A Wall

 

 

                                            A Wall 

 

You put up a wall, and I recognize it as your wall. We get together on the telephone and talk about it. Or perhaps we e-mail, or snail-mail. I tell you I'd like to put some of my stuff over on your side of the wall. It's not a fence, mind you. I'm not talking about general earth-bound real estate. I'm talking about Intellectual Property, Cultural Capital, the Psychic Self, and the Psychological Self, but in all those contexts I suppose I'm still talking about turf. You remember, I'm sure, how the Snow Leopard marks his turf. Very real stuff! Potent smell! So now we can rest assured, we know turf.  

            *   *  

I went to the funeral of a former girlfriend. Her father was there. I went up to look at her body and then walked toward the area where her family was standing. I said something to her father and I started to cry. I was embarrassed. I walked out onto the porch and headed in the direction of my car. My feelings of sorrow shut down as if a wall had descended in my brain. By the time I got to the car I had no feelings. It frightened me though. Such a powerful force in my mind that seemed to be beyond my conscious control. 

                      *   *

In his book, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction, Popular US Novels,, Modernism, and Form, 1945-75, Prof. Tom Perrin writes about blustering among mid-20th century literary critics. Here is a summary of one of the essays, written by Perrin.; 

"Part of a collection of essays on The New Yorker. I argue that the mid-century critic Dwight Macdonald’s prose emblematizes a mid-century middlebrow literary mode to which I give the name blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self-contradiction. Furthermore, I argue that blustering might itself be seen as an example of the modernism seemingly conspicuous by its absence from the mid-century New Yorker. I want to claim blustering as a variety of what Miriam Hansen calls “vernacular modernism,” an example from the expanded repertoire of modernist cultural productions that has been assembled in the new modernist studies over the last fifteen years or so. Hansen suggests that vernacular modernism comprises “cultural practices” outside the traditional modernist canon “that both articulated and mediated the experience of modernity.” Macdonald's blustering in The New Yorker is an exemplary instance of such a practice – a modernist and middlebrow mode mediated by modernism's self-contradictory and competing ideologies that at the same time attempts to articulate those ideologies." 

I've only read the one essay by Prof. Perrin but I found it to be brilliant and I'm hoping to read the rest of that book as soon as I can and whatever else of his that I can find. I am particularly interested in his ideas and description of what he refers to, referencing Hansen,  as vernacular modernism and its "cultural practices" outside the traditional modernist canon, and whether those who practiced this vernacular came into contact with certain walls in their thinking and...of what did those walls consist?

Without getting into a discussion of the subjects of semantics and linguistics too deeply let me just say that concerning walls, I'm using a broader definition than when describing an actual wall like the Great Wall of China. I'm using the term when it's discussed metaphorically; as I think I've said, in "You've put up a wall in our discussion of your mother!" As in the old topic of humor, the mother-in-law joke. I'm also using the term in other than geographic applications, as, for instance, the wall of a vein or artery, or a dam, such as the Hoover Dam, or a dam in an irrigation trench; walling up a river or a stream.      

I find the thought intriguing to go beyond the subject of literature to the subject of painting during the same historical period to which MacDonald and his peers aimed their criticism. I'm thinking specifically about MacDonald's essay, Mass Cult and Mid Cult. Can I assume, (let me just speak for myself at this juncture), that the mode of vernacular modernism spread over the entire world of art and cultural criticism of that time? One thing that is different of course is the effect that commodification has had on the value of individual art pieces as time went on, relative to the value of the printed word.  

But what about the construction of blustering? Of what does it consist? One thing that readily comes to mind is the fake. I think of Mike Tyson; a fake jab with one hand and a powerful blow aiming at the head with the other. Not once but many times, sometimes round after round. When I think of more boxing metaphors I could almost get carried away, but from shuffling I jump to shuck-and-jive which has to be another metaphor of numerous possibilities along those lines. What part do walls play in blustering?  

Painting?  Where to start?  Partisan Review? The Nation? Art News? Blustering? Well now, the first generation of abstract expressionism would be unique. They were developing a language; and there was a line-up of critics and a line up of galleries and buyers and promoters. But, is it even possible that it never got out of hand?

 * * *

Let's go back to the beginning for a minute. The Wall. I've mentioned the wall that is the discussion of the mother-in-law; a taboo subject.  That's a different kind of a wall; assuming we started out with the wall in our house next to where we're sitting. The living-room wall, the bathroom wall, the wall in the basement that is part of the foundation but has fake pine paneling on it so that it looks more like a wall. So, for the sake of my own semantic and/or linguistic intentions in this post, I'll be using the word wall as an alternate nomenclature for something which might more normally or for different purposes be using another word. (Keeping in mind that when it comes to walls for hanging paintings on we're talking about a completely different generation, ie Structuralism and Post- Structuralism.)   

Here are some places where I could use the word to describe something that is not the Great Wall of China:

A road block; a blood clot; a mental block; writers block. Suppose I stick with the letter b for awhile. Barrier, barricade, battlement, bar. Or a barrier by any other name, like the Maginot Line. (It was meant to be a wall, and Hitler did go around it; which is what you do to a wall.) [But, sorry, I switched from b to m.]

 

*    *    *  

 

The wall that is in the mind is the one I'm most interested in. The one that blocked my tears. On occasion, it has been there purely for self-torture; in terms of memory blockage. There have been occasions, with me as with most people if I may so presume, that there's been a wall, a conscious-unconscious wall between me and where I left my car keys. If you have a car that doesn't need a key please feel free to substitute.  O.K., I won't go further than this, but what I might do is use this post as a footnote to future mentions of walls in this context.   

 ........

Lacan; From a talk entitled "Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever".

"The question* that the nature of the unconscious puts before us is in a few words, that something always thinks. Freud told us that the unconscious is above all thoughts, and that which thinks is barred from consciousness. This bar has many applications, many possibilities with regard to meaning. The main one is that it is really a barrier, a barrier which it is necessary to jump over or to pass through. This is important because if I don't emphasize this barrier all is well for you. As we say in French, ça vous arrange, because if something thinks in the floor below or underground things are simple; thought is always there and all one needs is a little consciousness on the thought that the living being is naturally thinking and all is well. If such were the case, thought would be prepared by life, naturally, such as instinct for instance. If thought is a natural process, then the unconscious is without difficulty. But the unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question* of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness. The question is to find a precise status for this other subject which is exactly the sort of subject that we can determine taking our point of departure in language."

*Question? 
*Should this second bringing up of question be re-phrased as problem?  And where does he allow for the watchfulness to become conscious of a thought? 
[Here, I'm asking help from Lacan in arriving at a conscious thought. Is this too much to ask?  And/Or why did I add the above quote to my perfectly sensible short essay?  Probably, it's a fishing expedition.] 
 

Anarchists and Volcanos

I've just finished re-reading Survivors in Mexico, a book by author Rebecca West, left unfinished  at the time of her death. The man who edited the book is Bernard Schweizer, (b. 1962-) a professor of English at Long Island University Brooklyn. Schweizer is a naturalized American citizen born in Switzerland. His education began at the Waldorf School, an elementary school in Biel, Switzerland, continued with an apprenticeship in health care, autodidactic study for the federal Swiss baccalaureate, backpacking around the world, two years of college study at the University of Lausanne, a B.A. in English earned at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities Campus), and a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University in 1997. He held a teaching and research appointment at the University of Zurich from 1996-1999, was a research fellow for the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2000-2002. He joined the faculty of Long Island University in 2002. 

  He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literature, is a leading Rebecca West  scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he co-founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and was the second president of the Society, after Carl Rollyson, a West Biographer and author of many, many biographies and books and a University Professor. (I don't know where Rollyson is at present. He is a staggeringly productive man who really gets around.)   

In 2013, Schweizer founded another scholarly organization, the International Society for Heresy Studies,  and is currently it's vice-president. Heresy studies is designed to provide an intellectual platform for philosophers, literary critics, theologians, historians, and artists who are interested in the dialectic between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and who want to explore dissenting and heretical ideas outside of both confessional and anti-religious frameworks. He's the author of several books including Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, and Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum, two titles that almost make me wish I'd stayed in school.  

Prof. Schweizer isn't limited to writing in academic-speak. He can write well enough to pass muster with someone who appreciates Rebecca West for her writing style. Schweizer's substantive introduction explains in detail how he pieced together the notes and manuscripts of the book. I expect the chapter headings were part of this piecing together. Chapters include Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky, Mexico City, Race Relations and a dozen or so more subjects all in the best Westian prose.  My favorite part of the book though is that about Dr. Atl and the Reclus brothers.

 

West was a prolific writer. She began writing for the Feminist publications The Freewoman, and The Clarion while still in her teens. She must have been a gifted child, if only because she was interested in and reading about the Dreyfus case, which trial was in 1899, when she was only seven years old.  I've read two biographies of her; one book of letters; her semi-autobiographical novel; most of her better known novels; but none of her short stories and probably haven't made a dent in her journalism, though I have read The New Meaning of Treason, and A Train of Powder. I suppose I was trying to keep the memory of my father alive when, after his death in 1981 I felt compelled to read Black Lamb Grey Falcon. And when Robert Kaplan came out with his homage to Rebecca West with his book Balkan Ghosts,  I latched on to it, all the while congratulating myself for being prescient concerning Rebecca West's importance. And my love still grows.   

I know she has her detractors, and I respect their right to be right or wrong. I'm sure she made some errors of judgement and some errors of fact in Black Lamb Grey Falcon, but how could one not, in a book so huge? Anyway, history has a way of switching bogey men. One characteristic of R.W.'s writing which some might find annoying is her frequent use of hyperbole. For instance; in writing about Elie Reclus's attractiveness to women, she said..."There are two types of women which eternally attract Frenchmen, one tall and pessimist and Racinean, and the other small and optimistic and Molierean, and Arabella was highly Racinean." (Arabella was her paternal grandmother.)  

 Carl Rollyson gives a chapter to Survivors in Mexico in his biography Rebecca West A Modern Sibyl. With the help of her notes, he explains beautifully how a monumental book idea developed in her mind during her first trip to Mexico. That trip happened in 1966 at the end of a book tour in which she promoted her novel The Birds Fall Down, which had been a big success in both the U.S. and the U.K. The tour had been financed by The New Yorker editor William Shawn in the non-contractual hope that she might produce an article or two for his magazine. West's husband Henry Andrews accompanied her but was somewhat of an impediment due to mental lapses probably caused by hardening of the arteries. Henry was 72; Rebecca was 74. (He died two years later.)  She makes a few light-hearted comments about his flakiness but to understand her relationship with Henry is beyond the scope of this post. ...She loved him sometimes. Rollyson is very good about Henry, understanding better than the other biographers I've read so far that Rebecca knew that she was hard to love and not the most tolerant and patient of lovers.  

 

Here's how the book comes alive, for me. West extracts a tap-root from her own life to structure the expanse of the book. She goes back to her Paternal Grandmother. Arabella Fairfield was the second wife of Grandfather Major Charles George Fairfield, who, though he was Irish, served in the Third Scots Guards. He died in 1851 in middle age, of an infected gall bladder, leaving behind his attractive young wife, a daughter, and four young boys. Though she wasn't poor, had a pension and some property, they kept a low profile, both because of the potato famine and it's resultant poverty, and because she was member of an austere religious cult, the Plymouth Brethren, a cult also known as The Darbyites, after their founder, John Nelson Darby, a renowned preacher. Arabella, said Rebecca West,  "....looked like the figurehead of a ship and was a bigoted Protestant, ardently professing a faith hostile to ardor."   

   Mother and children divided their time between London in winter and Ireland in summer. In Dublin Arabella put an ad in the paper for a tutor, and one of the two Reclus brothers, Elie, responded. The brothers, Elie and Elisee, were political refuges from France, having been exiled due to their revolutionary politics. The two had dabbled for some years in different leftist sects from Switzerland to Paris, while at the same time attending University and picking up degrees; Elisee concentrating on Geography and Elie on Ethnography. For no particular reason that I could see, both Reclus brothers had a fascination with Volcanoes, which Elie transmitted to the children. All four boys loved Elie, and he stayed with them long enough to see two of them into the Military and two into Civil Service. 

*There were five Recluse brothers but for my purposes here we need only concern ourselves with the two.  

 

After his time with the Fairfield boys Elie continued his Anarcho-Syndicalist tendencies and with his brother was involved with the Paris Commune, and later, through political connections, became a director of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Rebecca West sums up her father's relationship with Elie this way: 

"Naturally, my father [Charles Fairfield] was in part Elie Reclus all his life long. Of course, Elie failed in his intention of instilling into his pupils no idea contrary to their mother's faith. It is true that my father was a Tory, but of the extreme sort which exalts the individual and would give the state hardly any powers at all, which is very close to anarchism, as conservatism often is today. When William F. Buckley junior tells his students that the only thing the state should be allowed to do is to regulate currency, he is making a remark which most of the great anarchists of the past would have happily endorsed. Since my father was so largely Elie Reclus, so am I, and that is why I have a certain insight into the mind of Dr. Atl, who had certainly read the works of the Reclus brothers and claimed to have been closely acquainted with both of them, and probably with truth, for they were always surrounded by anarchist sympathizers from all parts of the world, including a number from Latin America."
          

Some say Rebecca is, at least, expanding on her relationship with her father when she credits so much rubbing off of personality, but what was in her mind is guesswork at this point. I expect, (and I'm not alone); she had a father fixation. She does, certainly, romanticize him. And if that leaves her open to the critique of reaction-formation with the men in her life, well, I expect there's not too much room for argument there. Nobody's perfect.   

There was plenty about her father's story that could use a clean-up. Born the son of a British army officer in County Kerry, he had enlisted in the Army at the age of 17 and became a lieutenant. Gambling got him booted out of the Army. ...While working as secretary to the Soldier's Daughters' Home in Whitehall, he re-visited the Royal United Services Institute, which he had visited while in the Army and which contained a valuable collection of books, coins and badges. To bail himself out of gambling debts, he stole and sold a huge cashe of it's collection, was caught, and served five years hard labor. After prison, there is a lose of ten years, at least as far as my research is concerned. Is there any record of those years? I'd love to know. Was it during that time that he enlisted in the Confederate Army in America as a stretcher bearer? And was it after that episode in this life that he went to Mexico to see the Volcanoes?   

Ten years after he left prison he migrated to Australia, where he met Isabella Campbell Mackenzie, a Scot whose brother was the principal of London’s Royal Academy of Music. Fairfield was “a skilled horseman and a gifted orator”*..and charming. He and Isabella were married and moved back to London. Enough time elapsed for them to have three children, all girls, Cicely-Rebecca being the youngest. However, by the time they settled in Streatham, a district in south London, “Charles’s womanizing and squandering had led to a breakdown in the relationship. It was no longer a happy marriage.”*

*West's World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rebecca West;  Lorna Gibb;  Macmillan. 

 

What we know is that Charles Fairfield knew Elie Reclus well. Do we know that Dr. Atl and either one or both of the Reclus brothers knew each other? As far as I can tell Rebecca wants us to believe so. We do know that the Reclus brothers were two of the prime movers of Anarcho-syndicalism. And we know that Charles mentioned in a letter that he had met Dr. Atl. But as to a real physical meeting I'm not sure. ...I see it this way. It was a much smaller world in those days, and all three were in Paris at that time, perhaps the 1890s. Dr. Atl made it a point to hear Henri Bergson speak on several if not many occasions, and it is almost certain that both Reclus brothers did the same. Is there a connection between Anarchism, Revolution, Bergson's Elan Vital and volcanic activity? I think that element can be safely included on metaphoric grounds. As for his adoption of the Anarchist-syndicalist faith, West has this to say; 

"This was the most fashionable of all socialist theories at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. To apply the current test, it would certainly have been asked to a Truman Capote party, while Marxism, though well established, was just a little too dowdy for that, and social democracy, of the sort which has won in Great Britain, [circa 1960] would never have hoped to do more than read about the festivities in the newspapers." 

Born in 1875 into a wealthy Mexican family, when he was 21 his father sent Gerard Murillo to Rome to study law and philosophy, which he did, but at the same time he became more and more involved with painting, his first love, and, as West says, 

"Working for some time in Paris teaching studios, [Dr. Atl] adopted the Anarcho-Syndicalist faith. Of the nature of his treasured faith, Anarchism, most people will have to be reminded, for it is no longer modish. It rejected parliamentary Socialism in favor of a society formed of self-governing unions of urban and rural workers who minded their own business and left a minimum of power to the state, which it hoped to confine almost entirely to the conduct of international relations."       

 

In Europe, in addition to painting, he studied philosophy and law at the University of Rome, and heard Bergson lecture in Paris. In Italy he worked for the Socialist newspaper Avanti and became involved with Socialist causes. In 1902 he changed his name to Dr. Atl..  Here's Rebecca on the name change;

" ...[and]...he early changed his name to Atl, which is a word in the Aztec language, Nahuatl. That it means water, sperm, urine, brain-stuff, cranium, head, and war suggests that conversation in Nahuatl must be a risky game; but indeed, an idea can be seen passing in a stately way through these definitions, moving from an essential fluid (one without then one within man), extending to the idea of man's essential part, the intellect, and ending with what the Indians conceived to be man's essential occupation." 

 

In 1906 having returned to Mexico and connected with Diego Rivera, Francisco de la Torre and Rafael Ponce de Leon the three put together an exhibition of paintings sponsored by the editors of the magazine 'Savia Moderna'. Atl issued a manifesto calling for the development of a monumental public art movement in Mexico linked to the lives and interests of the Mexican people, a precursor of the Mexican Mural Movement launched in 1933. He was also commissioned by the Diaz government to design a glass curtain for the institute of Fine Arts under construction in Mexico City, which he did and which was executed by Tiffany's of New York. The curtain featured the two volcanoes overlooking the capital. 

He returned to Europe in 1911, and, in Paris, founded the newspaper Action d’Art, which related European Socialism to the political situation in Mexico. During the same period he printed a flyer against Victoriano Huerta; and also found time to study Vulcanology. 

 

 

On his second return home to Mexico Dr. Atl joined the Revolution on the side of the Constitutionalist forces led by Venustiano Carranza and through Carranza was appointed Director of the Academy of San Carlos, which, because he felt it was outdated and didn't belong with the Revolution, he immediately shut down. He founded the newspaper Accion Mundial and a journal entitled America. During the Revolution, he persuaded two young art students, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to join the Carrancistas and illustrated La Vanguardia, the Carrancista official paper.  

 

 

The following is taken from a talk given in Mexico by the artist and teacher Lucinda Mayo:

 

"The Revolution rejected the euro-centric direction the Mexican government had held onto into the 19th and early 20th century. Post-Revolution there was a new interest in Mexico's rich indigenous past and the current popular arts, music, arts and crafts, and folk dancing.  Dr. Atl prepared a two-volume study, Folk Arts in Mexico, published by the  government in 1922. No single artist influenced the 20th century Mexican art revolution as much as he, and – as Diego Rivera said, Atl “...was one of the most curious people ever born on the entire American continent. 

"He has the most picturesque story of any painter, impossible to even begin relating without filling several volumes. He introduced aesthetic theories, painted the finest colorful sensations with incredible brush strokes, led strikes, wrote criticism that set off sparks, agitated the populace, swindled morons, borrowed all his friends’ cameras,  organized their exhibits, and without having a cent, somehow subsidized dozens of them, while feeding them huge bowls of macaroni! He reinvented solid oil colors with Mexican minerals, planned businesses, formulated government programs, prepared presidents, "'...and got all my canvases sold at one time, so I could go to Europe.'"
 

Atl had a long career in Mexico as a landscape painter, often painting volcanoes* as part of his landscape. And he was a writer. In 1950 he wrote the book, "How a Volcano is Born and Grows - Paricutin, in which he told of witnessing that volcano's irruption in 1943, during which his leg was injured, later having to be amputated. He wrote about the Revolution. He even wrote a Novella, La Perla, which influenced John Steinbeck to write a similar novel, also called The Pearl. He had a famous, perhaps notorious affair with Carmen Mondragon, a movie actress turned poet and painter, who he called "Nahui Olin", a symbol of Aztec renewal meaning "four movements", the symbol of earthquakes. Long before he died in 1964 he had become a famous and beloved part of the cultural life of  twentieth century Mexico.   

*All active volcanoes of Mexico are listed in many places so you needn't rely on me for your volcanic literacy. The nearest I can tell there are 48 Volcanoes in Mexico. Mexico's volcanoes are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and formed on the North American continental tectonic plate under which the oceanic Pacific and (in the south) Cocos plates are being subducted.
The most active volcanoes of the country are Popocatepetl, Colima and El Chichon, which had a major eruption in 1982 that cooled the world's climate in the following year. (I remember taking close note of that occurrence because I was, being way ahead of the pack, worried about Global Warming. Since then I've found other things to worry about.)

 

By now Amazon knows of my relationship with Rebecca and the other day sent me an offer I couldn't refuse, The Essential Rebecca West; uncollected prose put out by someone called Pearhouse Press, Inc., a selected collection of 16 book reviews and 7 essays, ...for me it's just a perfect bunch, a great gift to myself. Full of humor, ...and "off the nose" criticisms. (Off the nose being a term from jazz, or swing, or someplace, meaning coming in a little before or after the beat..., drum, bass, whatever..rhythm.) Among the essays is an extract from 'Survivors', "Cortez Meets Montezuma", which not only works well in 'Survivors', but just as well in this collection, book-ended by two smart essays on writing. For that piece she did a lot of reading, mainly from the writings of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier with Cortez on that fateful trip for Montezuma.  

 

Prof. Schweizer says it well in his introduction to Survivors in Mexico,  

"As in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, West brings her conventional historical material to life with brilliant interpretations and creative narrative extrapolations. She embellishes Bernal Diaz's stolid account of Cortes's first interview with Montezuma, for instance, so ingeniously as to shed a revealingly new, personal light on this fateful encounter." 

Bernal Diaz, who's writing she must have read carefully and with enthusiasm judging from the way she drew from it, was with Cortez on that expedition. Diaz, born in 1492, the beginning of the age of discovery, was an astronaut of his day. Colonialism was in its infancy and Europe was in dire need of gold.* Without it Western Civilization was going down the tubes, something that Marxists of today might wish had happened, but leaving that behind......,

*Probably one reason why there were so many alchemists around in those days.  

 

In The Essential Rebecca West there is an introduction by Anne Bobby, an American actress, who explains to her fellow readers who Rebecca West was since according to Bobby no-one had ever heard of her. [Well, O.K., My father was a Yugoslav,  ...and..., everyone's heard of H.G. Wells..., I guess, because of Tom Cruise...] 

As soon as Anne Bobby heard about Rebecca West she set about writing a one-woman show about her, starring, well, Anne Bobby. Of course she had help, probably lots of help, from Carl Rollyson and a grand-niece of Rebecca's, Helen Atkinson. For me though, there was one particular problem with the intro and that was a quote from the play. Is it from Rebecca West, or the playwrights? But wait, it sounds familiar. I went to my copy of Rollyson's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, to the end of the book, and there it was in the first few pages of chapter nine. 

Anne Bobby introduces the quote in the following paragraph;  "I remember a line from the play in which Rebecca traveling in Mexico with her husband, Henry, visits Trotsky's grave, and in speaking with his grandson feels the idea for what would have been her last book, her,  "Final algebra of human suffering...," take shape;

"I would tell (Trotsky's) story, and mixed into it...would be my marriage, my family background and Henry's, the Aztecs, Meso-American art, the Spanish conquest, Cortes and Montezuma, even Napoleon. For we were all exiles and survivors...Though it was a huge pyramid of a book to scale, I hardly noticed."  

Is that a direct Rebecca West quote? The last sentence in particular? If it is it must have come from Rollyson's research, or from that chapter, which, by the way, is fine by me.   

  

West's first trip to Mexico was in 66. My first trip across the border was in 1963, having hitch-hiked from Amagansett, N.Y. to Laredo, Texas. My impressions though were registered on a muddled if not blank slate of a mind, since I hadn't bothered to learn much of anything up to that time. I was twenty and stoned. Rebecca West was 74 and she had been reading and retaining ferociously for probably 70 years.

 

On her first trip to Mexico, stopping in Mexico City, they spent that  evening and several more watching the sunset from the penthouse restaurant of an expensive hotel, followed the next day by a chauffeured tour of the city and it's parks and monuments. 

One Sunday morning the driver took them to the Diego Rivera Museum, which is not the beautiful civilization that Bernal Diaz saw but a carefully arrayed ruins, austere and solemn. Inside the museum she felt a certain feeling of the interior of a pyramid. The shadowed walls were being used as a background for beautiful pottery and sculpture, 

""which were also grey and black, [but], went for nothing because they had been designed to stand in bright light or against bright colours; and since the intention of many of them was comic, they were as disconcerting as Rowlandson* drawings would be hanging in a crematorium." 

*[Thomas Rowlandson, 1757 - 1827 English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era.]    

 

She gives a brief biography of Kahlo without much enthusiasm, but then she can't help interpreting Frida's work, and it ends up that she sees Kahlo as beautiful and crazy; a schizophrenic-narcissistic slightly silly but competent artist. (Can you be schizophrenic and narcissistic at the same time?) Then as they continue driving through the city she lets loose with the following zinger which I love. They drove but she had  "...no idea for how long. It is odd that the evolution of our species never implanted a clock in our brains which would have been most serviceable, but perhaps Teihard de Chardin could have proved that this omission showed a divine care for the populations of Switzerland and Waterbury, Connecticut. [No footnotes for that, you're on your own.]    

But she's not through with Kahlo yet and after seeing her in a certain dress and learning the story of the dress, the China Poblano dress, she tells how China Poblano became a saint in the minds of the people and Frida Kahlo too, a saint in the eyes of the mythologizing cab driver, who lets her know in no uncertain terms that she, Kahlo, was "....so good, so kind. Think of what she and her husband did for Trotsky." 

It isn't far from the Rivera museum to Coyoacan , but West uses that cab ride as an introduction to the story of Trotsky's last days. And she tells the story with great sympathy for someone she believes was a great man. Was Rebecca West in love with Trotsky? I think she says as much somewhere but I've searched back and haven't found the exact spot, but Carl Rollyson says as much in his last chapter of The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, a sensitive critique of Rebecca's last years, 1967-1983.

*

P.S. Notes:  I do think that in her time, (it was my time too, though I was much younger; I still, with the help of clarification by my parents, understood the social import of Trotskyism), to align yourself with Trotsky if you were on the Anti-Stalinist left, was the only sensible thing to do.

Was Rebecca over emphasizing her romantic feelings for Trotsky;  perhaps as a charm offensive on her Communist sympathizing fellow Socialists? Why did she continue to call her self a Socialist? I suppose she thought there was no alternative, particularly in terms of taking care of the poor; but I do enjoy imagining her spending time with William F. Buckley, [which she did], and in the evening having a drink and letting her hair down, so to speak.  

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

The Book Ban Crisis, Vol. ll

 

 

 

A good portion of my life is spent looking for books. I'll be looking for a book I know I have and it's the only one in the house that's completely disappeared. This, I know, is a mental block. More than that, it's my super-ego fighting a winning war against my ego; aka me. I've recently been thumbing through Bergler, his book that I read a year ago and ruminated about previously in this blog;  Bergler; The Super Ego; Copyright 1952, Gune & Stratton, Inc. NYC. : 

In that book Bergler makes a good case for the human condition being that of a hopeless victim of a blackmailing super-ego that terrorizes you, me, and everybody, by offering us a plea deal for our guilty ideas with the promise of letting us cop to a lesser crime. The deal of course is constantly re-negotiated, the lesser crime changing like a will-o-the wisp while the original crime becomes hopelessly lost and, anyway, irrelevant. I suppose since he offers no way out, his book should come with a cyanide pill; but instead he just offers the hope that the pain will be eased by understanding. Fat chance.

 

Another 'search' problem I get into, which, granted I would have even more trouble with but for Google, is looking for articles of the academic variety; those housed in such places as Jstor. I am ineligible for Jstor since I'm not a student or a professor.  

This morning though, I stumbled across an article I wanted to read as a result of having read another article, which I had been able to read.....,  (99+) (DOC) On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism, and The New Yorker | Tom Perrin - Academia.edu ....which article I had stumbled across while searching for more stuff by yet another academic, (I'm warm on academics this week), Bernard Schweizer, a Prof. at Long Island University, Brooklyn, and total Rebecca West expert and editor of that book I so love by West, Survivors in Mexico. His introduction to Survivors is enlightening both about Rebecca and how he, Prof. Schweizer, went about his edit.    

 As to the article I couldn't dig up, except in tease-form where you have to show proof of your academic status and/or pay a fee; that article is Project MUSE - From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: <i>Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i> and the Creation of Literary Value, by Prof. Daniel Tracy. You may remember that I have my own theory about Middlebrow Modernism which in fact may be related to that of Prof. Tracy's, or not, which had to do, in part, with Dwight MacDonald being a late blooming horn-dog.  

 

At any rate, getting back to the on-going book-ban crisis, and this might be slightly Berglerian; I give myself credit for continuing to look for books on my shelves until my super-ego gets worn down and the book magically appears. But as to those that are stored where only academics can reach them, that calls for meditation, prayer, contemplation and patience, my short suit.  ....How am I doing so far? lately? Well, I've bookmarked several books to be bought down the line, as for instance several by Jean Shepard, (the Talk Show Host not the country singer), in particular one or two about George Ade, about whom I thought I might do a blog post, a couple of books by women abstract expressionists, about whom I'd like to further inform myself, and a few other's I might mention as they come to me.  ...Lastly I'll say on this subject is that I do sneak in a kindle every now and then, with the thought that a book that only costs $2.99, is almost free. 

 

Changing the subject, there is a woman who writes novels galore, and she's a pretty good writer as far as I can see, but she is independently published, and I discovered her while looking to shore up my faith in self and/or independent publishing during the time I jumped into that world with my solitary effort; her name is Libby Hawker, and the last book of hers I read, a couple of weeks ago, was Daughter of Sand and Stone, about a Middle-Eastern Princess who fights the Roman  Empire. I enjoy her writing and it's kind of an escape from my usual focus. I've also been dabbling in William Carlos Williams as a side dish.  

But I've really been absorbed in a bio of Cecil Beaton for the last couple of weeks. I just finished reading it this am. Really long, but very enjoyable. I came to the book through my time spent reading about the Cyril Connolly group. Cecil was part of that. Cecil and Cyril went to the same elementary school. A really important connection the two had though, was that the man who backed, and helped edit, Horizon, Cyril's famous magazine, Peter Watson, was the love of Cecil's life. That story is quite interesting. Watson was an early collector of modern art. Between the three of them, Cyril, Cecil and Peter, they knew all the movers and shakers throughout Europe. 

The author, Hugo Vickers, spares us the sex scenes, which is O.K. by me, particularly since Cecil, at least in Vicker's telling, seems to count love as more important than sex. Cecil, by the way, seems to have been bi-sexual. In fact, more of the references to Cecil having sex are with women than with men. Was that spin? I'll get one of Cecil's unexpurgated diaries and see if I can tell. I suppose it's prejudice but I find the idea that he was women-positive sort of increases his value in my un-deconstructed psyche. Maybe you'll understand this better when you get to the Garbo part. I haven't said anything here about Cecil's photographs, or his set design, drawings, and paintings. That should have it's own chapter. But just for the record I think that is partly because he makes it look so easy.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Leaves Clem marries Laurence

My interest in Partisan Review led me, in a roundabout way, to its somewhat equivalent in the U.K., Cyril Connolly's Horizon Magazine. I had read that Clem Greenberg had had an affair with Connolly's wife, (She was American and had returned at the onset of war), after she had left her husband. In my post about Greenberg, "Dancing with Greenberg", I quoted him writing to his college buddy Harold Lazarus*; Greenberg said of Mrs. Connolly that she left him  ..."most thoroughly fucked-out and emptied - she takes her sex like a man." That goofy sexist remark makes little sense unless perhaps he felt he could treat Jean Connolly as an equal.   

I felt the need for a closer look. In keeping with my state of mind I thought that rather than fleshing out my knowledge of Cyril Connolly and his times I would go straight to the heart of the matter which I found in a review in the Guardian of The Lost Girls, Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951 by D.J. Taylor, published in the U.K. by Constable. It was Mrs. Connolly I was interested in first. I read The Lost Girls, and as I was finishing it, not having sated my appetite for wife number one, I ordered The Wonton Chase, [not about Chinese restaurants], by Peter Quennell, merely because the review of Lost Girls said that the latter book owed it's concept to the Quennell book. (You'd think I was getting paid for this!) 

The Quennell book added little info about the Greenberg affair other than that it had lasted about two years, and that Greenberg was somewhat broken up when it ended and that she had ended the affair because she had fallen in love with Laurence Vail. Vail, it so happened was someone I wrote about in my book The White Fence. He was once married to Peggy Guggenheim and was father to her two children Sinbad and Pegeen.    

 

 

I enjoyed the Taylor book; thought it was well done. (He's written a ton of books.) The title though is misleading in that the "girls" were probably no more lost than anyone who has their youth interrupted by a World War; but, that's how a certain type of single woman was referred to in those days, in war-time London. 

You have to discover the girls bit by bit as you read through a short bio of Connolly's youth and the history of his great magazine, which begins just a little before the start of WWll and ends in 1950. To simplify that, the girls are, in something like order of appearance, Jean Bakewell, Lys Lubbock, Janetta Wooley, Barbara Skelton, Sonia Orwell, Glur, (Joyce Warwick Evens), Angela, (Janetta's half-sister), Diana Witherby, Joan, daughter of Viscount Eyres-Monsell), Anna Kavan, (pseudonym of the writer Helen Emily Woods), and a few lesser mortals.    

Before I go any farther, though, and before we enter the world of Cyril himself, which it seems I've decided we must do, it should be understood that in those days particularly, on the other side of the great pond and in the neighborhood of London, and outside the lower classes of Great Britain, homosexuality, (although it was illegal), was thought of in a different way than it ever was in the United States, up to and including the present time. Starting in the public schools, which, [for those of you in Petaluma], are what Americans call private schools, and which had a more rigid social hierarchy than anything known in the U.S., with Eton, [along with Harrow], being at the very tip-top of the pyramid, public school boys had flirtations, crushes and romances with each other in a way that was both accepted and, if closeted, kept only from the lower classes, that including the entire bourgeoisie. 

The extensive Wikipedia entry for Cyril Connolly broadened my sense of the impact that Connolly had on his times. I learned that his father was a retired British Army officer and that his parents had separated early in their relationship; they lived for a time in South Africa, and his father undertook, as an amateur scholar, a study of Mollusks. The parents weren't wealthy but both sent him the occasional small check which combined with the income from an occasional review enabled him to travel almost continually. If you are really interested in his complete meanderings I suggest the Wikipedia Post, which is remarkable in its length and depth.   

 

When exactly it was that he jumped the rail to hetero isn't quite clear, but he had done well by his Eton and Oxford youth in terms of the social connections he made. Actually his fortunate friendships began at St. Ciprian's, the private boarding school he attended before Eton, the "Public" version of a private grammar school in the States. It was there that he became friends with George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. Connolly excelled academically all through Eton while making many friends that were helpful to him later on, although most are people I'm not familiar with, not being a full-fledged Anglo-phile, but I'll drop a few names anyway; Denis Dannreuther, Bobbie Longden, Roger Mynors, Anthony Knebworth. He also, in his last year, was elected to the most exclusive club at Eton, Pop. (Perhaps I should look up where that name came from?) At Oxford he did equally well making friends, including Nico Davies, about who's family I've written a bit; Teddy Jessel, Lord Dunglass and Brian Howard.  

He left Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in history and went for a vacation in the French Alps with friends. He took another trip in the autumn to Spain and Portugal. In April of '26 he took a job tutoring a boy in Jamaica, and set sail in November. He returned the following Spring, and found a post, (something slightly different then a job), as secretary/companion to Logan Pearsall Smith, a successful writer and discrete homosexual. Smith, born in the U.S., was the son of Robert Pearsall Smith, a prominent Quaker and glass manufacturer in New Jersey. Robert and his social prominent wife Hannah, it was her family that owned the glass business that Robert became manager of, had become involved in a movement within the Methodist church called the "Holiness" movement, and had risen to become internationally famous speakers and teachers. In 1875 though, Robert was accused of some sort of inappropriate behavior by a female American writer that had been part of an initiation ceremony he was conducting. An evangelical tribunal followed, and though details were not revealed, Mr. Smith was finished as a speaker. After that, he "lost his faith, withdrew from public gaze and spent most of the rest of his life as an invalid."  [Wikipedia] Why an invalid I haven't discovered, however, in 1888 the Smith family moved to England to be with their daughter who had married an Irish Barrister. (The same daughter later married Bernard Berenson.) Another daughter, Alys, married Bertrand Russell, and Logan, as mentioned, became a writer. 

Logan gave Cyril eight pounds per week for his secretary-companionship services even if one or the other was off visiting a third party. Much of his time was spent at Smith's Hampshire home, "Big Chilling", which was a gathering place for kindred spirits, including Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the New Statesman. At Big Chilling Cyril continued to broaden his growing friends-of-influence list.* In June of 1927 he submitted his first signed work for the New Statesman, a review of the work of Lawrence Sterne, and in August he was invited to join the staff. In September he wrote a review of The Hotel, by Elizabeth Bowen. Now, with a possibly regular income, he was able to afford a share in a flat, and moved in with a friend, Patrick Balfour.* Through Balfour he met more friends (Bobby Boothby* and Gladwyn Jebb)* who were helpful in introducing him around London and Paris. And, at around this time, he began taking an interest in women, with a couple of minor infatuations, and then, in Paris, (this is from Wikipedia), "...he met Mara Andrews, a poetic lesbian who was in love with an absent American girl called Jean Bakewell." 

 

He stayed in touch with Mara, (the poetic Lesbian), and some months later he arranged to meet her and the returned American girl, and they had some discussions, and fairly quickly decided to marry. A bit seems to be missing here, for which I searched fruitlessly; how he switched his sexual attraction from men to women and jumped into a marriage with a heretofore practicing lesbian, but, it does seem to have worked for both of them for a decade at least and they continued to love each other even after they were long separated.       

Having come from the New York State Public School system in the post-war period, it's hard for me to imagine Eton, or Oxford, or any of the types of friendships Cyril had, (although I did have as a friend my Godmother's nephew Julien, who had gone to Eton; discussed in another post.) I began to wish I was more prepared for what seemed to be turning into a study of the man and his times. I had read The Lost Girls, and the Peter Quenelle book, the Wanton Chase, and so I picked up Cyril's Enemies of Promise and read it, and one of several biographies of Cyril that are available, Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise. 

There is just no substantial record of the courtship between Jean and Cyril, so it gets put down in Wikipedia and the couple of reviews I've read as sort of a wam-bam thing. But they must have gotten to know each other a little more leisuredly than that. Cyril did in fact get to know Jean and Mara as a couple. And they introduced him to their bohemian friends in Montparnass. It was through them that he met Alfred Perles and Henry Miller as well as James Joyce, who he later wrote a piece about, titled The Position of Joyce, which appeared in Life and Letters. Then, abruptly, Connolly and Bakewell went off alone to Spain together and met up with Peter Quennell. Perhaps this is when the transfer of affections took place. But there is no record of any hurt feelings on the part of Mara.  

 

They were married in April of 1930 in the U.S. They were both 26 years old. With financial help from Jean's parents they immediately began traveling in comfortable style, mostly along the Mediterranean coast. When in London they lived at various places and were even welcomed for short stays at Big Chilling. After a few months they settled, for awhile, near Toulon, where their neighbors were Edith Wharton and Aldous Huxley.  

They were a messy pair though, very poor housekeepers and encumbered with a number of exotic pets; ferrets, lemurs, an African genet. Neither Huxley nor Wharton warmed up to the couple, nor did Virginia Wolfe, when they briefly stayed with her; she found Cyril uncouth and coined the name Smarty-boots for him, which led Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford to refer to him as "Boots", in the many funny letters they wrote to each other over the years.  

 

 In 1932 he got a rare paying assignment from John Betjeman at the Architectural Review to write some art criticism. (It was through Betjeman he met Waugh, with whom he developed the funny teasing back and forth that they maintained for years.) Later that year though, Jean fell ill and had what must have been a hysterectomy, though no specific operation is given that I could find.

On a recuperative trip to Athens, there was a coup d'etat, which Cyril wrote up for the New Statesman with the title "Spring Revolution". While in Greece they met up with a gay couple, Brian Howard (another Eton contemporary), and his boyfriend, and took a side trip to Spain, where the four were involved in a fight in a bar and were arrested. They were bailed out by the British Embassy. ...That summer, on the advice of Enid Bagnold, (author of National Velvet and former lover of Frank Harris), they rented a house at Rottingdean. 

 

During 1934 Connolly worked on Humane Killer, The English Malady and The Rock Pool, a trilogy of novels of which only The Rock Pool was finished. By 1935 Connolly's father was no longer to help him out financially, but Jean's mother continued to do so, paying for a trip to Paris, Juan-les-Pins, Venice, Yugoslavia and Budapest. In Paris he again met with Henry Miller and his publisher Jack Kahane and developed a strong rapport with Miller. (Kahane published The Rock Pool, the following year, to no appreciable acclaim.)  

By 1936 he had had a couple of brief affairs, (or flirtations), and then in late 1937 he became involved with Diana Whitbey, and it became serious. Jean seemed quite tolerant about it, she was after all a determined Bohemian, and she began to spend time in the South of France without Cyril but in the company of their mutual friend, a wealthy heir to a margarine fortune and a respected collector of modern art, Peter Watson, who lived with his homosexual lover, an American named Denham Fouts. This is where Cyril began to develop his style of playing lovers, (and friends), off each other. He explained to Jean that he was suffering low self-esteem, (perhaps using other terminology), from being supported by her, that he wasn't able to write his novel, (he was blocked), and that he felt horribly guilty and needed Jean to beg and plead for him to come back. (He needed to be needed.) Here is a bit about Diana from Michael Shelden's insightful biography. 

"Like Jean in 1929, she [Diana] was a bright, attractive student with boundless curiosity about anything connected with the arts.  She was twenty-two, twelve years younger than Connolly, and when he met her she was preparing to enter the Chelsea School of Art as a student of painting. ...she came from a conservative, upper-middle-class English family which had operated a printing firm in London for many years.  She had been brought up at her parents' country home in Hampshire and had received a conventional education at a fashionable boarding school in Kent. Connolly was charmed not only by her beauty and intelligence but by her innocent enthusiasm for art. Her dream of becoming a painter inspired him to think of her as both a muse and a fellow artist with whom he could share his life. ..."

 

In 1938, Connolly followed up The Rock Pool with a book of non-fiction, Enemies of Promise. The first part of the  book is a brilliant dissertation on the difficulties of maintaining popularity in the literature-as-art market place. Following that is a short autobiography, covering mostly his school days. In it he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece that he and others believed that he should have been capable of writing. The book was a surprise hit. 

In the meantime, with himself in the middle, he played off the emotions of Jean, Diana, and Peter Watson. When Enemies of Promise came out, he had persuaded Jean to come back, she was living with him, and he was deeply involved with Diana.Then Jean went back to Paris, and he pleaded again for her to come back. She told him that Watson thought they should maintain their separation for a while for the good of both of them. 

In September The War began. Jean realized that if she was ever going to see the States again she'd better go back soon. Watson realized that he couldn't stay in Paris and collect art, that he'd have to return to his own country; that his options were running out. Eventually, Denham Fouts and Jean took the same boat back to the U.S. The next time Cyril asked Watson about funding the magazine, he said yes. Horizon was born.

 

Watson insisted that Stephen Spender be brought on as an associate editor, sort of as a back-up for Cyril in case he lost interest or in some other way fell short. Watson would be financial backer and de facto art editor. Cyril remained as head of Horizon until it folded in 1950.

Jean spent some time in California and then settled in New York. She fell in with the Ex-Pat group that centered around Peggy Guggenheim and became Peggy's friend. She wrote some reviews for The Nation. (Did she write a good review of a Pollock before Clem ever did? Why don't I know that? Well, I'd need more support to consider it vetted.) She met Clem Greenberg who had been dating her sister. (How that came about has yet to be revealed to me.) She began dating Clem, (even after she learned that he had smacked her sister Annie in the face), and it developed into a love affair which lasted about two years, until Clem got drafted. The separation from her, combined with the poor ambiance of the Army threw Clem into what must have been a complete nervous breakdown, though one from which he recovered quickly when discharged. Jean however was no longer available, having by then fallen in love with Lawrence Vail, all the while she was still on chummy terms with his ex-wife Peggy. 

After the War Jean and Vail married and went back to Paris. Jean died of a stroke in Paris in 1950. Vail never remarried and died in 1968. Even stranger is how Jean lived with Peggy in NYC in 1943 while she was Laurence’s lover. Jean’s sister Anne would go on to marry Nathan "Bill" Davis, a former lover of Peggy and fellow early collector with Guggenheim of Jackson Pollock’s work.

 

*Concerning the friends of influence list, and for those who enjoy footnotes: [All from Wikipedia]........ 

*Cecil Beaton and George Orwell he had known since childhood, at St. Cyprian's. .....Bobby Boothby he knew from Eton. .....

*Boothby went from stockbroker to member of Parliament in 1924, where he represented the county of Aberdeen and Kincardine East, in the Scottish Highlands, and was there till 1958.....
.....He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill from 1926 to 1929.....From 1930 he began a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan, and rumored to be the father of their youngest daughter, Sarah. He was married twice. His first wife (married 1935) was Diana Cavendish, daughter of Lord Richard Cavendish, and Lady Dorothy's first cousin; he married her after concluding his relationship with the married Lady Dorothy to be "on the wane".  ....Then, swiftly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, (it went on to be a source of long-lasting guilt for him), it was dissolved in 1937. His second wife (married 1967) was Wanda Sanna, a Sardinian woman 33 years his junior. His second cousin, writer and broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy asserted that Boothby fathered at least three children by the wives of other men, "Two by one woman, one by another."

Throughout his career he held many important positions on many important government committees, was at one time Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic, was given many awards and a KBE in 1953.

He was a consistent supporter of homosexual law reform. While there were rumors about his sexuality he denied he was a homosexual. He did though speculate about the possibility of a homosexual relationship in the drowning of his friend Michel Llewelyn Davies, (one of the models for Peter Pan), and another fellow Oxonian Rupert Buxton.  

And then there is the following which I'll lift straight form Wikipedia: 

In 1963, Boothby began an affair with East End cat burglar Leslie Holt (d. 1979), a younger man he met at a gambling club. Holt introduced him to the gangster Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray twins, who allegedly supplied Boothby with young men, and arranged orgies in Cedra Court (the apartment block in Hackney where the Kray twins lived), receiving favors from Boothby in return. When Boothby's underworld associations came to the attention of the Sunday Express, the Conservative supporting newspaper opted not to publish the damaging story. The matter was eventually reported in 1964 in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror  tabloid, and the parties were subsequently named by the German magazine Stern.

Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the Mirror. His close friend Tom Drieberg—a senior Labor MP, and also homosexual—also associated with the Krays; hence, neither of the major political parties had an interest in publicity, and the newspaper's owner Cecil King came under pressure from the Labor leadership to drop the matter. The Mirror backed down, sacked its editor, apologized and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Other newspapers became less willing to cover the Krays' criminal activities, which continued for three more years. The police investigation received no support from Scotland Yard while Boothby embarrassed his fellow peers by campaigning on behalf of the Krays in the Lords, until their increasing violence made association impossible. It has been claimed that journalists who investigated Boothby were subjected to legal threats and break-ins, and that much of that suppression was directed by Arnold Goodman. [Whoever he was.] 

  

*Born in 1900 in Yorkshire, Gladwyn Jebb was educated at Sandroyd School, Eton College, and then Magdalen College, Oxford.  In 1929 he married Cynthia Noble, daughter of Sir Saxton Noble, 3rd Baronet. Cynthia was granddaughter of Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet and the and the great-granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. ( A  versatile and audacious 19th century engineer who created the Great Western Railway).

The couple had three children, one son and two daughters: Miles, Vanessa, who married the historian Hugh Thomas, and Stella, who married the scientist Joel de Rosnay. Jebb's granddaughter is the international best selling author Tatiana de Rosnay. 

 

In 1924 Jebb entered the Diplomatic Service and served in Tehran where he became known to Harold Nicolson and to Vita Sackville-West.  Later he served in Rome and at the Foreign Office in London where he served in such positions as Private Secretary to the Head of the Diplomatic Service. 

In 1940, he was appointed to the Ministry of Economic Warfare with temporary rank of Assistant Under-Secretary.  Later, he was     Later, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Special Operations Executive. In February 1942, with a change of Minister of Economic Warfare, Jebb was relieved of this appointment and returned to the Foreign Office. He was appointed Head of the Reconstruction Department and in 1943 was made a Counsellor. In this capacity he attended numerous international conferences, including those held at Tehran, Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and Potsdam. 

After WWll, Jebb served as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in August 1945, being appointed Acting United Nations Secretary-General from October 1945 to February 1946, until the appointment of the first Secretary-General Trygve Lie.  Jebb remains the only UN Secretary-General or Acting Secretary-General to come from a permanent member state of the United Nations Security Council.  

 

Returning to London, Jebb served as Deputy to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin at the Conference of Foreign Ministers before serving as the Foreign Office's United Nations Adviser (1946-1947).  He represented the United Kingdom at the Brussel's Treaty Permanent Commission with personal rank of ambassado

Jebb became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 to 1954 and to Paris from 1954 to 1960. He was the UK's first permanent UN representative.  In the latter role, he was angered that secret negotiations between the British, French and Israelis  in advance of the Suez invasion in 1956 took place without his knowledge and, in certain respects, that he was sidelined by Prime Minister Harold Mamillan at the Paris "big power" summit in 1960. His rather "grand" manner caused Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to coin an epigram; "You're a deb, Sir Gladwyn Jebb".

Knighted  in 1949, on 12 April 1960 Jebb was created a hereditary peer as Baron Gladwyn of Bramfield in the County of Suffolk. He became involved in politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was Deputy Leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords from 1965 to 1988 and spokesman on foreign affairs and defense. An ardent European, he served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1973 to 1976, where he was also the Vice-President of the Parliament's Political Committee. Jebb unsuccessfully contested the Suffolk seat in the European Parliament in 1979.

When asked in the early 1960s why he had joined the Liberal Party, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party. Like many Liberals, he passionately believed that education was the key to social reform.

Jebb died on 24 October 1996 at the age of 96, and is buried at St Andrew's Church, in Bramfield in Suffolk. 

*Violet Trefusis (nee Keppel; 6 June 1894 – 29 February 1972) was an English socialite and author. Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, and her husband, the Hon. George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. (But members of the Keppel family thought her biological father was William Beckett, subsequently 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, a banker and MP for Whitby.) \ Violet lived her early youth in London, where the Keppel family had a house in Portman Square. When she was four years old, her mother became the favorite mistress of Albert Edward ("Bertie") the  Prince of Wales, who succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII on 22 January 1901. Bertie paid visits to the Keppel household in the afternoon around tea-time on a regular basis until the end of his life in 1910. George Keppel, who was aware of the affair, conveniently made himself scarce. 

Violet is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West, which the two women continued after their respective marriages. The affair was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, and in many letters and memoirs of the period, roughly 1912–1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's  Love in a Cold Climate,  and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium. Trefusis herself wrote novels and non-fiction works, both in English and in French, with varying success. She had one sibling, born in 1900, Sonia Rosemary. Sonia is the maternal grandmother of  Camilla,  Duchess of Cornwall, and Violet was her great-aunt.

Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson  wrote the non-fiction Portrait of a Marriage, based on material from his mother's letters, and adding extensive "clarifications", including some of his father's point of view. Such works explored other aspects of the affair. Aspects of Trefusis' character also featured in other novels, including Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, and Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium.

Each of the participants left extensive written accounts in surviving letters and diaries. Alice Keppel, (Violet's mother), Victoria Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson, Denys Trefusis and Pat Dansey also left documents that referred to the affair.

Diana Souhami's Mrs Keppel and her Daughter (1997) provides an overview of the affair and of the main actors in the drama. When Violet was 10, she met Vita (who was two years older) for the first time. After that, they attended the same school for several years and soon recognised a bond between them. When Violet was 14, she confessed her love to Vita and gave her a ring. In 1910, after the death of Edward VII, Mrs Keppel made her family observe a "discretion" leave of about two years before re-establishing themselves in British society. When they returned to London, the Keppels moved to a house in Grosvenor Street. At that time, Violet learned that Vita was soon to be engaged to Harold Nicolson and was involved in an affair with Rosamund Grosvenor. Violet made it clear that she still loved Vita, but became engaged to make Vita jealous. This did not stop Vita from marrying Harold (in October 1913), nor did he curtail his own homosexual adventures after marriage.

In April 1918, Violet and Vita refreshed and intensified their bond. By that time Vita had two sons, but she left them in the care of others while she and Violet took a holiday in Cornwall. Meanwhile, Mrs Keppel was busy arranging a marriage for Violet with Denys Robert Trefusis (1890–1929), son of Colonel Hon. John Schomberg Trefusis (son of the 19th Baron Clinton and Eva Louisa Bontein. A few days after the Armistice, Violet and Vita went to France for several months. Because of Vita's exclusive claim, and her own loathing of marriage, Violet made Denys promise never to have sex with her as a condition for marriage. He apparently agreed, for on 16 June 1919 they married. At the end of that year, Violet and Vita made a new two-month excursion to France: ordered to do so by his mother-in-law, Denys retrieved Violet from the south of France when new gossip about her and Sackville-West's loose behaviour began to reach London. The next time they left, in February 1920, was to be the final elopement. Harold and Denys pursued the women, flying to France in a two-seater aeroplane. The couples had heated scenes in Amiens.

The climax came when Harold told Vita that Violet had been unfaithful to her (with Denys). Violet tried to explain, and assured Vita of her innocence. Vita was much too angry and upset to listen, and fled saying she couldn't bear to see Violet for at least two months. Six weeks later Vita returned to France to meet Violet. Mrs Keppel desperately tried to keep the scandal away from London, where Violet's sister, Sonia, was about to be married (to Roland Cubitt). Violet spent much of 1920 abroad, clinging desperately to Vita via continuous letters. In January 1921, Vita and Violet made a final journey to France, where they spent six weeks together. At this time, Harold threatened to break off the marriage if Vita continued her escapades. When Vita returned to England in March, it was practically the end of the affair. Violet was sent to Italy; and, from there she wrote her last desperate letters to their mutual friend Pat Dansey, having been forbidden from writing directly to Vita. At the end of the year, Violet had to face the facts and start to build her life from scratch.

The two former lovers met again in 1940, after the progress of the Second World War forced Trefusis to return to Britain. The women continued to keep in touch and send each other affectionate letters.

During the Second World War in London, Trefusis participated in the broadcasting of "La France Libre" which earned her a after the war; she was also made a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Trefusis, as she planned.

From 1923 on, Trefusis was one of the many lovers of the Singer sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer, daughter of Isaac Singer and wife of the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, who introduced her to the artistic beau-monde in Paris. Trefusis conceded more and more to her mother's model of being "socially acceptable" but, at the same time, not wavering in her sexuality. Singer, like Sackville-West before her, dominated the relationship, though apparently to mutual satisfaction. The two were together for many years and seem to have been content. Trefusis's mother, Alice Keppel, did not object to this affair, most likely because of Singer's wealth and power, and the fact that Singer carried on the affair in a much more disciplined way. Trefusis seemed to prefer the role of the submissive and therefore fitted well with Singer, who, whip in hand, was typically dominant and in control in her relationships. Neither was completely faithful during their long affair, but, unlike Trefusis's affair with Sackville-West, this seems to have had no negative effect on their understanding.

In 1924, Violet's mother bought L'Ombrellino, a large villa overlooking Florence, where Galileo Galilei  had once lived. When her parents' died in 1947, Violet became, till the end of her life, the chatelaine of L'Ombrellino. After the death of her husband in 1929, Trefusis published several novels, some in English, some in French, that she had written in her medieval "Tour" in Saint-Loup-de-Naud, Seine-et-Marne, France – a gift from Winnaretta.