Between 1900 and 1914, British cinema went through a boom period. Film exhibition began to move out of church halls and music halls into new, purpose-built theatrical venues, while a generation of British producers and directors began to build and consolidate Britain’s film industry. This chapter gives an account of the challenge posed to literature, and the resources created for it, by the increasing popularity, the spectacular novelty, and the technical impressiveness of this early cinema. It shows how the emerging institutions of early British film culture – its studios, its theatrical venues, its accompanying film criticism and popular press – contributed to a new cultural landscape in which literature and cinema, in their reciprocal shaping, engendered a powerful set of ideas about the nature of cultural modernity.

According to the International Continence Society (ICS) (2016), cystometry is the continuous fluid filling of the bladder via a transurethral catheter (or other route, e.g. suprapubic or mitrofanoff), with at least intravesical and abdominal pressure measurements and display of detrusor pressure, including cough (stress) testing. Cystometry ends with ‘permission to void’ or with incontinence of the total bladder content [1].

The film journal Close Up was published between 1927 and 1933 and edited by Bryher [Annie Winifred Ellerman] and Kenneth Macpherson (the young Scottish artist with whom Bryher entered into a ‘marriage of convenience’ in 1927, after he and her life-long companion, the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), who also contributed substantially to the journal, began a relationship). The journal played a significant role in the development of film culture at a time of rapid expansion and transformation in cinema history, traversing as it did the uncertain years of the transition from silent to sound film. The perceived backwardness of films, film theory and film culture in Britain compared to France, Germany and the Soviet Union was one of Close Up's main concerns; the location of its editors in Territet, Switzerland provided rapid access to international cinema, with Switzerland and Germany relatively unaffected by the censorship which prevailed elsewhere.

Close Up's internationalism is revealed in its spread of correspondents across Europe and the USA, its wider pool of contributors, many of whom were participants in film industries in a range of national contexts, and its extensive coverage of European and, to a lesser extent, British and American cinema. It also published articles by some of the most important film-makers and theorists of the period, making available the first English-language versions of articles by Sergei Eisenstein. Soviet cinema became of particular importance to the journal, which published numerous stills from films that were banned in Britain. Bryher's Film Problems of Soviet Russia, one of the first studies of Soviet film, was published under the POOL imprint which included Close Up.

Close Up's cultural and national identifications have been a matter of some debate, in part because of its highly critical attitude towards British cinema, film culture and criticism and its missionary zeal in relation to their improvement, both of which stances have tended to be poorly received by historians of British film who have, with good reason, pointed to significant films and dimensions of British film culture overlooked by the journal's often hyperbolic criticisms.

Virginia Woolf 's composition of her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), unpublished until many years after her death, is often linked to her simultaneous work on her biography of Roger Fry. The writing of the biography raised questions of the nature (and limitations) of biographical knowledge, while the creation of her autobiography entailed a shift from the issue of how much we can know of another person to that of the extent to which we can know ourselves. Other determinants include her extensive reading of Freud at this time, in particular in relation to her exploration of her “ambivalence”—a word and concept she took from Freud in her reading of him in the late 1930s—towards her father.

A further, important influence, was Woolf 's relationship with the composer and writer Ethel Smyth, including their discussions about the nature of autobiography and, more specifically, of the freedom to write openly and intimately of the self. In the 1930s, Woolf was in close correspondence with Smyth, and encouraging her to pursue her autobiographical writings. Smyth's two-volume autobiography Impressions that Remained had been published in 1919: she subsequently produced two more volumes, as well as another four of autobiographical essays. For Woolf, their interest seems to have been in large part what she saw as their frankness, or their potential for it. Central to Smyth's autobiographical account was the figure of HB (the American writer Henry Brewster), a married man when, as a young woman, she first met him. Their relationship appears to have been of the utmost importance to her—he was, she writes, the only man she ever loved—but it is unclear whether it was ever of a sexual nature.

Woolf and Ethel Smyth met for the first time in February 1930: almost immediately, a close, though by no means untroubled, friendship developed. Woolf 's early letters to Smyth articulate her desire to recount her life to her—an impulse often thwarted, she suggests, by interruptions or the shortage of time. “I too feel that the book—not that book—our book—is open, and at once snatched away…I cant write the history of my marriage on what remains of this paper, so good bye” (L4 144–45, 27 October 1930).

Rhythm-studies

The critic John Middleton Murry, writing of his conversations with the Scottish painter J. D. Fergusson in the early decades of the twentieth century, recalled (in his autobiography Between Two Worlds):

In Fergusson's reported sentiments there is the suggestion that ‘this modern movement’ had come into being, or had found its true function, in the reassertion of ‘the pre-eminence of rhythm’. In this account, modernism rediscovers or recovers a rhythm, whose centrality, it is implied, had become submerged. Fergusson (in Murry's account) represents ‘rhythm’ as the ‘quality’ which cuts across the divisions between the arts, although the fact that they made no attempt to define the ‘quality’ leaves open the possibility (perceived by the more cautious Murry) that ‘rhythm’ in the various and different arts is to be understood as a homonym rather than as an identity.

The absence, or refusal, of strict ‘definition’ alluded to by Murry has as one of its contexts the vitalism (with its resistance to classification and differentiation) to which ‘rhythm’ was central, and which is part of that ‘great hymn to energy’, in Jacques Rancière's phrase, sung by artists and thinkers in the early twentieth century.

The relationships between writers and the cinema in the twentieth century have received significant critical attention, but the work of Doris Lessing has not, to date, played a central role in explorations of this topic. Yet in a number of her works we can locate the multiple influences of cinema. As with many of her contemporaries, there is at times a perception of the threat which cinema represented to authors, competing for their readers as it turned them into spectators and, more dangerously, with the Hollywood machine imposing a restrictive set of narrative norms on authors. The cinema was, however, also a promise. The work of many writers, novelists and dramatists found new life on the screen through adaptation. The art of writing itself was, moreover, undoubtedly shaped and altered by the modes of representation which developed in the film medium, in ways which could be creative as well as restrictive.

In addition to questions of narrative in fiction and film, we find Lessing's complex representations of what I would term ‘the cinema mind’. This is connected, as in the work of many film theorists, to representations of collective and individual dreaming, an analysis underwritten by psychoanalytic theory's own engagements with the technologies of vision and models of perception. This chapter explores the meanings and representations of the cinema in these particular contexts, with a focus on two of Lessing's novels; The Grass is Singing (1950) and The Golden Notebook (1962).

Film and cinema play a significant role in The Grass is Singing, Lessing's first novel. This was begun in the mid-1940s, during the period of her marriage to Gottfried Lessing, when she was living and working in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, and was finally published in 1950, in a much shortened and revised form, after she had arrived in London. The novel tells the story of the ill-fated marriage of Mary, a woman in her thirties living and working in the city, who is impelled towards marriage to the farmer Dick Turner by her discomfort with her single status: he, in turn, is driven by loneliness and need. The narrative opens with a news report of Mary's murder by a black farm-servant: borrowing the model of the detective novel, The Grass is Singing begins with a corpse and a police investigation, and then retraces the events that have led to the crime.

There has been a long-held assumption that the genre of autobiography did not flourish in the contexts of literary modernism, with few of the writers most fully associated with Anglophone modernism producing fully-fledged autobiographical works. The recent shift away from this view, and the appearance of a number of significant critical works focusing on modernism and autobiography, has a number of causes. One relates to concepts of modernism which have both expanded, to take in ‘moderns’ such as H.G. Wells, among whose publications was the two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and extended, to include the turn-of-the-century writings, including the autobiographical works, of authors such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Secondly, the category of autobiography has become more expansive, with the term ‘life-writing’ (originally used in the eighteenth century but deployed in modernist contexts by Virginia Woolf) becoming inclusive of a range of personal writings, including memoirs, letters, and diaries. As a related point, the extensive publication in recent decades of such personal writings (as in the ongoing publication of Samuel Beckett's Letters), as well as manuscript versions of texts, has led to a new, or renewed, focus on the person of the author and the processes and stages of literary creation. Such a ‘genetic criticism’, while not necessarily concerned with the lives of authors, has contributed to the sense that the life and the work cannot, after all, be seen (as they were in much mid-twentieth-century structuralist criticism) as radically distinct.

While the perception that modernism excluded autobiography is thus questionable, the attitudes of many modernist writers towards autobiography were ambivalent and often contradictory. The period produced many highly ‘autobiographical’ fictions, including those by Mansfield, Joyce, Lawrence, Richardson, and Woolf, but their authors frequently expressed a distaste for ‘confessional’ literature and produced far fewer direct autobiographies (that is, works explicitly declared to be the story of the lives of their authors) than the generation of writers preceding them. One reason for this was, as a number of critics have suggested, the development of an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography, in which the divide between fiction and autobiography became ever less absolute.

In an essay published in the mid-1980s, Christopher Frayling wrote that ‘“Jack the Ripper” remains the elusive figure he always was: a space in the files, an absence which has been given a name by “an enterprising journalist”, and a character by successive writers, reporters and members of the reading public.’ Books on the series of murders of prostitutes in the autumn and winter of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of East London by an unknown figure who has been turned by popular legend into ‘Jack the Ripper’ have proliferated in recent decades. There have been continual attempts to solve the crimes and name the killer – as in the crime writer Patricia Cornwell’s exhaustive endeavours to prove that Jack the Ripper was the painter Walter Sickert – as well as a series of critical and cultural studies.

In reconsidering Jack the Ripper in this chapter, I look at some of the representations, early and recent, that have grown out of the Ripper murders of 1888, and examine the fascination with this particular moment of Victorian crime. I explore one text in detail: Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel of 1913, The Lodger, which merits renewed attention for several reasons. It is to this fictionalized version of the Ripper murders that a number of film directors turned, as I discuss at the close of the chapter, including Alfred Hitchcock, John Brahm and Maurice Elvey. The novel not only produces its own version of the Ripper narrative but is a form of metanarrative, embedding already existing accounts within itself. It is, moreover, one of the very few representations of the murders to have been written by a woman, and it gives a central place to a woman’s response – that of the landlady, Mrs Bunting – in whose house the Ripper figure lodges, and about whom she remains silent, despite her suspicions.

At the close of the twentieth century, it was possible to buy a short thriller or detective story from vending machines in Paris railway and underground stations. A spokeswoman for the publisher, Éditions de la Voûte, said in early 1997: ‘The idea is just a rethink of the success of station and airport novels. Since commuter journeys tend to be short, we decided that none of our books should take more than one hour to read.’ The novel on offer was changed every week, alternating between a new book and a reprint. The first offering in the Metro-Police series, as it was called, was Gérard Delteil’s Le Nouveau Crime de L’Orient Express, a new version of Agatha Christie’s famous train-crime novel.

Walter Benjamin noted the elective affinity between the railway journey and detective fiction in an article, published in 1930, entitled ‘Kriminalromane, auf Reisen’ [‘Detective Novels, on Journeys’]. In this short piece Benjamin (who, like a number of the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, was fascinated by detective fiction and indeed wrote a synopsis of a detective novel) observed that railway travellers prefer to buy their reading material from station bookstalls, opting for the contingency of what they find there rather than for the certainties of what they might bring from home:

The dominance of modernist and avant-garde literature in the first decades of the twentieth century has directed attention away from certain texts and genres. Biography is a prime example of this process. While numerous histories of the biographical genre do exist, few critics have attempted to situate early twentieth-century biography in the broader literary and cultural arena. Those who focus on modernist experimentation rarely consider the ways in which biographers approached the new aesthetics, or address the extraordinary popularity and perceived significance of the genre in the period of ‘high modernism’. Yet the marked increase in the popularity of biography during this period – the 1920s and 1930s particularly – was closely connected to the new forms of, and experiments with, the genre. ‘It is the day of the biographer’, Hesketh Pearson wrote in 1930. The rise in popularity of biographies was linked to the perception that biography had been reinvented for the twentieth century, requiring a new level of critical self-awareness.

David Cecil, for example, writing in 1936, called biography ‘the only new form’ of modern literature. Its newness and its success were due, he suggested, to the fact that it was the genre most congenial to the ‘scientific’ modern age, and the one most allied to modern psychology and the study of ‘human character’. Biography is, he argued, on the side of science on the one hand, while, on the other, biographers approach their subjects with newly aesthetic aims, taking advantage of a ‘literary’ space made available by the mutual lack of sympathy between literature (particularly poetry) and scientific modernity. Cecil’s argument is clearly flawed (there is no evidence that poets and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s felt peculiarly threatened by science, and indeed many embraced its terms), but it is echoed in numerous discussions of the ‘new biography’, in which, as we shall see, the relationship between the literary and the scientific and the importance of the study of ‘character’ are two of the dominant themes.