A short article in The Times in 1961, looking back on very misunderstood dimensions of the pre-Second World War literary world, observes:

Nowhere does this article mention the name of Squire, and yet every single term seems perfectly suited to sum up his impressively rich, diverse, genial, generous, companionable life. Sadly, the pattern of Squire’s rise and fall also conforms perfectly to that of the archetypal tragic hero: a one-time great and influential figure who, for want perhaps of the prerequisite social pedigree and weakened by a tragic flaw, gradually fell from the heights, and was left to the mercy of pithy jibes and caricatures.

Squire was born and raised in Devonshire, in a family largely maintained and nurtured by his mother, a sensitive, literature-loving and highly musical woman, after the father absconded. A scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, to read history provided the first major turning-point in his life. He discovered his life-long passion for poetry, also engaging dynamically in play-reading circles and amateur dramatics, musical societies, political debates and sport, and in particular cricket, which remained an abiding passion to the end. During the Cambridge years he also met his future wife, Eileen Wilkinson, a committed fighter for women’s rights and also a gifted literary personality in her own right. Together they joined the Fabian Society and participated in various emerging socialist movements, while Squire began publishing the writings for which he would soon be renowned and highly respected: parodies, epigrams, literary reviews and, of course, poetry. He also published translations of Baudelaire’s poetry that were much admired. His acute musical sensibility played into this success; very much like KM, he had an ear for the natural flow of speech, perfectly pitched alternations between quips and bathos, the passing idiosyncrasies of idiolect and sociolect, ‘a joyous sense of the ridiculous’, and the pulse of rhythm and song-lines woven into and gently tussling with more conventional poetic forms and meters.

Introduction

To have been identified as a ‘modern masculinist’ alongside Arnold Bennett and Desmond MacCarthy in an excised passage from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando1 is doubtless one of the lesser highlights in the life of Orlando Cyprian Williams, who from the earliest age was known to friends, family, work colleagues and the reading public as Orlo. Ironically, had the passage been maintained, he may, perhaps, have been better remembered today. Being close to the key players but never in the limelight, however, would seem to be a leitmotif of Williams’s rich, variegated life, characterised by ‘impressive accomplishment’ and ‘gaiety of manner’. Having been a King’s Scholar at Eton, where he was also president of the Musical Society, he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he did outstandingly well in Classics and Modern Languages, and proved equally proficient in boxing and fencing. In 1907, he gained his first appointment in public office as a clerk in the House of Commons, where he remained, holding positions of distinction and importance in the wings there throughout his career. He was an officer in World War One, notably serving as Chief Cypher to General Ian Hamilton during the Dardanelles Campaign, and later saw service in Egypt and Palestine before being appointed to the War Office in the department of Military Intelligence. One of his fellow officers in the Dardanelles was former schoolfriend Compton Mackenzie, who remained a life-long friend; it was also at the War Office that he first encountered JMM.

It was his sideline activities as a writer, rather than his military experience and his sporting trophies, of course, that brought Williams into KM’s orbit, although his detailed and sensitive accounts of the ANZAC campaigns in the Dardanelles would doubtless have struck a chord. He was a prolific and eclectic essayist, literary critic, biographer, translator, novelist and short-story writer, whose essays and reviews featured in The Times, Blackwood’s, the TLS and the National Review. He also contributed frequently to the London Mercury, edited by his close friend J. C. Squire. Through another of his friends, Hugh Walpole, he was introduced to KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, whom he visited in Switzerland – thus establishing another overlap with KM and JMM’s life.

Letter to Leslie Beauchamp

[30 June 1915] [ATL]

95 Elgin Crescent

Dearest

I was overjoyed to hear from you at last & very disappointed that you had been so near & so far. But I will come to Reading on Saturday afternoon – I would love to. Will you wire me a train that suits you and also tell me where we shall meet –

I long to see you – Any train that you mention will suit me for I will keep the day free for you –

With a thousand things to say & to hear

Your own

Katie.

Introduction

Given his illustrious literary forebears – the novelist and art historian Horace Walpole, and the novelist and chronicler Richard Harris Barham (usually known by his pseudonym Thomas Ingoldsby) – it appears quite fitting today that Hugh Walpole should have decided at an early age to become a man of letters. It was not, however, what his family had intended, for they marked him out for the clergy, following in the wake of his father, the Reverend Somerset Walpole, who was to become Bishop of Edinburgh in 1910. Somerset Walpole was the incumbent of the cathedral in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late nineteenth century, the coincidental result of which being that his eldest son, Hugh, shared with KM their country of birth. Only the very first years of Walpole’s life, however, were spent in New Zealand; when his father then moved on to his new incumbency in New York, his mother preferred to return to Britain, having long suffered from homesickness. Walpole thus grew up in Truro, in Cornwall, before going up to Cambridge to study history. He quickly evolved towards Cambridge’s more literary circles, however, especially under the influence of his long-term mentor and father-figure, the novelist A. C. Benson, who fostered Walpole’s lasting passion for the later nineteenth-century writers – Henry James, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett. After an uninspired appointment as a lay teacher, he was encouraged by a former Cambridge friend, E. M. Forster, to take up a position as a tutor to a ‘British’ author based in Germany – it was thus, by coincidence, that he came to live for some months in the family of KM’s cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, who would become a life-long friend. Walpole soon took up novel-writing himself, publishing six between 1909 and the outbreak of the war – thereby initiating a rhythm of output that was maintained almost throughout his life.

Walpole took up journalism during the war, after being disqualified from military enrolment by very poor eyesight. This choice took him straight to Russia and the Eastern Front as the Daily Mail correspondent, which allowed him not only to report back in great depth on conditions in the trenches and field hospitals, but also to make extensive stays in Petrograd and Moscow, where he instinctively explored the world of arts and letters – especially among the entourage of Maxim Gorky.

Introduction

Waterlow is one of the constant yet discreet figures in KM’s life story who recurs regularly over the years via a host of unexpected links and connections with family, friends and acquaintances. He was her second cousin, being the eldest son of Charlotte Elizabeth Beauchamp – Elizabeth von Arnim’s sister, also rather misleadingly known as ‘Chaddie’ within the family – and her husband, Sir Sydney Waterlow, a highly respected politician, social reformer and philanthropist. Waterlow moved into the emerging Bloomsbury circles when he went up to Cambridge, proving to be a brilliant classics scholar at Trinity College. Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, he was never admitted to the Apostles, however, which proved a source of lasting disappointment. During the Cambridge years, Waterlow forged lasting links with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster and J. W. N. Sullivan, but moved away from the tighter group of friends when he took up his first diplomatic posting in Washington, in 1900. Initially unconvinced by this career choice, and distressed by a first, unhappy, marriage, he then left the Foreign Office to take up university teaching. In the same years he became a close confident of T. S. Eliot, especially during the difficult years of Eliot’s first, unstable, marriage; a respected writer, translator and co-editor / translator (with Koteliansky); and – after the annulment of his first marriage – even a hopeful suitor of Virginia Woolf, who declined his proposal in 1911. Waterlow married his second wife, Margery Eckard (often referred to as ‘Dawks’ by the closer Bloomsbury set), in 1913, forming a family unit which Virginia Woolf rather dispiritedly described as ‘humble, aspiring & without illusions’ (DVW1, p. 155).

This rather humdrum, unfulfilled life changed again when Waterlow returned once more to the Foreign Office at the outbreak of the war. It was a career move that decided his professional path, and inevitably his social networks and geographical base until the end of his life. As a result of strategic, successful postings during the war years, he was, by 1919, Acting First Secretary of the Foreign Office, a function that made him one of the key British representatives at the Paris Peace Conference, alongside Sir Robert Cecil, Philip Noel-Baker, Molly Hamilton and Helena Swanwick, as well as a major architect of the emerging League of Nations framework (the mainstays of which were directly taken from Leonard Woolf’s International Government, as Waterlow scrupulously underlined).

Introduction

While a prolific and successful author and broadcaster in his later years, as well as a meticulously detailed raconteur of his own life (including fifteen volumes of autobiographical writings), it would have been Compton Mackenzie's high profile as one of ‘les jeunes’ in the English Review circle1 and as a name in the theatrical world that first prompted KM and three colleagues to contact him when they were trying to raise subscriptions for Rhythm.

Mackenzie was the eldest son of Edward Compton, a successful actor– manager, and Virginia Bateman, an American actress, who were themselves both born into families connected to the theatrical world. His younger sister, Fay Compton, was, by the early 1910s, also an emerging actress, who went on to star in a number of London productions of plays by J. M. Barrie.

Mackenzie initially set out to maintain the family tradition. He recounts in his memoir, Literature in My Time (1933), that by the age of thirteen, he had read ‘every play of major and minor importance written and produced by the year 1830. In my mind dialogue and action were thus firmly fixed as the dominant expression of the imagination.’ Despite the positive reception of his early plays and a proposed contract as an actor, he nevertheless preferred fiction, and gave up professional training as a lawyer to devote himself to his craft. He published his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, in 1911. Theatricality, however, remained the keynote of his best-loved writing, and he had a widely acknowledged gift for comic repartee, sparkling social satires and fictional comedies of manners – as KM herself noted in her review of his Poor Relations in 1919. It was just this that ensured the success of his later Whisky Galore (1947), now remembered as one of the best films produced by Ealing Studios. One striking exception to this comic vein was his 1913–14 novel Sinister Street, an evocative, sometimes brooding, semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman (initially conceived as one in a series to be called ‘the Theatre of Youth’) that reflected Mackenzie's life-long admiration for Hardy, and which Ford Madox Ford deemed ‘a work of real genius’.

Introduction

Herbert Palmer’s autobiography bears the poetic title The Mistletoe Child (1935), but like JMM and so many men of their generation born into one world, class and social environment but enabled by educational reform and aesthetic inclinations to make the often painful, partial transition into another environment, he could equally well have entitled it ‘Between Two Worlds’. As he explains,

The misfit child Herbert was born into a staunchly Methodist family, his father being a Methodist minister whose profession required him and his family to change communities and regions every three years. As a result, the child grew up constantly out of place in mostly painfully poor working-class areas of Staffordshire and Yorkshire, educated in the local mission school but living amongst the local children, from whom he felt painfully estranged by education, mindset, accent and even physique – they were boisterous and physical, he was painfully thin and sickly until adulthood. Only for a brief period in the Lake District did he find relative comfort in his home and surroundings, but was soon taken from there to be put into the grammar school system, where his comparative poverty left him sidelined. Family poverty prevented him from aspiring to a university education; instead, he matriculated and worked as an unsuccessful local journalist and then an elementary schoolmaster, hating his job and mostly disliking the boys. Humiliated by a sense of both professional and economic failure, he fled to Germany – determined at least to improve his modern languages on the Continent, while escaping what seemed to be a personal and professional dead-end. This hot-headed act of rebellion – a very characteristic one, the child having always swung between moods of apprehensive cautiousness and fear, and wild tantrums and physical violence – proved the making of him. After teaching and wandering in Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark, and gaining an impressive understanding of contemporary educational standards, ethics and praxis, he took a degree at the University of Bonn before planning the ensuing trip – to Russia.

Introduction

Of all the rich, intriguing personalities who came together at the beginning of the twentieth century to form the now infamous Bloomsbury Group, none is perhaps as paradoxically central and marginal as Leonard Woolf. As one of the close circle of friends around Thoby Stephen at the turn of the century, he certainly counts, along with Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey, as one of the founding members, present from the outset when the Thursday evenings first began at the home of the Stephen sisters – the future Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

He nevertheless remains something of an enigma, and to a certain extent, a presence in the margins. The first reason must certainly be his origins: he was born into a precariously middle-class Jewish family and brought up in Reform Judaism, which, by his teenage years, he had rejected. In the ambient antisemitism of early twentieth-century Britain – the almost instinctive, glib nature of which permeated even into the sceptical, rational, open-minded attitudes of his fellow ‘Bloomsberries’ – he could easily be marginalised with a pointed quip. In his youth, he learnt to block out such racial and social prejudice – with such success that he could later claim that it had had no influence on his life. Whatever the case, he proved a brilliant pupil at St Paul’s, and just as gifted as a scholarship-winning student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was soon to become the first ever Apostle of Jewish origin.

After graduating, less brilliantly than predicted, he entered the Colonial Civil Service and proved a successful colonial administrator in Ceylon, where he served for seven years. He resigned after proposing to Virginia Stephen and they were married in 1912. Thereafter, Leonard Woolf willingly relegated himself to the margins, as his wife’s career and well-being became the centre of his life, to a great extent, although he did have an extraordinarily successful, dynamic and productive literary career of his own. In this case, it would appear to be merely his own impressively assiduous, earnestly professional, committed working ethos which left him in the shadows when others opted for more visible, flamboyant public and professional paths.

Introduction

Virginia Woolf enjoyed telling Ottoline Morrell that she was going to write ‘the Great Garsington novel’, thus implying that some of the secrets and gossip behind the scenes would be made public. While we inevitably regret that the promised roman à clef never materialised, it is even more unfortunate that Garsington’s most easily overlooked, intimately involved bystander and eye-witness, Julian Morrell, never wrote hers. She willingly cooperated with biographers and editors exploring her mother’s life, or reconstructing the life and times of the famous manor house where she lived from the age of seven, even contributing prefaces when incited to do so. Similarly, she generously shared the pictures from her extensive family photo albums, but for herself, throughout her life, she preferred a more effaced profile. It must be said that it was the role to which she was used.

Julian Morrell, the only child of Ottoline and Philip Morrell, was born one of twins, and named after a nun whom Ottoline had loved and admired in her youth. She was a weakly child, a mere three pounds in weight, and not expected to survive; her brother, the bonnier, beautiful baby both parents instantly doted on, died abruptly just three days later. In the words of one of Ottoline Morrell’s biographers, ‘a clear picture emerges of a child being accommodated on the fringe of her mother’s life’. Julian likewise figures on the sidelines and in the margins of all her mother’s extended social circles; she crops up in passing in their letters, memoirs and even photographs, but she is rarely to be found at the centre or as the speaking subject. One of the rare records of Julian actually speaking is when she recites T. S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by heart, a feat for which she was admired by her parents, as Woolf noted. Meanwhile, she looked on, whether in the London flat in Bedford Square or at Garsington, while the foremost figures in British politics, the British and European artistic avant-garde, and a whole host of composers, socialites, dancers, refugees, exiles, conscientious objectors, journalists and highprofile philanthropists flitted in and out of her world.

Introduction

When Lilian Share married Harold Sidney Harmsworth in 1893, she was the daughter of an industrious London merchant based in Forest Hill. He was the younger brother and business associate of a journalist in the process of buying up a number of newspapers in difficulty. In the words of one press historian, ‘it was a rather lower middle-class match’. However, things soon improved after the brothers acquired the London Evening Standard the following year, and two years after that founded the Daily Mail, shortly followed by the Daily Mirror. Within two decades, Lilian’s father was bankrupt, but she was now the titled wife of a press baron and a millionaire, her husband having been raised to the peerage in 1914. The couple were, in effect, estranged by then, after a number of years living between their homes in London and La Dragonnière, near Monte Carlo, and raising three children. After choosing to remain initially in the Monte Carlo home, Lilian settled permanently in France, where she became a close friend and benefactor of a number of French writers, the most prominent of whom was André Gide. This wealthy, diplomatically separated lifestyle would doubtless have continued unhindered, were it not for the devastating tragedy of the war, in which two of their three sons were killed in action. Henceforth, she was noted for becoming withdrawn, unpredictable and rather unreliable in terms of her larger family affections and her substantial arts patronage; he became fervently opposed to war, ultimately espousing the cases of the Black Shirts, Nazi Germany and the British Union of Fascists.

Lady Rothermere’s life in France did not stop at endowing arts projects and providing substantial funds and sometimes unpredictable forms of friendly benevolence for a vast number of British, American and French writers. She published a number of translations into English, the most noteworthy of which was a playful literary satire by Gide, Prometheus Ill-Bound (Prométhée Mal-Enchaînée), and established a principle of offering artistic retreats at her home in the Alps to writers in need.

[9 December 1920] [ATL]

[Draft]

[Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton]

Sir

re abatement and the questions in that clause

Claimant does not remember

when it was

or

where it was

or

to what office her claim was sent.

I advised her ∴ to leave all unanswered

Was that right?

KM

(Bet I dont get a sniff of that £7. She’s furious with me!!!!!!

[early 1921] [Journal 1954, pp. 236–7]

[Villa Isola Bella, Garavan, Menton]

Your letters sounded insincere to me; I did not believe them. People don’t write such things; they only think they do, or they read them in books. But real life is on quite another plane. If I were not ill, I still would have withdrawn from ‘the world’ because of my hatred of insincerity. It makes me dreadfully uncomfortable and unhappy. I could have answered your letter just in your vein and ‘accepted’ it, you knowing how I accepted it and I knowing that you knew – but it wouldn’t have lasted. It would have been another cul de sac relationship. What good would that have been to either of us?

You see – to me – life and work are two things indivisible. It’s only by being true to life that I can be true to art. And to be true to life is to be good, sincere, simple, honest. I think other people have given you a wrong idea of me, perhaps. I only like to love my friends. I have no time for anything less ‘precious’. Friendship is an adventure; but do we agree about the meaning of the word ‘adventure’? That’s so important! That’s where I feel we would quarrel. If you came on to our boat should we have understood one another?

You must not think I am ‘prejudiced’ or unfair. I am not. I still wish it were possible; but I cannot, and I won’t pretend. Let us really and truly know where we are first. Let us be open with each other and not concealing anything.

Introduction

There can be few sideline figures in the margins of early to mid-twentiethcentury pioneering British and European literary history that are more influential, more in-the-know and more effaced than Martin Secker. Mostly remembered today as one of the names in the powerful publishing partnership of Secker and Warburg, he actually began life with a different name and doubtless a different career path traced out for him. He was born into a family of well-established German descent, his father, Edward Henry Klingender, having taken over part of the family trading and shipping company. Secker’s mother distanced herself from the Klingenders, and it was an unexpected inheritance from her side of the family that would seem to have prompted the young Percy Martin to take up employment as a reader in a London publishing company in preference to trade. He changed his name by deed poll in 1910, both to signal his new departure and to avoid the overtly anti-German tensions of the time. He quite unexpectedly came to cross paths with JMM and KM at the same time, having moved into a flat in John Street, Adelphi, where he set up as an independent publisher next door to another emerging publishing figure, Stephen Swift – the business name of Charles Granville – who absconded with the company funds soon after, leaving Rhythm magazine and a host of other emerging writers bankrupt.

Secker’s literary sensibility and keen alertness to new names and talents brought him to enjoy a series of often unexpected and impressive commercial successes. These began with his first publication, Compton Mackenzie’s first novel, The Passionate Elopement (1911), soon followed by warmly received new works by Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan, Frank Swinnerton, Maurice Baring, Ford Madox Ford and, most importantly DHL, who adopted Secker as his British publisher from then on. The two men remained friends, although DHL’s occasionally derogatory, sneering comments about Secker in his own correspondence suggest a lack of any true warmth and sincerity.

After making his mark with British and American works (notably the poetry of Emily Dickinson), Secker went on to become Britain’s foremost publisher of European works in translation, with an impressive line-up of Central European Modernists in translation, including Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka.

Introduction

Born into a modest Jewish family in Lithuania in 1888, Sarah Gertrude Liebson was a five-month-old baby when she arrived in what would prove to be, in every sense but the literal one, her native land. In the words of her biographer, she was ‘above all a white South African’, her ardent love for her country, and her passionate espousal of the lifestyle and mindset of the community she was brought up in, ultimately leading her to relinquish the liberal and progressive ideas she had cherished as a young woman and adhere unquestioningly to apartheid.

Her early years were spent living in a settlement by the River Vaal, where her father set up as a trader; the area owed its wealth to the burgeoning diamond-digging industry. Despite securing the family’s economic security, he also exposed his wife and large family to the crude lives and attitudes of the diggers, the harshness of which made a strong impact on Gertrude as a child – as powerful as the inspirational and formative role her education at the local schoolhouse had. Similarly, her direct experience of the ruthlessness and violence of troops (from both the British and the Dutch Transvaal sides) during the Boer wars marked her imagination and hardened the attitudes of those around her.

As she and KM would acknowledge during their sporadic correspondence, they had a lot in common – at the heart of which was the complex white colonial heritage, which had enabled them to experience childhood and their early growing-up years in the cocoon of white social privilege, only to find that, from the vantage point of the metropolis, they were instinctively considered more lowly and more uncouth than their London-born contemporaries. Their education was in many ways comparable, with music playing a key role, avid reading taking up much of their free time, and leading to an instinctive, unshakeable belief from an early age that they would become writers. More poignantly, both experienced the shattering effect of losing a dearly loved younger brother in the war, a calamity that greatly heightened their initial, instinctive pacifism when fighting began. It was also the distress of bereavement that incited Gertrude, by then married to her Johannesburg-based English husband, Philip Millin, to complete her first novel, having previously written only essays and short stories.

Woolf was writing about what she would call one ‘of the obscure’, the seventeenth century’s long-forgotten epistolary craftswoman, Dorothy Osborne. And like all great letter writers, Osborne didn’t just write letters, she wrote about them, keenly aware that their material presence, style, voice and craftsmanship were not mere accessories, too often dispensable, but desirable and essential testimonies whose lives and afterlives would always escape writer and reader, all the more so when they circulated across Europe in times of diplomatic tension, religious conflict and inter-state war as Osborne’s did. Nor could they be too beholden to conventions. As she wrote to her husband, William Temple,

It is impossible not to see Katherine Mansfield in her rightful place as one of the artists of letter writing resonating within Dorothy Osborne’s and Virginia Woolf’s words. As this second volume shows, we are indeed here at the centre of the pageant of her mind, as she envelops a host of odds and ends in the mesh of a personality which is her own precisely because it is at the same time a chorus of selves, personae and voices, performing the everyday freely and easily into existence to delight the reader. Not that every word that Woolf says here fits the volume to come.

Introduction

Sylvia Lynd once memorably described KM as being ‘not unlike one of those little dolls that, in Japan’s less commercial days, were among the most precious and transparent treasures of one’s toy cupboard’; Virginia Woolf was likewise struck by ‘her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead’. Japanese arts and culture had long fascinated KM, nurtured especially in the context of Japonisme at the turn of the century, so it is not so very surprising she KM should have bought two Japanese dolls, and on occasion loved to invest them with names, personalities and, to a certain extent, independent lives of their own. ‘Ribni’, or Ribnikov, the male doll, was one of them, his partner, O Hara San, the female doll.

The dolls appear to have been purchased just after KM visited the Japan–British exhibition, which was held in London from 14 May to 29 October 1910. As was the case with most such bi-national or international events, the exhibition was a key moment in Anglo-Japanese and Japan– Europe cultural diplomacy. Japan was bolstering its public image in the wake of its military successes against Russia in 1905 and the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and both sides were seeking to finalise major trade deals; foregrounding the refinement and elegance of Japanese arts, home decorations and lifestyles was an essential part of the Japanese organisers’ agenda. The image-bolstering impact certainly worked in the case of KM, inspiring her to arrange her home at the time (Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea) along minimalist, Japan-inspired lines, to acquire a number of iconic Japanese daily objects, to adopt a number of oriental effects in her hairstyle and clothing (notably a striking, patterned kimono), and to read a number of Japanese novels, poems and eye-witness accounts. Ribni’s partner, O Hara San, would seem to owe her name to these readings, a combination of two exquisite female portraits in the poetry collection From the Eastern Sea – ‘O Haru’ and ‘O Hana San’. O Hara San met with a sad fate after accompanying KM to France in 1915: she was packaged up and sent back to keep JMM company, but her head fell off during the journey, as he sadly reported back.