MAGAZINE SPRING 2018 ISSUE 39
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the dandy
The origins and melancholy nature of the dandy, by Philip Mann
a suffragette in the family
Biographer Anne Sebba on the militant suffragette Leonora Cohen and other relatives from the past
hidden corners
Francine Stock is intrigued by the titles in the Cinematograph shelfmark in Science & Miscellaneous
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4 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
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HIGHLIGHTS
The London Library Magazine / issue 39
14
Contents
Anne Sebba looks back at two women in her family – her grandmother Lily, a music-hall singer and artists’ model, and the famous suffragette Leonora Cohen – and describes the surprising turns her research into her family’s past has taken
7 FROM THE director 8 Contributors 10 BEHIND THE BOOK The Library’s titles on Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn were essential to Margaret Willes’s book about their relationship
13 MY DISCOVERY Anne Sebba’s grandmother Lily Black.
18
Ned Beauman on his chance find in Biography of the memoirs of Ludwig II of Bavaria’s chef
14 a suffragette in the family Biographer Anne Sebba on applying her research skills to her own family history
From Edward Carrick’s Designing for Moving Pictures (1941), in which the art director shares his experience of building lavish sets and encourages readers to have a go themselves, to Sartre’s script-that-never-was for John Huston’s film Freud (1985), the Cinematograph shelfmark has plenty to interest the browser, as Francine Stock has discovered
18 hidden corners Francine Stock is absorbed and entertained by the titles in S. Cinematograph
22 the dandy ‘Interior of typical cinematograph camera’, from The Cinematograph Book (1916), edited by Bernard E. Jones.
22
Philip Mann explores the dandy’s melancholia
27 MEMBERS’ NEWS
The philosopher Otto Mann found the dandy’s true nature in his pathology: ‘In the convulsive desire for a fulfilling content to life, all possibilities are exhausted.’ Philip Mann examines the complex psychology of the dandy, beginning with Beau Brummell.
Beau Brummell, from an engraving after a miniature by John Cooke.
p
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5
Trading in War London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson Margarette Lincoln
This immersive and meticulously researched study of London’s riverside districts in the 18th century revealing the lives of ordinary people who played a crucial role in Britain’s fight to sustain its global maritime trade and, eventually, defeat Napoleonic France Hardback | £25.00
Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales Jill Francis
Astrid Lindgren The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking Jens Andersen Translated by Caroline Waight
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for studies in British Art
A riveting biography of the turbulent life and work of the beloved children’s book author and Scandinavian literary icon Astrid Lindgren. Her series featuring the indomitable Pippi Longstocking has influenced generations of young readers throughout the world.
Hardback | £35.00
Hardback | £25.00
Exploring the less extravagant gardens of the 16th and 17th century British county gentry, this beautifully illustrated book presents a picture of gardeners and their daily activities.
200 colour + b/w illus.
Packing My Library
In Pursuit of Civility
Whistler’s Mother
Portrait of an Extraordinary Life
An Elegy and Ten Digressions
Keith Thomas
Daniel E. Sutherland and Georgia Toutziari
Alberto Manguel
A peerless study of the place of civility in the shaping of English society between the early 16th and the late 18th centuries from renowned historian Keith Thomas.
This crisp biographical portrait reveals the life of the figure depicted in James McNeill Whistler’s famous painting known as Whistler’s Mother.
Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England
Hardback | £25.00
Hardback | £18.99
YaleBooks
In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader and collector of books, renowned bibliophile Alberto Manguel meditates upon his vast personal library and champions the far reaching importance of all libraries. Hardback | £16.99
@yalebooks www.yalebooks.co.uk
p from the director
On the cover
Bunny Roger in front of his house, 10 Walton Street, Chelsea, in the 1950s. Photographer unknown.
Welcome to the first issue of the Magazine for 2018 – an issue that eloquently demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of what the Library has to offer and the range of topics our members are involved in. In Behind the Book, Margaret Willes discusses some of the sources for her recent book, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (2017), and the insights they have provided into two of England’s greatest diarists and life in the seventeenth century. In My Discovery, Ned Beauman unveils a very different sort of life story that he came across in the stacks – that of Theodor Hierneis, writing about his experience as cook for King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 1880s. Anne Sebba takes us on her own journey of discovery, tracking down some of her ancestors, including the militant suffragette Leonora Cohen, whose smashing of a glass cabinet in the Tower of London Jewel House was a celebrated incident in the campaign for women’s votes. Following the publication of his latest book, The Dandy at Dusk (2017) – and the talk he gave to members recently – Philip Mann explores the history of the dandy, and in Hidden Corners, broadcaster and writer Francine Stock takes a tour of one of Science & Miscellaneous’s most fascinating sections – the Cinematograph collection. Members’ News reports on a number of exciting developments, including awards in the New Year’s Honours list; the opening of new facilities for members on the sixth floor; a project to make more of our collection visible on Catalyst; and the start of our new events programme. I hope you will find much to interest you among these pages and on your next visit to the Library.
Philip Marshall Director
Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 2 March 2018 © 2018 The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201. The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.
Editorial Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Catherine Cartwright
Editorial committee Julian Lloyd Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner
Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Communications Department, The London Library 020 7766 4704
Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7
CONTRIBUTORS
Charmed lives in Greece Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor
Ned Beauman Joined the library in 2006
Ned Beauman was born in London in 1985. He is the author of four novels, most recently Madness Is Better Than Defeat (2017), published by Sceptre. In 2013 he was included on Granta’s list of the twenty best young British novelists, and his work has been translated into more than ten languages.
Art, literature and friendships in Greece
Philip Mann Joined the library in 2002
Born in Germany, Philip Mann has lived in London since 1988 and has a degree in the History of Art. He has written for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Vogue and has lectured on matters sartorial in Vienna, New York, Bern and London. His first book, The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century (Head of Zeus), was published in 2017.
8 March – 15 July 2018
Anne Sebba Joined the library in 1983
After a brief spell in the BBC World Service (Arabic), Anne Sebba joined Reuters in 1972, the first female graduate trainee. She left in 1980 and since then has written 11 books of non-fiction, including That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson (2011) and Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s (2016). She is currently working on a life of Ethel Rosenberg. © Serena Bolton Photography.
Francine Stock Joined the library in 2007
Francine Stock has fronted a range of current affairs and arts programmes for BBC Television and Radio including Newsnight, Front Row and The Film Programme. Her published work includes two novels, short stories, film criticism and a social history of cinema, In Glorious Technicolor (2011). She is a director of the Hay Festival. Supported by
Free
© Charlie Hopkinson.
Margaret Willes Joined the library in 2005
Organised with
In collaboration with the Benaki Museum and the Craxton Estate
8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.
Margaret Willes, formerly publisher at the National Trust, is the author of several books, including Reading Matters (2008), The Gardens of the British Working Class (2014) and, most recently, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (Yale University Press, 2017). She is currently working on a book about the use of plants in houses in the seventeenth century.
Monet and Architecture Richard Thomson The first book to focus on Monet’s work through his representation of architecture In an innovative approach, Richard Thomson considers Claude Monet’s paintings of buildings in their environment, offering a reappraisal of an artist more often associated with landscapes, seascapes and gardens. The book covers Monet’s representations of historical buildings, inner cities, beach resorts, railway bridges and stations and busy harbours – subjects spanning northern France, the Mediterranean and the cities of Rouen, London and Venice. Accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery, London, 9 April – 29 July 2018. 180 colour + b/w illus. Hardback £30.00 Published by National Gallery Company • Distributed by Yale University Press
YaleBooks
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Descent of Christ into Limbo (detail), Bronzino.
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Splendours of St Petersburg Verdi in Bratislava
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Cathedrals & Abbeys of the North
Power & Patronage in Florence
Great Houses of Yorkshire
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9
Behind the
Book
When Margaret Willes set out to research the friendship between the two great English diarists for her book, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (2017), she found important sources in The London Library
‘
’
Margaret Willes’s The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (Yale University Press, 2017).
The obvious place to begin researching was to burrow into the diaries of the two men. While I owned the volumes of Pepys’s diary edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, I did not possess the diary of Evelyn edited by Esmond de Beer, so The London Library proved invaluable for this, as well as for other key titles.
The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford 1955). Biog. Evelyn. Esmond de Beer, a trustee of The London Library 1949–76, donated a set of his impeccably edited version of Evelyn’s diary. From de Beer I found out how the diaries of both men came to be rediscovered. That of Evelyn was rescued from the fate of being used to cut out dress patterns and was published in 1818. As a result, the fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, decided to decipher the shorthand of a diary kept by Pepys. This was published in 1825 as Memoirs of Samuel Pepys: Comprising his Diary from 1659 to 1669, with a second edition appearing three years later. When the Library was founded in 1841, one of the first books it acquired was this 1828 edition, with Pepys’s rich descriptions of Restoration England, although his diary had been bowdlerised to respect Victorian sensibilities. Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, ed. Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge 1997). Biog. Pepys. The main title of this book is taken from Evelyn’s tribute to Pepys on hearing of his death in May 1703. The two men came from very different backgrounds, and they were brought into direct contact in 1665 through their official work to relieve the suffering of sailors during the Anglo-Dutch
10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Wars. At first their correspondence is strictly business-like, but as the years pass so the tone becomes more affectionate, with discussion of their mutual interests, especially their love of books. Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin (London 2002), Biog. Pepys; John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity by Gillian Darley (Newhaven and London 2006), Biog. Evelyn. These two biographies were published to mark the respective 300th anniversaries of the diarists’ deaths. Both men had long and busy lives during a period of complex political change, so it is a tribute to Tomalin and Darley that they rose so ably to the challenge, providing rich background detail. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, ed. Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith (2 vols., Toronto 2014). Biog. Evelyn. Evelyn was a prolific writer of letters, with correspondents who included his family, fellow members of the Royal Society, leading politicians and those who shared his horticultural interests. These letters have been scattered but Evelyn kept copies, which are now among his papers in the British Library. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England by Antonia Fraser (London, 1984). S. Women. The subtitle of this volume is telling, for women’s ‘lot’ to our modern thinking was
often hard, and sometimes tragic. Fraser tells of the perils of childbirth and the frequent death of children, experiences that Evelyn and his wife Mary knew only too well. She also charts the uneasy relationship between Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys, full of jealous strife fuelled by Pepys’s sexual adventures. Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin by Frances Harris (Oxford 2002). Biog. Evelyn. Evelyn was susceptible to the charms of young women who combined beauty with religiosity, and was particularly attracted to Margaret Blagge, a maid of honour at the royal court whom he met before she married Sidney Godolphin in 1676. Harris was the curator who catalogued the mass of Evelyn papers that came to the British Library, so was able to use this material in her sensitive examination of the ‘seraphic’ friendship between Evelyn and Margaret. Elysium Britannicum, or, The Royal Gardens by John Evelyn, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia 2001). S. Garden, 4to. Evelyn published over a dozen books, but his greatest work never reached the printing presses. Elysium Britannicum was his attempt to compile a comprehensive encyclopaedia of horticulture, a project that ultimately overwhelmed him. His manuscript, with its drawings of garden tools, speaking statues and Gothic beehives, was finally published in 2001.
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MY DISCOVERY the monarch dines the memories of theodor hierneis, one-time cook at the couRt of king ludwig II of bavaria (1954) The memoirs of Ludwig II’s chef offered Ned Beauman food for thought when he came to write his latest novel
Ludwig II, 1884, from The Monarch Dines: The Memories of Theodor Hierneis (1954). © Bayr. Verwaltung der Staatl. Schlösser, Garten und Seen, Munich, and the Kunstverlag Martin Herpich & Sohn, Munich.
These days chef’s memoirs are as common as sautéed kale, but the only chefs I really want to hear from are chefs who worked for famous demented autocrats. In 2003 the Japanese sushi chef Kenji Fujimoto published I Was Kim Jong-il’s Cook, in which he recounts his time with the former supreme leader of North Korea. Fujimoto would travel the world buying Czech beer, Uzbek caviar, Thai papayas, Danish pork and, on one occasion, hamburgers from a McDonald’s in Beijing. His book is, as far as I know, only the second example of this select genre, the first being The Monarch Dines: The Memories of Theodor Hierneis, One-Time Cook at the Court of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (transl. Martin Cooper, 1954). Hierneis was born in 1868 and entered Ludwig’s service as a kitchen-boy at the age of 14. He worked for Ludwig for 4 years until the king’s mysterious death aged 41, and was one of the group that discovered Ludwig’s body in the lake at Schloss Berg, his summer residence. From the beginning, Hierneis was warned that if he ever made eye contact with the king he would be sacked; later, ‘when the king’s nervous terror of people increased … orders were given that no one was to be seen at a door, in the courtyard, or even at a window. In the case of the king suddenly appearing and all escape being impossible, the only hope of avoiding his displeasure was to stand bent double, with finger-tips touching the shoes … I soon learned that the king always ate alone, and in spite of
Roman peacocks. Hierneis’s memoir made my tour of Neuschwanstein’s kitchens all the more enjoyable. But I still had it at the back of my mind later on, when I began work on my latest novel, Madness Is Better Than Defeat (2017). In a modern democracy, the most respectable way to behave like an eccentric tyrant is to become a film director. In Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now (1979), Eleanor Coppola writes that her husband Francis ‘was setting up his own Vietnam with his supply lines of wine and steaks and air conditioners. With his staff of hundreds of people carrying out his every request, he was turning into Kurtz. ’ My own book follows a film crew setting off to shoot a screwball comedy on location at a Mayan ruin in Honduras, and Ludwig was as much my inspiration as Coppola when one of the chefs is ordered to contrive a breakfast of Eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys using nothing but ingredients he can forage in the rainforest. When we think of the millions of North Koreans who starved as Kim Jong-il indulged his whims, we feel only revulsion; but Hierneis seems to have respected Ludwig for his excesses. ‘We all accepted such eccentricities as a kind of luxury, ’ he says – but then admits at last that ‘perhaps I was even then aware of the breath they brought of another, unintelligible world, and one whose explanation could not be sought merely in the difference between royalty and ordinary humanity’ .
this, every dish had to be prepared for four people. At first I accepted this as one of the many inexplicable prescriptions of court etiquette; but I later learned that the king imagined himself to be entertaining guests.’ Yet, Hierneis adds, ‘I never for a moment dreamed that the king was ill or mentally deranged. Such a thing would not have entered any of our heads. ’ I discovered Hierneis’s slim volume in The London Library prior to a visit I made a few years ago to Neuschwanstein, the palace of medieval kitsch that Ludwig built for himself as a kind of Wagner theme park. As a young man, Ludwig was famous for his svelte beauty, but in the picture at the front of this book, he’s so fat that the back of his neck brims over the collar of his coat. ‘Ludwig II of Bavaria, ’ reads the caption, ‘from a photograph taken in 1884, at the time when Hierneis was in his service’ . This, evidently, is what Heirneis’s cooking did to him. It’s rather like a riding coach beginning his memoirs with a picture of his most famous client being trampled by a horse. A typically leaden menu printed in the book begins with a casserole of ham dumplings, followed by salmon en coquilles, beef with stuffed mushrooms, green beans with veal, roasted hare and stewed tripe, along with two rounds of sorbets. Still, it must be admitted that Ludwig’s diet, like Kim Jongil’s, was at least enviably cosmopolitan: he relished Volga sterlets, Whitstable oysters, Courland reindeer, Indian bird’s-nests and
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
a suffragette in the family This year marks the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain, a good time for Anne Sebba to recount the courage of her relative Leonora Cohen, as well as the lives of other family members whose stories are admirable but less well documented Few writers can resist the temptation of putting their own family under the spotlight at some point in their lives. Beware the writer in the family, as the old adage goes. But if tackling a biography about someone you never met brings challenges by demanding you imaginatively enter into that hitherto unknown person’s world, writing about your own family is littered with traps of a different sort, emotional involvement merely one. So I know I am not alone when, in between researching and writing books about well-known figures that have been commissioned, I turn to my own family for inspiration. In my case the magnet is my grandmother Lily, who left school at 14 and achieved some fame in her day as a music-hall singer and artists’ model. Born in 1889, the same year as Charlie Chaplin, she briefly worked alongside him and used to tell us how he once proposed marriage and she turned him down. ‘Not a good prospect, you see. The whole idea was to get off the stage and live comfortably. ’ Perhaps she was right. For a brief time in her teenage years, Miss Lily Black was a big star in Bradford, had songs especially written for her and was even principal boy in an Emile Littler pantomime at Drury Lane in London. She was also the model for a series of rather risqué murals on Liverpool Town Hall ceiling painted by John Henry Amshewitz, who was commissioned after he won a major competition in Liverpool. But in 1910, aged 21, she gave it all up and married my grandfather Leo, also 21, then working as a travelling salesman 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Anne Sebba’s grandparents Lily and Leo on their wedding day, 1910.
for Raphael Tuck & Sons, the greetings-card company. Although Leo’s Polish Jewish family had settled in Birmingham and were running a silverware business, his own job was to persuade Lily to have her photograph taken for a postcard series he was promoting. They fell in love, she agreed to convert to Judaism and they were married in a Bradford synagogue by the pragmatic rabbi Joseph Strauss. Lily was famous enough in Bradford that the local paper sent a top reporter to cover her wedding. But then she became a housewife, mother of three and never really talked about her teenage independence and success, nor would she be drawn on the other men who had sent bouquets and carriages to the stage door to woo her.
‘
Lily briefly worked alongside Charlie Chaplin and used to tell us how he once proposed marriage and she turned him down
’
I have been trying to find out about Lily’s early life for years, but there are no letters. So, in idle moments, I browse The London Library shelves searching for any possible reference to her in books of theatre history or postcard history, or biographies of Chaplin, Tuck, or any of the artists for whom she sat, all of which the Library has in abundance. I have read many interesting vignettes of social history, but of my grandmother, sadly, there is nothing. Creating any biography demands multiple sources of information including archives, letters, photographs, newspapers and diaries, as well as interviews and conversations. All these must be sifted until some hoped-for objective truth arrives. But artefacts can be useful too; clothes or sometimes jewellery. For my biography of
Wallis Simpson it was a moth-eaten coat that had been made up especially for Ernest Simpson by the Prince of Wales’s tailor, which revealed to me how comfortably the affair had started as a threesome, with Ernest fully colluding in and enjoying the step up in society which the proximity to the Prince gave him through his wife’s friendship. When I wrote about Laura Ashley the family gave me a tiny document wallet, which Laura called her briefcase, in which she carried a piece of needlepoint, an example of her faux deference and wily determination to show that her husband Bernard was the boss. Writing about one’s own family there is at least a good chance that you might already own some letters, photographs, perhaps even the dinner plates they used, or have memorised halflistened to, overly embellished, family yarns. A few months ago I received a thrilling email from a stranger that sent me down a different path in the search for Lily. My correspondent, Geoff, told me that he owned a large pocket watch made by my great-great-grandfather Abraham Cohen, the man who became Lily Black’s grandfather-in-law. Abraham was born in Warsaw in around 1828 and in the early 1840s came to Leeds, where he married, had nine children and set up a watchmaking and jewellery business which quickly flourished. His signature is engraved on the inner casing of this large silver pocket watch, which was the part he would have manufactured, the movement no doubt imported from Switzerland. Geoff had worked out my family connection to the watch thanks to an article I had once written about Abraham’s famous daughter-in-law, the militant suffragette Leonora Cohen, who befriended my grandmother when she, ten years later, married into the family. Leonora, a former milliner, had grown up in hardship with only her widowed mother, Jane Throp, working as a seamstress to support them both. In 1900 she married Abraham’s son Henry, although both families opposed the marriage – the Cohens because they wanted a Jewish wife for Henry, and Jane because she did not want her daughter to marry at all and suffer the same hardships as she had. Yet everyone who knew them described the marriage as a love match and Henry was always deeply supportive of his radical wife. Henry’s sister, Rosa, married the man who became my great-grandfather and it was their son
Top Signed postcard of Lily Black posing as a flower-seller.
Above The pocket watch made by Sebba’s great-great-grandfather Abraham Cohen, which now sits on her desk.
Leo who fell in love with Lily, a similarly unsuitable love match. It was thus hardly surprising that when Lily and Leo married they invited Henry and Leonora, Leo’s aunt and uncle, to be witnesses at their wedding. There is no mention of any parents being present at the Bradford ceremony. Leonora was politically aware from a young age and in 1909, by then a mother, THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15
Above The piece in the Times on 8 February 1913 about Leonora Cohen’s court case. Left Leonora Cohen, the suffragette who married Sebba’s great-greatuncle Henry. Photograph Bridgeman Images.
‘
In 1913 Leonora became nationally famous when she followed a group of schoolboys into the Jewel House at the Tower of London and flung an iron bar into a glass cabinet
’
16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) led by Emmeline Pankhurst, which believed in direct action to win the vote, sometimes resorting to bombing and arson. But after several years of peacefully handing out leaflets and selling marmalade to raise funds, she wanted to raise her game. On 1 February 1913 she became nationally famous when she followed a group of schoolboys into the Jewel House at the Tower of London and, by sticking close to them at the back, gave the impression she was their teacher. Seizing her moment she flung an iron bar, hidden in her coat, over the heads of the schoolboys into a glass cabinet, which loudly smashed. She had wrapped a message around the implement bearing the message ‘Votes for Women: 100 years of Constitutional Petitions Resolutions Meetings & Processions have failed’ . She was immediately arrested, overpowered by Beefeaters and a police sergeant, who asked her why she had done
Opposite Leonora’s suffragette dress, now in the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection. © Leeds Museums and Galleries, photograph Bridgeman Images.
it. ‘It is my protest against the treachery of the government against the working women of Great Britain,’ she replied. Her case came up for trial three days later and, charged with causing damage worth more than £5, Leonora conducted her own defence. Thanks to his expertise in the jewellery trade, Henry had found an expert witness, a cabinet-maker who insisted he could repair the smashed case for only £4 10s. The jury decided therefore that Leonora was not guilty of causing damage in excess of £5 and was acquitted. The newspapers loved this dramatic story and, in the basement of The London Library, I find the Times’s sober reference to Leonora’s victory, a small paragraph but a clear reminder that she had narrowly escaped a prison sentence of several months, as was handed out to her fellow protestors. But in the following weeks suffragette violence escalated and, before the year was out, Leonora was arrested
A SUFFRAGETTE IN THE FAMILY again, this time for smashing windows in Leeds town centre. She believed that while attacking private property was wrong, government or public buildings were a legitimate target. This time, charged with causing damage of £26, she was sent to Armley prison in Leeds where she immediately went on a hunger and thirst strike. Her health deteriorated rapidly and within two days, as she was close to death, she was released on licence. These tactics were legitimised by Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government following the passing of the 1913 Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act. Henry, incensed at the possibility that his wife might die, now wrote to Home Secretary Reginald McKenna stating categorically that if Leonora were again arrested and subsequently released on licence he would refuse to accept her back, so that the government would have to take responsibility for her possible death. She survived and, together with their young son, Reginald, the couple soon moved to Harrogate to restore her health, where she set up and ran a vegetarian boarding house. During the war Leonora worked in a munitions factory and afterwards moved back to Leeds, became a magistrate and was awarded an OBE for her public work. She died 40 years ago in 1978, aged 105. I am devastated that I never met her even though my mother was named Rosetta, in memory of Henry and Leonora’s baby daughter Rosetta, who died before she was one. Geoff told me that he had found the watch, now broken, in an old biscuit tin and that it had been used by one of his grandfathers, both cotton-mill engine men in Worsthorne, near Burnley, so the accuracy of the mechanism would have been crucial. But he had no connection to it and wanted to offer it to me as a gift. ‘Perhaps a fair exchange would be one of your biography books, ’ he charmingly suggested. I rushed to the post office with three, duly signed. And soon after I received the watch. Merely holding this heavy object, which sits comfortably in the palm of my hand, gives me a frisson. I took it for an estimate for repair from an expert horologist and was only momentarily cast down by his opinion that it would cost hundreds of pounds to restore the movement properly and that the watch
had little or no intrinsic value. It is a good, solid, well-made everyday watch, which would have been pulled by its chain out of a waistcoat several times a day. By 1914, just a year after Leonora’s trial, soldiers in the trenches favoured wrist watches, and pocket watches went swiftly out of fashion. Yet the silver case, probably made in Birmingham and assayed in Chester around 1870, is charming and undented, and its value to me is priceless. I now have this watch, repaired, sitting on my desk, as a clock, reminding me (as I have to wind it daily) of my connections to this pioneering family. It could not have arrived at a better moment. In February 1918, women over 30 in Britain were finally granted the right to vote. And so, as this year is being celebrated as the centenary of women’s suffrage, it is worth remembering that some women felt such a strong sense of injustice that they were prepared to take part in violent protest and risk undertaking
hunger strikes to the death in order to win that right. Of course the pocket watch does not directly tell me any more about my actress grandmother who, striving to be upwardly mobile, turned down Charlie Chaplin and married a watchmaker’s grandson. And yet, for me, it is as if one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle has just been slotted into place. In this case a silver pocket watch has revealed to me how smoothly the small-scale Jewish emigration to early Victorian Britain could operate. Within a generation a scarcely educated Pole could build a flourishing enterprise and become sufficiently assimilated into provincial British society that his son and grandson felt confident enough not only to marry for love two British-born girls, respectively a milliner and a music-hall actress, but, in Henry’s case, to challenge the laws of the land by supporting his wife in her fight to the death for justice.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17
HIDDEN CORNERS
in focus
Francine Stock selects her personal favourites from the Cinematograph collection of titles in Science & Miscellaneous
Nestling in Science & Miscellaneous, beginning with Harold Lloyd, as he clutches at a clock-face above Manhattan traffic in Safety Last!, and ending with Gelsomina, gazing wide-eyed at Zampano the strongman in Federico Fellini’s La Strada, lies Cinematograph, buffered by Chronology and Circus. It’s an intriguing rather than a comprehensive collection. Like cinema itself over the past 120 years, it flourishes in distinct epoques. Certain directors command several inches of shelf – Ingmar Bergman, René Clair, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock – directors who most
18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
probably reflect the tastes of The London Library users – Andrei Tarkovsky, yes, but Quentin Tarantino, not so much … and Michael Bay not at all. Among several François Truffaut books in this section is a collection of interviews and his book on Hitchcock. (Antoine de Baecque’s study of the life of Truffaut himself, published in 1996, is in Biography, however, as are his letters to Renoir in Letters: Jean Renoir, published in 1994.) There are studies of national cinema – including Russia, India, Canada, Mexico, Iran – and collections of the great film writers, supple, sharp or sententious, from James Agate and
James Agee through Graham Greene and Pauline Kael to Andrew Sarris. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are so many published scripts of all kinds of films – Harold Pinter’s 1990 take on Ian McEwan in Venice, The Comfort of Strangers (delivering, like Christopher Walken to Rupert Everett, a sudden punch to the solar plexus); Fellini’s young bucks in Rimini, I Vitelloni – in Italian, naturally (in Quattro Film, 1974) – or Shane Meadows’ northern boxing-club drama Twentyfourseven (1998). In an age when pirated versions of contemporary scripts turn up in shoals on the internet, it’s good to see these bound texts with gold-lettered spines stand solid against the vagaries of fashion and boxoffice success or failure, director’s cuts and DVD release. None is more impressive, arguably, than the hefty annotated volume of JeanPaul Sartre’s screenplay for John Huston’s film Freud. This you can browse either in English (The Freud Scenario, trans. Quintin Hoard, 1985) or the original French, published in 1984. Editor JeanBertrand Pontalis (a former pupil of Sartre) provides what can be reassembled of this grand projet of the 1950s: synopsis, first version (1959), second version (1960), and a comparative table. Huston did indeed make a film in 1962, Freud: The Secret Passion, with Montgomery Clift as the Doctor and Susannah York as Cecily (an amalgam of early cases, including Anna O.), but that carries no screen credit for Sartre. The story of the script-that-never-was would make a film itself. What a team they promised to make – one of America’s most virile directors, Oscar-winner for Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), in creative partnership with the Marxist philosopher superstar, with a demonstrable pulling power that relied on neither fox-hunting
Opposite John Huston, 1975. © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Photograph Everett Collection inc./ Alamy Stock Photo. Left ‘Up-to-date Projection Outfit’, frontispiece illustration from The Cinematograph Book: A Complete Practical Guide to the Taking and Projecting of Cinematograph Pictures, 1916 edition, edited by Bernard E. Jones.
‘
Despite their mutual enthusiasm for booze, women and introspection, Sartre and Huston failed to make progress on the script for Huston’s film on Freud
’
nor boxing. Huston proposed the project; Sartre delivered a synopsis, thought some more (lots more), then delivered an initial draft. This combination of action and reflection might well have proved an exemplar of dialectal scenario writing. It turned out a disaster. The first draft was ‘as thick as my thigh’ , claimed Huston; it threatened to run over seven hours. Sartre and Huston spent weeks together at St Clerans,
Huston’s Irish country house. Despite their mutual enthusiasm for booze, women and introspection, they failed to connect or make progress. In Huston’s retelling, it was mainly Sartre who did the talking, minutes at a time without cease or apparent acknowledgement. ‘There was no such thing as a conversation with him, ’ Sartre in turn confided to Simone de Beauvoir; he found Huston lacking in concentration, easily bored, perpetually distracted. He was unimpressed by the household, too: ‘everybody dead, with frozen complexes. ’ At one point (and Mel Brooks could hardly have made this up) Huston attempted to hynoptise Sartre. ‘Hypnotically impregnable, ’ conceded the man who could stare a lion in the eye before shooting it. Freud is an anomaly in Huston’s output, a sombre oddity between The Misfits and The Night of the Iguana and, despite the lack of credit for Sartre, the links between his vision and Huston’s are apparent. Huston’s picture is in black and white with a leaner narrative, voiceover from Huston himself and expressionistic dream sequences, while Sartre’s dream scenes in his screenplay are altogether more
elaborate and occasionally in colour. Both versions feature significant architecture, of course; for Sartre, it’s a lighthouse – ‘Perfectly round and of considerable height, it is also evocative of a phallic symbol. Behind the tower, a marvellously calm, green sea, with a little white foam on the crests of small waves. ’ And so on. By absurd comparison, a decade and a half later comes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘description’ (he makes the distinction from literary work) of his film Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir (no translation necessary), published in 1974. Studded with black-and-white stills from the production, this is the story, though narrative is clearly superfluous here, of two barely clad women, murder, a suggestion of witchcraft, a detective and a prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Michael Lonsdale) and even a very young Isabelle Huppert as a student. Much of the action, if that’s a fair description of tableaux interspersed with glances and a bit of stroking, is set in a convent prison. Meanwhile in Britain we were making Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Freud’s theories and cinema had grown together, his publications in the THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19
1890s coinciding with the early public screenings. Just 20 years on, a popular manual for those wishing to take up the newest art was The Cinematograph Book: A Complete Practical Guide to the Taking and Projecting of Cinematograph Pictures (1915), of which the Library has a 1916 edition with half-tone plates and line drawings of remarkable clarity, even if baffling to a modern reader (but not half as baffling as the inside of a digital camera would be). The tone of the editor Bernard E. Jones is brisk but kind: ‘A scenic subject is suggested as a good one for the novice because the work will be more like ordinary photography, and there will be no embarrassment from the necessity 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
of following energetic action. ’ Once he gets over this initial reticence, however, Jones presents plenty on exposure and f-stops, printing positive film and eventual projection, with diagrams to explain the mysterious Demeny’s Dog Movement (Georges Demeny was Leon Gaumont’s partner in the short-lived manufacture of the Bioscope in 1895) to allow for optimum projection. Are there many things more fascinating than detailed illustrations for manoeuvres no one (or only a very few historical specialists) may ever make again? Or the unsettling evangelism of ‘singing poet’ Vachel Lindsay, writing The Art of the Moving Picture in Springfield, Illinois (also in 1915), exhorting film-makers, warriors for this ‘new weapon of men’ , to be ‘delivered from the temptation to cynicism and the timidities of orthodoxy … Every year, despite earthly sorrow and the punishment of your mortal sins, despite all weakness and all of Time’s revenges upon you, despite Nature’s reproofs and the whips of the angels, new visions will come, new prophecies will come. ’ A more measured enthusiasm runs through Edward Carrick’s Designing for Moving Pictures, donated to the Library on its publication in 1941. Carrick was the son of Edward Gordon Craig, grandson of Ellen Terry. The title was No. 27 in the ‘How to Do It’ series issued by Studio Publications. Other volumes included Figure Drawing, Embroidery Design and Making Pottery. You’d imagine that this would be a gentle introduction for the weekend crafters and the cine-camera amateurs. Carrick however was a successful art director, working for Basil Dean on Lorna Doone in 1934 and Carol Reed on Midshipman Easy in 1935; he also provided suitably ominous surroundings for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Dolores del Rio as Apache dancers caught up in a murder in Accused from 1936. Despite his knowhow, there’s no trace of condescension; Carrick sets no limit to the ambition of the ‘yes, do please try this at home’ approach. Among subsections on ‘set-dressing: mist, treetops and cobwebs’ or ‘stones and trees of plaster’ , he shares his experience of providing a three-masted vessel in the open sea for Midshipman Easy. Carrick believed real skies would prove better than a studio backdrop, but the ocean was impractical (and too expensive) so he built a 45-foot-high scaffolding platform
on the lot (high enough to clear sightlines from trees and buildings) and built the ship on top of it, ‘much to the amusement of the townspeople, who could see the ship, as it were, sailing over the roof-tops from almost any house in the town’ . Other tips for the amateur include glass shots (painting a scene on to a piece of glass and combining that with live action so figures would appear to be in an exotic location, for less expense than a lavish set) and, my favourite, the Schufftan Process named for the cameraman on the proto-noir Quai des Brumes (1938). A scale model or image of a location, a silvered piece of glass at 45 degrees to the camera, some judicious scraping … and you can add a roof to a ruined castle, merge a tank of water with the sky. Aside from the make-do-andmend derring-do, what makes Carrick’s observations so appealing is his manifest love for the medium. As he says in the Foreword: ‘Don’t come into Film at all unless you are also going to help wholeheartedly to make it the greatest medium of expression that man has ever handled.’ This inclusive enthusiasm is striking in writing on film from the first half of the twentieth century, even if the promise of film’s greatness also carries concerns about its effect. There were moral panics over moving pictures well before the age of video nasties. Jacob Peter Mayer’s Sociology of Film from 1946 contains testimonies from filmgoers of all ages of the impact that the screen had on them, although the welfare of children in the face of mass entertainment is clearly a preoccupation for the author. Mayer, who was a refugee from Germany, managed to produce this study between weightier work on Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber. It’s a bizarre work, interspersing first-hand filmgoers’ accounts with lengthy quotes (without translation) from de Tocqueville and other experts such as the French critic Albert Thibaudet. These lofty observations might bump up against the opinions of children from Hampstead and North Paddington as to their favourite animal film, or an office clerk on the incidence of new technologies (automated mortuary drawers in medical drama, the Dictaphone in Double Indemnity, and so on) that had most impressed him. On the whole, the picture-goers consider themselves
HIDDEN CORNERS
Opposite, from top Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture (1915); Edward Carrick’s Designing for Moving Pictures (1941).
Right Photograph of the ship constructed on top of scaffolding built by Carrick for the film Midshipman Easy (1935), from his book Designing for Moving Pictures.
influenced mainly by hair, clothes or etiquette. (A 28-year-old, who had been an engineer in wartime, and before that had spent nine years in the hotel trade, admits: ‘Ramon Navarro was a great influence on my trying to be chivalrous, polite and understanding to women. ’) Sometimes, though, the testimonies are more intimate – through observations they make about what happens on the screen, people reveal themselves: a 20-something ended an affair with a married man after a viewing of Back Street, which proved more influential than her friends’ advice; a 49-year-old wife had taken great strength from Jane Eyre’s devotion to the challenging Mr Rochester as demonstrated by Joan Fontaine in the 1943 film with Orson Welles: ‘I decided to love my husband like that whatever he did to upset me … in consequence he has become more faithful to me. That film helped me more than any sophistry could have done. ’ Then, as an aside, she mentions a recent viewing of Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942): ‘I often have dreams in which I am in the icy water clinging to the side of the upturned boat. In my dream I am never saved, but sink down, gasping, to the bottom. ’ Censorship stalks these pages (and the shelves). Mayer deplores that American and British authorities suppressed The Forgotten Village (1941), a study in so-called ‘ethnofiction’ , set in Mexico, scripted by John Steinbeck, for its scenes of childbirth and breastfeeding. He’s all for film as education, admiring the Soviet system of showing films in schools, but is also terrified about its effects if commercial interests dominate what children, in particular, watch. A State Distributing Corporation might ensure less Hollywood and more from Russia and France, he suggests. Otherwise, ‘if we persist in our academic remoteness from film as mass-
influence, the doom of our civilisation is certain’ . As these shelves demonstrate, film certainly proved a fertile patch for academic study, in further education if not in schools. But did that banish remoteness? Arguably, the pursuit of film studies at its worst turned in on itself, with its own language, sacred cows and roped-off territories as inaccessible to the average cinema-goer as the most paternalistic of early film commentaries. The collection is a good reminder of how, at best, film writing is inclusive. A book published a dozen years ago (and not so easy to find outside the Library), Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, edited by Antonia Lant with Ingrid Periz, is a glorious demonstration of accessible, informed comment, with scores of contributions from Colette to Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West to the poet Bryher, as well as practitioners like early screenwriters Clara Beranger and Anita Loos. Bryher has her own volume on the shelves from 1929. Two years earlier, she had set up the film journal, Close Up, with her intimate associates, Kenneth Macpherson and Hilda Doolittle. Her enquiry, Film Problems of Soviet Russia, begins with an arresting account of a flight to Berlin to see a number of Russian
films (at this point, she admits, her total experience had been of just four). Some time into the flight, the plane developed a fault; she understood the crew to say that they would crash. At that moment, gazing out of the window at a fast-approaching bank of trees, she recalled a shot from René Clair’s The Prey of the Wind. The plane eventually made its way to ground without casualties, and Bryher goes on to rhapsodise about the films she saw on her arrival, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, The Peasant Women of Riazan, directed by the former actor and stage manager Olga Priobrashenskaya, and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s treatment of Maxim Gorky’s 1906 story, Mother. Open up British cinemas to these films, she urges, they will not bring revolution. Train the critics, she exhorts, train audiences: let them demand more challenging fare than the standard British or American commercial offering. ‘For the moment the battle is to the spectator. Is he willing to allow a handful of individuals to deny him the intellectual liberty common to the Continent?’ The terms may have changed, the censors have been outrun, but look at the selection on the shelves of S. Cinematograph (and the choice at your local multiplex) and judge whether Bryher’s battle is yet over.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21
The Dandy
Pleasure for the Beautiful Body, Pain for the Beautiful Soul
From Beau Brummell to Quentin Crisp, Philip Mann examines the characteristics of dandies through history and the melancholic disposition that is an essential part of their nature It is a truth universally acknowledged that the origin of dandyism proper lies with George Bryan Brummell, known as Beau Brummell (1778–1840). Not only was he the first dandy, he also – a by-product of his dandyism – revolutionised male clothing and so became, in the words of Max Beerbohm, ‘the father of modern costume’ . Brummell replaced the silks and velvets worn by the aristocracy with wool, and returned the silhouette of male attire from the pear-shaped cut of the ancien régime to the proud proportions of classical antiquity. The period of Brummell’s influence did indeed coincide with the neoclassical moment. The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum were relatively recent, and the new interest in antiquity inter alia led to a reappraisal of the physical ideal aspired to by the ancient Greeks, as might be admired in the figures of the Parthenon frieze and the Apollo Belvedere. Brummell took the existing clothes of the English country gentleman and refined them according to these rediscovered classical ideals. He thus invented the modern male suit still worn in the twenty-first century, not because all the components of Brummell’s costume were made, as is the custom today, from one cloth – this would only become the norm a hundred years later – but because of its unified abstraction of form in keeping with the Greek ideal. This proud achievement was arrived at by what to most would appear as a routine of back-breaking idleness. The Beau was cerebral even down to the character of 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
his beauty: contemporaries described his high forehead, his piercing eyes full of concentrated irony. Indeed, physical activity of any kind – which he found a nuisance at school and in the army – was anathema to him. In Brummell’s case, the corpus sanum of classical antiquity was cut from cloth. The earning of money he eschewed as belonging to the lowly and vulgar sphere. His rejection of any profitable occupation was a silent protest against useful and barbarised man. As the German philosopher Otto Mann pointed out in 1925, the dandy’s idleness is not ‘a natural disposition towards under-achievement, but a philosophically determined lack of realisation’ . This attitude makes financial independence a necessity for him – a necessity, however, that he is able to meet only rarely. Starting with a small inheritance of thirty thousand pounds – the confines of which initially proved the makings of his dandyism, as the art of dandyism, and indeed ‘good taste’ , is ultimately one of reduction, of creating principles appropriate to one’s means – Brummell eventually tended to lose money at the gaming tables of Brooks’s and White’s instead of augmenting his fortune. And so fate caught up with him. He paradoxically entered his declining years when he got the first job of his life. In order to help him to pay off his debts, the Duke of Wellington managed to have Brummell appointed British Consul in Caen in 1826 (he had already been in exile in Calais for ten years at this stage). But the required repayments were vastly disproportionate
Above Irena Sedlecká’s statue of Beau Brummell, 2002, in Jermyn Street. Photograph Neil Setchfield/ Alamy Stock Photo.
Opposite A dandy surrounded by the paraphernelia of his art: Massimiliano Mocchia di Coggiola’s The Broken Bow, 2016, a reworking of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, 1514.
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Brummell’s rejection of any profitable occupation was a silent protest against useful and barbarous man
’
to his salary, and his situation deteriorated rapidly, culminating in the abandonment of the Consulate in Caen by the Crown. In 1835, at the instigation of his creditors, Brummell spent two months in debtors’ prison in the French city. After his release, the remainder of his life was little more than a dance of death: he subsisted – despite his circumstances – on his favourite delicacy, the dainty and rather expensive biscuit rose de Reims, and his increasingly threadbare clothes were patched up for free by a sympathetic local tailor. By 1840 the Beau had descended to a state of not only financial but also mental anguish that was intolerable. He had suffered episodes of depression – ‘the blue devils’ as he called them – throughout his life. They had now become chronic. In the end he was carried off to an asylum where he was soon to die, crying ‘Loose me, scoundrels! I owe nothing!’ The dandy does not strive for a state of doing, but rather for a state of being. He is, in Thomas Carlyle’s disdainful definition, ‘a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes’ . As such he is an artist who is his own canvas, and not only his clothed body but his entire life are his work of art. Much is made of the question of whether dandyism consists of a total preoccupation with clothing or a philosophically determined attitude to life merging stoicism and Epicureanism. In truth the nature of the dandy lies neither in his clothing, nor in his attitude, but in the total fusion of the two. His self-conception as a work of art also serves us
with the keys to his pathology: melancholy, decline and early death are often in his fate. In the introduction to his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton concedes that Plutarch already knew that idleness was the sole origin of all melancholy. What the world perceives as the dandy’s excessive vanity often has its origin in a perception of physical inadequacy – Michel Leiris speaks of the necessity of ‘using one’s clothes in order to erect a wall around oneself’ . The resulting product, however, has its own crosses to bear or rather to proudly display : the dandy’s melancholia is the flower of evil with which he adorns himself. Having
realised himself early, the passing of time poses a particular problem for him. He is, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, a Hercules without tasks and hence has to develop strategies for coping with time. Of these the most successful is suicide. Walter Benjamin identified suicide as the ‘passion particulière de la vie moderne’ , and indeed the twentieth century is littered with dandy suicides. The most dandyistic was without doubt that of Jacques Rigaut, Surrealist poet and friend of André Breton, who at the age of twenty resolved – unprompted by feelings of duress or despair – that one day he would commit suicide, which he did in 1929 on reaching his THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23
The Duke of Windsor on a jetty at Wörthersee, Carinthia, Austria, 1954, by Leo Palliardi. Photograph © Kärntner Landesarchiv.
thirtieth year. The dandy’s goal of triumphing without ever having taken part can scarcely find a better example than in Rigaut: ‘I will be a great dead man. Try if you can to stop a man who travels with his suicide in his button-hole. ’ A less final way of defying time is illness. In illness, the dandy can legitimately retreat from doing to a state of being. In an attempt to seek rest and recovery through suffering, he frequently cultivates more than an interesting limp. The dandy seeks redemption in suffering in the decadent manner. Oscar Wilde, generally thought to be the most prominent example of late 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
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The wish to travel, the desire for flight and obscurity, is a
’
utopia that nourishes the natural death
wish of the dandy
nineteenth-century dandyism in England, was always too preoccupied with l’art pour l’art aestheticism and too little with classicism to fit into the Brummellian mould. Inspired by the teachings of Walter Pater, Wilde was all too often pursuing the external beauty of symbols rather than the truth they conceal. Ironically, Wilde came to dandyism proper at precisely the point at which he believed he had left it behind: in De Profundis (1905) he reveals suffering to be the secret of life, as it nourishes the soul, transcends the banality of pleasure and brings the dandy’s unconscious to the surface. The decline to which both Brummell and Wilde fell victim, and that the Decadent movement celebrated, is as inherent to the dandy as it is to the antiquity that guides him. Yet fate often denies the dandy the desired release through suffering. His consequential self-determination can leave him with no other delight but the infinitely sad one of tearing himself apart. The excruciating self-analysis, the reopening of self-inflicted wounds, the oscillation between emotionless torpor and violent agitation, all too often threaten to be the end of his existence as well as the means. At one of the frequent points of keenly felt despair in his life, Quentin Crisp remarked: ‘Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of selfknowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and angry. ’ The dandy’s
THE DANDY
Quentin Crisp in his New York apartment. Photograph Jack Picone/ Alamy Stock Photo.
suffering is more readily identified as a state of depression by the contemporary eye. His philosophically determined idleness, his complete self-absorption and his coolly analytical nature rather predispose him towards pathological melancholia. Precisely because of his excessively rational nature, he is susceptible to escaping into the irrationality of mental illness, which in the case of depression is not a helter-skelter of emotions but their terrifying absence. A third and yet more agreeable possibility for defying the unbearable passage of time is geographical flight, as embodied in travel. Leaving the familiar behind is more important here than arriving at the unknown, since upon arrival it is only a matter of time before its passage becomes unbearable again. So it is the departure, and – as Edward Gibbon already knew in 1793 – the journey itself that approach closest to a form of relief: ‘I am always so much delighted and improved with this union of ease and motion that, were not the expense enormous, I would travel every year some hundred miles. ’ To the Duke of Windsor, a rather determined example of twentiethcentury dandyism, inasmuch as he left the throne in order to realise himself as a dandy, permanent globetrotting was certainly one part of filling the huge void created by his abdication. The illusion of a fulfilled life had to be maintained, and the Windsors spent the post-war decades flitting between North
America, Biarritz and more exotic locations, always with quantities of trunks and servants in tow. Eventually the at first enchanting rituals of time-wasting inevitably palled, although the Duke made sure that the gilded, unchangeable mask over the terrors of the void stayed in place. Harold Nicolson observed: ‘He pretends to be very busy and happy, but I feel this is false and that he is unoccupied and miserable.’ The wish to travel, the desire for flight and obscurity, is yet another utopia that nourishes the natural death wish of the dandy. Partir, c’est mourir un peu ; therein lies its attraction. What remains are the most immediate ways of escaping time, labelled ‘pleasures’ by Baudelaire: alcohol, fornication and les paradis artificiels, excessive enjoyment of which equates most closely to the common definition of decadence. They lie at the heart of fin-de-siècle dandyism, the ‘naughty nineties’ of the nineteenth century. The archetype of the decadent dandy is J.K. Huysmans’ fictional Jean des Esseintes in À rebours (1884), the book which the cultural critic Mario Praz described in 1930 as ‘the pivot around which the psychology of the whole Decadent movement centres’ . We meet des Esseintes at a point in his life when he is already greatly weakened by the excesses of active decadence and has retreated into a self-created hermitage in the banlieues. Like Wilde with Dorian Gray, Huysmans conveys only a vague impression
of exactly what pleasures have so sated des Esseintes. Sexually, however, he descends from encounters with singers and actresses, via ‘evil’ mistresses experienced in every art and ever less refined whores, to ‘unnatural’ love affairs and ‘perverted pleasures’ . The seemingly inevitable results of this polymorphous perversity are ‘lethargy and impotence’ . The fin-de-siècle dandy replaces Brummell’s asexuality with a glorified sexual pathology. Where effeminacy was an adornment to the Regency dandy, in decadence it becomes a weakness. While the dandy’s life is in most respects alienated from conventional definitions of happiness, it is neither entirely meaningless nor without salvation. The success of a dandy’s life is marked by the transition from lacerating self-analysis to shedding light on his own opaqueness. Suffering and pleasure are reflected in order to enter the work of art that is his life. Hence fate may reward the dandy with a transcendence not accorded to the unconscious sufferer; taking his cue from Marcel Proust, the godfather of twentiethcentury dandyism, Albert Camus grants the dandy his ‘own unity by aesthetic means’ . While this unity appears in the form of taste, it is gained through a life-long self-analysis that goes beyond the banality of all fashion-and-lifestyle discourses and might well be termed ‘intelligent taste’ .
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25
Master’s in
Biography
September 2018 - September 2019 A unique one-year programme, directed by Professor Jane Ridley, one of Britain’s most eminent historical biographers - providing a comprehensive introduction to the biographer’s art. The course is based in central London and may be taken either as a research programme
(leading to a dissertation), or as a taught course. Part-time study is also available. For further details, Google ‘Buckingham Biography’ or go to www.buckingham.ac.uk/london/ biography
For course enquiries and applications, contact: Maria Floyd on 01280 827514 E: london-programmes@buckingham.ac.uk or the Course Director, Jane Ridley E: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk
THE UNIVERSITY OF
BUCKINGHAM
LONDON PROGRAMMES
Q. What do Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Joyce and Ivy Compton-Burnett have in common?
A. They all received grants from the Royal Literary Fund.
Royal Literary Fund Registered Charity no. 219952
26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
MEMBERS’ News NEW YEAR’S HONOURS This year got off to the best of starts for the Library with the announcement that our former Librarian and Chief Executive, Inez Lynn, and two of our Vice-Presidents – Lady Antonia Fraser and Alexandra Shulman – all featured in the New Year’s Honours List 2018.
From top Inez Lynn, Lady Antonia Fraser, Alexandra Shulman.
Inez Lynn, who retired in September 2017 after a 29-year career at The London Library – 15 of which were spent as Librarian/ Chief Executive – was awarded an MBE for services to literature and libraries in London. Lady Antonia Fraser, who joined the Library in 1957 and has been a London Library Vice-President since 2012, has had a career as a writer of history, novels, biography and detective fiction spanning more than 50 years. Her many literary awards include winning the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Wolfson Prize for History. In this year’s New Year’s Honours she was appointed a Companion of Honour for services to literature. Alexandra Shulman – who was awarded an OBE in 2004 and appointed Vice-President of The London Library last November – was awarded a CBE for services to fashion journalism, following a 25-year career as Editor of British Vogue. We are delighted at their success and that their achievements have been recognised in this way.
UNVEILING OUR HIDDEN COLLECTIONS Anyone mining the extensive records on Catalyst, our online cataloguing system, may be surprised to know that only 75% of our collections is currently visible on the system. The hidden 25% represents older titles – acquired by the Library before 1950 – which form part of a batch of over 250,000 ‘raw’ print catalogue entries that were imported into Catalyst in the 1990s and held in ‘suppressed’ (i.e. invisible) form while the Retrospective Cataloguing Project worked to complete accurate and detailed records from these somewhat imperfect or incomplete entries. Approximately 130,000 of these records have been worked on, and fully catalogued entries have now been made visible on Catalyst. However, this is painstaking work and it will be many years before the detailed cataloguing work can be completed. Rather than leave the ‘missing 25%’ invisible throughout this period, we have found a way to make batches of the remaining 120,000 suppressed entries visible over the course of 2018 in their raw, unedited state, meaning that in a comparatively short time the visibility of our collections will shoot up to around 95%. The first batch, released in early March, is the Literature collection. Until these records are properly catalogued, these newly transferred entries have limitations and will contain inaccuracies, but it does mean that thousands of titles that have only been identifiable through our print catalogues will now appear on Catalyst as well. We will attempt to make the newly released entries as useful as possible while clearly flagging them as part of this project. We ask you to bear with some of the imperfections the entries contain and hope that the greater visibility afforded to a substantial – and previously hidden portion of our collection – will provide significant benefits to Catalyst users. Further information about this initiative can be found here: londonlibrary.co.uk/hidden25. If you would like to speak to someone about it, please contact mary.gillies@londonlibrary.co.uk
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27
events Miranda Seymour on Mary Shelley Philip Marshall describes Miranda Seymour’s recent talk, ‘Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein’, the first in a series of exciting events that are planned over the coming months This year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, and on 25 January we were delighted to welcome Miranda Seymour – author of the definitive Mary Shelley biography – to help celebrate the publication of a classic. In a fascinating talk, woven around selected readings given by actor Isobel Laidler, Miranda explored the life of Mary Shelley and the story of how she came to write one of literature’s most famous works. The talk was the first in a sequence of public events we are planning this year, which provide an opportunity to hear from inspiring speakers, meet other members and share ideas. The talk was also available to non-members, and we were delighted
New Events this Spring As part of our events programme we are pleased to announce three new public events taking place in the Library this spring: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Thursday, 15 March 2018 Giles Milton tells the true story of Winston Churchill’s inner circle of sabotage experts who planned some of the most audacious attacks of the Second World War. Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture Thursday, 26 April 2018 Joshua Levine looks at the extraordinary personal stories of the people caught up in 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
the dramatic events of the Dunkirk evacuation. Cityread with Jessie Burton and Cathy Tyson Thursday, 31 May 2018 We are looking forward to welcoming international bestselling author Jessie Burton and acclaimed actor Cathy Tyson to celebrate the power of reading for this year’s Cityread London.
To find out more and to book tickets, visit: londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on
Miranda Seymour’s talk on Mary Shelley in the Reading Room, January 2018.
that so many of the audience were new to the Library. We were also very pleased that the event was sold out, creating a lively atmosphere in the Reading Room and giving plenty of encouragement for our future plans. We’ve just announced the first of our spring events (see below) and please keep an eye out for our regular enewsletters and the new What’s On pages of our website, for news on forthcoming events. Book early to avoid disappointment.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR ENEWSLETTER One of the best ways of keeping up to date on Library news and events is through our enewsletter. It’s free and is emailed to subscribers every few weeks, providing a snapshot of what’s been happening across the Library, what’s coming up and how you can book tickets for talks and events. To subscribe, please visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ newsletter-signup. All we need is an email address and our regular newsletter updates will shortly be on their way. (New members will automatically receive the newsletter, by the way, so won’t need to subscribe separately via our website page.)
MEMBERS’ NEWS
LOCAL HERO The London Library has been a feature of life in St James’s for over 176 years and is the longest-standing resident of St James’s Square. We were delighted, therefore, to find ourselves shortlisted for the Community Awards of Mayfair and St James’s, curated and hosted by the Mayfair Times, ‘in recognition of those driving the blood around the beating heart of our thriving neighbourhoods’. Hosted by actor and TV celebrity Alexander Armstrong, the awards ceremony took place at Claridge’s Hotel on 22 January. It turned out to be a highly successful night – The London Library won the award in the Only in St James’s category (granted to independent retailers and business in the area engaging with the local community), while Inez Lynn was shortlisted for the Lifetime Achievement award, given to individuals who have made a big difference to the area.
Julian Lloyd, the Library’s Head of Communications, with Nick Stuttard of London Projects (award sponsor) and the host, Alexander Armstrong.
london library MOST borrowed books in 2017 It is always intriguing to find out what London Library members have been borrowing, and the list of Most Borrowed Books for 2017 sheds an interesting light on your reading habits. As in previous years, we have excluded multi-volume works, collected works and journals. FICTION 1. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (2017). 2. The Sellout, Paul Beatty (2015). 3. The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes (2016). 4. Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout (2017). 5. Days Without End, Sebastian Barry (2016). 6. The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis (2017).
7. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (2014). 8. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (2016). 9. Conclave, Robert Harris (2016). 10. My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout (2016).
NON-FICTION 1. Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation, James Stourton (2016). 2. Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee,
John Bew (2016). 3. East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Philippe Sands (2016). 4. Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra (2017). 5. The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars, Adrian Tinniswood (2016). 6. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, Christopher de Hamel (2016). 7. Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman, Minoo Dinshaw (2016). 8. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, David Goodhart (2017). 9. The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World, Michael Lewis (2017). 10. Victorians Undone: Tales of Flesh in the Age of Decorum, Kathryn Hughes (2017).
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29
Leave a Lasting Gift Since opening its doors over 175 years ago, the Library has continually relied not just on its dedicated membership, but also on the philanthropic support offered to maintain and develop both its collection and the historic listed building in which it is housed, all helping to safeguard the Library’s future. In particular, the Library has been fortunate to benefit from the many individuals who have generously left a gift in their will. These have been applied to a broad range of
NEW 6TH-FLOOR FACILITIES FOR MEMBERS We are pleased to inform members that we have now opened up additional member spaces on the 6th floor of the Central Stack. A reorganisation of staff accommodation has enabled us to turn all of the offices at the top of the central staircase into a suite of member areas offering thirteen additional study spaces (across two rooms) and two separate mobile-phone/ communication spaces. The new suite also includes toilets, increasing the availability of these across the Library. As well as providing additional and alternative work spaces, the new 6th floor will provide an alternative location for smallscale member events, which will mean less disruption to the everyday use of the Members’ Room. The new spaces will – like the existing Members’ Room – be designated a mobile-friendly area for light communications use. For members needing to carry out long or involved telephone conversations, or communications through platforms such as Skype, the introduction of two separate mobilephone/ communication spaces should provide more suitable arrangements than have previously been available. The existing Members’ Room remains unchanged – and, indeed, remained open to Members during the building work. We are very grateful to Members for putting up with the disruption while the work was being carried out. 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
projects reflecting the varied interests of the legators; from major building works and important refurbishments to the conservation and preservation of our collection and the acquisition of new books. As the Library is an independent charity, a gift in your will can be given tax-efficiently, will cost you nothing during your lifetime, and no matter how small or large will make a real difference to the Library. After providing for your loved ones, please consider including the Library among the beneficiaries in your will and play a direct and vital part in helping ensure the Library’s success, as generations before have done. For more information about leaving a gift in your will and the difference your support could make, please contact Rachel Thomas on 020 7766 4719 or rachel. thomas@londonlibrary.co.uk.
TRUSTEE RECRUITMENT We are seeking a new, energetic, enthusiastic and committed trustee to join the London Library Board. You would be joining at an exciting time as we are currently developing our Strategic Plan for the next five years. Our aims include raising the Library’s profile, growing our membership and increasing income, particularly from charitable donations. We would therefore like to hear from any candidate who would be able to contribute to the achievement of these aims. We are also very keen to take this opportunity to improve diversity at board level. We would therefore especially welcome applications from women and BME candidates. In accordance with our Charter & Byelaws, trustees must be members of the Library. All trustees elected to serve on the Board are given a full induction to assist them with the role. A brief guide explaining the responsibilities and commitments involved, with full details of how to apply, is available to download from the ‘Become a trustee’ section of the Library’s website (londonlibrary.co.uk/work-for-us/ become-a-trustee). Please contact Sarah Farthing on 020 7766 4712 or email director@londonlibrary.co.uk if you require any further information. PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION NO LATER THAN 30 APRIL 2018
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Handelsbanken, the oldest quoted company on the Stockholm stock exchange, has recently established a new office in Jermyn Street. Founded in 1871, Handelsbanken underwent some notable changes when, in the 1970s, its then CEO, Jan Wallander, introduced a blueprint for a strongly decentralised organisation. Branches were given the power to make decisions locally, believing that those closest to the customer would best understand their requirements and circumstances. Wallander scrapped budgets, considering them an unnecessary evil and potentially outright dangerous. Handelsbanken remains without sales targets, short-term bonuses or product campaigns. The decentralised model is core to its success. Each branch operates as a small business, benefiting customers by enabling swift local decision-making. Such a decentralised ethos makes them an ideal occupant of Jermyn Street, which has celebrated the independent retailer for most of its existence. Jermyn Street is named after the area’s first developer, Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Alban, courtier and preferred developer (and rumoured lover) of Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria. The street named after him has been extensively redeveloped over the years, but the houses between numbers 84 to 96 retain many of their 1675 architectural features. The fact that they have survived is probably because they have remained in private hands. Number 88, incidentally, was occupied by what is arguably the street’s most famous resident, Sir Isaac Newton. He lived here between 1696 and 1700, and then moved to number 87, staying there until 1709. Number 87 is now part of an extension to one of the more exuberant of the original buildings, number 86, and it is here that Handelsbanken have set up their new office. In 1960 this was described as ‘the best of the original houses in Jermyn Street, both in quality and state of preservation’. Much has happened to the building since then, although its stucco frontage remains largely intact, creating a distinct presence on the street. Handelsbanken London West End is managed by Roy Budgett and supported by 14 staff, offering full-service Personal and Corporate Banking to local customers. If you would like to know more about the bank, please contact them on 020 7925 0280 or visit handelsbanken.co.uk/ londonwestend.
JEWISH BOOK WEEK 2018 PRESENTS
WORLD-RENOWNED WRITER AND LITERARY CRITIC, STEPHEN GREENBLATT, ON SUNDAY 11 MARCH. In The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Greenblatt explores the artistic and philosophical interpretations of the Garden of Eden, in a richly illustrated talk. In The Play’s the Thing, Stephen Greenblatt, Howard Jacobson and Janet Suzman engage in a witty and illuminating conversation about the world’s pre-eminent playwright and poet.
JEWISH BOOK WEEK 2018 3 – 11 MARCH, KINGS PLACE
LONDON’S THINKING FESTIVAL
jewishbookweek.com
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31 5021 JBW 2018 London Library Ad_v3.indd 1
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