I wonder what happened to him?
Francis King
THE PENGUIN NEW WRITING 1940-1950 edited by John Lehmann and Roy Fuller
Penguin, £4.95
Provided that he managed not to get killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned by the Japanese, the years of the last war were good ones for a writer. Most people crave to be noticed and writers crave to be noticed more than most. With the dwind- ling of other leisure pursuits, with the need to distract the mind from the harassments and discomforts of the present and from apprehensions for the future, and, above all, with the constant infliction of bore- dom, reading became a burrow-like retreat even for those who, in today's circum- stances, would rarely pick up a book unless to look up a telephone number. The result of this was that, provided that they could achieve publication, even the most mediocre of writers were sure of attention.
In response both to this avid readership and to the always strange, often uncom- fortable and sometimes dangerous cir- cumstances in which they found them- selves, many serving writers wrote both better than they had ever written before and better than they were ever to write subsequently. In this anthology of stories, essays, memoirs and poems published by John Lehmann in his Penguin New Writing in the decade 1940-1950, one keeps coming on half-remembered names that prompt the question: 'I wonder what happened to him? 'An answer of a kind can sometimes be found in the 'Select Biographical Glos- sary' at the beginning of the book. Thus, of R.D. Marshall, whose story, 'A Wrist- Watch and Some Ants', about a soldier who loses an arm while fighting in, South Tunisia, has stuck in my memory since I first read it in 1944, one learns that he was born in 1917, that he was twice wounded in the desert, and that he wrote his story in convalescence after losing an arm. About his subsequent career there is nothing at all. Similarly, we are told of John Short, whose poem De Quincey in Westmorland' does not seem out of place in a section that includes Edith Sitwell, Pasternak, Elytis, George Barker and Auden, no more than that 'after service in the war he was en- gaged in adult education.' These writers and others like them clearly found im- aginative sustenance in their experiences during the war and its immediate after- math; and no less clearly their creative gifts shrivelled during the humdrum years that followed. All in all, this select biographical glossary strikes me as invidious. Presum- ably it is intended to enlighten the reader about those writers who may not be famil- iar to him. But surely Frank Sargeson, J.F. Powers, William Sansom and Alan Ross (all included in the glossary) are at least as well known as Diana Witherby, A.S.J. Tessimond, H.T. Hopkinson and William Chapell (all excluded).
Among the constant delights of Penguin New Writing were the contributions of someone who wrote a humorous series `Shaving Through the Blitz' under the pseudonym 'Fanfarlo'. Subsequently Fan- farlo temporarily disappeared, to bob up again irrepressibly as 'Joseph Gurnard'., This was G.W. Stonier, who worked on the arts pages of the New Statesman for almost 40 years. Despite the intermittent despair in which he passed his life — more than once he attempted to kill himself — he was a writer of infectious high spirits.
Two of the best documentary pieces, assembled under the heading 'The Pano- rama of War', are by J. Maclaren-Ross and Alun Lewis. They provide an interesting contrast, intensified when, later in the volume, one comes, under the heading `Stories, Memoirs and Impressions', on another piece by. Maclaren-Ross entitled `Second Lieutenant Lewis'. The 'Second Lieutenant Lewis' is Alun Lewis, who, when the two were coincidentally stationed in the same place, committed the uncon- ventional action of summoning Maclaren- Ross, a private, to come and see him, an officer, because he knew him to be a fellow writer.
Both Lewis, in 'Ward 03' and Maclaren- Ross, in 'Y List', write of men in hospital; but, predictably, Lewis's are officers, Maclaren-Ross's other ranks. Lewis writes in a scrupulously buttoned-up style, Maclaren-Ross in a negligently unbuttoned one. All that they have in common is an uncommon talent. Sadly, Lewis was killed in action; and no less sadly Maclaren-Ross may be said to have been killed in inaction, as in the aftermath of the war he allowed his gifts and his life to be submerged under a flood of booze in the pubs of Fitzrovia.
Reminders that John Lehmann was the first person to publish such things as V.S. Pritchett's little masterpiece of a short- story 'Sense of Humour', a section of Christopher Isherwood's 'Berlin Diary' and Auden's 'Lay Your Sleeping Head', surely one of the most beautiful love lyrics of the century, convince one yet again of the remarkably high standard achieved by his publication. He was also an editor who brought many now famous foreign authors to the attention of the insular English pub- lic. Here, for example, are excellent stories by Andre Chamson (France), J.F. Powers (America) and Yuri Olyesha (Soviet Un- ion), and no less excellent poems by De- metrios Capetanakis, a Greek doomed to die in an English hospital at the age of 32, Georg Anders, better known as the Au- strian playwright Jura Soyfer, who perished in a concentration camp, and F.G. Lorca, executed in the Spanish Civil War. As the most skilful literary obstetri- cian of his time, John Lehmann was fortun- ate to have the support of Allen Lane. It was Lane who, despite the stringencies of paper rationing, managed to find for Pen- guin New Writing a paper allocation of five tons per issue — roughly the whole paper allocation for the Hogarth Press for one year — and thus enabled Lehmann to pro- duce 75,000 copies of each number, to be despatched, to any part of the world in which British troops were to be found. It was a remarkable achievement, on a par with all those indefatigable ENSA tours and Myra Hess's lunch-time concerts at the National Gallery.
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