A fusion of books and boys
David Hughes
JOHN LEHMANN by Adrian Wright Duckworth, £.20, pp. 308 To the irritation of my parents, who in 1947 thought their teenage son well enough turned out in utility serge, John Lehmann threatened to buy me a jacket. I thought it contrary on his part to offer me clothes if his object was to take them off. The jacket never materialised, but, after I duly outed myself as a heterosexual, a job did, my first: two enjoyable, infuriating, rigorous years as editorial assistant on his London Magazine, postwar successor to Penguin New Writing.
If Lehmann's paternal origins were German, his name as a great English editor sprang out of the conflict with Ger- many. Into 40 issues of PlVW, the monthly package which fitted a battledress front trouser-pocket, Lehmann stuffed the whole of war-torn Europe: poems, stories, documentaries, anything that contained the essence of the civilisation its readers were fighting for, indeed the evidence that Europe as an idea still existed. While Connolly in Horizon was levitating literature beyond the reach of the masses, Lehmann edited elitism out of the war.
At last, to put it vulgarly as this admirable book often does, John has found his Mr Wright. On paper Lehmann did scant justice to his life. In three volumes of memoirs (1955-66) so stiff in tone as to be almost posthumous, he mum- mified his days in the bandages of discre- tion. Nor could any of his lovers unwind him for long, whether a boy star of the Polish ballet, the whippy wife of a French ambassador or the servicemen he beck- oned into his ivory tower in South Kens- ington or suburban Sussex. But Mr Wright strikes an affecting balance between Lehmann's sexual needs, rarely satisfied, and his literary passions, hardly fulfilled. His story is an epic of a failed attempt at a fusion of books and boys.
Insecurity wobbled John's infancy. A Punch man who mastered doggerel of more humour than his son could muster, Lehmann's father lost his family fortune a few hours before John's birth. John's own poetry was ever to seek a childhood lost in the soggy romance of a garden by the Thames, hounded by the dogs he loved as loyally as people. His first poem, at aged six, evoking Maidenhead and his mother in eight dry syllables, was among his briefest and best: 'Shopping Shopping Never Stop- ing'. His sense of not belonging was early cultivated. He gave Eton the elbow: 'a philosophic darkness that swallowed me up.' At Cambridge he was described by Dadie Rylands as 'a romantic old ninny' who loved suffering, meaning that he was making a passionate ass of himself with Michael Redgrave. He was already dealing in false antitheses: 'sexual attraction versus the wonder of nature', as Wright puts it, 'the prospect of carnal enjoyment against aesthetic appreciation'. By no great effort of will most of us manage to reconcile these non-opposites.
He persisted in staying rebelliously aloof, except in the laxity of pre-Anschluss Vien- na where he wallowed in freedom. Despite joining the Woolfs as their prewar conjuror of young writing at the Hogarth Press, bringing in Isherwood among other nota- bles, he longed to 'blow the spunkless coin- placencies of Bloomsbury sky-high'. As poet, he soon guessed he was no match for such contemporaries as the Thirties quartet who made up MacSpaunday, in particular Spender whom among other names he dubbed 'that Shelley of the Depression'. Spender's 'disease-swollen ego' might have been lured into bed; so might, at a pinch, Isherwood. But they resisted, where less bookish mortals fell. Often in these pages the creak of the mattress deafens the call of the true mistress: literary perfor- mance.
He spent the Thirties trying to pinpoint where real life was. The working class won his vote, not least because it embodied rough trade. His actress sister Beatrix told their sister Rosamond that their brother was 'violently determined about vague things'. Wright puts well the point that in boyhood 'he had never been allowed near ordinariness'. He was egocentricity masked as sensitivity; in his usual autocratic man- ner he insisted that the word 'egomaniac' to describe him be struck out of Leonard Woolf s autobiography. But boys world- wide were the tabula rasa on which his chalk could inscribe culture. In an erotic appendix to the three-volume memoirs he let all this hang out with naff courage. In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) is a late effort to set the record straight — or, rather, gay. He won no enemies and gained no friends. An incestuous relationship with Rosamond is revealed by Wright with a newsy nudge. There is no telling. I empha- sise sexual capers only because Wright strongly does: his Lehmann is presented as a lifelong loser more even in love than to letters. Every early affair rushed into the private diary 'as if it had always been meant', then fizzled out. The quick bang (20 years on in the diary a new fling was 'as if we'd always known each other in the deepest sense') was all too often followed by a long whimper. Wright speaks of Lehmann's `suitablY mandarin prose', mandarin understood as distant and inscrutable, elsewhere 'dead handed prose'; his own is rough and hasty, but more alive. He has perfected his own brand of tautology. He gives me 'the impressionistic impression' that in dealing with Lehmann's 'nervous neuroses' he Is providing an 'exemplary example' of not writing well at all. Meanwhile my misprint of the year is 'the Fourth Estuary' — whei'? writers go when evading their responsibili- ties to style? Lehmann's own firm, between 1945 and 1952, was a prime triumph, indeed one .of British publishing's all-time glories. His fin- ger was still on the European pulse: be brought home such unknown Americans as Vidal and Bellow; he gave Zorba the Greek its fame and title; his aegis made Elizabeth David a household name. In 1957, accord- ingf to Wright, I suggested he again start his own imprint. 'Having been betrayed bY Leonard Woolf, abandoned by Allen Lane, kicked out, ruined by Purnell, stabbed in the back and thrown out by Cecil King — I think I've had enough. . . Wouldn't you say so? Isn't it perhaps enough for one little life, for one little Eton schoolboy?' The heart aches, as so often in this tender account and analysis of an unhappy man Who gobbled all life's pleasures.
He clung on to poetry as the only sanity, seeing himself in a startling phrase as the 'hunter of living truth through the forest of seeming'. Yet call him 'wooden-headed and humourless', as Sacheverell Sitwell did, and you are tarred with your own brush. John Lehmann is too easy to dismiss, while too hard to define. But in his delineation Wright has drawn many of the right Conclusions about this self-styled 'puzzling cosmopolitan sophisticate'.
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