John Lehmann’s New Writing in Wartime : A Foreword to Postmodernism ?
p. 383-391
Texte intégral
1New Writing had a rather long life of fourteen years, encompassing one of the most difficult periods to analyse in the evolution of modernism. John Lehmann’s project took shape in the mid-Thirties ; the first issue came out in 1936 and the last one is dated 1950.
2The 61 issues altogether of the magazine offer a remarkably clear record of Lehmann’s own approach to his role as an editor, and of the way he steered through a rather troubled period which is also viewed as a transition between modernism and postmodernism. (These debatable terms are being used here in their commonly accepted meaning, referring respectively to the decades before and after the Second World War.) New Writing started three years before the war and came to an end five years after. In the meantime, Lehmann changed publishers several times, shaped and reshaped his original project, tried to adapt to a constantly evolving readership, altered the title in consonance with a mutating world.
3But there is one aspect of the magazine, which Lehmann unflinchingly preserved beyond the various changes, and that is his dialogue with readers. Almost all the issues of the magazine start with a “Foreword” : a one-page address to the individual reader, in which Lehmann speaks as an editor presenting his work and his latest choices as to the policy of the magazine. He also voices anxieties roused by the historical and political context, especially during the war. He expresses collective feelings after major war events, considering the readers as equal protagonists in charge of the life of letters. Lehmann’s forewords try to give every issue of the magazine a specific meaning. Despite the absence of space devoted to readers’letters in the pages of New Writing, the word “dialogue” remains more appropriate than “monologue” because readers’letters are occasionally mentioned and in the forewords, and they seem to have affected Lehmann’s style. Indeed, in Penguin New Writing, the paperback version of the magazine, Lehmann adopts a heart-to-heart tone, producing a sort of fireside-conversation effect, which sounds obviously more familiar than the way he addresses the readers of New Writing in book form pubished by the Hogarth Press1.
4All the forewords put together offer an accurate survey of collective sensibility filtered through and mouthed by an individual mind, attentive to history and to the evolution of literary production. The word “history” recurs almost obsessively in Lehmann’s prose.
5In addition to the editor’s forewords, Lehmann contributed a number of essays to New Writing : essays on the craft of letters, on artistic creation confronted with totalitarianism and the war, which give his work as an observer a more reflective dimension. He gives his appreciation of emerging talents and literary forms and he recurrently reinforces the role of his magazine as a bridge. The word “bridge” was Lehmann’s first idea of a title for his magazine. In the 1930s he thought of a bridge between Great Britain and the rest of Europe, then he evolved towards the idea of a bridge between cultures including Autralasia, the Commonwealth at large, and China. But he also tried to maintain the magzine’s function as a bridge between two eras. A few months after the outbreak of the war, he finds it essential to specify : “[…] our guiding principle remains the same : to create a laboratory where the writers of the future may experiment, and where the literary movement may find itself2 ”.
6This aspect of the spirit of the magazine is regularly reasserted by Lehmann in the first years of the war, when it is thought that the war can annihilate any new literary expression. Again in a foreword of 1941, he repeats : “[…] it has become increasingly important to undertake a reassessment of values and try to understand what course literature and the arts are taking and what their prospects are for the future3”. And it was this particular desire to gather scattered fragments, to produce a coherent portrait of the new generation, which urged Lehmann to write regular contributions. In retrospect, Lehmann’s contribution do not appear as landmarks in the evolution of the magazine, they rather produce a slow-motion vision of the passage from one era to another.
7The title of his essay “Looking Back and Forward” (194) expresses one of his permanent concerns : “the necessity to provide constant evaluations of writers,” achievements in wartime. Throughout the war he sticks to his belief in a specific mission of novelists (rather than poets) “to search for a deeper and more co-ordinated interpretation of the world we live in, an interpretation which, by helping us to understand its nature with the X-rays of the poetic imagination, will make it possible for us to adapt ourselves to it–and finally dominate it. […] Here, surely, is the task for the artist of tomorrow we are looking for : to take the whole scene of Europe, and give it poetic depth5”. But while expressing such hopes, Lehmann finds himself obliged to produce justifications for the absence of great novels inspired by the war. He evokes a general defiance for the exaltation of 1914, and a sense of impotence experienced by writers after all the warnings of an impending catastrophe that they formulated in the 1930s. In fact he evokes a number of reasons which sound curiously reminiscent of Benjamin’s approach to the art of narration6. But instead of acknowledging the defeat of narration as Benjamin did in 1936 (the year New Writing was launched), Lehmann places vital hopes in the future of the novel and the possibility of a contemporary epic. He believes in a close inter-dependence between literature and the war, a belief which is detectable in sentences like this one : “it has been one of my disappointments as an Editor to discover how little of any significance is being written as yet by this generation7-how little, that is, compared with the opportunity8”. Lehmann never tempers his hope for an adequate literary response to history.
8In “The Heart of the Problem” (199), he can be seen still trying to come to terms with the absence of great novels. He chooses three war novels (Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Hoellering’s The Defenders), that he considers the best among the latest production and he explains why they do not yet meet his expectations. He explains that they depict the progress of the European crisis “as if the whole machine of our lives were running downhill without brakes and with gathering momentum”. He stresses the “enormous possibilities of power offered by modern science and modern methods of organization, and the reckless exploitation of these possibilities in a moral void.” He identifies a recurring theme in the three novels : the presence of characters “who have embraced great ideals and in embracing them, have been tricked by fate into crime and disaster.” His conclusion betrays some sense of doom : “Our age is destroying itself by too great a belief in material power and dogma10”. His frustration and growing disappointment as an editor are so prominent that they can be interpreted as a signal for deep mutations escaping his faculty of adjustment.
9In 1942, he serializes his observations of the literary context, conceiving his next essay as an actual epic with an eponymous hero. “The Armoured Writer” runs through 5 issues of New Writing and Daylight11. The most recurrent words in Lehmann’s essays throughout the period are the words “history” and “tragedy”, which he uses in a much bolder way than one might suspect. In his attempt to come to terms with historical changes and evolutions, he remains attached to his pre-war awareness of belonging to a pivotal period in history, and he registers the end of the “social realism” and the so-called “new humanism” of the 1930s and the advent of a more complex way of writing, due to political failures such as the experience of the Spanish War. And he produces such analyses with one blatant objective : namely to define the work of art of the future, which he then figures out as “the modern tragedy” or, in a significant periphrasic expression, “the cathedral for an age that has broken up all the old settled shapes of belief, that must turn to art or die12”.
10In his anxiety to detect the expected master-piece, he often sounds as if he were marking papers. He tends to classify authors into two groups : the striving under-forties on the one side, and on the other side the less satisfactory under-thirties, comparing the worst production of the latter to “a sickly fungoid growth on decaying jam13”. Such a vitriolic tone is the tone of a self-appointed guardian of the standards of writing and thinking, who belongs to a generation still in search of its own myth and figureheads.
11It is interesting to notice how Lehmann describes the enormous machinery of cameras, microphones and the teams of BBC reporters collecting documents, testimonies and archives of the war, in contrast to the writers’failure to create “the true epic of our times14” and a “sense of oneness”. His use of “we”, “us”, “our” is permanent and seems to refer to contributing writers and readers of the magazine alike, namely the expecting, vigilant community considering art as an essential aspect of the political sphere, on bases defined by New Writing at its outset.
12In the course of this particular essay, in the fouth part to be more precise, Lehmann’s attitude changes. He passes from eager, articulate expectation to some lucid awareness of his misunderstanding of the period, and this is one of the most interesting aspects of the magazine’s evolution in general and Lehmann’s contributions in particular. In the winter of 1943-1944, he declares : “it is now becoming increasingly clear that, with rare exceptions, the real novels about this war are not going to be written until the war is over”, before he concludes “we are lived by powers we do not understand15”.
13In the next instalment, Lehmann devotes the last part of his essay to poetry, abandoning all hopes of a prose masterpiece, and distinguishing the “poets who wrote during the war” from the “war poets,” in order to show the respective merits of each category. He draws the portrait of a generation then appearing in a clear outline : a generation with a sense of history, capable of maintaining a link with the literature of the past. He also describes what he calls “a new continent” : “the suggestion of deeper and often terrifying truths of our historic existence that have begun to emerge from the clash of nations and beliefs we have been forced to take part in ; the sense of being about to discover a master-key to the riddle16”.
14In the last years of the war, Lehmann’s description of the latest advances of poetry betrays rigidity and blindness. His essays from then on contain traces of unexplained details, acknowledged and recorded phenomena escaping his analysis, as in the following remarks :
Again, I have heard many young men say that the war, terrible though it was in its essence, was welcome to them because it transported them from the confinement of false and hateful symbols to surroundings that more truly expressed what they felt to be the nature of man’s life in the world : to the small ship in the limitless, dangerous sea, to the camp in the desert, to the tangled track through the inexhaustible jungle.
The world today looks in a kind of paralysed dread at the supreme achievement of its own science, the absolute agent of pure destruction, the atom bomb. The spirit which would oppose all that the atom bomb stands for may indeed be appalled at the enormous resources, the vast and complex organization, the multitude of men of high intellectual endowment, demanded by the production of that satanic agency ; and may wonder whether it can ever confront it with any equivalent power that will work for Eros. And yet what greater power can that spirit call upon, than the small, so insignificant-seeming word, the creative word, the word of the poet17 ?
15In his post-war essays Lehmann remains faithful to the value of myths and symbols. “The Search for the Myth”, “The poet in the Modern World”, “The Craft of Letters”… such titles show an interest focused on corporatist concerns. Lehmann believes in his mission as an editor offering vital guidance to budding or striving authors ; and he believes in their common responsibility as guardians of a dwindling, threatened literary space. He intensifies his efforts through more frequent contributions, lectures, symposiums, which can be perceived as parts of a system of defence erected around an endangered craft. He describes the postwar situation of poets and writers as an impoverished condition in terms of readership and public interest, and also in terms of language and production.
16In his 1947 lecture delivered in Vienna, “The Poet in the Modern World18,” he develops his vision of a split that poets have failed to “bridge,” precisely, (keeping in mind the magazine’s original title) :
If the great split between knowledge and morality is to be healed, if the masked and powerful anti-humanistic movements of our world are to be held in check, it will only be by the operation of the poetic imagination on the thought of men, by which the spiritual wells of our nature are kept fresh, and the “visitations of divinity” are “redeemed from decay”. That is the task the great poets of the past can accomplish for us–if we listen to them ; but also the poets of our own times, if they preserve their freedom of spirit, for without creative freedom, under direction of the necessity of special pleading, the imagination as rapidly withers and dies as a tree whose roots can find no water19.
17After the liberation of the camps, Lehmann had reasserted and further developed his conception of the role of imagination, tracing filiations from Shakespeare to Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, and also stressing again and again the role of poetry in bridging the widening gap between science and morals.
After the orgy of Satanism in action through which we have just passed, the crying need of Europe is for a new humanism, for a reaffirmation, in all the manifestations of culture, of the dignity of man–of every man–for the philosophy that recognizes that man is a spiritual being, and that no man has a right to treat another man as mere experimental material. World history in this century is a ghastly moral written in the blood of millions of human beings, a reeking demonstration of the place to which such doctrines lead us as reject the principle of love and deny any law above their own. The horrors revealed in the camps of Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau were not just the crimes of the German nation or the Nazi party : they were the logical result of any way of thinking which demands the atrophy of the imagination. The truth of Shelley’s inspired words in his Defence of Poetry has never been clearer than today : “The great instrument of moral good is imagination20”.
18In his search for spiritual foundations, Lehmann condemns the anti-humanistic trends of the French existentialists, seeing in their attitude an obstacle to “the integration of Europe”. As an obstinate observer, he focuses on the camps and the atom bomb in which he identifies decisive collective experiences : pivotal events introducing a new era and a new challenge to artistic expression. But he fails to identify the emerging figure of the artist as an impotent observer, as an allegory of discouragement and depression. Such blindness gives his chronicle itself a tragic turn and, paradoxically, its value as a document on the period.
19Before the war, Walter Benjamin, had extensively argued that the chronicle as a genre had become one of the most significant expressions of his generation’s experience. In “Le Narrateur” (previously quoted), he explains the difference between the historian and the chronicler. The historian aims at explaining a chain of events, a series of causes and consequences seen from an impersonal point of view, whereas the chronicler simply describes his subjective experience of events considered separately. A chronicler neither selects nor explains events, he just records and accumulates them for future explanation, classification or understanding. Considered in the light of Benjamin’s remarks and analyses, Lehmann’s essays appear as repeated failures to produce a historical narrative of his generation’s experience. Obsessed with history as he is, Lehmann keeps trying to find explanations, relevant causes for his frustration as an editor and keeps failing to do so. His writings display a permanent shift from his ambition as a historian trying to explain the present reality, to the position of a self-ignored chronicler. He is forced to recede to the position of a reluctant chronicler barely taking notice of unexplained phenomena such as the emergence of “a multiplying race of anti-cultural publicists”, or the extinction of an “interest in literature that was due to the war21”.
20In fact, Lehmann repeatedly deplores the incapacity of poets and novelists alike, from the 1930s onward, to give unity and coherence to his generation’s sufferings.
[…] in looking back on the prose and poetry of the writers of the last decade, it is difficult not to feel how incomplete, on the whole, their vision was, how repeated their failure to assemble the fragments of their inspiration, brilliant as they often were, and to give their work that final imaginative intensity, which has always been the characteristic of great art22.
21What Lehmann fails to analyse is the slow defeat of narrative logic which he interprets as a failure, a weakness of writers’ imagination, whereas Benjamin sees it as the most significant expression of the age. And yet, in spite of diverging interpretations, Lehmann and Benjamin seem to agree more profoundly on the type of attention that is required by the age they live in.
22In 1922, Benjamin wrote a foreword to his own project of a magazine which never took shape. He would have called it “Angelus Novus23”, “the angel of novelty,” a title which is consonant with Lehmann’s choice, and inspired by a Talmudic legend defining the characteristics of an angel of novelty who must stop singing after the end of his song, to be instantly replaced by a totally new angel capable of maintaining the novelty of the song. In Benjamin’s project, the principle of a magazine is precisely to maintain the novelty of its contents, to secure a permanent renewal of testimonies about the present. Exactly as Lehmann would do two decades later, he ponders on the question of new religious beliefs in the making ; he proposes to produce a collection of moments, of experiences offered to unpredictable needs liable to emerge in future generations and he affirms his conception of a review which will find its own potential for renewal in individual “confessions24,” in texts emanating from subjective standpoints : the very kind of writings that a chronicler will favour, forcing the reader out of a religious conception of knowledge, out of the sacredness of literature, towards a ‘secularized’form of narrative25.
23Lehmann’s chronicle of his own disappointment and Benjamin’s unachieved dream seem to reveal the roots of a few characteristic themes that were developed by artists and philosophers after the war. Lehmann’s defeated obstinacy can be perceived as an introduction to the haunting idea of the end of art, whereas his role as a chronicler (close to Benjamin’s definition) seems to foreshadow the shift from the pre-war aesthetics of fragmentation to literally atomized forms of language which emerged in the Fifties and were never published in New Writing. The magazine therefore appears as a long expectation of a voice that never rose from the landscape of chaos and ruins in which the artist was losing influence as a conscience-bearer. But Lehmann’s attachment to “the duty to be tormented26” did not prevent him nonetheless from chronicling the crossing of a shaking bridge–in a chronicle, definitely denied by him as such, and yet extremely accurate in its description of the slow advent of a new era which, in the course of the 1950s, came to be called “post modern” by another poet and essayist, Charles Olson. The angel of novelty had certainly come to the end of his song.
Notes de bas de page
1 From 1940 onward, the magazine appeared in two distinct versions with very few common contributions. The Penguin New Writing was launched as a monthly in the first months of 1940 due to the success of the magazine published in book form by the Hogarth Press and addressed a larger readership. In 1940, Penguin New Writing cost 6 pence when the issues published by the Hogarth Press were sold for 6 or 7 shillings. Paper shortages affected the publication of the book version more than the Penguin version, but during the war years only Lehmann managed to have 11 issues published by the Hogarth Press (4 issues of Folios of New Writing and 7 issues of New Writing and Daylight), and 26 issues by Penguin.
2 John Lehmann, “Foreword,” Folios of New Writing, London, The Hogarth Press, Autumn 1940, 5.
3 Id., “Foreword,” Folios of New Writing, London, The Hogarth Press, Spring 1941, 6.
4 Id., “Looking Back and Foreward,” Folios of New Writing, London, The Hogarth Press, Autumn 1941, 5-11.
5 Id., “The Heart of the Problem” Daylight, London, The Hogarth Press, 1941, 137-143. The single issue of Daylight is currently assimilated to New Writing : John Lehmann contributed to this issue and the title was soon changed into New Writing and Daylight until 1946.
6 Walter Benjamin, “Le Narrateur,” Ecrits francais, Paris, Gallimard, Collection Folio, 1991, 265-298 : “[…] l’art de narrer touche a sa fin. Il est de plus en plus rare de rencontrer des gens capables de raconter quelque chose dans le vrai sens du mot. De la un embarras general lorsque, au cours d’une soiree, quelqu’un suggere qu’on se raconte des histoires. On dirait qu’une faculte qui nous semblait inalienable, la mieux assuree de toutes, nous fait maintenant defaut : la faculte d’echanger nos experiences. Il est aise de concevoir l’une des causes de ce phenomene : le cours de l’experience a baisse. Et il a l’air de prolonger sa chute. Nul jour qui ne nous prouve que cette baisse ait atteint un nouveau record, que non seulement l’image du monde exterieur mais celui du monde moral ait subi des changements consideres avant comme impossibles. Avec la Grande Guerre un processus devenait manifeste qui, depuis, ne devait plus s’arreter. Ne s’est-on pas apercu a l’armistice que les gens revenaient muets du front ? non pas enrichis mais appauvris en experience communicable. Et quoi d’etonnant a cela ? Jamais experience n’a ete aussi foncierement dementie que les experiences strategiques par la guerre de position, [les experiences] materielles par l’inflation, [les experiences] morales par les gouvernants. Une generation qui avait pris le tramway a chevaux pour aller a l’ecole se trouvait en plein air, dans un paysage ou rien n’était demeure inchange sinon les nuages ; et, dans le champ d’action de courants mortels et d’explosions deleteres, minuscule, le frele corps humain”(265).
7 At this stage in his essay, Lehmann is referring to what he calls “the under-thirties,” as opposed to his own generation labelled as “the under-forties”.
8 “Looking Back and Foreward,” op. cit., 10.
9 Op. cit.
10 Op. cit., 142-144.
11 “The Armoured Writer–I to V” appeared in the first five issues of New Writing and Daylight, dated Summer 1942, Winter 1942-1943, Summer 1943, Winter 1943-1944 and Autumn 1944, published by the Hogarth Press.
12 Id., “The Armoured Writer–1,” op. cit., p. 156.
13 Id., “The Armoured Writer–2,” op. cit., p. 168.
14 Id., “The Armoured Writer-3,” op. cit., p. 171.
15 Id., “The Armoured Writer-4,” op. cit., p. 162 and 164.
16 Id., “The Armoured Writer-5,” op. cit., 164.
17 Id., “The Search for the Myth,” Penguin New Writing, 30, 1947, 157-158.
18 Id., “The Poet in the Modern World,” in The Open Night, London, Longmans Green, 1952, 117-128.
19 Ibid., 128.
20 Id., “In Daylight–1,” New Writing and Daylight, 1945, 10.
21 Id., “Foreword” to New Writing and Daylight, autumn 1944, 6.
22 “The Heart of the Problem,” op. cit.
23 Walter Benjamin, “Annonce de la revue Angelus Novus” (1922), Œuvres, vol. 1, Paris, Gallimard, Folio, 2000, 267-273.
24 Ibid., 271.
25 “Le Narrateur,” op. cit., 284.
26 “Le devoir d’un écrivain est d’être tourmenté” is a quotation from André Chamson, made by Stephen Spender, in the original French, in his report of the Writers’International Congress held in Madrid in July 1937 : New Writing, 4, autumn 1937, 250.
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