story?" he claimed that his urge to write fiction was killed off by a need to be seen in print quickly with reviews and the pressure of the intellectual community he mixed with which assigned more status to criticism than creative work. The truth was that Krim didn't have the imaginative stamina required for a sustained attempt to produce a novel. The work that he published prior to the mid-1950s, leaving aside the few bits of fiction, was conventional in terms of its use of language and development of ideas. It suited the sort of publications it was in and was intelligent and astute, but could probably have been written by any number of young, aspiring critics. A good illustration of how he wrote can be gained from the pieces from this period reprinted in the enlarged edition of Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer published in 1968. They are usefully contrasted with his post-1955 writings. It was a combination of a breakdown in 1955 and the arrival of the Beats on the scene around the same time that gave Krim the impetus to try something new. He recalled, "the Beats came along and revived through mere power and abandonment and the unwillingness to commit death in life some idea of a decent equivalent between verbal expression and actual experience." And he also wrote about "the revivifying power of the Beats" and the "actuality of the Beat messianic excitement." It probably helped that, with the advent of new writing, new magazines sprang up to give it outlets. Krim found a platform in the Village Voice and it printed several of the pieces which not only brought him to the attention of the Greenwich Village bohemian community but also aroused the interest of well-known writers like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. The open, personal and jazzy style was something different and Krim knew how to be controversial. He wrote about relations between blacks and whites and pointed out that white hipsters, anxious to establish their apartness from American society by identifying with blacks through an appreciation of jazz, simply didn't understand what lay behind the music. They romanticised it and didn't acknowledge the prejudice and poverty and violence that blacks had to put up with. He also wrote about the growing militancy of gays in New York and the decline (as he saw it) of traditional fiction and the rise of much more personal writing which would blend fact and fiction. There was in addition a frenetic piece, "Making It!" which dealt with the growing cult of celebrity and still reads accurately today. A short-lived little magazine called Exodus gave Krim space to look at his own experiences in Harlem and, in "The Insanity Bit," to give an honest account of what led to his breakdown and his encounters with psychiatrists and others in the medical profession. Krim's Jewishness was a key factor in his writing once he'd opened up his style and feelings, and Mark Cohen, referring to how he's relegated to a background role among the Beats, makes the interesting suggestion that, "The steady drumbeat of Jewish topics in Krim's work is almost certainly what has made him unwelcome in Beat anthologies. Allen Ginsberg's role as a Beat icon does not refute this argument. Where Krim wrestled with Jewish issues that confronted him in his daily life, Ginsberg, though of the same American-born generation, wrote immigrant literature when he wrote on Jewish themes. His masterpiece, Kaddish (1961), is a memorial to a dead Jewish world, as is "To Aunt Rose." I suppose it could be asked where Seymour Krim could go once he'd created a style that enabled him to place himself at the centre of whatever subject he was dealing with. He had to earn a living which meant that he had to take on editorial jobs and get his work published in newspapers and magazines which paid well. Over the years he wrote for Playboy, Vogue, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and many more, though he also still sometimes contributed to smaller publications. But he needed money and took on different assignments to get it. If I can bring in a personal anecdote, I had a letter from him (it's undated but I'd guess it was around 1973) from an address at the University of Puerto Rico where he was teaching. In it he says that if his contract with the University isn't renewed, "I'll move over to Penn State for the Dec-March term. I Need the bread to pay off gambling debts." Krim taught at other educational establishments in addition to those mentioned above, though always on a temporary basis. Like his publishing record it added up to what Mark Cohen calls, "an impressive but spotty résumé that often made Krim feel like a failure." Was he a failure? The pieces collected in Missing a Beat can be a reasonable way to test how successful he was, though they are only a small selection from his total output and my own notion is that it's necessary to read the contents of the three books published during his lifetime to get to grips with the real Seymour Krim. But I'm reviewing Missing a Beat so I'll look at that. It certainly has some of the best of his early work, including "What's This Cat's Story?" which is not only a wonderful personal account of his involvement with the New York literary scene of the late-1940s and early-1950s, but also provides a fascinating glimpse of a particularly talented group which included Chandler Brossard, Weldon Kees, Clement Greenberg, Manny Farber, and Anatole Broyard, all of whom went on to make their mark in one way or another. In a similar vein, the long piece about Milton Klonsky, another Greenwich Village resident though never as well-known as the others, is a tribute to someone Krim saw as a teacher (in the informal sense) who would "radically change my formless young life." It painted a picture of a young, impressionable Krim but also said a lot about Klonsky who had such rigorous intellectual standards that he often found it difficult to complete anything to his own satisfaction. "The American Novel Made Me," Krim's long memoir of growing up in the 1930s and being influenced by contemporary novelists, is a key piece: "I was literally made, shaped, whetted and given a world with a purpose by the American realist novel of the mid to late 1930s." With this in mind I think it's easy to understand why, in the personal journalism, he was always engaging with the real world. An essay like this shows him at his best, but I have doubts about other articles that he published, sometimes against the advice of friends. Norman Mailer had praised Krim and even written a short introduction to one of his books, but "Norman Mailer, Get out of my Head" attacked the famous novelist because he had become such a public figure, and as Mark Cohen says, "bristles with the aggrieved ego of the would-be famous." Another example of Krim's compulsion to launch attacks on people he'd previously had good relations with came when he accused the noted journalist Jimmy Breslin of anti-Semitism and also questioned his abilities as a novelist. It's difficult not to think that the "aggrieved ego of the would-be famous" had got to work again, and Breslin responded by calling Krim "a little, resentful failure." I haven't mentioned all the pieces in Missing a Beat and I'm not convinced that they represent the best of his work. It's only fair, though, to mention that the book is in a series dealing with "Judaic traditions in literature, music, and Art," so there is an emphasis on how and why Krim used and dealt with his Jewishness in his writing. Mark Cohen's excellent introduction deals effectively with this and helps explain why Krim often acted as he did. I've always been fascinated by Seymour Krim, ever since I first came across his work in publications like Exodus, Evergreen Review, and the Village Voice. I read him in The Beat Scene, bought The Beats when it came out, and picked up copies of Swank, the men's magazine he edited four sections of Beat writing for, in back-street bookshops where the respectable didn't go. In 1963 I wrote a short article, "Pin-up Lit.," for The Guardian in which I pointed out that some good and interesting writing could be found in publications like Swank and Nugget, where Krim had a job for several years. I wrote to him at Nugget and enclosed a copy of the article and got a friendly letter in reply, along with a copy of the first edition of Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. We had an on-and-off correspondence for a few years and I met him in London and found him friendly and informative. I was working on an essay, "Krim's Story," which was published in Stand in 1971. I sent him a copy of the magazine and got a relaxed reply from him, but I suspect that he may not have really appreciated my conclusion that his best work to that date had been in Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. He wrote: "It seems that I'll never match that damned first book, but life keeps moving me on and I have to write about it differently." A few years later (1977) I published his short "A Letter from America," about a journey south by Greyhound bus, in Palantir, a little magazine I was then editing. That was our last contact and I only occasionally saw his name in magazines. He was said to be working on Chaos, a book-length manuscript that would represent his ideas about America through the form of creative non-fiction. A few pages from it that did get into print after his death didn't suggest that it was ever likely to be published. It seemed too formless to be able to sustain its interest for very long. Krim had a heart-attack in the mid-1980s and his health suffered to the point where he could hardly function. Mark Cohen says: "Rather than decline into helplessness, Krim planned his own death." He committed suicide in 1989. Missing a Beat is a good book, despite my mild reservations about some of its contents. I've already referred to Mark Cohen's informative introduction and there's also a useful bibliography. Seymour Krim may not have been a major writer but he was often a very good one.
Modern Classics: My Happy Days in Hell From THOMAS LAND, in Budapest
A BROOKLYN TYRO
ISSUES THE HOLOCAUST NOVEL OF THE CENTURY
A 30-SOMETHING Brooklyn author has
written a brave and beautiful book about the Holocaust comparable, without
exaggeration, to the greatest novels of all literature. Readers must read it,
teachers must teach it, and those among us who have survived the horror that it
describes must be grateful to its author for making our experience
comprehensible for the 21st century.
Orringer’s grandparents emigrated to the US after the war. In common with many other Holocaust survivors, they maintained complete silence about their experience -- until they were questioned closely by the author when she came of age. The novel began as an endeavour to erect a loving monument to honour her Holocaust dead. And like the novel’s protagonists, the author of Hungary’s infamous First Jewish Law also emigrated to the US where he died beyond remorse in 1994 of Alzheimer's disease resembling, according to one who nursed him, an Auschwitz skeleton. GENDER AND ACTIVISM IN A LITTLE MAGAZINE: THE MODERN FIGURES OF THE MASSES by Rachel Schreiber Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 182 pages. £60. ISBN 978-1-4094-0945-8 Reviewed by Jim Burns
There is currently (April, 2011) an exhibition at the National Gallery in London called An American Experiment: George Bellows and the ' Ashcan Painters. And there's an excellent small book accompanying the exhibition, but nowhere in it is it mentioned that Bellows, and his contemporary, John Sloan, were for a time closely associated with the radical magazine, The Masses. Neither the exhibition or the book claim to be comprehensive surveys of Bellows and the Ashcan group, so there is perhaps a good reason why that episode in their lives is left out. But the book under review does focus attention on the material that Bellows and Sloan contributed to the magazine. Rachel Schreiber describes The Masses as a "small-run journal published in New York City between 1911 and 1917,"which seems a rather low-key description but she then says that it "was an exceptional magazine produced during an exceptional decade." It was started by Piet Vlag who ran the restaurant at the Rand School of Social Science, a socialist establishment which aimed to "educate workers and raise class-consciousness." Vlag persuaded many of the writers and intellectuals who came into the school to contribute, even though he couldn't pay them. The Masses, like many political and literary publications, never sold enough copies to make it a profitable venture and its use of graphics kept production costs high. According to Schreiber it always depended on outside donors who were often "wealthy philanthropists who were sympathetic to socialism and enjoyed The Masses' exposés." Neither the bohemians on the editorial board, nor the philanthropists, liked to have details of the funding too well-known so that their standing in their respective communities would not be affected. The years prior to the First World War were a time of social ferment. Eugene V. Debs had received almost one million votes when he stood for the Presidency, the I.W.W. was flexing its muscles, and unions in New York were organising strikes among the large immigrant workforce in the city. There was a general feeling that the time was ripe for change. Needless to say, there was opposition to change, especially among business leaders, conservative politicians, and others with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But many writers and artists were inclined to support socialist ideas, and when The Masses appeared it pulled in writers like Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, and Mary Heaton Vorse, and artists such as George Bellows, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Robert Minor . It needs to be noted that it was not a theoretical journal, no matter how much it wanted to promote socialism. Schreiber describes it as "idealistic," but makes it clear that it was "humorous, literary, and journalistic," and she quotes Floyd Dell as saying that it "stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, feminism, revolution." Humour was a key factor in the magazine, especially in the visual work. I don't think there is any doubt that it's the drawings that have retained their interest over the years. Irving Howe once pointed out that "not much of the political writing in The Masses has worn well," whereas the art work can still pack a punch. There was a drawing by Boardman Robinson (it's not in Schreiber's book) of two working-class women talking. One asks the other why she's celebrating and is told that her son is being released from prison. He was sentenced to ten years but has been given three off for good behaviour. "Ah," says the first woman, "I wish I had a son like that." There's humour there, though some might claim that it's of a patronising kind. A darker humour comes through in K.R. Chamberlain's drawing of an obviously upper-class couple watching soldiers marching off to war, and the woman saying, "It checks the growth of the undesirable classes, don't you know." I’ve read some of the poetry that was published in The Masses and very little of it still has energy or relevance. Schreiber states that "the muscular male appeared regularly in political cartoons that supported labour rights," and that in the antiwar cartoons he "served as the iconic and symbolic ideal for the might of the working-class." That "might" was seen as a contrast to the supposed weakness of the ruling class, and in the illustrations bosses were often shown as bloated while younger well-to-do types come across as effete and indolent. These were all stereotypes, of course, and in the case of representations of the working-class they could almost lend themselves to confirming suspicions about workers being "brutish, unintelligent, and prone to violence." But artists liked to play on ideas of working-class muscularity as compared to middle and upper-class flabbiness. There's a wonderful drawing by George Bellows, "Superior Brains: The Businessman's Class," which has a group of skinny or overweight, but clearly out-of-condition businessmen, being put through their paces by a trainer. It's effective and very funny, but really no more true than idealised drawings of supposedly fit and healthy workers. One of Schreiber's main points is that mostly male figures appear in cartoons of industrial situations. And, of course, men did play a dominant role heavy industry and many of the service industries, as well as in strikes. But women were heavily represented in the garment trades in New York and in the mills of New England and Massachusetts. In many ways, however, the artists tended to accept the idea, also believed by their supposed opponents, that "the normative worker was male," and that a woman's role should be mostly domestic. Schreiber says that "Unionists and other labour advocates took it for granted that men should be the primary wage earners," and she points out that, in fact, "the realities of working-class life" meant that everyone in a family (husband, wife, older children, the elderly) often had to contribute when possible. Women did do domestic work and look after children but they also had to do piecework in the home or work in sweat shops. There are a few drawings of women in these circumstances reproduced in the book and they mostly show them as worn-out and downtrodden. This was probably an accurate portrayal of their circumstances and it contrasted with the frequent images of working-class men towering over cringing bosses. Or there was Robert Minor's picture of "labour's lawyer," a giant fist punching its way into a courtroom and terrifying everyone there. Minor was one of the most forceful of the artists linked to The Masses. It's significant that he and Art Young were overtly political artists and, unlike Bellows, Sloan, and others, did not also produce what might be called conventional (in the sense of non-political) work for the art market. And it's a fact that, once they lost contact with The Masses, Bellows and Sloan were no longer involved with direct social and political commentary. Schreiber notes that Robert Minor did produce work which focused on women's role in industry but that little of it got into The Masses. Was this because the editorial board "favoured the gendered distinction of active male working figures to passive female victims"? Perhaps not, though she does think that "the editors emphasised a visual strategy that elevated the muscular male working-class figure to heroic status in order to further their political aims, leaving female workers within the space of representation to serve only as symbols for the adverse aspects of industrial labour." One of the most striking illustrations shows a large capitalist (easily identifiable by his top hat and coat tails, not to mention the grim expression on his face) pointing to an empty cradle and shouting "Breed" to a woman standing nearby. In the background is a gloomy factory with hordes of workers pouring in while large black clouds hang menacingly overhead. The clouds symbolise war (the word is actually printed among them). Schreiber has a neat discussion of this drawing by Art Young, but I couldn't help thinking that her idea that it is a "depiction of (male) workers and soldiers as dispensable fodder for industrial gain" may be pushing the gender analysis a bit too far. It may sound like nit-picking but I think I can see some female figures in the crowd, and Art Young would have been well aware that women worked in large numbers in mills and elsewhere and were just as much "dispensable fodder for industrial gain," as well as being affected by war. But I don't want to quarrel with Schreiber's general view that the role of women was often overlooked or underplayed in The Masses. The suggestion that women should breed tied in with worries about eugenics prevalent at the time. The mass immigration policies that had led to an influx of people from Russia, Eastern Europe, Italy, and other places led to claims of "race suicide" as birth rates among white middle-class American-born women declined. The Masses satirised these fears by questioning how people with large families living in deplorable conditions could be expected to raise healthy children. Art Young's "Hell on Earth" pictured a mother with three young children in a hovel while the father (not at all a sturdy-looking type) stares in despair at a pile of bills falling off a small table. Young liked to tag on captions and this one read: "Questions for Eugenists: In an atmosphere of worry and fear, how can children be developed physically and morally?'" Of course, some people would ask why the working-class had children if they couldn't afford them, but this was a time when birth control methods were known about but were still frowned on because they would, it was said, encourage women to be promiscuous. The notorious Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice attempted to limit the circulation of information relating to contraception and other matters. The Masses supported Margaret Sanger in her work and frequently attacked Comstock. There are three illustrations (one by George Bellows, two by Robert Minor) which lampoon him, but one of the sharpest comments on what happens when proper forms of birth control aren't available was K.R. Chamberlain's "Family Limitation - Old Style," which shows a woman about to drop a baby into the river. Artists in The Masses were fervently anti-war and Schreiber has some interesting comparisons to make between their views and those expressed by illustrators in more-conventional magazines. While Robert Minor drew an officer looking at a massive but headless man and saying, "At last a perfect soldier!", and Art Young showed a tough-looking worker confronting a capitalist and asserting that, having done the fighting, the workers would now take over, the suffragist magazine, The Woman Citizen, had covers which hammered away at the idea that if women played a key role in the war effort (they were called "Win-the-war-Women") by working in factories, on the land, or even just knitting, they would earn the right to vote. The women in these pictures were usually pretty, neatly-dressed, and if in a domestic setting shown only with one healthy child. It would seem that there was only a single-issue involved, that of getting the vote, and that otherwise there was an acceptance of the traditional female roles, with women only going outside them when an emergency arose. A K.R. Chamberlain drawing in The Masses suggested what would really happen once the war was over and men attempted to dominate again. The editors of The Masses had never been totally in agreement about how political its art work should be, and not all of the illustrations were as didactic as some of those I've mentioned. John Sloan's "The Return from Toil" is simply a picture of a group of tidily dressed working-class girls walking arm-in-arm and seemingly having a good time. And the same artist's "The Bachelor Girl" can be taken as a positive statement about a woman living independently, though that may be a form of social comment, not all of society thinking it right and proper that women should be able to act in that way. With regard to illustrations that didn't fit into the political category there was a mocking little rhyme in circulation:
But it's undeniable that social and political commentary was a priority for most of the artists, as it was for the writers, and once America entered the First World War in 1917 trouble was almost inevitable. Draconian laws restricting free speech came into force and were cited by the Post Office as the reason for refusing to deliver copies of The Masses to subscribers and that added to the problems it had been having for some time with distributors who refused to place it on bookstalls because of its anti-war sentiments. Some of its contributors (George Bellows was one of them) deserted the magazine. And then the Government decided to prosecute some of the editors for allegedly conspiring to obstruct recruitment and enlistment in the armed forces. Two trials took place and both resulted in hung juries. Art Young was the one artist to appear in court, along with the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, and even though they walked free the magazine was effectively at an end. As I mentioned earlier, it's the illustrations in The Masses that have survived best. Just look at the Robert Minor drawing on the cover of Rachel Schreiber's book. It's called "Pittsburgh," and is a comment on the use of militia to suppress a strike. A worker is impaled on the bayonet of a rifle held by a lunging militiaman, and Schreiber refers to the "forceful crayon strokes and deep contrasts between the dense black marks and the white page." Its power is still evident. She also describes it as a "striking example of the dynamic, powerful images of the muscular male workers that had become standard fare by the time of its publication in The Masses in August, 1916," so it helps support her general thesis about the "workings of gender and the role of images in activist practices" early in the 20th Century. She presents her case efficiently, though at times I couldn't help thinking that, given the period they lived in, the artists couldn't help portraying men and women, and their respective roles in society, in certain ways. Hutchins Hapgood, a writer who shared many of the same interests with the writers and artists of The Masses (see his Types From City Streets, with lively illustrations by Glenn O. Coleman, an artist associated with the Ashcan group) later wrote an autobiography called A Victorian in the Modern World, and that title perhaps points to the crux of the problem, which was that they were living at a time when old and new values were often in competition for the attention of creative people and this led to inevitable contradictions in their attitudes and activities. Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine is a fascinating book and is largely free of the worst forms of academic jargon. Rachel Schreiber has not tried to tell the whole story of the rise and fall of The Masses, and though she does sketch in the backgrounds of the leading artists who contributed to the magazine it is necessary to turn to other books for information about their activities and those of more artists who are referred to. Her lengthy bibliography will easily provide the relevant information. I ought to add that the book is well illustrated throughout.
BECOMING AMERICANS IN PARIS: TRANSATLANTIC POLITICS AND CULTURE BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS by Brooke L.Blower Oxford University Press. 354 pages. £22.50. ISBN 978-0-19-973781-9 Reviewed by Jim Burns
Paris in the 1920s. Well, of course, it's Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, expatriate drinkers, and little magazines that carried the message of modernism, and dozens of books have been written to tell the tales of literary experiments and entertaining escapades. It's all fascinating but in reality was just a small, if important, part of the total experience of the city in the period concerned. Paris, after all, is in France, so what were the French doing while the Americans lived it up? And were those artists and writers in Montparnasse the only Americans in town? Also, what was happening in the political arena? Most accounts have little or nothing to say about French politics but they did impact on the Americans in more ways than one. The inter-war years saw the rise of confidence in what was said to be the "American way of life." As Brooke L.Blower puts it: "Before, Americans had looked to Europe for cultural models. Now, celebrating their own arts and traditions - cultivating self-consciously American styles and postures - they were becoming a more self-aware and integrated population while simultaneously building up their economic and political clout around the world." And she goes on to suggest that Paris became central to the way in which "modern American culture would be defined, and how Americans would be imagined as critical players in global affairs." To emphasise her thesis about Paris being more than just a location for a Hemingway novel she asserts: "All but forgotten are the thousands of businessmen, journalists, scholars and others who poured into Paris alongside the more famous expatriates. And beyond the artistic impact of musicians, painters, and writers, little attention has been paid to Americans' influence in the city or the ways in which Parisians protested their presence, sometimes violently." The number of permanent American residents rose from 8,000 in 1920 to 32,000 in 1923 and around 40,000 in the mid and late-Twenties These figures did not include tourists and special occasions such as when over 20,000 members of the American Legion held their convention in Paris in 1927. To explode another myth, that of the Left Bank being where most Americans congregated, it's pointed out that the Right Bank was much more popular. The place de 1'Opera became "the prime reference point. This imposing square emerged during the 1920s as the main hub for the rapidly growing American colony - a nexus around which the grand hotels did a brisk transatlantic business, where tour buses lingered and scores of American companies set up shop." The financial benefits for the French capital are obvious and it's also significant that the Americans brought with them speciality goods and services previously unknown, or at least with little presence, in Paris. Not all Parisians welcomed the American influence which, they thought, led to the "French way of life" coming under threat. Blower reckons that reactions to foreigners, including Americans, "ranged widely from tolerance or more likely avoidance and indifference, to outright hostility." Some French writers went into print with lamentations for the decline of "the old Paris." André Warnod said: "Our guests, welcomed too eagerly, have spoken like masters and we have listened to them," meaning that things were becoming more and more Americanised. There were allegations that the influx of foreigners (not only Americans, though they were probably the biggest and most obvious contingent) had driven up the cost of living: "There are too many of these parasites here, eating our food, drinking our wine, going untaxed, and paying ridiculously little for everything they consume, thanks to the exchange." The fall in the value of the franc meant that Americans benefited but Parisians suffered, and a spate of attacks on tourists took place along with demonstrations against manifestations of American culture. Magazines and newspapers ran articles which claimed that Paris was becoming "a copy of America" and the city was "a conquered land." Critics attacked American films, seeing them as "potentially dangerous vehicles of cultural imperialism." And the American attitude towards eating and drinking horrified the French: "American customers threatened cherished routines - by demanding faster service, by promoting the abbreviated cocktail hour instead of the lingering aperitif, and, rather than adopting the protracted midday meal, by spreading the much-dreaded habit of the quick lunch." The cultural clashes referred to, along with the currency problems, altered relations between many Americans and the French. American foreign policy also disturbed Parisians, especially when it meant helping to revive the German economy while pushing France into quicker repayment of its war debts. Large economic and political concerns combined with small matters relating to social habits to create a climate of anti-Americanism. It was this climate that allowed extremists from both right and left of the political spectrum to manipulate crowds into street action. All it required was a trigger and that was provided in 1927 by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were convicted of an armed robbery in the USA during which two people were killed. The case had dragged on for several years and had attracted world-wide attention, and when they were finally put to death left-wing mobs took to the streets in Paris and a night of rioting followed, with hundreds of rioters and police injured and many arrests made. Restaurants and bars frequented by Americans were attacked and individual Americans seen on the streets were often targeted by the rioters. If the Sacco and Vanzetti affair gave the left an opportunity to indulge in a display of anti-Americanism, the right, too, seized on an opportunity to oppose "the liberalism linked with Americans and the districts that catered to them." The Paris police were noted for their brutality and were controlled by a reactionary Prefect, Jean Chiappe. He decided to launch what Blower describes as "a purging or cleansing" of certain areas of the city, and she hints that behind this operation lay a suspicion of the "Americans' presence and the kinds of values they were believed to embody." Chiappe was quoted as saying that "fear of the police is the beginning of wisdom," and his purge was said to be for the benefit of decent, well-behaved citizens. His men focused on anyone seeming to be outside a norm established in Chiappe's mind. The working class were seen as a threat, especially if they were politically active on the left. Blower, alluding to Chiappe's right-wing associations, refers to his cultivation of "reactionary cultural politics" which opposed communists and the like and also meant that "right-wing activists like Chiappe could hold together in their minds a cluster of enemies, including foreigners, homosexuals, Jews, Americans, and other purported undesirables, all imagined as agents of an economic and cultural liberalism that would undermine the health of the nation." The police may have kept a close watch on working-class areas of Paris, but they paid equal attention to parts of Montmartre and Montparnasse where Chiappe saw "cosmopolitanism in turmoil." Blower's account of the visit by well over 20,000 members of the American Legion in 1927 is particularly interesting. The Legion had been formed in Paris in 1919 when thousands of American servicemen were awaiting demobilisation. It established itself in America in the 1920s as an ultra-patriotic organisation that, its preamble said, aimed to "maintain law and order; to foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism," and much more. It had some positive aspects, in that it "piloted civic improvement schemes, contributing to child welfare services and disaster relief efforts." But the Legion also tried to exert control over what was taught in schools, insisted on loyalty oaths, chased radicals out of town, intimidated journalists, and helped break strikes. When they decided to stage their convention in Paris they met with opposition from French left-wingers but were welcomed by conservative elements in the Government and business community. A planned parade down the Champs-Élysées, and a national holiday declared by the French Government for the opening day of the convention, particularly aroused the anger of communists, socialists, and anarchists. Blower works hard to indicate that the Legion had some disturbing similarities to aspects of European fascist movements like those in Italy and Germany, something that French left-wingers and American liberals were aware of. As she says, it wasn't an outright fascist organisation but "exhibited key fascist elements." Not all Americans who lived in Paris were in favour of the Legion's visit, feeling that it would exacerbate anti-American sentiments. But, despite threats from the left, the parade passed off peacefully and, in fact, seemed to have entertained the crowds who watched it. It was hardly a militaristic display and was described as more of a carnival than a march. Blower's analysis of it is first-rate, though she comes to the conclusion that "the Legion's superficial lightheartedness and the group's potential as a dangerous political force were really two sides of the same coin." Americans who took part in the Legion's activities in Paris "acted out many Americans' growing belief that Europe was stagnant and inefficient, a region weighed down by cumbersome tradition, spent by the war, and burdened by out-of-control radicalism." I mentioned at the start of this review that the expatriates (those usually identified with Paris in the 1920s and 1930s) were only one element in the American association with the city. And they were often condemned by other Americans for having, it was alleged, abandoned their native land and its problems and sought refuge in Paris where they could avoid involvement with anything other than the purely personal. According to Blower, since the publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, "expatriates have been stereotyped as escapists who selfishly renounced civic responsibilities, watching unscathed from afar the social conflicts of the post-war United States while at the same time maintaining distance from the vagaries of European affairs." And she proposes that the expatriates themselves helped perpetuate this myth when they wrote about their experiences in Paris after they'd returned to the United States and often were involved in radical politics. The fact is, though, that people like Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Shirer, and Josephine Herbst, frequently travelled far beyond Paris and were aware of what was happening in the world generally. Hemingway, working as a journalist, covered events in Italy, Greece, and elsewhere, while Dos Passos also went to Greece and Turkey and into parts of the Soviet Union. As Blower says: "Casting themselves as radical sympathisers or noble partisans of democracy ready to take on the burdens and moral choices demanded by the period's popular politics, they modelled a deeply social and cosmopolitan sense of the engaged world participants Americans could be, an alternative to the bellicose versions of worldliness displayed in Paris by the veterans, casual tourists, or the Chamber of Commerce crowd." The journalist William Shirer covered wars and political turmoil in many countries, the black writer Langston Hughes visited Russia, as did Josephine Herbst and her husband, John Herrmann. I'm pulling just a few names out of the text to emphasise the point Blower makes, that the expatriates were much more aware of, and sometimes involved with, wider social and political matters than some accounts of their activities would have us believe. Blower sums up by telling how, following the end of the Second World War, a kind of depoliticisation of Paris began to take over in depictions of the city. The 1951 film, An American in Paris, "showcased a Paris of timeless appeal and stock clichés: boulevard cafes, neighbourhood bistros, and - now the most important icon of the city for Americans - the Eiffel Tower." She also says that, in various films, "Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces by Manet, Degas, or Toulouse-Lautrec became crowd-pleasing vehicles for celebrating the city in purely aesthetic terms," probably because such paintings did not seem related to any kind of art (surrealism, for example) that "smacked of the factious interwar political scene." Blower mentions a "depoliticised epilogue" in a reprint of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, originally published in 1934, and she adds that Hemingway's A Moveable Feast "stripped the city of its shrill newspaper headlines, its refugees, its rampaging policemen." According to her: "This sanitised version of Americans' place in the capital appealed at mid-century because it resonated so well with the intellectual and social preoccupations of the age." Disillusionment with communism and the rise of McCarthyism meant that "many quietly buried their past associations of their more adventurous days of youth." The real Paris of the 1920s and 1930s was forgotten and in its place appeared the mythical one that it suited later generations to believe in. Becoming Americans in Paris is an important book and adds an extra dimension to what we know about the city and the Americans who spent time there. It's well-researched, has a good bibliography, and is written in a style that never bogs down in jargon.
ARTISTS ON THE EDGE: THE RISE OF COASTAL ARTISTS' COLONIES, 1880-1920 Amsterdam University Press. 408 pages. $59. ISBN 978-90-8964-251-6 Reviewed by Jim Burns
There is currently a fair amount of interest in the history of artists' colonies. The idea of specific locations, usually on the coast or in attractive country areas, where painters and others congregated, seems to intrigue people, and it's useful when curators are thinking about organising exhibitions. I've seen several, large and small, devoted to St Ives and Newlyn, and the number of books with St Ives in the title appears to increase year by year. I'm not condemning this activity and personally find it all fascinating. It may be that there's an element of nostalgia involved in some of the interest. People perhaps look back to a time when things seemed to be less institutionalised. And it could be that the heyday of artists' colonies produced paintings that are, on the whole, easy to look at, by which I mean that they're based on a realistic, if sometimes romanticised, view of the world. Looking at them we see landscapes, seascapes, people working in fields or on the quayside, and mostly small towns or villages which appear to have an atmosphere of security and continuity about them. It's a simplification, of course, to suggest, as I appear to be doing, that what was in paintings before 1880 didn't deal with the matters referred to. But there may be a general point to be made in saying that a lot of art prior to the late-19th Century often used religious, historical, and classical imagery that required a degree of knowledge or explanation to bring out its qualities. And some art after 1900, as it moved towards abstraction and other experimental areas, likewise couldn't be easily understood. There's a sly comment in Brian Dudley Barrett's book when, discussing the rise of a series of modern movements, he remarks: "The art market was almost back to its original position, whereby the canvas needed someone educated to explain its meaning or purpose." In contrast, a great many of the painters mentioned in his survey stuck to orthodox styles, even if they sometimes varied their subject-matter or showed an awareness of innovations in the use of colour and how they dealt with the effects of light. The main thrusts in the push towards radical changes came from the cities, and you can't imagine Cubism, for example, coming from an artists' colony of the kind that Barrett deals with. One or two individuals stand out in terms of being adventurous and he refers to Jan Toorop, who was something of a livewire and liked to keep up with the latest trends. Not all colonies were the same in the way that they functioned and the artists they attracted. Barrett makes the point that they have to be seen in the "wider context of the modern movement." And it may be necessary here to say that his detailed analysis largely concentrates on coastal colonies in Denmark, Germany, and Holland, with minor asides for Newlyn, Concarneau, Staithes, and a few other places. Artists often moved from one colony to another, not just in the same country but internationally. But he does devote a chapter to Barbizon, which wasn't a coastal colony but had a major impact in that it set the style for what came later. He says: "The School of Barbizon is commonly cited as the precedent for artists' villages, though independent inquiry into the unspoilt countryside was already common across Europe by mid-century." He does add that none of the artists linked to two major colonies, Worpswede (Germany) and Skagen (Denmark), had visited Barbizon, "although it would have been difficult to avoid knowledge of that 'Mecca for Realism' prior to their own experiments in rural social creativity." Why did artists choose to gravitate towards colonies around this time? Individuals had gone into the countryside or to the coast in search of fresh ideas about what to paint, but it wasn't until Barbizon that groups of them chose to move to places where they could live together in some sort of community, loose as it may have been. Barrett argues that "the rise of these groups was entirely in keeping with the changing social, philosophical and economic conditions of the era, and was in many ways predictable." And he later says: "Ideological notions of a rural Arcadia may have inspired a few urban artists to leave for the countryside, although money matters were never far away from the minds of the majority of participants. They were all looking for a competitive edge." Economic pressures within the art profession probably caused many artists to look for new subjects they could exploit. There is a suggestion that coastal colonies, as opposed to those inland where the pace of change was slower, experienced rapid alterations to the way of life they represented as railways brought them into contact with the wider world and tourism developed. What were once villages largely operating around fishing became holiday destinations as access to them eased and, in some cases, they could even be reached by day-trippers. How did the artists who had gone there hoping for traditional dress, customs, etc., to paint respond to the changes? They certainly didn't all begin to produce pictures showing new sights (trains, steamers instead of sail, people relaxing on the sands), at least not at first, and continued presenting an idealised view of coastal life. Dealers and their customers wanted to see fishermen and their women, though with much of the hard work, poverty, and danger either toned down or eliminated altogether. An occasional hint of tragedy could creep in as recognition that men were lost at sea, but it was usually done in a sentimental way. Walter Langley, an English painter based in Newlyn, had socialist leanings and did try to invest his canvases with some social significance, but he had to mostly cater for the middle-class market if he wanted to sell and buyers didn't want to be disturbed too much. Art markets earlier in the 19th Century had largely been dominated by what Barrett describes as "the traditional Academy-Salon system," whereby established institutions, essentially an arm of the State, were the outlets for painters wanting to display and sell their work. The escalation in the number of artists in the 19th Century (Barrett notes that were "over 4,000 registered painters by the early 1860s" in Paris) meant that it was increasingly difficult for young painters, and many older ones, to reach possible buyers. But from mid-century it started to become obvious that innovations in printing, the rise of journalism as newspapers and magazines proliferated, and the surge in the number of people who could afford and wanted to buy paintings, were beginning to have an effect. There arose what Barrett refers to as "the Dealer-Critic System" as a replacement for the "Academy-Salon System." Did artists' colonies develop in response to this new marketing process as painters realised that it gave them greater freedom to survive outside the old framework for marketing their work? This new market, like the old one, naturally made its own demands, but I doubt that they were too much of a problem in many cases. Most artists have no great desire to break new ground and simply want to sell their work. So, they're happy to produce what the market wants. With this in mind it's clear that moving to a colony as they spread across Europe could be a sound career move for some artists. The better colonies became known as places where dealers and critics could discover new talent. Also, the large numbers of newspapers and magazines catering to a public insatiable for news and entertainment meant that journalists were always on the lookout for good stories. Novelists, too, could get in on the act, colonies often providing colourful material. An example, though it's not mentioned by Barrett, can be quoted in connection with Concarneau on the Brittany coast where there was an active colony. An American writer, Blanche Willis Howard, based her novel, Guenn: A Wave on the Breton Coast, published in 1883, on the relationship between the painter Edward Simmons and a local girl he used as a model. In real life it doesn't appear that there was anything to the relationship beyond painting, but Howard dramatised it to make it seem more complex than it was. The book was successful and drew artists and tourists to Concarneau. Stories about artists' colonies, even if they weren't as colourful as Howard's novel, were always good copy and even serious art magazines liked to feature articles about them. There may have been advantages to the publicity if it stimulated interest in the work of the artists, but there were drawbacks if it encouraged the wrong kind of visitors. I've perhaps annoyed Barrett by moving into the anecdotal because he's at pains to stress that he considers too many earlier studies of colonies have focused on personalities and entertaining stories. He set out to be much more analytical and contextual, and wants to show how and why artists thought it worthwhile gathering in colonies and how those colonies took different directions when arriving at arrangements that enabled them to function successfully. They were not Utopian colonies of the kind set up by political activists and which often aimed to be self-sufficient or at least operate at some distance from the wider society. A few artists were socialists but most were more concerned to get on with their own work. They usually tried to get along with the locals, sometimes by helping to set up schools or starting schemes to alleviate poverty. But the aim of many artists was to develop and sell their work in an atmosphere where they could count on some support, such as constructive criticism and advice about marketing. And they enjoyed the fruits of success if it came their way. Barrett documents what happened when artists were successful: "It is also surprising how quickly the Worpswede pioneers separated once success came their way, and how each retreated into rather conventional-looking homes and detached villas." They were not usually life-long bohemians, if they had ever been bohemians at all. One of the factors that Barrett looks at closely is the 19th Century rise in plein-air painting. There had been artists who painted in the open before the Impressionists helped widen the idea, and painters at Barbizon worked out-of-doors before finishing their canvases in their studios. But by the 1880s, and the rise of colonies, it had become a standard practice to paint outside. There were still attacks on it, often because it was said that the paintings "appear merely sketched out and in no sense complete," or because they pictured "ordinary daily life." Such criticisms came from conservative voices in the art establishment, but the fact was that the new audience for realism (or something near to it) in painting liked what they saw, provided it wasn't too raw, and they had the money to buy it. It's Barrett's contention that "the grass-roots development of pleinairism, as seen in the growth of many rural artists' colonies, implied a fresh, open and more democratic movement that took a wholesome view on all kinds of experimentation." Add to this the fact that a lot of plein-air paintings were relatively small for practical reasons - they had to be carried around and large canvases would easily blow over if a wind got up - meant that they could be transported to dealers in cities where there was a demand for art that could be hung in middle-class homes. Barrett is astute when he talks about practical matters, such as the development of the paint tube and the role it played in encouraging artists to work outdoors. Before tubes paint had to be carried in pigskin or bladder containers which were "troublesome, inefficient and dirty." Once paint tubes were available it became easier to have a selection of colours in another useful innovation, travel paint boxes. Add to these the manufacture of easels, chairs, and parasols for protection against the elements, and leaving the studio wasn't a problem. Amusingly, a minor trend started with "painters painting painters painting" as they hunted around for subjects they thought would have an appeal. It's noted that "Realism or Naturalism, Social-Realism or Romanticism - they all came together under the parasol of pleinairism at Skagen's artists' colony," and this ties in with his observations about colonies not being centres for the advocacy of a particular artistic aim. A variety of styles co-existed, at least within the boundaries referred to above, and many artists were happy to alternate between easel painting and magazine illustrations. Rapid developments in printing were of benefit and combined with greater access to outlets to enable them to earn much-needed money. They weren't all in a position to make a living from paintings alone and local circumstances sometimes affected sales. When he discusses colonies in Germany, Barrett says: "Many of Germany's wealthiest collectors had a penchant for the international juste-milieu that was Impressionism, as they saw it as uncomplicated, uncontroversial and un-political. Just as in other countries in this study, most of the nouveau-riche actually preferred artwork devoid of social comment." And he adds dryly that they wanted subjects "distant from their own source of wealth," and preferred "the bourgeois comforts of late-Impressionism, exemplified by Manet." At Worpswede, "the vast majority of its artists produced purely uncontroversial landscape pictures devoid of social criticism." Their attitude is easy to understand. They wanted to sell their paintings so produced what the market wanted. In any case, I doubt that many painters were really interested in using their work for social commentary of a political kind. If they had been they surely would have gone to industrial towns and cities. It can be argued that in choosing to paint in the countryside or along the coast, though avoiding the grimmer scenes even there, they were making a form of protest against the modern world, but I find it hard to accept this. I suspect that most of them knew just what to do to find a market for their work. I'm put in mind of the Glasgow Boys exhibitions in Glasgow and London in 2010 where it was noticeable that, with a couple of minor exceptions, none of the paintings had any scenes that showed the industrial world of Scotland. And this at a time when Glasgow was a major centre for shipbuilding and related activities and there was plenty of poverty around. I recall a picture which had a railway-station, though the people on the platform looked polite and well-dressed, and another in which a couple of factory chimneys could be seen in the distance, but that was it. The Glasgow Boys were associated with an artists' colony at Cockburnspath in Scotland, and their work was popular in Germany and widely exhibited and publicised there. One of the interesting facts about the German colonies is that they don't seem to have attracted many foreigners. But German artists did visit colonies like Katjwik and Volendam in Holland. Both were very active communities and Barrett looks at them closely. Volendam, in particular, sustained a large and lively group of painters, partly thanks to a sympathetic and enterprising innkeeper who welcomed them and helped with useful contacts in the local community, language difficulties, and so on. Barrett is keen to stress that an inn, especially one with a friendly owner, was central to a colony. They did vary from place to place, with German innkeepers not being noted for their helpfulness, something which could be ascribed to the artists not being seen as useful to local economies. There may have been other reasons, including a suspicion of outsiders and especially foreigners who might try to bring in new ideas. It wasn't only the innkeepers who were unfriendly and in Holland the village elders in Volendam at first resisted the notion of opening a hotel, or allowing strangers to stay overnight, but were eventually persuaded to change their minds by the innkeeper. He seems to have been someone who liked artists and what they did, as well as realising how they could bring business to the area. Three of his daughters later married artists. Barrett provides information about the nationalities of the artists who lived in or visited the various colonies. There were a lot of Americans, at least in those in France and Holland, and American painters were generally busy in Europe. Barrett gives a figure of 5,000 American artists in Montparnasse in 1910, which is rather startling. They turned up at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing, Pont-Aven, Concarneau, Giverny, Volendam, St Ives, and elsewhere. In Giverny the main hotel registered almost 700 Americans in its first twelve years. There's a gallery at Giverny which, until recently, was run by the Terra Foundation and had special exhibitions of American artists who had worked in France. Like so many other artists who functioned in colonies their paintings, judging from those I saw over a number of years, were competent, colourful, and largely focused on attractive scenes in the countryside, on the coast, in gardens or perhaps along a river. None of them that I can recall had much to say about the lives of the locals, nor did they suggest that the artists had any interest in what was going on in Paris and elsewhere, other than with regard to artistic trends and even then the interest didn't extend much beyond Impressionism. One of the reasons why Americans went to Pont-Aven was because a law had been passed restricting access to L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts to those fluent in French. But it was more than probable that a lot of artists settled in, or visited, the colonies like Volendam or Egmond or Concarneau just because they were, to use a contemporary phrase, where the action was. Barrett says that they brought "new enthusiasm, a commercial awareness and realistic attitudes to modern publishing and advertising methods, seen in the high number of illustrators amongst their number." They were usually financially solvent, too, which helped local economies and were also noted for their outgoing natures and companiable ways which helped create a "friendly atmosphere." It's apparent that a whole series of reasons led to the creation of artists' colonies in the late-19th Century. One was certainly the reaction against the academicism of art, with training in the established institutions failing to excite young artists. Another was the enthusiasm for plein-air painting with its desire to find new subjects so that the classicism insisted on by academics and conservative commentators could be challenged. Technical initiatives, such as the paint tube, played a part, as did the extension of rail and road systems which made it easier to get to places on the coast while also being able to stay in touch with dealers. The rise in the number of newspapers and magazines which drew attention to new trends, and the spread of literacy which increased the audience for those publications had an effect. And the replacement of the Academy-Salon method of selection by the Dealer-Critic system meant that there was a greater tolerance of fresh ideas. It could also be said that there were increasing numbers of people who wanted to be artists, even if many of them never fully achieved their ambitions. Do we really know how many unsuccessful painters spent time in a colony? I mentioned earlier that Barrett didn't set out to write a popular or anecdotal history of the colonies. But he does refer to one or two incidents, albeit briefly, and liking anecdotes myself I can't resist using one of them. It concerns the painter Christian Krohg and the poet Hans Jaeger and the mistress they shared, Oda Lasson. Both Krohg and Jaeger were involved with an anarchist group in Christiania (Oslo) called The Bohemians, and both wrote books which caused a scandal. Jaeger was imprisoned because of the contents of his book, From The Christiania Bohemia, and while he was inside Krohg and Lasson decided to get married and head for the colony at Skagen. Jaeger was incensed, claiming that Lasson had broken a pact with him in which she'd agreed to kill him if she ever broke off their relationship, and when he was released from prison he set off in pursuit of the couple. They left Skagen and Jaeger eventually lost interest and returned to Christiania. To complete the story, Lasson later had an affair with the Norwegian poet, Jappe Nilssen, who fell into a depression when she ditched him. His depressive state was said to have inspired Munch's painting, Melancholy. I've culled most of these details from Michael Jacobs' The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America (Phaidon, 1985), which Barrett rightly describes as a more-anecdotal survey than his book. I've got to admit that, for myself, reading about the antics of Krohg and company can be a useful antidote to accounts of painters settling into bourgeois respectability, though obviously the quality of the work any painter produces is what counts, not the way they lived. Still, I can't help thinking that a factor in the existence of colonies could be the kind of people they attracted. The late-19th Century saw a surge of interest in bohemianism, in cities as well as elsewhere, and this could also have tied in with new movements in other areas, such as politics where Utopian ideas thrived. Hundreds of people must have visited the colonies, even stayed in them for a time, without leaving a record as successful artists, and we can only hazard guesses at their motives for being there. Brian Dudley Barrett has written a stimulating book and he thankfully keeps clear of academic jargon while still managing to be penetrating in his analysis of the rise of artists' colonies. He can be a little repetitious, as when he tells the reader twice what Robert Louis Stevenson said about innkeepers having a duty to extend credit to impoverished artists, or that Millet was not involved in decorating the hotel at Barbizon. Something else he repeats is R.A.M.Stevenson's comment that: "any writer could tell you that they found those colonies more suited for the study of the human heart than for that of rocks and trees," which rather suggests that sometimes anecdotes and personalities might have a place in accounts of life in the colonies. This may be a writer's point of view, of course, because human behaviour is what writers thrive on, and only recently I heard a well-known British sculptor declare during a radio discussion that he thought novels and histories which revolved around aspects of the lives of artists were distractions from their work. Artists on the Edge is well-researched and has sufficient relevant illustrations to complement the text. Some poor proof-reading has resulted in a number of typographical errors, though they're mostly of a minor kind. The book has a valuable bibliography, but I'd like to draw attention to one omission, not to fault Barrett (the book may not have been available to him when he was writing his) but because it does have useful information about how an important colony functioned. David Tovey's St Ives (1860-1930): The Artists and the Community: A Social History (Wilson Books, 2009) is worth consulting when looking at the history of artists' colonies.
THE
INDIGNANT GENERATION: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN
Princeton University Press. 579 pages. £24.95. ISBN 978-0-691-14135-0 Reviewed by Jim Burns
Some years ago, around the mid-1990s, there was something of an upsurge of interest in the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement usually characterised as relating to the 1920s. Glancing at my bookshelves I can see several anthologies published, or re-published at that time, and I have a memory of at least one large art exhibition. Lawrence P. Jackson says that the Renaissance started in 1924 and then "collapsed as the economy ground to a halt in the early 1930s and unemployment and breadlines became common American realities." But the fact of a movement coming to an end doesn't mean that individuals stop writing and, in any case, new writers appear despite, or perhaps because of, the economic situation. By the mid-1930s there was a new generation of writers and intellectuals on the scene, many of them influenced by Marxism and with a tendency to "see the racial problem in economic terms." The number of black graduates rose but employment problems continued even when the economy showed signs of recovery. Blacks with degrees still had to be content with menial jobs if they managed to find work. And, as Jackson puts it: "The unemployed black writers, artists and activists were making a beeline for the political parties and artistic clusters on the left wing." Socialists and communists were not a new breed among blacks in the United States, and black intellectuals had "cut their teeth during the 1910s on the giant issue of the delegation of the resources of society, the kind of leadership group needed to begin the redistribution of power and the involvement of the rank-and-file." He mentions a group mainly made up of West Indians in New York which included Claude McKay, whose Home to Harlem and Harlem Glory point to his radical leanings, including his involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World. McKay published poetry, novels, and other writings, and though often critically acclaimed his "reward for all of this was to live hand-to-mouth for his entire adult life." McKay always had a deep suspicion of communism, even if he did sometimes work alongside communists, but there's no doubt that, for many other blacks, the American Communist Party had a significant role in their activities. As so often happened, communist policy and tactics were dictated by Moscow, and the "Black Belt thesis" held that "Negro Americans were an oppressed nation, sharing a common land, heritage, and culture, and that American blacks deserved the right to self-determination and their own national territory." Maps were produced which showed the areas that blacks should control. Was this ever a realistic proposition and likely to appeal to the mass of blacks in the United States? It hardly mattered when Stalin gave his approval. For writers the communists were important because of the existence of the New Masses and the John Reed Clubs that were established in many towns and cities. New Masses had always been sympathetic to blacks from its inception in 1926. I have a somewhat tattered copy of the December 1926 issue which contains four poems by Langston Hughes, a report on conditions in various parts of the South, and an advertisement for Fire, "a quarterly devoted to the younger Negro artists," edited by Wallace Thurman, a leading black writer. Jackson says that, "New Masses was an excellent example of the sort of radical democratic possibility available to black writers in the 1930s." As for the John Reed Clubs, they were based on the kind of literary studios for worker-correspondents created by Prolecult in the Soviet Union. New York and Chicago had the largest clubs and their purpose was both educational and agitational. When Party policy dictated in 1928 that the class war should be taken into every aspect of culture, the slogan "Art is a Class Weapon" emphasised opposition to notions of "art for art's sake." The Chicago club had a mixed membership, including the white novelist Nelson Algren and the black writer Richard Wright. Left Front, a magazine funded by the John Reed Clubs, published some of Wright's early poems. He was later to break with communism and, in 1950, contributed to a notable anti-communist anthology, The God That Failed, but in the 1930s he was a dedicated member of the Party and believed that a union of blacks and whites could be forged to oppose capitalism. Wright's American Hunger, which only saw complete publication in 1977, is a fascinating account of this period of his life. Party policy changed again in 1934 and the Clubs were dissolved, along with many of the little magazines they had started. Proletarian writers, black and white, were usually unknown and little published, and they were discarded in favour of "a broader coalition that could accommodate already established artists; this new coalition became known as the Popular Front." Few black writers could lay claim to being widely known, but Langston Hughes did have credibility with the Communist Party. He'd spent a year in Russia in the early-1930s and had a publishing record stretching back well into the 1920s. And he was popular with whites. His work had become increasingly radical and was regularly featured in New Masses, By 1934 he was president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, a communist-front organisation that, according to Eugene Lyons in his 1941 book, The Red Decade, had Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, Gil Green, and Clarence Hathaway, all of them members of the American Communist Party, on its council. Lyons thought that Hughes was "stronger in heart than in mind," and "accepted the shadow of communist phrases for the substance of reality." He also went on to suggest that the League never really meant much to the Negro masses, "attracting largely careerists and black bohemians." Hughes's radicalism tapered off in later years, and Saunders Redding, writing about a 1962 conference in Kampala that both he and Hughes attended, remarked on the fact that Hughes avoided reading any of his radical poems and didn't join in the discussions about anti-imperialist revolutionary activity. In 1935 the New Deal programme established the Federal Writers' Project which aimed to provide work for at least some unemployed writers, though there were always arguments about who qualified as unemployed or as a writer. Leaving aside the differences of opinion the Project did offer employment to a number of black writers, among them Sterling Brown and Richard Wright. Brown produced some work for a guidebook to Washington that Jackson describes as "among the most arresting analyses of an African American urban community, from privies to lace curtains, ever written." He was also involved with interviewing ex-slaves, "arguably the most important research undertaken by the entire Federal Writers' Project", and invaluable to scholars studying the history of slavery. Richard Wright was hired by the Chicago branch of the Project as a field reporter for the state guidebook, though he also benefited from having time to write a novel. Other black writers on the Project included Willard Motley, who later made a name with the novel Knock on Any Door, and Frank Yerby, who also succeeded as a novelist but with potboilers that had white heroes and heroines cavorting in the old South. Prior to success with The Foxes of Harrow and The Vixens Yerby had contributed to little magazines but had grown tired of earning little and reaching only a small audience. It's easy to dismiss a writer like Yerby but, as Jackson points out, his "apparently innocuous historical romance had the capacity to touch an audience that a 'professionally liberal' book might never have reached. Yerby used the pulp narrative to present without pleading the common sense arguments in favour of ending racial segregation." Jackson performs a useful service by devoting a great deal of attention to Chicago in the late-1930s. Writers like Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, William Attaway (author of a social-realist novel, Blood on the Forge, which focused on working conditions and racism in the steel mills around Pittsburgh) and Margaret Walker were active in the city, though the most successful was Richard Wright. His Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Native Son (1940) were critically acclaimed and commercially popular, at least when compared to books by other blacks. The four stories in Uncle Tom's Children revolved around racism and, as one critic put it; "In each story, the main character experiences a traumatic event that takes him or her from childhood innocence to hardened militancy." Native Son was an even bigger success, though Wright had to agree to a certain amount of editing and censoring to make it acceptable to the Book-of-the-Month Club readership. Even so, it was remarkable that a novel as hard-hitting as Native Son, with its stark message of racial divisions and their consequences, could be made available to a wide audience. Native Son also had a political effect: "The new breed of young blacks - exposed to college, seeking Marxism and relationships with Communists but not in awe of them, highly critical of white liberals and the traditional black middle-class, and violently impatient with segregation - converted Native Son into a catalyst for political organisation." Jackson points out that Ralph Ellison, then a "young Marxist radical, decided that Bigger's 'indignation' - the violent eradication of the idea of moral and ethical justification in favour of Marxist 'necessity' was Wright's paramount achievement." The entry of America into the Second World War found white liberals like Archibald MacLeish attempting to persuade black newspaper editors to play down calls for racial equality so as not to rock the boat during wartime. Young black writers were still pushed towards left-wing publications or obscure little magazines if they wanted to see their work in print. A significant publication was Negro Quarterly which Jackson says "was largely shaped by Communists," though it disagreed with the Party's policy of soft-pedalling on demands for an end to segregation in the armed forces. Negro Quarterly struggled to attract readers and wartime paper shortages also affected its capacity to maintain a regular publication schedule. Young black writers didn't hold with curtailing their calls for racial equality and instead saw the war as an opportunity to push their demands even harder. After all, wasn't it meant to be a war for democracy and against fascist ideas of racial superiority? Chester Himes, not long out of prison, and already published in Esquire and New Masses, wrote an article in which he said: "Now, in the year 1942, is the time; here in the United States of America, is the place for 13,000,000 Negro Americans to make their fight for freedom in the land in which they were born and where they will die. Now is the time and here is the place to engage and overcome our most persistent enemies. Our native American fascists." It was enough to start the FBI keeping a check on his future activities. The Communist Party, or people with links to it, still played a part in getting black writers into print. Edwin Seaver had worked for The League of American Writers, a front organisation, and the Daily Worker, and in 1944 he edited the first Cross-Section, a large anthology with a definite left-wing slant and contributions from several black writers, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Carl Ruthven Offord. What Jackson says was obvious from the work by black writers was that the kind of consensus between blacks and white liberals that had typified the 1920s and 1930s was breaking down: "By 1944 the fiction writers were imagining black identity in the same terms that Horace Cayton had predicted - one that did not rely on white liberals." Cayton was a black activist in Chicago who encouraged people to look to their own communities for support rather than relying on white liberals. Like Chester Himes he attracted the attention of the FBI when he questioned why blacks should be fighting in a war that would only benefit whites. Jackson states that by 1945 it was obvious that a second "Renaissance" was in sight. Wright, Ellison, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, the critic Saunders Redding, and many more, were being published regularly and given serious attention. One problem that arose, though, was that as the war ended and an anti-communist mood began to build up, writers displaying what could be called un-American tendencies were looked on with suspicion. Discussing some events at the writers and artists retreat at Yaddo, Jackson remarks that "few blacks outspoken on racial issues were invited as guests." When Chester Himes's Lonely Crusade, his novel about politics and prejudice in an aircraft factory, was published in 1947 it got some unfavourable notices because it seemed to be sympathetic towards communism, or at least didn't show communists as simply evil characters bent on destroying the American way of life. Jackson thinks that readers "would not gravitate to a book that showed Communists as wise liberators," and he adds that the book sold poorly. Some of Himes's fellow-writers thought he'd made a mistake by publishing his novel at a time when the "Red Scare" was mounting in intensity. Newer black writers were less directly-political than their immediate forerunners. Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door was certainly written in a social-realist style but its central characters were white and its theme was one of social reform of the kind that would solve the problem of juvenile delinquency. It had a good liberal message and, perhaps not surprisingly, was picked up by Hollywood and turned into a powerful film. The book sold reasonably well and it's interesting to note that Motley was assumed to be white until his photograph appeared in newspapers and magazines. Another writer who began to surface in the post-war years was James Baldwin and he started to make a name for himself with reviews in New Leader, Commentary, and Partisan Review, publications that were inclined more to the centre than the left. They certainly weren't the kind of magazines most young black writers would normally be associated with. Jackson also mentions Anatole Broyard as another black who managed to enter the world of prestigious intellectual journals, but he is something of a special case in that he could pass for white and usually tried to do so. Baldwin was dark-skinned but knew how to turn white sympathy to his advantage, according to Jackson. He had been a member of the Young People's Socialist League and a Trotskyite, but it's doubtful if radical politics were ever his main interest, and he soon distanced himself from writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison with his article, "Everybody's Protest Novel," which ended with an attack on Wright. In Jackson's view Baldwin said that "wallowing in bitterness and indignation was flawed because it led to violence and self-destruction, either of the black self, of the black people, or of the American nation." Baldwin and other black writers moved to Paris, where the city seemed to offer an environment largely free from racial prejudice, though they soon learned that it was only their American passports that ensured they weren't harassed too often by the police. They couldn't help noticing that other coloured residents were treated differently, particularly when the Algerian War of Independence started. Baldwin, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and others, were all in Paris at one time or another. Interestingly, the early-1950s saw the publication of what Jackson refers to as "four key works of African American highbrow modernism," namely Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Ann Petry's The Narrows, Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha and James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain. And he claims: "These works, all of them major achievements in narrative form and psychologically complex black characters, would signal the successful acceptance of blacks into American life." Richard Wright's The Outsider was also published in the early-1950s, though Jackson says that "the public never warmed to it," and he relates the response to it to that which greeted Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore, which he describes as "trying to work through the communist-capitalist-existentialist morass and using elements of detective fiction as well." With anti-communist hysteria at its height (black writers in Paris were convinced that their conversations were being reported to the CIA) it wasn't a time for any kind of book that didn't seem to adhere to conventional notions of politics. The American Communist Party was starting to fall apart as its members were hounded, lost their jobs, and in some cases went to prison. Its influence on black writers was in decline, though a few still gave it their support. Lloyd Brown, author of the 1951 prison novel, Iron City, pointed out that white liberals were quick to distance themselves from communism in the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s, "while glossing over the actual hard work that had been conducted by the Communist Party in defending black rights and black lives since the 1930s." As the 1950s developed new black writers got their novels published. Jackson brings in Herbert Simmons, whose Corner Boy he describes as "a gritty novel of black urban life," in which Simmons "graphically revealed the institutionalisation of narcotics and gang violence in urban America." New black poets appeared, among them Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Leroi Jones, all of them linked to the Beat movement. And James Baldwin continued to produce important books, including Giovanni's Room, set in Paris, and Another Country, which moved to New York and especially Greenwich Village. In an interesting aside, Jackson says that Seymour Krim, who had written a couple of provocative essays about white attitudes towards blacks and his own experiences in Harlem, "was nearly a double for the character James Baldwin would name Vivaldo in the 1961 novel Another Country." Jackson's discussion of Krim, Norman Mailer's The White Negro, hipsters, and the whole question of how and why many whites wanted to identify with black experiences and life-styles is well worth reading. There are a few minor errors in this book. A sentence is repeated on page 182, and elsewhere Eugene McCarthy is confused with Joseph McCarthy. Norman Podhoretz's famous attack on the Beats, "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," comes out as "No Nothing Bohemians." And Jackson seems shaky when he touches on jazz. Charlie Parker died in 1955, not 1956. He gets Thelonious (as in Thelonious Monk) wrong several times. And he refers to "Duke Ellington and his band's great soloist voice on the trumpet, Roy Eldridge." I don't think Eldridge was ever a member of the Ellington orchestra, certainly not on a regular basis, and it's probably true to say that he became best known to many jazz fans for being featured with the white bands led by Artie Shaw and Gene Krupa. Minor quibbles apart, The Indignant Generation is a splendid book, succinctly argued and packed with information about writers, books, magazines, and organisations. Jackson provides some useful critical comments on various novels, short stories, and poems. And he rightly indicates how the American Communist Party played a significant role in getting black writers into print, even if its influence wasn't always completely benign.
JOHN CRAXTON by Ian Collins Reviewed by Jim Burns
There is in Penguin New Writing 35 (1948) a small selection of photographs under the heading, Portraits of Contemporary British Painters. Eight artists are included: Robert Medley, John Craxton, John Minton, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Keith Vaughan, Lucien Freud, and Leonard Rosoman. There's no doubt that Freud is the one whose reputation prospered and whose work has been internationally acclaimed. Several of the others died relatively early and, it's probably true to say, never achieved their full potential due to a variety of personal circumstances. Minton and Vaughan committed suicide and the two Roberts declined into drink and near-destitution. Freud apart, I suspect that few people, other than those with an interest in British art of the 1940s, will know much about most of the others, though biographies have been written about Minton and Vaughan and the two Roberts. But it's almost 25 years since a major exhibition, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-1955 (Barbican, 1987) and Malcolm Yorke's book, The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic artists and their times (Constable, 1988), drew attention to their work. John Craxton appears in Yorke's book and was prominently displayed in the Barbican show. And he survived until he was 87 and died in 2009, perhaps because, while always taking his art seriously, he tended to believe that "life is more important than art," and he spent a lot of time indulging his liking for food, wine, travel, conversation, and the like. There have been suggestions that he spent too much time on these things with the result that his work suffered. Craxton was born in 1922 in London to well-off parents who had artistic connections (his father was a pianist, musicologist, and Royal Academy of Music professor and his mother the daughter of an art publisher). Ian Collins describes their home as "a chaotic haven" and full of "warm bohemian disorder." Craxton from an early age had an interest in art and after encouragement by the art teacher at one of the schools he attended he had work exhibited at a London gallery when he was 11. When he was 14 he went to Paris where he saw Picasso's Guernica. Years later he said: "There's not a line wasted or out of place. And there was no sense of brushwork; I was already aware of the false admiration of 'beautiful passages of paint.' You shouldn't be aware of the construction. The point is the emotional impact." It's interesting, though, that Craxton doesn't seem to have had any kind of response, emotional or otherwise, to the general situation in Europe at that time. As Collins puts it: "the pain, politics and propaganda of a deeply troubled continent passed him by." One thing becomes clear from the account of Craxton's life: he was always fortunate in the sort of people he knew. His family connections put him in touch with various people in the world of the arts as when his mother persuaded Eric Newton, art critic of the Manchester Guardian, to look at his portfolio of drawings. Newton suggested that he apply to the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, but he was turned down because he was considered too young to look at nude models. A friend then persuaded him to go to Paris where the restriction didn't apply. In Paris he was befriended by a Russian family whose daughter had been a visitor to his parent's home in London. Jacques Milkina was a portrait painter and he encouraged Craxton to focus on "the crucial role of drawing and the importance of getting the colour harmonies right in ensuing paintings." By the time Craxton returned to London war clouds were gathering, though again he doesn't appear to have paid too much attention to events outside his own sphere of activities. He enrolled for drawing classes at the Westminster and Central art schools, and accompanied a family friend on field trips to country churches. Drawings from this period show him to be influenced by Paul Nash and "depicting dead, split and toppled trees." And there's a pen and ink illustration of the ruins of Knowlton Church, a place Craxton described as "a set for an M.R.James ghost story." It was in the early-1940s that Craxton met Peter Watson, who was to play a significant role in his life for some years. Watson, a wealthy patron of the arts, was "a collector of beautiful things and brilliant young men, and was the perfect connector for John." He showed him drawings by Samuel-Palmer and Craxton "took these revelatory images as touchstones for his own times and nature." A comparison of Palmer's "Valley thick with corn" from 1825 with Craxton's "Poet in Landscape" from 1941, both reproduced in the book, shows how much he was influenced by the earlier artist. He had never heard of Palmer before seeing the drawings Peter Watson had but knew at once that he had encountered someone special. It's relevant to note that he was also deeply involved with William Blake's work, both poetry and painting. Craxton was faced with conscription in 1941 but was eventually rejected for military service. His 1942 "Dreamer in Landscape," has a man closing his eyes and "blotting out a claustrophobic world of twisted and tortured trees and rampant foliage eerily lit by a sickle moon." It's not hard to accept that it represented Craxton's attempts to escape from the ugly wartime world around him. He later said that "Poet in Landscape" and "Dreamer in Landscape" were derived from Blake and Palmer and were "my means of escape and a sort of self-protection...I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery and I was drawn to the idea of bucolic calm as a kind of refuge." Both were illustrated in Horizon, a significant publication at that time, and helped to focus attention on Craxton. He may have been trying to stand aside from a London dominated by the effects of war, but being someone never averse to socialising he frequented the pubs and clubs of Soho, mixing with Colquhoun and MacBryde and becoming friendly with Lucien Freud, though they eventually fell out. But for a time they shared a studio, thanks to Peter Watson, and Craxton did say that his time with Freud had its advantages: "He made me scrutinise. I gave him confidence. We respected our diversity. And nobody bothered us - we could just get on and paint." A meeting with Graham Sutherland also had an effect, as did an encounter with John Piper. Ian Collins states: "John Craxton greatly admired the way in which Piper's modernist sensibility had been mobilised from abstraction to record an architectural heritage menaced or destroyed by war." Other factors were at work, with Craxton reflecting some aspects of surrealism so that he was thought ideal to illustrate a book of poems by Ruthven Todd, a poet associated with the "New Apocalypse" group. Craxton's "private world of mystery and allegory" was not exactly surrealistic but neither was Todd's poetry. Craxton said of wartime London: "Everything was narrowed down to practically nothing. In Soho there was the French pub and the Swiss House - which I liked because they were talking pubs - and the Golden Lion where sailors were picked up." He noted that a few galleries were still open and that he sometimes frequented the Coffee An' which was "a rough house with porno-erotic pictures on the wall and an incredible range of customers: intellectuals, draft dodgers, people looking for a pick up." The war also had a restrictive effect on the supply of art materials available, though Craxton, again thanks to family contacts, managed to get hold of a supply of Ripolin household enamel paint which gave his paintings a brighter colour. The artists that Craxton was mostly associating with have generally been linked to the Neo-Romantic movement. The term had originated in Paris in the 1920s but by the 1940s it was being used to describe "certain members of an otherwise disparate group of British artists tied to the appropriated tag in the 1940s by writer and surrealist artist Robin Ironside. He bagged it for an art that was personal and contrasting with the doctrinaire geometrical abstraction of the 7 & 5 Society under Ben Nicholson. In the rigours of war and its aftermath, the title came to cover a sense across the arts of escape from a world of anxiety into an insular landscape protected by history, myth and fantasy." Craxton was never convinced that Neo-Romantic made sense as a term - "You're either Romantic in spirit or you are not," he said - but he did know Keith Vaughan, John Minton, Michael Ayrton, and others, though he wasn't always necessarily impressed by them. He thought that Ayrton was too full of self-importance and described him as "the last barrage balloon in London that never got taken down." Several of Craxton's lithographs were used in The Poet' s Eye, an anthology edited by Geoffrey Grigson, who also wrote a 1948 monograph, John Craxton; Paintings and Drawings, publication of which was financed by Peter Watson. But there was a problem in the post-war years in that Craxton's work was sometimes said to be "too bright, charming and decorative," perhaps because he was too busy enjoying life to get down to the necessary sustained effort that could result in significant creativity. Wyndham Lewis was of the opinion that he produced "a prettily tinted cocktail that is good but does not quite kick hard enough." The ending of the war allowed Craxton to travel, first of all to the Scilly Isles where, Collins says, "John found valuable resources for a series of dark landscapes already begun in Welsh pictures. Primary yellows, blues, reds and greens against black were taken from the banded colouring of tarred fishing boats and worked into luminous Miro-like compositions." Thanks to Peter Watson he visited Paris and then went to Switzerland where a show of his work had been arranged at a gallery in Zurich. Athens followed, again thanks to Watson's influence, and he was represented in British Council exhibitions alongside Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland, and Ben Nicholson. He certainly appears to have been something of a Golden Boy in the way that his career was advanced through the well-connected. It was the Mediterranean that was to become Craxton's base for most of the rest of his life. He went to the island of Poros where "he could live cheaply and freely" and gain inspiration from "the intensity of Aegean light." The design and colour in some of his paintings are reminiscent of the work of the ill-fated Christopher Wood. In due course Craxton settled on Crete where he painted pictures of Greek boys and sailors and produced landscapes which utilised "double and triple lines in pigment." They also displayed his liking for Byzantine art. I have to admit that when looking at the examples of Craxton's work from this period I have the feeling that they lean towards the decorative, no matter how pleasant they are in their form and colour. It's a feeling I also experienced when I visited the Craxton exhibition at Tate Britain earlier this year (2011). Ian Collins narrates how a Craxton exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1967 "drew a chilly response from critics - many now in thrall to American abstract expressionism and the cool, satiric gloss of pop art. A journey towards playfulness, sensuality and pattern - and love in a hot climate - was noted and resented." This reaction tied in with Craxton's expulsion from Greece when the military junta came to power. He was suspected of espionage, largely because he liked to frequent sailors' bars where, it was suggested, he was fishing for naval secrets. He then travelled widely to North and East Africa, the Canary Islands, Kenya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Lanzarote. Often in financial difficulties he accepted a commission to decorate a harpsichord for the Scottish Baroque Ensemble and collaborated with a potter on a range of domestic ceramics. Collins refers to his "final fifteen years - when he was often locked in what he called 'procraxtonation' – two vast unresolved paintings, and variants on them, often blocked his easels." He did occasionally have paintings in the Royal Academy summer exhibitions, and when he died in 2009 he was "making some of his best drawings for years, with Greek birds, trees, rocks and ravines in black ink soaring above the Tippex white." Was John Craxton a major artist? The answer has to be "no," though he was often a very good one. His early work reflected the circumstances in which he found himself, with wartime restrictions on movement and freedom of expression shaping his thinking. The later work is usually much more colourful and entertaining to look at, though it sometimes lacks depth. It seems to have lost some of the mystery - the enigmatic quality that he mentioned - when he settled on the Greek islands. Did he fritter away his talent in return for easy living? Someone who knew him said: "He was having fun and living doing what he loved," which sounds like an ideal way to get along and something that most people would settle for. But it's not necessarily a guarantee of achieving anything truly remarkable in the arts. Real achievement may depend on a willingness to give up other things in order to concentrate on essentials. Craxton's art perhaps lost the cutting edge of his early promise when he decided that Greece and hedonism were his priorities. Or it could be that he'd realised that he was never likely to fulfil that promise and so settled for a highly competent but stylised art that would appeal to people with romantic or nostalgic notions about the Mediterranean. Ian Collins has written a book that looks fondly on John Craxton's output as an artist. It is beautifully illustrated and well-documented. And if it may not convince anyone that he was a painter of the first rank it should draw attention to him as someone who was highly-skilled and often produced work that, if not always memorable, was usually pleasurable to look at.
NICA'S DREAM: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE JAZZ BARONESS Reviewed by Jim Burns
When Charlie Parker died in 1955 the New York tabloids had a field day. "Bop King dies in Heiress' Flat" shouted one of the headlines and details followed of how Parker, just prior to his death, had made his way to the "swank 5th Avenue apartment" of Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter . It was a story likely to attract attention as it mixed allusions to race, class, jazz, sex and drugs in a manner that readers at the time would have seen as convincing proof that their suspicions about the subversive nature of jazz, and especially bebop, were justified. But who was Pannonica Rothschild (known as "Nica") and how was it that she knew someone like Parker? She was a member of the English branch of the Rothschild family and had been born in 1913 to parents who were obviously wealthy but who didn't just limit their activities to making money and maintaining large estates. Her father had a keen interest in the natural sciences and, according to David Kastin, is now looked on as "one of the pioneers of the modern conservation movement." He was an expert on fleas and amassed a collection of 30,000 specimens and published 150 scientific papers. Her mother had been a national tennis champion in Hungary, knew several languages, read Proust, and dabbled in politics. Nica also had an uncle who, like her father, was interested in the natural world. He was something of an eccentric and had a private zoo that included zebras, kangaroos, emus, and other species. Kastin says that the scholarly articles he published "established Walter Rothschild as one of the leading zoologists of his age." Nica's father still had to play a part in running the Rothschild bank even if his heart was with his other interests, and he suffered from bouts of depression and committed suicide in 1923. Her mother took over running the properties they owned and looking after the family finances. Nica's brother, Victor, had a traditional education, going to Harrow and Trinity College, but she was educated at home and had to conform to what Kastin describes as "stringently enforced schedules." The facts of her upbringing are interesting in terms of their possible effect on her later behaviour. Victor was a talented amateur pianist and was destined to lead a varied life. Kastin describes him as: "a research director of the Cambridge zoology department, a member of MI5 (the British secret service), Winston Churchill's personal envoy to President Roosevelt, a senior executive at Shell Oil, the chairman of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, the head of Britain's Central Policy Review Staff (a.k.a. the Think Tank), and the suspected 'fifth man' in the clique of Communist sympathisers known as the Cambridge spies." His interest in the piano had led him to jazz and friendship with the noted pianist, Teddy Wilson. It was Victor who first introduced Nica to jazz. Her education had been widened when she spent a year in Paris in the late 1920s and then toured Europe. Back home she mixed with other debutantes, frequented London night-clubs, and indulged her liking for fast cars. A London musician got her interested in flying and by the time she was twenty-one she had her own plane. A trip to France brought her into contact with Baron Jules de Koenigswarter and, after a quick romance, they were married in New York in 1935. A couple of children soon followed. When war broke out in 1939 Nica and the children were in France but she was told by her husband to go to England and then to America where they would be helped by the Guggenheims, "another of the great Jewish financial aristocracies." After ensuring that the children would be looked after Nica headed for North Africa where her husband, a supporter of De Gaulle, had joined up with Free French forces. She worked as a translator and decoder and later drove ambulances in Italy. After the war the Baron became part of the new French government and had diplomatic posts in Norway and Mexico. It's probable that, by 1949, the marriage was unstable, with Nica searching for something that would add meaning to her life. The Baron was contemptuous of her liking for jazz and she started visiting New York where she renewed her acquaintanceship with Teddy Wilson and met other musicians. In 1951 as she made her way to the airport to return to Mexico she called to see Wilson who insisted that she listen to a recording of Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight. Kastin quotes from an interview in which she recalled what happened: "I couldn't believe my ears. I had never heard anything remotely like it. I made him play it to me twenty times in a row. Round Midnight affected me like nothing else I ever heard." And he adds that she missed her flight and extended her stay in New York by a couple of weeks so that she could experience more of Monk's work. By 1953 Nica was living permanently in New York and had separated from her husband. When the jazz writer, Nat Hentoff, asked her about breaking with the Baron and her children, as well as virtually giving up the kind of social status and way of life that many would envy in order to mix with mostly black and often impecunious jazz musicians, she responded by affirming her love of the music: "It's everything that really matters, everything worth digging. It's a desire for freedom. And in all my life, I've never known any people who warmed me as much by their friendship as the jazz musicians I've come to know." Throughout his account of Nica's life Kastin breaks off to offer his analysis of events and developments in the arts. To set the scene for her arrival in New York he outlines how bebop came about, what the Beat writers aimed for in their poems and novels, and where Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist painters were heading in their search for new forms. It's a narrative that holds fairly closely to what has become a fairly standard history of artistic changes post-1945, with a so-called "culture of spontaneity" taking precedence over other areas of activity. To be fair to Kastin he doesn't go overboard for this version of events and he notes that the musicians, artists, and writers he refers to weren't always "promoting the same aesthetic agenda." It's a sensible qualification to make because generalisations about movements in art or music or literature can often be seen as faulty when looked at in detail. As Nica involved herself with the New York jazz community she did meet with a degree of suspicion on the part of some musicians. They wondered what she wanted from them, and inevitably in what tended to be a male-dominated environment it was suggested that she was sleeping with this or that jazzman. Kastin says that gossip columnists like the notorious Walter Winchell commented on her liking for being in the company of black musicians, and society types sneered at her taste for visiting run-down places where bebop could be heard. Kastin doesn't refer to it in detail but in the early-1950s bebop was considered subversive, with its practitioners mostly junkies. This was when the McCarthyite hysteria was at its height and not only communists were thought of as threats to the American way of life. It has to be accepted, though, that the use of drugs, particularly heroin, had spiralled in the late-1940s and early-1950s, and that it was a major problem among the beboppers. Kastin points out that the Mafia became heavily involved in developing markets for heroin once the supply lines opened up again following the end of the Second World War, and he suggests that black communities were targeted most of all. But he gives other reasons for the increased use of heroin: "Heroin's ascendancy during the bebop movement can also be seen as both a symptom of the bebopper's marginalised role in the pop music mainstream and an emblem of hipness worn (along with berets, shades, and goatees) by a generation of black jazz modernists who were challenging the vestiges of minstrelsy they associated with their big-band predecessors. For their white cohorts, the drug became a way of symbolically connecting to their musical heroes." Kastin talks about the drugs problem among the New York modernists because Nica, like anyone observing the musicians, couldn't help being aware of it. And some criticism was levelled at her for the way in which she appeared to respond to the situation. There were suggestions that she should have done more to persuade people to stop using heroin, and a fictional character clearly based on her in a short story by Julio Cortazor appears to obtain drugs for an addicted saxophonist. She was, perhaps, sometimes over-tolerant of the behaviour of certain musicians, and tended to excuse their personal failings by referring to the music they produced, but experience taught her to be wary. Discussing addicted musicians and their problems she said: "I used to think I could help, but no one person can. They have to do it alone. I had to find out for myself that one has to stay away from them. Addiction makes them too ignoble, and you can't be safe around them." It is known that she helped a great many musicians by giving them money, buying food for their families, and sorting out the chaos surrounding the cabaret cards they needed in order to work in clubs in New York. A criminal conviction meant that a musician could be denied a card. This was particularly disastrous for blacks who often couldn't find alternative employment in the recording studios and elsewhere. Not only musicians were affected and the card system applied to anyone working in a club as a waiter, cook, or whatever. Kastin raises the interesting point that when it was first introduced the idea was to apply some form of control to unions, such as the one organised among waiters, which were said to be communist dominated. Its most notorious use, however, seems to have been when musicians, singers, and other performers were involved. Needless to say, it was wide open to abuse by the police and a payment into the right pocket often meant that a card would be issued even if the person concerned had a conviction or two. I mentioned earlier that Charlie Parker died in Nica's suite at the Stanhope Hotel in New York, and that, along with complaints about noise as she entertained various musicians, led to her being asked to leave, a process repeated when she moved to the Bolivar Hotel. Parker's death and the accompanying publicity also caused her husband to sue for divorce and custody of the children. And the Rothschild family, with a few exceptions, closed ranks on her. They may have been rich and famous but courting publicity in the manner that contemporary celebrities do was not part of their thinking. For them, the only time your name should appear in the press was when you were born and when you died. Nica's life seemed to contradict much of what they had been taught to believe was the correct way to behave. Her links to Parker were, in fact, relatively limited when compared to her devotion to Thelonious Monk. A major part of Kastin's book deals with her relationship to this enigmatic character. There's no doubt that Monk had problems and Kastin says that he inherited bi-polar disorder from his father. But sustained use of drugs over many years also affected his mental condition. At various stages he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, suffering from a chemical imbalance, and with manic tendencies. He was given shock treatment and subjected to psychotherapy which verged on the farcical. Nica's endeavours on his behalf were, at times, almost heroic, especially as he was responsible for her being evicted from a third hotel. In due course it was agreed that having her own place was the best option, and with the help of her brother she bought a large house that had previously been owned by Joseph von Sternberg. It soon became known as The Cathouse due to Nica's fondness for cats, and it was also open house for any number of jazz musicians. Thelonious Monk's life after the early-1970s was a near-tragedy. He spent time in a private clinic, with the fees paid by Nica, and he left his wife and settled in The Cathouse, though not because of any sexual liaison between Nica and him. He simply needed to get away from the domestic arrangements that applied at home. It was during this period that he virtually stopped playing the piano and started to retreat into near-silence. He died in 1982. Nica was by that time in her late-sixties, but she continued to befriend musicians and visit the few remaining jazz clubs in New York and she was contacted by some younger members of the Rothschild family who had become intrigued by hearing about her and her adventures among the jazz fraternity. She died in 1988. Nica had written a memoir, but it has never been published and the manuscript is in the possession of the Rothschild family along with numerous tape recordings she made of the musicians who stayed at the Cathouse. Kastin says that her five children continue to reject requests for interviews about their mother, and even refused to help a cousin, Hannah, when she made a documentary about Nica. Another young relative, Nadine, was luckier when she wanted to publish Three Wishes, a collection of Nica's photos accompanying the three wishes that she'd invited her musician friends to make. It's an intriguing book and I can't resist quoting a couple of the wishes made by the bebop pianist Barry Harris: "A room with a Steinway and a good record player, where I can be alone with all the Charlie Parker and Bud Powell records," and "The end of all soul, funk, and rock'n'roll jazz." The reluctance of the Rothschilds to give interviews, and a certain amount of reticence on Nica's part when talking about her family background and life, has meant that David Kastin has written a book that is as much about New York and its bebop musicians as it is about her. Perhaps that's the way it should be because her devotion to the music and the people who played it was legendary. There are a few minor errors. Wardell Gray is called Grey, and Jackson Pollock somehow comes out as Pollack several times. When Kastin discusses the Julio Cortazor story, "The Pursuer," I mentioned, he says that it's "set in New York's 1950s jazz underground," but it's actually located in Paris. A final point. Several musicians, including Monk, named compositions for Nica ("Nica's Dream" is one of them, as is "Pannonica") and there is currently a CD available which brings together recordings by Monk, Doug Watkins, Kenny Drew, Gigi Gryce, and others, paying tribute to her. Nica; The Jazz Baroness is available on Saga 531 093-0.
UNION
by Paul Summers
Reviewed by Alan Dent NO HAPPY SHOPPER Paul Summers hails from Northumberland but now lives in Australia. He was born in 1976 and has published nine collections. He’s also written for theatre , radio and television. This is a substantial collection, nearly two hundred pages, of work drawn from his previous books. He is a varied writer: he doesn’t have that one voice young writers are always urged to discover. He can write out of tenderness or sheer disdain with equal skill. He comes into his own, however, when he’s writing from the heart of his northern, working-class sensibility. This isn’t a matter of taking a political stance. You couldn’t call him a political poet in the way Brecht or Neruda were political. It’s more a matter of a way of being and in that he reminds me of Joe Orton. Orton had no need of political ideology because he had the experience of coming from the bottom and enduring the daily humiliations that imposes and astute and sensitive understanding of how his experience had ruined him. He turned his rage into laughter and chose a form which allowed him to make his audiences fall about watching their own corruption and hypocrisy paraded before them. Summers has something of this quality. Like Orton he has a nose for hypocrisy and loathes it. One of the best poems here is the dinner party. It’s not the kind of thing that wins prizes. Nor would it win Summers an invitation to join Carol Duffy and friends at the Royal Exchange where she holds court as the queen of contemporary poetry. It’s about his visceral, murderous anger at listening to the pretentious wittering of a woman displaying her radical chic. There are very few poems which deal with negative sentiments honestly. No-one likes to admit to being wound up to such a pitch of hatred by something so essentially trivial as silly dinner party chat. There are safer ways to deal with the theme: the kind of ventriloquy for example which allows the poet off the hook by loading all fault onto the subject. Summers is more honest. He takes full responsibility for his feelings. This is how these people make me feel, he says. It’s not pleasant but it’s true. Like Orton he refuses to be a hypocrite. And the poem is hilarious for the same reason Orton’s plays are: because straightforward honesty about our disdain for pretension, posturing and corruption is intrinsically funny. Why should this be? According to Bergson in his famous study Le Rire, we laugh at du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant (something mechanical applied to something living). This explains well enough why the man slipping on the banana skin is funny but not so much why this exchange is amusing: Husband: I’m going to climb up and clean the gutters. Wife: Do nothing till I’ve checked the insurance. This makes us smile, I think, for the reason Ramachandran points out: jokes work by leading us up the garden path. They create an expectation which is subverted or turned back on itself and this is a sine qua non of humour. Ramachandran is interested in this from his point of view as a neuroscientist, the way a particular cascade of neurons stimulates parts of the brain which provoke amusement. We have an expectation that a wife is not going to make cynical calculations about insurance payments when her husband is about to climb a ladder. We expect her to be concerned for his safety. Wives are supposed to love their husbands. The exchange establishes these standard expectations but the wife’s cynicism subverts them and the little waterfall of neurons tickles the right part of the brain. Summers’ poem does the same. The title establishes an expectation. We all know dinner parties are supposed to be polite occasions. They are a middle/upper-middle-class convention. They are not frequent on the estates where benefit claimants and the low-paid are ghettoised. Because they are polite and middle-class and because one of their conventions is you don’t insult your host, Summers’ diatribe of contempt for Verity’s poised references to William Morris and other symbols of her liberal, advanced views is very funny. He is the wild boar terrifying the supermarket shoppers, the gorilla who wanders into church, he brings to the dinner party a straightforward way of speaking and being which doesn’t belong. It is precisely one of the functions of middle-class dinner parties to create a protected environment for pretension; people are not merely allowed to boast about Jeremy’s internship at the Foreign Office or Felicity’s new job at the hedge fund, they are expected to. To be modest, unassuming and self-effacing at a dinner party is as out-of-place as being drunk at a Methodist funeral. But the cleverness of this poem is Summers’ self-denigration: he dubs himself a deranged anarcho-syndicalist. He makes no excuse for himself. He doesn’t try to write from some false position of superior objectivity. He lets his subjectivity off the leash and that’s another reason it’s so funny: working-class subjectivity isn’t welcome at middle-class dinner parties. Joe Orton once said, I like plain food, it tastes better. That’s exactly what you’re not supposed to say between the butter nut squash soup and the minted creamed asparagus. The Joe Orton cookbook suggests you serve the sardines and rice pudding on separate plates. Dinner parties aren’t the place to admit sardines and tinned rice pudding are your standard fare. That is what Summers is doing; he’s letting slip that he comes from a culture where to brag about your achievements or to drop leaden hints about your cultivated liberal values is disdained. This makes him something of a refreshing rarity among contemporary poets. Since 1979 it has been not just unfashionable but perilous for your poetic career to set your face against middle-class hypocrisy. But Summers has an unreconstructed sensibility and it’s attractive, charming, funny and honest. It might be worth saying, as the association is bound to spring to mind, that the dinner party has nothing in common with the rancid flavour of Abigail’s Party. Mike Leigh makes the mistake of setting himself up as a superior consciousness. The implied author of his play isn’t a deranged anarcho-syndicalist but a manipulator bringing the audience into his circle, flattering their own sense of superiority. Summers, like Orton, avoids this. He will excuse neither himself nor his audience. Rather, he wants the unadorned truth to be made visible. Not many writers do this because ambition gets in the way. the dinner party is a very well written poem. Summers is highly-skilled and is like no other poet writing today because he has worked hard to find a way to realize his sensibility poetically. In general, poets are less concerned to do this than to find a niche, to fit with the accepted way of writing. Summers’ sensibility is a product of his northern, working-class roots, but it’s individual. It would be possible to imitate Summers’ practice, but no-one could sound like Paul Summers. He is at his most individual in poems like the dinner party or in the five prose poems in which he assumes the persona of historical characters including god in hey moses, catch this one or poppy day in which he makes fun of a national institution or drinking with dad where in a poem of impressive economy he touches on the tragic estrangement between father and son, the mistakes of Stalinism and the cruelty of a culture which exploits people’s pride in their work. His touch never fails. Even in the group of poems which end the collection and which are, for the most part, evocations of place and therefore exempt from the raw humour, the anger, the genius for subversion which informs other poems, his skill is consistent. If there is a place where his writing might have sagged a little, it would be here. These pieces are less rooted in his individual sensibility, closer to the work of some of his contemporaries, but they are excellently realised. For me, and this is purely personal, they are less interesting than the poems I’ve cited. For what it’s worth, this is because, in my view, the physical world has no meaning, in the sense that meaning is intrinsically human. The physical world existed long before us and will continue long after and once we have disappeared, the meanings we attribute will evaporate. The universe will carry on its way and the brief candle of human meaning will have fluttered and expired. Hence, poems about physical place don’t mean much to me and I find that poets’ attempts to evoke their mentality or morality through physical place are usually unconvincing. When poets write about nature they’re usually writing about themselves. I think this is probably true of the poems of place here and I prefer the Paul Summers of the dinner party to the one of pen bal crag. That isn’t to detract at all from the achievement of this collection. Summers is one of those excellent writers who would never have been published without the small presses. It’s easy to understand why big houses don’t publish him, intent as they are on pushing poetry which doesn’t offend, wins prizes and would be at home at a Buckingham Palace garden party. Summers is the beast our culture denies. Bert Lawrence noted frequently the emotional deadness of the middle-classes. He was, of course, in the uncommon position of having a middle-class mother and a working-class father, the former rather prim and proper the latter easy-going and fond of his sensual pleasures. In poor Lawrence was fought out the bitter cultural battle between what he called life and adherence to respectability. It’s often said of Terence Rattigan (Michael Billington repeats it frequently) that he wrote about the emotional reticence of the middle-classes. I think it’s much worse than that. I think it’s as bad as Lawrence intuited. It’s not that the polite classes are afraid to show their emotions, it’s that the emotions aren’t there. Lawrence makes this observation at the start of Daughters of The Vicar. The full range of human emotion is missing from their father. Darwin is right, of course, that a basic range of emotion is present in all cultures and is expressed in the same way but that basic palate of emotional colours should produce many shades. Most of our emotions don’t have names because they are amalgams of feeling. Our minds are culturally made and this happens because our brains respond to the stimuli around us in ways we can’t control. Grow up in a pleasant village in Berkshire where all the houses have gardens, most people are well off, there’s a high proportion of graduates, a low crime rate, no drug dealers and the effect on your brain is very different from growing up among the rows of terraces in an old industrial northern town where most people scrape by. Simply to grow up in streets without grass, trees and gardens makes a big difference to how you experience yourself and the world. Our culture denies this because of its ideology of individualism: we are what we make ourselves. Circumstances are not defining. Barrow boys become millionaires. What’s stupid about this is that a millionaire barrow boy retains all the hallmarks of his origins, however hard he tires to hide them. Alan Sugar may be a millionaire but he’s an oik millionaire. David Cameron is a toff millionaire. Oik millionaires are by definition rare exceptions. Toff millionaires are the rule. The fact that the odd oik becomes rich doesn’t contradict the fact of inequality nor that it tends to replicate itself. Come from the bottom and your chances of rising very far from it are slim. The essential truth that circumstances are defining and that people do not have some omnipotent capacity to override them is what our culture resists. People do, if the opportunities are there, change their circumstances but if we take Lawrence as an example, he was right to say that little Bert Lawrence of Eastwood was what he always remained even when he became a famous writer rubbing shoulders ( and more) with toffs. It’s true of all of us. Our brains register the colour yellow because of a particular frequency of light. We can’t choose whether or not we see yellow. Nor can we choose how the range and character of our emotions is engendered by the circumstances of our upbringing. All this illuminates the essential point about Summers: he’s a working-class lad from the north-east and his sensibility doesn’t chime with that of our ruling institutions. This isn’t a matter of political affiliation: Andrew Motion is a declared Labour voter, but his sensibility is upper-middle-class. Political ideology is a feeble, flimsy thing compared to sensibility. When you come from the bottom you learn very early, so it’s almost a matter of instinct, that things are stacked against you. Though you’ve done nothing wrong, you get it in the neck. You keep getting it in the neck and no matter how hard you try to follow the rules, you still get it in the neck. You develop an acute sensitivity for hypocrisy and a simmering disdain for it. If you come from the bottom and you’re highly intelligent and intuitive, like Summers, you can refine and intellectualize these responses. This is what he does. As such, he is dangerous to our culture. If there were a House Unbritish Activities Committee it would be shining bright lights in his eyes. Our culture says if you are as intelligent and gifted as Summers you should make your way, get on, land a job as a diplomat, become a cabinet minister, a professor, a cardiologist, but for god’s sake, deny your working-class sensibility. Summers won’t. He likes it. Which is not to say he celebrates inequality or observes some reverse snobbery, but he knows his visceral opposition to the culture that made him, something he explores wittily in happy shopper, is the best thing he has. It makes him genuine. He’ll never be poet laureate or be published by Faber, but posterity will cherish him. When Eliot wrote about dissociation of sensibility what he was picking up on was that Milton was an urban writer and while the poetry of rurality rested on hospitality, that of the city was built on wit. Eliot liked the older form because it spoke of the rights of landed property and the fixed traditions that went with them. He rightly spotted in Milton the stirrings of something democratic and it terrified him. If he could read Paul Summers he would drop dead on the spot. But Joe Orton would laugh and recognize a fellow-spirit. So do I. Games of Survival: When the Danube Ran Red By Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, Syracuse University Press, 2010, Hardcover, 184pp. $17.95, ISBN-10: 0815609809 & 13: 978-0815609803 Reviewed by Thomas Land
AMERICAN LETTERS 1927-1947: JACKSON POLLOCK & FAMILY Edited and annotated by Sylvia Winter Pollock Polity Press. 215 pages. £20. ISBN 978-0-7456-5155-2 Reviewed by Jim Burns
There's an image of Jackson Pollock that is, I suspect, etched deep in most people's minds. It's of a T-shirted man moving quickly around a canvas laid on the floor and dripping paint over it direct-from a can he's carrying. This is, of course, the picture of Pollock derived from the film made by Hans Namuth in 1950, and which is often shown on TV when the subject of Pollock and Abstract Expressionism crops up. If you add to it Pollock's drinking, his violent outbursts, and his death in a car crash, it's easy to understand why a certain idea of the man exists. But I doubt that many people know much more about Pollock than the facts I've outlined, and they probably have little awareness of his life prior to the early-1940s when he began to establish a name for himself on the New York art scene. Jackson Pollock was the youngest of five brothers and he wasn't the only one of them to have ambitions as an artist. His older brother, Charles, though never becoming as well-known as Jackson, was "a painter all his life and taught calligraphy, lettering, typography and printmaking from 1946 to 1968," then moved to Paris where he died in 1988. Another brother, Sanford, started out as a painter and worked on the Federal Art Project, a government scheme designed to provide employment for impoverished artists during the Depression. He later did silk-screen printing but died in his early fifties. Two other brothers, Frank and Marvin, were less directly involved with art, though Frank had ambitions to write and Marvin worked in printing. What is worth noting is that all the Pollock brothers were quite radical in their political opinions, though Jackson perhaps didn't get .actively involved in the way that the others did. Frank joined the Communist Party and Marvin seems to have been close to it, if not actually a member. Sanford's sympathies lay in that direction, and Charles spent some time working for the United Auto Workers union during their major organising drives in the 1930s. In a letter to Charles, Frank said that there was little chance of changing the system by voting and that "armed revolution" was the only way to succeed. Sanford also said that it might be time to "start the shooting" if elections failed to alter things. In their major biography, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, published in 1989, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith say that Jackson attended communist meetings in Los Angeles and mixed with union organisers and Party members, though they admit there is little or no evidence to indicate how often he attended or if he was active in any way. It is probable that his involvements with left-wing activists helped to bring work by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros to his attention. I've dealt with a little of Jackson's background so as to provide a context for the letters that comprise the contents of this book. In fact, he doesn't feature a great deal in it as a letter writer, though he's mentioned often enough in the other brothers' letters to each other and their parents. And it becomes clear that, as the youngest, Jackson was his mother's favourite and that the others were often concerned about his behaviour. He had problems with alcohol from an early age and also showed signs of mental instability as he got older. Evidence of this is in letters that will be referred to later. The main focus of the letters is Charles Pollock. He had left California, where the Pollock family had settled after some wanderings, and arrived in New York in 1926. He had gone there to study with Thomas Hart Benton, a populist/regionalist artist whose celebrations of the American spirit in often large canvases were popular, though there were suggestions that Benton was a "shrewd politician" in the art world and knew how to exploit the populist role to his advantage. But both Charles and Jackson were attracted to Benton's swirling style and Jackson's early work certainly reflects its influence. I don't think Jackson was ever a particularly good draughtsman and, judging from the examples provided, Charles was much more accomplished in drawing. He was competent in what can be described as a social realist framework, though if seen in context (the social art of the 1920s and 1930s) he might not be judged as particularly individual in his approach. I don't think that should be held against him and most artists, no matter how skilled, follow an established pattern in their work. Charles later moved towards abstraction, perhaps influenced by Jackson's example, but also, perhaps, because the post-1945 period brought an anti-radical mood that didn't look kindly on left-wing social realism in art. A letter written in 1929 by Frank and sent to Jackson expresses concern about the latter's waywardness. And a response from Jackson refers to his having been "ousted from school again after a fight with the head of the Physical Ed. Dept." It also mentions that he was in trouble because he'd given a couple of teenage girls some money so that they could run away, an act that he thought might lead to him being imprisoned. In 1931 Jackson, who had joined Charles in New York, made his way back to California by hitching lifts and riding freight trains. Letters to Charles and Frank say that he "got a number of kicks in the butt and put in jail twice with days of hunger," but that it was a worthwhile experience. The Depression was deepening and he says, "The freights are full, men going west men going east and as many going north and south - millions of them." A 1932 letter to his father shows that Jackson was taking note of world events, such as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. And he comments on how cold it is in New York and says that it is "tough on the poor old fellows out on the bread lines, and no place to flop." As I mentioned earlier, all the Pollock brothers were radicalised by the Depression. There's a long 1933 letter from Frank to Charles which refers to Roosevelt's efforts to sort out America's economic problems, and adds: "Since the ignoble death of the London conference Roosevelt has adopted a policy of economic nationalism." A useful note appended to the letter by Sylvia Winter Pollock reads: "The London Conference of 1933 was the World Monetary and Economic Conference, which had as its object the checking of the world Depression by means of currency stabilisation and economic agreements. Unbridgeable disagreements made the meeting a total failure." What was it someone said about history repeating itself? A letter from Stella, the matriarch of the Pollock family, describes a number of people coming to her house for dinner, among them Leonard Stark, a photographer and cinematographer who, in the early-1950s, worked on Salt of the Earth, a film about a strike in New Mexico that was made by people who had been blacklisted by the Hollywood film studios. Also present at the dinner was Philip Guston, later a leading abstract expressionist painter but in the 1930s producing figurative work that centred on social commentary, as witness his 1932 painting The Conspiracy, with its hooded Ku Klux Klan figures holding clubs. Interestingly, similar figures re-surfaced in Guston's work years later when he moved away from abstraction and started producing cartoon-like pictures. Around the time that Stella was playing host to left-wingers like Stark and Guston, Charles was telling Frank that he was interested in the American Workers Party, a short-lived organisation dominated by A.J. Muste, head of Brookwood Labour College for many years. A note mentions that Elizabeth Pollock, Charles's wife, taught at Brookwood for a time. The American Workers Party merged with the Communist League of America, a Trotskyist party, to form the Workers' Party of the United States. Following the myriad divisions of the American left is a specialist's occupation, but taking note of some of the details does help when considering how Charles was reacting to political events. He was not unsympathetic to the Communist Party but doubted that it would ever be able to provide the kind of leadership "to effectually organise the American worker." Some of the most fascinating letters written by Charles were sent to Elizabeth and concerned a cross-country trip that he and Jackson made in June and July, 1934. Working their way through Pennsylvania and into West Virginia they saw at first-hand the effects of the Depression and the unrest it caused. They met an Italian miner "who turned out to be radical," and were nearly arrested in Pittsburgh. Charles described what happened:
Later, Charles was told that a strike was brewing and everyone was on edge and suspicious of strangers. Moving onto Harlan County in Kentucky, an area notorious for violent confrontations between strikers and police, they came across a man who told them that his union activities had got him blacklisted in all the mines in the area. He advised them to be careful about what they said and did while they were in Harlan County. By the time they reached El Paso in Texas Charles was telling Elizabeth that he felt out of touch with what was happening in "Germany or anywhere else," and that he missed reading New Masses, the communist cultural magazine which published well-known writers like Erskine Caldwell and Ernest Hemingway alongside newcomers like Richard Wright and Albert Maltz. He did say that a daily paper he'd seen had reported that a general strike was being planned in San Francisco. Further evidence of a kind of network of left-wing writers, artists, activist and others comes when Charles, writing to Frank, advises him to get in touch with "a friend of ours who is working in Hollywood." The friend was Lester Cole, a scriptwriter who worked steadily in films until he was blacklisted in the late-1940s after he'd refused to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and was imprisoned for a year. Charles describes him as "mildly interested in the left movement," but Cole's autobiography, Hollywood Red, suggests that he joined the Communist Party in 1934. If the majority of the letters in the first part of the book were written by Frank and Charles, Jackson was still a presence in them, and in letters from other members of the family. Elizabeth, writing to Jackson's mother, said: "Jack's work is improving amazingly; he is going to be a magnificent painter one of these days. It, the work, is entirely different from C's in style. Jack's is much more imaginative and unrealistic and I like this about it." By this time (1936) a lot of the effort required to take care of Jackson had passed to Sanford. Both had obtained posts with the Federal Arts Project, though as Sanford's letters indicate, they never really felt secure and pressure was always being exerted by anti-New Deal politicians and businessmen to withdraw government funding from the scheme. Even if it survived individuals were subject to monitoring, both for their qualities as artists and their financial status. And they had to sign to say that they were not members of the Communist Party. Sanford refers to "a re-investigation of every Project worker," and adds, "I Know of some cases where workers unable to meet the rigid requirements have been fired." The notes to a later letter tell how, in December 1936, protesting artists occupied the offices of the Federal Arts Project in New York because dismissal notices had been issued to a large number of them. Police were called and attacked the artists. While Frank and Charles worried about political developments, including the Moscow trials and the way that anything not conforming to Party policy was labelled Trotskyite, Sanford worried about Jackson: "I don't know whether or not you know but Jack has been having a very difficult time with himself. This past year has been a succession of periods of emotional instability for him, which is usually expressed by a complete loss of responsibility both to himself and to us. Accompanied, of course, with drinking. It came to the point where it was obvious that the man needed help. He was mentally sick. So I took him to a well-recommended doctor, a psychiatrist who has been trying to help the man find himself." Sanford, like Charles, was questioning the role of the Communist Party more and more, though in one letter he tells Charles that his criticisms might be misdirected: "I don't think your venom is being well spent in raving at the mistakes of the CP. It is not they who were bombing Barcelona and raping Austria and directing the idiotic policies of Chamberlain and Blum." But Sanford himself was confused and I'd guess that by the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact he'd more or less withdrawn from political activity. His letters are more concerned with family matters and the workings of the Federal Arts Project. And as American involvement in the Second World War became inevitable there was the additional worry of being conscripted. By 1943, when the letters are tailing off, Jackson had begun to establish himself as a painter and was on the verge of critical if not financial acknowledgement. Lee Krasner had arrived on the scene and was proving to be a steadying influence on him. She, like Sanford, sacrificed a lot of her own talents as an artist in order to provide the kind of support that Jackson obviously needed. It's easy to understand why Jackson's name is highlighted on the cover of this book. It's a name people will recognise. And the letters do have relevance to his story and can be usefully read in conjunction with Naifeh/Smith biography mentioned earlier and Jeffrey Potter's fascinating oral biography, To a Violent Grave, published in 1985. But it would be a pity if attention was focused on American Letters solely because of Jackson. It provides a valuable picture of a family under pressure and a vivid account of young men and women responding to extreme economic and political circumstances. Scattered references to Charles's wife, Elizabeth, and her activities make her seem a particularly interesting person. I've mentioned a few of the people the Pollocks knew, and there were many others, like David Siqueiros, the Mexican artist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was also involved in an assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico, and Frank Bonetti, another volunteer in the International Brigades. A letter from Marvin to Frank asks: "By the way, did you kids ever meet Frank Bonetti, one of our L.A. comrades who went to Spain? He is back now in New York, after serving eighteen months and having suffered the loss of his left leg." Marvin says that he's hoping that Bonetti will come and stay with them. The references to Bonetti led me to Arthur H. Landis's The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a large history of Americans in the Spanish Civil War, where some of Bonetti's experiences are given prominent attention. He was clearly a Party member and some years later, when McCarthyism was at its height, attempts were made to deport him from the United States on the grounds that he was a foreign-born alien and a communist. Circumstances like those may help to give a partial explanation of why so many people who were radicals in the 1930s found it advisable to play down their left-wing opinions after 1945. American Letters is a fascinating book, has an informative introduction, and is well edited and annotated by Sylvia Winter Pollock, Charles's second wife.
AN
ARMY OF PHANTOMS: AMERICAN MOVIES AND THE MAKING OF THE COLD WAR by
J.Hoberman Reviewed by Jim Burns
Looking along my shelves I can see a whole section of books about Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s when a large number of writers and others found themselves under fire because of their political interests and affiliations. Some were even accused of attempting to insert left-wing propaganda into the films they wrote or directed. Histories, memoirs, accounts of the making of specific films, interviews, and even a few novels focus on the activities of individuals and what happened to them after they came under suspicion, were sometimes forced to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and either became friendly witnesses and preserved their careers by naming colleagues they said were communists, or defied the Committee and were blacklisted. Even those who didn't appear but had the wrong friends or had shown too close an interest in alleged subversive ideas often found that they were on a kind of greylist and work began to dry up. It was a sad time in Hollywood and America generally, and it shouldn't be thought that it only affected people in the film capital. Numerous academics, civil servants, union activists, and others, lost their jobs and were harassed by the authorities. But it's the film community that occupies our attention here, and I think one of the first questions we need to ask is why Hollywood turned from the left/liberal mood of the 1940s, when pro-Soviet films like Song of Russia, Action in the North Atlantic, North Star, and Mission to Moscow could be made, to the right-wing paranoia of the 1950s and a spate of anti-communist films. The obvious answer is that after 1945 attitudes towards Russia and communism quickly changed. Thinking positively about both had only been a temporary measure and once the war was over old suspicions about Russian intentions soon re-surfaced. It's an illusion to imagine that the pro-Russian sentiments of the war years had been shared by everyone. I doubt that political realists expected the wartime comradeship to last, and once events began to show that Stalin had no intention of extending the spirit of co-existence attitudes rapidly changed. The threat from strong Communist Parties in Italy and France, communist takeovers in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Berlin Air Lift, Russian development of the atom bomb (helped by spies in the USA), and the start of the Korean War, which didn't directly involve Russia but could be seen as part of an overall strategy of communist domination, convinced many people that communism was the major threat to Western democracy. An Army of Phantoms primarily concerns the 1945-1960 period but in a fast-moving prologue Hoberman looks at events and films in the years between Pearl Harbour and VJ Day. And he recounts a telling little story about the filming of Back to Bataan, a wartime flagwaver that starred John Wayne, a noted rightwinger. Wayne, it seems, liked to taunt the scriptwriter Ben Barzman, a known communist, with comments about Stalin. Barzman told him that, after the war, "the Russians will be our friends," to which Wayne replied, They'll be your friends." It was, perhaps, a minor incident, but in its way it illustrates how, despite wartime co-operation, basic attitudes hadn't changed. Wayne was not alone in Hollywood in seeing anti-communism as a priority, and in the post-war era he would be active in making life difficult for left-wing writers and actors. It needs to be said that anti-communist sentiments were not the only reason why politics loomed large in the late-1940s. There were major disputes by unions representing craft workers which divided the community And the investigations into the political backgrounds of certain writers, directors, and actors, were almost an extension of what had taken place in the 1930s as writers fought to form a union (the Screen Writers Guild) and have it recognised by the various studios. The SWG was something of a battleground as right, moderate, and left-wing factions competed for control of it. There is probably sufficient evidence to show that the rancour that arose from the 1930s disputes continued after 1945 and was at least partly responsible for the way in which communists were hounded and blacklisted. I would guess that a lot of old scores were settled when various people identified others as communists or fellow-travellers. I don't want to extend these comments too far, but anyone interested might like to refer to Nancy Lynn Schwartz's The Hollywood Writers' Wars, published by Knopf, New York, 1982. By 1947 the tempo of what has been referred to as "witch-hunting" was increasing. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) arrived in Hollywood to begin its investigations into supposed infiltration of the film industry by communists. Known members of the Communist Party were still working openly on films. Crossfire, for example, was produced by Adrian Scott and directed by Edward Dymtryk, both communists, and its writer, John Paxton, was described as "friendly to the left." Scott was also involved with the filming of The Boy With Green Hair, written by Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt and directed by Joseph Losey, all of them members of the Communist Party. Both films could be described as socially conscious in the way that they dealt with problems arising from prejudice. And films like Body and Soul and Force of Evil could be seen as questioning capitalist values and were written and/or-directed by Robert Rossen and Abraham Polonsky, two more members of the Hollywood communist community. But time was running out for them. HUAC called witnesses to testify about communist machinations in the film capital. The actor Adolphe Menjou claimed that Hollywood was "one of the main centres of communist activity in America," and Jack Warner, head of one of the major studios, trotted out a long list of people (mostly writers) he said were communists and announced that he'd already fired them. The chairman of HUAC asserted that what he'd heard had convinced him that the Screen Writers Guild was "under the complete domination of the Communist Party." There was still opposition to what was happening, and when nineteen so-called "unfriendly witnesses" were summoned to appear before HUAC in Washington the Hollywood liberal establishment mobilised and sent a deputation to support the nineteen. It included such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye, and Lucille Ball. In the event not all the nineteen were called, but a group who became known as The Hollywood Ten were defiant when questioned. They were eventually held to be in contempt and sent to prison. Realisation about what HUAC could do set in and the opposition to it began to crumble. The tactics employed by the Ten had alienated some people as they argued, shouted, tried to make speeches about democracy, and accused the Committee of fascism, totalitarianism, and abuse of free speech and the Constitution. Stars like Bogart were pressured to back away from appearing to support alleged communists, and studio bosses, if they hadn't already, began to apply their own forms of exclusion. It all tied in with the general mood in the country as fears of spies, atomic war, and communist conspiracies turned into near-paranoia. In 1948 John Ford started to film Fort Apache, the first of his cavalry trilogy. Hoberman says it "opened in New York on June 25th - one day after the Soviet blockade of Berlin created a beleaguered Western fort in the midst of hostile Red territory." He sees the film as having some liberal elements but adds that it "is a vision of total mobilisation with an appropriate emphasis on order and eternal vigilance; militarised suburbia. The bombing of civilian populations in World War 2 suggested that the next war might have no front - or, rather, that the front might be in America's living room." One thing that Hoberman is good at is showing how the communist press responded to films, and Ford's second instalment of his trilogy, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, brought a review in The Daily Worker which questioned its view of the Indian Wars as "a glorious page in our history." The positive view of ex-Confederates serving in the cavalry was also questioned. By the time Ford completed the trilogy with Rio Grande, described by Hoberman as "a right-wing attack on the status quo," the Korean War was under way and the film's theme of soldiers frustrated because orders from Washington stop them crossing into Mexico to rescue children kidnapped by Indians matched the frustrations felt by American commanders in Korea when political concerns limited their actions. It was not long afterwards that General MacArthur wanted to bomb China when it sent its troops to support North Korea. HUAC returned to Hollywood in 1951 and this time the list of victims of its investigations lengthened as people hurried to name names and so save their own careers. Guilt by association was enough to get many writers and others blacklisted. At the same time the number of anti-communist films increased. The Red Danube, The Red Menace, Pickup on South Street, and I Married a Communist were just a few of them, and it was said of the latter film that Howard Hughes used it as a kind of loyalty test by asking certain directors to work on it. If they refused, as did Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, and John Cromwell, they were immediately suspect. What many of these films suggested was that communism was akin to crime and so communists were portrayed as behaving like gangsters and were not averse to murder if it helped further their aims. In Pickup on South Street, in fact, they're depicted as a breed below common criminals, one of whom when refusing to sell information to a communists, says: "Even in our crummy business you gotta draw the line somewhere." Hoberman's analysis of this film is fascinating and he neatly shows how the business ethic dominates the actions of many of its characters, communists and criminals. The police apart, little of the outside world intrudes on their lives as they fight for the best deal. Another film that Hoberman dissects is Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan who, after a period of doubts, testified before HUAC and offered names of communists, including people he'd worked with in the Group Theatre in New York in the 1930s. Panic in the Streets is a "trim little thriller," in the words of Kazan's biographer, Richard Schickel, and tells how a merchant seaman, unwittingly infected with pneumonic plague, is murdered on the docks in New Orleans. The authorities realise that he will have infected the people who killed him and set out to track them down. They also have to try to stop the news from spreading so that there won't be panic in the streets. It sounds straightforward enough, but Hoberman reads it as a possible parable about the contagion of communism. He quotes the Attorney General at the time as saying that communists "are everywhere - in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society." Did Kazan have that in mind when he made the film? Perhaps of more relevance is did people watching Panic in the Streets draw a parallel, consciously or not, with the supposed communist threat? Kazan later directed On The Waterfront from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg, another ex-communist who had named names, and more or less made it into a justification for his own co-operation with HUAC. The hero, played by Marlon Brando, testifies before a committee investigating corruption in the waterfront unions, and is cold-shouldered by his fellow-workers who, despite their knowing who the gangsters are, see informing as a greater sin than trying to clean up the unions. But Brando finally wins the day when the workers eventually follow him rather than the corrupt union boss. Was Kazan suggesting that history would judge him right for informing? The early-1950s also produced a number of science-fiction films that may have helped fuel the paranoia of the period. The Thing, It Came From Outer Space, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers; did they all suggest that something alien was waiting to take over? When the hero of Body Snatchers is seen at the end uselessly shouting a warning to people obviously ignoring him was it a way of drawing attention to the conformity that would be enforced if communists took over, or was it a protest against the mass conformity that was evolving as a combination of growing consumerism and increasing governmental control worked against the interests of the individual? In the film, with its screenplay originally by Daniel Mainwaring, a one-time left-winger, and later re-worked by Richard Collins, an ex-communist who co-operated with the Committee, the hero notes how "people have allowed their humanity to drain away....only it happens slowly rather than all at once. They didn't seem to mind." John Wayne crops up a lot in this book, his right-wing beliefs being evident! He starred in Big Jim McLain as a tough, no-nonsense investigator sorting out communists in Hawaii. And he made his views on High Noon, in the cinemas around the same time, well-known. Wayne was outraged at the idea of the sheriff (played by Gary Cooper) almost having to beg for support when it's obvious that a gunman and his gang are coming. And the final scene where the sheriff, having killed the bad guys, throws his badge on the ground and leaves town with his wife, further upset Wayne. He seems to have blamed Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, for what Wayne thought was the un-American tone of the film, and he was quoted as saying that he had "helped run Foreman out of this country." Foreman moved to Britain where, among other things, he worked with Michael Wilson, another blacklisted writer, on the screenplay of The Bridge on the River Kwai. It's of interest to note that a number of patriotic British films, such as Zulu, Lawrence of Arabia,and Young Winston, had contributions from blacklisted Americans. But to return to High Noon, John Wayne may have been upset but the film was immensely popular, perhaps because it could be interpreted in a variety of ways. It functions as an orthodox western, of course, but Carl Foreman always maintained that people knew he was drawing a parallel with what was happening in Hollywood as HUAC (the bad guys) arrived and the locals were too frightened to back up the few who stood up to the Committee. The scene where someone does initially offer support but then withdraws it when he realises no-one else is coming forward had its basis in what actually happened to Foreman. Another interpretation of High Noon came from a Swedish film critic who said that it was "the most honest explanation of American foreign policy. The marshal (America) had wanted peace after cleaning up the town five years before (i.e.WW2) and reluctantly must buckle on his gun belt again in the face of new aggression (the Korean War), and eventually his pacifist wife (American isolationists) must see where her true duty lies and support him." I'm not sure how Carl Foreman would have viewed this analysis of his script, but it is a fact that High Noon was the film most requested for showing at the White House by a number of American presidents. Eisenhower was a great fan and Bill Clinton saw it as "a movie about courage in the face of fear and the guy doing what he thought was right in spite of the fact that it could cost him everything." As the 1950s developed and Senator McCarthy's power waned the number of films taking a crude anti-communist approach declined. Hollywood still reflected (exploited?) society's paranoias and films about juvenile delinquency began to attract attention. The Wild Ones, The Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause were probably the best-known ones. Intellectuals, however, may have been more concerned about Walt Disney's Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier which opened in around one thousand cinemas across America. The popularity of the film and the TV series that followed it, the mass-marketing of Davy Crockett-related merchandise, the widespread broadcasting of the song about Crockett were all viewed with suspicion and dismay by contributors to highbrow publications. Communism may have implied one kind of conformity but so did mass culture. It wasn't long before Budd Schulberg began work on A Face in the Crowd, a screenplay adapted from his story, "Your Arkansas Traveller," which was about the rise to fame of a hillbilly singer who uses a populist approach and, helped by TV, becomes a national hero who, it is suggested, might run for president. Elia Kazan directed the film and, curiously, it was acclaimed by a critic in a communist publication, The People's World, who identified Schulberg and Kazan as "stool pigeon witnesses before the Un-American Committee," but added that they'd made "one of the finest progressive films we have seen in years." Perhaps they hadn't lost all their radical ideas, the critic said, or could it be that guilty consciences had "prompted them" to work on such a story? Hoberman comes to the conclusion that "Kazan and Schulberg intuited that, in the nation's dream life, media personalities and movie stars would now nominate themselves for the leading role." And he adds that, in the contest between "moribund, repressive Communism and responsive audience-pleasing television," it was TV that prevailed. Kazan and Schulberg "may have publicly repudiated their youthful politics, but the fear and loathing so forcefully expressed in A Face in the Crowd placed them again on the losing side of history." I count myself lucky because I grew up at a time when the cinema was dominant and I spent a large part of my young life watching most of the films that Hoberman discusses. Some of them still turn up on TV and others are available in Video or DVD format, though it's not quite the same as having seen them when they appeared. I have to say that I was often surprised by Hoberman's interpretations of their stories. I was, and still am, an admirer of John Ford's cavalry trilogy, but I can't claim that when I first saw them I thought of them as anything more than superior westerns. When I watch the films again I'll have Hoberman's observations to add to my own. At the same time, however, I'll wonder whether or not Hoberman's comments are necessarily valid. The subversive thought occurs to me that a critic can take any period and select a number of films (or books or plays) which seem to have relevance in terms of being possibly related, in one way or another, to events in the wider world. And perhaps it would be equally easy to select films or whatever that have no relevance at all. I don't want to close this review on a negative note by suggesting that Hoberman's views lack substance. That would be completely wrong. An Army of Phantoms is not just an illuminating analysis of a critical period in film history, it's also a thoroughly entertaining book. He has a lively way of writing and likes to lightly mock many of the directors, writers, producers and actors he mentions. Members of the Hollywood branch of the American Communist Party - the "Swimming pool Soviet," as they were sometimes called - are usually referred to as "Comrade Lawson," "Comrade Maltz," and so on. And the pretensions of both right and left are wittily held up for examination, as are the follies and foibles of the bosses. There's an anecdote about Elia Kazan and John Steinbeck showing the screenplay of Viva Zapata! to Eddie Mannix, the tough general manager at MGM. Mannix took them to task because of the way the film portrayed revolutionaries in a positive light, but on being told that the Mexican government had offered substantial financial support for the film his attitude changed. "What the hell," he said, "Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, too." When all was said and done it was money that decided most things in Hollywood.
BARON'S COURT, ALL CHANGE by Terry Taylor
THE
FURNISHED ROOM by Laura Del-Rivo
ADRIFT IN SOHO by Colin Wilson Reviewed by Jim Burns
These three novels were first published in 1961 and they all deal with lives lived on the fringes of society in the 1950s. The title of the series they appear in — "Beats, Bums and Bohemians" - sums up the kind of people they focus on, though their links to an older Soho bohemianism might incline the pedantic to wonder if "Beats" really applies in a couple of cases. There were Beats around in the late-1950s, and the word itself was often a substitute for bohemians, but colourful and/or oddball characters didn't just arrive in Soho after Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg became well-known. Roland Camberton's Scamp, an earlier title from New London Editions, can be mentioned as throwing light on the subject in fictional form, and The World is a Wedding, an autobiography by Bernard Kops, tells in part about his induction into the community of misfits in Soho: "The regulars included the would-be poets, the sad girls from Scotland, the artists without studio or canvas." And he refers to Iron Foot Jack, the "King of the Bohemians," and Iris Orton, "A strange girl with a cloak, who was a beautiful poet." I remember seeing some of her poems in Jazz & Blues around forty years ago when I was writing for the magazine, so she was obviously still around then, but like so many poets she's since been forgotten. Jazz & Blues was edited by Albert McCarthy, himself an old Soho bohemian with roots going back into the 1940s. I've mentioned Jazz & Blues because Terry Taylor's Baron's Court, All Change, the book that might have some sort of Beat linkage, has a fair amount of jazz content and points to the importance of the music as a kind of escape from the routines of working and lower middle-class lives and the dull and dispiriting nature of the jobs available to intelligent, but not academically qualified young people. John, the hero of the novel, has an interest in spiritualism, though it becomes clear that it too is a means of finding something that doesn't tie in with the conformity of the wider society. It's at one of the spiritualist meetings that he encounters Bunty, an older woman, who is also there because it offers an alternative to conventional involvements. As she says: “There's a hundred different paths to travel that have nothing to do with crying babies, football pools, watching the tele, and Saturday night at the local.” Bunty introduces John to abstract art, alcohol, and some tentative sexual adventures, but at the same time his jazz interests take him into the world of cannabis, or "charge" as those in the know called it. Several other names are also used and I suppose it's inevitable that, as well as its virtues as a novel, Baron's Court, All Change has a great deal of sociological interest. There were never all that many books, either fact or fiction, that talked about the kind of people who frequented jazz clubs where modern jazz was played in the 1950s, which is one reason that I read Terry Taylor immediately his book was published in 1961. It referred to experiences when listening to the music that I could identify with. John says that his introduction to bebop came through hearing Bebop Spoken Here, track recorded by Tito Burns in 1949. It was around 1950, when I was fourteen, that I first heard this record, and though I suspect that more-aware enthusiasts may have considered it a commercialised version of the real sounds it seemed to me to sum up an attitude of wanting to stand apart from the square world. John is soon a committed user of cannabis and is drawn into selling as well as using it. He and a friend are soon supplying many of the musicians they admire, but John objects when the friend wants to expand their business into dealing in heroin. A couple of junkies are described in the novel and their dependency is shown as contrasting with the benign influence that cannabis supposedly has. The partners have been using the home of an acquaintance, Miss Roach, to hide their supply of drugs, though she's not aware of this fact. When the police raid her flat she's left to take the blame because she has a previous conviction for possession of cannabis. John seems to be having a crisis of conscience as the novel ends, but it's not clear if he'll tell the police that Miss Roach is innocent. He has been portrayed as behaving responsibly in other circumstances, particularly with regard to his sister, so the reader is left guessing about what will happen. As I said earlier, Baron's Court, All Change has documentary value, and jazz historians may find it of interest. A few names of real people are mentioned, such as Phil Seamen, a legendary British drummer and notorious junkie, Kenny Graham, Sonny Stitt, and Charlie Parker, and Miss Roach has a cat she calls Wardell Gray. Other musicians have fictitious names, though it may be possible to identify the real people behind them, if that's what you like to do. For me, it's enough that Terry Taylor evokes the period and the atmosphere so well. True, some of the slang now sounds so dated that it's almost cute, but most slang is like that. At one point in Terry Taylor's novel his hero is in a Soho coffee-bar and describes it as a place "where the strangest mixture of human beings gathered to fix up deals that never materialise, to talk about their painting and writing and a whole gang of other things, but I'm afraid they talk more than they create." It's a description almost echoed in Laura Del-Rivo's The Furnished Room when the central character, Beckett, goes into a Soho cafe and reflects on the kind of people he'd fallen in with when he moved to London: "He had found writers who did not write, painters who did not paint, petty thieves who were so unsuccessful that they were always scrounging the price of a cup of tea, and pretty girls who turned out to be art-school tarts with dirty faces." Taylor's hero has ambitions, if only to break away from suburban existence, and his activities as a drug dealer might point to an attempt to establish a role for himself in the circles he'd chosen to move in. But Beckett is a drifter, a man without any real aim in life. He works as a clerk but hates it and hasn't the energy or motivation to move on to something more interesting or challenging. He's not necessarily a bad person and helps an old man who is being harassed by some Teddy Boys. He also has some regard for his mother. But an encounter with a disgraced ex-officer leads to him considering whether or not to get involved in a plot to murder an old lady for her money. Beckett, with his mixture of Catholic guilt and existentialist doubt, needs to do something that will force him to face up to reality. He wants to feel something beyond doubt and disbelief because, as he says at one point, "disbelief is the opposite of freedom, because it paralyses action at the root." The Furnished Room, like Baron's Court, All Change, is full of small details that create the atmosphere of the 1950s. It's a world of brown ales and pubs that close at 3pm. When Beckett invites a girl back to his bedsit he has to ask her to talk quietly because he's not supposed to have visitors after 10.30pm. And he says: "I want to find a place without a landlady on the premises. I detest the whole race. The constant pettiness and prying, the complaining notes pushed under the door." After Beckett walks out of his job he drifts around, has desultory affairs with a couple of women, and eventually agrees to kill the old lady. The kind of quasi-philosophical discussions that Beckett has with the old man he helped and with the slightly sinister ex-officer are the sort of thing that Harry in Colin Wilson's Adrift in Soho likes to engage in. It's perhaps not surprising that Laura Del-Rivo was, in the 1950s, a member of a group that clustered around Wilson. I would guess, though I could be wrong, that he had some influence on her writing. Wilson's own novel is about yet another unsettled young man who samples the Soho scene. The difference is that Harry has no desire to become a king-pin around the jazz scene, nor is he as depressed and aimless as Beckett. It's true that, like John and Beckett, he's at odds with the world of humdrum jobs and conventional people, but he's determined to become a writer and is far more intellectually inclined than the others. Harry understands from the beginning that the bohemian life he encounters in Soho may have its charms, and can be entertaining, but it's not likely to lead to producing anything of great value. His immersion in it is just a short episode on a longer journey. It was Arsene Houssaye, the 19th Century French writer, who said that he was suspicious of literary bohemians because he saw them as only passing through and looking for material to write about. And it isn't to Colin Wilson's discredit if I say that his book often gives that impression. It's an intellectual exercise, albeit one with a light touch and some humour. John and Beckett are contemptuous of the non-productive bohemians they encounter, whereas Harry is amused by them. The world of literature and learning is a constant throughout Adrift in Soho and names like T.S.Eliot, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche soon crop up. There are also references to Count Basie, Stanford White, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Charles Boyer. Harry is an autodidact and likes to immerse himself in a world of culture where one thing leads to another. When he finds his way to bohemian dives in Soho he encounters a self-proclaimed anarchist, Robert De Bruyn who sells him a book by Lautréamont, and is introduced to Iron Foot Jack and other characters. I'm sure that many of them would be easily recognisable to anyone who frequented Soho in the 1950s, or who knows something of the literature of the period. The people Harry talks to are not the types found in Baron's Court, All Change, nor in The Furnished Room. They often seem to be from an older category of bohemians. I was reminded of John Gawsworth, at one time a poet with at least a minor reputation but who declined into drink and a shambling existence around Soho and elsewhere. I doubt that many people know his poetry, and I've only read it in a couple of anthologies, but he had been rated enough in his day for a Collected Poems to be published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1949. He also edited Poetry Review for a time and was said to be knowledgeable about the literature of the 1890s. Gawsworth (his real name was Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) also wrote fantasy and horror stories and knew M.P.Shiel, who bequeathed him an island in the Caribbean that he supposedly owned. Gawsworth liked to see himself as the King of Redonda and was given to bestowing titles on friends and acquaintances, especially those who plied him with liquor. There's an entertaining, though perhaps also sad account of a visit that Gawsworth paid to the St Ives poet Arthur Caddick in the Winter 1972 issue of The Cornish Review. Caddick was not averse to a drink himself but he struggled to cope with Gawsworth's alcoholic eccentricities. Interestingly, there is some useful information about him in All Souls, a novel by the Spanish writer, Javier Marias. Have I digressed too far from considering Adrift in Soho? Not really, because I wanted to mention Gawsworth as an example of the sort of bohemians around Soho when Wilson got there in the pre-Beat days. His book is full of characters like Gawsworth. Harry meets a man who describes himself as a "Babouvian," which he explains is a follower of Gracchus Babeuf, "one of the earliest and greatest of the socialist thinkers." Later, there's a reference to "two drunken homosexual painters," who, when mentioned a second time, are described as "Welsh." But it doesn't take much imagination to guess that they're based on the two Scottish Roberts - Colquhoun and MacBryde - who were well-known around Soho in the 1940s and 1950s. Harry has a dream of establishing a "community of artists" who would pool their resources and support each other. But he lodges in a tumbledown Notting Hill house where a variety of would-be poets and writers live, and soon realises that their main aim is to avoid having to work. He comes to the conclusion that "avoiding work costs more energy than a straightforward job." While sampling the bohemian scene he's met an out-of-work actor who has explained his philosophy of bohemianism, and though Harry has been interested by what he's seen and heard he knows he can't possibly remain in that situation: "I could never live according to James's 'philosophy of freedom.' For better or for worse, I am a bourgeois." Harry has realised the truth in what Tambimuttu, another Soho regular of the post-war years, told Julian Maclaren-Ross: "If you get Sohoitis, you will stay there always day and night and get no work done ever." Adrift in Soho ends on a more-positive note than the other two books under review. Harry helps an artist, Ricky, who is the one talented person in the Notting Hill house, to construct a barrier to his studio so that the shiftless bohemians hanging around in the rest of the property will not keep invading his space and stopping him working. Harry feels a sense of satisfaction at the thought that Ricky has accepted him as understanding why it's sometimes necessary to go to extreme lengths to assert one's needs for privacy and time to work. I can't end this review without referring to the context in which the three books were first published. 1961 was very much a time when books and articles by and about bohemians, Beats, and other outsiders seemed to abound. The Beat explosion of the late-1950s was partly responsible, but I'd guess that rising affluence and the loosening of the social restrictions that shaped life in the 1950s also helped. The 1960s didn't really start until 1963 or so, and the kind of "underground" scene often dominated by pop music was not much in evidence before that. But something was stirring. I've had a quick look along my bookshelves and there are books, all published around 1961, that point to the interest in the bohemian lives of artists and writers. To name a few of them, Robert Baldick's The First Bohemian:The Life of Henry Murger; Allen Churchill's The Improper Bohemians; Ned Calmer's All the Summer Days; Louis Vaczek's The Troubader; Lawrence Levine's The Great Alphonse. I'm sure I could find more if I looked hard enough. Bohemianism was in the air, and Soho, St Ives, Montparnasse, and Greenwich Village, not to mention North Beach in San Francisco were the places to head for. And the writers now? Taylor, Del-Rivo and Wilson are all still alive. A note tells us that Wilson lives quietly in Cornwall with his 30,000 books. He's written over 100 himself on a variety of subjects. Laura Del-Rivo also carried on writing but supported herself with a market-stall in Portobello Road. Terry Taylor never published anything after his first book, though there was a "lost" novel and another that remains unpublished. He had a somewhat colourful life, being at one time the lover of the photographer Ida Kar. An exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery in 2011 included photographs of Taylor and Laura Del-Rivo. I was delighted to read that, in more recent years, he ran a sandwich shop in Rhyl.
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