(Group) Portrait of the Week: gas masks!

This was, needless to say, not the standard issue!

“Baby I’m home!”: the lives of Lee Miller in our church hall (which is the last place you would expect to find her)

Who would think that the life of the legendary muse artist and subversive Lee Miller could fill a church hall in Surrey a good 30 years after her death. Well, it did – the week before last, and I was one of the congregation of listeners when her son Anthony Penrose gave an illustrated and candid discussion of his mother’s life. I have read quite a lot about Lee Miller and I guess that the number of people should have come as no surprise to me: she always did know how to pull a crowd.

Here was a lady who has gone down in history as a staggering beauty and a muse who utterly obsessed the artists who immortalised her. By far the most famous images of Lee are those photographs of her taken by her lover Man Ray and it was together that they discovered the process of solarisation. As a result of an unplanned encounter with a rat in the dark room, a photograph was exposed to some light during development such that its tones were reversed and a strange line appeared around its object. This odd beautiful effect became entirely associated with Miller and Ray.

And there is one of the main points that Penrose made about his mother: she was not just an beauty to be brushed on canvases and pictured and objectified; she had her own work. Miller’s photography abounds with images of freedom and escape and like many surrealists – she was fascinated by the idea of the “found object”. That is to say that she looked for the marvellous in the ordinary and she, as Penrose put it – used her camera like a cookie cutter to chop out bits of everyday life. Intellectually she railed against being objectified. Here was a woman who served a severed breast up on a plate with a knife and fork to make a point. She was pretty subversive and she was pretty brave.

Which she needed to be when she went into occupied with the allied troops at the end of the Second World War. She was there as a war correspondent and the photographs that she took and the words that she wrote were the first that many people knew of the horrors of life under the Nazis. She took the most harrowing pictures of concentration camp interiors and they were not taken from a distance: they were right close up. She was able to flash her camera while men around her were vomiting into the bushes. Famously her companion took a picture of her having a lounge in Hitler’s bath, her muddy boots, fresh from the camps on the dictator’s bathmat.

Miller only left Europe because she was told, none too subtly, that her English husband wanted her back and was not content for her to roam around with the army forever. I got the impression from Penrose that his mother would never have come home of her own volition. When she did come home she suffered badly from having nothing important to do. She became extremely depressed, hit the bottle and there is no doubt a lot in her son’s suggestion that she was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. For those of you (and there are quite a few I think) who excel in the domestic arts, it will be heartening to know that her life was practically saved by the restorative powers of cookery. That having been said, Miller was no Delia – she was a surrealist in all things and her meals reflected her love for the unpredictable and the outrageously coloured.

One of the most touching aspects of Penrose’s talk is that he was utterly candid about his own dreadful relationship with her mother while she was alive. It sounds as though they argued like cat and dog. Miller did not have the normal maternal feelings towards her child and he was embarrassed and no doubt deeply hurt by her. The experiences of the children of avant-garde families in the twentieth century is a pet interest of mine and I think that Penrose would have quite a bit to say on the subject. He described himself as having met his mother through her work and through the work of others who knew and loved her.

The public face of Lee Miller is available for everyone to discover and the archives of her life are kept at her former home Farley Farm House in Sussex. I feel a trip coming on.

Life writing on the edge: Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and other Julian Maclaren-Ross adventures

This week’s reading has been the seediest of double helpings. Having enjoyed the Collective Memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross, I felt that I could not leave the story uncompleted and picked up the wonderful Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: the Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Raconteur: Julian Maclaren-Ross by Paul Willetts. For those who are strangers to Maclaren-Ross, he was a gifted writer who came to represent the dissolute and chaotic life of London’s Soho in the middle of the last century. The sordid colours of his person and lifestyle evolved to overshadow his versatile and interesting work. He spawned numerous fictional characters of whom the most famous was the dreadful X Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Long before his death in 1964 he had become part of the myth of Fitzrovia – that tiny pub lined area north of Oxford Street and west of the Tottenham Court Road.

Paul Willetts conveys an excellent sense of Maclaren-Ross; sharp suited; Malacca cane carrying; hard drinking; sharp tongued observer; whilst at the same time extracting his subject from a welter of myth and half truth. His biography looks under the carpet of the stories of generations and proves that truth really is stranger than fiction. In his short life Maclaren-Ross was a writer, door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, soldier, deserter, prisoner and regular at the Wheatsheaf pub. He was far from being the only deserter who washed up in Fitzrovia. During the course of the Second World War an estimated 80,000 men went “AWOL” from the armed forces and a healthy number drank out the war in a similar style to Maclaren-Ross. Willetts shows however that his desertion was far from stereotypical – he deserted having become frustrated to the point of madness that the army kept him behind a desk with a humdrum occupation rather than use his skills. Not the most self-sacrificing attitude maybe, but far from the plain cowardice suggested by mythology.

As well as looking under the carpet, Willetts has made a great achievement in even finding it. Maclaren-Ross wrote a series of memoirs (for which, read on....) but no biography can be credibly based purely on the words of the subject. His life was a mind-bending chaos of poverty, homelessness, hotel dwelling and psychosis. Women and friends came and went with speed and left little behind for the intrepid biographer. Willetts triumphed over disaster by seemingly following every tiny clue. A biographer who is willing to search telephone directories deserves a bit of credit in my view. This book shows what I have always suspected; that biography at the fringes of fame is by far the most worthwhile.

Maclaren-Ross’s own Collected Memoirs surprised me in their tone. I knew the myth of the man and was expecting his narrative voice to be far more abrasive and harsh than I found it to be. In fact, his memoirs are a series of keenly observed and sparely composed period pieces that display a grasp of character and a detachment from stereotype, which I found most impressive. Probably the most interesting are his Memoirs of the Forties in which he rubs shoulders with Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas (and of course many others) in hilarious circumstances. The stories are witty and revealing and far more self-deprecating than I suspected.

Julian Maclaren-Ross had an almost pathological dislike of being photographed and so there are limited images of him available. I have included what I can find together with a still of Sean Baker as one of his fictional alter egos X Trapnel in the 1997 adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

What ever were we thinking? The mass observation of Britain in wartime.

Of all the fields of historical enquiry, there seems to me to be nothing more challenging and nothing more rewarding that trying to understand how ordinary people lived their lives and what they were thinking. When I was an undergraduate I cheerfully wrote essays extrapolating the values of everyday ancient Athenians from religious carvings and the plays of Aristophanes. Now, in my old age (well, shall we say the approach to middle age), I realise how ridiculous this was. Social history is the narrative that hides behind political history, but which in many respects is more key to understanding human events. How can I have neglected it for so long?

It was these feelings that so excited me when I first discovered Mass Observation. Mass Observation is a social research project which aims to gage the thoughts, feelings and values of the nation. It was founded in 1937 in the wake of the Abdication Crisis of 1936. In the final months of 1936 Edward VIII, the youthful and popular King had been forced by the giants of his family, his Government and the Church to abdicate the throne sooner than make a Queen of the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The affair between Edward and Wallis had been kept out of the newspapers and so when the story went public in the run up to Christmas 1936, it was a massive shock to almost the whole of Britain. Some people agreed with the then Archbishop of Canterbury that Edward represented some kind of moral rot. Many idealised Edward and saw him as a victim of the unpopular Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. The secretary of the Communist Party probably spoke for many when he declared “there is no crisis in all this for the working class, let the King marry whom he likes”.

The complexity and downright confusion of what the nation thought about the abdication crisis led to the foundation of the Mass Observation project. The organisers appealed for volunteer observers and asked that they contribute their own diaries and answers to open ended questionnaires on an ongoing basis. Data was collected on all areas of life – food, sex, work, growing up, giving birth, the list is endless. The enormous archive of information collected is now stored at the University of Sussex and anyone can read it (I have consulted some of the archive for research but if you are interested, please remember that you have to make an appointment).

A good taster is the excellent book that I have just finished Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology 1937 – 1945 edited by Dorothy Sheridan. This is a collection of diaries and responses from women all over Britain during the Second World War. The book is well organised into different themes and periods but it feels far more intimate than your average social history. It is not a dry discussion of possibilities, but an introduction to a range of larger than life characters such as Nella Last, a Barrow-in-Furness housewife, the plucky young Norfolk sisters Muriel and Jenny Green and the Leeds based nurse Amy Briggs. By setting out individual voices, the editor Dorothy Sheridan shows the strange interplay of continuity and disruption of life during wartime. The pattern of domesticity is radically changed, but much remains. We learn through poor Amy Briggs that a bad marriage in peacetime is a bad marriage in wartime too.

So it is a good read, and it is ground breaking stuff, in its way. Mass Observation was not a perfect answer to the problem of gathering social history data of course. It will be obvious that it appealed far more to women than to men and so it is rather one sided for that reason. Much effort was made to get working class women to contribute, but inevitably it was easier for middle class women to do so. Nevertheless, it is a marvellous archive of material and lets hope that there may be a few more anthologies in the pipeline somewhere.

War declared, innocence destroyed: Ursula Holden’s wartime story Unicorn Sisters

I am sitting in the garden, having just finished Ursula Holden’s Unicorn Sisters, and feeling slightly cast adrift. My usual way of “rediscovering” forgotten classics is to visit the Persephone Books shop, or the Capuchin Classics website, or to look at the Virago Modern Classic back catalogue. But this time, the route has been quite different. The inside page of my copy of this book has “95p” scrawled in pencil and so this must have been what I paid for it when I picked it up in a charity shop. I have certainly been hoarding it for a couple of years, unread. This book is living proof of how easily a work of excellent writing can slip out of the cannon – disappear down the side of the literature sofa. It is excellent, and yet it is barely known at all.

Unicorn Sisters is a wartime novella charting a few months in the history of Bonnie and her sisters Tor and Ula. Bonnie narrates their tale of woe and awakening in the first months of 1939 when they are abandoned by their glamorous and negliegent mother in a remote west country boarding school for girls. This school is haphazardly run by two spinster sisters of wildly divergent opinions and an elderly gardener who has found that his wartime role has been expanded to cooking and cleaning. The other children are upper middle class girls, each with a smattering of french, and mostly rather affected. Hard upon the heels of Bonnie and her sisters a batch of evacuees from London’s Clerkenwell arrive, sporting ill fitting clothes, common accents and tales of boyfriends and homely families. The isolation of the school and the seige mentality caused by the war combine and before long mutual suspicion has given way to friendship and confidence, the grammaphone has been wound up and girls dance long into the night to the tune of “Roll out the barrel”. The joy of such vistas will not last forever. Soon Bonnie and her sisters find themselves on the stage of tragedy. Worse, they are propelled into an anarchy of knowledge and experience which will horrify them.

This short novel deals with many things, but for me its main theme is displacement. All of the children are displaced by the war – they are far from home in an unknown and disintegrating place. The Boarding school girls and the Clerkenwell evacuees are also displaced by contact with oneanother. Gone are the comforts of a class identity; here are people who live differently and speak differently, and yet seem to manage; maybe there is not only one proper way to live? For Bonnie and her sisters, the displacement is still greater. They are new girls, and so they properly belong to neither group. Whatismore, they suffer from social inexperience and the dark and long shadows of their family history. Between then they have inadvertently caused the deaths of two other children before the war, and how can a child ever be free of such an awful secret?

Bonnie is a complexnarrator of an atmospheric tale and a splendid period piece. She is a bossy girl who is teetering under the heavy strain that her absent mother has placed her under - to look after her younger sisters. Their sibling love is powerful but will be tested, as Bonnie’s love for her scented mother will also be. Ursula Holden writes compellingly of the monstrous misunderstandings and miscommunications that can befall a parent and their child. The destruction of class barriers and the sudden revealation of an adult world, which is as sordid as it is liberating will provoke a crisis in Bonnie’s mind which seems as real to the reader as any declaration of war.

A novel this good deserves not to be forgotten, and the good news is that it is available from £0.01p on Amazon. Let the rediscovery begin!

Because this book is so obscure, I cannot find my usual picture of the author. To celebrate the coming of the summer therefore, I have posted some pictures of our garden, the place of my reading and ruminations.