978-3-030-45200-1

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING
SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS
Transnational
Perspectives on
Artists’ Lives
Edited by
Marleen Rensen · Christopher Wiley
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
Series Editors
Clare Brant
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
Max Saunders
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with
an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but
accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on
connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series
aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars
and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects
and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative
risks with potent materials.
The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect the academic,
public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic
tradition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond
traditional territories – for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
It also aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest
(such as food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing schol-
arship can engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the
political engagement of life writing especially in relation to human rights,
migration, trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes.
The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing
is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing
digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on
the subject, and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the
world relevance of life writing.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200
Marleen Rensen · Christopher Wiley
Editors
Transnational
Perspectives
on Artists’ Lives
Editors
Marleen Rensen Christopher Wiley
European Studies Department Department of Music and Media
University of Amsterdam University of Surrey
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Guildford, UK
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

ISBN 978-3-030-45199-8 ISBN 978-3-030-45200-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1
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Contents
1 Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures:

Biography, Biofiction and Transnationality 1
Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley
Part I (Re)Thinking Biography—Artists in Between

Nations and Cultures
2 The Transnational Aspect in Harold Nicolson’s The

Development of English Biography 27
Maryam Thirriard
3 Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky:

A Reassessment of Transnational Identities
and Abstraction Through Biography 43
Suzanne Bode
4 Frances Hodgkins: A Twentieth-Century Modernist

Painter Torn Between Nations 61
Samantha Niederman
v
vi CONTENTS
5 ‘No Use Calling Yourself South African. South

African Is Nothing’: Understanding and Exploring
the Concept of Place and Nationhood in the Life
and Music of Christopher James 77
Marc Röntsch
Part II Writing the Lives of Transnational Artists
6 The Spanish Translations of Richmal Crompton’s Just

William Stories 93
Jane McVeigh
7 Alienation and Intimacy: Transnational Writing

on Julia Margaret Cameron 107
Tamar Hager
8 A Hungarian Woman Writer’s Transnational Afterlife

in the Digital Era: Renée Erdős (1879–1956) 127
Anna Menyhért
Part III Artists on Transnational Artists
9 ‘Something Out of the Way’: Edmund Gosse’s

Biography of Henrik Ibsen 147
Suze van der Poll
10 Chopin on the Dnieper: The Musician-Poet and Boris

Pasternak’s Search for the Transnational 165
Maria Razumovskaya
11 ‘All the Nuances of His Predicament’: Caryl Phillips

on James Baldwin 183
Josiane Ranguin
CONTENTS vii
12 Vie de Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieussecq:

Between Portrait and Self-Portrait 203
Manet van Montfrans
Part IV Fictional Representations of Artists’ Lives

Transnationally
13 ‘Don’t Tell Anyone’: K. Schippers’s Reflections

as Novelist on Life-Writing and Transnationality 221
Sander Bax
14 The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s Life

and Art in Michael Cunningham’s America 239
Maximiliano Jiménez
15 Ethel Smyth as the Composer Edith Staines in

E. F. Benson’s Dodo Trilogy 255
Christopher Wiley
Index 271
Notes on Contributors
Sander Bax is associate professor in Literary Studies, Cultural History

and Education of Dutch Language and Literature and vice-dean of educa-
tion at Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. He has
published De taak van de schrijver (The task of the writer, 2007), De
Mulisch Mythe (The Mulisch Myth, 2015) and De Literatuur Draait Door
(As Literature Turns, 2019), and he has co-edited the volume Inter-
rupting the City (2015). He is currently working on a monograph on
twentieth-century authorship and on a biography of Dutch writer Bernlef.
Suzanne Bode did M.A. research at the Courtauld Institute of Art exam-
ining the transnational links between the Czech Osma and German
Brücke artists. She subsequently worked at Christie’s Auctioneers and
English Heritage, where she gained experience in world art markets and
media relations. She lectures in art history and is lead teacher of German at
Park Lane International, Prague. She is fluent in German, French, Czech
and Italian and specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
European Modernism. She has delivered courses for the Workers’ Educa-
tional Association in the UK and published essays on nineteenth-century
pre-Raphaelite and twentieth-century art. Her current research interest is
Gustav Klimt and his cultural links with Bohemia. She lives in Prague with
her husband and two sons.
Tamar Hager is Associate Professor in the Department of Education
and Gender Studies at Tel Hai College, Israel. Motherhood, critical
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
feminist methodology, art sociology, and fictional and academic writing

are core issues of her academic research, writing, teaching and social
activism. She published a book of short stories, A Perfectly Ordinary Life
(in Hebrew), in 2000 and in 2012, she published Malice Aforethought
(in Hebrew), microhistories of two English depraved mothers who killed
their babies in the 1870s. She is the co-editor of Bad Mothers: Regulations,
Representations and Resistance, published in 2017, and she is currently
researching the lives of two females sitters of the Victorian photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron.
Maximiliano Jiménez is a full-time Research Administrator (Técnico
Académico) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM),
Mexico, currently working as the academic editor for the journals of the
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He is also a part-time lecturer at the
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of this Faculty. He
holds an M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, which was made possible thanks to a scholarship granted
by the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) and
the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT).
His main line of investigation is the development of twenty-first-century
narrative in different media.
Jane McVeigh is Honorary Research Fellow in the Humanities Depart-
ment at the University of Roehampton, UK. Previous publications include
In Collaboration with British Literary Biography: Haunting Conversa-
tions (Palgrave, 2017). Her biography, Richmal Crompton, Author of
Just William: A Literary Life, will be published by Palgrave in 2022, the
hundredth anniversary of the first Just William story collection.
Anna Menyhért is Professor of Trauma Studies at The Budapest
University of Jewish Studies. From 2016 to 2018, she was a Marie
Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the University of
Amsterdam. Previously she led the Trauma and Gender in Literature and
Culture Research Group at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. She
has been Vice President of the European Writers’ Council. She is the
author of the monograph Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-
Century Hungarian Women Writers (2020), and of the bestselling
fictional biography of the early twentieth-century female writer Renée
Erdős, A Free Woman (2016). She is currently working on a book project
entitled Trauma in the Digital Age: Trauma-Related Communication on
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Social Media in the Context of Contemporary Hungary. From September

2020, she will be a Research Fellow at The Wiesenthal Institute for
Holocaust Studies, Vienna.
Samantha Niederman recently completed her Ph.D. in the History of
Art Department at the University of York. Her research examined the
artistic friendship between two twentieth-century British artists, Frances
Hodgkins and Cedric Morris, and their joint development of a Romantic
Modernist pictorial language. Before commencing her doctoral thesis,
Samantha served as Curatorial Assistant at the Norton Museum of Art,
where she contributed research and assisted with the organisation and
development of O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in
New York. She received a M.A. from University College London, a MLitt
from the University of Glasgow and a B.A. from Boston University. She
is the author of Frances Hodgkins (Eiderdown, 2019).
Josiane Ranguin holds a Ph.D. in English Studies from the University
Sorbonne Paris-Cité, France, where she teaches English and Black British
film as a Senior Lecturer. She has published numerous journal articles and
book chapters on Caryl Phillips, Black Literature and Culture. Her Medi-
ating the Windrush Children: Caryl Phillips and Horace Ové has recently
been published by Peter Lang (2020). Her forthcoming monograph is
focused on Caryl Phillips’s works and film.
Maria Razumovskaya is an internationally acclaimed pianist and
recording artist. As a researcher, her focus is on Russian pianism and
intellectual history from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the
Soviet era. Her monograph on the legendary pianist-pedagogue Heinirch
Neuhaus: A Life Beyond Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) was awarded
CHOICE Outstanding Best Academic Title 2019. Other writing includes
a chapter on Nikolai Medtner (Indiana University Press, 2020), and arti-
cles for journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.
Razumovskaya is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Marleen Rensen is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Literature
at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has published
numerous journal articles and book chapters, and co-edited and intro-
duced the special collection Life Writing and European Identities (2019)
and the volume Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on
Transnational Life Writing (2020).
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Marc Röntsch is a musicologist, guitarist and bassist living in Cape

Town, South Africa. Röntsch holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Stellen-
bosch University under the supervision of Professor Stephanus Muller.
He is currently a research affiliate at Africa Open Institute for Music,
Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University, and in 2020 will take
up the prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship
at Nelson Mandela University. His research interests include life writing,
musicology, popular music and archival studies.
Maryam Thirriard received her Ph.D. in English Studies in 2019 from
Aix Marseille University, where she teaches in the English Department
(DEMA). She specialises in British modernist literature. Her research
interests are focused on ‘The New Biography’, the theory and practice
of modernist biography, and, more generally, life writing in the modernist
period.
Suze van der Poll is Assistant Professor in the Department of Scandi-
navian Studies and the Department of Modern European Literature at
the University of Amsterdam. She has published several works on Henrik
Ibsen and on contemporary Scandinavian literature. She has recently
published Reconsidering National Plays in Europe, co-edited with Rob
van der Zalm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Manet van Montfrans studied Romance languages at the University of
Amsterdam and obtained her Ph.D. in 1999. From 1986 to 2009, she
was a Senior Lecturer of Modern European and French Literature in
the Department of European Studies. Since 2009, she has worked as a
researcher for the chair in Modern European Literature. She specialises in
the work of Georges Perec, Marcel Proust, Patrick Modiano and several
contemporary French writers. Since 2002, she has been co-editor of the
bilingual journal Marcel Proust aujourd’hui (Brill). Two recent publi-
cations are her monograph, Georges Perec, een gebruiksaanwijzing (De
Arbeiderspers, 2019), and the article ‘Jeux de mots, lieux de mémoire:
Sur Parc sauvage et autres récits brefs de Jacques Roubaud’, in Jeux
de mots—enjeux littéraires: de François Rabelais à Richard Millet (Brill,
2018).
Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of
Surrey, UK. He is the author of many book chapters and articles on
musical biography and life-writing appearing in journals including The
Musical Quarterly, Music & Letters and Comparative Criticism. He is the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contempo-

rary Art and Artists (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Writing About Contem-
porary Musicians (Routledge, 2020), Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image,
Music and Drama (Routledge, 2021), and The Routledge Companion to
Autoethnography and Self-reflexivity in Music Studies (Routledge, 2021),
as well as a recent guest-edited double-issue of the Journal of Musicological
Research (2019). He is currently preparing a monograph on the earliest
volumes of the ‘Master Musicians’ biographical series (1899–1906).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Gabriele Münter, ‘Stilleben mit Heiligem Georg’, 1911,

oil on board, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und
Kunstbau München 50
Fig. 4.1 Frances Hodgkins, ‘Ibiza Harbour’, c.1933, oil on canvas,
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Collection of the Dunedin
Public Art Gallery. Given in 1970 by the O’Sullivan
Family, in memory of Irene Stanislaus O’Sullivan 66
Fig. 4.2 Frances Hodgkins, ‘Green Valley, Carmarthenshire’,
1942, gouache on paper, Collection of the Dunedin
Public Art Gallery. Purchased in 1967 with funds from
the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society, 20–1967 68
Fig. 8.1 Renée Erdős, c. 1902. Photograph from the frontispiece
of the volume Versek [Poems]. Budapest: Pallas, 1902 128
Fig. 12.1 Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Reclining Mother-and-Child
Nude’, 1906, oiltempera on canvas, 82.5 × 124.7 cm,
Museen Böttcherstraβe, Paula Modersohn-Becker
Museum, Bremen (Photo Copyright: Paula
Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen) 211
xv
CHAPTER 1
Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations

and Cultures: Biography, Biofiction
and Transnationality
Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley
In her novel How to Be Both (2014), Ali Smith entwines two life stories:
those of the fictional teenage girl George, living in Cambridge in the
twenty-first century, and Francesco del Cossa, a real-life fresco painter
in Renaissance Italy. Unusually, the book is published in two editions,
one starting with the story of George and the other with that of Cossa.
Implicit in this double publication is the suggestion that it does not
matter which of the stories you read first, since, one way or the other,
they make up one. They converge at the level of the narrative in several
ways. George, for instance, studies the biography of Cossa, whose life and
M. Rensen (B)
European Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
e-mail: M.J.M.Rensen@uva.nl
C. Wiley
Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Rensen and C. Wiley (eds.), Transnational Perspectives
on Artists’ Lives, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_1
2 M. RENSEN AND C. WILEY
works are little known. In his classic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Sculptors and Architects , the famous Renaissance writer on art, Giorgio
Vasari, ignored the School of Ferrara’s mural paintings, of which Cossa
was an exponent, and even confused him with another artist. In Smith’s
modern treatment of the same subject, she turns the painter into a living
and speaking character, who appears as a ghost in twenty-first-century
Britain, following George through the streets of Cambridge and to the
National Gallery in London, which displays one of his paintings.
When George discusses her biographical research on Cossa with a
friend, they humorously imagine Cossa’s commenting on it with the
words: ‘alas I am being made up really badly by a sixteen-year-old girl
who knows fuck all about art and nothing at all about me except that I
did some paintings and seem to have died of the plague’ (Smith 2015,
p. 139). In the part of the novel where the painter takes centre stage and
tells his life story, his voice is direct and forceful as a result of Smith’s
use of the stream of consciousness technique. In a creative and playful
way, her novel thus counters the existing image of Cossa, based on a few
biographical sources. She presents the painter as a girl who has dressed up
as a man in order to find employment, which may fall within the realm of
imagination. At least, art histories do not offer any indications for such a
gender shift.
The biographical parallels between Cossa and George—the gender
confusion, the premature loss of the mother, the artistic aspiration and the
‘mural art’ (George decorates the walls of her bedroom with pictures)—
express connections between the two characters, just as much as does
the form of the novel. In a vein similar to fresco painting, where a layer
of paint is applied over fresh plaster, this story is layered in such a way
that the one portrait shines through the other. This confirms sameness
as the central theme of the story, bringing together past and present, life
and death, man and woman, fact and fiction, painting and literature, and
Britain and Italy. How to Be Both not only fundamentally reveals how art
and artists’ lives can speak to us across centuries, cultures and nations,
but it also illustrates how they can be reimagined and recreated in new,
experimental ways. As such, it intersects with the issue at the heart of this
volume: writing artists’ lives across different nations and cultures. This,
in turn, relates to a number of subsidiary themes that will be raised in
the course of its chapters, including the cross-cultural representation of
artists’ lives, the artist’s interest in the lives of other artists, the rewriting
1 WRITING ARTISTS’ LIVES ACROSS NATIONS AND CULTURES … 3
of history and canons, and experiments with new modes of life writing,
both in biography and in biofiction.
Artists’ Lives and the Return of the Author

Smith’s How to Be Both exemplifies the strong contemporary interest in
the biographies of painters, writers, musicians and other artists evidenced
in various forms of life writing. Most visible, perhaps, is the burgeoning
corpus of biographical fiction, also termed ‘biofiction’, examples of which
form the basis of discussion in multiple chapters of this volume.1 Even
though there is no agreement on the precise definition of biofiction,
it can generally be understood as the literature that presents hypothet-
ical or imagined lives, relying on real-life stories yet containing a certain
degree of creative invention.2 This can take many different shapes and
forms, ranging from realistic tales to postmodernist experiments. Among
the diverse types of historical figures that are portrayed in biographical
fiction—which includes political leaders, adventurers and migrants—
artists are particularly well represented. Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt
van Rijn, Henry James, Maurice Ravel, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, Jean
Rhys, Dmitri Shostakovich, Frida Kahlo and Charlotte Salomon are just
a few of the artists whose lives have been the subject of literary works
of fiction in recent years. Aside from, or parallel to, the proliferation of
biofiction, ‘real’ biographies of artists equally enjoy popularity in our time,
emblematic of the recent interest in the genre of biography more gener-
ally. Biographies frequently figure on bestselling lists and seem to attract
more media attention than ever before (Lee 2009, pp. 17–18).
Writing about the lives of artists, of course, has a long and rich history.
Giorgio Vasari’s previously mentioned series of artists’ biographies, Lives
of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), often
referred to as Lives or Vite, opened up the subject centuries ago. The
classical authors Duris of Samos and Pliny the Elder can arguably be
considered the founders of the genre of lives of the artists, yet, while they
focused on a variety of ‘great men’, including men of state and military
men, Vasari was the first to concentrate on subjects who were visual artists
exclusively (Kisters 2017, p. 26). Since Vasari’s time, there has hardly been
a change in the basic structure of artists’ biographies, which attributed a
mythological status to the figure of the artist through anecdotes relating
to their exceptional talent (Kris and Kurz 1979; Soussloff 1997). The
genre has flourished particularly since the Romantic era, owing to the rise
of the notion of ‘genius’ and the changed appreciation for imagination,

originality and artistic freedom. The Künstlerroman, which originates in
this period, portrays fictional artists (such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and the character of Johannes
Kreisler in several E. T. A. Hoffmann novels), but the genre also epito-
mises the Romantic cult of the artist, in which actual artistic ‘geniuses’
became cult figures, set apart from ordinary people not only by virtue
of their special gifts, but also by their eccentric personalities and extrav-
agant lifestyles. The study and writing of biographies of real artists have
remained popular ever since and expanded into increasingly rich, diverse
and complex modes, forms and genres (Hellwig 2005). The present-day
interest in artists’ lives among literary writers, practising biographers and
scholars alike is closely related to two wider developments within and
outside academia: the flourishing field of ‘life writing’ and the ‘Return of
the Author’.
Since the early twenty-first century, ‘life writing’ has become a widely
used umbrella term for a broad range of genres and modes of telling
stories of one’s own, or someone else’s life. As Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclo-
pedia of Life Writing indicates, life writing encompasses autobiographical
forms, such as memoir, diary and autofiction; biographical forms, such as
biography and biographical novels; as well as auto/biographical crossovers
(Jolly 2001).3 Even if the term is predominantly used in the Anglo-
Saxon world and has different connotations in different countries and
disciplinary areas, life writing has undisputedly emerged as a lively area
of research and writing practices. It is especially relevant for writing
and studying the lives of artists, for, as an open and inclusive field, as
well as a fundamentally creative one, it allows us to bring together and
explore the two narrative forms that are central to this volume: biography
and biographical fiction. It furthermore enables us to take into account
experimental forms of writing lives at the intersections of biography
and literature, or biography and autobiography, which are prominent in
contemporary life writing (Boldrini and Novak 2017, pp. 1–36). This
approach, however, by no means suggests that generic distinctions are
insignificant.
Even if biography is considered to be at the junction between art and
craft, or art and science, it differs markedly from biofiction. Like many
literary writers, biographers endeavour to bring to life a historical char-
acter, making use of their imagination and storytelling skills—yet they are
bound to facts. Biographers are often described as ‘artists under oath’
(Desmond McCarthey, quoted in Parke 2002, p. 28). This illuminates

that their creative freedom is restricted: they cannot simply ‘make stuff
up’ about their subjects,4 nor may they change facts, or fill in the gaps of
knowledge about their subjects’ lives by inventing a story in the manner
that Smith does in How to Be Both. As writer David Lodge stated, in
distinguishing biofiction from biography: ‘Respectable biographers regard
modern biography as an evidence-based discourse. Everything has to be
verifiable’ (quoted in Lackey 2019, p. 119). Critics in biography studies
have also emphasised that biography is a ‘scholarly method’ in historical
research, one that searches for the truth about the past, and as such, it is
distinct from biofiction (Renders et al. 2017, p. 4). Undoubtedly, biog-
raphers differ among themselves in their understanding of the genre, but
no matter how creatively they deal with their biographical material—for
example, in extrapolating dialogues based on the evidence of diaries or
letters—they are all restricted in their use of the techniques of fiction.
Biofiction is, by definition, a hybrid genre, merging biography and
fiction. Even though the term is not widely used until the 1990s, this
literary form dates back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century
and had an initial flurry around the 1930s, when, for example, Irving
Stone published Lust for Life (1934), his now classic novel about Vincent
van Gogh (Lackey 2019, p. 88), and when Virginia Woolf’s experimental
biography Orlando (1928), a thinly veiled portrait of Vita Sackville-West,
first appeared. Michael Lackey has noted that biofiction, despite its popu-
larity, has long been considered ‘a bastard genre of secondary rate’—being
neither a ‘real’ work of art, nor a ‘real’ biography. However, its status
has considerably changed, Lackey argues, as biofiction has become ‘a
dominant literary form’ in the twenty-first century. The creative impulse
towards imagination, and the push back against it, is now considered to
be a compelling tension of this aesthetic form, which has the unique
capacity to ‘go into the head of characters’ and represent their inner
thoughts and feelings (David Lodge in Lackey 2019, pp. 119–20). More-
over, it lends itself well to giving expression to postmodern themes of
the elusive self and the uncertainty of biographical knowledge. According
to Lackey (2016, 2017), contemporary critics judge the genre on its
own terms, looking at the work itself and the kind of truth it reveals.5
Indeed, in recent decades, many biofictions by and about artists have
received serious critical attention from literary critics and scholars alike
(Lajta-Novak 2017).
The resurgent popularity of artists’ biofictions runs parallel to the

renewed scholarly interest in biography. This fresh attention followed a
period during which biographies of artists had lost some of their appeal to
scholars since the 1960s, when, under the influence of post-structuralism,
the work of art was held to be more important than its creator himself or
herself. Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the ‘Death of the Author’,
under which the style and subject matter of a work of art was no longer
to be interpreted as the expression of the author’s life, character and
intentions. Instead, arts such as texts, paintings or music compositions
were understood to comprise a series of codes and signs that are imbued
with meaning by the reader. Since the early 1990s, critics have conversely
signalled the ‘Return of the Author’ (Burke 2007).6 This does not consti-
tute a return to uncritical biographies of isolated artistic geniuses, so much
as a revived attention in the artist behind the art, who is approached as a
socio-historical being, one who reflects, represents or takes up reflections
of society at large relating to ethnicity, gender and class.
Numerous studies illustrate that the biographical genre has survived,
reinvented itself and regained academic acceptance in arts research, in
the face of the criticism of post-structuralist thought, which has nonethe-
less had an impact: biography continues to be disregarded as a valid tool
for interpreting works of art (Junod 2010, p. 3). In both biography and
scholarly studies on artists’ lives, more attention is now paid to the ‘his-
torical and social circumstances in which art is produced, as well as to
the artist’s gender and ethnicity’ and (self-)fashioning of public images
(Kisters 2017, pp. 10, 66). Some works examine the role of biography
in the formation of artistic identities in a certain time period, such as
Karen Junod’s Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Iden-
tity in Britain, 1760–1810 (2011) and Julie Codell’s The Victorian Artist:
Artists’ Life writings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 (2003).
Other studies turn specific attention to the biographical image-making
of artists in the ‘production field’ of a commercial and mediatised art
world. For instance, Sandra Kisters’s The Lure of the Biographical: On the
Self -representation of Modern Artists (2017) demonstrates the persistent,
even increasing focus on the biographies of individual ‘author-artists’,
both in art history and in the art world, where the public’s ‘desire for
the biographical’ reigns (pp. 71, 376).7 Through case studies of Rodin,
O’Keeffe and Bacon, she shows that the (self-)representation of their
character and life story is pivotal for their public reputation, which affects
the way in which the style and subject matter of their artworks are inter-
preted. An example from literary studies is the volume with the telling
title, Idolizing Authorship (Franssen and Honings 2017). This contribu-
tion to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of ‘celebrity studies’ analyses
the stardom of literary writers, which largely rests on their larger-than-life
personalities, excessive lifestyles and outspoken opinions.
These and other studies have revealed aspects of transnationalism
in artist’s lives and in the writing of these lives. Kisters, for instance,
illustrates the importance of Rodin’s contacts abroad and shows how
biographical publications about the sculptor, within and outside of
France, made a crucial contribution to the international cult surrounding
the ‘solitary genius’ (2017, p. 226). She indicates that stereotypical ‘life
scripts’—prescribing how to live the life of an artist—were disseminated
and ‘enacted’ across Europe and beyond. This kind of transnational
dynamics is also revealed in Idolizing Authorship, which presents a case
study of the Dutch writer Nicolaas Beets, who admired Byron and
presented himself as a melancholic poet of the same type (Honings
2017). Analysing celebrity cultures as global phenomena further allows
the transnational comparison of artistic identities, whether icons of the
nation, or universal geniuses. Nevertheless, the transnational is nowhere
addressed explicitly as the focal point of research, which affords us the
opportunity in this volume to open up new, interesting avenues in the
inquiry into modes and forms of representing artists’ lives. Rather than
imposing a prescriptive or rigid definition, the chapters that follow engage
with transnationalism in a range of different ways, coexisting with one
another in order to generate an enhanced overall understanding of this
multifaceted concept.
The Turn to Transnationalism

The interest in transnationality, which has been clearly manifested across
the humanities for some decades, has only recently gained prominence
in the field of biography and life-writing studies. Even if transnation-
alism has been defined in different ways, it generally refers to a critical
angle or approach that challenges the still dominant national framework
in biography, which conceives of individual lives as part of a nation’s
history (see, for example, Clavin 2005; Schweiger 2012; Iriye 2013).
Pioneering studies, such as Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global
Modernity, 1700–present (Deacon et al. 2010), have drawn attention to
those aspects of lives that transcend the borders of the nation-state, for
instance through travels, cross-cultural contacts, exchanges and influences
from abroad. Instead of the nation, they take ‘mobility’ as their frame of
research. Migrants, exiles and expatriates are obvious subjects for such
a transnational study, but this new approach may be additionally rele-
vant to many other artists as well. Painters, musicians and writers have
always reached out for inspiration across national borders and many have
found an audience outside their home countries. Furthermore, travel is
not merely restricted to people and works of art: artistic genres, forms
and idioms cross borders as well. Musicological research has, for example,
shown that styles and genres, such as opera and jazz, have spread across
countries and continents.8 Similarly, avant-garde art and literature of
modernity emerged simultaneously in various parts of Europe, partly as
a result of cross-border cultural exchanges.9 Yet the lives of artists have
often been celebrated within, and presented from, a primarily national
perspective and hence been framed within such a context.
This tendency is deeply rooted in the rich and long-standing histor-
ical traditions of the writing and study of artists’ lives. Vasari’s collection,
covering the lives of Florentine painters, was clearly meant to demon-
strate the glory of the Renaissance-era Italy in which he lived. As noted,
he essentially followed the classical tradition of Pliny and Plutarch, in
which memory and biography were already entwined, in the sense that
the writing of lives was intended to commemorate the nation’s great
men. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in particular may be viewed in the light of
transnationalism since it juxtaposes famous Greek and Roman figures to
offer exemplary models of behaviour, both positive and negative. Critics
have argued that ‘the strategy of such pairing lends weight to their parallel
fates and the transnational nature of such exemplarity’ (Fleming 2008,
p. 128). Aside from this transnational aspect of his comparative approach,
however, Plutarch strove to illustrate how these noble men were rooted
in their respective Greek or Roman cultures.
The national perspective became dominant in the nineteenth century,
the age of nationalism, in which artists’ lives played a vital role in the
forging of national identities. Illustrating the paradox that nationalism
is actually a transnational phenomenon itself, everywhere in Europe,
painters, poets and composers were cast as icons of their associated
nations, as they were thought to embody and exemplify the character-
istics of their national culture. To give a few examples: the poet Robert
Burns became the national hero of Scotland; Rubens achieved the status
of Belgium’s national painter; and the composer Dvořák was celebrated

as a symbol of Czech culture. Closely linked to the Romantic cult of
the genius, artists were venerated as ‘cultural saints’ in memorial celebra-
tions and monuments across the nations, all of whom aspired to build
their own pantheon (Leerssen and Rigney 2014; Dović and Helgason
2017). Artists’ biographies, which were often written in a form analo-
gous to saints’ lives—hagiographies exemplifying national virtues—were
inspired by, and fed into discourses about, national character and national
styles, schools and legacies. Widespread notions of the ‘creative genius’
contributed to the construction of male-dominated national canons in
literature, visual arts and music alike (Wiley 2003, 2008; Junod 2010).
In the wake of feminist and postcolonial criticism, the ‘great man’
paradigm has been extensively critiqued, just as national canons have been
critically evaluated and redefined. Life writing—the new terminology was
popularised to make the domain more inclusive (see, for example, Smith
and Watson 2010; McCooey 2017)—had an important role in drawing
attention to the lives of marginalised artists. Women artists notably take
centre stage in life-writing research and life-writing texts (Lajta-Novak
2017). Not only well-known figures, such as Virginia Woolf and Frida
Kahlo, but also less famous female artists who have been undervalued,
neglected or forgotten, have received renewed interest in both biog-
raphy and biofiction.10 Diverse scholars have examined the forms and
strategies of writing those subjects’ lives as a way not only to make
women more visible in history and celebrate their achievements, but also
to investigate gender identities and processes of national canon forma-
tion. Recent research has demonstrated how diverse life-writing texts on
composers such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn counter the
male-dominated music history, in which women have often been regarded
merely as the ‘muses’ of male composers, or cast in the subservient role of
performers who therefore lack creative genius of their own (Wiley 2015).
Elsewhere in the arts, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gabriele Münter, two
figures often considered as muses to associated male geniuses, are both
addressed as subjects in their own right in chapters in this volume, by
Manet van Montfrans and Suzanne Bode, respectively.
While there is still a tendency, within both academia and society at
large, to emphasise the national heritage of specific artists, the critical
rethinking of the nation’s artistic canon goes hand in hand with the
wider scholarly turn to the transnational. Biographical or life-writing
studies that adopt a transnational approach can bring into focus cross-
border connections and interactions in the lives and output of individual
artists. This is particularly relevant for those many modern artists who
frequently travelled, received training abroad, lived in exile or migrated to
a different country in the course of their life. It also matters to artists who
identify with multiple nations and cultures. For instance, many writers,
painters and musicians who lived in the colonies, such as Christopher
James, the subject of Marc Röntsch’s chapter, identified with the culture
of their native country as much as with that of their motherland. As
they were often regarded as ‘colonial artists’ in the motherland, they
were marginalised in the national context and, generally, excluded from
national canons.
Certain artists’ biographies have explicitly shown that their subjects
cannot be caught in a national framework. The biography of nineteenth-
century writer and critic Heinrich Heine, by Jan-Christoph Hauschild and
Michael Werner (1997), can be taken as an example. Drawing on theo-
ries of cultural transfer and mediation, these biographers have focused on
Heine’s role as a mediator between France and Germany, highlighting
his multiple identities as a German, European and world citizen. The
transnational angle in this book by no means diminishes the importance
of Heine’s national identity, but shows how it combines and conflicts with
other modes of identification. Another pertinent example is Phyllis Birn-
baum’s biography of the Japanese painter Foujita (2006), which counters
dominating national studies that view the artist in the light of Japan’s
national character. Birnbaum instead portrays Foujita as ‘the artist caught
between East and West’, who travelled extensively and lived and worked
at length in France, Latin America and the US.
Although numerous biographical studies of single writers, painters and
musicians have brought out elements that challenge national borders,
the full potential of transnational approaches to the study and writing
of artists’ lives, across time and artistic domains, has not yet been thor-
oughly examined. Many questions remain to be explored. For instance,
how do biographers deal with cultural otherness, with cultural differences
they experience while writing the lives of their subjects, or with analysing
their subject’s encounters with other cultures? Another pertinent issue is
to what extent a biographer can or should study the international circu-
lation and reception of an artist’s work, given the fact that sources can be
dispersed across the globe. Related to this, it is relevant to ask which audi-
ence, or audiences, a biographer should strive to address. And finally, as
Anna Menyhért discusses in this volume, how does digitalisation, and the
advent of online communities, affect the rediscovery and reconstruction
of artists’ lives and afterlives, both nationally and transnationally?
Transnational perspectives can also contribute to a greater under-
standing of how artists’ life stories have themselves ‘travelled’ across the
borders of nations and continents, whether during their own lifetime
or after their death. Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven are among
the most famous of many internationally renowned artists, supposedly
belonging to a supranational canon, whose lives have been rewritten
across Europe and beyond. In many cases, such texts were themselves
‘cross-cultural’ representations,11 being the product of biographers with
national identities different from their subject’s, who were thereby tasked
not just with introducing that subject to foreign audiences—such as
Edmund Gosse’s writings for Anglophone readers on the Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen, explored by Suze van der Poll in this volume—
but also with shaping their reception and establishing their public image
and relevance to new national or supranational communities. Thus seen,
writing the biographies of foreign artists can be considered a form of
transnational mediation.
Like biography, fiction has been an important vehicle for the transna-
tional circulation of an artist’s life story. Numerous literary writers
have engaged with (historical) artists from abroad, by making them the
subjects of biographical portraits, stories and novels. Whether they iden-
tify with, or critique, their ‘hero’, they implicitly or explicitly establish
a transnational relationship with that particular artist. From the earliest
biographical fictions, it is notable how authors, in a similar manner to
Ali Smith, offer representations of artists’ lives across cultures and artistic
genres. For example, The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a fictional biog-
raphy of the French painter Paul Gauguin, written by the British novelist
Somerset Maugham; Irving Stone evokes Vincent Van Gogh, as noted, in
Lust for Life (1934); and Klaus Mann presents an imaginary retelling of
Tchaikovsky’s life in his novel Symphonie Pathétique (1935).
In a similar manner to biographers, writers of biographical fiction thus
impact on the international reputation of an artist and help to nurture
transnational communities. Yet, arguably more so than biographers, they
imagine, reinterpret and reframe the lives of artists, appropriating their
subject for the story they want to tell. Analysing the modes and forms
of biographical representations, as well as the aesthetic, social and ideo-
logical context in which they are created, is therefore important to an
understanding of how artists’ lives travel and how this affects the public
image of an artist. In the case of biofiction especially, this applies to both
the author and their biographical subject. New, experimental imaginings
of an artist’s biography, like Ali Smith’s portrayal of Cossa, not only shed
new light on the fresco painter and his artistic creations, but also reveal
which elements in life and art are presented as transnational (and tran-
shistorical) and how this suggestion is evoked through the techniques of
fiction.
It is further relevant to examine the mediation of popular biofictions by
film or digital media, which can give an important impetus to the cross-
border travel of artists’ lives, affecting their public images and creating
or reinforcing ‘afterlives’ transnationally, and future research might seek
to explore this area in more detail. For instance, the Hollywood film The
Hours (2002), based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same title
(1998) (discussed in this volume by Maximiliano Jiménez), has undoubt-
edly ‘encouraged a resurgence of interest’ in Virginia Woolf in the popular
realm globally, even though scholars have been critical about the way
she is portrayed and framed in a modern feminist and queer context
(Goldman 2012, pp. 34–35).
∗ ∗ ∗
This volume aims to advance research in this field in two directions.

Firstly, it collects together and studies practices of writing and researching
transnational biographies and lives of artists. Its contributions comprise
case studies that explore how one can write the biographies of artists who
lived in between cultures, or who can be considered transnational subjects
because they participated in an international network or drew on cultural
traditions from abroad. Related issues include the ways in which such
biographies can or cannot constitute or foster transnational communities;
how biographers deal with subjects who belong to a culture and nation-
ality different from their and the reader’s own; how they conceive of, and
navigate, national traditions in biography; and how they mediate between
cultures. Its chapters identify which specific cultural codes, conventions
and concepts need explanation or translation for new audiences; and
which boundaries are drawn between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘familiar’.
Secondly, this collection of essays examines fictional representations of
artists’ lives across nations and cultures in order to understand how and
why writers engage with the lives of artists from abroad and reach out
to an (inter)national audience. It explores how authors construct their

subject’s cultural, social, racial, gender or artistic identity in order to
generate new interest in the artist concerned, to define their position as
an artist and to express their own views on the artistic world or society
at large. This relates to an investigation of the literary experiments with
modes and forms of narration, bordering on fiction, biography and auto-
biography, which are used in contemporary literature to breathe life into
historical characters and express an artist’s identity, causing the reader to
experience his or her art anew.
The volume brings together the wide-ranging expertise of scholars
from across the humanities, from biography and life-writing studies to
history, literature, music and the visual arts, and covering the studies
of artists from different nations, cultures and languages within Europe
and beyond. Perhaps inevitably given the Eurocentric nature of modern
histories of arts subjects, England, France and Germany are particularly
well-represented; but the volume equally opens up perspectives on artists
from Spain, Norway, Hungary, Russia, North America, South Africa and
New Zealand. As it includes studies of both males and females, and of
canonical and non-canonical artists, the collective contributions enable
us to look closely at gender issues in relation to canon formation and
(trans)nationality.
Part I presents studies that critically inspect approaches to, and prac-
tices of, national biography by examining the lives and works of artists
whose transnationality derives from their being located in between nations
and cultures. Maryam Thirriard explores transnationality in relation to
a single text, Harold Nicolson’s (1886–1968) milestone The Develop-
ment of English Biography (1927), which in practice incorporates aspects
of French culture (consonant with the author’s strong sympathy with
French literature) within its modernist survey of the evolution of the
English genre. One core concept that Nicolson cultivated throughout
his text was the difference between ‘pure’ biography, which artfully
combines history and literature (and which he considered to adhere to
the truth), and ‘impure’ biography, which is sullied by elements external
to these, or by the biographer’s subjectivity. Nicolson was preoccupied
with identifying distinctly English features of biography, epitomised by
James Boswell’s landmark Life of Johnson; and he held that ‘pure’ biog-
raphy was revitalised, following the age of Victorian hagiography, at the
hands of Edmund Gosse and Lytton Strachey. Conversely, he believed
that at certain historical junctures, English biography had been impeded
by foreign influences, including elements of the European classical revival

such as the renewed interest in Plutarch’s Lives and Theophrastus’s Char-
acters, as well as cross-pollination with the French genre of memoir and
specifically with the saloon character-sketch. It was these influences that
he felt had, at times, obstructed English biography’s expression of what
he considered to be native genius.
Suzanne Bode addresses the partnership between the artists Gabriele
Münter (1877–1962) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who were
at the forefront of developments in modernist art in Germany in the
earliest years of the twentieth century (the image on the front cover of
this volume is a painting by Kandinsky of Münter, portraiture being a
well-known metaphor for life writing). By the time of the earliest biog-
raphy of Münter, written by her partner Johannes Eichner in 1957, she
had been largely forgotten by history, and her reputation needed to be
re-established by reasserting her previous association with the internation-
ally renowned Kandinsky and her role in the expressionist art movement
in Germany. In portraying Münter as child-like, simple and passive,
Eichner presented her as ‘other’ to the better-known male artist, within
the confines of a national biography. This not only set the agenda for
the subsequent understanding of Münter, but also obfuscated the cross-
pollination between her and Kandinsky, setting them apart as opposites to
one another. An important change in her life writing occurred via femi-
nist art criticism in the years around 1990, which yielded greater attention
paid to Münter’s American heritage in addition to her German nationality.
Kandinsky similarly straddled two national cultures, as a Russian expa-
triate whose artistic theories of the time reflected German philosophical
discourse. Life writing that focuses on a single national identity for each
of the two artists therefore overlooks important transnational influences
on their abstract art as well as the strong exchange of ideas between them.
The subject of Samantha Niederman’s chapter is the New Zealand
expatriate artist Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947), who, although based in
England for much of her life, has been largely omitted from discussions of
British modernist art, while also being disparaged at the time in her native
country; in essence, she found herself between nations. Through exam-
ining the views of art critics contemporary with Hodgkins, Niederman
argues that this exclusion has its roots in the shared understanding of
the nature of ‘Englishness’ and national identity, in connection with
British modernism, in the decades immediately following World War I.
Modernist elements in Hodgkins’s paintings conversely originate in her
periods spent in Continental Europe, particularly France, which exerted

a significant influence on her artistic language (while nonetheless contin-
uing to reflect her time working in England). Her works may have been
too international in their aesthetic to have been recognised as native
English art, which overlooked transnational influences that only started
to be acknowledged in the late 1940s and 1950s. Niederman therefore
calls for Hodgkins’s output to be considered as transcending geograph-
ical boundaries rather than fitting neatly and conveniently into a single
national school.
Marc Röntsch discusses the composer Christopher James (1952–
2008), who identified with several different nationalities: Great Britain,
the country of his ancestors and for which he held a passport owing to his
English émigré father; Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), where he grew
up on his parents’ tobacco farm, while they held on to their British iden-
tity; and South Africa, where he received his university education in music
and where (excluding a two-year sabbatical in the US) he settled perma-
nently. James’s national identity was therefore challenged throughout his
life by the combination of British and Southern African elements, as
evidenced in his musical output, which shows strong influences from the
art and culture of both geographical areas, notably including sympathy
with Nelson Mandela and the post-Apartheid ‘New South Africa’. The
multifaceted transnationality that James embodied is particularly apparent
in his seven-movement symphonic poem Paradise Regained (1997–1999)
for orchestra and optional choir, named after John Milton’s celebrated
poem and incorporating an assortment of musical quotations in one of its
movements including both British and South African national anthems,
emblematic of the composer’s dual nationality. The greater understanding
of James’s life and outlook generated by the exploration of this work
demonstrates that music compositions may constitute a valid biograph-
ical source capable of yielding a more rounded impression of an artist’s
transnationality.
The contributors to Part II are all themselves engaged in biographical
writing, fictional or non-fictional, and reflect here on the ways in which
they have approached the writing of the lives of specific transnational
subjects. Jane McVeigh contemplates the nature of the biographer’s role
in recreating and reimagining the life of another person, informed by the
work undertaken on her forthcoming biography of Richmal Crompton
(1890–1969), author of the famous Just William stories (1919–1969),
which have been widely translated, and whose eponymous eleven-year-

old has since eclipsed the relatively unknown person who created him.
Following Walter Benjamin, McVeigh suggests that the biographer—like
the translator—deals with the ‘afterlife’ rather than the ‘life’, and that
Crompton (in stark contrast to the literary character she created) has not
enjoyed much of an afterlife, which is therefore her function as biographer
to recreate. Such a narrative possesses three main strands: writing that
recreates, and animates, the subject within the time and place in which
they lived; recreational writing, which prompts emotion and empathy in
the reader in consequence of the life story being recounted; and recre-
ative writing, which proceeds thematically and innovatively, bordering on
fiction, by way of revealing specific elements of the subject’s life. Each has
implications for transnationality given the popularity of the Just William
stories in other languages (notably Spanish), in which form they have
been differently received as well as differently nuanced by the translators,
yielding subtly variant meanings for—and understandings of—the texts
themselves.
Tamar Hager discusses her own contribution to writing the life of the
pioneering British female photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–
1879), whose claim to transnationality stems from her strong ties with
India and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), having resided in both coun-
tries in the course of her life. Taking up photography in middle age,
Cameron soon pursued her new-found career with fervent enthusiasm,
hoping (even if she was ultimately unsuccessful) to bring her family some
income to offset their financial difficulties. Hager visits the same places
once frequented by Cameron in a bid to gain an enhanced understanding
of her life story, contemplating what it meant for her, while living in India,
to have sent her six-year-old daughter Juley to be educated in England.
She likewise considers Cameron’s motivations for seeking to enter the
profession of photography, then new, expensive and male-dominated,
resisting conventional gender roles since it took time and resources away
from her domestic responsibilities, which were inevitably neglected. Thus,
Cameron prompts comparison with Hager’s own situation as a wife and
mother intent on pursuing a career as a writer juggling professional and
familial duties, leaving her feeling alienated by Cameron’s example. While
Cameron seems largely to elude Hager, she finds some common ground
in Cameron’s identification with her subjects, as demonstrated by her
ambivalence towards colonial stereotypes in photographing Ceylonese
sitters. This leads Hager to conclude that transnational art may take place
within such a shared middle ground.
Anna Menyhért explores the afterlife of an artist (a notion also devel-
oped, as noted, in McVeigh’s chapter), referring to the continuing
discourse on their life story following their death, particularly in the
transnational environment of online digital media. Her discussion exam-
ines the case of the Jewish Hungarian writer Renée Erdős (1879–1956),
who achieved success first as a poet in the 1900s, then for her works
of fiction from the 1920s onwards; the break in her career was caused
by a nervous breakdown following which she was unable to write for
some years. As a bestselling novelist, she became a victim of her own
popularity, since her writings were therefore not considered worthy of
serious literary attention. Menyhért wrote a fictional biography of Erdős
in 2016, based partly in fact but also the product of her imagination,
filling in lacunae creatively according to the partial picture that had
already formed of Erdős’s life. The monograph constituted part of Meny-
hért’s broader endeavours to reconstruct largely forgotten traditions of
Hungarian women writers through a variety of conventional and digital
media. Erdős had been forgotten to history owing to the literary processes
that contribute to canonisation, involving both people and institutions,
which systematically exclude women writers from discussion. In the digital
era, however, transnational online networks offer a more accessible and
participatory means for the afterlives of historically marginalised figures
to be recovered, remembered and refreshed.
The volume’s Part III concerns artists on artists: distinguished writers
who have taken as their subject the lives of transnational artists with a
nationality different from their own. Suze van der Poll discusses Edmund
Gosse’s (1849–1928) biography of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), published
in 1907, the same year as Gosse’s more famous biography Father and
Son. It therefore encourages parallels and contrasts to be drawn between
Gosse’s life writing on the Norwegian dramatist and that on his own
father, which evidently prompted the author to rethink his views on
Ibsen’s works such as his play The Wild Duck (1884). Gosse had orig-
inally been drawn to Ibsen in his endeavours to identify a subject that
had not already been covered by others in order to launch his own career
in literary criticism, and he published widely on the playwright in the
1870s. His biography of Ibsen was the first to offer a complete picture of
the subject up to his death, benefitting from the insights into his personal
life given by his letters published just a few years earlier as well as offering
rich analyses of the plays, all set against the backdrop of European culture.
Gosse’s biography of Ibsen constructed the playwright as a major Euro-
pean author and transnational subject, albeit one alienated from both
his family and artistic communities, with the notable exception of his
compatriot and rival, the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910).
Maria Razumovskaya’s subject is the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak
(1890–1960), best known for the scandalous novel Doctor Zhivago
(1957), which was rejected in his home country during a deeply chal-
lenging period of history in which writers were a particular target
for censorship and condemnation. Within this sociopolitical climate,
(auto)biography became a key agent of indoctrination and the enforcing
of the ideal of the new transnational Soviet Man, a move of which
Pasternak personally despaired, and which he publicly opposed through
the Union of Soviet Writers in the 1930s and subsequently through
Doctor Zhivago, leading to the work’s suppression. Doctor Zhivago was
largely sketched around 1932, at a time when Pasternak—who earlier
in his life had aspired to become a composer—had developed a close
friendship with the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus and his wife that led to his
affair with (and ultimately marriage to) the latter, events he explored in
his autobiographical literary cycle Second Birth (1932). As an acclaimed
interpreter of the music of Fryderyk Chopin, Neuhaus also fuelled Paster-
nak’s passion for the Polish composer, by whom he had been inspired in
his search for an alternative transnational identity as early as his 1928
poem ‘Ballade’, and whose spirit he further evoked in Second Birth,
in writing of the love triangle in which he had become embroiled. By
illustrating competing notions of transnational identity, this case study
critically reflects on the tendency to conceive of transnationalism as a
typical product of modern Western society.
Josiane Ranguin discusses the influence of the African-American
writer James Baldwin (1924–1987) on the Anglo-Caribbean writer Caryl
Phillips (1958–) and the response to systemic racism in his literary works,
particularly evident in Phillips’s essay collection The European Tribe
(1987) and his earlier play The Shelter (1984). Phillips, who became
acquainted with Baldwin’s writings in the late 1970s, first met Baldwin
in 1983 and perceived a transnational dimension in his life and work:
Baldwin had been forced to relocate to France as a young man owing
to racism experienced in the US, moving first to Paris and then living
in Saint Paul de Vence in Southern France for 17 years from 1970. He
became a spokesperson for equal rights at the expense, Phillips believed,
of the quality of his literary output. Baldwin was also a homosexual whose
writings engaged with homosexual topics in advance of the advent of
queer studies as a distinct academic field, and in that respect, he was
effectively doubly exiled. He felt the burden of the responsibility of the
writer in bearing witness to marginalised groups and publicly challenged
expressions of white supremacy.
Manet van Montfrans’s chapter concerns French novelist Marie
Darrieussecq’s Vie de Paula M[odersohn] Becker (2016), a life of the
German expressionist painter that continues a flourishing tradition of
contemporary authors writing lives of artists in which the biographer has
an explicit textual presence and the portrayal of the subject is conse-
quently a deeply personal one. Inspired by Becker’s painting ‘Reclining
Mother-and-Child Nude’ (1906), Darrieussecq recreates Becker’s life by
drawing on her substantial body of artwork, as well as her published
letters and diaries, availing herself of the opportunities to provide her own
perspectives when faced with conflicting documentary evidence. As she
does so, Darrieussecq explores key themes that are shared with her novels,
including motherhood (and its depiction through Becker’s paintings), the
tension between family life and the pursuit of art, male domination and
the place of women within the arts, and Becker’s own untimely death
following childbirth at the age of 31. Darrieussecq champions Becker as a
painter whose works challenged long-standing artistic representations of
the female body, resonating with her own feminist outlook as an author:
much as self-portraits were an important component of Becker’s output,
Darrieussecq’s text is at the same time a self-portrait of the biographer.
Part IV of the volume crystallises around fictional representations
of artists’ lives across nations, through the medium that would today
be recognised as biofiction. The subject of Sander Bax’s chapter is the
Dutch writer K. Schippers (1936–), who was preoccupied throughout
his career with the visual arts, and whose 2015 book Niet verder
vertellen (Don’t Tell Anyone) elides geographical and historical bound-
aries by creatively bringing together his own mother Dientje, Dutch artist
George Hendrik Breitner, Italian painter Alberto Giacometti, Schippers
himself as narrator and another twenty-first-century character, his trav-
elling companion Simone. It therefore combines art history, life writing
and fiction, as well as taking a transnational approach in which modern-
day Stampa, Switzerland (Giacometti’s home town) is connected with the
Amsterdam of Schippers’ young mother, thereby blending the stories of
historical artists with aspects of the author’s own biography. In the second
half of Don’t Tell Anyone, Schippers’ use of fictional techniques become

more prominent, as he gives his characters an agency beyond that typical
of conventional historical writing, assigning them thoughts and feelings
to yield an intimate portrait of his mother. At certain points in the book,
indeed, the biographer himself appears as a character who has fictional
encounters both with the narrator and with Dientje, calling into question
whether authorial power in this instance lies with the biographer, as one
might expect, or with the narrator.
Maximiliano Jiménez explores the transnational engagement between
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham’s The
Hours (1998; film adaptation, 2002), a literary homage that sees
Cunningham transpose Woolf’s characters—including the eponymous
heroine, now renamed Clarissa Vaughan—from 1920s London to late
twentieth-century New York. For example, Cunningham’s novel reimag-
ines British monarchs as illustrious Hollywood actresses, thereby inviting
comparison between the current cultural power of the global film industry
and the historical political force of British imperialism. Cunningham also
incorporates in his story a dramatisation of a reader of Woolf’s novel,
Laura Brown, located in post-World War 2 suburban Los Angeles, as well
as the fictionalised character of Woolf herself—thereby obfuscating the
boundaries between fact and fiction in a manner that may be traced back
to Woolf’s own writings, as well as raising questions about literature’s
capacity to represent the real world. In doing so, Cunningham establishes
a number of distinct ‘worlds’ for his characters, in terms of their relation-
ships with the constructed surroundings within which they are confined
as well as their motivations for writing and reading Mrs Dalloway as a
means of seeking entry to other such worlds.
Finally, Christopher Wiley investigates the three Dodo novels by E. F.
Benson (1867–1940) as the earliest iterations of a diverse tradition of
artistic representations of the composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1958–1944)
that extends to the present time. Benson’s original Dodo (1893) intro-
duces the character of Edith Staines, a thinly veiled portrait of Smyth
(a close friend of the Benson family) who, like the real-life figure on
which she is based, had composed a Mass, and customarily gave perfor-
mances of her music at the piano. Its sequels, Dodo’s Daughter (1913) and
Dodo Wonders (1921), extend the parallels between the two: Edith, like
Smyth, has had her songs performed at Queen’s Hall in London, and has
written a string quartet, giving concerts of her music in Germany as well
as enjoying games of golf. Benson’s sensational and immensely successful
novels, which were published in the UK and US (and, in the case of the
second instalment, appeared in America in the year prior to the British
publication), constitute transnational writing that placed before reading
communities not just a fictionalised version of Smyth, but also the very
notion of a woman composer of large-scale works, at a time in which this
was highly unusual.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the rele-
vance of life writing to the making and unmaking of artistic identities
transnationally in the past and present. The nature of transnationality,
and of the lives and works of artists who straddle different nations and
cultures or who cannot be conveniently located within the boundaries
of a single country, is investigated through a wide-ranging series of case
studies encompassing biographies and biofictions, the study and writing of
subjects’ lives, as well as artists writing about one another. The resulting,
much-needed scrutiny of transnationality in relation to life writing will,
we hope, lay solid foundations for further study in these constituent areas
and beyond.
Notes
1. Michael Lackey refers to the present proliferation of biographical novels in
his edited book Conversations with Biographical Novelists (2019, p. 49).
Biofiction has gained further attention in the scholarly world in recent
years, evidenced by the increasing number of journal special issues,
conferences and conference proceedings devoted to the topic.
2. Michael Lackey, for instance, defines biofiction as ‘literature that names its
protagonist after an actual biographical figure’ (2016, p. 3; see also Lackey
2017). Others, though, define this literary form in more general terms.
See, for example, the recent call for papers for the conference ‘Biofiction as
World Literature’ at https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-lit
erature/call-for-papers (accessed 28 January 2020). In some studies, the
term ‘biofiction’ is explained within the broader framework of ‘autofic-
tion’, ‘biografiction’ or ‘historiographic metafiction’; see, for example,
Saunders 2010, p. 15 and, for a discussion on the term in relation to
life writing, Boldrini and Novak 2017, pp. 9–12.
3. It is worth mentioning here that Michael Lackey separates biofiction from
the category of ‘life writing’ as he conceives biofiction as a non-referential
genre in which (some) facts are altered, whereas life writing, in his view,
is referential, as it aims to represent actual historical lives accurately and
truthfully (2017, pp. 8, 12). This view is, however, different from the
generally accepted understanding of life writing as described in Jolly’s
Encyclopedia and in other foundational studies in the field, such as Smith

and Watson (2010).
4. These are the words used by George’s friend, Helen, in Smith’s How to
Be Both (2015, p. 139).
5. According to Georg Lukács, who conceived of the historical novel as a
literary work with fictional characters ‘typical’ of the larger social and
cultural patterns in a certain age, the biographical novel was too much
focused on the life of one single individual to be historically representative.
Yet, by the standards of biography, the handling of facts in biofiction was
deemed to be too loose and imaginative.
6. Kisters (2017) refers to Fastert, Joachimides and Krieger’s edited Die
Wiederkehr des Künstlers (2011).
7. Another example is The Mediatization of the Artist, edited by Rachel
Esner and Sandra Kisters (2017).
8. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Iriye and Saunier
2009) offers several entries that highlight the relevance of a transnational
approach to the history of music. See also Golovlev (2018).
9. For the study of literary modernism in a transnational context, see, for
example, Hart (2010).
10. Julia Lajta-Novak mentions the proliferation of biographical novels about
women artists (2017, p. 223).
11. Thomas Keller uses the German term ‘gekreuzte Biographie’ for studies
in which biographer and biographical subject do not belong to the same
culture (2013, p. 143).
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PART I
(Re)Thinking Biography—Artists in Between

Nations and Cultures
CHAPTER 2
The Transnational Aspect in Harold

Nicolson’s The Development of English
Biography
Maryam Thirriard
Harold Nicolson is generally remembered for his career as a diplomat, and

this explains to some extent why his literary legacy has been overlooked.
Yet he had belonged to an influential group of modernist biographers who
contributed to a breakthrough in the writing of biography in the 1920s
and 1930s and the advent of the ‘New Biography’. The term was coined
by Virginia Woolf in an essay of the same title, which reviewed Nicol-
son’s biographical achievements in Some People (1927). Woolf’s article
also cited Lytton Strachey and the French writer André Maurois as prac-
titioners of the New Biography. Nicolson’s The Development of English
Biography was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press
in 1928; it provides a historical overview of the genre from the author’s
modernist perspective, as well as embodying his contribution to the
theory of biography.
M. Thirriard (B)
LERMA (Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone),
Aix Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_2
28 M. THIRRIARD
Nicolson was a fervent Francophile and had a deep-rooted knowledge

of French literature and culture; his French friends considered him to be
fluent in the language. He had studied in Paris before the First World War
and was posted there again as a diplomat during the 1919 Peace Confer-
ences. During his stay, he was introduced to the capital’s literary circles
and also started writing his first biography, Paul Verlaine (published
in 1921). The Development of English Biography offers insight into the
way Nicolson’s experience of French culture permeates his perception of
how English biography had evolved throughout history. Though it was
not his primary goal, Nicolson’s historiography is an early attempt at a
cross-cultural analysis of the intertwining of French and English cultural
aspects as they appear in the praxis of English biography. This chapter
discusses Nicolson’s take on the transnational features in his history of
the genre and pays particular attention to the ways in which he links
these transnational elements to his core concepts of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’
biography.
∗ ∗ ∗
Nicolson did not start off in life destined to be a writer. His father was a
British diplomat based in Tehran, where he was born in 1886. He spent
his early years with his parents in several chancelleries in the Orient. After
reading History at Balliol College, Oxford, he entered the Foreign Office
as a diplomat in 1909. During his service, he became acquainted with the
prominent political and diplomatic figures of the First and Second World
Wars including Lord Curzon, Lloyd George and Churchill. In 1929, he
chose to give up his diplomatic career to be nearer to his wife, the novelist
and poet Vita Sackville-West, and to become a full-time writer himself.
Their son, Nigel, wrote Portrait of a Marriage (1973), which made the
story of their open union famous.1
Through Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, Clive Bell, Nicolson became
acquainted with Lytton Strachey and Woolf herself and, through them,
became involved in the New Biography. Woolf’s first impression of
Nicolson had not been a good one; like most of the Bloomsbury Group,
she had thought him a self-conscious show-off and snob.2 However,
her attitude towards him eventually changed in the following years, and,
with Some People (1927), she became convinced that he had opened up
new horizons for the genre of biography.3 Indeed, Nicolson occupied a
position at the foreground of the experimental modes of life-writing in
2 THE TRANSNATIONAL ASPECT IN HAROLD NICOLSON’S … 29
the 1920s and 1930s. He produced biography, theorised and interacted

with other New Biographers, creating a dynamism that led biography to
become accepted as an art, liberating it from the Victorian constraints that
held that history belonged to the hard sciences. In doing so, not only did
Nicolson revolutionise the reader’s experience of biography, but he also
played a part in modernising the techniques of historiography of his time.
Nicolson’s debut in biography can be traced to 1919 when he was,
as noted, sent to Paris by the Foreign Office. During this period, he
started writing his first biography, Paul Verlaine (Rose 2005, p. 82).
The emotional turmoil of that year may have provided the impulse that
laid the foundation of his literary career. His wife, the mother of his two
sons, had eloped with the poetess Violet Keppel to the south of France.
Furthermore, it was in 1919 that Nicolson was introduced to the intel-
lectual and artistic circles in Paris. Through his friend, the painter Jean
de Gaigneron, he became acquainted with André Gide, Paul Adam, Jean
Cocteau and even Marcel Proust, for whom he had an unlimited admi-
ration. Other biographies were to follow in the 1920s: Tennyson (1923),
Byron (1924), Swinburne (1926) and his aforementioned masterpiece,
Some People (1927).
In 1928, Nicolson set down his theoretical principles in The Develop-
ment of English Biography, published as part of the ‘Hogarth Lectures on
Literature’ series. He made a determined effort to formulate a theory of
biography linked to the historiography of the genre. He concurs with the
Oxford Dictionary definition, which he uses to identify biography as ‘the
history of the lives of individual men as a branch of literature’ (Nicolson
1947, p. 7), and which provides the starting point for his thoughts on the
genre in its relation to history and to literature. History, Nicolson holds,
aspires to give truth; the aim of biography is to provide a truthful record
of an individual through the art of literature. He writes that ‘It is not
sufficient to merely differentiate biography from history on the one hand
and fiction on the other’ (p. 8). He wishes to steer away from that endless
debate and, instead, to speak of biography in relation to other ‘cognate’
modes of expression: ‘journals, diaries, memoirs, imaginary portraits, or
mere jottings of gossip or conversation’ (p. 8). In other words, Nicolson
is concerned with all forms of what we would today call life-writing and
considers biography as ‘a distinct form of narrative’ (p. 8): a genre distinct
from history and from literature. As we shall see, this provides Nicolson
with a framework for his key concept of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ biography.
Although The Development of English Biography presents the reader with
30 M. THIRRIARD
a chronological study of the genre’s evolution, the main elements of

Nicolson’s reflection can be seen to revolve around three axes: firstly, his
aforementioned concepts of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ biography; secondly, the
role of narrative and literary art; and thirdly, the subsequent question
of representation and the importance of creating an experience for the
reader.
In Nicolson’s conception of the genre, biography comprises a combi-
nation of history, the individual (the biographical subject) and litera-
ture—that is to say, a text written with artistry. His view is that it is the
pollution of ‘pure biography’ with features outside of this triad that leads
to ‘impure biography’. ‘Pure’ biography is achieved when the biography
presents only the truth. It is ‘historical truth’, containing ‘absolute truth’;
it delivers the veracity of a complete and accurate portraiture (Nicolson
1947, p. 11). Biography becomes ‘impure’ if the biographer’s intent strays
away from that one desire to seek out the truth about the subject. This
is the case with those texts that are tainted with any ‘purpose extraneous
to the work itself’ (p. 10). Another case of ‘impure’ biography is ‘undue
subjectivity’ (p. 10), written with a specific point of view and in which
the biographer therefore intrudes. For Nicolson, its worst form is autobi-
ography: ‘is it essentially truthful’, he asks, ‘[and] has any autobiographer
yet attained to the detachment necessary to convey truth convincingly?’
(p. 15). According to Nicolson, ‘Impure’ biography can be merely ‘the
desire to celebrate the dead’ (1947, p. 9), as with runic inscriptions,
hagiography, funeral orations and Victorian apotheoses; or it can be ‘the
desire to compose the life of an individual as an illustration of some extra-
neous theory or conception’, or some ‘undue subjectivity in the writer’,
alluding to the biographer’s own personality (p. 10).
Nicolson’s claim is that the English disposition of mind allows for the
kind of truth required in ‘pure’ biography, but that its dearth was due
to anomalies in its development. He explains that ‘Something like this
happened to nineteenth-century biography […]. It all began splendidly.
We had Moore and Southey and Lockhart; but then came earnestness,
and with earnestness hagiography descended on us with its sullen cloud,
and the Victorian biographer scribbled laboriously by the light of shaded
lamps’ (p. 110). The imagery is strikingly similar to Woolf’s in her exper-
imental biography, Orlando, whose subject is based on Nicolson’s wife,
Vita Sackville-West, and in which the Victorian age is symbolised by the
abrupt darkening of the sky:
The great cloud which hung, not only over London, but over the whole of
the British Isles on the first day of the nineteenth century stayed […] long
enough to have extraordinary consequences upon those who lived beneath
its shadow. (Woolf 2004, p. 158)
Nicolson perceives the nineteenth century in a similar way, his own

imagery portraying the Victorian age as having lost visibility and verve,
when earnestness replaced the eagerness of the eighteenth century.
Nicolson had explained his point of view earlier in the text: ‘this acci-
dental tradition was given the authority of a moral law. “The history of
mankind”, wrote Carlyle, “is the history of its great men: to find out
these, clean the dirt from them, and place them on their proper pedestal”’
(Nicolson 1947, p. 11). In Nicolson’s opinion, Carlyle wrote impure
biography and so did Sidney Lee, who considered biography ‘an instinc-
tive desire to do honour to the memories of those who, by character and
exploits, have distinguished themselves’ (p. 12). Instead of hero worship,
Nicolson holds that biography’s aim should be nothing other than the
record of personality. Nicolson goes on to claim that ‘inaccuracy in repre-
sentation’ would be ‘more culpable even than inaccuracy of fact’ (p. 12);
this is a core creed for the New Biography, allowing Nicolson to consider
biography as an art: the representation itself is what produces truth, not
only the facts.
In the history of English biography, Nicolson identifies two features
from foreign cultures that hindered what he calls ‘our native genius’,
in that ‘disappoint[ing]’ seventeenth century (1947, p. 41). The first
was the classicist revival and the influence of Plutarch’s Lives, as well
as Theophrastus’s The Characters. Nicolson reproaches both writers for
dealing with their subjects’ typical ‘characters’ rather than considering
their individual temperaments, and for casting their biographies in an
‘unconvincing mould’ (Nicolson 1947, p. 39). Consequently, according
to Nicolson, this practice ‘led biographers to fix upon a certain quality
or type, and then to adjust the details so as to fit them into the thesis
or frame selected’ (p. 41). Not only does that inevitably produce carica-
ture, in Nicolson’s view, but it also prevents any grasp of the multifaceted
dimension of the subject and the complexity of the individual.
The second hindering factor is said to be an outcome of the first, orig-
inating in the French school of the character sketch. It concerns ‘The
English exiles in France’ who, in Nicolson’s harsh words, ‘caught the
infections of the French memoir and introduced it into England’ (1947,
32 M. THIRRIARD
p. 40). Nicolson may be referring more specifically here to the memoirs of

the French aristocracy, which focused on describing their social environ-
ment. He also points to French saloons, a milieu in which the character
sketch thrived, with members of intellectual circles writing portraits of
each other. He sees these forms to be at the origins of the customary form
of historical or elegant portraiture that developed in England in the seven-
teenth century, through eminent historians such as Clarendon (p. 45).
Nicolson points out that, although Clarendon did much to contribute
to historical writing as a form of creative literature, his method was to
‘personify qualities’, thus further popularising Theophrastus’s treatment
of historical figures as ‘ethical types’; this practice was then passed on to
Burnet, Halifax and then to Macaulay and Carlyle (p. 41). Likewise, the
nascent genre of the memoir is said to have prevented Izaak Walton from
achieving pure biography in his Lives. It could be countered, however,
that this French form of memoir-writing nurtured the literary aspect of
life-writing, thereby elevating it to the level of art, in compliance with
Nicolson’s own concept of ‘pure’ biography.
Nicolson considers the major incompatibility between the French
disposition to classicism and English ‘native genius’ to be the ‘Latin mind’
(1947, p. 41). The latter, he holds, is based on deductive idealism while
the English temperament is rooted in inductive realism, which Nicolson
claims to be ‘the more robust and realistic tradition’, and he names it
the ‘Chaucer tradition’ (p. 45), invoking the father of English literature.
Aubrey is said to belong to that same tradition: being far from the influ-
ence of the précieuses and French Salons, he was apparently unaffected.
Nicolson blames the French connection, but, from another perspective,
the classical revival was a generally European phenomenon—in varying
degrees—and memoir-writing developed simultaneously in England and
on the Continent. Theophrastus’s Characters was as direct an influence
in England as it was in France: Joseph Hall’s emulation, Characters of
Virtues and Vices, was published in 1608, well before the French saloons
became a recognisable entity. The Table Talk of John Selden (1689) may
have been just as inspired by the French ana, as Nicolson claims, as it had
been by Plutarch’s own nine books of Table Talk. Moreover, John Lyly’s
euphuism may not justify an allegation of wholesale borrowing, but rather
a parallel development to French préciosité.
However, Nicolson’s account eventually grants a more positive role to
the French. The development of the enlightenment in France and the
move towards social realism provided ‘the sustenance of a new and richer
soil’ that then allowed the ‘sturdy roots and sensitive fibres’ (Nicolson
1947, p. 72) of eighteenth-century English biography to develop in
favour of the inductive method and pure biography.
The importance of questions of Englishness and nativeness is promi-
nent in Nicolson’s text. It was a recurring topic among contemporary
authors, in an age when nationalism had become a widespread ideology,
though the issue of Englishness did not always produce perspectives in
line with jingoism.4 However, Nicolson’s take on the English specificities
of biography underlines the divide, instead of bridging the gap, between
Britain and its neighbouring European cultures. Nicolson was a patriot
and a nationalist, from which his obsession with ‘native genius’ follows.5
Common ground with Woolf and Strachey is to be found mainly in
terms of biography, and Nicolson concurs with both Bloomsbury Group
members that the eighteenth century is a golden age for the genre.
Nicolson explains this particular turn in the writing of biography as
a sudden resurgence of the English mindset. Biography returned to a
pure form, thanks to Johnson’s breakaway: ‘it is Dr Johnson who is the
real founder of pure biography’, writes Nicolson, ‘for he was the first
to proclaim that biography was a distinct branch of creative literature’
(Nicolson 1947, p. 79). Nicolson considers that Johnson contributed to
making biography a distinct genre: ‘Johnson, with his mistrust of history
and his dislike of fiction, found in biography a satisfaction such as no
other branch of literature could provide’ (p. 80). It then took the least
expected of men to bring the perfect turn to what Nicolson considers
the essential component of biography: the anecdote. That man was James
Boswell. Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature characterises Johnson’s famous
companion as follows: ‘One of the most extraordinary successes in the
history of civilisation was achieved by an idler, a lecher, a drunkard, and
a snob’ (1931, p. 87). In a vein similar to Strachey’s hyperbole, Nicol-
son’s understanding is that ‘the genius’ in Boswell’s Life of Johnson did
not come from the author himself, but from a favourable set of circum-
stances, or ‘accidents’ as Nicolson calls them. The anecdote is one of
those essential elements, and it developed and matured into a narrative
technique: ‘The device of introducing anecdote and actual conversations
had been brought to a high pitch of perfection in the French ana’
(Nicolson 1947, p. 106). Nicolson is referring to the popular genre that
thrived in the eighteenth century, which is characterised by its collec-
tion of detached thoughts, criticism and anecdotes relating to a departed
subject. He sees this particularly French form to have been employed in
34 M. THIRRIARD
The Table Talk of John Selden, and by Spencer in his depiction of Pope and
his circle (p. 106). Nicolson views Boswell, in his turn, to have applied
the technique of anecdote to biography and, for Nicolson, the result was
far-reaching for the art of biography:
the national talent for biography found its full expression. The gay realism
of Chaucer, the sly realism of Aubrey, the dramatic gifts of Roger North,
the synthetic talent of Walton—all these combined in Boswell to create a
method of biography which is essentially national and essentially suited to
the British temperament. (Nicolson 1947, p. 109)
Hence, the assets of British biography, according to Nicolson, are to be

found in its propensity to be maladroit, derisive and disorganised.6 The
contrast with the French Cartesian rationale explains, in his view, ‘how
few Frenchmen can appreciate Boswell; how Taine muddled his whole
Johnson section; how ill at ease the Latin mind becomes when confronted
with the Boswell formula, not knowing whether to laugh at or with,
confused by the absence of any apparent purpose or design’ (p. 109).
And so Nicolson sees the dichotomy between the French and British
approaches to biography to originate in the opposite mindsets of the
French and the British. He writes: ‘the Anglo-Saxon mind is at its best
when proceeding inductively, building up the facts of life slowly, humor-
ously, patiently; interpreting these jumbled facts not by any consecutive
process of reason, but by the sweeping lighthouse flashes of intuition and
imagination’ (p. 110). In other words, only an anecdote-based narrative
can convey the truth about a subject.
Nicolson is right that Boswell belongs to a different category from
neoclassicism in the Augustan age. Rather, this may well be the ‘Age
of Sensibility’ to which Northrop Frye alluded in his article ‘Towards
Defining an Age of Sensibility’ (1956). Nicolson sensed something similar
to Frye concerning literature as process replacing literature as product:
Boswell’s narrative construction fascinates the reader as much as Johnson,
the subject, does. The process of writing conveys a sense of being written
‘on the spot’, an experience that Frye also saw in Richardson’s Pamela
and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, in which we witness the genesis of the
narrative while reading. In the same way, Boswell’s technique gives a
direct contact with the subject: we discover Boswell discovering Johnson.
It is no surprise that this turning away from neoclassicism and towards
the Age of Johnson and then the Age of Sensibility appealed to Nicolson,
Woolf and Strachey alike; each expressed their admiration for Boswell,
Gibbons and Sterne. Lacking an illustrative analogy, Frye, himself, estab-
lishes a parallel between that golden age of biography and this same circle
of modernists in stating that ‘when we compare Arnold Bennett and
Virginia Woolf on the subject of Mrs. Brown7 we generally take the side
of Virginia Woolf. So it seems that our age ought to feel a close kinship
with the prose fiction of the Age of Sensibility, when the sense of liter-
ature as process was brought to a peculiarly exquisite perfection’ (Frye
1956, p. 145).
According to Nicolson, the history of biography is a series of ‘advances
and regressions’ (1947, p. 137). After a marked regression in the Victo-
rian age, and with the advent of the twentieth century, two champions of
English biography made their way to the foreground: Edmund Gosse and
then Lytton Strachey, leading biography into a new phase. Gosse’s Father
and Son is held to be a masterpiece. Gosse is presented as an enlight-
ened contributor, being ‘an expert both in the theory and the practice
of biography’ (p. 143), and Nicolson could not have agreed more with
his convictions: ‘The article which he contributed to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica is a lucid exposition of what, in effect, is “pure biography”’,
that is to say, ‘the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life’,
unaffected by ‘moral passion or prejudice’ (p. 143). Father and Son is
seen as ‘unconventional’ from all perspectives: ‘it is a triumphant experi-
ment in a formula, it is a clinical examination over a detached and limited
period of time’; Gosse presents us with ‘a genuine slice of life’ (p. 146).
Ironically, the zoologist ends up being studied as if he were, himself, a
curiosity of nature. Gosse had spent much of his childhood using his
father’s microscope at hand; the son then went on to use those same
observation methods on his father. Nicolson explains that it is a master-
piece in that the author was able to combine ‘a maximum of scientific
interest with the maximum of literary form’ (Nicolson 1947, p. 148).
However, Nicolson could hardly have considered Gosse’s text to be a
piece of ‘pure biography’ because of its strong autobiographical strand.
Moreover, as Gosse was to confess to Nicolson, the end of the book
had been ‘slightly “arranged”’ (Lees-Milne 1987, p. 317). Nevertheless,
Nicolson’s enthusiasm for Gosse’s techniques of self-portraiture, as well
as for his playing with fact and fiction, is not surprising given the simi-
larity with the formula Nicolson had devised for his own masterpiece,
Some People.
36 M. THIRRIARD
Strachey’s Queen Victoria is also considered part of the English revo-

lution in biography. Nicolson comments that ‘Victorianism only died in
1921’ (1947, p. 145), the year that Queen Victoria was published, which
effectively says that Strachey was responsible for it. Strachey’s biography
had to deal with 81 years of ‘vast national movements’ (Nicolson 1947,
p. 149), the ‘far-reaching changes’ (p. 149) in Britain both industrial and
social, the rise of nationalism, the complexity of imperial and domestic
policy, and the multitude of secondary characters. Nicolson comments:
to compress all this within some three hundred pages; to convey not
merely unity of impression but a convincing sense of scientific reality; to
maintain throughout an attitude of detachment …—this, in all certainty,
is an achievement which required the very highest gifts of intellect and
imagination. (p. 149)
Nicolson describes Strachey’s Queen Victoria as being a significant feat

in biography. He acutely perceives Strachey’s psychological approach: the
events and other characters, whether major or minor, ‘are all subordinated
to the main psychological purpose, are introduced or explained only so
far as is necessary to the elucidation of the central personality’ (Nicolson
1947, p. 151), with an impressive ‘display of his own literary powers’
(p. 152). Even so, he also notes that ‘Mr Strachey, inevitably has his point
of view; and it is this point of view which dictates his method’, leading
Nicolson to the conclusion that ‘Mr Strachey, with all his virtues, does
not finally solve the problem of the relation of biography to science on
the one hand and to literature on the other. I am second to none in
my admiration of Queen Victoria, but I cannot call it a “pure biography”’
(p. 153). As indicated previously, any form of personal thesis compromises
‘pure’ biography. What Nicolson means by this is that such a personal
thesis is bound to leave out material that needs to be exposed to achieve a
faithful portrait. Boswell and Lockhart had achieved ‘pure’ biographies, in
Nicolson’s eyes, because they had no thesis concerning their subjects and
advanced through their study thanks to an inductive approach, inferring
as they went along instead of defending established precepts about their
subject.
For all that, Nicolson does not necessarily condemn impure biography:
as noted, he had indulged in impure biography himself when writing
Some People, a mixture of autobiography and fiction. His description of
‘impure’ complies with his own projections for the future of biography, in
which a split between scientific and literary biography would set the genre
to wander off into the realms of the imagination. History has proven
him right, in that a synergy between biography and fiction is a major
development in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.
As mentioned above, Nicolson identifies ‘our happy April humour’ as
a distinct feature of the ‘English genius’ in biography (1947, p. 110).
It may be true that biography should be as messy and derisive as life
itself. In a way, this echoes the essence of British humour, which often
uses irony and self-deprecation to emphasise the absurdity of everyday
life.8 Nicolson seems to have sought to extrapolate the idea to his own
text, introducing a strong subversive meta-discourse, which reveals his
modernist take on the topic of historiography. In doing so, he tears down
his own narrative construction. His last chapter, entitled ‘The Present
Age’, starts as follows:
I have now traced the development of English biography […] I have

throughout adopted the convention of speaking (as if I really believed
in such things) of ‘influences’ and ‘innovators’, of ‘reactionaries’ and of
‘pioneers’ […] I have attributed to these people conscious artistic or
biographical purposes which, I well know, they did not possess. I have
contended that Roper ‘introduced’ vivid dialogue […]. I have examined
[…] the ‘influence’ of the French character-sketch. I have given you Lord
Herbert, Lady Fanshawe, Mrs Hutchinson, and the Duchess of Newcastle,
and have constrained each of these people to ‘contribute’ something defi-
nite to my story, to notch a mark upon my measure. I have derided Sprat
as a ‘reactionary’ and have eulogised Aubrey as a ‘pioneer’, Walton, being
an ethical biographer, had to be explained away. Dryden was also some-
what vague; but with Roger North I was again able to speak convincingly
of ‘pure’ biography, and to represent him as the direct succession between
Aubrey and Boswell. Johnson and Mason were extremely helpful, since
they not only formulated their own theories of biography, but they formu-
lated them in such a manner as to accord with my own. Boswell, for his
part, was an obvious landing: we paused to take breath. (Nicolson 1947,
p. 133)
Nicolson’s modernist propensity for subversiveness is at its peak in this

excerpt. In one short passage, he sets out to discredit the whole of the
lecture given so far: he argues in favour of attributes and techniques he
thinks to be untrue, he explicitly denies believing in the conventions he
has used to depict the elements of his history, ‘as if I believed in such
38 M. THIRRIARD
things’, and he denies his own conclusions about the attributes of his
subjects, ‘purposes, which I well know they did not possess’. The use of
punctuation, notably of inverted commas and brackets, creates a distance
between the narrator and the very terms he has chosen himself. Nicolson
exhibits the artificiality of argument by highlighting the trick of rhetoric
with verbs such as ‘contended’, ‘derided’, ‘explained away’ and, above
all, ‘I have given you’, revealing a certain playfulness in his attitude. We
are made aware of the whole account being little more than ‘my story’,
in which not only has Nicolson made elements to fit his narration, but
he has also ‘constrained each of these people to “contribute” something
definite’; at times, it was a tricky task, at other times, the characters were
‘extremely helpful’. His own historical account becomes a chimera of a
construct. In this way, Nicolson swaps Taine’s positivism for modernist
relativity. He elicits the point made in this destructive passage:
the historical method has its value. It is, in the first place, a convenient
convention […] although it often falsifies essential proportions, [it] does
in the end convey an impression of growth, does in fact indicate a line of
development as expressed in the slow and somewhat confused evolution of
English biography. (Nicolson 1947, p. 135)
Nicolson shows that Cartesian argumentation does not necessarily exclude

fallacy and the reader is left with the impression that, as in fiction, histor-
ical narrative is but an illusionary construct, despite the rational structure.
The reader becomes aware that this historical account, which seems to
flow, does so because it is written with artistry. Nicolson uses this passage
to introduce his chapter dedicated to the ‘The Present Age’, as if it were
a way of writing himself into the timeline he has designed and of demon-
strating to his readers that the ‘spirit of the age’ calls for him to be
included in the lot that revolutionised and anglicised English biography,
alongside Gosse and Strachey.
To conclude, Nicolson’s take on the transnational nature of English
biography is such that, in his retrospective, the history of English biog-
raphy becomes a ‘story of arrested development’, with an ‘unfortunate
history’ (Nicolson 1947, p. 16). He puts forward the idea that the English
have a natural gift for biography and that the genre could have thrived
as an expression of the fullness of a ‘native genius’, had it not been for
foreign influences that led biographers away from the English mindset. To
support this view, The Development of English Biography casts the evolu-
tion of the genre within a narrative in which the flourishing of English
biography was interrupted by the ‘polluting’ influence of the Greek and
the French during the classicist frenzy that overwhelmed the arts in
England in the seventeenth century. With Boswell, English biography
resurfaces gloriously, before plunging back into ‘impure’ biography and
the hero worship of the Victorian age. Finally, in the modern age, thanks
to Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey and himself, English biography’s
‘native genius’ is regained.
It is surprising that Nicolson failed to consider other influences, such
as that of German biography, in his history of the genre. He mentions
only the Greek and the French, the two cultures of which he was most
fond, despite his harsh criticism of their influence. He finished writing
The Development of English Biography just before being posted in Berlin
(Lees-Milne 1987, p. 318). In Germany, he met with Thomas Mann
and Emil Ludwig, part of the literati, but apparently failed to connect
with them on the topic of biography. Instead, Nicolson despised Ludwig
(Rose 2005, p. 158), notwithstanding much common ground for their
modernist standpoints.
However, in the following years, Nicolson connected with André
Maurois, the French biographer who was also part of the New Biography
movement and whom Nicolson had previously met in the early 1920s.
Maurois’s Clark lecture, Aspects of Biography, published in 1929, discusses
very precisely the New Biography as practised by Nicolson, Woolf and
Strachey. He converses with Nicolson’s The Development of English Biog-
raphy. When Maurois was writing his biography of Byron, Nicolson
offered him the papers he had gathered for his own biography of the
poet. In the 1950s, their subjects seem to converge: Maurois wrote Victor
Hugo’s biography, while Nicolson wrote the life of Hugo’s close friend,
Sainte-Beuve, and made reference to Maurois’s text in his own. However,
bridging the Channel was apparently not a priority for Nicolson. In the
main, his extensive experience of other countries and cultures led him to
nurture a strong sense of English distinctiveness, which he subsequently
extrapolated to the art of biography.
Notes
1. In his foreword to Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson describes his
parents’ union as ‘the story of two people who married for love and whose
40 M. THIRRIARD
love deepened with every passing year, although each was constantly and
by mutual consent unfaithful to the other. […] If marriage is seen as a
harbour, their love-affairs were mere port-of-calls’ (1992, p. xiii).
2. Woolf recorded an account of their first encounter in her diary. ‘Harold’,
she noted, ‘is simple downright bluff; wears short black coat & check
trousers, wishes to be a writer, but is not I’m told & can believe, adapted
by nature’ (Woolf 1981, p. 236).
3. In my Ph.D. dissertation, I question the combination which usually seals
off Woolf and Strachey together as the Bloomsbury duo for life-writing.
Indeed‚ a closer look at Woolf’s reception of Strachey’s and Nicolson’s
works reveals, on the one hand, an aversion, on Woolf’s behalf, for Stra-
chey’s work and, on the other, a growing admiration for Nicolson’s. This
culminated in Woolf’s laudatory review of Some People in her essay ‘The
New Biography’ (Thirriard 2019).
4. This was the case, for instance, for Virginia Woolf (see Briggs 2006).
5. Nicolson is also well known to have held racist and anti-Semitic views. His
flirtation with British Fascism is perhaps to be situated on another level.
Oswald Mosely had been an old friend of Nicolson’s from the Foreign
Office who married Lord Curzon’s daughter, bringing both men even
closer. Nicolson joined Mosely’s New Party in 1931. He freed himself
from his much-loathed job as a gossip columnist at the Evening Stan-
dard and became head editor of Action, the party’s weekly. Instead of
listening to the clear-sighted criticism of close friends, such as Raymond
Mortimer, he ‘soldiered on’, although his personal papers show that he did
not believe in, and indeed despised, Fascism (see Rose 2005, p. 170). The
following year, Nicolson broke away from Mosely when the latter formed
the British Union of Fascists in 1932, bitterly regretting his flirtations with
the movement.
6. Without wishing to suggest that the two words are entirely synonymous
for Nicolson, he does use the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ interchange-
ably in his text. This was a common practice in Victorian times as well
as in the early twentieth century. In Nicolson’s historiography, ‘English’
can be considered a generic term used to refer to those biographers who
wrote in English, encompassing figures such as John Lockhart and Thomas
Carlyle. It so happens that neither of Nicolson’s own parents were origi-
nally from England. Nicolson’s father Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock
(also known as Sir Arthur Nicolson, 11th Baronet), was Scottish, and his
mother’s family, the Rowan Hamiltons, were based at Killyleagh Castle in
Northern Ireland. To avoid altering the original meaning of Nicolson’s
text, I have adhered to Nicolson’s own choice of words in this chapter.
7. In this essay, Woolf criticises Edwardian authors, such as Bennett, for their
excessive care to materialistic detail and their failure to convey a consistent
sense of personality.
8. Nicolson gave much importance to the topic of humour; he published

a full-length study in 1946 entitled The English Sense of Humour (see
Nicolson 1946).
Bibliography
Boswell, James. 1992 [1791]. The Life of Samuel Johnson. New York: Everyman’s
Library.
Briggs, Julia. 2006. ‘“Almost Ashamed of England Being so English”: Woolf and
Ideas of Englishness’. In Reading Virginia Woolf , pp. 190–207. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Frye, Northrop. 1956. ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’. English Literary
History 23, no. 2: 144–52.
Lees-Milne, James. 1987. Harold Nicolson: 1886–1929. Vol. 1. London:
Hamilton.
Maurois, André. 1954. Olympio ou La Vie de Victor Hugo. Paris: Hachette.
Maurois, André. 2014 [1929]. Aspects of Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nicolson, Harold. 1925 [1923]. Tennyson: Aspects of His Life, Character and
Poetry. London: Constable.
Nicolson, Harold. 1926. Swinburne. London: Macmillan.
Nicolson, Harold. 1934 [1921]. Paul Verlaine. London: Constable.
Nicolson, Harold. 1946. The English Sense of Humour and Other Essays. London:
Dropmore.
Nicolson, Harold. 1947 [1928]. The Development of English Biography. London:
Hogarth.
Nicolson, Harold. 1957. Sainte-Beuve. London: Constable.
Nicolson, Harold. 1999 [1924]. Byron: The Last Journey. London: Prion.
Nicolson, Harold. 2013 [1927]. Some People. London: Faber and Faber.
Nicolson, Nigel. 1992 [1973]. Portrait of a Marriage. London: Orion.
Rose, Norman. 2005. Harold Nicolson. London: Cape.
Strachey, Lytton. 1931. Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays. London: Chatto
& Windus.
Theophrastus. 1991. The Characters of Theophrastus. London: Open Gate.
Thirriard, Maryam. 2019. ‘Crafting the New Biography: Virginia Woolf, Harold
Nicolson and Lytton Strachey’. PhD diss., Aix Marseille Université.
Woolf, Virginia. 1981 [1978]. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2 (1920–4).
Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Woolf, Virginia. 2004 [1928]. Orlando: A Biography. London: Vintage.
Woolf, Virginia. 1988 [1924]. ‘Character in Fiction’. In The Essays of Virginia
Woolf , edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3, pp. 501–18. San Diego, CA:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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Woolf, Virginia. 1994 [1927]. ‘The New Biography’. In The Essays of Virginia
Woolf , edited by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 4, pp. 473–80. Orlando, FL:
Harcourt, Inc.
CHAPTER 3
Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky:

A Reassessment of Transnational Identities
and Abstraction Through Biography
Suzanne Bode
Between 1902 and 1915, the partnership of the German-born Gabriele

Münter (1877–1962) and the Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky (1866–
1944) proved one of the most innovative of the early modernist period.
However, understandings of their work and their interactions have been
profoundly shaped by the increasingly apparent limitations of what I
shall call the perspective of national biography. This perspective has oper-
ated—most notably in the first biography of Münter, Johannes Eichner’s
1957 Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter: Von Ursprüngen moderner Kunst
(Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter: On the Origins of Modern Art)—
to construct both an ‘othered’ Münter and an ‘othered’ Kandinsky. In
the case of the female artist, Münter, this ‘othered’ representation is of
naivety, spontaneity and instinctiveness. In the case of Kandinsky, his
status as a ‘foreign’ Russian artist is equally predictably equipped with
S. Bode (B)
Park Lane International School, Prague, Czech Republic

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_3
44 S. BODE
‘masculine’ characteristics where intellect and ‘prophetic genius’ play a

crucial role.
This chapter examines how transnational approaches to biography,
shaped by feminist and structuralist thinking, have increasingly sought
since the 1980s to challenge the national perspective. I intend to
show how the resulting transnational perspective on these subjects has
contributed to the emancipation of recent accounts from previously domi-
nant assumptions about relationships between art, gender and nationality,
thereby facilitating a more elaborated, nuanced and enriched under-
standing of the development of abstract art in the crucial years between
1908 and 1913.
Gabriele Münter and the First Biography

As noted, the earliest biography of the artist Gabriele Münter did not
appear in Germany until 1957. Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter: Von
Ursprüngen moderner Kunst was written by the artist’s partner, the art
historian Johannes Eichner. It aimed, ambitiously, to reposition Münter at
the forefront of the modern abstract art movement, as well as to reintro-
duce her to the art world. Eichner describes the book as ‘a contribution
to the growing research’,1 providing Germans who had lived through the
Nazi ban on modern art with an opportunity to rediscover key figures
in the German modernist movement. He highlights his unique access
to Münter’s recollections, her correspondence with Kandinsky, and the
artworks Münter had in her private collection. Münter was at the time
considering whether to donate her collection and her archive of Blaue
Reiter art to the city of Munich, and the book therefore also served as
an anchor point, ensuring that her early relationship with Kandinsky was
formally recognised.
The fact that no biography had previously been written on Münter
was significant as it meant that her contribution to German Expres-
sionist art was yet to be properly acknowledged. Kandinsky had died in
1944. Numerous biographies in Germany and abroad recognised him as
a founder of abstract art, while Münter by contrast had fallen into almost
total obscurity. A post-war German newspaper review of the influential
1949 Der Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, talks
of her as functioning in the ‘Hintergrund’ (background) of the Blaue
Reiter, her art placed on a second tier and categorised as belonging to
the ‘aesthetic milieu’ (Die Zeit, Der ‘Blaue Reiter’, 1949). Münter had
3 GABRIELE MÜNTER AND WASSILY KANDINSKY … 45
struggled during the Nazi years (1933–1945) because her modernist style
had clashed with the heroic realist art promoted by the Nazis, and now,
post-war, her art was being dismissed as merely decorative. While male
artists such as Kandinsky and Franz Marc were being rehabilitated, she,
like many female avant-garde artists of the pre-war period in Germany,
had joined the group of women who found ‘their roles marginalised to
that of student, muse, lover or wife’ (Behr and Hoberg 2005, p. 46).
Eichner’s biography set out to counter this reductive view. The societal
prejudices against German women who wished to become artists were
strong. In 1926, she noted in her diary: ‘In the eyes of many, I was only
an unnecessary side-dish to Kandinsky. It is all too easily forgotten that a
woman can be a creative artist with a real, original talent of her own. A
woman standing alone […] can never gain recognition through her own
efforts. Other “authorities” have to stand up for her’ (Gossman 2019,
p. 3). By 1957, aged 80, Münter was impatient to take control of her
legacy and pragmatically decided to use both her art historian husband
and Kandinsky’s fame to provide that ‘authority’. Kandinsky’s surname
stands alone next to Münter’s full name in the book’s title: Kandinsky
und Gabriele Münter, highlighting his established position in the art
world. But by giving unique access to her private correspondence with
Kandinsky, she could redefine her position in the relationship. Eichner
concurs that the purpose of the biography is to understand both artists
and to show ‘How it actually was’ (Wie es eigentlich gewesen) stressing
the importance of original source material from Münter and her role in
the biography (Eichner 1957, p. 25).
Münter may also have had financial reasons for featuring Kandinsky’s
name so prominently. Demand and prices for modern and contempo-
rary art was rising (Lucie-Smith 1989, p. 18) and Münter had saved over
200 of Kandinsky’s artworks from the Nazis in the cellar of her house
in Murnau. At the time of the biography’s creation, she was deciding
whether to sell or donate them to a museum (Kleine 2015, p. 651). By
enhancing Kandinsky’s reputation through the biography, she raised the
value of his paintings and thus her own influence in the art world.
This was particularly important as Kandinsky’s widow, Nina Kandinsky,
wanted to reduce the significance of Münter in Kandinsky’s life. She
sought to position him as the ‘Russian Genius’, who independently
created the world’s first abstract artwork in 1910 (Kandinsky 1978,
p. 81). Only those biographers who shared her views were given access to
46 S. BODE
his paintings (Der Spiegel, ‘Kandinsky Ringe Gekauft’, 1960). By collab-

orating with Eichner in a joint biography, Münter set about ensuring
that her role by his side, during what German critics referred to as his
‘Geniephase’ (genius phase), was firmly secured.
As an artist, we see then that Münter was making clear decisions to
enhance her position in the art world and that Eichner too was highly
aware of the usefulness of an academic biography in establishing an alter-
native view of the couple’s relationship. Eager to be objective, he states
that his sole biographical aim is to understand the ‘internal and external’
lives of the artists in order to capture the ‘Geist’ (spirit) that drove their
art. Referring to the popular psychology pioneered by Sigmund Freud, he
stresses the view that all art is personality-driven. Furthermore, he asserts
that the artist’s work must come from the individual and whether it is
‘abstract’ or still concrete (as in the art of Münter), if it is true to the
individual, then it is art. He explains, however, that this is not how art
historians value artists, and regrets that artists like Kandinsky are given
the role ‘des prophetischen Rufers an der Weltwende’ (of the prophetic
proclaimer of the new world order) while artists like Münter, not having
‘achieved’ full abstraction, are labelled ‘schwach’ (weak) because they do
not have ‘das Ziel im Herzen’ (the destination in their heart) (Eichner
1957, pp. 10–13).
Eichner recognised how the post-1945 definition of abstraction,
combined with the personality cult of Kandinsky, had led to a negative
measure of Münter’s artistic worth. He sets out to present Münter as a
powerfully German female force to reset the balance. However, rather
than present a close examination of Münter’s actual character, he turns
instead to the conventional model or view of woman as ‘other’ and
opposite to man.
In seeking to present Münter within the conventions of national biog-
raphy, it becomes impossible for her to be viewed other than as a German
woman artist whose art is imbued with her ‘softer’ female personality.
Ute Frevert’s catalogue essay for the 2016 exhibition Geschlechterkampf
(Battle of the Sexes) provides an overview of the presentation of women
in the art world through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and
quotes the German politician Robert Blum: ‘Predominantly Man has
spirit and reason, Woman instinct and feeling. For men there is courage,
determination, strength and energy, for women there is shyness, devo-
tion, grace and gentleness’.2 Eichner’s depiction of Münter as naive and
anti-intellectual in contrast with Kandinsky’s complex and highly cerebral

nature follows Blum’s view closely.
This male-female narrative was to prove so compelling that it formed
the basis of major German biographies of Münter for the next two
decades. As shown by Sabine Windecker in her extensive assessment of
the German reception of Münter, respected art historians such as Hans
Konrad Roethel, Peter Lahnstein, Paul Vogt and Erich Pfeiffer Belli all
repeated Eichner’s characterisation of Münter as simple and unintellectual
(Windecker 1991, pp. 26–29). It is of course true that Münter had indeed
had a very limited education, while Kandinsky had achieved a professor-
ship in law in Russia and published extensively on his art theories. Münter
also alluded to the powerful draw of Kandinsky’s high idealism and her
subsequent feeling of abandonment, writing in 1917 after their separa-
tion: ‘I lived in the company of a prophet, now I stand on my own feet, a
child of the world’.3 However, Münter had shown extreme determination
to learn her craft, choosing to pay to be educated privately at Kandinsky’s
Phalanx School. In Wilhelmine Germany, women were barred from state
art schools and becoming a professional artist was frowned on. Phalanx
classes were mixed-sex, and she received instruction in sculpture and
nude drawing. It was this intellectual approach to learning technique that
national biographies such as Eichner’s failed to convey.
By promoting the conventional and unchallenging view of the ‘female’
artist, it seems that Eichner and other German biographers were either
unable or unwilling to recognise the ambition and professionalism of
Münter (both seen to be male qualities) and to present this to a German
audience. While it is possible that Eichner sought to protect her reputa-
tion, countering nineteenth-century German stereotypes of women artists
as merely out to snare a husband, caricatured ruthlessly in popular jour-
nals such Simplicissimus as ‘das Malweib’ (the painter-female), he deflects
and reduces her artistic agency. Protection of the reputation of a woman
artist who chose not to marry and pursue her career is ultimately achieved
through the creation of a passive and guileless personality.
Eichner’s representation of the artist as innocent and childlike also
profoundly affected the evaluation of Münter’s art. In a chapter enti-
tled ‘Das Wesen Gabriel Münter’ (Eichner 1957, pp. 26–36), Eichner
links the personality of the artist with the essential nature of her art.
By creating a character, who is unteachable and unaffected by the real
world, Eichner makes a number of false assertions. He states that she first
encountered ‘Kunst’ (real Art) aged 24 with Kandinsky (Eichner 1957,
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p. 35), when in fact she had studied portraiture and landscape in 1897
with the artist Ernst Bosch, and later formally under Ernst Spatz at the
Düsseldorf Ladies Art School (Gossman 2019, p. 15). Eichner also writes
that, during the six months she spent in Tunisia, she was unmoved by
what she saw and mostly stitched Russian beadwork following Kandin-
sky’s designs (Eichner 1957, p. 52). The American art historian Roger
Benjamin with Cristina Ashjian has since shown that she photographed
and painted extensively alongside Kandinsky throughout their time there
(Ashjian and Benjamin 2015, pp. 67–76). Eichner’s dismissal of Münter’s
life before meeting Kandinsky, and the suggestion that she was not artis-
tically active during the early years she spent travelling with him, implies
that art did not occupy the central position in her life as it did for
Kandinsky or that she was unable to process complex new environments.
Similarly, Eichner’s linking of simplicity in Münter with the German
avant-garde’s admiration of authenticity and so-called primitive art is
problematic. Eichner refers to her as a ‘Naturkind’ (a child of nature) and
‘eine echte Primitive’ (a true primitive) (Eichner 1957, p. 39). Quoting
Kandinsky’s now-famous comment to Münter about her natural talent,
‘You are a hopeless pupil—it’s impossible to teach you anything. You
can only do what is grown within you. You have everything instinctively
by nature. What I can do for you is protect and cultivate your talent so
that nothing false creeps in’ (Eichner 1957, p. 38), Eichner suggests that
Münter did not grow as an artist through contact with others. However,
Münter, in a letter to Kandinsky in 1922, counters such an approach,
writing: ‘Perhaps you don’t know that our relationship was not felt by
me to be that of woman to man, but more like a child to a mother—a
mother who does not help a child to grow up, but rather wants to keep
it as it is—a credulous, loyal child’.4 Münter and Eichner interpret the
importance of personal growth and art very differently.
While Eichner viewed simplicity of form in Münter’s art as an indica-
tion of the artist’s childlike personality, other German biographers did not
reach the same conclusion about her male contemporaries. A number of
Blaue Reiter artists, such as August Macke, Franz Marc and the expres-
sionist Künstlergruppe Brücke, were inspired by art created by ‘primitive’
cultures and by children, but there is no suggestion that they were actually
childlike in their attitudes or behaviour (Frascina et al. 2007, pp. 62–
81). Behr comments: ‘as a consequence of this perception of her work
as aligned with nature, never capable of approaching male artists’ subli-
mation of the primitive into high art, scholarly appraisal of Münter’s
reinvention of lesser genres—landscape, still life, portraiture, interiors—

has been sorely neglected’ (Behr and Hoberg 2005, 50). It was not
until the 2017 exhibition Malen ohne Umschweife at the Lenbachhaus,
Munich, that Isabelle Jansen provided a more complex evaluation of how
Münter interacted with ‘primitive art’ including children’s art (Jansen
2017, pp. 135–82).
It is important to note just how subtly and deeply both Münter and
Kandinsky did in fact engage with ‘primitive art’. It is likely that Kandin-
sky’s essay ‘Über die Formfrage’ (On Form), published in Der Blaue
Reiter Almanach, 1912, resulted from intense discussion and exploration
of the subject with Münter and the other Blaue Reiter artists. Kandinsky
writes: ‘As form is just the expression of the inner content of the artist
and as the inner content is different among different artists, it is clear that
at any one time there can be many different forms, which are equally as
good’ (Kandinsky 1912, p. 140). He emphasises that all art, including
modern art, must above all focus on inner impulses and not what is
outwardly visible. There could be no hierarchy of styles in art. Kandinsky
and Münter (unlike the cubists or Künstlergruppe Brücke artists, who
borrowed directly from African or Polynesian art), believed that Blaue
Reiter artists must ‘feel’ their own way towards new and original artforms,
just as artists from the past or other cultures had done. In this, Münter’s
art synchronised entirely with Kandinsky’s theories.
Thus, when Kandinsky compiled the Blaue Reiter Almanach, he
included two of Münter’s paintings and several examples of the German
and Russian folk art that the couple collected and displayed in their
home. Münter had been the first Blaue Reiter artist to learn the ‘Hin-
terglasmalerei’ (behind glass painting) technique practised by Bavarian
peasants in Murnau, with Kandinsky later taking up the art form. Both
artists displayed these images in their home, the ‘Russenhaus’ (Russian
House) in Murnau and their apartment in Munich. Alessandra Comini
notes in her essay ‘Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German
Expressionism’ (2018, p. 161) that examples of ‘Hinterglas’ painting can
also be found in Marshall, Texas, suggesting that Münter may have first
come across the technique amongst the German immigrants that she met
when she travelled there in 1899. Comini expresses surprise that Münter’s
travels in America have been so neglected by art scholars.
The artist’s complex intellectual engagement with folk art can be seen
most successfully in her still life ‘Stilleben mit Heiligem Georg’ (Still
Life with Saint George), 1911 (Fig. 3.1). Despite Münter referring to
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Fig. 3.1 Gabriele Münter, ‘Stilleben mit Heiligem Georg’, 1911, oil on board,
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München
such paintings in a letter to Kandinsky as ‘gamaaalt kitschisch’ (paaainted

kitscheee), the American Bibiana Obler in her book Intimate Collabora-
tions has demonstrated that Münter was exploring highly original ideas of
composition, authenticity and identity (Obler 2014, pp. 31–44). Münter
places Bavarian and Russian folk art together, denying a hierarchy of any
particular culture. Instead, she is interested in the spiritual interaction of
forms and creates a complex work of art where tension and harmonies
between objects dissolve conventional art composition rules. Kandinsky
described this approach to the still life in his reference to Paul Cézan-
ne’s work in his treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Kandinsky 1912,
p. 64), writing: ‘He understood how to make a spiritual being out of
a cup, or better said, to recognise a being within this cup. He raised
the “nature morte” to a height where objects which are “dead” on the
outside become alive on the inside’.5 It is significant that Cézanne died in
October 1906, at which time Münter and Kandinsky lived in Sèvres near
Paris. Both artists would therefore have had the opportunity to view the
large retrospective exhibition of 56 of his works at the Salon d’automne
and read the journal articles written in his honour. Eichner’s failure to
link Münter’s exploration of ‘low art’ and ‘high art’ as being motivated
by the same curiosity as her male colleagues is a denial of her complexity
as an artist.
We begin, then, to see the limitations of a biography that interprets
the life of its subject within a national framework, especially if that
subject does not conform to society’s expectations or norms. Eichner,
as a German academic, despite his close admiration of his life partner,
seems to have struggled with how he should best depict a German woman
artist. The pre-World War I Wilhelmine Germany, in which Münter grew
up, discouraged women from being active politically or economically.
Eichner, therefore, had few precedents of women artists being the subject
of biography.6 Both Wilhelmine and Nazi ideology had strictly defined
women’s positions in society, requiring women to take up the role of
nurturer, wife and mother while men were active in the world at large.
A German woman’s destiny lay above all in motherhood and the well-
defined spheres of ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (Children, Kitchen, Church).
Münter had fulfilled none of these roles. By identifying Münter as a naïve
and instinctive artist and the polar opposite of her partner Kandinsky,
the opportunity to examine the artistic cross-fertilisation that took place
between Kandinsky and Münter was missed.
Transnational Biography
and a Reinstatement of Multiple Identities
The first turning point for a re-evaluation of Münter came in the late
1980s and early 1990s with the rise of a feminist art criticism that
sought to rebalance women’s position in art through a re-examination
of gender, race and class. While conventional art history texts still largely
ignored or underplayed her significance—as late as 1993, the presti-
gious American publication Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940
showed paintings by all of her Blaue Reiter contemporaries but none by
Münter, and the 1988 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Art gave no
reference for her either as an individual artist or as a member of Der
Blaue Reiter—feminist approaches challenged conventional stereotypes
that women artists could only imitate their male counterparts rather than
innovate. A pioneering study of the female artists of the expressionist
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movement by Shulamith Behr (1988), and research by Annegret Hoberg

with the Gabriele Münter und Johannes Eichner Stiftung at the Lenbach-
haus Museum in preparation for the artist’s first retrospective in 1992
(Friedel and Hoberg 1992), began to give greater weight to Münter’s
international background, extending beyond her time with Kandinsky.
Significantly, Gisela Kleine’s seminal 1994 German biography Gabriele
Münter und Wassily Kandinsky seeks a total change of perspective, care-
fully researching her years of travel and describing her as a ‘weltoffene,
junge Malerin’ (a young painter, who was open to the world).
Transnational approaches in more recent biographies emphasise that
she came from a German-American family and spoke fluent English. Her
mother was born in America and her father had lived there for many
years, only returning to Germany at the start of the American Civil War.
Following her parents’ death, she and her sister travelled extensively in
America from 1898 to 1900, and her experiences provide an early indi-
cator of how Münter was to learn new skills in new environments. She
visited each of her mother’s sisters across Texas and the Midwest and
started to document her family with her Kodak Eastman (No. 2) camera,
taking more than 400 photographs, as well as making portrait sketches
(Friedel 2006).
Contrary to Eichner’s statement that Münter lacked an awareness of art
pre-1900, Behr notes that the photographs and sketches she made there
show a subtle understanding of composition and the ‘art nouveau’ style
(Behr and Hoberg 2005, p. 51). Her relatives’ future-oriented American
outlook—Behr quotes the cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, who wrote
that ‘Empire moves outward in space as a way of moving forward in time;
the prospect that opens up is not just a special scene but a projected
future development’ (Behr and Hoberg 2005, p. 52)—may also have
inspired the 23-year-old Münter to become a professional artist on her
return to Germany in 1900. Strong independent female role models in
the form of her pioneering relatives whom she avidly photographed, and
debates around the ‘New Woman’, would also have impressed the young
Münter, who took up art classes in Munich and rode confidently around
the countryside on her bicycle.
Transnational biographies from America, England and Germany ‘re-
present’ an artist, whose identity and experience spanned two conti-
nents—America and Europe—and reveal her varied interactions with
non-German groups including family, friends, art critics and other artists.
We know that Münter was fluent in French, Danish and Swedish, all
languages that she learnt from interacting with other cultures. Here a
‘liquid identity’, as described by the Turkish writer Elif Shafak in her TED
Talk of September 2017, where the identity of an individual can encom-
pass a number of national identities enhancing their creative powers,
becomes a far more useful tool in exploring Münter. This identity is
not a restrictive ‘othering’ imposed on its subject. Rather, it is formless,
absorbing cultures and reshaping them to become an integral part of the
artistic creative process.
Turning to Kandinsky, it is increasingly clear that transnational
approaches in biography are revealing previously underestimated German
influences on his art. He came to Munich in 1897, aged 30, leaving
behind a successful academic career as a lawyer to retrain as an artist. His
choice of Germany mirrored that of many of his countrymen, who sought
to leave behind the autocratic Russian political system for a freer life.
However, Kandinsky also had artistic reasons for choosing this country. In
his essay ‘Reminiscences’ (1913), written for Sturm magazine, Kandinsky
writes that an opera visit to see Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin in Moscow
inspired him to believe that visual art could develop and attain the same
power as music. Significantly, it surpassed in importance the famous
encounter he had with the French Impressionist artist Claude Monet’s
‘Haystacks’ (Kandinsky 1978, p. 39). Munich was, in many ways, a home-
coming—his heritage included a German-speaking grandmother, who had
brought him up on German fairy tales. Once in Germany, Kandinsky
wrote his art essays in German, made notes on his paintings in German
(Benjamin 2015, p. 45) and firmly believed that Munich rather than Paris
was the best location for him to promote his views on art and abstraction
(Kleine 2015, p. 274). The extent to which he identified with the culture
can also be seen in photographs taken by Münter of him wearing the
traditional Bavarian costume with Lederhosen at their home in Murnau.
By other Blaue Reiter artists, however, he was still viewed as a foreigner,
with Macke stating quite simply ‘He is an Asian’.7
Kandinsky’s ability to span two cultures counters previous narratives
that a uniquely Russian mindset drove his experiments in abstrac-
tion. Kandinsky travelled frequently back and forth between Russia and
Germany and only left Germany, which he regarded as his home, when
forced to by war. He wrote: ‘The Russians view me as foreign and don’t
need me. The Germans are good to me (at least better than the Russians).
I grew up half German, my first language, my first books were German, I
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feel Germany is a motor … I have a good feeling towards Germany. And

lastly …. my little Ella is German’.8
The statement that ‘Germany is a motor’ is significant, when we
consider Kandinsky’s first important work on his theory for abstrac-
tion, Über das Geistige in der Kunst conceived in 1910 and published
in 1912. The American art historian Lisa Florman, following extensive
new research, argues that the basis of this text should be viewed in the
context of G.W.F. Hegel’s 1818–1829 Lectures on Aesthetics (Florman
2014, p. 1). In his writings, Kandinsky sets out what he views as being
wrong in representational art and argues that an industrialised society
must be healed through art. Kandinsky anticipates abstract art becoming
the most effective pathway towards this healing, as the paintings invoke
feelings in the viewer directly via the artist’s perception of the world. Like
Hegel, Kandinsky believed that music through abstraction had surpassed
the visual arts in expressing the whole. By abstracting form in the visual
arts, he believed it would be possible for painting to regain its relevance
(Florman 2014, p. 18).
Florman suggests that Über das Geistige can be seen as Kandinsky’s
direct response to Hegel’s announcement of the ‘Death of Art’ in Western
culture. She comments that Kandinsky’s choice of the German word
‘Geist’ for the self-conscious spirit and his opening phrase ‘Every work
of art is a child of its time’ addresses key language and passages in
Hegel. Florman continues: ‘Kandinsky’s decision to begin his text with
a passage drawn from the end of Aesthetics might easily be seen as part of
a larger effort to reopen the latter’s closure and thereby revise its histor-
ical trajectory’ (Florman 2014, pp. 5–6). It is interesting to note that
while references to ‘Geist’ (spirit) or ‘geistlich’ (spiritual) have often been
interpreted by Anglophone biographers as a link to Russian spirituality or
theosophy, Florman’s analysis points towards Kandinsky’s writing on the
‘spirit’ in German because he wanted his language to match the clarity of
Hegel and other German philosophers (Florman 2014, p. 1).
We also see Kandinsky continue to draw deep inspiration from music to
develop his art. Both he and Münter were talented musicians. Kandinsky
interpreted colours as having sounds and referred to his paintings as
containing ‘Leitmotive’. He was also profoundly affected by a concert
of music by Arnold Schoenberg in Munich in January 1911 and began to
refer to his most abstract paintings as ‘Compositions’, suggesting a free
selection of marks or notes on the canvas. However, Kandinsky believed
that these marks must always contain memories of images bound to the
real world. When back in Russia painting during the Revolution, he

refused to align his work with the Russian Constructivist painters, stating
defiantly: ‘Just because an artist uses “abstract” methods, it does not mean
that he is an “abstract” artist. It doesn’t even mean that he is an artist.
Just as there are enough dead triangles (be they white or green), there
are just as many dead roosters, dead horses or dead guitars. One can
just as easily be a “realist academic” as an “abstract academic”. A form
without content is not a hand, just an empty glove full of air’ (Düchting
2000, p. 63). Kandinsky’s theory for abstract art consistently retained the
German philosophical system that had guided his early thinking.
Münter and Kandinsky: Abstraction

Through Transnational Identity
We have seen how Münter and Kandinsky shared complex national iden-
tities, and it is likely that together they were able to understand the
transitions each artist needed to make in order to paint works that tran-
scended current national art trends. It is significant that while Eichner
states that Münter could not remember the philosophical conversations
she had had with Kandinsky (Eichner 1957, p. 23), she wrote in 1923
in a letter to him after they had parted that his most creative years had
taken place at her side. She writes: ‘I am sure I remember very well, that I
gave you many artistic suggestions, impulses, initiatives. I also remember
that you spoke of your eternal gratitude and I doubt very much that
you will achieve the heights of the works you made in the “unhappy”
years of 1909–1914 again’.9 Münter firmly believed that she was an active
participant in the relationship.
In Murnau in 1908, Kandinsky and Münter began to reinterpret boldly
the traditional landscape of Bavaria and to push the boundaries of art
in new directions. They had spent the previous year in Paris, where the
couple had seen the ‘wild’ paintings of Les Fauves led by Henri Matisse,
but they chose to return to Germany to work. Münter, inspired by Matis-
se’s idea of synthesis and its application in colour and line, discussed
his methods with the Russian artist Alexej Jawlensky, a former pupil.
As a group, she, Kandinsky, Jawlensky and his Russian partner Mari-
anne von Werefkin painted throughout the summer. In ‘Blue Mountain’,
1908, Münter permanently moved away from the Impressionist style and
her work became stark in its composition but powerfully expressive. She
avoids all sentimental German Heimat (homeland) themes and the rustic
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Bavarian scenery is newly experienced through planes of bright clashing

colours. Münter was confidently producing the ‘abstracted’ art, departing
from nature, which French critics had denounced so vehemently at the
scandalous 1905 Fauve exhibition. Her transnational experiences guided
her work.
Kandinsky’s ‘Sketch for Composition II’, painted in 1909, shows the
process of abstraction still further, but just as with Münter, in these
early stages of development, his work still includes figuration. He retains
imagined elements of Russian willows, lovers and jumping horsemen to
reinforce emotions of joyfulness and vitality in the landscape. Biogra-
phers have focused on the exuberant Russian imagery of this painting,
but Kandinsky was in fact ‘composing’ with diverse cultural images.
Recent research by Ashjian and Benjamin in their book Kandinsky and
Klee in Tunisia, 2015, demonstrates how motifs gathered in Africa were
being reused in Murnau. ‘Sketch for Composition II’ blends Russian and
German landscape motifs with Arab horsemanship, the leaping horses
mirroring Kandinsky’s gouache ‘Arab Riders’, 1905 (the same riders he
had painted in the ‘Russenhaus’ that Münter had bought in Murnau)
(Ashjian and Benjamin 2015, pp. 59, 91). In contrast to the contem-
porary Russian artist Mikhail Larionov, who stated ‘we are against the
West’ (Figes 2003, p. 426) and opposed all European influences in his
art, Kandinsky’s art is a collage of diverse transnational images chosen for
the transcendent emotions they generate rather than conforming to any
national style.
Conclusion
An examination of Eichner’s biography of Münter makes very apparent
the limitations of a national approach to complex, cross-cultural lives. In
Münter’s case, her position as an internationally rooted woman artist in
Germany did not fit into the contemporary social narratives of women
artists. Eichner’s well-meaning attempt to rehabilitate her reputation to
a German audience led to a misleading narrative of her life and work.
Placed alongside a successful and already famous male artist, her story
was reduced to a ‘national’ view of what was expected of a German
woman artist. The strength of this narrative persisted for decades and was
only challenged through international feminist art theory from America
and Britain. German biographers such as Gisela Klein have subsequently
succeeded in reframing Münter’s life through a transnational approach,
embracing the experiences she had with other artists and avant-garde
groups. By not ‘othering’ the female artist and giving both individuals
equal status, a more balanced view of the couple has emerged. The 2017
exhibition at the Lenbachhaus, which included Münter’s photography
and a sensitive examination of ‘primitive’ and children’s art, showed that a
thoughtful avoidance of hierarchies of value and status in art can also help
us gain insight into previously ignored aspects of an artist’s development.
In the case of Kandinsky, new biographies are providing us with
a deeper understanding of his German heritage placed alongside his
Russian origins. As a foreigner living in Germany, Kandinsky also became
‘othered’ as the ‘spiritual’ Russian. But while the imagery of his paint-
ings has often been interpreted as Russian, careful analysis of his writing
by Florman has shown how his theories on art are subtly connected
to German philosophical discourse. Further research by Benjamin and
Ashjian on his experiences in Tunisia have shown how images were taken
across cultures and used in paintings such as ‘Sketch for Composition II’.
This enhances our understanding of his art theories as it becomes clearer
that Kandinsky aimed to create paintings that were linked to cultures but
not bound to national culture.
The transnational approach has immensely enriched our understanding
of ‘how it was’, as Eichner puts it, in all its complexity and subtlety. This
shift in perspective refines our insights into Europe’s early abstract art
movement, and it is to be hoped that it will continue to stimulate fruitful
investigation of the role of connections between artists and groups—not
only in Wilhelmine Germany, but also with other European avant-garde
groups in France, Italy, Scandinavia and the former territories of the
Hapsburg Empire.
Notes
1. ‘ein Beitrag zu der wachsende Forschung’ (Eichner 1957, p. 10). All
translations from German provided in this chapter are my own.
2. ‘Beim Manne ist Geist und Verstand, beim Weibe Gemüth und Gefühl
überwiegend, den Mann ziert Mut, Entschlossenheit, Festigkeit und
Thatkraft, das Weib Schüchternheit, Hingebung, Anmut und Sanftmut’
(Krämer 2016, p. 31).
3. ‘Ich lebte im Prophetenstand jetzt bin ich Weltkind’ (Friedel and Hoberg
1992, p. 67).
58 S. BODE
4. ‘Vielleicht weißt du es nicht, dass unser Verhältnis in meinem Gefühl nicht

eigentlich wie Frau zu Mann, sondern mehr wie Kind zur Mutter war—
aber eine Mutter die dem Kind nicht hilft erwachsen zu werden, sondern
es so behalten will, wie es ist—ein gläubiges, treues Kind’ (Kleine 2015,
p. 521).
5. ‘Er verstand aus einer Tasse ein beseeltes Wesen zu schaffen oder richtiger
gesagt in dieser Tasse ein Wesen zu erkennen. Er hebt die “Nature Morte”
zu einer Höhe, wo die äußerlich “toten” Sachen innerlich lebendig werden’
(Kandinsky 1912, p. 64).
6. Interestingly, a biographical note written about Angelika Kauffmann
(1701–1807), in the 1840 edition of the Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiser-
tums Oesterreich, focuses heavily on the professional training of the artist.
This suggests that prior to the German reunification in 1871, women’s
gender or intellect was not an issue regarding the study of art.
7. ‘Er ist Asiate’ (Kleine 2015, p. 413).
8. ‘Die Russen halten mich für fremd und brauchen mich nicht. Die
Deutschen sind gut zu mir (wenigstens besser als die Russen). Ein halb
deutsch bin ich aufgewachsen, meine erste Sprache, meine ersten Bücher
waren Deutsch, als Motor fühle ich Deutschland … Ein gutes Gefühl habe
ich zu Deutschland. Und schließlich … mein Ellchen (Gabriele Münter) ist
eine Deutsche’ (Kleine 2015, p. 275).
9. ‘Ich glaube mich wohl zu erinnern, daß ich Dir manche künstlerische Anre-
gungen, Impulse, Initiativen gegeben habe. Ich erinnere mich auch, daß
du von ewiger Dankbarkeit gesprochen hast. Deine Entwicklung hast du
an meiner Seite durchgemacht, und ich zweifle sehr, ob Du die Höhe der
Werke der „Unglücksjahre“ von 1909–1914 noch einmal erreichen kannst’
(Kleine 2005, p. 522).
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Retrospektive. Munich: Prestel.
Frevert, Ute. 2016. ‘Von Männerängsten und Frauenwünschen:
Geschlechterkämpfe 1850–1950’. In Geschlechterkampf: Franz von Stuck
bis Frida Kahlo, edited by Felix Krämer, 31–40. Munich: Prestel.
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ssman/munter.pdf.
Haftmann, Werner. 1949. ‘Der Blaue Reiter’. Die Zeit, 15 September 1949.
Accessed 7 February 2020. https://www.zeit.de/1949/37/der-blaue-reiter.
Hamilton, George Heard. 1993. Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jansen, Isabelle. 2017. Gabriele Münter 1877–1962: Malen Ohne Umschweife.
Munich: Prestel.
Kandinsky, Nina. 1978. Kandinsky et moi. Paris: Flammarion.
Kandinsky, Wassily, 1912. Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Munich: Piper.
Kandinsky, Wassily, Franz Marc and Klaus Lankheit, eds. 2009. The Blaue Reiter
Almanac. Berlin: Piper.
Kleine, Gisela. 2015. Gabriele Münter Und Wassily Kandinsky: Biographie Eines
Paares. Frankfurt am Main: Insel.
60 S. BODE
Lucie-Smith, Edward. 1989. Movements in Art Since 1945. London: Thames &
Hudson.
Moeller, Magdalena, ed. 1994. Der Frühe Kandinsky 1900–1910. Munich:
Hirmer.
Nicholson, Harold, ed. 1988. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford: University
Printing House.
Obler, Bibiana K. 2014. Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky & Münter, Arp &
Tauber. New York: Yale.
Roditi, Edouard. 1980. Dialogues on Art. Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson.
Roque, Georges. 2019. Qu’est-Ce Que L’art Abstrait. Paris: Gallimard.
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Blauen Reiters. Berlin: Reimer.
CHAPTER 4
Frances Hodgkins: A Twentieth-Century

Modernist Painter Torn Between Nations
Samantha Niederman
Born in Dunedin into an English family in a Scottish settlement, Frances

Hodgkins (1869–1947) has been and continues to be heralded as New
Zealand’s ‘major historical expatriate artist and as something of a cultural
icon’ (Buchanan et al. 1995, p. 1).1 From 1914 until her death, the artist
was based in England, but her present placement in British Modernism
has been demoted to a mere footnote. Is Hodgkins’s current obscure
fate in Britain due to the fact that British Modernism embodies a mainly
English canon? By focusing on Hodgkins’s transnational artistic training
and painting excursions abroad, I will widen the view to recent schol-
arly thought concerning the connection between British Modernism and
‘Englishness’, and the premise that due to uncertainties at the end of
the First World War, the reconstitution of ‘Englishness’ redefined the
nation and its cultural assets. This will be demonstrated by revealing the
importance of nationality to English art critics through relevant exhibition
reviews and articles and, consequently, the marginalisation of non-English
S. Niederman (B)
History of Art Department, University of York, York, UK
e-mail: sjn518@york.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_4
62 S. NIEDERMAN
artists as outsiders, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1940s
and 1950s, modern British art had come to be redefined to encom-
pass an international, progressive movement unbounded by geographies,
climates, cultural barriers and national schools. More recent and contem-
porary discourse, however, has reverted to excluding Hodgkins from the
scholarship on British Art History as a whole as well as that of neo-
Romanticism.2 Therefore, this essay will propose that there is a need
to continue to revise the mainly English canon of British Modernism in
order to incorporate this visionary modernist from a provincial foreign
location, as compared with her contemporaries from London such as Paul
Nash or Vanessa Bell.
In 1893, Hodgkins trained under the visiting Italian painter Girolamo
Nerli, who exerted the most significant influence over painting in New
Zealand in the late nineteenth century. By the age of 26, she had enrolled
in the Dunedin School of Art, where she gained first-class passes. During
these formative years in New Zealand, she painted watercolour figure
studies of children and of Māori women, with occasional landscapes in
an Impressionist style. Hodgkins’s colonial background emancipated her
from the societal shackles of many English women artists of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, and enabled her actively to navigate
between spheres designed mainly for male artists at this time. Hodgkins
was not only the first female artist of her generation to abandon her
successful career in New Zealand in order to train in Europe, but she
also became the first New Zealander to be ‘hung on the line’ at the Royal
Academy in 1903 (Gill 1993, pp. 164–65).
While on the Continent, Hodgkins abandoned her earlier Impres-
sionist phase in order to experiment with a completely radical form of
Modernism rooted in the interrelationship between abstraction, orna-
mentation and the underlying essence, or life force, of the objects and
places she chose to depict. In Paris, her work was exhibited widely, for
instance with the Société Internationale Aquarellistes and the Société
Internationale de la Peinture a l’Eau, and by 1910, Hodgkins became the
first female artist to be appointed to teach watercolours at the Académie
Colarossi. When she returned to England, did her transnational frame of
reference continue to be principally French, or was she able to assimi-
late Anglo-French aesthetics into her art, based on a dialogue between
the English ‘native’ tradition and foreign influences? The isolation of
Hodgkins’s works throughout the interwar period was largely based on
factors surrounding her foreign national identity as well as her evolving
4 FRANCES HODGKINS: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY … 63
transcultural aesthetic assimilations. By addressing issues of cultural geog-

raphy and the role of nationality against a backdrop of active ‘cultural
imperialism’ in England, this essay will expand the discourse on the notion
of ‘Englishness’ versus that which is considered ‘un-English’.3
‘Englishness’ of Art Made in Britain

Beginning with her initial voyage from the New to the Old World up
until her death in England, Hodgkins found herself endlessly nego-
tiating between the ‘contending claims of Europe and New Zealand’
(McCormick 1954, p. 62). Just before the turn of the century in 1895,
Hodgkins determined, ‘I have only one prominent idea and that is that
nothing will interfere between me and my work’ (Gill 1993, p. 37).
Although the Victorian, colonial population recognised Hodgkins for her
advanced use of Impressionism, the artist yearned to achieve more than
just a reputation as a New Zealand Impressionist. In fact, Hodgkins aimed
to ‘measure [herself] against the moderns’ of Europe (Stephens 1913,
p. 5). The turning point in Hodgkins’s career as an artist came when she
decided to leave New Zealand for her first of three separate journeys to
the Continent and to Britain in 1901 (the second was in 1906 and the
third in 1913, following which England served as a base for the remainder
of her life).
The first exhibition of Hodgkins’s work in London was in 1902 and
was organised by a fellow artist and agent from New Zealand, John
Baillie. In London, at this time, there was a significant colonial art society,
and Hodgkins’s work was included in the show Colonial Artists. Upon
attending the exhibition, however, Hodgkins cynically observed, ‘It was
odd to find oneself flanked, as in the old Dunedin days by Miss Joel
& Annie Black—Miss J. showed some flowers, old friends, & Miss B.
a frightening sort of figure thing—quite in her old style’ (Gill 1993,
p. 141). The tone of Hodgkins’s letter makes it quite clear that the artist
desired to break free from her association with ‘lady painters’ from her
Antipodean past. Yet Hodgkins continued to associate her art with colo-
nial exhibiting societies and institutions until 1929, both in England and
back in New Zealand and Australia.4 At the same time, her modernist
pictorial language became increasingly disparaged in New Zealand. When
reviewing her paintings exhibited in the New Zealand Academy of Fine
Arts, Charles Wilson, an art critic from Wellington, wrote, ‘I may be too
old fashioned but I regret I fail to understand much of Miss Hodgkins’s
64 S. NIEDERMAN
present day methods. To me they convey an impression of something like

artistic chaos’ (1928, n.p.).
Despite her determination to pursue a successful international repu-
tation for her increasingly experimental work, Hodgkins admitted in an
interview, ‘I would hesitate to recommend a New Zealand girl to follow
the road I travelled… I feel that if I had known what was before me,
I should never have had the courage to begin’ (Stephens 1913, p. 4).
Hodgkins made this remark at the peak of her Australasian career, but
Europe was where she wished to be recognised for her newly minted
modernist idioms. In fact, her work produced in Europe and in Britain,
rather than in New Zealand, was significantly more modern, and by 1941,
Eric Newton, a prominent English art critic, acknowledged Hodgkins
as ‘the subtlest and most adventurous colourist in Europe’ (p. 473).
However, Hodgkins’s path to this point was wrought with struggles
against the safeguard of ‘Englishness’ throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
For example, she faced an onslaught of dismissive reviews of her art such
as one anonymous critic, who, after seeing her work in the exhibition
The Society of Women Artists held at the Royal Institute Galleries, 195
Piccadilly, wrote of ‘a good deal that is not very agreeable… Miss F.
Hodgkins’s “Night Peace” is a clever exercise in conscious distortion,
carried perhaps a little too far’ (1919, n.p.).
What then exactly could be determined as characteristics of true
‘Englishness’ during this time? Roger Fry and Clive Bell, two leading
English critics and painters, expressed interest in formalist art theory
and pushed pictorial design as the legitimate expression of English
Modernism. This particular impetus enabled artists who worked within
the confines of Bloomsbury aesthetics to dominate most discussions on
this movement not only during the interwar period but also up to the
present. However, attention to the technical and formal aspects of design
in Modernism was just one of a variety of responses to experiences of
modernity in England after the First World War. As David Peters Corbett
has noted, ‘The art between the end of the Great War and the reappear-
ance of Modernism as a significant force towards the end of the 1920s
remains a neglected subject’ (1997, p. 2). Indeed, artists outside the
peripheries of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Hodgkins, learned to avoid
trends by painting in highly individualised methods in order to capture
the life force within all animate and inanimate entities, but their work has
remained marginalised. In 1918, Hodgkins described her art as follows:
‘every stroke I put down comes from real conviction & is a sincere aspect
of truth—if not the whole truth’ (Gill 1993, p. 338). The recession in
England, however, proved to be a challenging time for Hodgkins as little
of her work sold, which left her destitute. In 1921, she wrote to her
mother, who was back home in New Zealand,
I cannot stay on here any longer living on hope & credit so have literally
had to send round the hat & beg fivers from my friends… In my despair
I have allowed my name to be sent into a [British] Artists Benevolent
Fund for helping those who are hard up, thro’ sickness or non-sales…
I am quite prepared to have them say Oh! She’s a New Zealander. Let
her own country support her. But I hope this will not be so—(Gill 1993,
pp. 355–56)
As she continued to face financial struggles during these fraught years

of attempting to gain recognition for her work, Hodgkins came close to
abandoning her artistic career in Britain altogether, when she booked a
ticket back to Melbourne in 1925. At the last moment, though, she was
offered employment as a fabric designer at the Calico Printers’ Associa-
tion in Manchester, which provided her with a desperately needed fixed
income to continue pursuing her art.
When Hodgkins was able to save enough money, the artist resumed her
preferred peripatetic existence with frequent sketching excursions abroad
to France throughout the 1920s and to Spain in the 1930s in order to
find fresh inspiration in the new topographies and cultural landscapes.
From Tossa de Mar, the artist wrote, ‘I am working up courage to start
on figures—The life of the village is rich & dramatic. The little shops
at night, enchanting like Dutch interiors gone Spanish—and the gilded
altars in the village churches, vulgar & gaudy, but in the dim light, like
a Rembrandt’ (Gill 1993, p. 469). Hodgkins particularly responded to
the country’s intense sunlight as can be seen with works such as ‘Ibiza
Harbour’ (Fig. 4.1), which was created during the six months she spent in
Ibiza in 1933. ‘Ibiza Harbour’ not only demonstrates Hodgkins’s effec-
tive use of colour, as she paints her landscape in the transformative sunset
light with iridescent pinks and blues, but the artist also applies a surreal-
istic technique, known as neo-primitivism, which was inspired by the folk
seascapes of the Cornish painter, Alfred Wallis. By flattening the forms of
the landscape and compressing the pictorial space, Hodgkins’s emphasis
on design and free treatment of anthropomorphically shaped nature and
vernacular architecture prefigures the works of the neo-Romantic artists,
66 S. NIEDERMAN
Fig. 4.1 Frances Hodgkins, ‘Ibiza Harbour’, c.1933, oil on canvas, Dunedin
Public Art Gallery, Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Given in 1970
by the O’Sullivan Family, in memory of Irene Stanislaus O’Sullivan
who were largely influenced by the landscapes of the eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century British Romantics. Thus, in this painting, Hodgkins
has been successful at fusing transnational influences into a harmonious
whole.
In England, during the interwar period, there was an isolationist-
driven, nationalistic or ‘little Englandism’ sentiment, ‘whose key features
included the English countryside… rural and small-town life… and an
active xenophobia’ (Wolff 2003, p. 136). The creation of a modern
English identity depended upon turning to pastoral subjects—a preoccu-
pation that extended across the arts in England at this time, such as with
the music of Vaughan Williams—along with the exclusion of reminders
from overseas. How did this insular shift affect foreign-born artists, who
produced significant English landscape paintings with a completely fresh

perspective? Why were Hodgkins’s commemorative works of the English
countryside not considered equally as celebratory of ‘Englishness’ as her
counterparts?5 Upon her initial experience in rural England, specifically
the Chiltern Hills, in 1901, Hodgkins wrote:
the beauty of the English lanes is beyond all description. We simply don’t
know what green is out in N.Z. The endless sloping fields with every
imaginable & unimaginable shade of green… it was like fairyland to me…
Certainly my first introduction to English landscape made a very deep
impression on me. (Gill 1993, p. 91)
From Hodgkins’s ‘first introduction’ to an English ‘fairyland’ at the

turn of the century until the 1940s, she continually felt inspired by the
beauty of Britain, as can be seen with a late work entitled ‘Green Valley,
Carmarthenshire’ (Fig. 4.2) from 1942. During the disturbances of the
Second World War, Hodgkins escaped to rural Wales and wrote, ‘To me
it is paradise… Fine country which will be better still in a week or so—
harvest in full swing’ (Gill 1993, p. 528). In this gouache, Hodgkins
enlivens this tranquil autumnal landscape of muted earthy colours with
an unexpected use of pink—perhaps again painting reflected light from
an evening’s sunset. She distils the essence of the abstracted Welsh loca-
tion in this work. Indeed, when considered within the overall context of
British Modernism at this time, Hodgkins’s art not only dovetails with
her neo-Romantic contemporaries, such as Graham Sutherland and Paul
Nash, but also prefigures the majority of her male British modernist coun-
terparts, as she determined to‘—Get the character & essential spirit of the
place in the simplest manner—’as early as 1917 (Gill 1993, pp. 325–26).
This attempt to reclaim authentic representations of ‘Englishness’ by
means of rejecting typical expressions of industrialised modernity, through
Hodgkins’s artistic exploration of pastoralism, has been defined by Potts
(1989, p. 160) as a ‘defensive turning away from the realities and chal-
lenges of the present… that… has been incorporated into a national
mythology mobilized… to figure some essence of true Englishness’.6 Yet,
Hodgkins’s modernist pictorial language, which overtly renounces explicit
signs of what is most commonly accepted as avant-garde twentieth-
century modernity—urbanity, radicalism, mechanisations and politics, for
instance—was deemed as looking backwards, ‘with a climate of persistent
68 S. NIEDERMAN
Fig. 4.2 Frances Hodgkins, ‘Green Valley, Carmarthenshire’, 1942, gouache

on paper, Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Purchased in 1967 with
funds from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society, 20–1967
resistance and retrenchment in face of more uncompromising European

developments’ (Harrison 1981, p. 8).
Many of the English avant-garde artists exhibiting with Hodgkins,
especially those in the Seven and Five Society, were influenced by modern
art produced in Paris and had worked in the capital for extended periods
of time. When they returned to England, however, their English iden-
tity seemed to define their art more than anything else. Perhaps this was
because Winifred and Ben Nicholson, for example, also trained at the
Byam Shaw School of Art and at the Slade School of Fine Art, respectively,
prior to their experiences abroad. Conversely, Hodgkins was unique in
that she never trained within the English academic system. I would argue
that the establishment, in turn, dismissed those who studied abroad by
obscuring their place in the British art historical canon. There were other
native factions rooted within the Royal Academy, who were outspoken
critics opposed to Modernism and art produced in Paris during this time.
Artists such as Sir Alfred Munnings returned to a conservative belief that

English art should embody ‘Englishness’. The value of individualism and
formalist aesthetics, elements so vital in Modernism, was instead replaced
by the continuation of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘ambi-
tious collective enterprise to improve and promote indigenous high art,
directed to a public in the interest of national and imperial progress, the
whole backed but not determined by royal support’ (Monks 2013, p. 4).
‘Englishness’ in visual culture has been defined by Wolff (2001, p. 182)
as ‘less by its inherent characteristics than by its exclusions ’. Within the
canon of art history, ‘Englishness’ was initially distinguished in Pevs-
ner’s 1955 The Englishness of English Art in which the essential elements
of English art, such as naturalism, detachment and conservatism, were
rooted in the relationship between national character and art as well as
England’s climate and language.7 The nature of English art continued
to carry similar nationalistic undertones in David Piper’s The Genius of
British Painting by relating English art in terms of the country’s climate:
‘Any account of the Englishness of English art must begin with geogra-
phy’ (1975, p. 8). A marked variation to these definitions of ‘Englishness’
came about in 1986 with Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920,
and its framing of ‘Englishness’ as having a fluid, open-ended meaning:
‘Englishness has had to be made and re-made in and through history,
within available practices and relationships, and existing symbols and
ideas’ (Colls and Dodd 1986, p. xi). This theory of mutation is proposed
alongside the onset of modernity with its evolving social and political rela-
tions. Dodd suggests that within this national culture are two groups, who
are, simultaneously, ostracised and yet challenged to contribute. They
have been characterised as
the working class, and the Celts (Irish, Scots and Welsh). Their colonisa-
tion is… founded on an initial positioning of members… as ‘other’ to the
dominant culture… the discursive construction of a collective identity by
process of exclusion, is absolutely central to the case of the construction
of Englishness. (quoted in Corbett and Perry 2001, p. 182)
Dodd concludes, ‘the definition of the English is inseparable from that

of the non-English; Englishness is not so much a category as a relation-
ship’ (1986, p. 12). The construction of national identification involves
a form of abstracted generalisations, where the category of Britishness
always involves a conflicted relationship. Therefore, the ‘Englishness’ of
70 S. NIEDERMAN
modern art was a misleading construct of an international, cosmopolitan

identity veiled by nationalism.
Debunking Nationalism
in Modernist Artistic Identities
The 1920s has been labelled by English art historian Charles Harrison
as ‘rootless’ and as ‘an unpromising decade’, while proposing that
Modernism at this time was ‘historically uncontroversial’ (1981, p. 167).
Frances Spalding’s characterisation of these decades as a ‘period of
retrenchment’ or as ‘insular, with relatively little exchange between British
and foreign artists’, has extended into the twenty-first century (2002,
p. 107). Contrary to these standpoints, different cultural realities and
a synthesis of techniques and styles from various international aesthetic
traditions, in fact, act as the vital force in British Modernism. The
complexity of the relationship between Modernism and ‘Englishness’
begins with the understanding that national cultural identities are tran-
scended by Modernism’s focus on the cosmopolitan Continent. Despite
obvious contradictions, certain English critics in the 1920s and 1930s
championed an art with ‘a traditional English domesticity’ (Corbett
et al. 2002, p. 242). Charles Marriott frequently referenced the distinc-
tions between English and French artists where ‘the Englishman is a
subjective and the Frenchman an objective animal’, writing that ‘[if] the
Frenchman tries to be subjective he is generally only sentimental’ and ‘if
the Englishman tries to be objective he is generally bald’ (1920, p. 73).
Even though Marriott recognised that many modernist movements origi-
nated in France, he paradoxically established separate categories to group
English artists together in opposition to French artists, rather than
acknowledging the fact that there was a recurrent exchange between the
two nations. The categorisation of ‘Englishness’ was often linked with
overused, vague descriptors such as ‘native’, ‘genius’, ‘vision’ and ‘vital-
ity’ in Herbert Read’s writings as well.8 While few recognised that a
purely English modern art could not possibly exist, they, nonetheless,
suggested a specifically English perspective. For instance, in 1936, Read,
an important proponent of British Surrealism, stated:
From the moment of its birth Surrealism was an international

phenomenon… It would therefore be contrary to the movement to
present… a specifically English edition of Surrealism. We who in England
have announced our adherence to this movement have no other desire

than to pool our resources in the general effort. Nevertheless, there is an
English contribution to be made to this effort, and its strength and validity
can only be shown by tracing its sources in the native tradition of our art.
(p. 20)
The assertion that ‘Englishness’ and its ‘native tradition’ are evident,
despite Surrealism’s identity as an international movement, suggests that
the nativist stance overlooks the transnational interconnections across the
Continent and Britain at this time.
However, the popular nationalistic perspective of English art started to
shift during the late 1940s and into the 1950s. For instance, the exhi-
bition catalogue from the 1953 New Zealand tour of Twentieth Century
Drawings and Watercolours, featuring three of Hodgkins’s watercolours
and two drawings, offered an illuminating introduction by Geoffrey
Grigson in which he commented on the universality of Modernism.
Grigson wrote, ‘The individuality of the painting or drawing… is helped
into being by a strong and refreshing appetite for an international diver-
sity of influence… the artists of one country are able to feed upon the arts
of all… countries, all cultures, without consideration of time or distance’
(Tate Archives, TGA 9712.2.74). An anonymous reviewer of this British
Council exhibition praised the fact that the selection of works presented a
growing universality of art—the vanishing of the old so-called national

schools of art and the emergence of a modern eclecticism which knows no
limitations of time or space, in which all artists are free to be influenced by
all others wherever they may be, and in which progress, either to futility
or new glory, is accelerated accordingly. (1953, n.p.)
Another example can be seen with the 1955–1957 Canadian tour of

British Watercolours and Drawings of the Twentieth Century, in which
Grigson also wrote:
National characteristics are becoming less important… in the arts… the

era of aggressive nationalisms is coming to an end… it was in their heyday
that we talked so much of French art, Italian art, German art, English art
and so much over-emphasised national schools and national differences…
So it is today with the idiom of English painting, which is both English
and European, blown upon by a universal wind. (Tate Archives, TGA
200817/2/81)
72 S. NIEDERMAN
Grigson then continued to correct a critical misunderstanding regarding

Modernism, which was put forward by earlier critics such as Marriott
in 1920. Marriott had boldly written, ‘The whole subject of modern
movements in England is compromised by the fact that most of them
originated in France’ (pp. 73–74). Grigson, instead, later correctly clar-
ified, ‘We are accustomed to talk of the School of Paris and of French
painting. Yet Paris has been less a centre of French art than a place where
artists of many nations have worked and flourished and elaborated a twen-
tieth century mode’ (Tate Archives, TGA 200817/2/81). As has been
previously addressed, Hodgkins lived and worked in Paris before and after
the First World War, and in 1943, Hodgkins herself wrote about the ‘uni-
versality I ever strive after, apparent between the Ecole de Paris & FH
[Frances Hodgkins]’ in her work (Gill 1993, p. 535).
Home Away from Home

The aftermath of the First World War reawakened Hodgkins’s sense of
patriotism, so that she was often in the company of her compatriots more
so than at any other period since her first journey to London twenty
years before. Nevertheless, it was neither Hodgkins’s national identity
nor the influence of her continued interactions with New Zealand but
her extensive time spent in Paris and on the Continent that played the
most instrumental role in shaping this expatriate’s modernist visualisa-
tions, while living in England. At the same time, Hodgkins transported
historical as well as contemporary lessons learned in England to the work
she was producing while abroad. Therefore, to view Hodgkins’s life and
art in the framework of a singular canon is problematic, since the artist
successfully disintegrated national boundaries by engaging in an interna-
tionally connected community, as realised by later English critics in the
1940s and 1950s.
By examining Hodgkins’s colonial origins and cross-cultural identi-
ties together with her Continental avant-garde exchanges, this essay has
demonstrated how several prominent English art critics and subsequently
historians were not prepared to accept Hodgkins’s modern art as much
as that of her English counterparts throughout the 1920s and 1930s,
due to their nationalistic discourse. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s
that ‘Englishness’ was finally accepted more as an universal vision by
art critics such as Grigson, who later helped to define certain aspects of
‘Englishness’ with his reviews of Hodgkins’s art. Similar to many of her
British modernist contemporaries, Hodgkins’s oeuvre should be presently

redefined by its complex transnational modernist context.
Notes
1. See also Gooderham and Alty (2012), Barton (2005), and McCormick
(1954).
2. For instance, Harris (2010), Wolff (2003), Corbett et al. (2002), Wilton
(2001), Corbett and Perry (2001), Corbett (1997), Sillars (1991), Lister
(1973), and Chamot et al. (1964).
3. The term ‘cultural imperialism’ can be found in Corbett and Perry (2001,
p. 1).
4. A selection of examples include in 1908 when Hodgkins won a shared prize
in the Australian section of Women’s art at the Franco-British Exhibition
in London, the 1918 exhibition in Sydney at Anthony Hordern’s Gallery
and in 1919 when works were shown at the Australian exhibition at the
Fine Art Society, Melbourne.
5. Geoffrey Gorer, a close friend of Hodgkins, suggested that since the artist
was originally a New Zealander, she was ‘less saturated in tradition’ (1937,
p. 1082).
6. The depiction of landscapes seen as a ‘nationalist symbol’ of anti-modernity
has also been explored in Lowenthal (1991), Barringer (1993), and
Vaughan (1996).
7. Pevsner’s theories were contested in Vaughan (1990) and Barrell (1990).
8. See Read (1933a, b) and Marlborough Fine Art (1965).
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CHAPTER 5
‘No Use Calling Yourself South African. South

African Is Nothing’: Understanding
and Exploring the Concept of Place
and Nationhood in the Life and Music
of Christopher James
Marc Röntsch
Introduction
Sitting in her wheelchair in a retirement home in Ballito—a holiday desti-
nation on South Africa’s east coast—Marjorie James wears a flower in her
hair. This aesthetic effort marks the occasion: she is to be interviewed
about her late son’s life. Despite her age—91 at the time—and her phys-
ical state of gradual degradation, her memory is strong, and she has an
enviable recollection of detail. She speaks to me for just short of four
hours, so long that for the following interview scheduled for that evening,
I am unable to use the dictaphone I borrowed, as its hard drive is full.
M. Röntsch (B)
Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_5
78 M. RÖNTSCH
My interview with Marjorie James formed part of a week-long field-

work trip across South Africa to interview the family, friends and
colleagues of the composer Christopher James (1952–2008). My inter-
views probed varying theoretical questions around James’s life—with the
question of nationality, or transnationality, as a central theoretical consid-
eration. When I began this discussion with Marjorie, she scolded me at
uncomfortable length for rejecting the German ancestry she (correctly)
ascribed to me due to my Germanic sounding surname. I told her that
I favoured a South African identity—one that aligns itself to the country
of my birth and upbringing, rather than the one that the umlaut in my
surname suggests. Marjorie’s response was simple: ‘No use calling your-
self South African. South African is nothing’. For Marjorie, the notion of
nationality was straightforward: I am German, and her son was English.
Yet the narrative reconstruction of a life is rarely that simple, and as
much as I believed my own national positioning to be more complex than
Marjorie allowed for, I also believed that her son’s was equally opaque.
Christopher James’s Background

In this chapter, I will discuss the consideration of music as an interpretive
tool for life-writing praxis. My doctoral project, completed in 2017, was
to create the first-ever biographical study of the composer Christopher
Langford James. Born in Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe—in 1952, James
moved to South Africa in 1974 to pursue a music degree at the Univer-
sity of Pretoria, specialising in composition under Stefans Grové. In 1983,
James relocated to Cincinnati and worked towards a Doctorate of Musical
Arts with Professor Scott Huston, returning to South Africa in 1985.
Sadly, both during his life and posthumously, James’s music received
minimal attention from both performers and musicologists, and he died
of cancer on 4 February 2008, a few weeks after he turned 56.
James’s life was in many ways a tragic one—he suffered from mental
illness and had regular nervous breakdowns leading to frequent insti-
tutionalisation and shock therapy. His divorce and subsequently limited
access to his daughter had a severe impact on him, and in a letter to his
mother dated 6 November 2001, he wrote: ‘I’ve been through probably
the most tragic divorce in the history of music’. His final years were spent
living with his mother, as well as being under financial curatorship due to
being a victim of financial scams. In addition, James had very few friends,
almost no colleagues, and struggled to get his music performed, or even
to get performers to look at his work.
5 ‘NO USE CALLING YOURSELF SOUTH AFRICAN. SOUTH AFRICAN … 79
James’s (Trans)Nationality
My conversation with Marjorie James displays the complexity of under-
standing and finitely expressing the intersections of national identity
of white Southern Africans. This diffuse, fluid and transient sense of
national belonging can also be seen in Christopher James, which creates
a productive tension in reading his works and writing his life.
With a name like Christopher Langford James, it is not hard to imagine
he had ancestral links to Great Britain. His father, Thomas Hareshaw
(T.H.) James, was born in London on 23 June 1907 and moved to
Rhodesia in 1926 to become a tobacco farmer (Röntsch 2017, p. 36).
His mother, despite her previously-noted conviction that a South African
national identity lacks meaning, was herself born in South Africa on 23
December 1924 (ibid.), although in her interview with me she emphati-
cally insisted that she was Scottish due to her Scottish ancestry. T.H. and
Marjorie settled on Chiswana Farm in Wedza, close to Marandellas (now
Mardonera) in Rhodesia. There they had two children: Christopher Lang-
ford James, born on 20 December 1952, and Islay Frances James, born
on 4 May 1954 (Röntsch 2017, p. 37).
The fact that Christopher James was born in Rhodesia does not alone
make his national identity easily definable as Rhodesian, and throughout
his life, James identified with the nations of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, South
Africa and England. By virtue of his father’s nationality, James was enti-
tled to a British passport, an asset of particular value for white Rhodesians
and South Africans in the latter half of the twentieth century, as it gave
them an opportunity to immigrate easily if the political and racial tensions
escalated too severely. For white South Africans, it was of particular value
because it not only allowed them to travel without being touched by the
global stigma over Apartheid, but also allowed them to partake in inter-
national activities during the boycott of South Africa (Clegg and Drewett
2006, p. 134).
In 1992, James’s composition Like A Rainbow You Shone Out was
performed at the Athens Goethe-Institut, Greece, as part of the Olympia
International Composition Prize. James entered the competition under
his British nationality, as evidenced by the programme that lists James as
being from England. There are a number of reasons that could have influ-
enced James’s decision to enter as British, but the most likely is that he
was living in South Africa at the time, and would not have been allowed to
enter as a South African composer owing to the aforementioned boycott.
80 M. RÖNTSCH
However, this act of national chameleonism displays a delineated national

identity of which James was clearly aware and apparently used to his
advantage.
Yet James’s links to Britain extended beyond ancestry and passport
ownership. White Rhodesians were primarily settlers from England and
retained their English identity. In The Idea of English Ethnicity, Robert J.
C. Young writes about ‘the adoption of a new identity, in which English-
ness was an attribute of the English, but no longer directly connected to
England as such, rather taking the form of a global racial and cultural
identity’ (Young 2008, p. xi). Young theorises that Englishness was less
about a geographical connection to England, so much as an identity
attached to England through descendents, and therefore that ‘Englishness
was constructed as a translatable identity that could be adopted or appro-
priated anywhere by anyone who cultivated the right language, looks, and
culture’ (Young 2008, p. 1).
This adoption of English ethnicity, located in tradition and culture
rather than geographic proximity, was a characteristic of white Rhode-
sians. Isolation became a large part of white Rhodesian existence,
which allowed them to become ‘incapable of distinguishing between the
ephemeral and the substantial, between fantasy and reality’ (Godwin and
Hancock 1993, p. 3). White Rhodesians therefore created an idea of
Rhodesia as being faux-England, which was culturally removed from the
African cultural landscape that surrounded them (Hughes 2010, p. 5).
The Jameses, residing on their tobacco farm in Africa, were no excep-
tion. Beyond their almost stubbornly British names, their existence in
Africa was one that sought to emulate British cultural norms (Dubow
2009). Ruth Finnegan (2006) argues that a settler society attempts to
retain its connection to its place of origin by clinging to traditional
cultural characteristics. She writes: ‘Myths and images current in partic-
ular epochs or in particular cultures themselves affect family and individual
memories, and shape the ways they represent the past, even their own
experiences’ (Finnegan 2006, p. 179).
At the age of five, Christopher was sent to boarding school at Lilfordia,
and two years later, he was moved to Ruzawi, both in Rhodesia. His
boarding school experience was one that mirrored the traditional colonial
British boarding school, a fact most obviously seen in the letters he wrote
home during his boarding school days. These letters are addressed to
‘Mummy and Daddy’, and speak of British-inspired pastimes such as ‘rug-
ger’ and cricket, news of academic progress and general information about
his fellow classmates with equally British-sounding names. In a letter of 20

February 1960, Christopher writes: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy. On Friday
the Queen laid a baby boy’—referring to Prince Andrew, the third child
of Queen Elizabeth II of the British Royal Family. Here James implicitly
identifies the British Queen as ‘his’ Queen, and these Royalist loyalties
were arguably not simply boyhood idolisations. As an adult, he would
show his respect and admiration for the British Royal Family through
his music, such as his compositions Paradise Regained (to be discussed
later) as well as the dedication of his opera Cosmic Horizons to ‘His Royal
Highness Prince Edward’.
Yet throughout his life, Christopher James’s British identity always
seemed to be intertwined and challenged by an affinity to Africa. After
two years in Cincinnati from 1983 to 1985, Christopher and his wife Tina
(whom he had married in 1982) returned to South Africa, much to the
consternation of his family who believed living in the USA would afford
him more opportunities as a composer. His decision in this regard was
partly pragmatic: he had applied for two years’ study leave from his job at
the University of South Africa, and this study leave had ended, meaning
that he was contractually obliged to return to work. Yet his reason for
returning seemed to be beyond the practical, moving instead towards the
sentimental. In a letter to his doctoral supervisor, Scott Huston, on 17
February 1988, James wrote: ‘I think I will find it difficult to settle in the
USA permanently. My roots are too strongly African.’ James’s sense of
having roots in Africa aligns with Cavanagh and Veracini’s argument that
settlers ‘come to stay’ (2013, p. 1).
This expression of loyalty to Africa can be identified not only in
James’s correspondence, but also in his music, with titles such as Images
from Africa (1985–1987), African Safari (1990) and Fantasy on Two
Venda Children’s Songs (1992), as well as being the original orchestrator
of Mzilikazi Khumalo’s musical epic UShaka KaSenzangakhona. James’s
involvement in this work saw him delving deeply into an understanding
of a traditional Southern African sound world. However, alongside these
obviously African titles, his works list again shows an inclination towards
the British, particularly British literature and poetry, as seen in works such
as A John Keats Song For Melissa (n.d.), Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
(1992) and Songs of Innocence—William Blake (2005–2006).
82 M. RÖNTSCH
Africa---But Which Africa?

For the most part, James’s titles speak of Africa without too much speci-
ficity about where in the continent the music was intended to refer to,
and his use of African musical elements in his compositions (particularly
outlined in his correspondence with Scott Huston regarding Images from
Africa) also speaks of the idea of ‘African music’ as being a single idea,
‘never mind that the continent’s nearly billion people represent a diversity
of musical cultures’ (Agawu 2011, p. 50). It is thus not sufficient simply
to cast James’s identity as being part-African: more nuance is required.
As mentioned, Christopher James moved from Rhodesia to South
Africa in 1974, where he remained—with the exception of his two years
in Cincinnati—until his death in 2008. During his time in South Africa,
which encompassed more than half his life, it seems that James laid roots
in South Africa, writing to Scott Huston on 4 June 1986 that he had
‘decided to settle here and try to do something to improve the [political]
situation’. These roots in South Africa were strengthened by events such
as his parents also moving from Rhodesia to South Africa in 1978, his
marriage to a South African woman and the birth of his daughter in the
country, and the acquisition of full-time employment at the University of
South Africa.
Aside from these obvious ties to the country, James felt a particular
loyalty to the politics of the ‘New South Africa’—the post-Apartheid wave
of optimism brought on by the presidency of Nelson Mandela in 1994,
which espoused a message of transracial reconciliation and forgiveness of
the sins of Apartheid. James was particularly enamoured with Mandela;
his close friend Stephen Allen, when interviewed by me, stated that James
saw Mandela as a messianic figure. This can be seen in the dedications
of two of his pieces: Paradise Regained (1997–1999) to ‘Dr. Nelson
Rolihlahla Mandela and all other subsequent presidents of South Africa’
and Adulations! (2005) to ‘Nelson Mandela. In appreciation, affection
and respect for your dignity’. What is also of particular interest is that
these dedications to South African politics exist within a dearth of Rhode-
sian/Zimbabwean counterparts. James’s loyalty to South African politics
is decidedly not mirrored in his view of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, with
the only reference to Zimbabwean politics in his musical output being in
his doctoral composition Images from Africa, in the second movement of
which James uses former Zimbabwean President Canaan Banana’s poem
‘Liberating Love’.
What can be seen here is a triangular sense of transnational identity,

with James simultaneously experiencing belonging to a waning sense of
British imperialism, an idyllic white Rhodesian farm life and a post-1994
South African political hype. His transnational sense of self operated in
a liminal space not unlike what Breyten Breytenbach describes as ‘The
Middle World’, a space beyond exile, which is ‘inhabited by the bums
of the Global Village, … the position of being neither here nor there’,
which ‘[o]f itself implies the acceptance and practice of multiple identities’
(Breytenbach and Sienaert 2006, p. 270).
Paradise Regained
While individual James compositions point to expressions of singular
national identity, it is his symphonic tone poem Paradise Regained in
which this sense of transnationality finds its most pronounced voice. The
remainder of this chapter will examine this work as a site of musical
expression of James’s own transnational identity, as well as reconsidering
his compositional decisions as musico-autobiographical expressions of self
from a previously silenced figure.
Paradise Regained is a composition for orchestra and optional choir
of approximately 26 minutes in length, written between 1997 and 1999.
The work consists of seven movements and four interpolations. The final
movement, entitled ‘Epilogue’, was revised and extended in 2002, with
final revisions to the work undertaken two years later. Within James’s
otherwise neglected oeuvre, this piece is an outlier as it has been both
performed and recorded, and is arguably his most successful composition.
With a title like Paradise Regained—taken from John Milton’s poem
of the same name—one could interpret Paradise Regained as an expres-
sion of James’s inclination towards British culture and specifically British
literature, an inclination which, as discussed, was a common thread
through his life and musical inspirations. Yet despite the title, there are
otherwise no connections between this work and Milton’s poem, with
James clarifying on the cover page of the composition: ‘The title of
this work is the same as the English poet John Milton’s work, however
the musical piece bears very little resemblance to the poetic work’. In
contrast to the superficial link to Milton, this work’s connection to
Nelson Mandela and the New South Africa is much stronger, as can be
seen not only in the aforementioned dedication but also in its musical
characteristics.
84 M. RÖNTSCH
In the sixth movement of Paradise Regained, entitled ‘Finale’, James

seeks to represent South African reconciliation through the use of musical
quotations, creating a patchwork of pre-existing themes and allowing
them to integrate with, and collide into, each other. Here James borrows
musical material from a wide variety of sources, quoting the Chris-
tian hymns ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell’ and ‘O Sacred Head
Now Wounded’, jazz alto saxophonist Charlie Parker’s ‘Ornithology’ and
‘Anthropology’, jazz pianist Duke Ellington’s ‘In A Sentimental Mood’
and three national anthems: the British ‘God Save the Queen’ as well
as two South African anthems, ‘Die Stem van Suid Afrika’ (The Call
of South Africa) and ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (Lord Bless Africa). James
pushes the concept of the national anthem even further in the work’s
final movement, ‘Epilogue’, where he creates his own suggestion for a
New South African national anthem.
While the intention of James’s nexus of musical quotations was
arguably a musical representation of the democracy and reconciliatory
moral impetus of the post-1994 ‘New South Africa’, I would argue that
this use of musical material (not least the national anthems) can also be
read as a musical expression of James’s transnational identity, his sense of
both belonging and disbelonging.
The musical themes that James quotes in Paradise Regained carry
important historical and cultural significance. The use of ‘Die Stem’ and
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ had potent political meaning in the New South
Africa. The lyrics of ‘Die Stem’ were written by C. J. Langenhoven, an
Afrikaans poet writing against the current of British linguistic and cultural
domination of Afrikaners during the early twentieth century (Muller
2001, p. 21). The poem was set to music by Dutch Reform Church
minister Reverend Marthinus Lourens de Villiers in 1921, and from 1957
until the end of Apartheid in 1994, it was South Africa’s national anthem
(ibid.). ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ was composed by Enoch Sontonga and
was adopted as the anthem of the African National Congress (ANC),
Mandela’s political party, as early as 1925 (Muller 2001, p. 23).
The historical connotations of ‘Die Stem’ and ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’
were representative of opposing positions within the Apartheid state, one
synonymous with Apartheid and Afrikaner nationalism and the other with
the anti-Apartheid struggle and African nationalism. In a reconciliatory
effort to smooth the political transition in 1994, one verse of each of
these two anthems was used to create the post-Apartheid South African
national anthem (Ballantine 2015, p. 516).
‘God Save the Queen’, as the British national anthem, was historically
sung across the British Empire (Maake 1996, p. 145), including South
Africa and Rhodesia. In addition to being a one-time anthem of both
former British colonies, ‘God Save the Queen’ is unique in its celebration
of the country’s monarch as opposed to its flag, land or people (Richards
2001, p. 88). The connection in Paradise Regained to British royalty is
further entrenched by James’s quotation of ‘All People That on Earth Do
Dwell’, also known as ‘The Old Hundredth’, a versified setting based on
Psalm 100 for which the famous arrangement by English composer Ralph
Vaughan Williams was used for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in
1953 (Range 2012; Richards 2001).
It is not simply the fact that James quotes these themes in his work,
but rather the manner in which he musically treats them that speaks
to a kind of transnational musical expression. Unlike the current South
African national anthem’s treatment of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ and ‘Die
Stem’, which has been criticised by South African musicologist Christo-
pher Ballantine as ‘an embarrassment, a crude, simplistic juxtaposition of
two nationalist songs’ (Ballantine 2015, p. 516), James’s treatment of
the two songs speaks to a more nuanced musical understanding. In an
e-mail that Ballantine wrote in 2004 to the Chief Executive and Artistic
Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, Bongani Tembe,
he states:
But the real discovery of the morning, I think, was Christopher James’s
[Mandela] piece, which had never been heard before. Everyone, orchestral
musicians included, found the excerpt extremely moving. Its culminating
treatment of ‘Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika’ is simply the best there is; the move-
ment as a whole reveals tremendous commitment, clarity, accessibility and
brilliance.
James’s use of these themes is less superficial, as he weaves them elegantly

into each other, allowing for a true sense of musical unity and integration.
His use of ‘Die Stem’ is somewhat sparse in comparison with his use
of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ which moves throughout the orchestra, giving
the theme sonic shifts from the stately connotations of a horn fanfare to
lyrical string phrases. Upon the conclusion of these quotations, James’s
next section sees ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘All People That on Earth Do
Dwell’, the two themes associated (as noted) with British Regency, played
simultaneously. ‘O Sacred Head Now Wounded’ and ‘Ornithology’ are
86 M. RÖNTSCH
also played by trumpets and alto saxophone, respectively; however, this

modest instrumentation places them more as background material. The
result allows all of these musical motifs to interlock and interweave to
form a tapestry of contrasting musical ideas.
An anonymous reviewer wrote in a report of Paradise Regained
intended for publication with UNISA Press: ‘Mr. James’s pilgrimage, as
exposed in Paradise Regained sums up much of the common journey
experienced by many white people in South Africa over the last ten years’
(Anon., n.d.). For many white South Africans, this common journey can
be argued to be a navigation of a dual identity, a settler identity ‘no longer
European, [but] not yet African’ (Coetzee 1988, p. 11). What can be
seen in James’s use of these quotations is the musical expression of a dual
sense of nationality, with affiliation to both Britain and the New South
Africa. James’s use of one anthem associated with Britain, colonised South
Africa and the British monarchy speaks to his own sense of belonging to
England. Much like the Rhodesian understanding of England, in many
ways the England to which James is drawn is a fantasy, a mirage within
the African farmland. Yet his sense of South Africa as a bastion of recon-
ciliation is in itself somewhat naive, even if it was in step with the political
spirit of the time. For James, these two identities operated in unison
within both his life and his music, and this makes a work like Paradise
Regained an essential tool for interpretation within a life-writing project.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued for musical compositions as a site for under-
standing and a source of biographical excavation. As has been outlined,
aspects of a composer’s life may be read within a musical work, and to
overlook such works as sites for genuine biographical research is therefore
to miss an opportunity for a more nuanced approach to the artist’s life.
In writing the life of Christopher James, it is seen that James’s music can
be a site of interest and understanding. James used his music as an outlet
of expression, and in studying the life of a man whose works became less
and less heard as his life progressed, this is an important marker.
In his Out of Place: A Memoir, Edward Said wrote: ‘To me, nothing
more painful and paradoxically sought after characterizes my life than the
many displacements from countries, cities, abodes, languages, environ-
ments that have kept me in motion all these years’ (Said 1999, p. 217).
This idea of multiple belonging and disbelonging motivated me to probe
the question of nationality, and during my fieldwork, I asked all my inter-

locutors about where Christopher James considered ‘home’—all of them
gave me a different answer. Upon asking Marjorie James about her son’s
sense of home, she answered: ‘Chris’s nationality of course was English.
There was no such thing as a Rhodesian, because what is a Rhodesian?
What is a South African? What’s an American? What’s an Australian?
Nothing’. When I pointed out that her son had expressed a loyalty to
South Africa in his music, she responded: ‘No he wouldn’t call himself
South African. No he wouldn’t. I think he would’ve just called himself
British’.
Marjorie James’s answers here show her own leaning towards British
imperialism; that the national identities she names above are all from
former British colonies is unlikely to be a coincidence. To her, the concept
of identity—be it hers, mine or her son’s—is straightforward. Yet in
looking at her son’s life, it can be seen that ideas around national identity
are complex and potentially in constant flux and tension. For Christopher
James, a silenced figure within South African music, careful consideration
and reading of his compositions can provide in-depth understandings of
his own transnational position.
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Dubow, Saul. 2009. ‘How British Was The British World? The Case of South
Africa’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1: 1–27.
Finnegan, Ruth. 2006. ‘Family Myths, Memories and Interviewing’. In The
Oral History Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson,
pp. 177–183. London: Routledge.
Godwin, Peter and Ian Hancock. 1993. ‘Rhodesians Never Die’: The Impact of
War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c.1970–1980. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hughes, David McDermott. 2010. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape and
the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
James, Christopher. 1960. ‘Letter to T. H. and Marjorie James’, 20 February.
Correspondence. Christopher James Collection, Documentation Centre for
Music, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
James, Christopher. 1986. ‘Letter to Scott Huston’, 4 June. Correspondence.
Christopher James Collection, Documentation Centre for Music, Stellenbosch
University, South Africa.
James, Christopher. 1988. ‘Letter to Scott Huston’, 17 February. Correspon-
dence. Christopher James Collection, Documentation Centre for Music,
James, Christopher. 1999. Paradise Regained. Programme notes. Christopher
James Collection, Documentation Centre for Music, Stellenbosch University,
South Africa.
James, Christopher. 2001. ‘Letter to Marjorie James’, 6 November. Corre-
spondence. Christopher James Collection, Documentation Centre for Music,
James, Christopher. 2001. Cosmic Horizons. Programme notes. Christopher
James Collection, Documentation Centre for Music, Stellenbosch University,
South Africa.
James, Christopher. 2005. Adulations! Programme notes. Christopher James
Collection, Documentation Centre for Music, Stellenbosch University, South
Africa.
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19–38.
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Young, Robert J. C. 2008. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Oxford: Blackwell.
PART II
Writing the Lives of Transnational Artists

CHAPTER 6
The Spanish Translations of Richmal

Crompton’s Just William Stories
Jane McVeigh
Literary translation is a re-creative process and literary biography shares

some of its characteristics. This essay discusses these connections to intro-
duce an approach to re-creative narrative in biography in a transnational
context. It moves on to a case study on the impact of the Just William
stories by Richmal Crompton in Spain, a country where they have been
particularly successful. This is one example of the re-creation of the
afterlife of one literary artist’s work in a transnational context.
As we enter a new decade, I am writing a biography of the British
writer, Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890–1969)—known profession-
ally as Richmal Crompton—whose fiction is read by both children and
adults.1 The impact of Crompton’s work outside the UK will be one
theme in my literary biography about her life and work, about which I
shall say more below. The international reception and readership of the
Just William stories, however, would require an entirely different study.
J. McVeigh (B)
University of Roehampton, London, UK
e-mail: Jane.McVeigh@roehampton.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_6
94 J. MCVEIGH
This essay will introduce the writer Richmal Crompton and move on
to explore connections between re-creative processes in literary biography
and literary translation. It will then briefly highlight studies of re-creative
narrative in biography, introduce some of its main characteristics, and
finally consider how this approach can be used to discuss the impact of
Crompton’s writing in Spain. The essay will discuss Crompton’s impact
on Spanish readers from three perspectives. First, I will introduce some
of the themes of my biography, including her transnational impact in
Spain. Second, I will explore why her writing has been popular with
Spanish readers. Finally, the history of the publication of the Just William
stories helps to explain her popularity. All three perspectives are part of
re-creative narrative in biography. A structured approach to re-creative
narrative offers one way to frame transnational analysis of artists’ lives.
Crompton wrote Just William stories about an eleven-year-old boy
called William Brown for fifty years. The first was published in a maga-
zine in 1919 and she was working on another story at the time of her
death in 1969. From 1922, collections of these stories were published
in books that have been read across the world. At the height of her
popularity, Richmal Crompton sold over nine million books. The Just
William stories have been translated into many languages, including
French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Norwe-
gian, Dutch, Icelandic, Finnish and Russian. These stories have been
particularly successful in Spain and this essay focuses on Crompton’s
impact in Spain for this reason. The internationally successful Spanish
author Javier Marías has commented that one of the reasons he became a
writer was because of the Just William books, which he read passionately
as a child (La Pointe 2018).
William Brown’s antics captured the imagination of readers who had
no experience of the early twentieth-century village life portrayed in the
Just William stories, set amidst the affluence of South-East England.
Williams remains the same age throughout 38 books. Ben Sherriff and
well-known Spanish translator Margaret Jull Costa (writing under her
married name of Sherriff), argue that William ‘has many fine qualities:
he is courageous, resourceful, loyal to his friends, a leader among boys,
an essentially virtuous being who has to survive in an adult world which
too readily would dismiss him. His ever-pressing materialistic need for
more pocket money we can excuse as virtue seeking its reward’ (Sher-
riff and Sherriff 2006, p. 10).2 The plots of the stories take account of
historical events and social changes in England during the early twentieth
6 THE SPANISH TRANSLATIONS … 95
century, but they rarely reflect anything other than the life of a quintessen-
tial English village. Crompton takes a wry, satirical and humorous look at
the lives of grown-ups in William’s life and at his adventures, which he
often shares with three friends, Ginger, Henry and Douglas.
The role of a literary biographer and a literary translator is very
different, but we share an interest in an original text and in the re-
creation of an afterlife of a writer’s work. Biographers, as defined by Sally
Cline and Carole Angier, are life-writers who are ‘re-creative artists, living
“betwixt and between” our imaginations and reality, trying to re-create on
the page the living and the dead’ (2010, p. 7). Similarly, Susan Bassnett
describes translation as ‘an activity which involves reading a text written in
one language and then endeavouring to recreate it in another language’
(2019, p. 2). In our approaches to research on transnational perspectives
of artists’ lives, both biographer and translator consider in different ways
how to translate or reinvent the subject’s life and work.
Studies on literary translations have identified complexities in the role
and voice of a translator. In an influential study, Bassnett argues that each
translation is informed by the active role of the reader and the translator:
‘The translator is, after all, first a reader and then a writer and in the
process of reading he or she must take a position’ (2002, p. 83). As part
of this process, Bassnett advises the translator to consider structure as well
as content when translating prose (p. 114), and she warns that the tone
of a text can be overlooked (p. 117), as can other aspects of an author’s
style. In their 2009 article, Sherriff and Sherriff give one example of the
nuances in Spanish translations of the Just William stories:
William is a rebel and an outlaw, which translates in Spanish as ‘proscrito’,

which means both ‘outlaw’ in the bandit sense and ‘political exile’—of
which there were many following the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, when the
‘Outlaws’ first appear in the first William books, the Spanish translator has
to append a fairly lengthy footnote, explaining that the word ‘outlaw’ in
English has very different connotations from its Spanish equivalent, and
conjures up positive images of Robin Hood and his merry men, stealing
from the rich to give to the poor and so on. (p. 24)
This suggests that my biography needs to understand some of the factors

that may influence the reception of Crompton’s stories in translation.
One potential misreading of Crompton’s work in translation will be
influenced by whether the literary translation of her stories in different
96 J. MCVEIGH
languages recognises her as a writer for both older children and adults.
For a crossover writer like Crompton, prescriptive genre expectations
applied to literary translations may not recognise the subtleties of her
writing. Translations that identify her Just William stories solely as chil-
dren’s literature or pigeon-hole all of her novels as family sagas for older
readers will miss the opportunity to market her work for a wide range
of readers of all ages. Older readers particularly enjoy the complexity of
her style and language, as well as the satire of her plots. She chooses
her words and phrases carefully and the subtle irony of the Just William
stories could be missed by some readers if the translations do not recog-
nise this aspect of her style. Sandra Beckett argues that dual-audience
texts ‘often have the veiled, deceptive simplicity of myth and parable that
conceals multiple levels of meaning for readers of all ages’ (1999, p. 53).
As Spanish reader Juan Campos explains, Crompton’s ‘children and their
actions are always intelligible in terms of the social world around them
and the frustrating ways in which adults control it’ (2007, p. 31), and
that readers of all ages are intrigued as William ‘is able to exploit, for
his own purposes, adult fears and conventional or unconventional adult
values’ (p. 37). Research on the alternative re-imaginings of a writer’s
work by his or her translator will enhance our understanding of his or her
reinterpretation of work translated into different languages and within a
range of historical contexts. My role as a literary biographer will be to
understand such re-imaginings in the experiences of Crompton’s Spanish
readers, among others.
In an influential essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin’s
concern is with art forms, such as literary works, not with autobiograph-
ical or biographical embodiment. He comments: ‘isn’t the afterlife of
works of art far easier to recognize than that of living creatures?’ (2002,
p. 255). Quite so, to date, the life of Richmal Crompton Lamburn is less
well-known than that of William Brown. Richmal Crompton Lamburn,
and her alter ego, Richmal Crompton, have been haunted by the life of
her literary creation. Since her death, William has lived on in the reading
lives of Crompton’s readers, many of whom still think that his creator was
a man. The tussle between the writer and her famous character will lie at
the heart of my biography. Benjamin also argues that a translation comes
from the original, ‘not so much from its life as from its afterlife’ (p. 254).
Literary biography is similarly based on what comes next and contributes
to the re-creation of both its subjects’ afterlives and that of their work. In
doing so, biographers concern themselves with understanding the life of
their subjects in the historical context of the period in which they lived
and the history of reading and literary fashions since that time. Each biog-
rapher also writes within the wider political and cultural context of their
own lifetime.
American biographer Jeffrey Meyers has argued: ‘There is still a differ-
ence between inventing a story and constructing one. Proust’s biographer
George Painter put it best: “The artist has creative imagination, the
biographer recreative”’ (1989, p. 134). As part of this process of recon-
struction and re-creation, biographers ask questions about identity, whilst
re-creating something that is unique, of its moment, and open to more
reimagining.3 British biographer Michael Holroyd also considers the
nature of re-creative narrative and wants to take the ‘non’, the nega-
tive inference, out of nonfiction or creative nonfiction: ‘I prefer creative
and re-creative writing. You can’t make anything up, but you have to
try and recreate it’ (Wroe 2008, p. 13).4 His writing is in tune with a
form of biography that seeks a pattern based on rigorous research and
compelling storytelling, and his biographies seek a balanced landscape of,
to use Virginia Woolf’s formulation, both ‘granite’ and ‘rainbow’.5 For
Holroyd,
Biographies create, or re-create, a world that the reader may enter, where
his or her imagination may be stimulated, and some of the emotions,
thoughts and laughter experienced in reading—as well as the informa-
tion—may remain with the reader after the book is finished. (1988,
p. 103)
This is one reason why multiple biographies about the same person are
necessary; each biographer will tell his or her own story, and for some
this will include a transnational context. This essay considers both my
approach to re-creative narrative, which has been informed by studies
of literary translation, and how the life of one literary artist, Richmal
Crompton, might be told within a transnational context. As part of my
case study about the impact of her writing in Spain, it considers some
of the factors that will influence my understanding of my subject’s work
when it is read by those whose first language is not English, or who do
not read in English at all.
This essay will now argue that re-creative narrative in literary biog-
raphy, in which a form of afterlife of Crompton’s writing is re-created,
has at least three main characteristics and this is the model around which
98 J. MCVEIGH
the remaining sections of this chapter are structured. First, re-creative

writing is concerned with the ways in which a biographer writes their
story. To name but a few of the options open to them, a biographer
may decide to challenge the boundaries of tradition and write something
experimental, or focus on a place, object or journey that is significant to
their subject and, perhaps, themselves. They may decide to write a single
life, or write about a significant relationship between two people, or a
group of people who shared an experience or a profession, even if they
did not know each other. Biographies often reflect on what happens in
the afterlife of their subjects and may take a thematic approach. Secondly,
re-creative narrative is recreational as readers feel a connection between
themselves and the biography’s subject or subjects, or at the very least
enjoy reading about them and feeling they have learnt something new as
a result. This connection does not have to be close or personal. We may
experience a tangential link with people who have led very different lives
if their experience touches on something that is important to us. Finally, it
re-creates events and scenes in the life of a biographical subject, in which
the professional life of an artist or writer and the afterlife of their work
form a central part. From a transnational point of view, this means that
my biography should consider wider events both within and outside the
UK, as well as drawing on anecdotes about events, scenes and moments
in Crompton’s life.
Re-creative writing in biography may take an innovative approach to
style, structure and form and focus on themes that highlight aspects of
someone’s life. Also, an approach based on re-creative narrative reflects
choices made by the biographer as a writer about the story they want to
tell. There may be a version of someone’s life that a biographer wants
to challenge or to re-evaluate. We all tell stories about our own lives
and those of others, but the story may have a slightly different focus or
emphasis depending on who is telling it, who they are speaking to, when
the events discussed took place and how the story is told. British biog-
rapher Claire Tomalin believes that the biographer’s imagination informs
this process of storytelling:
Novelists and biographers are both excited and inspired by the patterns
of human activity. They are both story tellers. Both use the basic raw
materials of life, birth and childhood, work and love, family structures,
betrayal, woe and death. You need imagination even if you don’t invent,
and writers who invent very often depend on research too, their own or
someone else’s. (1999, p. 131)
It is hard to prescribe the laws of genre for biography. As Karen Seago

has suggested in relation to her work as a translator, ‘Genre conventions
are… normative, but all genres also live and renew themselves through
transgression and reinvention of generic conventions’ (2018, p. 54). Life-
writing can take many forms and the laws of genre continue to be broken
as life-writing, whether biographical or autobiographical, explores the
boundaries between creative and re-creative narrative, fiction and nonfic-
tion; in other words, between life-writing in which some or all the content
about a life or lives is invented, or in narratives primarily based on the
evidence that is available.
My biography of Crompton will take the form of nonfiction and will
be thematic in structure. It aims to take Richmal Crompton Lamburn out
of the confines of the quintessential village English village within which
her reputation has been constrained and to offer a story about her life and
the afterlife of her writing that recognises her contribution as a significant
professional woman writer of fiction for both adults and children within
and outside the UK. Clearly, a theme that addresses one aspect of her
transnational success, namely her impact in Spain, will contribute to this
story about her life and the afterlife of her work. One can only hope
that further studies, including a book about her international impact,
will follow. Other themes in my biography will explore her experience
as a disabled person, as a writer of forty novels, very few of which have
received any recognition, and her professional life as a writer of hundreds
of short stories, including Just William stories, that were published in
magazines for many years and cover a huge variety of subjects. Like
Virginia Woolf, Crompton writes about the life of a woman writer and
the lives of women more generally as they strive to find recognition within
and outside marriage in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Another strand of re-creative narrative is recreational. Firstly, it evokes
thoughts and emotions that often live with us after the book has finished.
It becomes literature that engenders empathy, because we care about and
feel a connection with the approach taken by the biographer, the plot of
the stories being told, the experiences of each character or the period of
history that it represents. The reader may not be familiar with the place,
culture or historical period in which the subject or subjects of a biography
100 J. MCVEIGH
lived, but an aspect of their story, or a sense of meaning that it evokes,

re-creates a connection between the narrative and its readers.
Secondly, re-creation suggests something that is enjoyable and even
fun. Recreational activities for both children and adults, including those
that are online and on social media, may be educational and help us to
learn and develop new knowledge. Readers of all ages know that the
world around William Brown in the Just William stories is intended to
be entertaining, and they enjoy reading them. Crompton’s readers also
know that these stories, like fables or parables, reflect some of the tensions
and fallibility inherent in family and community life. Humour heightens
the fun of reading Just William and draws attention to the satire in these
stories. Readers laugh at the world around William, in which adults are
committed to bizarre conventions and traditions, parents impose ridicu-
lous restrictions and sanctions, and community life revolves around social
activities such as parties and meetings that seem boring and pointless to
anyone who is younger.
My biography will explore the extent to which it is within the comedy
and satire inherent in all aspects of Crompton’s writing that a connec-
tion is re-created between this author and her readers, whatever language
they speak and wherever they live. However, there may be nuances in
the translations of her Just William stories, influenced by the translator’s
understanding of the humour in the narrative. They can be read mainly
as slapstick or farce if the translation focuses on action and the adventures
in William’s chaotic life, or as social satire if the translator can capture the
subtlety of Crompton’s language. A successful translation will embrace
both aspects.
In 1976, one grown-up reader from Santiago in Spain wrote to
Crompton to explain that the stories about William Brown have ‘helped
me understand that it was not totally absurd to consider the world of
adults as absurd as it seemed to be’.6 And in 2009, Spanish journalist,
broadcaster and music critic Diego Manrique wrote about his experience
of reading William books in Spanish as a child and his pleasure in discov-
ering that John Lennon was also an enthusiastic reader of her stories. For
Manrique, the books were ‘a great source of comfort in his somewhat
unhappy childhood’ (Sherriff and Taylor 2010, p. 10). He notes that
‘William—The Dictator was changed to Guillermo el Luchador (William
the Fighter), although whether this was due to the intervention of the
censors or on the part of the publishers, we do not know. In the repres-
sive world of post-Civil War Spain, William was a refreshing subversive
(and, of course, very funny) anti-hero, always defeated but never beaten’
(p. 10).
William also appealed to philosopher and writer Fernando Savater as a
young man in Spain, who was astonished
how easily one slipped into the circumstances of William’s life, which after
all were entirely different from those of a Spanish boy of my generation.
The lush green world of a small English town, more like a village than
a city, with its cottages, its vicar and his wife, its confusion of pennies,
guineas, and half crowns, its greenhouses, its absurd charity teas, all the
constant references to a foreign history and culture… each and every one
of these things should have placed us at a vast distance from William’s
adventures… [However, he] was, without doubt, just like one of us. It was
precisely because he was one of us that we admired his splendid peculiarity;
the fact that he shared our tastes, our duties, and our limitations allowed
us to enjoy his triumphs as if they were our own. (Savater 2010, p. 30)
William and his three friends were known as the Outlaws, and Savater
believes that what linked young Spanish readers in the 1950s ‘to those
British outlaws was a yearning to be free, to escape from stifling rituals,
to live life to the full without fear or blame or the vigilance of others’
(2009, p. 28). Another reader, Juan Campos, felt that ‘some at least of
the appeal the William books had for us Spaniards would have been the
oddities, to our eyes, of the society in which William lives’ (Sherriff and
Sherriff 2009, p. 26), and for Spanish readers most seductive of all ‘would,
perhaps, have been the sheer joy and energy of William, intoxicating and
liberating to anyone growing up in a grey, repressive society’ (p. 26).
In contemporary Spain, Just William readers feel a personal connection
with William Brown, cherish the stories’ slapstick and farcical moments,
and recognise the wider implications of his challenges to authority. For
Savater, ‘William was myself, but completely successful, me at my very
best, at the tip-top of my energy and good fortune… William was not a
more or less unattainable ideal, but the joyous fulfilment of my best possi-
bilities’ (2010, p. 31). Many of Crompton’s readers identify with William
in a similar way and relish in his sense of adventure and the experiences
that they would like to have had in an alternative fantasy childhood in
which they dared to challenge the grown-ups around them in the same
way as their hero.
Finally, each reading of Crompton’s writing unfolds and re-creates
its own afterlife, either in the original English or in translation, in the
102 J. MCVEIGH
reading of new or existing readers. Some readers may share experiences of

reading her work who have no direct connection with the period in which
she lived, or the landscape and culture explored in her writing. Some
loved Crompton’s stories without any direct knowledge of the world they
depict. My biography will consider this aspect of her reception in Spain,
as well as some of the reasons why Crompton’s books have been popular
in translation, and it will discuss the historical period within which this
took place.
The history of the publication of her stories in Spain illustrates how
Crompton’s work has been re-created in a transnational context. Margaret
and Ben Sherriff have identified that ‘more than thirty of the William
books were translated into Spanish from 1935, which coincided with
the Spanish civil war [of] 1936–39, and all the books were reprinted
in the late 1970s after Franco’s death in 1975’ (Sherriff and Sherriff
2009, p. 17). Ian Craig has studied the censorship of Crompton’s Just
William stories in Spain during the Franco era from 1942 to 1958 (2001,
p. 81). As the Sherriffs observe, ‘The 1940s were known as “the hungry
forties”, a period when many Spaniards came close to starvation, and
into the 1950s, Spain remained in many ways a cheerless place rife with
repression and censorship, in which people were forced into polarised
positions—either of left or right’ (Sherriff and Sherriff 2009, p. 18).
From 1942, the William books were censored for their large reader-
ship, their Englishness and the particular brand of irony and humour
that Crompton masters in these stories (Craig 2001, p. 81). It appeared
that ‘such nonconformity had become unacceptable’ (p. 82). The publi-
cation of the Just William books was revived in the late 1950s when ‘the
additional xenophobia applied to children’s literature in the early 1940s
was relaxed’ (p. 95). Craig suggests that one of the connections made by
censors in the period was between the adventures of William and those
of Don Quixote, suggesting that they had interpreted some of the Just
William stories ‘as cautionary tales on the perils of confusing fantasy (or
art) and reality’ (p. 97). The stories were again popular in Spain in the
1960s, although further censorship followed in 1968 when irony was
again rejected as a permissible feature of children’s literature (p. 101).
Marisa Fernández López notes that the elements of children’s literature
that were traditionally banned in Spain until the 1970s were references to
sex or religion:
Thus, in the Spanish version of ‘Jumble’ (a story in Richmal Crompton’s

1922 Just William, translated in 1935 as Travesuras de Guillermo), the
15 lines referring to a kiss were eliminated. Similarly omitted was a para-
graph in Crompton’s story ‘The Outlaws and the Missionary’ in William’s
Crowded Hours (1931, translated as Guillermo el atareado, 1959), in which
William complains, according to his own peculiar logic, of the behaviour
of certain missionaries whom he compares to thieves… Censoring by the
publisher would appear to be the most probable reason. (Fernández López
2006, p. 43)
By the 1980s, the popularity of the stories in Spain was in decline (Craig,
p. 104). As these examples illustrate, an understanding of the history of
an author’s work in translation can inform the re-creation of events that
influenced his or her reception in a transnational context.
A case study about the impact of Crompton’s Just William stories
in Spain, as part of a wider story about her life and the afterlife of her
writing, will not tell the whole story about her international success.
It will, I hope, challenge some myths about her life and work being
constrained within the confines of twentieth-century English village life.
Some stories have wider appeal if we can only find a suitable form of
re-creative narrative in which to tell them.
Notes
1. ‘Crompton’ was Richmal’s mother’s maiden name. She first wrote under
the pseudonym ‘Richmal Crompton’ when she worked as a teacher, in an
effort to keep her two professions separate from each other.
2. Margaret Jull Costa translates fiction and poetry from Spanish and
Portuguese. In 2013, she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature, and in 2014 she was awarded the OBE for services
to literature.
3. McVeigh (2017, p. 8). This chapter has grown out of my analysis in In
Collaboration with British Literary Biography (2017).
4. McVeigh (2017, p. 8). Creative nonfiction is a branch of writing that
employs the literary techniques usually associated with fiction or poetry
to tell stories about actual people, places or events.
5. In an essay about the nature of biography, ‘The New Biography’, first
published in 1927, Virginia Woolf argues that ‘On the one hand, there is
truth; on the other there is personality. And if we think of truth as some-
thing of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like
intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into
104 J. MCVEIGH
one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one’ (Woolf
1967, p. 229).
6. RC/1/7/2/8 Richmal Crompton Collection, Foyle Special Collections
and Archives, University of Roehampton.
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Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader, edited by Gillian Lathey,
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Holroyd, Michael. 1988. ‘How I Fell into Biography’. In The Troubled Face
of Biography, edited by Eric Homberger and John Charmley, pp. 94–103.
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ave-marias-an-interview-with-javier-marias/ (accessed 17 January 2020).
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Guardian Saturday Review, 13 September: 12–13.
CHAPTER 7
Alienation and Intimacy: Transnational

Writing on Julia Margaret Cameron
Tamar Hager
My journey in the footsteps of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), the

prominent Victorian female photographer, started by chance. Searching
for an image of a nineteenth-century woman for a research novel I was
writing, I came across one of her portraits, Mountain Nymph Sweet
Liberty (Hager 2018). Looking for the identity of the model, I encoun-
tered her photographer—the ‘Indomitable Mrs. Cameron’, as she was
called by Virginia Woolf, her niece’s daughter—whose art, professional
struggles and successes have captivated my imagination (Woolf 1925).
For the last nine years, I have been slowly and laboriously crossing time,
space and culture in order to write my version of her life story.
Nevertheless, my task is not without its challenges. As one of the few
pioneering female photographers, Cameron’s life and artistic activities
are well documented (see, for example, Newhall 1982; Warner 2002).
There are several biographies (e.g. Gernsheim 1975; Olsen 2003) and
catalogues (e.g. Cox and Ford 2003; Weiss 2016), dozens of articles and
quite a few dissertations, as well as novels and a play, Freshwater, by Woolf
T. Hager (B)
Tel-Hai College, Upper Galilee, Israel

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_7
108 T. HAGER
(1976 [1923, 1935]). The albums she made for relatives and friends,
hundreds of photographs and prints she sold or donated, letters she wrote
to her contemporaries, her few literary works and several pages of her
unfinished autobiography, Annals of My Glass House (1980 [1890]), are
available in various archives and lately some have been uploaded online.
She is mentioned in memoirs of her contemporaries who related many
anecdotes which reveal her generosity, talent, and imperious and eccentric
nature (Thackeray 1919; Taylor 1924).
If so much has been written about her, what could my contribution be?
How would Cameron’s story benefit from the perspective of a twenty-
first-century Israeli writer like me? How could I bridge the gaps of time,
place and culture, and overcome the distance by achieving the intimate
relationship with the subject required for writing a convincing biography
that would capture Cameron’s ‘vivid courage and disregard for ordinary
rules’ (Thackeray 1919, p. 5), and her tireless efforts to gain recognition
as a professional artist at a time when women were regarded as amateur
at best? Could I imbue new meaning to her elusive cultural location as a
transnational subject situated at the intersection of Anglo-India, France,
Victorian England and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka)?
In this chapter, I endeavour to answer these questions. I begin by
introducing my theoretical framework, explaining how I have embraced
the nature of transnational biography in this particular writing project.
Next, I describe some of the obstacles with which I was confronted when
having to cross national and cultural barriers in order to interact with
and write about my subject. Finally, I show how my encounter with
Cameron’s transnational artistic project in Ceylon enabled me to over-
come the challenges of writing, and how by ‘extending beyond national
bounds’ I may contribute new knowledge on transnational biography in
general and in particular on Cameron and her artistic ventures (Clavin
2005, p. 433).
Transnational Biography, Biographer and Space

Why do I see my writing of Cameron’s life as transnational? According to
Pamela Graham, ‘to be transnational is simply to transcend the borders
of the national […] Many memoirs and biographies can already be
considered transnational, in that they feature lives that have transcended
national borders’ (Graham 2019, p. 113). Cameron crossed more than
one border during her lifetime—she lived in India, France, England and
7 ALIENATION AND INTIMACY: TRANSNATIONAL WRITING … 109
Sri Lanka—and these crossings left an impact on her conduct, world view
and art. Interestingly, most of her biographers represent her transnational
background as typical of nineteenth-century British colonial middle-class
females, viewing her preference for coloured Indian garments, her love of
curry dishes or her tendency to speak Hindi with her sisters either as signs
of her charming eccentricity (Thackeray 1919, pp. 3–4; Taylor 1924)1
or as marks of her British imperial heritage (Olsen 2003; Rosen 2016).
Moreover, focusing mainly on Cameron’s links to British culture, her
biographies tend to ignore the influence of her travels to France on her
cultural awareness.2 I argue that a transnational perspective unmasks her
rootedness in more than one community or society, and that challenging a
clear national affiliation and identity enables researchers like me to better
explore her uniqueness as a woman and as an artist (Deacon et al. 2010;
Thackeray 1919, pp. 3–4). Moreover, adopting Ellen Fleischmann’s
suggestion to consider transnationalism in an internal, individualistic
and personal sense, I view my writing of Cameron as an opportunity
to examine ‘national, cultural, linguistic, ethnic and other boundaries
that delineated the Self from the foreign “Other”’ (Fleischmann 2009,
pp. 113, 114). By exploring how these barriers were realised in her
life story and in the process of writing that story, my biography both
questions and reinforces cultural and national differences.
Ostensibly, this writing project did not seem particularly complicated.
As an academic, I had international networks and regular funding to
travel from Israel to England twice a year and visit relevant archives
(Janz and Schonpflug 2014, pp. 13–14). Moreover, the digitisation of
archives made crossing the boundaries between nations easier. I could
survey Cameron’s photographs and letters and read related research
on my computer screen while sitting at my desk in my Tel Aviv flat
(Graham 2019, p. 4). Yet physical or digitised archives, with their gaps
and silences, were not sufficient for me. As a biographer with a different
national identity from my subject, I grappled with many epistemological
lacunae, cultural and national misunderstandings, and continuous feelings
of estrangement, despite the accessibility of applicable records. This state
of affairs often made me wonder why I had chosen this frustrating project,
yet at the same time, it invited me to ‘break’ the archive walls and, like
other biographers, to engage in reading other histories and biographies as
well as looking for ‘other sources, sometimes material (as in physical, like
objects and buildings) and unwritten ones’ (Fleischmann 2009, p. 110).
In a similar vein to the Romantic biographer Richard Holmes, I have been
110 T. HAGER
involved in ‘a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s

path through the past’ by following Cameron’s footsteps, ‘while retaining
her physical presence […] in landscapes [and] buildings’ (Holmes 1985,
pp. 27, 67). This method of research and writing compelled me to visit
geographical sites, walk the same streets and paths, visit buildings she
inhabited or called on, and hold her original letters and photographs in
my hands.
While moving over ‘the same historical ground, the same trail of
events’, crossing transnational barriers, I constantly conducted a fictional
and imaginary dialogue with Cameron regarding her artistic decisions,
her social and cultural views, and her behaviour toward family members,
comparing her sentiments, ideas and conduct to my own (Holmes 1985,
p. 66). During these continuous conversations and arguments, I could
imagine her presence and her voice, yet at the same time I was conscious
that, like Holmes, ‘you cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them…
They are always in motion, carrying their past life to the future’ (Holmes
1985, pp. 66, 69). What I could freeze, however, were episodes of my
life, since this ongoing fictional dialogue, part of which I outline in
this chapter, involved my own impressions and autobiographical insights
which seemingly assisted me in understanding her life conditions when
following her trail. Consequently, my biography of Cameron also contains
a piece of my own autobiography, ‘a way of making sense of my own
world’ (Holmes 1985, p. 83).
I see this writing venture as occurring within transnational spaces.
These spaces ‘bridge boundaries and incorporate trace elements of the
different contexts from which they evolved’, while integrating separate
facts regarding the subject of biography with creative and imaginative
elements in order to fill gaps and silences (Janz and Schonpflug 2014,
p. 4; Fleischmann 2009, p. 110). This mixing of fact and fiction may
turn these elusive spaces, which are uncomfortably close to artifice, into
a source of bafflement to historians (Fleischmann 2009, p. 110). Yet
Virginia Woolf asserted that the ‘[t]ruth of fact and truth of fiction
are incompatible; yet [the biographer] is now more than ever urged to
combine them. For it would seem that the life which is increasingly real
to us is the fictitious life’ (Woolf 1967b, p. 234). As Cameron’s biog-
rapher, I have therefore immersed myself in archival documents, piles of
books, catalogues and articles while frequently exercising my imagination,
attempting to construct the engagingly real, complicated and fascinating
character I believe she was.
Encounter
Cameron was born in India on 11 June 1815 into the British colonial
elite, to parents of French and English descent.3 She and her eight siblings
grew up speaking English, French and Hindi and were educated both
in France and in England. At the age of 23, she married Charles Hay
Cameron, a jurist and classical scholar twenty years her senior, in 1838, in
Calcutta, and she assumed a prominent place in Anglo-Indian society until
1848 when they migrated to England following his retirement. Cameron
enjoyed what Woolf identified as three advantages, ‘travel, experience,
knowledge of the world’, the lack of which she believed had delayed the
artistic development of women writers like Jane Austen and George Eliot
(Woolf 1989 [1929], p. 92). Oliver Janz and Daniel Schonflug define
this mindset as a female form of cosmopolitanism ‘marked by conscious
choice, ideological underpinnings and provocative demonstration of a
certain attitude towards life’ (Janz and Schonpflug 2014, p. 11). Cameron
certainly developed this transnational awareness and mindset.
She mothered six children, one daughter and five sons, and although
she was involved in London’s cultural life through her sister Sara Prinsep’s
bohemian salon in Little Holland House, Kensington, she was mostly
engaged in domestic affairs until 1863, while living near Freshwater Bay
on the Isle of Wight. At 48, all of her children had left home, and her
husband was away, managing their coffee plantations in Ceylon. Her auto-
biography relates that her daughter Julia, whom everybody referred to
as Juley, approached her with a camera, a Jamin lens and a darkroom
outfit with the words: ‘It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photo-
graph during your solitude in Freshwater’ (Cameron 1980, p. 135).
What was intended as a diversion for a middle-aged Victorian matriarch
became a professional artistic obsession engulfing everyone around her,
plunging her household into chaos. ‘She photographed without ceas-
ing’, Ann Thackeray Richie tells us, ‘in season and out of season, and
summoned everyone round about to watch the process’ (Thackeray 1919,
p. 25). Laura Troubridge described her as ‘a terrifying elderly woman,
short and squat […] dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from
her photography (and smelling of them too), with a plump eager face
and piercing eyes, and a voice husky and a little harsh, yet in some way
compelling and even charming’ (Troubridge 1925, pp. 33–34). Woolf
playfully referred to Cameron’s urge to transform reality into art: ‘The
coal-house was turned into a dark room; the fowl-house was turned into
112 T. HAGER
a glass-house. Boatmen were turned into King Arthur; village girls into
Queen Guenevere… The parlour-maid sat for her portrait and the guest
had to answer the bell’ (Woolf 1925, p. 6). Among her models were social
and literary celebrities, relatives, friends, servants and strangers who just
passed by.
From 1864 to 1875, when she and her husband moved permanently
to Ceylon, Cameron did not stop working, regularly submitting her
photographs for public display, relentlessly promoting and marketing her
art, and hoping to be defined as a professional artist, part of the increas-
ingly rich elite in Victorian culture (Hamilton 2014). She thought that by
raising her artistic status and selling her photographs she could save the
family from financial difficulties, resulting from the continuous failures of
their coffee plantations in Ceylon. Thanking Henry Cole, the director of
South Kensington Museum, after allowing her the use of two museum
rooms as a portrait studio, she straightforwardly referred to her profes-
sional and commercial aspirations: ‘I am likely now to acquire fortune
as well as fame, for… a woman with sons to educate cannot live on
fame alone’ (Weiss 2016, p. 27). Her disregard for the current style of
portraiture and her blurry and, at times, messy printings which are today
considered signs of her creativity, artistic ingenuity and unique indepen-
dence were criticised during her lifetime by the photographic community
as a mark of her lack of technical skills and aesthetics (Ford 2003, pp. 11,
83–88; Olsen 2003, pp. 175–78; Weiss 2016, pp. 31–40). However,
she received positive reviews and won prizes at major exhibitions in
Edinburgh, Berlin and Paris.
Yet these achievements did not lead to the desired commercial
success. The high cost of living of an upper-middle-class family with no
capital, financial difficulties and growing debts probably contributed to
Cameron’s decision to leave England in 1875 and follow their four sons
to Ceylon (Olsen 2003, p. 245). Cameron herself ignored the economic
aspect of the decision, explaining the move as conforming to her maternal
needs to live close to her sons, and as fulfilling her wifely duties by
satisfying her husband’s wish to live in Ceylon (Thackeray 1919, p. 35;
Troubridge 1925, p. 39).
Cameron rarely mentioned photography in her letters from her new
home, and consequently, the prevailing assumption has been that she
stopped taking pictures almost completely (Olsen 2003, pp. 251–56).
That only 26 photographs have survived from this period seems to prove
this supposition. Some biographers have explained the reduced scale
of her work by the absence of emotional urgency (i.e. to immortalise

great men, to eternalise beauty or to enhance photography by alluding
to canonised works of art and literature) or practical necessity (i.e. to
save the family finances), while others point to the lack of a sustain-
able project (i.e. an illustration of a book or an exhibition) (Olsen 2003,
pp. 252–53). I assume that residing mainly in her son, Harding’s house
in Kalutara, as described by her visitor, the English biologist and botanical
artist, Marianne North, and only rarely in their own rented bungalow in
the mountains, Cameron had trouble organising a room of her own to
pursue her career, lacking the required conditions to immerse herself in
photography (North 1892, pp. 314–15; Olsen 2003, pp. 244–58).4
From Curiosity to Estrangement

In a photograph taken by her son, Henry Hay, in 1870, Cameron is
wrapped in an Indian shawl, her eyes staring away from the camera and
the viewer. She appears mysterious and exotic, different from photographs
of a conventional Victorian Lady (Ford 2003, p. 14). With this image,
I could envision her approaching the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi
during his visit to the English poet laureate Alfred Tennyson in Fresh-
water, falling on her knees in supplication and asking him to sit for his
portrait. Garibaldi, who saw her blackened hands, dismissed her as a
beggar. In some versions of this story, she cried after him: ‘This is not
dirt but art’ (Olsen 2003, p. 152). I also visualised her accompanying a
friend, wearing a flowing red velvet dress bareheaded ‘carrying a cup of
tea which she stirred as she walked along’ (Thackeray 1919, p. 4). I could
imagine her standing near the camera, barking orders while her female
servants moved tables, chairs, wings, lamps and curtains hung on the wall
for another mythological scene. I imagined myself watching, a little irri-
tated, as she pushed a child into the studio despite her protests, declaring
impatiently: ‘Just one picture and you can join your friends. And here are
some sweets for you and your brother. Now stand still’; I followed her
striding quickly into Lord Alfred Tennyson’s manor house, ignoring the
servant’s protests, appearing in the poet laureate’s room with a plate of
cooked liver and demanding that he eat it for the sake of England.5
But these exercises in imagination, which involved a sense of attach-
ment to the person I was tracing, could not conceal feelings of estrange-
ment and alienation. Holmes reminded me that although my fascination
with Cameron was the very reason for following in her footsteps, ‘the true
114 T. HAGER
biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where

this naïve form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of
personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal objective recreation’
(Holmes 1985, p. 67).
I began being sceptical at her ability to work long hours in the
studio and the darkroom and still write hundreds of letters every month,
handling servants and household chores, and taking care of regular guests,
her visiting sons and an often unhealthy and quite depressed husband.
Could she really handle all these assignments properly? I suspect that she
tended to take too much upon herself and did not always meet the tasks.
I can imagine her taking out her frustrations on the maids and models
who worked alongside her, or forgetting scheduled meetings with family
members and guests when being completely absorbed with designing or
developing photographs. Since in the memoirs of her contemporaries she
appeared so independent and self-contained, I wondered whether she had
friends in whom she could confide when things were deteriorating, which
I guessed they often did with so many conflicting commitments.
Reading a letter that Julia wrote from Calcutta to her six-year-old
daughter Juley who had been sent to England in 1845 to live with her
aunts, I felt more alienated and perplexed.6 In this letter, which mainly
contained instructions and hardly any inquiry as to her daughter’s well-
being, Julia insisted that she had suffered more than her small child from
the separation. Reading that Rudyard Kipling and William Makepeace
Thackery, who grew up (like Cameron and her daughter) in India to
British parents and were relocated alone at the age of five to England,
testified to how brutal and traumatic the separation from their family
was, enabling me better to realise Juley’s ordeal (Olsen 2003, p. 18).
Knowing that Julia met her daughter again only three years later, when
moving to England, I could not help thinking that this separation insti-
gated the estrangement between mother and daughter in later years. The
biographer Victoria Olsen demonstrates that Juley and her children never
visited Freshwater (Olsen 2003, pp. 64–68, 98–101, 229–30).
Yet reading about life in the British colonies to understand Cameron’s
social context, I apprehended that middle-class English parents in India
customarily sent their small children to be educated in the homeland
(Olsen 2003, p. 17; Buettner 1999, p. 118). This practice derived from
their belief that India’s climate and the associations with indigenous
peoples endangered children’s physical and moral development. Given
the racial and social stigma, if Juley had remained in India beyond a
certain age she would have been regarded as socially ‘contaminated’ by

the mixed-race community and thus lacking in the cultural competencies
that would have made her eligible for a respectable marriage (Chaudhuri
1988; Buettner 1999; Olsen 2003, p. 17).
I live in an era in which, for white middle-class people like me, sepa-
rating from a six-year-old daughter and shipping her off to be educated
in another country would be unthinkable. Social norms in the Israeli
pronatalist state where I was born, raised and gave birth to my twin
daughters dictate that women who choose to part from small children
are dangerously peculiar, even abnormal, particularly if they belong to
the Jewish middle class like myself. One of the imperatives of such state
policy is that ‘a good mother spends a lot of time with her child because
it is better for the child’s mental health’ (Hager 2011, p. 39). My
recoil from Cameron’s divergent conduct made me realise that, notwith-
standing my awareness that every society or culture in every era creates
its own norms, I have to invest emotional effort to overcome my intoler-
ance towards maternal behaviour fundamentally different from my own.
Robert Darnton demonstrates that such obstacles are elicited in anthro-
pological and historical studies. ‘Other people are other’, he infers; ‘They
do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand their way
of thinking, we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness’
(Darnton 1985, p. 4).
I found Cameron’s letter to Juley in a box of documents while visiting
Dimbola Lodge, her house in Freshwater, now a museum and gallery
dedicated to Cameron’s life and work. My visit to her house was part
of my attempt to follow Darnton and set out to capture her otherness
by familiarising myself with her surroundings, hoping it would help me
to construct her story. I took two trains, a ferry and a bus to Fresh-
water. It was springtime and I walked between Dimbola, Farringford,
Tennyson’s house, Lewis Carroll’s rented cottage in front of the Liddell
family summer home, where the young Alice (to whom he reportedly
told Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) lived with her parents, and the
local graveyard in the pouring rain. Strolling a day later on the beach
and up the Downs in surprisingly hot weather, I could delude myself
that I was experiencing the landscape from Cameron’s own eyes. Coming
back from the Isle of Wight, I also visited the site of her house in Putney
Heath, London, with the same aim, discovering with disappointment that
it had been destroyed a long time ago and replaced by a council house; I
visited Holland Park, where her sister, Sara Prinsep, had held her famous
116 T. HAGER
bohemian salon, at Little Holland House. Walking between the trees, I

imagined Cameron coming towards me. I held my breath waiting for her
to get closer, but when she approached, she seemed to evaporate. Frus-
trated, I took the tube to the Victoria and Albert Museum which she
often visited when it was still known as the South Kensington Museum,
waiting in vain for her carriage. I wandered for hours in the streets of
London among Victorian buildings, imagining that she had done the
same 150 years ago. Nothing really helped. Cameron the historical figure
remained elusive, mysterious and distant.
Between Attraction and Recoil

The gap between Cameron and me was not only the result of history and
culture but also of different gender choices. Cameron’s total commitment
to art when her children left home was to me both a source of jealousy
and alienation. She worked all day on her photographs, and when she was
not photographing, developing negatives or looking for models, she was
relentlessly promoting and marketing her photographs by approaching
directors of museums and galleries, critics, fellow artists and friends, and
organising exhibitions and reviews. Although she rejected a commercial
route which would have forced her to change her artistic objectives, she
struggled to achieve professional and financial success (Hopkins 1986,
pp. 145–62; Weiss 2016, pp. 27–30; Cox 2003, pp. 41–80).
However, since gender dictates customarily prevent middle-class
women from working to achieve fame or self-fulfilment, Cameron was
probably compelled to apply a maternal excuse for her intensive artistic
labour. By declaring that her artistic motivation was to support her family
and thus, to improve her sons’ education options and career prospects,
she used a justification that better suited the expectations of middle-class
women to invest their energy in domestic matters. I suspect that behind
this apparent capitulation to accepted gender norms, she was hiding an
ambition to acquire personal artistic distinction and a name for herself
(Olsen 2001, pp. 103–11; Suleiman 2001, pp. 113–38).
A similar strategy was used by other female contemporaries. Woolf
tells us that the famous actress Ellen Terry employed a financial justifi-
cation—‘the bailiffs were in the house’—when she left her children to
go back to the stage (Woolf 1967a, p. 70). Yet in the case of Cameron,
the hidden ambition and wish for artistic and commercial success occa-
sionally surfaced in the face of conflicts between her maternal and artistic
roles. The proximity of her major solo exhibition in 1873 to the death
of Juley, her only daughter, during childbirth distressed many of her
relatives. Julian Cox demonstrates that her decision to carry out this
public display of her works was in stark contradiction to what was socially
expected from a middle-class bereaved mother (Cox 2003, pp. 71–72).
Moreover, her confidence that photography, then a new, less acclaimed
and quite expensive medium, which entailed a sizable investment of
time, energy and money, would benefit her family financially was quite
unfounded and unjustified. As a female photographer, her chances to
profit in the male-dominated art world were even slimmer. Her family
friend and benefactor, Lord Samuel Overstone, declared, for good reason,
that Cameron’s photography was overtaxing the family finances (Olsen
2003, p. 215).
It also created domestic chaos. In her letters and memoirs, the writer
and family friend, Annie Thackeray (the daughter of the acclaimed author
William Makepeace Thackery), described the food in Dimbola as ‘shock-
ing’ and noted that ‘we […] are obliged to have eggs and bacon to
make up for almost every meal’ (Olsen 2003, p. 169). Cameron’s maids
became her helpers in the studio, and thus, household chores were often
neglected. Attending to artistic efforts and experiments while abandoning
household management was inconceivable among Victorian wives and
mothers, whose main moral and social responsibility was running the
home and taking care of its inhabitants (Showalter 1977).7 So to preserve
her public image as a proper Victorian matriarch, she had to explain to
family friends, guests, critics and other cultural agents (such as Cole, the
director of South Kensington Museum) how this exceptional domestic
arrangement in fact conformed with her familial and maternal duties.
However, she did not seem to apologise for her creative impulse and
art. On the contrary, her artistic confidence was enviable: when some
reviewers regarded the soft focus of her photographs as accidental, a result
of her incompetence in dealing with the heavy and complex equipment,
she angrily wrote to Sir John Herschel: ‘Who has a right to say what
focus is the legitimate focus?’ (Brusius 2010, p. 343). When she and
her husband left England, she did not lose her artistic assurance, and in
the absence of cash, she distributed her photographs among the shocked
porters as payment for their services (Melville 2003, pp. 106–7). I imag-
ined one of them holding a portrait of Darwin and frowning behind her
back, wondering what his family would eat without a proper salary for a
long day’s work.
118 T. HAGER
For Cameron, art brought moments of self-absorption that occa-

sionally made her oblivious to other people’s different circumstances
and needs. Her conduct partially reflected the Romantic myth of the
solitary independent male artist whose individual claim to genius—a
combination of feeling, intuition, passion, imagination and male sexual
energies—allowed him to defy social norms (in her case, the expectations
of upper-middle-class women to manage the domestic sphere) for the
sake of sublime art (Battersby 1989; Bain 2005). She consciously worked
to prove this artistic independence by insisting that she learnt photog-
raphy by herself and took pictures and developed negatives alone, despite
reports to the contrary. Her biographers relate that she was influenced
by photographers like Charles Dodgson (who wrote under the pen name
Lewis Carroll) and Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and was constantly assisted
by her maids and her sons when taking pictures, developing negatives
or marketing her art (Olsen 2003, pp. 159–60, 136–38). Yet the ques-
tionable ethic of ignoring others’ input and support does not reduce my
admiration for her. In a masculine patriarchal art world, which relegated
upper-middle-class women artists like her to the status of keen amateurs,
her confident, assertive and independent manner appeared as resistance
to gender norms.
I have desperately wanted to follow Cameron’s example and become a
professional artist. However, since I lacked financial family support, like
many twenty-first-century artists, I had to subsidise my writing predom-
inantly by teaching in academia (Bain 2005). Refusing to relinquish my
dream, I have imagined myself sitting for hours in front of the computer
without interruption, ignoring my family’s discontent as well as the dirty
clothes, dishes and unmarked papers that have been piling up behind
my back. Yet, at the same time, I have found myself shying away from
Cameron’s self-centred conduct and her carelessness regarding domestic
matters. Attempting, often futilely, to fulfil my domestic and maternal
responsibilities while holding a full-time teaching job and a commitment
to my writing, Cameron’s negligence and disregard for her house and
sometimes for her maternal duties have annoyed and alienated me.
I have engaged in a different artistic process in which I have written
with lasting connections to the world. In her article, ‘A writer because
of, not in spite of, her children’, Alice Walker describes writing ‘in bits
and pieces while her children are still asleep or not so quietly playing’
(Walker 2001, p. 101). Like her, I have been writing while listening to
the washing machine, in dialogue with what is happening around me, with
the teaching work, with the needs of my daughters growing up, with the
needs of my life partner. This way of writing invades the texts themselves
and shatters them. This is how I wrote my book Malice Aforethought
(2012), about Victorian women who committed infanticide, and this is
how I am now writing the still title-less book about Cameron, slowly, in
bits and pieces, which imitates the fragmentary, interrupted and formless
nature of my life (Smith and Watson 1998, p. 9). These texts, in which
I follow and construct Victorian women’s life stories, are transnational
spaces that I am part of, not only as an author but also as a subject, coping
with the work of mothering and with the difficulty of resolving that with
teaching, and with having to cross national and cultural boundaries which
have been imposed by my writing projects. These are complex textual sites
of expression, communication and struggle.
Yet despite historical, cultural and artistic differences between Cameron
and myself, it is hard to ignore the similarities which derive from our expe-
rience and fate as women-artists. I borrow this perspective from Woolf,
who saw in Cameron a role model of a successful wife and mother, as
well as an independent businesswoman and artist who subverted patriar-
chal institutions ‘by her espièglerie’ (Dell 2015, pp. 73, 88). Examining
the texts Woolf wrote about her great aunt Emily Setina shows that
Cameron’s undertaking—her efforts to achieve a unique photographic
aesthetic and her struggle for economic independence—inspired Woolf’s
best-known feminist statement: ‘a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction’ (Woolf 1989, p. 3). To achieve this
independent space as a mother is not a simple matter, as Woolf argues
when asserting that ‘[m]aking a fortune and bearing thirteen children—
no human being could stand it’. Pointing to the difficulty of reconciling
motherhood and economic independence with artistic creation, Woolf
invokes the cultural prejudice that you could either be a good mother
and wife or an excellent artist, but not both (Woolf 1989, p. 20).
According to Elaine Showalter, the either/or theory was already
invoked by the early Victorians who prohibited mothers from engaging
in creative activities beyond the domestic sphere until their children were
grown up (Suleiman 2001, p. 119). As a woman of her time, the idea
that as a mother she had moral obligations to her family was probably the
reason why Cameron began her artistic career only when she was middle
aged and her children had left home. But, as Susan Rubin Suleiman
demonstrates, the either/or theory is reinforced today as many mother-
artists, among them photographers and writers, testify when addressing
120 T. HAGER
the guilt involved in demanding to be left alone in the studio or study.

When closing these doors, the mother-artist is regarded as neglecting
what is still perceived as her main obligation—her family. This unresolved
conflict, argues Suleiman, directs many mothers away from art.
Yet those who have insisted on creating art despite these social obsta-
cles still experienced it at times as an ‘either/or’ situation. When Cameron
could afford a studio of her own and was ready to resist gender dictates,
she worked unremittingly, yet when becoming financially dependent on
her sons in Ceylon, she could only photograph ‘in bits and pieces’. I, who
live in more equitable times, have chosen to obey gender expectations and
have destined myself to writing with interruptions in permeable working
spaces which have been unceasingly invaded by my daughters, my partner
and my students.
Cameron’s uniqueness also stems from the challenge she posed to
certain Romantic notions of an artistic occupation. By struggling to
achieve fame and commercial success, she defied ‘myths of marginality,
alienation, “outsider” status and creative freedom’, considering art as a
business like any other (Bain 2005, p. 28; Kosmala 2007, p. 38). I, on
the other hand, who have felt too embarrassed to circulate and promote
my writing, without even noticing, until meeting Cameron, have held the
Romantic belief that artistic freedom goes hand in hand with symbolic
marginalisation (social, economic or cultural) and alienation from the
capitalist enterprise. Yet realising my unsophisticated stance has not elim-
inated the sense of alienation I still feel towards her businesslike and
aggressive manner when promoting her art.
Choosing Ambivalence
So how can I write a biography of a person who seems too distant for
historical and cultural reasons and whose personal and creative choices
estrange and annoy me? Cameron’s relations with her female Ceylonese
models provided me with a possible answer.
At the outset, Cameron’s Ceylonese photographs differed in compo-
sition and lighting from her English ones. Joanna Lukitsh and Victoria
Olsen argue that many of them resemble ethnographic studies which
enforced then popular myths of the inferior colonised native savagery
(Olsen 2003, p. 253; Lukitsh 1996; Warnapala 2008). Yet Olsen claims
that the photographs of the ‘draped, swathed and covered’ Ceylonese
women still show a remarkable continuity with Cameron’s English
Madonna pictures, which ‘implies an intimacy with her subject’ (Olsen

2003, p. 254). This continuity infers that Cameron’s transnational vision
emphasised similarities among women over racial, national and ethnic
differences.
Kanchanakesi Channa Warnapala delves deeper into the matter by
analysing three of Cameron’s Ceylonese female portraits. She testifies
that although Cameron’s colonial gaze objectified the Ceylonese sitters’
bodies, her perspective was more complex (Warnapala 2008, p. 10).
Refusing to pose her subjects against a familiar background of trop-
ical vegetation and instructing them to look away from the camera,
she undermined colonial visual discourse. Warnapala suggests that the
subversion of existing conventions implies that Cameron felt some inti-
macy with her colonised subjects. Hence, although, on one level, the
Ceylonese photographs conform to colonial stereotypes, they also signal
Cameron’s ambivalence towards these conventions, which perhaps stems
from her multiple homes—India, England and Ceylon—which enable her
constantly to shift from the position of the colonialist photographer to
the location of the colonised model, inhabiting an ‘in-between space’
which grants her access to multiple sites of knowledge and identification
(Warnapala 2008, p. 16).
Reading this analysis, I realised that Cameron and I seem to share
a similar artistic experience. As transnational artists, crossing physical,
cultural and emotional borders when engaging in our work, we have
often recoiled from the otherness of our subjects, yet at the same time we
have experienced moments of identification, like this one. This ambivalent
stance in which anger, disgust and aloofness are mingled with sympathy,
empathy, familiarity and affinity towards our subjects enables us to follow
their mindsets.
But is this mix of distance and closeness necessary for reconstructing
compelling transnational biographies? Patricia Clavin claims that individ-
uals engaged in border crossing reflect the culture of their nation state,
region or local community (Clavin 2005, p. 437). Therefore, transna-
tional encounters are always influenced by national ideologies from which
may follow a sense of remoteness and alienation. Therefore, transnation-
alism is among other things about ‘the study of encounters that both
attract and repel between people […] which are represented and anal-
ysed through a host of different types of evidence’ (Clavin 2005, p. 423).
Studying what repels and estranges us when addressing strangers on
the other side of a border (in my case, Cameron, and in her case her
122 T. HAGER
Ceylonese subjects) shows us the complex meaning of cultural disparity,

but also teaches us humility in the face of the gaping chasm between
the present and the past, or between different cultures and nations. Yet
as Yaron Vansover claims, the otherness of people beyond historical and
national borders does not nullify the similarities between them (Vansover
2019). Therefore, despite feelings of ambivalence towards the Other, I
agree with Holmes that biographers and artists like myself can compre-
hend and maintain a sense of intimacy and identification which is at the
foundation of artistic creation.
In-Between Spaces: A Conclusion

Transnational art, as I see it, always takes place in unstable ‘transnational
spaces’ where facts taken from the different cultures and nations of the
author and her subject are linked together by creative and imaginative
details, thus filling the gaps apparent from archival sources. These are
‘in-between spaces’, where the writer/photographer either moves away
or gets closer to his or her foreign subjects, feeling complex emotions
towards them. Combining intimacy, empathy, respect and solidarity with
alienation, revolt, anger, disappointment and hostility due to cultural,
ethnic, class or national differences often creates blurred pictures, reminis-
cent of Cameron’s soft focus portraits. Yet these vague pictures, which are
frequently the best images we can obtain, can provide a sense of intimacy
with our subjects. I question Carlo Ginzburg’s assertion that we ‘must
destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they
come from societies very different from our own’ (Kandell 1991, p. 47).
Despite Cameron’s otherness and strangeness, I, a twenty-first-century
Israeli writer, feel a sense of familiarity, affinity and intimacy towards her
as a woman, a fellow artist and a mother.
Notes
1. Eccentricity during the nineteenth century referred to independent mind,
mental vigour and moral courage and was associated with Englishness (see,
for example, Saville 2002).
2. One of the exceptions is Victoria Olsen, who suggests that Cameron’s
obsession with the Madonna and child, which was unusual in nineteenth-
century English art, may be seen as a trace of her French sensibilities (Olsen
2003, p. 19).
3. I have constructed this summary from the books previously cited.
4. Cameron moved to her son Henry Hershel’s house in the mountain before
her death only because Harding was ill (Olsen 2003, p. 258).
5. These are extended versions of stories told by Cameron’s contemporaries
and were repeated in her various biographies (see, for example, Olsen
2003).
6. Unpublished letter from Cameron to Juley, 7 April 1845, Calcutta Dimbola
Museum and Galleries, Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
7. The common opinion in Victorian times was that women artists ought to
stay unmarried and childless, see Showalter (1977, pp. 65–66).
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CHAPTER 8
A Hungarian Woman Writer’s Transnational

Afterlife in the Digital Era: Renée Erdős
(1879–1956)
Anna Menyhért
The Transnational Afterlife in the Digital Era

Transnational biography, autobiography and life-writing studies have been
receiving a growing interest in recent years (Fleischmann 2009; Deacon
et al. 2010; Schweiger 2012; Boter et al. 2020). The impact of the
digital age on the transnational element in biography writing and anal-
yses has become one of the key topics in this field (Graham 2019). In
this chapter, I will interpret the transnational element in life stories and
canonisation processes as one being capable of realising an ‘afterlife’ for a
writer. Such an afterlife, that is, a life story within a cultural and canon-
ical framework, can come into being because of trans-border networks
made possible by online connections: networks of researchers, readers
and family members of the author who become interconnected on digital
media platforms. This has already taken place in the case of Renée Erdős
(1879–1956) (see Fig. 8.1), after the fictional biography I wrote about
A. Menyhért (B)
The Budapest University of Jewish Studies, Budapest, Hungary

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_8
128 A. MENYHÉRT
Fig. 8.1 Renée Erdős,

c. 1902. Photograph
from the frontispiece of
the volume Versek
[Poems]. Budapest:
Pallas, 1902
her life, entitled A Free Woman (Menyhért 2016), served as an impulse

for others to initiate connections that in turn served as a starting point of
an online network. I will also inquire into the impact that the existence of
a transnational afterlife can have on the canonisation of a woman writer
marginalised in the national context: how the emergence of new, digital,
trans-border, easily accessible communication channels can free institu-
tionalised nation-based canon-forming structures and make life-writing
partly a participatory network activity.
Hungarian Women’s Literary Tradition

In 2013, I published a monograph in Hungarian, entitled Women’s
Literary Tradition (Menyhért 2013). It was published in English in
2020 as Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian
Writers: Renée Erdős, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Minka Czóbel, Ilona Harmos
8 A HUNGARIAN WOMAN WRITER’S TRANSNATIONAL AFTERLIFE … 129
Kosztolányi, Anna Lesznai (Menyhért 2020). In it, I presented the stories

of five twentieth-century Hungarian women writers whose legacy of
literary criticism has been neglected or distorted, thus depriving subse-
quent generations of readers from knowing about the work of these
inspirational figures lost to cultural memory.
The starting point of the monograph was the fact that women writers
are not generally included in Hungarian school curricula. I looked
through several sets of textbooks of literature for secondary schools and
found that the only women writers that students can read during these
years are Sappho, and, 2300 years later, the poet Ágnes Nemes Nagy.
By omitting women writers, these textbooks have been conveying a false
message, according to which women have not been active as literary
figures. Thus, it became necessary to speak to women’s hidden literary
traditions, to reflect upon the ways that canons and traditions determine
reading strategies, and to attempt to build a women’s literary tradition
retroactively, in order to ensure that, unlike their predecessors, today’s
women writers were not going to be forgotten.
In each chapter, I described the specific relationship that I as a woman
writer developed to my literary foremothers, the writers of the past about
whom I wrote, so as to connect the writers of the past with each other as
well as with those of the present, and to establish a tradition upon which
future women writers might build. Linked to Virginia Woolf’s famous
theme of the ‘room of one’s own’ and her notion that ‘we think back
through our mothers if we are women’ (Woolf 1977, p. 83), I introduced
the concept of ‘a tradition of one’s own’ and the idea of the ‘room’,
a theme that returns at the end of each chapter when I metaphorically
enter the room of a certain writer, illustrating the process of becoming
familiar with the wider tradition of women writers.
For each one of the five women writers, I found something with which
I could identify, be it a character trait, a motif or event from their biog-
raphy, or a style or approach to their work. This is a method by which
we may reconnect with our predecessors. Having analysed their life and
work, I confirmed my hypothesis: in none of the cases did purely aesthetic
reasons account for the fact that twentieth-century canons and those of
the present have not acknowledged the work of these writers—or, in the
case of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, have not acknowledged it in its entirety,
including her so-called feminine poems. Life events, personal and literary
relations, and various biographical issues play a much greater role in
canonisation processes than critical theory and literary history tends to
assume.
130 A. MENYHÉRT
Having identified the importance of life stories in canon formation,

I sought out genres in which I could convey my message to large
readerships. I followed several paths. As part of a research project, my
research group constructed an interactive website about the life and work
of 12 twentieth-century Hungarian women writers, focusing on their
connections and communication platforms, entitled Women Writers on
the Net (http://ironok.elte.hu).1 I co-organised a discussion series about
women writers entitled Rose-tinted Spectacles in a cultural community
centre in Budapest for four years and published the edited version of
some of the roundtables (Kiss et al. 2009; Bán et al. 2009). And I started
to work extensively on the writer Renée Erdős. I co-wrote a film script
for a documentary about her life in 2014 (Oláh 2015), and ultimately I
wrote a fictional biography about her.
My A Free Woman: The Remarkable Life of Renée Erdős was published
in 2016 in Hungarian and became a bestseller. In this book, I was inter-
ested most of all in how the personal life of an author is connected to
her canonical status and to the aesthetic evaluation of her writings, in
the themes that Erdős wrote about: women’s sexuality, heterosexual rela-
tionships, and the (im)possibility of reconciling ambitions and traditional
roles for women, especially in the field of writing. I needed to adopt a
genre that made it possible to represent the mediated nature of the past in
ways accessible for readers in the present, and to portray early twentieth-
century women’s lives based on selecting research-based material and
combining it with fiction.
Renée Erdős
Renée Erdős (1879–1956) achieved success as a poet at the start of her
career in the 1900s, and again as a fiction writer in the 1920s and 1930s.
In between these two periods in which she flourished, she experienced
a serious personal crisis that intertwined with her professional life. She
found herself outside of the world in which she had been successful, and
she was forced to build a new career. She thus achieved popularity twice.
She was born into a Jewish family, the daughter of a pub-owner. In
1896, aged 17, she moved from Győr to Budapest to attend drama
school, but did not prove to be a talented student. She stayed with the
Somorjai family, through whom she became acquainted with the jour-
nalist Marcell Kadosa. It was with his help that, from 1897, her earliest
poems began to appear in the journal Hungarian Genius. They attracted
the attention of Károly Eötvös, a defence lawyer who had worked on

the infamous Tiszaeszlár blood libel case of 1882, in which all 15 of the
Jews accused of murdering a teenage girl were acquitted. He was also a
Member of Parliament, a journalist, author and editor and was referred
to by the nickname ‘Vajda’ or ‘governor’. Eötvös became her champion,
taking her on as a columnist for his journal Agreement and publishing her
first volume of poetry, Leányálmok [Girldreams ], at his own expense in
1899, writing the foreword to it himself.
Renée Erdős soon became a familiar figure on the Budapest literary
scene of the time. Among her friends (or lovers), she could count such
prominent men as the celebrated playwright and author Ferenc Molnár,
the social scientist and historian Oszkár Jászi and Ervin Szabó, the
progressive librarian after whom the network of public lending libraries in
Budapest is named to this day. The poet József Kiss, editor of the journal
The Week, whom Renée Erdős regarded as her mentor, also promoted her
work. It was through Kiss that she came into contact with Károly Pfeiffer,
the director of the publishing company Pallas, who went on to publish her
second volume of poetry, Versek [Poems ], in 1902, and who, according
to Erdős’s autobiography (Erdős 2018), fell in love with her. Before their
relationship had a chance to become more serious, Pfeiffer committed
suicide (with a book of Renée Erdős’s poetry on his bedside table). It
was at this time that the writer and journalist Sándor Bródy entered her
life, with whom she was to have a stormy three-year love affair.
Bródy attempted suicide by shooting himself not long after their
break-up. The literary and journalistic circles of Budapest blamed Erdős.
Publishers and papers terminated her contracts, and she found herself in a
very difficult financial situation. She suffered what we would now under-
stand to be a mental breakdown, but was then called neurasthenia. For
years, she was unable to write. She travelled abroad with the support of
a female friend, possibly her lover, Erzsébet Héczey, moving to Florence
in Italy, where she converted to Catholicism. In 1909, she was married
to Lajos Fülöp, who later became a prominent art historian and cler-
gyman. They moved back to Hungary together, and she gave birth to
two children before getting divorced. Her husband left her during the
particularly challenging period of her pregnancy and protracted recovery
period following the very difficult birth of their second daughter, Erdős
having nearly died in childbirth.
132 A. MENYHÉRT
After World War I, she started to write fiction and became a bestselling
author. Her book sales yielded enough for her to live off, a rare occur-
rence not only then, but now as well, and especially for a woman. In fact,
she is known to have earned the most money of any Hungarian writer
of the era from book sales. She earned many times what was deemed
sufficient for a comfortable bourgeois standard of living in her day. In
1927, she bought a villa, now the Erdős Renée House, a community
house-museum in the XVIIth district of Budapest, and it was from this
house that, with the help of her second husband, Artúr Lőfler, she ran
her literary and business affairs. Originally her secretary, this husband was
ten years her junior. Renée Erdős was a businesswoman and checked over
the lists of her book sales carefully. She signed each and every copy of her
books and permitted only signed copies to be sold. She was a publisher’s
nightmare, asking too much money for her books and for doing readings.
Nonetheless, she was an immensely popular author.
As for how many of her books were in circulation: in 1926 Renée
Erdős switched publishers, leaving the struggling Manó Dick for the
Révai Brothers’ Literary Institute. The Révais began to reissue Renée
Erdős’s collected works as a series. Manó Dick recalled all of the copies
from the shops and the Révais bought his stock for 30% of the retail price.
A report on those copies reveals that 13 titles were in the shops: a total
of 17,713 copies (Analecta 1926a, b).
In the 1940s, her Jewish origins meant that she was only able to
publish under a penname, and from 1944 she was in danger of perse-
cution. What emerges from her letters of 1945 and 1946 is that, firstly,
the people living in the neighbourhood carried off everything that was in
her house while she was being hidden, initially by her daughter, now a
doctor, in a hospital and later at a friend’s house in the provinces. The
house that she had abandoned was used by the soldiers of the Soviet
Army. When they had vacated it, Erdős was still unable to return to the
house as, under the new Communist regime, ‘a private individual was
no longer permitted to live in a house of that size’ (Erdős 1945). Renée
Erdős writes after World War II that she would like to work again, to find
a publisher. After all, there was still great demand for her books. As she
said at the time, the ‘second hand booksellers are selling tattered copies
of them for a kilo of lard’ (Erdős 1946).
At the time, Renée Erdős came to be completely forgotten by literary
history. Her works did not make it into the canons preferred by the
cultural ideology of the Communist era. Even before that, in the 1940s,
she was far too popular and her writings were therefore considered not
worthy of the attention of literary history, which, since the end of the
1920s, had portrayed her early success story, comprising her publication
in journals and the popularity of her collections of poems, as if it was
entirely due to the support of Sándor Bródy. Her second period of success
was labelled as that of an erotic lady author, and her works, assumed to
address only women readers, were considered ‘not the business of literary
history’ (Várkonyi 1942, p. 311).
On the other hand, a large number of readers remember her poems and
novels. No one else in twentieth-century Hungarian literature has written
as extensively and as expressively about women’s sexual problems as Renée
Erdős. Her poems depict the struggle between the woman who lives for
her man, to whom the man’s positive opinion is the most important thing,
and her consciousness of the importance of having her own say. This is
a fundamental problem for many women even today. And in her novels
there is no happy ending, no silence kept about what comes after marriage
and how that is far from simple either. Her novels are much more about
female problems: women’s sexual issues, interpretations of marriage and
women’s various paths in life.
In my monograph, I introduced Renée Erdős in a new light, drawing
on the critical reception of her poems in the 1900s to show that she
was highly valued by her own contemporaries. I explained that her novels
attracted large numbers of readers because of their unique way of writing
about norms and the breaking of those norms. Close reading of her
poems showed that she was the forerunner of several well-known trends
in twentieth-century Hungarian poetry. I emphasised that it is not easy
to connect to a forgotten and undervalued writer, because readers are
not used to her way of writing—we need to make an effort to reframe
our own expectations so as to become able to discover our roots and the
women’s literary tradition.
A Free Woman: Writing About Renée Erdős’s Life

A Free Woman (Menyhért 2016) is written as a fictional biography, or
a biographical novel. Many readers are curious about the lives of both
famous and lesser-known people. I interpret the genre of fictional biog-
raphy (which on the face of it, may read like a contradiction in terms)
as one that produces an enjoyable text based on research, distinguished
from many biographies and histories by being more engaging and freer in
134 A. MENYHÉRT
its filling in of the gaps in knowledge; and, as such, it is the best choice
to introduce a subject’s life to the readers in a personal way, so that they
can feel close to them.
My book is partly based on facts, and partly on the work of my imagi-
nation. The genre thus provided me with creative freedom while tying my
hands at the same time. Since the characters of the story are real people,
famous Hungarian writers and journalists of the early twentieth century,
a large amount of information is generally known about them, especially
among Hungarian readers. Streets in Budapest are named after many of
them, so their names are familiar to visitors. On the other hand, as literary
history in Hungary has hitherto neglected to research on women writers,
there was very little information available about Renée Erdős.
When I started to read and research into Renée Erdős in 2009, I
liked her poems and novels, but initially I found it difficult to approach
her work, and to get close to her. I was not familiar with the way she
wrote, because I had not been acquainted with her oeuvre previously. I
patiently read on. I thought that what I was experiencing as her ‘foreign-
ness’ was the result of the canonisation processes due to which she had
been forgotten, and thus her work had not been part of school curricula.
I could not have had a chance to become familiar with her work earlier,
thus my task was to get used to reading her newly. As a next step, I
started to read archival material, letters, diaries, invoices, contracts with
publishers, medical reports and so on in archives in Hungary as well as
Italy.
The story of her life was exciting and impressive. Her personality
seemed fascinating. She was a determined, strong-willed, powerful, even
adamant woman, yet at the same time resilient and flexible, and very
attractive to men, but not in the conventional sense. Many of the contem-
porary reports, articles, reviews and memoirs referred to her body as
robust, strong, large, with mockery and awe—as the following excerpt
from 1901 shows.
The name of the lady who decorates our front page today has been known
to our readers for nigh on three years. The Week has brought you her poetic
creations, each more beautiful than the next, one or two of which lay bare
the struggles that take place in the womanly breast with shocking frank-
ness. […] A woman poet, who not only is unwilling, but also unable to lie,
compelled as she is by every fibre of her naturally lyrical being to confess.
This woman is one confession, a corner of the veil is lifted in the breeze, a
tiny gap through which we can peek into the mystery of the female soul.
She doesn’t bother much with conventions. As for what is permitted of a
poet and what is not—she doesn’t ask. What will that revered institution,
public opinion say to it? She rises above that. And don’t go imagining
some itsy-bitsy, waif-like, delicate creature, a wonderful concoction of
fragrance and sweetness and noble sentiments. Instead, picture a hefty
serving woman, all muscle, all strength, all pulsing life and health! And her
soul is as healthy as her body. She doesn’t philosophise, is not a follower
of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. She’s not a Buddhist or a Christian or a
Jew. She is all woman. For now, she is harmless. She might someday be
someone’s Delilah. Who dare claim she won’t? (Anon 1901, trans. Anna
Bentley)
Erdős had an inclination to take the initiative that was unusual for a
woman in her era. Moreover, and this was particularly impressive to me,
she had a great talent for standing up again and again after suffering
huge blows, and for working through them to reach yet another stage
of renewal in both her personal and professional life.
Due to the fact that the life and work of Renée Erdős had not
previously been researched systematically, and that no monograph or
biography had been written about her, only certain parts of her life were
known. There was no single source that could have provided me with
information concerning her address, the dates of the important events of
her life, the names of her parents, husband and children and so on.
I have collected information from the archives, letters, memoirs,
contemporary articles and essays. I discovered Erdős’s typewritten 200-
page autobiography, entitled Our Youth, which covers a short period of
her life, the first few years after she moved to Budapest when she was 17,
up until the time that she met Sándor Bródy. She wrote it in her old age.
Since then, the book has been published; I contributed by editing the
text (Erdős 2018).
Many times I struck it lucky through checking material about the
lives of the famous men who were important to her. I was able to place
one piece next to another, as in a puzzle. The famous men’s lives are
well researched and documented. I knew, for example, that she was the
wife of Lajos Fülöp in the 1910s (they married in 1913 in Tersato).
Fülöp’s correspondence has been published in a five-volume series, and
he normally put his address on his letters. I could make the assumption
that his wife lived at the same address at that time. However, Erdős’s
presence was not strong in the volumes of her husband’s collected letters.
136 A. MENYHÉRT
The marriage did not end well: Fülöp left his wife just before she gave
birth to their second child, and he did not support her when she was
ill for months after suffering a pulmonary embolism while giving birth,
from which she nearly died. Literary history has preferred to forget these
details. I talked to one of the archivists editing the volumes of letters, and,
it turned out, she was related to Fülöp’s family. She said that the family
‘policy’ was not to talk much about aunt Renée. Her uncle Lajos did not
like it when people mentioned her.
Literary processes include their agents—people and institutions—who
form them. Texts come into contact with each other via people—writers,
readers, editors, critics, publishers and booksellers—within an institution-
alised framework. Literary life has its actors, and they, in turn, have goals,
interests, social status, social roles, feelings and decisions. Which piece
of literary work is good and which is not? Which is worthy of being
included in textbooks, and which is not? How do we define the norms,
standards and viewpoints that serve as a basis for these decisions? Rela-
tions of interest and power form the common taste of an era, culture
and community. Literary history often pretends that something—which
is in fact shaped by people—is naturally occurring; yet people, men and
women alike, have been framing it based on the age-old habituated norms
and rules of a male-centred society according to which women can only
come second. Literary history accepts that women writers are not talked
about. I did not want to accept this.
I thus went on collecting data. I made lists, graphs and tables: who did
Erdős know, where did she live, where did she travel, what did she write
and publish, and when. That is how I put her life story together. But
there were lacunae remaining, and I had to make guesses. I filled these
lacunae imagining scenes, locations and meetings. But I would not just
make up any story, only those that would fit the picture that had already
started to emerge for itself during my research. The pieces of mosaic had
a certain logic that I had to obey.
I found Renée Erdős in torn pictures. Her life story is not complete,
and cannot be complete. I aimed at representing such a fragmented char-
acter within the timeframe of the novel. I built the story in a diary-like
way, grabbing certain moments. Each chapter has the subtitle of a date
and place. This method gives the book a strong sense of a cinematic flow,
and at the same time it shows the way we remember, the way we create
memories, the way we can track the footsteps of a person in the past.
In addition, this solution enabled me to emphasise what I thought was
the most important in the story of Renée Erdős: the fact that she wrote
about the complex relationship between the roles prescribed for women
by societal norms, love and writing. She wrote the most about love, in a
very open, unique way, and about the female body, desire and emotions.
In my novel about her, love also plays an important part. My book, in
keeping with her own novels, does not have a happy ending. It ends at a
stage of individual growth following a separation. I learned from writing
about Renée Erdős that women today still struggle with the same issues
that made an impact on her life a century ago.
The Two Renées

The following two sections discuss how a woman writer, forgotten for a
long time by national literary canons, can become the subject of narratives
that bring her life story and consequently her works into the transnational
space. In the first, I will describe how a group of people from several
countries, who now engage in working on Erdős, came together, and
how their meeting was facilitated by digital connections. In the second
section, I focus on the significance of this case study and link it to the
theoretical background that I outlined at the beginning of this chapter.
In the transnational afterlife of Renée Erdős, people from several coun-
tries have come together in the digital space to form a network; this
network has already lead to the rediscovery of lost intergenerational family
links and had a significant impact on research as well. In November 2018,
I received a letter from David Robert Evans, who had translated the first
chapter of A Free Woman into English for my website. He forwarded
me a message from Jano Tyroler, who had contacted him after he had
read that chapter. Jano Tyroler is the grandson of one of Renée Erdős’s
brothers, Ignácz. He lives in Israel, where his family emigrated in 1945
after being on the Kastner train in 1944. (The Kastner train carried 1684
Hungarian Jews to Switzerland and was diverted to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp, from where most of the original passengers reached
Switzerland by December 1944.) I wrote back to Tyroler, and we have
been in touch ever since. He is very interested in his family’s history, and
particularly in Renée Erdős’s works. He initiated the translation of her
poems into Hebrew by Eli Netzer and recently published a volume that
they have compiled (Erdős 2020).
In March 2019, I received an email from Paul Kiem, the Profes-
sional Officer of the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales in
138 A. MENYHÉRT
Australia. He reached out to me after he had also been contacted by Jano

Tyroler, then saw my website and learned that I had written a fictional
biography about Renée Erdős. Paul Kiem researches the life and work
of Renée Fauvette Erdős (Kiem 2008). When he wrote to me, he had
recently discovered from the exchange with Tyroler that there were in fact
two writers with the name Renée Erdős, and that they were related. Renée
Fauvette Erdős (1911–1997) was the niece of Renée Erdős, the daughter
of her other brother, Fülöp (Philippe), who moved to Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka) in the 1900s and worked as a photographer and Kodak agent in
Colombo. After travelling with his family in the early 1910s, he died in
1915 in London. Renée Fauvette Erdős was an Australian educator, the
founder of the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales (Kiem
2008). Kiem asked me if I had come across of any reference to Philippe
Erdős and his daughter in Renée Erdős’s work. I reported that there were
several mentions of a brother living in Colombo, and a possible journey
to Ceylon, in Erdős’s autobiography Our Youth. When in a difficult situa-
tion in Budapest, Renée Erdős received an invitation from her brother to
visit him, and several friends advised her to go, to escape the foreseeable
crisis that was inherent in starting a relationship with Sándor Bródy. But
I had not known that there existed a niece with the same name.
Jano Tyroler had previously asked me to read a handwritten letter by
Renée Erdős to her brother, Tyroler’s grandfather, which he had in his
possession, but was not able to read. I was used to her difficult hand-
writing as a result of my archival research, but I had postponed this task
for some time. Kiem’s email reminded me of it. As I looked up the letter,
I discovered the missing link between the two Renées. Kiem said that he
was not sure how much the Australian Renée knew about her Hungarian
aunt, as he had not found any mention of her Hungarian connections. It
was an amazing coincidence that the letter given to me by the grandson
of one of Renée Erdős’s brothers in Israel contained evidence of the fact
that the two Renées had been in touch, and that I could provide this
missing link to Kiem to assist in his research on the other Renée Erdős.
14th Aug. 1950

I received a beautiful letter from Renée in Sydney after I told her about the
tragedy. This remarkable person has always been attached to me. From my
own children I have never received such warm words as from her. Now she
wrote that she always felt similar to me, and she trusted that we would still
meet in the uncertain future. And that I shouldn’t feel abandoned because
she is with me a lot in spirit, if not in person. These are not empty phrases
for her. (Erdős 1950, trans. Anna Menyhért)2
Transnational Afterlives as Products

of Digital Network Activities
In her study of Dr Mary Eddy’s life, Ellen Fleischmann (2009) advo-
cates for a new understanding of the transnational individual. Mary
Eddy (1863–1923), an American Protestant missionary, was ‘the first
woman to obtain a licence to practice medicine in the Ottoman Empire’
(p. 108). Fleischmann writes about ‘struggling to incorporate a transna-
tional approach to the biographical subject […] [and] asking what it
means to be transnational and to live a transnational life, and how a
historian constructs a transnational biography’ (p. 109). She comes to
the conclusion that transnationalism is a ‘useful concept for attempting
to make sense of her life, for Mary Eddy’s life reveals the contradic-
tions of how these cross-cultural encounters simultaneously reinforced
cultural boundaries and expanded them, and how transnational identi-
ties played a role in both processes’ (p. 112). Similarly to Fleischmann’s
approach to transnationality in connection with Eddy, in this chapter
I have inquired into what it means to have a transnational afterlife as
a forgotten twentieth-century Hungarian woman writer. I have linked
the transnational character of Erdős’s afterlife to the possibility of her
re-evaluation by national and international literary canons.
In my monograph about women writers, I discussed how I saw the
author as a character in a story about her life. It is only by means of
this story that we can approach her. When, therefore, we speak of this
writer or that, it is not merely the person herself that we are talking about
or even her works; we are also talking about the story in which she is a
character. We can see in the figure of the author and in how she is inter-
preted the different approaches to life and literature of different ages and
cultures. Writers are particularly well-suited to this representative func-
tion, their lives being much better documented than the average person’s;
they both wrote and were written about. These life stories are written by
literary historians, but also by public opinion and public literary aware-
ness. They are then modified over and over, just as the past appears again
and again in our memories and it is different each time. It is as if, in the
140 A. MENYHÉRT
junctions of the countless interconnected strands of the great invisible net

that is literary history, novels are unfolding. These literary historical ‘nov-
els’ about writers show us what a given period thought about them—and
about their literature. A particular story may get forgotten from time to
time, then come to the fore again later in a modified form.
It is exactly at this point when it is possible to pin down how an
afterlife, that is, a life story that exists within a cultural and canonical
framework, eludes the restrictions of boundaries and becomes transna-
tional in the twenty-first century; and to see how this process differs from
that of the pre-digital era. In the digital era, the ways of digital commu-
nication and the subsequently formed transnational networks have an
impact on how and by whom these life stories can be compiled. Although
national institutional frameworks of communication about literature and
authors still exist, the digital platforms for such voices have become much
more liberal and accessible to many (Graham 2019, p. 4). Biographies
and afterlives can develop more spontaneously, through contributions in
a participatory manner on digital platforms. It is much easier for stories
about authors to cross borders, to become transnational, and conse-
quently canon-formation customs and norms can become more liberal,
too. The transnational will have an effect on the national: transnational
afterlives will come into being as a result of digital network activities
(Boter et al. 2020).
It is also important to remember that certain events at the micro- and
macro-historical level necessitate the reconnection that we can consider
to be transnationalisation and network-building from another point of
view. Renée Erdős and her siblings followed different life paths: some of
the siblings and/or their children remained in their home country; others,
like her brother Philippe, emigrated due to personal reasons, finding work
elsewhere; whereas the daughter of her other brother, and her children,
including Jano Tyroler, moved to Israel because of the persecution of the
Jews during the Holocaust. The twenty-first-century interconnection of
those interested in Renée Erdős’s life is in a way, partly, a reconnection:
not only a discovery but also a recovery of links lost in the past, just
as in the case of the network around Erdős described in the previous
section. Our network also has further plans: Paul Kiem and I will give a
talk together at the 2021 IABA conference in Turku; and we have been
discussing the establishment of a transnational foundation linked to the
memory of Erdős.
The life and work of Renée Erdős, a twentieth-century Hungarian

woman writer, has been mostly confined to national boundaries, and her
life story, through gender-biased acts of literary history, was consigned to
oblivion. This happened despite the fact that her life has had a transna-
tional aspect, as she lived abroad for several years and was in touch with
artistic and literary circles in countries other than her home country.
We know very little about her life abroad and her transnational connec-
tions at that time, due to the lack of previous and current research,
with documents being scattered across continents in archives and personal
collections.
At this point, we can see yet again the specific relevance in terms of the
forgetting and remembering of Erdős being a woman writer from Eastern
Europe. The developments of feminist criticism and related movements,
such as gynocriticism, reached that region belatedly. As far as the official
‘classical’ literary canons are concerned, the twentieth-century Hungarian
women’s tradition is barely visible. Making a conscious effort to redis-
cover forgotten women writers has been a recognised literary practice in
America and in Western Europe for four or five decades and has resulted
in some of those writers finding their place in literary history retroactively.
In Hungary, this work began only more recently, about two decades ago;
and this means that it broadly coincided with the beginning of the digital
era. For this reason, the digital element weighs more in the rediscovery
of forgotten women writers in Hungary. That is why the transnational
element in Erdős’s biography, that is, her relocation to Italy and her
consequent trans-border connections, have surfaced together with her
recognition as a woman writer in the national context, and go hand
in hand with her being the subject of narratives created by a digitally
facilitated network at a transnational level. At a future stage, the gender-
based literary and digital transnational recognition will hopefully lead to
reaching an English-language academic readership, with my monograph
on Hungarian women writers having been published in English, followed
by reaching an even wider audience with my fictional biography in an
English-language version (a translation is in process). At the end of the
road, it remains to be seen how all this will affect the official national
canons.
Thus, it is through an afterlife, initiated via digital connections, that
Erdős’s life story and impact has begun to elude borders and bound-
aries (Deacon et al. 2010, p. 4). At the end of this chapter, it is worth
mentioning that her transnational afterlife has started to shape with a
142 A. MENYHÉRT
surprising simplicity, ease and spontaneity. The process has brought about
discoveries and the linking of biographical and literary research, creative
writing, history and genealogy with family and readers in several countries
already, including Hungary, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Italy,
Israel and Australia. Possible further research threads will likely lead our
network to Sri Lanka, Belgium, Croatia, Romania and Austria as well.
All of this supports the hypothesis that in the digital era, institution-
based national canon-forming practices will be at least partly replaced by
transnational, multi-centred, democratic-participatory network activities.
This, in turn, can lead to the reassessment of literary history, to the coun-
teracting of the gender-based marginalisation of women writers, and to
the recognition of the forgotten writers of the past across boundaries in
digitally mediated cultural memory.
Notes
1. This is an interactive website developed under the auspices of the research
project ‘Women Writers and Their Publication Platforms in the Turn-of-
the-Century Hungary’, led by Anna Menyhért, funded by the National
Research, Development and Innovation Fund (OTKA), grant no. OTKA
PD 104264. It presents the oeuvres of the early twentieth-century
Hungarian women writers Minka Czóbel, Renée Erdős, Irén Gulácsy, Anna
Lesznai, Terka Lux, Emma Ritoók, Fruzina Szalay, Szikra (Madame Sándor
Teleki), Cécile Tormay, Anna Tsutsek, Janka Wohl and Stefánia Wohl.
2. Quoted with the permission of Jano Tyroler.
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PART III
Artists on Transnational Artists

CHAPTER 9
‘Something Out of the Way’: Edmund Gosse’s

Biography of Henrik Ibsen
Suze van der Poll
Sir Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was not only the librarian of the House
of Lords but a literary critic and poet as well. In 1907, he published
two biographies, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments and
Henrik Ibsen. The former was published in October of that year and
represents a biography in which Gosse drew an intimate portrait of his
own childhood and the close relationship with his father. Gosse’s biog-
raphy of the Norwegian playwright followed two months later. Each was
published in both Britain and the United States.1 Father and Son was
received as the ‘Literary Sensation of the Season’ and is still regarded
as Gosse’s masterpiece,2 but his Henrik Ibsen received rather less praise
(Anon 1908).3
As for Ibsen himself, the celebrated Norwegian dramatist, by now
known far beyond the borders of his home country, died on 23 May
1906, whereupon Gosse decided to erect a literary monument to the
S. van der Poll (B)

Faculty of Humanities, Scandinavian Studies, University of Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: S.vanderPoll@uva.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_9
148 S. VAN DER POLL
man to whom he had owed the start of his own career as a critic some
three decades earlier. It would take Gosse 18 months to finish a work
stretching to 244 pages and which may be seen as a mixture of eulogy,
biography, literary analysis, and political and social history. Father and
Son, written at the same time, ran to 178 pages, so we might wonder
how he managed to complete such a huge, if self-imposed task. A short
passage in the epilogue of Father and Son hints that the two works are
not completely unconnected:
there can hardly be imagined a figure more remote from my Father than
Ibsen. Yet when I came, at a far later date, to read ‘The Wild Duck’,
memories of the embarrassing household of my infancy helped me to
realise [the character of] Gregers Werle, with his predetermination to pull
the veil of illusion away from every compromise that makes life bearable.
(Gosse 1907, p. 345)
These lines, referring to one of the characters from Ibsen’s play The
Wild Duck, highlight the contrast between the father figure described
in Father and Son and the Norwegian author, who was the subject of
Gosse’s biography, pursued in parallel. Gosse’s presentation of and praise
for the atheistic, cosmopolitan, ‘business-like bard of sixty’ in Henrik
Ibsen (Gosse 1908, p. 171) differs strongly from his portrait of a reac-
tionary father figure in Father and Son in the narrative of his own home
life, which ends with the 17-year-old Gosse leaving Devon and his father’s
home for a ‘new life in London’ (Gosse 1907, p. 328). During those years
in London, the young Gosse gradually distanced himself from his father,
a loving if deeply pious man who had no high opinion of the literary
art. It was during this London period that the young Edmund devel-
oped his interest in Ibsen, the uncompromising man of letters and, of
course, a foreigner. Gosse’s positioning of the reference to Ibsen at the
end of Father and Son indicates that the epilogue may be read as a sort
of prelude to his study of Ibsen, a man for whom Gosse’s admiration
perhaps lay partly in his sense that the Norwegian writer was everything
Gosse’s own father was not. At the same time, Gosse’s descriptions also
show the similarities between himself and Ibsen, as illustrated by these
lines describing the playwright:
There has scarcely been another example of a writer of the first class
who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but debarred from all enjoyment
9 ‘SOMETHING OUT OF THE WAY’ … 149
of it until his thirty-seventh year, has been suddenly dipped, as if into

a magic fountain, into the heart of unclouded loveliness without transition
or preparation. (Gosse 1908, pp. 89–90)
A reader familiar with Father and Son would immediately see the similar-
ities with Gosse’s own childhood experiences, for, like Ibsen, Gosse had
not enjoyed youthful exposure to the worlds of art and literature.4 In
the following pages, I intend to examine how far we can say that Gosse’s
Father and Son, along with both his earlier critical writings on Ibsen and
the extensive source material provided by others, functions as a source of
inspiration for Henrik Ibsen. Looking more closely at the structural prin-
ciples of the work and Gosse’s presentation of temperament and his use
of narrative techniques, I hope not only to demonstrate that the English
biographer’s portrait shapes Ibsen as a canonical European author and
citizen of the world—that is, as a transnational subject, a man who had
left his native country at the age of 36, spending the next 28 years in exile
in various European cities—but that this portrait at the same time reflects
Gosse’s own development, as both human being and literary critic.
‘Something Out
of the Way’---Becoming a Biographer
It is certainly no coincidence that Edmund Gosse was to write the first
biography of Ibsen published following his death, as the life and works of
the Norwegian dramatist were in various ways tied to those of his English
biographer. Long before his fellow countrymen had even heard of the
Norwegian playwright, Gosse sensed Ibsen’s importance. It had been an
anonymous review of ‘Ibsen’s New Poems’, in The Spectator of 6 March
1872, that made Gosse ‘the first person to introduce Ibsen’s name to the
British public’ (Gosse 1908, p. xi) and paved the way for Gosse’s own
career as a literary critic.
That career had its beginnings in London where, as soon as he arrived,
the young Gosse began to work as a transcriber in the cataloguing depart-
ment of the British Museum. Dreaming of a career in the literary world,
he wrote poetry and reviews in his spare time, but finding publishers
was difficult. Then in 1872, Gosse met R. H. Hutton, literary editor
of The Spectator, who advised him to ‘[c]hoose something out of the
way, Scandinavian literature for instance’, for which he would certainly
‘get a hearing’ (Charteris 1931, p. 39). By coincidence, Gosse had visited
150 S. VAN DER POLL
Norway the year before, where he had come across Ibsen’s writings. In a
letter of 9 March 1888 to William Archer Gosse, he offered his memories
of that literary encounter:
Dear Mr. Archer, […] In 1870 I was at Trondhjem as a common tourist.

I strolled into the principal book-shop to buy a Tauchnitz. The foreman
(Braekstad), who was unfastening a huge parcel, talked to me in English,
and I asked him if there were any Norwegian poets. He said, with indig-
nation, yes, indeed! And added that the parcel before him, just arrived
from Copenhagen, contained the last new book, of the greatest Norwe-
gian poet, Ibsen. I bought it. It was the Digte of 1870. I sent for other
books, and finally in the Autumn, I reviewed the Digte (very ignorantly,
in The Spectator) and that was the first time Ibsen’s name was printed in
any English publication. (Charteris 1931, p. 222)5
The review, in which Gosse publicly displayed his admiration for Ibsen’s
poems, neither made Ibsen’s name widely known in Britain nor did it
promote Gosse as a critic, for the piece was published unsigned. Still, that
first review of Ibsen’s work in England was the starting point for a corre-
spondence between the young English critic and the Norwegian poet and
playwright,6 and this contact soon proved to be of mutual interest to
Ibsen. While Gosse opened the door to English readers for Ibsen, Ibsen
for his part proved himself to be a perfect springboard for Gosse’s career,
such that Hutton’s prophecy did indeed come true. Within ten months,
Gosse had managed to publish five articles in various magazines, four of
which focused on Ibsen’s work, and he would continue writing on Ibsen
and his work in the following years. Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem (2018,
p. 143) report that Gosse published ‘around twenty notes, essays and
reviews on Ibsen alone’ between 1872 and 1879. The chapter on Ibsen
in Gosse’s Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879) marks
the end of a decade during which he studied Ibsen’s life and writings
intensively. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at what Gosse wrote
then about Ibsen, as it shows clear parallels with how he would present
Ibsen’s life and writings in Henrik Ibsen some three decades later. In the
chapter, Gosse clearly employs a transnational perspective. Before turning
his attention to Norway’s two most famous writers, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
and Henrik Ibsen, Gosse introduces the young and sturdy nation to his
English readers. And in his descriptions of the two writers, one can easily
discern the difference between the stereotypical image of the Norwegian
(Bjørnson) and the somewhat atypical Ibsen:
Björnson [sic] is well known, by this time to many Englishmen: he repre-

sents the happy buoyant side of the life of his fatherland; he is what
one would naturally expect a Norwegian author to be—rough, manly,
unpolished, a young Titan, rejoicing in his animal spirits. Ibsen, on the
other hand, is a quite unexpected product of the mountain-lands, a
typical modern European, a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unful-
filled desire, piercing downward into the dark, profound Promethean—a
dramatic satirist. (Gosse 1879, p. 36)
The quotation is interesting because it is revealing of the critic’s view

both of himself and of his subject. Gosse presents himself as a discoverer
of unexpected creations from the Norwegian nation, choosing not only
to characterise Ibsen as a (transnational) European, but also to signal
the contrast between Ibsen and his fellow writer Bjørnson. In fact, he
made that contrast the basis for his portrait of Ibsen. The narrative choice
to present two temperaments as opposites is reminiscent of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives , and the trope would prove to be fruitful for Gosse’s
biographical writings. The relationship between two binaries formed one
of the cornerstones of Father and Son, as it would in Gosse’s biography
of Ibsen, a point to which I shall return.
In Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe, Gosse combined
biographical information about Ibsen with descriptions of the works
written between his literary debut, in 1850, and 1877. Whereas the earlier
historical dramas as well as his then most recent play, Pillars of Society, are
briefly mentioned, the other plays—most of which Gosse had reviewed
in 1872–1873—are discussed in detail. After briefly outlining the plays,
Gosse comments on their literary aspects, touching on characters and plot
with illustrative excerpts from the texts, as well as describing how the plays
were originally received. Nearly thirty years later, Gosse would employ a
similar approach in Henrik Ibsen.
In the 1880s, Gosse was to leave the subject of Ibsen to return to
English literature, perhaps indicating that for Gosse, the main purpose
of his advocacy of Ibsen might indeed have been to make a name for
himself in literary criticism. Still, he did not entirely lose sight of Ibsen,
although it was only in 1889 that Gosse resumed his promotion of the
Norwegian playwright by means of reviews—amongst which was a long
article on ‘Ibsen’s social dramas’ in The Fortnightly Review (1889)7 —
along with translations of Ibsen’s work.8 As a point of interest, one of
the translations was a biography. In 1890, Gosse collaborated with Clara
152 S. VAN DER POLL
Bell to issue a translation of the first biographical study of Ibsen, written

by Henrik Jæger.9 Published in 1888 under the original title, Et literært
livsbillede, Jæger’s biography—according to Gosse, the only one that
received widespread acceptance of the literary community—was a thor-
ough piece of work and, together with Gosse’s earlier writings, provided
expert knowledge to the English critic.
Henrik Ibsen---A Serious Biography

In his introduction to Henrik Ibsen, Gosse suggested that his biography
could be read in connection with the final edition of Ibsen’s complete
dramatic works prepared by William Archer. Archer had played an invalu-
able role paving the way for the Norwegian playwright in England, both
as translator and critic. This work also proved to be of great help to Gosse,
and like Jæger’s biography of Ibsen it functioned as an important source,
as reflected by Gosse’s many references to and quotations from Archer’s
analyses of Ibsen’s plays.
It was Gosse’s intention to write a serious biography of Ibsen, and just
as Jæger had done in his 1888 work, Gosse chose to position Ibsen and
his writings against the background of cultural and historical develop-
ments both in the young nation of Norway as well as in Europe more
widely.10 Jæger had written his text for the occasion of Ibsen’s 60th
birthday for Scandinavian readers, while Gosse presented Ibsen’s whole
life up to his death and thus was able to offer a more complete picture of
the playwright. Furthermore, Gosse’s biography is aimed at an English-
speaking audience. This meant that he took the time to describe Norway
and Norwegian life to his readers.
In his introduction, Gosse outlines his intentions with his biography.
He proposed to conform to a general plan to bring together ‘what ha[d]
been recorded of his adventures as an author’ (Gosse 1908, p. ix). Gosse
wished to explore how Ibsen’s writings were related to the author’s life,
but was to find that approach a challenge, for although he had corre-
sponded with Ibsen between 1872 and 1899, their exchanges had been
purely professional. Furthermore, as Ibsen had always been extremely
reluctant to reveal details of his personal life and because his social life
was somewhat limited, only rather sparse information was known about
the man behind the works. However, in the early twentieth century, new
material became available on the by-now ageing author. In 1904, The
Letters of Henrik Ibsen were published by Julius Elias and Halvdan Koht,
containing a selection of letters written by the Norwegian master. Nearly

every letter written to him had been destroyed, but those he had written
proved to be an important source for Gosse who made use of frequent
quotations from them to give his subject a voice. Nevertheless, to Gosse’s
disappointment, Ibsen’s letters contained very little information about
Ibsen’s character, as he was to note in his biography:
To the enigma of Ibsen’s character it was believed that his private corre-
spondence might supply a key. […] But the enigma remained unsolved;
the sphinx spoke much, but failed to answer the questions we had been
asking. […] [The letters] give valuable information about the genius of
his works, but they tell almost less about his moral nature than do his
imaginative writings. (Gosse 1908, pp. 227–28)
More useful was a smaller collection of letters published by Georg Brandes

in September 1906. Brandes’s collection contained Ibsen’s candid letters
to Emilie Bardach, a young Viennese girl with whom the then 61-year-
old author had fallen in love during the summer of 1889. Those letters
provided newly discovered evidence of Ibsen’s personal life, for while
there had been rumours of Ibsen’s relations with younger ladies, now
there was some proof. In Henrik Ibsen, Gosse referred to the episode
as shedding new light not only on the author’s life but also on his
work. According to Gosse, every dramatic work Ibsen wrote after he had
met Emilie Bardach ‘bears the stamp of those hours among the roses in
Gossensass’ (Gosse 1908, p. 188). This autobiographical view of Ibsen’s
plays illustrates that, according to Gosse, the border between Ibsen’s life
and works was rather porous, as at least part of the route to the author’s
character passes through his works.
In the same year that Brandes published Ibsen’s letters to Emilie
Bardach, a collection of reminiscences was published by Johan Paulsen
(1906), whom Gosse described as Ibsen’s Boswell—one of the many
analogies to writers and artists from the English-speaking world that
reveal Gosse’s transnational perspective. Paulsen had been a friend of
the Ibsen family and was therefore able to observe Ibsen at close quar-
ters.11 Those memoirs were criticised for their lack of accuracy but Gosse,
although acknowledging their naiveté, was not altogether unamenable to
using such sources, which, while less factual, provided useful contextual
information to a biographer who after all had met Ibsen face to face only
once.12
154 S. VAN DER POLL
For his biography, Gosse made use of the newly discovered records
of Ibsen’s adventures as an author, and re-evaluated and reinterpreted
the existing sources, including his own previous writings on Ibsen. As
illustrated by Gosse’s evolving appreciation of The Wild Duck at various
stages in his career as a critic, his re-evaluation of his own writings displays
Gosse’s development. In his previously mentioned 1889 article ‘Ibsen’s
Social Dramas’, Gosse had characterised The Wild Duck not only as
Ibsen’s most difficult play, but also as ‘the least interesting to read’, which
Gosse held was because of its cynical selfishness (Egan 1972, p. 89). Gosse
had been pleased to see that in his next play, Rosmersholm, the poet had
again risen ‘to the height of his genius’ (Egan 1972, p. 89). How radi-
cally then had his opinion changed by 1907! In Henrik Ibsen, Gosse gave
a much more positive account of The Wild Duck, now highlighting its
realism. Evidently, he had in the interim understood that The Wild Duck
presented ‘wholly real and living persons’ (Gosse 1908, p. 160).13 As
indicated by the remark on the play in the epilogue to Father and Son
about the household in The Wild Duck reminding Gosse of his own child-
hood, it had been the memories of Gosse’s early years that had made him
acknowledge the play’s realism.
Edmund Gosse as the English Tour

Guide to Ibsen’s Life, Work and Country
Edmund Gosse’s Ibsen biography serves as an excellent example of the
themes of the present volume. As an English biographer taking a Norwe-
gian as his subject, Gosse adopts a transnational view that is indicative
of his wider narrative strategy. His biography is consciously aimed at a
broader English reading audience. For although Gosse’s foreword reveals
his serious and academic ambitions, Henrik Ibsen at times reads rather like
a late Victorian novel. When describing the summer that would change
Ibsen’s life, in 1889, Gosse writes the following: ‘And now he was more
than sixty, and the grey tones were gathering around him more thickly
than ever, when a real ray of vermilion descended out of the sky and
filled his horizon with colour’ (Gosse 1908, p. 184). Enter Miss Emilie
Bardach, the young Viennese girl of eighteen whom Ibsen met that
summer and who by its end had left the old poet ‘heartbroken’ (Gosse
1908, p. 185). No doubt it was descriptions like those that made Francis
Henry Gribble (1908) conclude in his review of Henrik Ibsen that ‘[t]he
appeal of Mr. Gosse’s book, indeed, is rather to the general reader than
to the student who is specializing in dramatic literature’.
Gosse’s alternating between academic and more novelistic aspirations
is reflected in his switching between a serious style and a more poetic
approach to the subject rather reminiscent of Dickens—and, for that
matter, it is not so very different from the style he used in Father and
Son. The balancing of different registers is evident throughout the book.
Indeed, Gosse’s poetic style often draws on analogies with painting, which
are used equally to describe Ibsen’s native country, as well as his works and
his character. Though Ibsen’s plays had been debated publicly in England
from the late 1880s onwards, to most English readers Norway was a
remote country. In his descriptions, Gosse therefore employs a compara-
tive strategy: Ibsen’s hometown of Skien is likened to a sort of Poole or
Dartmouth. Ibsen himself is frequently compared to Robert Browning:
both shared a curiosity for small incidents, and moreover, according to
Gosse, both authors were fighters and had long been misunderstood.
Gosse also calls upon Shakespeare to illustrate Ibsen’s greatness. Yet he
underlines that Ibsen knew nothing of Shakespeare, and truly believes that
‘the loveliness of scenery […] and the varied and exquisite appeal to the
eyes’ (Gosse 1908, p. 107) in Peer Gynt surpasses what has been written
by the English master dramatist. When analysing Hedda Gabler, Gosse
compares the way that Hedda is described with how ‘Mr. Sargent might
paint a lady of the London fashionable world’ (Gosse 1908, p. 178),
laying bare the disorder of her nerves and her impotent egotism. Such
lyrical descriptions illustrate the narrative’s transnational perspective, as
the biographer explains elements of Ibsen’s writings by comparing them
with works of art with which his English readers will already be familiar.
Gosse used a vocabulary similarly related to painting for his depictions
of context, although there he applied a touristic gaze, noticeably different
from the style he used to describe the plays and their author. A good
example is his narrative of Ibsen’s visit to Molde in the summer of 1885,
of which Gosse wrote, ‘that enchanting little sub-arctic town, where it
looks southward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever
guarding the mountainous horizon’ (Gosse 1908, p. 164). Passages like
that can be found throughout Gosse’s biography and reveal his ability
to visualise, as he did in his comparison of Ibsen’s description of Hedda
Gabler with John Singer Sargent’s paintings. They also reflect Gosse’s
own initial interest in Norway and must have stimulated the interest
of his English-language readers, whom Gosse shepherded towards and
156 S. VAN DER POLL
guided through Ibsen’s life, works and country like an expert tour guide,
offering a nuanced picture in which he balances stereotypical descriptions
of Norwegian nature with more in-depth sociopolitical and historical
information.
Gosse’s authority as biographer was bolstered by his knowledge of
Ibsen’s writings, his (albeit fleeting) personal acquaintance with the writer
and—thanks to his visits there in the early 1870s—his impressions of
Norway as a country, all of those lending the resulting work a ‘personal
touch’. Indeed, as Gosse himself underlines, the writer of ‘these pages’
was personally involved too, as reflected in his use of first-person narra-
tive, just as in Father and Son. The same intimate approach is seen in
Gosse’s undisguised pride in being in a position to quote from letters he
had personally received from the Norwegian master.
All the same, Gosse’s sense of personal involvement seems to differ
from a similar tendency, discernible in many Victorian biographies, ‘to
domesticate the artist as “one of us”’, as Julie Codell (2003, p. 23)
puts it. Ibsen is always kept at arm’s length by Gosse, who frequently
writes ‘us’ and ‘we’, but always in reference to his readers, not to Ibsen.
That becomes even clearer if we compare Gosse’s use of the first-person
narrator in Henrik Ibsen with that in Father and Son. Whereas the
narrator of Father and Son operates as the subject of the narrative as
well as narrating it, and displays closeness not only to his younger self but
to his father too, in the biography of Ibsen the narrator is more reserved.
That distance from his subject both helps to strengthen the biographer’s
objectivity and contributes to constructing the image of Ibsen as a genius
who was hardly influenced by other writers, let alone foreign writers—
according to Gosse, Ludvig Holberg and Adam Oehlenschläger14 were
the only writers Ibsen had read when his first play was written—and so
must be presented as unique.
Henrik Ibsen---A World Citizen

‘No great wild swan of the flocks of Phœbus ever began life as a more
ungainly duckling’, Gosse wrote in his chapter on Ibsen’s childhood and
youth (Gosse 1908, p. 7). Ibsen’s genius as a playwright was acknowl-
edged as early as 1867, in Georg Brandes’s review of The Pretenders
(Kongsemnerne). Yet, as the quotation above illustrates, in Gosse’s view
Ibsen developed into a genius against all odds. The fact that despite his
obscure ‘youth and middle age, and his […] consistent refusal to adver-
tise himself by any of the little vulgar arts of self-exhibition’ (Gosse 1908,
p. 211), Ibsen grew to be so celebrated in the literary field that he became
a legend, ‘equalled by no other living man of letters’ (p. 230), intrigued
his biographer.
It is revealing that to Gosse, Ibsen’s financial success was as important
as his artistic triumph: he repeatedly states that Ibsen was a successful
‘Man of Business’ (p. 135). This is even more telling in the light of
Gosse’s characterisation in Father and Son of his own father as a man who
took very little interest in money, and as one whose reputation as a scholar
was damaged because he rejected Darwin’s theory of the mutability of
species as presented in 1856.15 Philip Henry Gosse had left London’s
academic milieu and withdrawn himself—and his son—to the periphery.
By contrast, Ibsen remained a rebel, who wrote his major works abroad.
The Norwegian playwright moved between European cultural centres like
Rome, Dresden and Munich in the years between 1864 and 1891, only
to spend the last years of his life in his native country, ‘as a wealthy and
prosperous citizen of Christiania’ (Gosse 1908, p. 211). Gosse was clearly
delighted to list Ibsen’s economic and social successes. The decorations
that Ibsen received left ‘the breast of his coat sparkling with foreign stars
and crosses’ (Gosse 1908, p. 174); the number of copies of his plays
printed and the fact that there appeared ‘simultaneous translations into
most of the languages of Europe’ (Gosse 1908, p. 195) clearly speak
to Ibsen’s transnationality. Gosse saw all that as proof both of Ibsen’s
growing celebrity and the recognition of his qualities as a writer not only
in his home country, but across the continent too.
Interestingly, Gosse traces the origin of Ibsen’s genius and transna-
tionality to his solitary and passive existence. Gosse repeatedly notes that
Ibsen ‘did nothing at all’ (Gosse 1908, p. 162), and uses the mirror as
a metaphor for Ibsen’s relation to the outside world. As Ibsen separated
himself from society, Gosse is dependent on the gossip mainly provided
by Johan Paulsen, for example when describing Ibsen’s days in Rome:
In Rome Ibsen had his favorite table, and he would sit obliquely facing
a mirror in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his
gold spectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, and
especially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, every couple
that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to those
untiring eyes. The newspaper and the café mirror—these were the books
158 S. VAN DER POLL
which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and out of the
gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph in a newspaper,
even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could build up a drama.
(Gosse 1908, p. 162)
The quotation is revealing and illustrative of the way that Gosse sees his
hero. The biographer views his subject as one who ‘did not belong’ to
any community: ‘[I]f he was to be limited at all, he might be styled Euro-
pean’ (Gosse 1908, p. 139). And it is exactly that paradoxical question of
‘belonging’ that forms a leitmotif from the opening lines of Henrik Ibsen:
The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish skipper,
Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century […] became a
citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the family, all following
the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorous disposition, continued to
haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinister and taciturn wives, who, by
the way, were always, it would seem, Danes, or Germans or Scotswomen,
so that positively the poet had, after a hundred years and more of Norwe-
gian habitation, not one drop of pure Norse blood to inherit from his
parents. (Gosse 1908, p. 1)16
It is interesting to note that as in Father and Son, the first chapter of

which is devoted to Gosse’s own ancestors, Gosse chose to start his biog-
raphy with a history of the Ibsen family. But whereas family lay at the
core of Father and Son, it is thereafter strikingly absent from Gosse’s
biography of Ibsen. Ibsen himself had little contact with his family after
leaving home shortly before his sixteenth birthday, and in the later chap-
ters Gosse scarcely mentions Ibsen’s wife or his son. The Ibsen that Gosse
presents is no family man, either in his private life or as a member of
the wider ‘Norwegian family’, with Gosse frequently adopting familiar
archetypes such as the ‘writer as rebel’ and the ‘writer as exile’ (Benton
2009, p. 2) to illustrate Ibsen’s revolutionary spirit and his aversion to
Norwegian narrow-mindedness.
Yet for Gosse, Ibsen’s non-belonging characterises his artistic career as
well. Gosse’s portrait is of an author suspicious of literary examples or
influences, especially those of his contemporaries—Gosse underlined that
Ibsen’s debut, Catiline (1850), was not influenced by Alexandre Dumas’
play from 1848. In Gosse’s view, the only man who really influenced the
development of Ibsen’s writing was Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. As early as in
his chapter on Ibsen in his previously mentioned book of 1879, Gosse
had highlighted the contrast between the two authors. A decade later he
wrote:
it is difficult not to believe that the rivalry between these two great poets
has been beneficial for the greater of the two, and if I had the space, or
could hope to hold the interest of the reader in such a discussion, I should
like to dwell upon the relation of Björnson’s Leonara and The New System
to A Doll’s House and the possible influence of Björnson’s The Glove on
The Wild Duck.17
Henrik Ibsen offered Gosse the chance to develop these lines of enquiry
further.
In his essay ‘Nature Vs Naturalist: Paths Diverging and Converging
in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son’ (2014), Martin Goodman argues
that Edmund Gosse sought to define himself by contrasting his own life
with his father’s. That view takes its cue from the work’s subtitle, ‘A
Study of Two Temperaments’. Father and Son opens with the remark
that the book records the struggle of two natures: ‘one was born to
fly backwards, the other could not help being carried forward’ (Gosse
1907, p. 1). Whereas Edmund Gosse presents his father as a pure-bred
naturalist, Edmund thought of himself as a literary man. And if there
had been one man who ‘helped’ him become one, that man was the
Norwegian bard, Ibsen. In Henrik Ibsen, the notion of the struggle of
two temperaments is as constitutive of Gosse’s portrait of the Norwegian
playwright as it had been for his description of the relationship between
himself and his father. Gosse wrote that ‘No feature of Ibsen’s personal
career is more interesting than his relation to Björnson’ (Gosse 1908,
p. 139). The contrasts with Bjørnson helped Gosse build his image of
Ibsen as both man and author. Gosse referred to Bjørnson’s gregarious-
ness to highlight Ibsen’s solitary existence, while Bjørnson’s patriotism
served to present Ibsen—who could scarcely be characterised as ‘a good
Norwegian’ (Gosse 1908, p. 140)—as a transnational subject.
In his description of the relationship between the two Norwegian
authors, Gosse frequently employed warlike metaphors. Gosse charac-
terises Bjørnson as Ibsen’s ‘audacious enemy’ (Gosse 1908, p. 134). The
rivalry between the two is introduced in the analysis of The Pretenders,
for, to Gosse, their relationship was similar to that between the play’s
two rival dukes, Håkon and Skule. The youthful and brilliant Bjørnson
reminded Gosse of the self-reliant Håkon, whereas Skule’s gloom and
160 S. VAN DER POLL
hesitation was reflected in Ibsen. That the analogy between these two
oppositional pairs continues throughout the book not only illustrates
that in Gosse’s view the distinction between Ibsen’s life and work was
rather slender, but it also underlines the structural importance in Henrik
Ibsen of the notion of the two temperaments. Gosse describes Bjørnson
as Ibsen’s ‘popular rival’ (Gosse 1908, p. 87) and ‘brilliant antagonist’
(Gosse 1908, p. 88). Notwithstanding the martial metaphors, the rivalry
between the two temperaments is not presented as destructive. On the
contrary, their ‘benevolent, rivalry […] was eminently to the advantage
of each of them’ (Gosse 1908, p. 139). When in the mid-1870s Bjørnson
chose a new literary path, Ibsen was ‘determined to drive his audacious
enemy back by means of greater audacities’ (Gosse 1908, p. 134). Starting
with The Pillars of Society, Gosse held that Ibsen invented a new sort of
realistic drama that would not only herald a new phase in his literary
career, but would completely change world drama. And at this point,
another element in the description of the two temperaments becomes
clear. Bjørnson, though four years Ibsen’s junior, at several times shows
himself to be the more mature. He had already studied in Christiania
when Ibsen arrived, and it had been Bjørnson who (in a fatherly manner)
initiated the reconciliation between the two after years of animosity. Yet
in Gosse’s view, Ibsen by far is the more original writer, and this partly
had to do with the fact that he did not wish to please the majority of his
target audience and thereby proved to be the more radical.
Gosse’s image of Ibsen as a genius is established by his emphasis
on contrariness: to his family, his native country, contemporary society
and his rival, the patriot Bjørnson—a contrast that shows similarities
with that between Edmund and Philip Henry Gosse in Father and Son.
Ibsen is lifted ‘above the narrowness of local conditions’ (Gosse 1908,
p. 139). Nevertheless, towards the end of the biography, the transna-
tional perspective becomes somewhat ambiguous when Gosse underlines
the importance of Ibsen’s relationship with Norwegian society. In his
concluding remarks, Gosse wrote that ‘although Ibsen’s appeal is to the
whole world […] it is to Norway he belongs’ (Gosse 1908, p. 243).
Could it be that Gosse’s view of Ibsen as a cosmopolitan had been
coloured by his own wish to highlight that Ibsen had been able to ‘escape’
the milieu of his upbringing? Gosse’s choice of words in his characteri-
sation of the narrowness of local conditions perhaps signals his personal
preoccupations, as it is precisely this ‘narrowness’ to which Gosse also
referred in Father and Son to describe the milieu in which he himself
grew up.
Notes
1. Henrik Ibsen was published by Hodder and Stoughton in London and
by Scribner in New York, as the eighth in the Literary Lives Series, after
volumes on Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Ernest Renan, Coventry
Patmore, John Bunyan, Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold.
2. See, amongst others, Peter Alan’s article ‘Sir Edmund Gosse and his
modern readers: The continued appeal of Father and Son’ (1988). In this
article, Allen outlines the work’s narrative rhetoric and considers Father
and Son to be a good read for the serious and cultivated reader, providing
both ‘historical understanding’ and ‘a dramatic and well-told story’ (1988,
p. 489).
3. Though Gosse’s Henrik Ibsen was challenged by later studies on Ibsen’s
life and works, this biography would for decades be the only one available
in English. A reviewer writing for Outlook judged Gosse’s study to provide
‘appreciations rather than criticisms’ (Anon 1908).
4. Gosse’s childhood was spent in isolation. He had no friends, and his main
contact was with his father—his mother had died when he was seven
years old—and the household servants. In Father and Son, Gosse describes
how he watched his father paint and write, and accompanied him as he
went collecting material for his scientific research or visiting the religious
community in which the elder Gosse played a leading role.
5. Edmund Gosse, Letter to William Archer, 9 March 1888. Contrary to
what Gosse writes, and perhaps illustrative of the lack of attention to
detail for which he was regularly criticised, the review was not published
in the Autumn, but in March 1872.
6. Gosse sent his review to Ibsen in Dresden. Ibsen, who was keen for his
works to be published outside Scandinavia and Germany, seemed very
pleased by Gosse’s initiative.
7. On 1 January 1889, Gosse’s article ‘Ibsen’s social dramas’ was published
in The Fortnightly Review, which according to Michael Egan influenced
Henry James and George Bernard Shaw among others (Egan 1972,
p. 77). The article clearly evidences that Ibsen’s name was no longer
unknown in England, as Gosse could confidently state that Ibsen could
be considered ‘a European imaginative writer of the first class’. That
development was mainly the result of the seven plays in which Ibsen
dealt with contemporary life in Norway (Samfundets Støtter; Et Dukke-
hjem; Gengangere; En Folkefiende; Vildanden; Rosmersholm and Fruen fra
Havet ). According to Gosse, since the 1870s, Ibsen had in those plays
turned to hypocrisy in society and the brutality of personal egotism, and
described ‘with an accuracy hitherto unparalleled the symptoms of her
[Europe’s] disorder’ (see Egan 1972, p. 80).
162 S. VAN DER POLL
8. As Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem indicate, Gosse did not translate A Doll’s
House, although Ibsen granted him the right to do so in a letter dated 26
November 1880 (see Fulsås and Rem 2018, p. 143). Gosse published a
translation of Hedda Gabler in 1891, although the play had been trans-
lated by William Archer the year before. A translation by Archer and
Gosse appeared as volume 10 of The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen
(1906–1912). In 1893, Gosse translated The Master Builder together with
William Archer.
9. That same year he published The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S., a
biography of his father.
10. Descriptions of the cultural and political context play an important role
throughout the work, but as biographical information on Ibsen’s early
years is scarce, they are more prominent in the first part of Henrik Ibsen.
When Gosse came to describe the period when Ibsen was established as
a dramatist, he also devoted more time and space to his analyses of the
plays’ characters and styles.
11. After Paulsen had published a novel, Familien Pehrsen, which was clearly
based on his knowledge of the Ibsen family, the Norwegian writer severed
all links with him. It was not until after Ibsen’s death that Paulsen renewed
his contact with Suzannah Ibsen: he published his reminiscences in that
same year.
12. Gosse was probably present at the opening of the new National Norwe-
gian theatre (replacing a building that had burned down in the 1870s),
as his descriptions of both the opening and second nights, which were
a triumph for Ibsen, are described in great detail. Gosse referred to the
evening of 2 September 1899 as ‘the climax of Ibsen’s career’ (Gosse
1908, p. 204).
13. This was contrary to his view on Rosmersholm, the artificiality of which
Gosse now regarded as a backward step.
14. Ibsen did not read English nor French. According to Gosse, Ibsen’s first
play, Catiline, was not influenced by Dumas or Ben Johnson, who had
also written about Catiline. The Danish author Adam Oehlenschläger
(1779–1850) was formerly a foreigner to Ibsen, yet the written language
in Norway, until the final decades of the nineteenth century, was Danish.
Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) was born and raised in Norway, but studied
and settled in Denmark.
15. Gosse’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was in some respects a reactionary,
who held to the law of the fixity of species.
16. The genealogy in the opening is reminiscent of that in Gosse’s Father and
Son.
17. Edmund Gosse, ‘On Ibsen’s Social Dramas’ (1889) as quoted by Michael
Egan (1972, pp. 81–82).
Bibliography
Alan, Peter. 1988. ‘Sir Edmund Gosse and His Modern Readers: The Continued
Appeal of Father and Son’. English Literary History 55, no. 2 (Summer):
487–503.
Anon. 1908. ‘Ibsen To-Day’. Outlook, 27 June 1908.
Benton, Michael. 2009. Literary Biography. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Charteris, Evan. 1931. The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. London:
Heinemann.
Codell, Julie F. 2003. The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca.
1870–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Egan, Michael, ed. 1972. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Elias, Julius and Halvdan Koht. 1904. Breve fra Henrik Ibsen. Copenhagen:
Gyldendal.
Fulsås, Narve and Tore Rem. 2018. Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of World
Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, Martin. 2014. ‘Nature vs Naturalist: Paths Diverging and Converging
in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son’. Life Writing 11, no. 1: 85–101.
Gosse, Edmund. 1872. ‘Ibsen’s New Poems’. The Spectator, 6 March 1872.
Gosse, Edmund. 1879. Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe. London:
Kegan Paul.
Gosse, Edmund. 1889. ‘On Ibsen’s Social Dramas’. The Fortnightly Review, 1
January 1889.
Gosse, Edmund. 1890. The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. London: Kegan
Paul.
Gosse, Edmund. 1907. Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. New
York: Scribner.
Gosse, Edmund. 1908. Henrik Ibsen. New York: Scribner.
Gribble, Francis Henry. 1908. ‘Review of Henrik Ibsen’. The Times Literary
Supplement, 23 January 1908.
Paulsen, John. 1906. Samliv med Ibsen. Nye Erindringer. Copenhagen:
Gyldendal.
CHAPTER 10
Chopin on the Dnieper: The Musician-Poet

and Boris Pasternak’s Search
for the Transnational
Maria Razumovskaya
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) needs little introduction as

one of the most inspired minds to have fallen victim to the Soviet regime’s
political maelstrom. His international fame was sealed by the scandalous
clandestine publication of his literary masterpiece and only novel, Doctor
Zhivago, in 1957 in Milan by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, following the
manuscript’s notorious rejection in the USSR in 1956, where it was
accused of being a ‘political sermon-novel par excellence’ (Ministerstvo
Inostrannïkh Del 1958, p. 6), and its publication being suppressed until
1988. Adding insult to the editorial board’s injurious 10,000-word letter
of rejection was the demand of the Soviet authorities for Pasternak to
decline the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1958, and his
expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers. As described by Pasternak in
M. Razumovskaya (B)
Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK
e-mail: maria.razumovskaya@gsmd.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_10
166 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
his own lyric poem The Nobel Prize [Nobelevskaya premiya] (1959), he
became a hunted and ‘impounded beast’.1
This turn of events could not have been entirely unexpected for
Pasternak, who was totally committed to the orchestrated nature of his
mission to enable the publication abroad of his rejected manuscript: ‘I
am ready to engage in any scandal to bring this book out’ (Mancosu
2016, p. 4). Amidst the West’s scramble to depict Doctor Zhivago as a
dissident response to the Soviet State (see Mancosu 2016), the story of
smuggling the novel across the border provided an unmitigated testimony
to the plight of Soviet-Russian creative artists being forced into a life
of coercion and resignation that closed them off from the international
community. Consequently, the significance of Pasternak’s international
stature then, and still today, relies heavily on the recognition of inter-
national borders to facilitate the distinction between a fluid cosmopolitan
culture of transnational cooperation, one that Western citizens could take
for granted, against that peculiar isolation of the Soviet East.
The complex Cold War agendas mythologising Doctor Zhivago,
however, often conceal the irony of the novel as a nuanced but venomous
criticism of the imperialist Soviet vision that defined its citizens as
members of the ultimate transnational society: the supposedly immi-
nently emerging internationalist communist state (see Kotkin 1995;
Halfin 2003; Hellbeck 2006). With Pasternak setting down the main
sketches for the novel around 1932, the very heart of Doctor Zhivago
became a canvas elucidating his personal distinction between the notion
of a ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ intelligentsia which undermined the Soviet
rhetoric of selfhood. In particular, Pasternak was critical of the Soviet
intelligentsia’s ambition to define the Soviet Man as both a product
and embodiment of a transcended geographical space since, as will be
discussed, its notion of progress relied on the propagation and indoctri-
nation of cloneable models. Pasternak was disturbed by the arrogance of
this vision, not least because crucially for him, the resulting fixation on the
narration of Soviet society’s historic movement forwards into a glorious
internationalist future could achieve nothing except the erosion of the
individual.
In contrast, the ideas expressed within Doctor Zhivago were those
rooted in a long journey of self-searching that Pasternak undertook and
explored with some of his closest friends in the 1930s—that dark decade
of Terror marked by Stalin’s purges. Central to this journey was an explo-
ration of the deliberate displacement of the historic consciousness of
10 CHOPIN ON THE DNIEPER: THE MUSICIAN-POET … 167
the individual. Lacking both the ties of time and nation, such a defini-
tion of selfhood may well fall under the vision of transnationalism, but
it would be important to appreciate it in an altogether different sense
from the Soviet imperialist ambition. Rather than triumph, it reflected
the Russian intelligentsia’s need to define selfhood as a product of confes-
sion: of admitting the weaknesses and fallibilities of both the subject and
wider society, and the idea that these weaknesses could be overcome by
engaging with a series of self-selected historical personalities to temper
one’s own self to take on their noblest attributes. This freely chosen
amalgamation of subjects across historical time and across geographical
borders, and its autobiographical embodiment through art instigated a
profound process of individuation of the self. This, for Pasternak, was
the mark of true ‘internationalism’2 —although perhaps ‘transnationalism’
might be a better term. In his eyes, the individual, in whatever artistic
sphere, who had attained this transnationalism of the self was worthy of
bearing the title of ‘poet’.
In this respect, Pasternak’s openly blasphemous navigation of complex
aesthetic territories juxtaposed the ‘crooked-spirit’ of Soviet transnation-
alism with the sublimation of the Russian ‘free individual’. The elaborate
lens through which this free individual was envisaged was that of an auto-
biographic embodiment of the Gospel, via Lev Tolstoy, and the spirit of
Fryderyk Chopin’s music. This chapter will firstly explore the guises under
which these influences came to be tightly woven into the heart of Doctor
Zhivago. It will then look at how Pasternak integrated them into his own
process of autobiographical individuation, reflected in his poetry of the
1930s. As part of this it will unveil how, in defiance of the Soviet ideology
of mass identity, Pasternak came to define and idolise Chopin as the ulti-
mate individual—the ‘poet’—and how the pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, who
performed music by the composer on the banks of the Dnieper, proved to
be a catalyst to a highly individualistic melding of these distinct personas.
Despite the unveiled outspoken criticism of Soviet outlooks, Pasternak’s
poetry from that decade had a far-reaching effect on thinkers and creative
artists of the time; it shows that Pasternak remained startlingly immune
to the full force of the wrath of those in charge of 1930s cultural policy,
with Stalin even supposedly writing ‘do not touch this cloud-dweller’ on
his arrest file (Dubnov 2017, p. 120).
The temptation to think of transnationalism as a striking product
of modern Western society with little place in the heinous propaganda
168 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
programme enforced by the Soviet regime in the 1930s lingers stub-

bornly in mainstream consciousness. After all, the Bolshevik glory and
immanent collapse of supposedly rotten Western bourgeois capitalism is
perhaps the most distinct mass-indoctrinations of the State which gath-
ered momentum in that decade, creating the widespread perception of a
closed Soviet society. As the distinction of ‘Bolshevik comrade’ and the
‘enemy’ became an all-consuming political agenda measured under the
aesthetic criteria of Socialist Realism—coined as a term by Maxim Gorky
in 1932—amongst the arts it was writers who were particularly vulner-
able to ideological scrutiny under the official triad of criteria: partiynost’,
ideynost’ and narodnost’, terms roughly translatable as ‘serving the ends
of the Party’, ‘having correct ideological content’ and ‘being accessible to
all of the people all of the time’.
Extolling the significance of culture to the Soviet identity, Gorky’s own
hopes for social change had stemmed from a national separation of pre-
Revolutionary ‘Russian feebleness, spiritual mourning [and] specifically
Russian bent for sadness’ from the optimism and confidence of the Stalin-
era ‘heroic Soviet citizens’ who were collectively building a new world
that would ‘release [Soviet] man’s inborn heroic essence and allow him
to live a new, rich, vital and beautiful life’ (Hellbeck 2006, p. 30). The
problem was, according to Gorky, that the backbone of this idealistic new
world—the Soviet worker—was as yet unaware of the mammoth signif-
icance he had to play through his active participation in the creation of
this new ‘heroic reality’. With this vision and at Stalin’s behest, Gorky was
tasked to redirect the entire Soviet writing profession towards the goal of
‘instilling a socialist consciousness into the new man’. Literature was to
become the ‘magnifying mirror’ through which writers became ‘engineers
of the soul’ (Hellbeck 2006, p. 29). With the written word being an easy
target to scrutinise for its alignment to official political goals, the ensuing
campaign of bloodthirsty paranoia exterminated nearly a third of the total
membership of the Union of Soviet Writers between 1936 and 1939: over
600 individuals (Medvedev 1989, pp. 446–48).
The divorce of ‘Russian’ from ‘Soviet’ from within ideological rhetoric
signalled a mawkishly distorted transnationalism that mirrored the impe-
rialistic ambitions of Stalin’s Soviet State. The multi-ethnic, national or
religious identities that were highly characteristic of the late Imperial
years (such as Russian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Baltic, Tartar and
so on) were largely made redundant. Instead, to identify oneself as a new
transnational Soviet Man was part of a process of ‘positive integration’
through which people swiftly learned that their engagement with this
new hyper-national identity or ‘official society’ developed under Stalin
was a beneficial undertaking (Kotkin 1995, pp. 230–36). Uniting that
‘self-fashioning’ which was ideologically fermented in the illiberal minds
of citizens and sincerely accepted, and that which was adopted by others
through ‘public performance’, was the reliance on autobiography as a
primary mode of indoctrination, and the ensuring of its self-policing.
As explained by Halfin: ‘Hermeneutics of the soul (inner moral dispo-
sition) emerge as a manifest, objectively verifiable way of distinguishing
true revolutionaries from imposters’. Narrating about the self—whether
as an artist, a Party member or simply as a rank-and-file worker—was
to make one’s persona or lichnost’ ‘nameable and describable’—a useful
tool for the authorities in a regime seeking surveillance and conditioning
(Halfin 2003, p. 7).
Biography was a genre to which Pasternak returned in various guises
throughout his literary career: from Safe Conduct written in the early
1920s, and published in separate parts in the journals Zvezda and Kras-
naya nov in 1929 and 1931, to An Essay in Autobiography completed
in 1956 (and appearing in different countries under the names Instead
of a Foreword, I remember—A sketch in autobiography, People and
Circumstances and Autobiografia e nuovi versi), to the more veiled
autobiographic literary portraits of his poetry and, of course, his master-
piece Doctor Zhivago. Already, however, the Soviet playwright Alexander
Afinogenov had identified that for Pasternak, biography was an apolit-
ical aesthetic which he championed fearlessly and with an unmatched
self-mastery:
Pasternak’s vital sort of stoicism […] rendered him oblivious to the world:
the buzz of the Moscow literary scene, the intrigues in the Writers’ Union,
the feats of heroic Soviet citizens lauded by the media. [In the presence
of people like Pasternak] you learn the most important thing—the ability
to live independently under all circumstances no matter what. (quoted in
Hellbeck 2006, p. 323)
Despite his increasing reclusiveness, Pasternak used the platform of the

meetings of the Union of Soviet Writers in the 1930s to attack the flaws
of Soviet ambitions in their assignment of biography as a canonic key
to propagate the ‘immortality’ of the New Soviet Man, and ultimately
170 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
expressed doubt in the superiority and perfection of Soviet society (see

Clark 2001).
Although Pasternak agreed in essence that an artist’s ‘immortality’ was
inherently linked to biography, his first requirement of the poet was a
quality he defined as pryamodushiye [the ‘straight-soul’]: ‘Great things’,
he would write in his preface to his translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
could only be ‘approached full of deliberate freedom’ (Fleishman 1984,
p. 428). In a meeting of Soviet Writers in 1935, Pasternak had already
warned his fellow colleagues not to ‘unite’ [ne obyedinyaytes’!], since
belonging to a ‘herd’ [stadnost’ ] signalled the death of art. After raising
this issue again at a meeting the following year, his position was attacked
as the arrogant polemics of a ‘judge and preacher’ (‘Eshyo o samokritike’
1936, p. 1). Biography, as Pasternak would go on to express through
Doctor Zhivago, as a mass tool designed to indoctrinate the boundless
identity of Soviet Man made him ‘lose control and fall into despair’: ‘They
have never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them exis-
tence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in
need of being processed by them’ (Pasternak 2017, p. 304). Describing
the evolution of his work on Doctor Zhivago in a letter to his father in
1934, Pasternak rather starkly summarised his personal despair: ‘Nothing
which I write about exists. That world ended, and to the new world I
have nothing to show. […] I am remaking myself [and my world to live]
in that world and kingdom’ (Fleishman 1984, p. 221).
With the grievous crime of counter-revolution being seen as a state
of mind rather than as an action, it is clear why Pasternak’s ideas on
biography fell foul of the censorship officials (Halfin 2003, p. 244).
Pasternak’s identification of biography as a mode of distinction between
the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia was not lost on the editorial board
that rejected the novel’s manuscript in 1956:
We advise you to reread carefully those words which are written in your
novel. […] Symbols are not something foreign to you, and the death or
rather the dying of Dr. Zhivago at the end of the ’twenties, it seems to us,
symbolises the death of the Russian intelligentsia ruined by the revolution.
[…] Dr. Zhivago, in your opinion, is the acme of the spirit of the Russian
intelligentsia. […] who could not stand the political mysticism of the Soviet
intelligentsia. (Ministerstvo Inostrannïkh Del 1958, p. 6)
Although ominous, it is sobering to see that the very same aesthetic belief
had already penetrated the opening pages of Pasternak’s autobiograph-
ical Safe Conduct, which appeared in print in 1931 amidst that infamous
decade of Terror. Here, Pasternak had already cryptically set the role
of biography as the self-reflective means to relate to the shared life of
humanity, and by doing so transcend historical time:
I am not writing my biography. I turn to it when somebody else’s requires

me to. […] The poet imparts to the whole of life such a steep incidence
that it cannot exist in the vertical axis of biography where we expect to
find it. It cannot be found under his name and has to be sought under
someone else’s.
It follows that the creative genius is in Pasternak’s view a free person-

ality who defines their own individuality through a sustained desire and
impetus to inhabit the biography of another. As described by Hell-
beck in relation to the wider pre-Revolutionary Russian concept of
lichnost ’, which correlates closely with Pasternak’s view of biography,
personal narrative ‘could endow loss with new meaning and certainties
by anchoring the self in [an alternative] History’ (2004, p. 280).
The inhabiting of another’s biography as a mode of individuation
resonates throughout the novel (see Weir 2002). As Pasternak remodelled
his early assessment of autobiography into the mature ideas of self-
reflection presented in Doctor Zhivago, it is no accident that the novel’s
hero, the doctor-poet Yuri Zhivago—whose surname roughly translates
as ‘alive’—saw himself as an inheritor of Russian and European culture
who ‘studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the
past and of nature, as though they were the family chronicle of his house,
his own genealogy’. Rejecting any philosophy that is incompatible with
the idea of the ‘free personality’ or ‘free individual’, Zhivago is a direct
reflection of Pasternak’s own philosophical views that every man is born
a Faust, with a longing to grasp and experience, and express everything
in the world: ‘He was afraid of nothing, neither life nor death; everything
in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary’ (Pasternak 2017,
p. 78).
As the orphaned young Yuri Zhivago mourns the death of his mother
and comes to terms with the detachment from everything that had
defined him up until that point, the roots of this pre-Revolutionary
172 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
concept of the historical-lichnost ’ are introduced through his uncle,

Nikolai Vedenyapin:
[History] is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual

unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery
of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of
symphonies. To move forward in that direction it is impossible without a
certain uplift. Such discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds
for it are contained in the Gospel. […] First, love of one’s neighbour, that
highest form of living energy, overflowing man’s heart and demanding to
be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man,
without which he is unthinkable—namely, the idea of the free person and
the idea of life as sacrifice. After [Christ does] man now die not by some
fence in the street, but in his own history, in the heat of work devoted to
the overcoming of death, he dies devoted to that theme himself. (Pasternak
2017, p. 9)
Presented within the opening pages of the novel, the symbolic significance
of this passage as an autobiographical moment of reflection for Pasternak
cannot be underestimated. It is the elaborate unfolding of the ultimate
transnational ‘Realist-Artist’ which he defined in his article ‘Chopin’ in
1956 as one who turns away from the banality of Socialist Realism and
for whom ‘his work is his cross and destiny’ (Kats 1991, p. 96).
As a self-professed atheist from a family of Jewish heritage, the immer-
sion of Pasternak’s outlook in Russian-Orthodox Christianity is incon-
ceivable without acknowledging the profound influence that had been
exerted on the young Pasternak by the family’s friendly interaction with
Lev Tolstoy.3 Grappling with the principles that create a ‘Realist-Artist’,
Tolstoy’s existentialist Christian suffering that pointed to the artistic over-
coming of death—‘spiritual activity and its expression, genuinely needed
by others, is the greatest calling of man: [his] cross as conveyed in the
Gospel’—is an unmistakable doppelgänger for Vedenyapin’s sentiments
that confirms Pasternak’s reverence of the writer (Tolstoy 1985, p. 104).
Thus, the funeral of Yuri Zhivago’s consumptive mother is a literal
moment through which the readers become witnesses to a transforma-
tive crisis of despair that drives the poet on to the cusp of a new life: a
second birth. However, if by speaking in Tolstoy’s words Vedenyapin puts
the young Yuri onto the verge of the beginning of his journey of spiri-
tual awakening, the defining moment when Zhivago recognises himself
as entering that plane of existence—the metamorphosis into the free indi-

vidual and transnational spirit—comes through his becoming a poet: ‘the
last traces of sleepiness fell from the writer, he awakened, took fire, the
narrowness of the available space itself told him how to fill it’ (Pasternak
2017, p. 394). Evoking one of the most significant Russian symbols of the
spiritual progression into a new life—the horse—in a fleeting but pivotal
sentence, Pasternak reveals the catalyst for this sacred moment: ‘[Zhivago]
heard the pace of a horse stepping over the surface of the poem, as one
can hear the clop of a horse’s amble in one of Chopin’s ballades’ (p. 394).
Despite Pasternak’s youthful exasperation and feelings of inadequacy
for his musical development leading him to close the door on his aspi-
ration to become a composer, the yearning for music had never released
its grip on him.4 As a lyric poet, Pasternak’s psyche was rooted in the
Silver-Age sublimation of music by poets from the twilight of Imperial
Russia including Alexander Blok as the most potent metaphysical force
that could be harnessed for the purpose of healing society. It is no under-
estimation to say that amongst these individuals the musician-poet was
awaited for as a messiah (Mitchell 2016, p. 2). Naturally, if Zhivago was
a doctor yearning to be a poet, Pasternak was equally a poet yearning to
be a musician. The perfect melding of poetry and music for Pasternak
became an all-consuming quest, and the subject of many of his works.
He held fast to the belief that such a synthesis ignited the very essence
of the Gospel that gave rise to the free individual who ‘looks into one’s
own life’ as the means ‘to understand all life’, and was hence ‘biographical
without being egocentric’ (Kats 1991, pp. 96–97). If Tolstoy, speaking
through Vedenyapin, represented the chrysalis, the ‘father and master of
longing’,5 it was already in 1928, in Pasternak’s first poem entitled ‘Bal-
lade’ [Ballada], that one also glimpses the identity of the fully fledged
messianic musician-poet born out of him, as Chopin.6
Biographically, 1928 marked a period of intense activity in which the
symbolism of Chopin spurred Pasternak to bring about the integration
of his own lichnost’ with history. These ideas took their mature and most
confessional shape in his autobiographical cycle of poetry Second Birth
[Vtoroye rozhdeniye] from 1930 to 1931. Among the intelligentsia the
cycle was greeted as a revelation: ‘full of the hieroglyphs of his biography
[which] in its realistic survey of the world bring one to the limits of art.
[…] Second Birth [is one of those works that] changes the consciousness
and life of the poet which leaves him standing at the cusp of some-
thing new’ (Fleishman 1984, pp. 110–11). Inspired by the life-changing
174 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
friendship with the legendary pianist-pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus, and

his then-wife Zinaida, they immortalise day-to-day events, intense soul-
searching and anguished period of uncertainty in the future precipitated
by the crisis (which would drive Pasternak to suicide) of being faced with
the recognition of the immeasurable kinship he felt for the former, and
the realisation of his love for the latter (Razumovskaya 2018). Fittingly
in 1932, as the emotional storms subsided, Doctor Zhivago began to take
shape.
Pasternak’s personal introduction to the Neuhauses in the winter of
1928–1929 consolidated his opinion that this was ‘one of our best
pianists’.7 Neuhaus’s increasingly frequent private performances at Paster-
nak’s home led him to single out their mutual meetings as the ‘only joys
in my existence’.8 Similarly, Neuhaus revealed that ‘Under the invisible
influence of feelings and thoughts of this extraordinarily multifaceted and
talented persona, it was as if, for several decades, I lived basking under his
light’ (Del’son 1966, p. 47). Their interactions intensified during their
summers spent together in Irpen in the 1930s on the outskirts of Kiev
where Zinaida arranged for them to rent out dachas in close proximity.
Their reciprocation of ideas increasingly revolved around the music of
Poland’s most iconic composer and national hero, Chopin. Neuhaus’s
Polish roots and distinct affinity for the music of Chopin—including the
vision of the composer as the most perfect embodiment of Dostoevsky’s
‘vsechelovek’ (the universal man)—had long garnered him the praise of
being one of the Russia’s most celebrated interpreters of the composer
(Razumovskaya 2018). For Pasternak as a poet, the symbiosis of these two
musical personas often evolved in a manner that made his presentation of
them quite interchangeable.9
The beginnings of this permutation can be traced to one of the
two ‘Ballade’ [Ballada] poems published in Pasternak’s collection Second
Birth that was composed that first summer in Irpen in 1930. Here,
Neuhaus’s emotionally charged performance of Chopin’s First Piano
Concerto in E minor, op. 11, in Kiev, on an outdoor stage on the banks of
the Dnieper, accompanied by thunder and lightning, caused the poet to
meld Neuhaus, Chopin and the drama of the occasion into what is widely
considered his most musically structured work. Speaking on behalf all of
humanity,10 Neuhaus’s inspired performance of Chopin inhales from the
heavily perfumed night air the strife of everyday life around him, and, as
an ‘injured eagle’, takes flight and soars.11
This flight of the injured eagle references Neuhaus’s national identi-

ties through its multifaceted emblem of Poland, Germany and Russia. As
the symbol of St John the Evangelist’s Gospel, Pasternak incorporates a
powerful reference to Neuhaus’s, albeit atheist, view of what it meant to
be a transnational artist or ‘vsechelovek’: ‘Only a true artist is given the
strength to “erase the casual features” [that cloud his path]—and this is
made all the more difficult for him because he sees clearer than anyone
else and acknowledges all the “evil of the world” and “suffers it much
more”’ (Neygauz 1999, p. 213). The strength to admit to vulnerability
and injury was a vital prerequisite that Neuhaus believed an artist needed
in order that he could access that confessional state where his creativity
reflected his soul most truthfully. Fittingly, around the time of Pasternak’s
defining of the ‘straight soul’, Neuhaus’s description of an ideal perfor-
mance in 1931 revealed it to be ‘that unique, sacred [playing] in which
everything was felt-through to the end, and which flowed so easily—all
that which is sometimes so torn, polluted, maimed, and tortured in me,
all that which I love and for which I live, and which makes me a brother
of Chopin […] and Boris’.12
Injury equally marked the artist’s greater position as a healer in society.
If the ‘straight soul’ was the hallmark of a great artist, the ‘crooked
soul’ [krivodushiya], as Pasternak later related in Doctor Zhivago, was
a disease gripping society and in desperate need of healing: ‘An enor-
mous number of us are required to submit to constant and systematic
state of crookedness of the soul. It is not possible to present yourself
against what you feel day in and day out without consequence for your
health; to grovel at what you do not love; be joyful for that which causes
you unhappiness’ (Pasternak 2013, p. 697). Pasternak’s poetry frequently
paid his dues to the distinct Silver-Age sublimation of the artist-poet as a
doctor healing the ills of the world, including ‘Elevated Illness’ [Vïsokaya
bolezn’ ] (1931). No composer occupied the role of healer as selflessly
as Chopin in Pasternak’s work.13 That Neuhaus’s musicianship became
a symbolic image for the artist-musician as a healer is apparent through
the exchange of poetry depicting the pianist’s performance of Chopin
between Pasternak and his friend Osip Mandelstam at this time. The
latter’s ‘Grand Piano (under the impression of H. G. Neuhaus’s playing)’
[Royal’ (pod vpechatleniem igrï G. G. Neygauza)] (1931) culminated
with the image of Neuhaus’s playing of Chopin as a fight against moral
injustices inflicted on society by summoning up the ‘resinous sonata of
the genie’ from the piano’s hammers (its ‘vertebra’) in such a way that
176 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
the coiled bass string of the piano becomes a ‘Nuremberg spring that
straightens out the dead’.14
Through this merging of personas and ideas, the defining transmu-
tation of Chopin in Pasternak’s Second Birth is his displacement from
both Poland and his epoch. Instead, Chopin becomes an embodiment
of three intertwined lives in Irpen and Kiev: the poet’s, Neuhaus’s and
Zinaida’s—the connection of autobiography and history in a healing
transnational act. Despite the artistic productivity and happiness of the
friendship between Pasternak and Neuhaus, deep trauma lay between the
surface as the poet realised he had fallen in love with Zinaida and she
with him. In mid-September 1930, Pasternak approached Neuhaus for a
long and difficult conversation. As Neuhaus left for an extended concert
tour of Siberia on 1 January 1931, Pasternak admitted to his parents that
‘What happened in his absence would have happened anyway, but given
the circumstances became overcast with the shadow of dishonesty’.15
There was no hiding from the scandalous affair. Leaving for Kiev,
Zinaida felt torn: ‘Pasternak conquered me with the power of his love
and his depth of intellect. […] I was completely taken with him and his
passion. [Then Neuhaus] arrived in Kiev with concerts… And, like after
all his successful concerts, I once more believed that I desperately love
him’ (Pasternak 1993, p. 181). Pasternak, for his part, was sure his fate
rested with Zinaida (Pasternak and Pasternak 2004, p. 511). Neuhaus
never ceased loving Zinaida: ‘You will always live in the most sacred part
of my heart—[…] no matter how our journeys part […] but despite
my heart’s pain, know that yours has gained the love and artistry of a
great, extraordinary man’.16 According to Pasternak, Neuhaus’s explosive
temperament and frayed nerves were strained with the ‘impossible task of
being a friend’ with which he could no longer cope.17 It was only early
in 1932 with Pasternak’s suicide attempt that the situation found a final
resolution.18 Zinaida, along with her two sons, started a new chapter of
their lives with Pasternak, marrying later that year.
Coming to terms with his great personal fear that living in denial of
his love for Zinaida would be an act of self-betrayal, Pasternak also had
to cope with the fact that admitting this love would be a betrayal of a
friendship he valued dearly.
Pasternak’s act of suicide, or of being prepared for self-sacrifice, was
matched by Neuhaus’s self-sacrifice of stepping aside to allow Zinaida to
find her happiness. Throughout the soul-searching of these autobiograph-
ical events documented throughout each poem in Second Birth, Chopin
becomes an image that directly inhabits their daily lives in those traumatic
days in Irpen and Kiev: his music resounds through the three sycamore
trees (‘two together one aside’, symbolic of the awkward love triangle)
growing in the artistic Reitarskoy Quarter where the three stayed in
Kiev19 ; he becomes the silent tears and anguished thoughts of suicide.20
Chopin’s music thunders as the emotional crisis crescendos: the white
chestnut blossoms framing their apartment windows take on the form
of the distinct Catholic church spires, shattering on the floor of the
communal apartment in heated exchanges and frayed nerves. Integrating
the subliminal suffering that the Gospel commands of the lives of great
artists, the crucified piano signifies the cathartic recognition that it is
through sacrifice, and not self-gratification, that the soul takes flight and
sets the path towards the truth.21
Through this poetic integration of both himself and Neuhaus into one
symbolic persona of a displaced and ahistoricised Chopin, Pasternak trans-
ports the composer outside of the specific delineations of his epoch and
circumstances, and instead crashes him into the ‘old pavement’ to cast
him into the everyday objects, smells, sights and sounds of Irpen and Kiev
as the flesh and blood of their own lives.22 Healing comes through the
mutual recognition that living with a ‘crooked soul’ is impossible. As they
are penetrated by Chopin’s spirit, both musician and poet conquer fear
of uncertainty in the future and take the step to self-sacrifice. With both
overcoming the fear of the death of their previous lives they metaphor-
ically live the Gospel as Pasternak had conceptualised it through Doctor
Zhivago, and are reborn healed as free personalities.
In a bitterly ironic twist, the editorial committee rejecting the
manuscript had unwittingly grasped and humiliated the very essence of
this synthesis of egos that Pasternak designated as the sacred and immortal
transnational free personality of the musician-poet:
When he finds himself in the middle of terrible nationwide suffering, Dr.

Zhivago forgets everything but his own ego and, as an appendix to it,
people related to that ego. That ego, as embodied in himself and those
dear to him is not merely the only thing worth bothering about, but is,
indeed the only thing of value in the whole universe. It embraces all the
past and all the future, and if it were to die, everything would die with it.
(Ministerstvo Inostrannïkh Del 1958, p. 3)
178 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
Ultimately though, Doctor Zhivago became the grand canvas not simply
for the crystallisation of Pasternak’s autobiographical ideas, but for his
own final sacrifice. Having kept the manuscript a tightly held secret for
many years from all but his closest friends for fear of the dire and likely
fatal consequences of its being seen by the Soviet authorities, at the end
of his life Pasternak made the startling plea that it is published with a
scandal. In this willingly made self-sacrifice—mirroring Christ’s sacrificial
acceptance of the cup at Gethsemane—it is inconceivable that he would
not have expected the rage and humiliation of the Union of Soviet Writers
and the political figures who crucified him. Given the offer of unfettered
passage to leave the Soviet Union as an enemy of the people, Pasternak
was mocked for daring to align himself through Yuri Zhivago with a
Christ-figure. The press demeaned Pasternak as one who knew nothing
of the Gospel, let alone the life of the transnational Soviet Man who was
defined by his readiness to suffer for the salvation of the people. Ironically,
the Soviet political authorities who indoctrinated their mawkish agendas
on unwilling subjects were playing out the passion as they crucified their
King. Pasternak’s willing transnationalism was of a different kingdom: not
interested in geography, his was about a profound artistic individuation
that dissolves into history to speak for all humanity.
Notes
1. ‘Ya propal, kak zver’ v zagone.’ [I am lost, like an impounded beast.]
Translations provided in this chapter are my own unless otherwise stated.
2. ‘Internationalism’ is the term that Pasternak uses in various sources
including B. L. Pasternak (1991).
3. This includes his father Leonid Pasternak’s role as an illustrator of
Tolstoy’s novels.
4. Pasternak initially toyed with the idea of becoming a professional
musician, studying music for six years whilst enrolled at the Moscow
Conservatory.
5. ‘Ottsa i mastera toski.’ [Father and master of longing/sorrow.]
6. ‘Vpustite, mne nado videt’ grafa. / O nyem est’ balladï. On
preduprezhdyen. / […] Pozdneye uznal ya o myertvom Shopene. /
[…] Otkrïlas’ mne sila takogo stseplen’ya / Chto mozhno podnyat’sya i
zemlyu unest’.’ [Let me in—I need to see the Count. There are ballades.
He knows to expect me […] Later I found out about the deceased Chopin
[…] and the power of these clutches opened up to me.]
7. Pasternak’s letter to his sister from Moscow dated 16 January 1929
(Pasternak and Pasternak 2004, pp. 475–76).
8. Letter to his parents from Moscow dated 6 March 1929 (Pasternak and
Pasternak 2004, pp. 475–76).
9. For example, in his 1956 poem ‘Music’ [Muzïka], composed as he
awaited news of the fate of the Soviet publication of Doctor Zhivago.
10. ‘I vse molitvï i ekstazï / za sil’nïj i za slabïj pol.’ [And all the prayers and
ecstasies for the strong and fairer sexes.]
11. ‘Udar, drugoj, passazh – i srazy / V sharov molochnïj oreol / Shopena
traurnaya fraza / Vïplïvaet, kak bol’noj orel.’ [A strike, and another; a
passage [of music]—and immediately in the spheres of milky aureoles,
Chopin’s mournful phrase emerges like an injured eagle.]
12. Letter from Neuhaus written from the town of Zinovjevsk to Zinaida
Neuhaus-Pasternak dated 1 August 1931 (Katts 2009, p. 217). Neuhaus
frequently reminded Zinaida that she only loved him ‘after successful
recitals’.
13. For example, through the poem: ‘Opyat’ depesheyu Shopen / K ballade
strazhduschey otozvan. / Kogda yeyo ne izlechit’, / Vse leto budet v
difterite.’ [Again Chopin is dispatched to the suffering ballade when it
needs to be healed.]
14. ‘Nyurenbergskaya yest’ pruzhina / Vïpryamlyayushchaya mertvetsov.’
[There is a Nuremburg spring (coil) that straightens out the dead.]
15. Letter dated 8 March 1931 (Pasternak and Pasternak 2004, p. 511).
16. Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus from Moscow dated 29 April 1931 (Katts
2009, pp. 204–5).
17. Letter to his sister dated 11 February 1932 (Pasternak and Pasternak
2004, p. 526).
18. Pasternak kept his suicide attempt a closely guarded secret, but wrote
about it at length to his sister in a letter dated 11 February 1932
(Pasternak and Pasternak 2004, pp. 526–27).
19. ‘Dva klyena v ryad, za tret’im, pazom’. [Two maples in a row, directly in
front of the third.]
20. Rozhdat’ rïdan’ye, no ne plakat’ / Ne umirat’, ne umirat’. [Give birth to
weeping, but not to cry. Not to die, not to die.]
21. ‘Opyat’ Shopen ne ischet vïgod, / No, okrïlyayas’ na letu, / Odin
prokladïvaet vïkhod / Iz veroyat’ya v pravotu.’ [Again Chopin does not
look for benefits but, gaining wings in flight, alone lays down the path
from faith to truth.]
22. ‘Vsem devyatnadtsatïm stolet’yem / Upast’na starïy trotuar’. [With all the
nineteenth century to fall upon the old pavement.]
180 M. RAZUMOVSKAYA
Bibliography
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Indiana University Press.
Del’son, V.Yu. 1966. Genrikh Neygauz. Moskva: Muzïka.
Dubnov, Eugene. 2017. Never Out of Reach: Growing up in Tallinn, Riga and
Moscow. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press.
‘Eshyo o samokritike’. 1936. Literaturnaya gazeta 16, no. 575 (15 March): 1.
Fleishman, Lazar. 1984. Boris Pasternak v Tridtsatïye Godï . Jerusalem: Magnes.
Halfin, Igal. 2003. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hellbeck, Jochen. 2004. Autobiographical Practices in Russia. Edited by Heller
Klaus. Goẗtingen: V & R Unipress.
Hellbeck, Jochen. 2006. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kats, B. A., ed. 1991. Raskat improvizatsiy… Muzïka v tvorchestve, sud’be i v
dome Borisa Pasternaka. Leningrad: Sovetskiy Kompozitor.
Katts, A.I., ed. 2009. G.G. Neygauz: Pis’ma. Moskva: Deka.
Kotkin, Stephen. 1995. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Mancosu, Paul. 2016. Zhivago’s Secret Journey: From Typescript to Book. Stanford
University: Hoover Institution Press.
Medvedev, Roy. 1989. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of
Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ministerstvo Inostrannïkh Del. Polnomochnoe Predstavitel’stvo SSSR v
Velikobritanii. 1958. Letters Relating to Boris Pasternak’s Book ‘Doctor
Zhivago’. London: Ministerstvo Inostrannïkh Del. Polnomochnoye Pred-
stavitel’stvo SSSR v Velikobritanii.
Mitchell, Rebecca. 2016. Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the
Twilight of the Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Neygauz, G. G. 1999 [1961]. Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï . 6th ed. Moskva:
Klassika-XXI.
Pasternak, B. L. 1991. ‘Shopen’. In Raskat improvizatsiy… Muzïka v tvorch-
estve, sud’be i v dome Borisa Pasternaka, edited by B. A. Kats, pp. 96–100.
Leningrad: Sovetskiy Kompozitor.
Pasternak, B. L. 2013. Doktor Zhivago i drugiye proizvedeniya. Moskva: Ėksmo.
Pasternak, Boris. 2017 [1957]. Doctor Zhivago. Translated by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.
Pasternak, E. V. and Pasternak, E. B., eds. 2004. Boris Pasternak: Pis’ma k
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Pasternak, Z. N. 1993. ‘Vospominaniya’. In Vospominaniya o Borise Pasternake,
edited by E. B. Pasternak and M. I. Feynberg, pp. 175–231. Moskva: Slovo.
Razumovskaya, Maria. 2018. Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life Beyond Music. Rochester,

NY: University of Rochester Press.
Tolstoy, L. N. 1985. ‘Tak chto zhe nam delat’?’. In Chto takoe iskusstvo?, edited
by V. V. Osnovin, pp. 77–106. Moskva: Sovremennik.
Weir, Justin. 2002. The Author as Hero: Self and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak
and Nabokov. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
CHAPTER 11
‘All the Nuances of His Predicament’: Caryl

Phillips on James Baldwin
Josiane Ranguin
In Caryl Phillips’s account of his experimental tour of Europe as an Afro-

European Briton, The European Tribe (1987), ‘Dinner at Jimmy’s’ is the
chapter dedicated to Baldwin James and his new home away from home in
Saint Paul de Vence. This village in Southern France was far from the stark
Parisian realities described by Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son (1955),
and visiting Baldwin in this ‘very expensive kingdom’ became a ‘spiritual
fix’ (Phillips 1987, p. 43) for Phillips, who paid repeated tributes to James
Baldwin on the radio, one of his favourite media.
Phillips conducted an interview for a BBC TV documentary: ‘Book-
mark (An interview with James Baldwin at 60)’ in 1984, a BBC Radio 4
interview with Baldwin titled ‘No Complaints’ (1985), recorded a BBC
radio play, A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), and returned
to the 1985 interview on 2 August 2014 for a programme that celebrated
James Baldwin’s work. The purpose of ‘James Baldwin 90th Anniver-
sary: No Complaints’ was to ‘record his thoughts and feelings about
J. Ranguin (B)
TTN Lab Textes, Théories, Numérique, Université Paris Nord, Villetaneuse,
France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_11
184 J. RANGUIN
James Baldwin’s legacy and to introduce his own 2004 Radio 4 play: “A
Kind Of Home—James Baldwin In Paris”—which was inspired by Bald-
win’s fateful journey to Paris as a young, penniless, black, homosexual
writer struggling to survive’ (McHugh 2014). This recurrent interest
points to the importance of the African-American literary father figure
in Phillips’s development as a writer, and this chapter will focus on
Phillips’s texts on Baldwin as they document how Phillips perceived the
transnational dimension of Baldwin’s life and work.
Caryl Phillips: Transnationalism as a Necessity

Thus, in The European Tribe (1987), Phillips describes the formation of
his writing personality as stemming mainly from two sources: Caribbean
culture and the African-American literary tradition that he discovered first
through Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. When Phillips writes of his
childhood in Yorkshire, he describes an environment that silences the
cultural import of Blackness but keeps alive the stigma attached to skin
colour: ‘If the teaching of English literature can feed a sense of identity
then I, like many of my black contemporaries in Britain, was starving’
(Phillips 1987, p. 2). At the time, the only existing discourse on diversity
or difference to which he could relate was linked to Anne Frank’s tragic
story. In The European Tribe (1987), Phillips evokes his reaction to a TV
programme on Anne Frank: ‘The many adolescent thoughts that worried
my head can be reduced to one line: “If one people could do that to
white people, then what the hell would they do to me?”’ (p. 66). Black-
ness was invisible as a concept and yet was a reality in the young man’s
world who saw himself as being ‘too late to be coloured, but too early to
be Black British’ (Phillips 2002, p. 4). In this statement on the naming
of Anglo-Caribbean people, Phillips is using linguistic signs as historical
markers. ‘Coloured’ was used by white interlocutors as a euphemism for
‘Negro’ or ‘Black’ in the 1940s and 1950s when the first waves of Anglo-
Caribbean subjects moved to Britain to answer the call of the British
government and help rebuild the country. Conversely, ‘Black British’ is
an appellation coined by Black activists who struggled in the 1960s and
1970s against blatant systemic discrimination. As a child, Phillips seems
to have been caught in a linguistic time warp that explains the fumbling
attempts at self-definition he recalls.
Later, an African-American student whom Phillips meets in his Oxford
College urges him to ‘“plug into” black life’ (Phillips 1987, p. 5), which
11 ‘ALL THE NUANCES OF HIS PREDICAMENT’ … 185
he does by connecting with Caribbean culture through frequent trips to

the Elephant and Castle area in London. Then in 1978, before starting
his last year at Oxford, he decides to travel to the USA where he discovers
African-American literature by chance:
One day I took the bus into a nearby college town and found myself
browsing in a book shop. A book titled Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
caught my eye. I had already discovered what it meant to be invisible in
America, but I bought it together with Native Son by Richard Wright.
Native Son had a huge cover photograph of a young black man’s face.
The young man looked puzzled. I knew how he felt. […] The emotional
anguish of the hero, Bigger Thomas, the uncompromising prosodic muscle
of Wright, his deeply felt sense of social indignation, provided not so much
a model but a possibility of how I might be able to express the conundrum
of my own existence. Even before I had opened Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man, I had decided that I wanted to become a writer. (Phillips 1987, p. 7)
These African-American writers made Phillips realise that Blackness is a

puzzling experience they had conceptualised and integrated into their
narratives as American members of the African diaspora. Their elders, like
Phillips’s, had also had ‘Their lives fractured. Sinking hopeful roots into
difficult soil’ (Phillips 2011, p. 1).
Phillips had to wait for this trip to the USA to eventually discover,
eventually, the writers who ‘had set the stage of the debate on race that
was needed then, and is still desperately needed today’ (Phillips 2007).
African-American writers answered his ontological needs. Phillips, who
had been educated in Britain, found the missing adjuvants in his quest
for self-definition in Caribbean culture and the African-American literary
traditions. The transnational impact of African-American writers, among
them James Baldwin, helped him deal with ‘the conundrum’ (1987,
p. 7) of his existence as a Black man and writer. Michel Fabre‚ also‚
noted Baldwin’s transnational influence: ‘But success did not diminish
his commitment, and it appears that French intellectual life contributed
to making Baldwin more closely attuned to non-American attitudes and
perspectives all over the world’ (Fabre 1991, p. 52). Baldwin’s performed
as the voice of Blackness, speaking for all oppressed Black persons under
the generic ‘I’:
In France, more than in the U. S., James Baldwin continued to be

regarded as a representative Afro-American. Not that he sought publicity,
186 J. RANGUIN
but journalists liked to quote his pronouncements when some world event
involving blacks took place. And he increasingly performed as a spokesman
for Africa too, since he tended to include all blacks (who have oppression
in common, more than a mythical Negritude) under the generic ‘I’ he
used. (Fabre 1991, p. 51)
Caryl Phillips became James Baldwin’s ‘fervent admirer and devoted

friend’ (Farber 2016, p. 289) on the basis of this commonality. ‘A Good
Man and An Honest Writer’ (1988), Phillips’s eulogy for Baldwin who
passed away in 1987, presents the three facets of Baldwin’s powerful
talent. First‚ Phillips ranks the author of Go Tell It On The Moun-
tain (1952), Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1960)
alongside Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison as: ‘he gave new force and
direction to black American fiction and made it possible for the newer
generation of Toni Morrisons and Alice Walkers to emerge’ (191). Phillips
then places Baldwin the essayist among the ‘best America has produced’
(192), and thirdly recognises in him ‘the literary voice of the most impor-
tant of twentieth century American social movements, the Civil Rights
campaign. The Fire Next Time is the Bible of the Black American sixties
and one of the great non-fictional documents of American literature’
(192). It is striking to note that Phillips followed Baldwin’s lead by
being a novelist, an essayist, and as his interest for the media took shape
in the form of radio plays, TV films and documentaries, he went on
to achieve one of Baldwin’s dream when two of his screenplays were made
into films: ‘Playing Away’ (1988) and ‘The Mystic Masseur’ (2001).
Phillips knew of Baldwin’s underlying insecurity and craving for atten-
tion and human warmth: ‘Every meal, shared drink, moment of friendship
helped to relieve the thinly disguised loneliness that lurked beneath his
warm and gregarious personality’ (Phillips 1988, p. 191).
In an interview with Farber, Phillips insisted on the tension in Baldwin
between his need to write in isolation and his love of being sought out by
the media. He pointed out that the posh Provençal village combined what
Baldwin needed both as a public figure and a writer. But what was under-
lined in this interview is that Baldwin’s craving for company and public
adulation gradually took the upper hand at the expense of the silence and
solitude needed to foster the creative process. Still, Phillips remarked that
because Saint Paul was not simply ‘a rustic village hidden away some-
where’ (Farber 2016, p. 105), it enabled Baldwin to enjoy the last years
of his life to the full:
That’s the reason he stayed in Saint-Paul for seventeen years. It was the
place where he could live so long at that pace. It lengthened his life. Paris
had extended his writing life. How long could he have survived in New
York? Saint Paul is a unique place offering both privacy and glamour. It’s
the most glamorous village around. Jimmy [Phillips’s affectionate nickname
for James Baldwin] wanted to see and be seen. He didn’t want to be left
alone. La Colombe d’Or [a restaurant and hotel] provides perfect dazzle
and discretion. (Farber 2016, p. 105)
As Baldwin himself stated, the pressure of blatant systemic racism had

already made him flee to France as a young man, leaving his beloved
mother and underaged brothers and sisters behind:
I simply came to the end of a certain rope. I realised that I could not
work as a waiter anymore, all my nerves came out of the edge of my skin.
I could not be called a nigger. Since I was small and all that shit, it was fun
to beat me up—well, they could not always beat me up either. I’m not a
small boy in the street, as a street boy will tell you. Since he knows that he
is going to be killed, he is going to try to kill you. So my life turned out
to be a nightmare by the time I left the country. And I left the country
because I knew two things. I knew that if I went on like that I would go
under, if I stayed I would certainly kill somebody. And that would have
been the end of my family, my five sisters, my three brothers, my mother.
I was twenty-four when I left, and they were all kids. (Baldwin in Binder
2001, p. 201)
Baldwin thus saved his own life while remaining driven by an acute sense
of responsibility to his family. This family spirit helps explain some of his
ventures, as here when Baldwin’s love for his brother made him project
an adaptation of Othello so that his brother might land a part in the play,
as Phillips explains:
He talked constantly of helping his younger brother David to ‘make it’ as

an actor and to this end he even announced that he would be ‘adapting’
Othello so that David might take the starring role. The older brother
[James Baldwin] was by the time a different type of actor, the type that
the American media creates out of sportsmen, politicians, and of course,
writers. He was a star, which involved being in possession of and cultivating
all the skills of an actor, in timing, posture and delivery. And in this, Jimmy
was a natural. There was much his actor friends might have learned from
him. (Phillips in Farber 2016, p. 227)
188 J. RANGUIN
Phillips met Baldwin for the first time in 1983 (Phillips 2007) when as ‘a
young writer in search of a literary community, Baldwin could not have
been a finer ally’ (Phillips 1988, 192). He perceived that Baldwin’s love
for movies and his underrated essay on film: ‘The Devil Finds Work’
(1976) stemmed from Baldwin’s craving for the fame that only film actors
can bask in: ‘I knew long before I met James Baldwin that he wanted to
be involved in the movies. I don’t believe that I ever heard him mention
in any interview that he harboured such a desire, but through the public
window of his life, I espied a man who positively adored the attention of
the media’ (Farber 2016, p. 230). Phillips recalls that during a conversa-
tion Baldwin mentioned that fame could harm the artistic integrity of the
writer: ‘the greatest crime an artist can commit […] is to abandon that
gift in order to pursue money or honor, or both’ (1987, p. 40).
Phillips never forgot the warning, as is apparent in a 2012 text: ‘In
1979, I started to write because I had something to say. I had no desire
to be either famous or to become a celebrity. I still have no desire to
embrace either fame or celebrity. These are terrible accidents that can
destroy the privacy of a writer’s life and impair his ability to see clearly’.
(Phillips 2012, pp. 7–8). In his Guardian tribute to Baldwin’s life and
work: ‘The Price of The Ticket’, Phillips also insists that Baldwin’s choice
to be a witness in the struggle for equal rights in the USA had inevitably
led to his literary concerns losing their pride of place in his preoccupations
given the raw urgency of the political turmoil.
After having published The Fire Next Time in 1963, Baldwin became
one of the most eloquent spokespersons for the equal rights cause,
offering his time and energy at the expense of his health and the quality
of his literary output according to Phillips who judges that his writing
from the 1970s on loses some of its flamboyance. Phillips notes that:
If Beale Street Could Talk (1972) and Just Above My Head (1978) are […]
excessively rhetorical, structurally confusing, and lacking in any coherent
characterisation. There are passages in both novels, particularly in Just
Above My Head, which soar with a familiar eloquence, but all too often
such moments quickly give way to longueurs where one feels as though the
impatient author, Baldwin, has decided to elbow his way past the gallery
of assembled characters and speak directly to us—witness to congregation.
(Phillips 2007)
James Baldwin had established himself in the south of France in 1970

after having lived through the aftermath of the successive murders
of outspoken civil rights advocates he admired Medgar Evers (1963),
Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King (1968). He started to
write on the three figureheads but never completed the project. The thirty
pages became the basis of an acclaimed documentary film on Baldwin, ‘I
Am Not Your Negro’ by Raoul Peck in 2016. Yet, Baldwin’s diminishing
impact in the world of letters was a source of inner anguish and gnawing
doubts (Phillips 1987, p. 42). Phillips recalls that in 1986, a middle-aged
woman in a Manhattan bar saw James Baldwin: ‘She grabbed his hand
and the sun broke out all over her face: ‘My God, Mr Baldwin. Do you
know how much you mean to us?’ I don’t believe he did. He suspected,
but he could never be sure’ (Phillips 1988, p. 192). Indeed, Baldwin’s
deep humanity, his humility before the demands of writing and his duty
as a witness for the fights of the African diaspora can be inferred from the
quip Phillips remembers: ‘All I want to be is a good man and an honest
writer’ (Phillips 1988, p. 192). The price of stepping on to the US stage
as a Black activist, as a witness to the fights, hopes and pain of his people
and as the voice of Black defiance was the corresponding sacrifice of the
texts he no longer had the time to nurture and write:
And the passion and purpose of his writing, his early work, in particular,
had long ago ensured the permanence of his place in the literary canon.
[…] The journey was complete. The price paid. The pain and frustration
fully absorbed. ‘Sometimes I just can’t believe that I’m famous too.’ Three
days later, James Baldwin died. (Phillips 2007)
In The European Tribe, (1987) when Baldwin invites Phillips to have

dinner at home in Miles Davis’s company, he is by then an isolated
writer haunted by his past, his creative energy dissipated. Phillips remem-
bers: ‘Around the same time, in the summer of 1985, I sat in the south
of France where I was supposed to be working on a BBC documentary
about James Baldwin, and one evening Baldwin asked me to read the
manuscript of his new book. He couldn’t find a publisher. The book had
been repeatedly turned down. So, of course, I sat through the night and
read it. It wasn’t good. Baldwin was on his heels. Publishing, promo-
tion, and touring felt like things of the past for him. He seemed quite
far removed from the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, it was
tempting to think of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; there was a
190 J. RANGUIN
quality of the film about the scene, especially when Baldwin said to me,
“I’ll soon be making my comeback’ (Phillips 2017, p. 13). There is a hint
of cruelty in the description of Baldwin’s vain attempts at recapturing his
disappearing gift as a writer and in his casting as the forgotten star from
the silent-screen era, Norma Desmond, played by the star Gloria Swanson
in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Baldwin seems to belong to a
fast fading era, a character in a Gothic scene devoured by a thirst for fame.
As an up and coming writer, the young Phillips took up the baton
but thirty years later, Phillips still feels the need to banish his fears of a
similar fate by reiterating his condemnation: ‘He was a star, in the old-
fashioned sense of the word. People didn’t know who he was, or what
he was, but they knew he was famous. Today, I don’t think of writers as
being celebrities or making comebacks. Which is just as well, for celebrity
is toxic and leads one away from the desk and in the direction of the
cameras’ (Phillips 2017, p. 14).
Back in the 1980s, Phillips stood in awe of Baldwin and could not
allow himself to interfere with Baldwin’s precious moments of remi-
niscence with his musician friend: ‘A spiritual fix is a serious business,
especially when they come as irregularly for Jimmy as they do these
days. I would only have been in the way’ (1987, p. 43). Phillips remem-
bers that while coming back from a stroll on that Bastille Day evening,
his encounter with members of the French police and the racial slur
directed at Baldwin and his friend strikes an awkward chord: ‘[They] eyed
me suspiciously. […] They scowled in my direction—French policemen
seldom smile. […] He twisted back round and stared at me. “Les nègres,
ils s’amusent bien, n’est ce pas?”’ (1987, p. 44) [‘Aren’t the niggers
having fun?’ (Translation mine)] By recording this unexpected irruption
of systemic racism, Phillips reveals a situation of self-isolation that does
not immunise Baldwin from transnational manifestations of racism. This
takes us back to the beginning of the chapter when Phillips compares
Baldwin’s superb villa to a gilded cage: ‘Whenever I arrive at the tall
iron gates separating James Baldwin from the outside world, my mind
begins to wander. The gates remind me of prison bars. I wonder if
Baldwin has been in prison, or whether this exile, his homosexuality,
or his very spacious home are the different forms of imprisonment’
(1987, p. 203). Phillips is pointing at a geographical exile, but also
at a double existential exile as a homosexual and a Black man in
France. Baldwin, marooned in Provence, was still thinking of himself
as ‘Baldwin’s Nigger’ (Ové 1975), forever conscious of his white man’s
name, forever ‘in the wake’ in the words of Christina Sharpe, occupying
and being ‘occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s
as yet unresolved unfolding’ (2016, p. 14). Baldwin lived in the wake of
‘the great black disaster: the global disaster’ (Baldwin in Randall-Tsuruta
1989, p. 218), the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King and
Malcom X. He nevertheless wrote in ‘Nothing Personal’ (1964, p. 60)
that he had kept breathing in the wake of harrowing moments: ‘In that
darkness of rape and degradation, that fine flying froth and mist of blood,
through all that terror and in all that helplessness, a living soul moved
and refused to die’.
Above all, Baldwin remains for Phillips a mentor who had a decisive
effect on his life and literary career: ‘I learned from him much about
courage, generosity, purposefulness and writing. But it is as a man who
opened up a new door in my life, who expanded my emotional vocab-
ulary that I will now, at this late stage, remember him best’. (Phillips
1988, p. 191) Baldwin was an elder who strove to articulate the expe-
rience of Blackness, to analyse the economy of the white gaze on the
black body or to teach his people how to resist the toxic effects of white
supremacy. Phillips remembers that on a Bastille night: ‘Later, much later,
I would sneak in unobserved and unheard. Like a naughty schoolboy, I
slipped quietly into bed and listened to the old men’s laughter until dawn
broke’ (1987, p. 44). This quotation hints at Miles Davis and James
Baldwin, two African-American artistic figureheads, as being symbolic
father figures. Phillips’s attitude testifies to a desire to emulate the two
artists, guided by a commonality of experience as a Black individual in
the face of systemic racism.
The scene, taking place in Europe, shows how a young Anglo-
Caribbean aspiring writer connects to two African-American elders in
another manifestation of transnationalism born out of the experience of
the African diaspora. The long-lasting friendship between Miles Davis and
James Baldwin is partly built on the fight to maintain artistic and personal
integrity in a struggle that for Baldwin was at times too hard to fight from
within the USA. Baldwin insists on the absolute necessity of distance:
‘Now, I imagine, I will have to spend the rest of my life as a kind of
transatlantic commuter. At some point when I’m in this country, I always
get to the place where I realize that I don’t see it very clearly, because it
is very exhausting … so that I suppose I’ll keep going away and coming
back’. (Baldwin to Terkel 1961, p. 15)
192 J. RANGUIN
Baldwin’s further comment on identity is where the commonality of

experience between Baldwin and Phillips seems to lie, above the fact that
both writers are Afro-descendent: ‘All you are ever told in this country
about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order
to survive this, you really have to dig down into yourself and recreate
yourself, really, according to no image which exists yet in America’
(Baldwin to Terkel 1961, p. 6). Faced with a world that smirked at him
but was unable to answer his questions as to his identity as a Black person
nor could yet conceive of such a thing as Blackness, Phillips had to rein-
vent himself as a Black Anglo-Caribbean person by immersing himself in
the London Caribbean community to retrieve his silenced past. He then
found in the USA a community of African-American writers who, before
him, had also grappled with the notions of Blackness, self-definition and
the toxic effects of the white gaze.
Transnational Baldwin: ‘I’m

a Witness. That’s My Responsibility’
To a question asked by Wolfgang Binder, a German academic, concerning
the tension between political message, activism and literary expression,
Baldwin answered that:
Yes, here is a tremendous tension between two aspects of reality, really. It

has nothing to do with whether I think of myself as a political writer or
not. The state thinks of me as a political writer, if only because it is in itself
a political act to write, and a black writer is always a political target. So it
takes that as given. The real problem is finding a way to combativeness,
which comes very early, even before you are a writer. It is a matter of
learning every day, a terrible kind of discipline. So that you don’t let your
rage or your anguish tear you, tear your sentences to pieces. There are
days you would rather blow up a police station than sit at a typewriter.
And then you have to do something difficult, you have to accept that for
you to blow up the police station, which you are not going to do at any
rate, would not be the real application of your responsibility. So you have
to think beyond the details of the day of disaster, which exists daily, then
react again to your own reaction and try to find a way to engrave it in
stone, to make certain that it will not be forgotten. (1989, p. 200)
It was obvious for Baldwin that his texts had to be intellectual booby-traps
of a kind, literary equivalents of the street fights against white supremacist
violence, hence the surgical precision with which Baldwin detected and
analysed the inner workings of systemic discrimination. He also had to
fight as a homosexual writer writing on homosexuality at a time when
queer studies had not acquired pride of place in American universities,
and deal with the worry of the repercussions his writing could have on
the advancement of Black people, as he admitted to Colin MacInnes in
1965. The British writer had asked him about the demands made on him
as a ‘Negro leader’ that surely had to inhibit his freedom as a creative
artist:
It threatens to. It’s a great menace, in many forms, but part of it is the
danger of beginning to take yourself seriously, and beginning to quote
yourself. And a graver danger when you’re before the typewriter, before
that blank sheet of paper, is to have a kind of audience at your shoul-
ders, invisible of course, saying to you—‘What will this do to the cause?’
(Mossman 1965, p. 54)
Then, in a 1969 interview, Baldwin acknowledges a third persona, slightly

different from that of the artist and the activist, that of the ‘Negro writer’.
This difference is significant in terms of the responsibility of the African-
American artist to his people. Asked by Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch
whether he was ‘stealing from the artist to pay for the Negro’, Baldwin
answered:
Yes. It’s one of the prices of my success. And let’s face it, I am a Negro
writer. Sidney Poitiers, you know, is not simply an actor; he’s a Negro actor.
He’s not simply a movie star; he’s the only Negro movie star. And because
he is in the position that he’s in, he has obligations that Tony Curtis will
never have. And it has made Sidney a remarkable man. (1969, p. 81)
Baldwin’s acknowledgement of his role as a Black artist was part of ‘the

price of the ticket’ in the sense that Baldwin did not feel that he could
indulge in writing from a colour-blind aesthetic vantage-point. He had
to write from the position of a Black writer the same way as Sidney
Poitiers was not only perceived as an excellent actor: he was perceived as
a Black actor who was excellent and who subsequently chose to demon-
strate publicly his willingness to be a role model to his people by declaring
his solidarity with the African-Americans fighting for their civil rights.
Baldwin often reaffirmed what was for him the responsibility of a writer
to his people:
194 J. RANGUIN
My responsibility to them is to try to tell the truth as I see it—not so much

about my private life, as about their private lives. So that there will be a
standard you know, for all of us, which will get you through your troubles.
Your troubles are always coming. And Cadillacs don’t get you through.
And neither do psychiatrists, incidentally. All that gets you through it,
really, is some faith in life, which is not so easy to achieve. (Baldwin in
Terkel 1961, p. 20)
The responsibility is a moral one and has nothing to do with psychological

adjustment to the realities of life, or advice on how to achieve material
success. Here Baldwin echoes Langston Hughes, who had also mentioned
the need for truth in the evocation of the Black experience:
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restric-
tions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a
great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside
his race, and even among the better classes with their ‘white’ culture and
conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there
is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and
whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones,
surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible
supply of themes at hand. (Hughes 1926, p. 33)
In the 1960s, Baldwin had to help his people configure a fresh outlook
on their lives and maintain the new self-confidence empowered by the
advances resulting from their fights for equal rights. This is the same
concern for the communication of the truth of his experience of being
Black that we find echoed in Phillips’s preface to his 1984 play The Shelter:
but I, perhaps motivated by the luxury of inexperience, had always felt

that my only responsibility was to locate the truth in whatever piece I was
working on, live with it, sleep with it, and be responsible to that truth
alone. After all, I could see no other way of surviving as a sane individual
given the often cruel contradiction of the society I had chosen to live in.
(p. 7)
Philips refers to ‘the often cruel contradiction’ that Langston Hughes had
formerly denounced: that in order to tell their truth, Black writers often
have to face the violent criticism of their fellow artists and at the same
time avoid the trap of becoming the recipients of suspect favours from
the white establishment. Fame became for Baldwin a mixed blessing since
it deflected the attention away from the community’s needs, and Baldwin
felt the pressure:
Some of the young people do trust me, including some of those who have
been jailed and beaten in the South. I’d rather be eaten by dogs or put
in a concentration camp than betray them in any way. You know, the real
point is that people like me and Harry Belafonte and even Martin Luther
King are not Negro leaders. We’re doing our best to find out where the
people are and to follow them. (Baldwin in Hentoff 1963, p. 35)
For Baldwin, the Black personalities who publicly voiced their discontent
and eagerness for change in the 1960s and were celebrated in the media
on that account were simply articulating and giving a face and a voice to
the African-American revolt against the horrendous social status quo that
had followed the Reconstruction period. This is why Baldwin’s view of
Martin Luther King not as a leader, but as a follower of his people is both
unique and striking. We also find in Baldwin the same concern about the
responsibility of the writer that was reported by Langston Hughes, then
echoed by Caryl Phillips. Baldwin’s burden was to be a faithful witness to
the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s:
Jimmy: I’m a witness. That’s my responsibility. I write it all down.

Ida: What’s the difference between a witness and an observer?
Jimmy: An observer has no passion. It does not mean I saw it. It
means that I was there. I don’t have to observe the life and
death of Martin Luther King. I am a witness to it. Follow
me? (Baldwin in Lewis 1970, p. 92)
A Black writer with a political conscience and an acute ability to discern

the workings of white supremacy in the most mundane conversations
or intellectual debates, Baldwin was a witness to the repeated attempts
by Malcolm X or Martin Luther King to circumscribe systemic racism,
endeavours that ceased only with their assassinations:
And then when both men (and this happened before your eyes), when both
men arrived at the same point—that is to say when they connected,—then
the great black disaster: the global disaster. At the point where Malcolm
came back from Mecca and said, ‘White is a state of mind; white people
196 J. RANGUIN
are not devils. You are only as white as you want to be.’ And when
Martin connected the plight of garbage men in Memphis with Korea and
Viet Nam, then both men were killed. (Baldwin in Randall-Tsuruta 1989,
p. 218)
In this excerpt, Baldwin is pointing to whiteness as a ‘state of mind’,

meaning that whiteness is the ideological construct that cements enter-
prises aiming at comforting the economic, social and ethnic status quo.
He is also pointing out that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had
come to understand that what they were pitted against in the USA as
Black people was what other peoples under other climes were confronted
with, the transnationalism of oppression. Baldwin remained a witness of
this struggle that is still going on today on the humanitarian, ecological
and socio-economic fronts through other necessary means. And like his
heroes, Baldwin also personally paid the price of being a witness.
A Tribute to James Baldwin are the proceedings of a 1988 conference
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that should have seen a
second dialogue between James Baldwin and the Nigerian writer Chinua
Achebe, and the furthering of a transnational dialogue between a dias-
poran African and a Nigerian writer. The latter recalled that during their
earlier exchange at the University of Florida in 1980:
This conversation was marred, was destroyed by somebody, some unknown

voice from somewhere in Gainesville, Florida, getting into the circuit of the
public address system and while Baldwin was talking on the platform, this
voice began to pour in racist abuse. And it was a most terrifying experience.
This huge hall, absolutely packed full, this thing happening, and I saw
tough Black people in the audience rush out to the door to take possession
of this room. It was like an invasion. And Baldwin took this in his stride.
He waited for a moment, then he began to talk to this voice. (Achebe
1989, p. 73)
Chinua Achebe’s description testifies to the sheer terror that could

envelop Black assemblies discussing their future at the time and also
reveals the survival techniques Baldwin had adopted in order to survive.
An academic attending the conference, Dorothy Randall-Tsuruta, gives
her own testimony:
This time a voice pushed through loud and clear with, ‘you gonna have to
cut it out Mr Baldwin, we can’t stand for this kind of going on.’ The voice
carried more angry words which were difficult to make out. A shocked
audience drew a collective breath and fell to whispering and restless excla-
mations. A no longer patient Baldwin spoke forcefully into the mic: ‘Mr
Baldwin is nevertheless going to finish his statement. And I will tell you
now, whoever you are, that if you assassinate me in the next two minutes,
I’m telling you this: it no longer matters what you think. The doctrine of
white supremacy on which the Western world is based has had its hour—
has had its day! It’s over!’ The audience added to Baldwin’s stand their
own shouts of ‘right on’ and more applause. (1989, p. 216)
That day, by publicly confronting white supremacist voices that he knew

had the power to silence him, Baldwin helped restore the speaking power
of a group that had previously been whispering under the threats. The
fact that he retreated twice to France, first in the late 1940s, to be able
to survive, write and escape a grim future, and then in 1970, when he
finally moved to Saint Paul de Vence, does not diminish his stature as a
standard-bearer, a witness to the cause: ‘By 1970 it was too much, and
46-year-old James Baldwin, his health broken, and in need of rest and
recuperation, returned to France, this time to the south, to St Paul de
Vence, where he began the third and final act of his literary life’ (Phillips
2007). Baldwin nevertheless kept travelling back and forth, ‘in his last
years dividing his time nearly equally between Amherst and Saint Paul de
Vence’ (Fabre 1991, p. 52) and did not cease to help his people recover
their voice to articulate a new vision of the future.
These two accounts of the hijacking of a public address system during
a conference to threaten and abuse Baldwin and through him, his audi-
ence, are more evidence that Baldwin was commonly harassed by white
supremacists. Helene Roux, a member of a friendly French family in Saint
Paul de Vence remembers that:
Jimmy had received death threats in the U.S. Don’t forget that his life
was in danger after his run-in with Robert Kennedy who was the Attorney
General. When Jimmy first started coming here, Saint Paul was like a Band
Aid on all his agony. He needed a resting place where he could feel safe.
He couldn’t function, he had to get away to find some place far away from
home. His brother, David, came over to protect him while he was going
back and forth to the United States after the assassinations. He could not
trust anyone, he did not know where the next bullet would come from.
(Farber 2016, p. 93)
198 J. RANGUIN
As suggested by Caryl Phillips, Baldwin’s self-isolation prolonged his life,

but did not allow him to recover the grace of writing. In 2014, Phillips is
still unrelenting in his denounciation of Baldwin’s lack of literary control
in his criticism of Nothing Personal (1964) the book Baldwin co-signed
with his childhood friend Richard Avedon: ‘Written at the height of
Baldwin’s fame, and in the midst of Avedon’s own prominence as a
high fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, the book’s fundamental
clumsiness, populated as it is by Avedon’s somewhat didactic images
and Baldwin’s rambling text, suggests two creative artists merely rushing
through the motions to fulfill a commission that might deliver them to
even more media attention and celebrity’ (Phillips 2017, p. 20). Nothing
Personal is currently reappraised and considered as an arresting kaleido-
scopic vision of the USA. with obvious links to the questioning of the
social status quo by movements such as Black Lives Matter.
Phillips goes on to note that 1963, the year preceding the release
of The Fire Next Time, saw the murder of Edgar Mevers, Baldwin’s friend
and civil rights activist, the March on Washington, the white supremacist
bombing of the Baptist Church in Birmingham and the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy: ‘Baldwin was absolutely not writing’ (Phillips
2017, p. 24). As the raw violence was not quelled, Malcom X, the
Reverend Martin Luther Jr and Robert Kennedy were murdered in the
course of the same decade.
Baldwin, seeing himself in the role of a witness for his people’s fight,
of one who had to spread the word, explained and demonstrated that it
was precisely this mission that made of him ‘a man who was continually
invited to mount the platform, and [who] always appeared to be happy
to oblige’ (Phillips 2017, p. 18).
Baldwin remains for Phillips a source of admiration and respect but
also of a deep anxiety when he saw Baldwin deserted by the elusive gift of
writing. While Gerald David Naughton noted that ‘the Phillips-Baldwin
dialectic [...] speaks to the expanding issue of international and (transna-
tional) American literary influence’ (113), he also remarked that Phillips
had perceived in Baldwin ‘the ghastly isolation of the jazz musi-
cian’ his mentor had described in Nobody Knows My Name (1993,
p. 137). The variations of the jazz soloist, and his search for plen-
itude, born from and dependant on a musical ensemble, result in a
unique experience whose limit is its own time frame and whose achieve-
ment leaves the musician starkly bereft. Struggling against writer’s block,
cut off from his native New York and his own people, Baldwin appeared
as a man alone. Yet, Baldwin’s fame and ubiquitous face printed on

glossy paper offered the best answer to the white supremacist forces he
had courageously contested and survived. It also sent the message across
nations and continents that Black thought and Black queerness would
be forces to be reckoned with: ‘For nothing is fixed, forever and forever
and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always
changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not
cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only
witnesses they have’ (Baldwin 2008, p. 60).
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. 1989. ‘Panel Discussion’. In Black Writers Redefine the Struggle:
A Tribute to James Baldwin. Proceedings of a Conference at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, April 22–23, 1988, featuring China Achebe,
Irma McLaurin-Allen, Andrew Salkey, Michael Thelwell and John Edgar
Wideman, edited by Jules Chametsky, pp. 62–81. Amherst: The University
of Massachusetts Press.
Auchincloss, Eve and Lynch‚ Nancy. 1989. ‘Disturber of the Peace: James
Baldwin—An Interview’. In Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by
Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 64–82. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Baldwin, James. 1993. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son.
New York: Vintage.
Baldwin, James. 1993 [1960]. Another Country. New York: Vintage.
Baldwin, James. 1993 [1962]. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage.
Baldwin, James. 2000 [1952]. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Delta.
Baldwin, James. 2000 [1956]. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Delta.
Baldwin, James. 2008 [1964]. “Nothing Personal.” Contributions in Black
Studies‚ 6(5).
Baldwin, James and Avedon, Richard. 1964. Nothing Personal. New York:
Atheneum.
Binder, Wolfgang. 1989. ‘James Baldwin, an Interview’. In Conversations with
James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 190–209.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Fabre, Michel. 1991. ‘James Baldwin in Paris: Hardship and Romance’. In James
Baldwin: His Place in American Literary History and His Reception in Europe,
edited by Jakob Köllhopher, pp. 45–56. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Farber, F. Jules. 2016. Escape from America, Exile in Provence. Gretna, LA:
Pelican.
200 J. RANGUIN
Hentoff, Nat. 1989. ‘“It’s Terrifying”. James Baldwin: The Price of Fame’. In
Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H.
Pratt, pp. 33–37. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Hughes, Langston. 2002 [1926]. ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’.
In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9: Essays on Art, Race,
Politics, and World Affairs, edited by Christopher C. de Santis, pp. 31–36.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Lewis, Ida. 1989. ‘Conversation: Ida Lewis and James Baldwin’. In Conversations
with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 83–
92. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
McHugh, Peter. 2014. ‘James Baldwin 90th Anniversary: No Complaints’.
BBC Radio Four Extra Publicity, 2 August 2014. Accessed 13
February 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/31/
james-baldwin-90-anniversary.
Mossman, James. 1989. ‘Race, Sex, and Colour: A Conversation with James
Baldwin and Colin MacInnes’. In Conversations with James Baldwin, edited
by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 46–63. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
Ové, Horace, Dir. 1975. Pressure; Baldwin’s nigger: Two Films by Horace Ové.
London: BFI Video Publishing.
Phillips, Caryl. 1984. ‘Bookmark (An Interview with James Baldwin at 60)’. BBC
TV Documentary.
Phillips, Caryl. 1985. ‘No Complaints’. BBC Radio 4 Radio Documentary.
Interview.
Phillips, Caryl. 1987. The European Tribe. London: Faber.
Phillips, Caryl. 1988. ‘A Good Man and an Honest Writer’. Présence Africaine,
n°145, pp. 191–192.
Phillips, Caryl. 2002 [2001]. A New World Order. London: Vintage.
Phillips, Caryl. 2004. A Kind of Home—James Baldwin in Paris. BBC Radio
Play.
Phillips, Caryl. 2007. ‘The Price of the Ticket’. The Guardian, 14 July 2007.
Accessed 9 August 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jul/
14/fiction.jamesbaldwin.
Phillips, Caryl. 2011 [1993]. Crossing the River. New York: Vintage.
Phillips, Caryl. 2012. “Preamble.” In Writing in the Key of Life, edited by
Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca‚ pp. 7–9. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Phillips, Caryl. 2013. ‘Revisiting The European Tribe’. Keynote Speech, AfroEu-
rope@ns IV: Black Cultures & Identities in Europe, 1–4 October 2013,
Institute of English Studies, University of London.
Phillips, Caryl. 2014. ‘James Baldwin 90th Anniversary: No Complaints’. BBC
Radio 4 Radio Documentary, 2 August 2014.
Phillips, Caryl. 2017. ‘Nothing Personal: James Baldwin, Richard Avedon,

and the Pursuit of Celebrity.’ In Ariel: A Review of International English
Literature‚ 48 (3-4). July-October 2017, pp. 13–28.
Randall-Tsuruta, Dorothy. 1989. ‘In Dialogue to Define Aesthetics: James
Baldwin and Chinua Achebe’. In Conversations with James Baldwin, edited
by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 210–21. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi.
Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In The Wake. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
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James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, pp. 3–23.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Wilder Billy, Dir. 1950. Sunset Boulevard. United States: A Paramount Release.
CHAPTER 12
Vie de Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie

Darrieussecq: Between Portrait
and Self-Portrait
Manet van Montfrans
For the last four decades or so, both literature and historiography have
shown a surge of interest in the lives and histories of individual people. In
France there has been a remarkable blossoming of life stories, whether
or not fictionalised. Whereas Serge Doubrovsky introduced the term
‘autofiction’ in 1977 to indicate that any autobiography, despite the so-
called autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975), inevitably contains fictional
elements, Philippe Vasset coined the term ‘exofiction’ in 2013, refer-
ring to La Conjuration (2013), a novel in which he evokes the lives
of the outcasts roaming the vacant urban areas he described in Un livre
blanc: Récit avec cartes (2007).1 Today, exofiction is used in France as
a synonym for ‘biofiction’ or ‘fiction biographique’, denoting the liberal
recreation of the lives of known or indeed unknown people (Leyris 2017).
Where traditional biography ostensibly reconstructs a person’s life history
M. van Montfrans (B)

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: m.a.e.vanmontfrans@contact.uva.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_12
204 M. VAN MONTFRANS
more or less truthfully, authors of biofiction or exofiction create their own

version of their protagonist’s life. This may lead to a permeability of the
traditional boundaries between biography and fictional life story, and also
between biography and autobiography.
The hybrid genre of biofiction draws on the centuries-old tradition
of vitae, which started with Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and, via Jacobus
de Voragine’s The Golden Legend and Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors and Architects , led to Marcel Schwob’s Vies imagi-
naires.2 For contemporary writers, the lives of artists continue to be a
fascinating subject. Pierre Michon gained international fame with Vies
minuscules (Small Lives, 1984), his debut, about the lives of unknown
people; subsequently he wrote Vie de Joseph Roulin (The Life of Joseph
Roulin, 1988) about Van Gogh and his friend Roulin, and Maîtres et
serviteurs (Masters and Servants, 1990) about Goya, Watteau and Piero
della Francesca. Other examples include Georges de la Tour by Pascal
Quignard (1991), Ravel by Jean Echenoz (2006), Charlotte (on Char-
lotte Salomon) by David Foenkinos (2014) and the subject of this
chapter, Être ici est une splendeur: Vie de Paula M. Becker by Marie
Darrieussecq (2016). Rather than discussing the works of their artists in
isolation, these writers situate them in the context of their subjects’ lives
or reconstruct the life from the works. In doing so, they inevitably weave
in their own themes and views, thus hovering between biography and
biofiction.
Être ici est une splendeur: Vie

de Paula Modersohn Becker
By the choice of her protagonist, Marie Darrieussecq, born in 1969 in
the French Basque country, embarked on a transnational journey. She
derived the title of her ‘biography’, Être ici est une splendeur (Being
here is everything), from the seventh of Rilke’s hymns to life, the Duino
Elegies, ‘Hiersein ist herrlich’ (Rilke 1963, p. 55). The subtitle Vie de
Paula M. Becker (The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker) seems to situate
it in the tradition of the vitae.3 But in reconstructing the life of the young
deceased German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the French novelist
Darrieussecq also explores her own favourite topics: motherhood, the
tension between family life and artistic independence, forming an identity
12 VIE DE PAULA MODERSOHN -BECKER BY MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ … 205
of one’s own during and following the creative process, and the represen-
tation of women in the arts. Death is another theme, which more or less
pointedly permeates all her work.4
Paula Modersohn-Becker died in childbirth in 1907 at the age of
just 31, nonetheless leaving an impressive oeuvre of over 700 paintings,
hundreds of drawings and a dozen etchings. Born in 1876 in Dresden, she
joined the German artists’ colony in Worpswede (a village near Bremen)
which advocated a return to nature and the simple values of farm life.
In 1901, she married the widowed painter Otto Modersohn, who was
eleven years her senior. The lack of artistic courage of the colony’s natu-
ralist painters and their dark palette drove her to look for other sources of
inspiration. This she found in the international avant-garde circles in Paris.
She made her first visit in 1900 and returned regularly for some months
in the years thereafter. Painters such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Le
Douanier Rousseau and Picasso inspired her, as did Fauvism and the then
recently discovered Fayum mummy portraits.
Shortly after her untimely death, her fame rose in Germany with the
publication of her diaries and letters, of which more than 45,000 copies
were sold between 1917 and 1937. A museum dedicated to her works
was founded in 1927 in Bremen, the first in Europe exclusively dedi-
cated to a female artist, designed by the architect and sculptor Bernhard
Hoetger. Becker is seen as one of the earliest exponents of German expres-
sionism. In 1937, over 70 of her paintings were destroyed or sold as
entartete Kunst (degenerate art), and some of her works were presented
as deterring examples in the Munich exhibition organised by the Nazis.
In France, however, Paula Becker remained relatively unknown until
the 2016 exhibition of her work in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris—
unknown, perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps because her
early death did not allow her to have any artist followers, or because
two world wars also thwarted Franco-German relationships in the cultural
field. Marie Darrieussecq, who for some time combined writing with her
other career as a psychotherapist, had coincidentally discovered Beck-
er’s work in 2010 in a conference brochure for psychoanalysts on the
theme of motherhood. She had just given birth to her third child and,
intrigued by the reproduction of Becker’s life-size painting ‘Reclining
Mother-and-Child Nude’ from June 1906, decided to learn more about
her life and work. She reconstructs the artist’s life, her milieu and her
time by means of her paintings and by quoting and paraphrasing passages
from the diaries and letters written by Becker (1983), her relatives, and
her friends the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the Bohemian-Austrian poet
Rainer Maria Rilke (1998). She also consulted Diane Radycki’s recent
biography (2013). The letters and diaries—Paula’s, Otto’s, Rilke’s and
Westhoff’s—do not always agree with each other, and some topics seem to
have been avoided altogether. Darrieussecq nestles herself in these hollows
in order to write her Vie de Paula M. Becker, claiming the liberty to priori-
tise her own perspective, that of a twenty-first-century female first-person
narrator, over that of the artist and her contemporaries:
Through all these gaps, I in turn am writing this story, which is not Paula
M. Becker’s life as she lived it but my sense of it a century later. A trace.
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 53)
The book has five parts consisting of concise segments and paragraphs
separated by blank lines. Part I is about Becker’s carefree youth before
1901; parts II–IV are concerned with the period 1901–1906, seeing
her struggling with social and artistic conventions within the confines of
marriage; part V traces her turbulent development in 1906–1907. This
disparity in the biographical content (21 pages covering the first twenty-
five years, but 122 for the last six years) already shows that Darrieussecq
did not envision a traditional cradle to grave approach.
Marriage, Motherhood and Art

Part I opens with the biographer visiting Paula Becker’s home in Worp-
swede and her grave, which is dominated by a monumental sculpture
of mother and child by Hoetger, ‘a half -naked reclining woman, larger
than life, a naked baby sitting on her belly. As if the baby had died too’
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 12). The revulsion this sculpture provokes—‘hor-
rible’—is just as great as the admiration she felt on seeing its antithesis,
Becker’s ‘Reclining Mother-and-Child Nude’. The burial monument is a
conventional portrayal of the mother and child relationship, while Beck-
er’s ‘Reclining Mother-and-Child Nude’ reveals its essence by depicting
the plain, non-idealised symbiosis of two bodies in full nudity. Although
Darrieussecq mentions her discovery of this painting much later in her
text, she anticipates it in her description of Hoetger’s sculpture. In
her view, he has done Becker great disservice by neglecting to refer to
her outstanding artistry. What is more, she notes with frustration that
Mathilde Modersohn, the baby sitting on her mother’s lap and the indi-
rect cause of her death, herself reached the age of 92. When rereading
the book, it thus turns out that at the outset some of Darrieussecq’s main
themes are already announced—male domination of the arts, the fraught
relation between motherhood and artistic vocation, and the looming
shadow of death.5
When Paula Becker becomes pregnant in early 1907, the school of
life had not been easy on her, leaving intact only her artistic vision
and, possibly, her ideas on motherhood. Her first stay in Paris, where
she arrives on 1 January 1900, and where she experiences in particular
Cézanne’s work as a revelation, is abruptly cut short in June. While Otto
Modersohn is visiting the World Fair in Paris at her invitation, his then
wife, who had remained in Germany, suddenly dies. It is the first of a
chain of events reaching its fateful culmination seven years later, the threat
of which permeates the text by means of recurrent prolepses that infuse
it with tragic irony.6
Becker and Modersohn become engaged a few months later. Staying in
Berlin with a view on being schooled in culinary skills by way of prepara-
tion for her marriage, Becker corresponds with Modersohn. Darrieussecq
does not hide her exasperation with such a conventional preparation for
marriage, nor can she bear Becker’s sweet-scented prose on masculinity
and virginity and the like. In commenting on such passages from her
letters and diary she remarks that, unfortunately, reading Maeterlinck
and Rilke did not have the same salubrious effect on Becker’s writing,
as did viewing the works of Cézanne and Gauguin on her paintings
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 54). In a cynical, contemporary image, she hacks
to pieces such premarital illusions: ‘Like an oil covered seagull, she
[Becker] gets bogged down in symbolism all about swans and princesses’
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 54).
Indeed, her marriage to Modersohn turns out to be disillusioned, but
as an artist Paula Becker develops rapidly, despite the suffocating social
and artistic conventions governing the artists’ colony in Worpswede no
less than elsewhere. Soon, she changes her subjects from landscapes to still
lives and portraits of people in the village: peasant children, mothers with
babies, old women, herself. The principles of perspective are dropped.
Light is hazy, figures are simplified, her palette is bold, her backgrounds
are bare or reminiscent of Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh.
A Life in Pictures
Darrieussecq mentions a number of Becker’s paintings. At first she gives
little more than summary descriptions of their subjects: ‘A young girl in
front of a window’ (1902), ‘Portrait of Elsbeth in the Orchard’ (1902),
‘Two large nudes of madame M’ (1903), and ‘A baby asleep in a red
rug’ (1904). Some paintings, however, are discussed more extensively
because they illustrate important moments of Becker’s development,
including the ‘Self-Portrait, Green Background with Blue Irises’ (1905)
that adorns the book cover of the French and English publication, the
enigmatic ‘Portrait of Rilke’ (1906), the life-size ‘Reclining Mother-and-
Child Nude’ (1906), ‘Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch’ (1906–1907),
and the ‘Self-Portrait, Age 30, 6th Wedding Day’ (1906).
Each of these is concisely described and set in a particular context.
Darrieussecq describes for instance how the ‘Self-Portrait with Irises’,
painted in 1905 in Worpswede, marks a turning point in Becker’s
development:
It is a tipping point, a perfect moment. Pure simplicity: this is me, these are
the irises. See: this is what I am, in colors and two dimensions, mysterious
and composed.
Paula is about to turn thirty. The picture is green, orange, black and
iris-blue. Dark eyes, an intense shade of purple. Her skin and her hair
are orange. The dress and the background are green. […] Her mouth is
slightly open, her gaze anxious: she is exhaling, breathing, she is going to
speak. […] Yellow amber, fossilized pine, ancient sap at her neck. ‘Tears of
the Gods’, according to Ovid, memory stones in which thousand-year-old
insects are fixed. (Darrieussecq 2017, pp. 100, 101)
Darrieussecq then inserts two quotations, one from Becker’s diary: ‘I

think I am living very intensely in the present’ (Darrieussecq 2017,
p. 101). And another from her husband Modersohn’s diary, which praises
her use of colour, but also makes some deprecatory remarks about her
penchant for primitivism and voices a lack of confidence in women’s
artistic potential in general:
A great gift for colour but unpainterly and harsh. She admires primi-
tive pictures which is very bad for her—she should be looking at artistic
paintings. She wants to unite colour and form—out of the question the
way she does it. […] Women will not easily achieve something proper.
(Modersohn-Becker 1983, p. 377, italics added)
The ‘Self-Portrait with Irises’ is the prelude to the eruption of an unbri-

dled urge to create in the last two years of Becker’s life. In February 1906,
she departs for Paris once again. She wants to break up with Moder-
sohn and is painting feverishly: a new canvas every four or five days. ‘I
am becoming somebody’ is the mantra reverberating in her letters, clari-
fied by Darrieussecq as ‘Not Modersohn, not Becker. Somebody’ (2017,
p. 110). But she cannot live off her art. Only a small number of her paint-
ings is exhibited during her lifetime and she only manages to sell three in
total. In other words, she is financially dependent on her husband and
thus forced to return with him to Worpswede in 1907.
Darrieussecq draws a link with A Doll’s House (1879) by Ibsen and
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which she was trans-
lating in the same year as working on Becker’s life story. Like Ibsen’s
Nora, ‘Paula leaves everything, house and husband, for something else,
for the unknown’ (Darrieussecq 2017, p. 105). Like Virginia Woolf, she is
permanently looking for ‘a place of one’s own’—her studio in Worpswede
and later her places in Paris—where she can work quietly, without being
disturbed by marital or social duties (Darrieussecq 2017, pp. 48, 71).
Darrieussecq also mentions the Swiss painter Sophie Schaeppi, Becker’s
fellow student at the Académie Julian (the Paris art school), who wished
for a private income of ten thousand francs. She adds that, 30 years later,
Virginia Woolf mentioned a similar amount as a necessary condition for
achieving independence (Darrieussecq 2017, p. 76). By these compar-
isons, Darrieussecq places Becker’s situation in a broader, transnational
context: Becker shared her fate with real or fictional female contem-
poraries who essentially lacked the opportunity for self-fulfilment in a
male-dominated world.
The description of Becker’s portrait of Rilke forms the climax of
the narrative of the friendship between them. The Prague-born Rilke,
whom Darrieussecq considers ‘the incarnation of Europe’, spoke a dozen
languages and was introduced by his lover, the Russian-German writer
Lou Andreas-Salomé, to Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Freud (Darrieussecq
2017, p. 35). Longing for quietness and peace after his broken rela-
tionship with Salomé, Rilke settled for some time in Worpswede. There
he met Becker and married her friend, Clara Westhoff, in 1901, shortly
after Becker’s engagement to Modersohn. This marriage goes awry as
well, despite, or perhaps because of, the birth of a daughter. Westhoff

does not get to her sculpturing and Rilke cannot write when the baby is
crying. From 1902, he is in Paris with the intention of writing a mono-
graph about Rodin (published by Julius Bard in [of] Berlin in 1903) and
when Paula is around they keep each other company. Rilke introduces
her to Rodin, he lends her money, and together they visit artist studios
and the galleries exhibiting the celebrated artists of that era—Cézanne,
Gauguin, Van Gogh and Degas. Rilke, who did not even mention Becker
in his 1903 monograph about Worpswede, three years later praises his
friend’s boldness and acknowledges her talent. In May 1906, he sits for
her. Paula had seen the recently discovered Fayum mummy portraits in
the Louvre, and the portrait she paints of Rilke clearly shows their influ-
ence. Darrieussecq describes the colours and shapes of Rilke’s masklike
facial features. Just like Becker in the ‘Self-Portrait with Irises’, he appears
to be about to say something. Darrieussecq interprets Rilke’s gaze as
manifesting his complete dedication to his art:
Rilke is orange, white, black and green. He looks young. A pharaoh’s

beard, a Hun’s moustache, a high, stiff collar, a broad forehead, dark
ringed, watery, bulging eyes, the whites of which are violet, raised
eyebrows, his mouth open, thick-lipped. […] Rilke looks into the distance,
somewhere else, within; he seems struck by what it is that, for the rest
of his life, will make him write without really knowing how to live.
(Darrieussecq 2017, pp. 111–12)
Despite her enormous drive, Paula was ambivalent about Rilke’s radical
stance on the relation between art and life, about which he held that
the artist lives in order to work and not that he works in order to live
(better or more truthfully). Darrieussecq of course rejects the consequent
implication that female artists should refrain from motherhood in order
to be able to bear the fruit of their art all their lives.
Immediately following the comments on the Rilke portrait,
Darrieussecq describes her first coincidental encounter with the ‘Reclining
Mother-and-Child Nude’ (1906). This beautiful painting depicts a
mother and child asleep, facing each other in a foetal position, which, as
Darrieussecq maintains, had never before been represented as such: ‘Milky
drowsiness, zoned out with milk and the warmth of the two of you’
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 117). It is a painting of one of Paula’s models,
who had brought her baby along and had fallen asleep when the posing
session was over. The painting does not show the figure of a woman
from a religious or masculine perspective; it is no Madonna and Child
nor a Venus and Cupid. The woman is asleep and shares the warmth of
her body with her child. The woman and child are not beautiful in the
conventional way. It is an intimate image of their deep-felt, sensuous,
bodily connection.
This is the painting (see Fig. 12.1) that inspired Darrieussecq, herself
a mother and artist, to write her Vie de Paula M. Becker. The body of a
mother is the most important metaphor for Paula Becker to capture her
own position as a female artist in relation to the creative process. Her
paintings of woman and child nudes offer a compromise between the
duty for women to be useful as a mother and the female artist’s desire for
an identity of her own. And in the depiction of these babies, real babies
rather than images of the baby Jesus wearing an expression that looks far
too old, Becker is innovative too: in the baby’s focused gaze when being
Fig. 12.1 Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Reclining Mother-and-Child Nude’,

1906, oiltempera on canvas, 82.5 × 124.7 cm, Museen Böttcherstraβe, Paula
Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen (Photo Copyright: Paula Modersohn-
Becker-Stiftung, Bremen)
breastfed, the little balled fist, its tiny hand merging into the arm without
transition, and the fold in the skin in between.
Darrieussecq interrupts her narrative about this radically new way
of depicting motherhood with a memory of her visit to the Folkwang
museum in Essen. The museum flaunts an enormous banner with one of
Becker’s self-portraits (‘Self-Portrait with a Camellia Branch’), but when
she looks for it inside, it turns out to be in storage, where, as Darrieussecq
discovers, it is stowed away behind a huge TV screen. Naturally, this
is grist to the mill of her feminist indignation. Apparently women are
relegated to the basement, whether they are painters or the subject of
painting, while men are given all the public space upstairs. The museum
director and the head of the Franco-German centre in Essen interprets
Becker’s gaze in the painting as an expression of disillusion and despair
about artistic isolation, but Darrieussecq sees something else: to her, this
painting is ‘a self-portrait of a woman painting’ (2017, p. 121). Perhaps
it is no coincidence that the Nazis, with their limited views on the role of
women (Kinder, Küche und Kirche), picked precisely this self-portrait,
together with another, a full-length nude, to present Becker’s art as
entartete Kunst.
In the period 1906–1907, Paula painted some 20 self-portraits, seven
of which are nudes. The best-known is a half-nude with amber necklace at
the age of thirty, painted on the occasion of her sixth wedding anniversary.
She looks to be four or five months pregnant, but the date, 25 May 1906,
seems to belie that, as shortly before that date she had written to her
husband that she did not want a child with him. But why could she not, as
Darrieussecq rightly wonders, have imagined what it would be like to be
pregnant and then recorded this image in painting? Artists do not depict
reality as it is but as they imagine it: ‘The self-portrait as auto-fiction’
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 126). Paula signed the portrait as P. B., using her
maiden name, which was exceptional, and all the more remarkable as it
was her wedding anniversary. Darrieussecq writes that this is the first time
in history that a female artist woman painted herself not only naked but
pregnant.
Requiem for a Friend

Almost a full year after Becker’s sudden death, Rilke wrote his moving
Requiem für eine Freundin over two nights (31 October–2 November),
at the Hotel Biron, 77, rue de Varenne, in Paris (now the Rodin
Museum). He felt guilty about his own silence after her death, haunted
by his memories: ‘That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve the lament
that we omitted’ (Rilke 1982). Darrieussecq quotes part of this Requiem
in which Rilke refers to two of Becker’s 1906 paintings, ‘Self-Portrait on
my 6th Wedding Day’ and ‘Self-portrait Nude with Amber Necklace’:
For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.

You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your
colors.
Women too, you saw, were fruits, and children,
molded from inside,
into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit
you stepped out of your clothes and brought
your naked body before the mirror, and you
let yourself inside
down to your gaze, which remained strong, and
didn’t say: ‘This is me, instead: This is’. (Rilke 1982)
Rilke held that the artist should shield the earth from its perishability by
recreating it in himself, thus preserving it. In a letter to his Polish trans-
lator Witold Hulewicz in 1925, he writes about the Duino Elegies: ‘We
[the artists] are the bees of the Invisible. Passionately we collect the honey
of the visible to store it in the big golden hive of the Invisible’.7 Paula
had that capacity, but on seeing her self-portraits he could not escape the
painful insight that she died precisely because she prioritised life over art:
Why do you want to make me think

that in the amber beads
you wore in your self-portrait, there was still
a kind of heaviness that can’t exist
in the serene heaven of paintings?
Why do you show me
an evil omen in the way you stand?
What makes you read the contours of your body
like the lines engraved inside a palm, so that
I cannot see them now except as fate? (Rilke 1982)
Darrieussecq ends her text with another question, combining Rilke’s bee
metaphor with her own description of Paula’s ‘Self-portrait with Irises
and Amber Necklace’ from 1905, ‘yellow amber, memory stones in which
thousand year old insects are fixed’: ‘If Paula’s necklace has survived her
somewhere, can we see her looking at us, like a bee, through the amber?’
(Darrieussecq 2017, p. 151). And she answers: ‘Paula is here, with her
pictures. We are going to see her’ (Darrieussecq 2017, p. 151).
Portrait and Self-Portrait

Paula Becker’s last utterance was the word Schade—a pity, a shame.
Darrieussecq writes that once she was introduced to Becker’s work, she
decided to write her life story because that early death sadly put an
end to a promising oeuvre and because in France she was practically
unknown. She collaborated on the first retrospective exhibition of Beck-
er’s work in France and on the accompanying catalogue. In her book,
she emphatically calls attention to Becker’s exceptional position in terms
of the topics she embraced, her courage and her receptivity to inno-
vations brought about by the contemporary international avant-garde,
which was almost exclusively a movement of male artists. Darrieussecq
rightly emphasises the groundbreaking qualities of Becker’s work: she was
the first modern woman artist to challenge centuries of traditional repre-
sentations of the female body in art and, as such, Darrieussecq recognises
in her a precursor.
As I have argued above, French literature has seen a renewed interest
in all kinds of life-writing, including those of artists. In a departure
from their predecessors, the authors of these lives make manifest their
textual presence either in person or by means of a fictional double;
they question general knowledge, accepted truths and prevailing myths
concerning their topic, and overtly take all kinds of liberties with their
material. Darrieussecq, in this regard, makes manifest her textual pres-
ence as biographer. She adheres to the facts and to the source material of
correspondence and diaries, limiting herself to critical remarks and well-
considered suggestions when the information falls short. She does not use
fictional elements, but that this artist’s life is a personal version is clear
from her outspoken and unwavering feminine perspective. It resonates in
all kinds of ways—the structure of the narrative, the selection of quota-
tions, the choice and interpretation of the paintings, the reconstruction
of the latter’s whereabouts and the reception after their maker’s death.
In Darrieussecq’s portrayal of Paula Becker, we can see her self-
portrait as author shimmering through—an author who, two feminist
waves on, still battles with certain restrictions having to do with being
a woman and who in some of her novels, drawing on her own experi-
ences, has endeavoured to contest the persistent, clichéd misconceptions
about motherhood and children. In an elliptical, sparse style, through
irony and humour, she reveals both the importance of clichés (as, liter-
ally, keys to our world), as well as their limitations, and tries to find other
words and ways of exploring the ideas and feelings behind these clichés.
This blending of biographical and autobiographical elements allows us
to consider Becker’s life story as biofiction rather than a straightforward
biography.
Paula Becker occupied two different worlds—provincial Worpswede
and cosmopolitan turn-of-the-century Paris. Her connections with the
international avant-garde, as well as her close friendship with the
cosmopolitan and francophile Rilke, certainly contributed to her discov-
ering an identity of her own in her art. Is the same true for Darrieussecq?
In other words, did writing the life story of a German female painter
contribute to reinforcing the artistic identity of a French woman writer
in the early twenty-first century, or did it enhance the awareness that she
too is part of a larger transnational community of artists?
The affinity Darrieussecq feels with Paula Becker is based mainly on
the unsentimental approach to her subject matter and the determination
of her creative urge. Darrieussecq’s version of Becker’s life and art is the
result of calibrating her own literary imagination of motherhood, children
and authorship against the work of a female artist who, a century ago,
looked for freedom in a world that could not accommodate her.
Although Darrieussecq often refers to the dark history of Germany
in the twentieth century, quoting authors like Paul Celan (Darrieussecq
2017, p. 41) and W. G. Sebald (p. 56), the fact that Becker was German
is only relevant in so far as it determined the late recognition her work
found in other European countries: ‘She was German, of course, but not
more so than Picasso was Spanish or Modigliani Italian’ (p. 150). Beck-
er’s Germany was still an idyllic and relatively peaceful country, one that
would be ruined by belligerence and war soon after her death (p. 56).
What really matters, however, is that she was a woman who—perhaps for
that reason, in Darrieussecq’s view—did not have the right to a ‘passport
to the world’. And that is an injustice that Darrieussecq sought to amend
by recreating the transnational artistic community in which she herself
moves so freely, and of which, in retrospect, Becker is a fully fledged
member. Given the many translations of her book, Darrieussecq seems
to have accomplished her mission to give Becker wider recognition.
Notes
1. Doubrovsky invented the term for his autobiographical novel Fils (1977).
According to Philippe Lejeune (1975), the notion of an autobiographical
pact spells out the unity of author, narrator and autobiographical subject.
Vasset introduced the term ‘exofiction’ in an interview with Frédéric
Roussel about La Conjuration: ‘Philippe Vasset: De passage secret’, Libéra-
tion, 22 August 2013. Autofiction is about oneself, and exofiction is about
another person (the affix ‘exo’ means ‘outside’, ‘outer’ or ‘external’). For
a definition of the term ‘biofiction’, see Gefen (2004, p. 12), and for an
in-depth analysis of the genre of biofiction, see Viart and Vercier (2008,
pp. 99–124), as well as Chapter 1 of this volume by Marleen Rensen and
Christopher Wiley.
2. Vies imaginaires (1896) is a collection of 22 short biographies—of ‘poets,
gods, murderers, and pirates’. Schwob states that he is not concerned with
verisimilitude.
3. Page numbers for quoted passages refer to Hueston’s translation.
4. In the 13 novels that she has published since her notorious debut Truismes
(Pig Tales) of 1996 (translated into more than 40 languages, with over a
million copies sold), Darrieussecq has explored in depth several aspects of
these closely related topics.
5. In 2001, shortly after giving birth to her first child, Darrieussecq published
the short novel Le bébé (The Baby), a text about the developing rela-
tionship between a mother and her baby that questions the conventional
views on motherhood, an attempt to counteract clichés and questions like
‘What does it mean to be a mother?’ (p. 118). For example, she rejects
the special place of the mother as primary caregiver, and she questions
notions like ‘maternal instinct’ and psychoanalytical theories of infantile
separation. Darrieussecq’s Tom Is Dead (2007) is the first-person récit of
the death of a four-year-old boy, told by his mother ten years later. Mothers
in French literature have, on the whole, tended to be objects of others’
discourses rather than narrative subjects in their own right. However, since
the beginning of the 1990s, mothers’ own voices have come to the fore in a
new body of literature, comprising authors such as Christine Angot, Marie
Darrieussecq, Camille Laurens and Marie Ndiaye, among many others. On
this subject, see Rye (2009).
6. Marie Darrieussecq discusses the figure of irony in her doctoral thesis
(1997).
7. Letter by Rilke to Witold Hulewicz (13 November 1925). After the death
of Cézanne in 1906, deeply moved by a retrospective on the artist’s work in
Summer and Autumn 1907, Rilke wrote a series of letters to his wife Clara
Westhoff. He was especially enchanted by the artist’s relationship with his
art: ‘Only a saint could be as united with his God as Cézanne was with his
work’ (October 1907).
Bibliography
Darrieussecq, Marie. 1997 [1996]. Truismes. Paris: P.O.L. English translation by
Penny Hueston, Pig Tales. New York: The New Press, 1997.
Darrieussecq, Marie. 1997. Moments critiques dans l’autobiographie contempo-
raine: l’ironie tragique et l’autofiction chez Serge Doubrovsky, Hervé Guibert,
Michel Leiris et Georges Perec. PhD diss., Université de Paris VII.
Darrieussecq, Marie. 2001. Le bébé. Paris: P.O.L., 2001. English translation by
Penny Hueston, The Baby, e-book.
Darrieussecq, Marie. 2009 [2007]. Tom est mort. Paris: P.O.L., 2007. English
translation by Lia Hills, Tom Is Dead. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009.
Darrieussecq, Marie. 2017 [2016]. Être ici est une splendeur: Vie de Paula M.
Becker. Paris: P.O.L., 2016. English translation by Penny Hueston, Being
Here Is Everything: Life of Paula M. Becker. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
Semiotext(e), 2017.
Doubrovsky, Serge. 1977. Fils. Paris: Galilée.
Echenoz, Jean. 2006. Ravel. Paris: Minuit.
Foenkinos, David. 2014. Charlotte. Paris: Gallimard.
Gefen, Alexandre. 2004. ‘La fiction biographique, essai de définition et de
typologie’. Otrante, No. 16, Vies imaginaires, edited by A. Essen et D.
Mellier, pp. 7–24.
Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil.
Leyris, Raphaëlle. 2017. ‘Le triomphe de l’Exofiction’. Le Monde des livres, 16
August 2017.
Michon, Pierre. 1984. Vies minuscules. Paris: Verdier. English translation by Jody
Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays, Small Lives. New York: Archipelago, 2008.
Michon, Pierre. 1988. Vie de Joseph Roulin. Paris: Verdier. English translation by
Wyatt Mason, The Life of Joseph Roulin, in Masters and Servants.
Michon, Pierre. 1990. Maîtres et serviteurs. Paris: Verdier. English translation by
Wyatt Mason, Masters and Servants. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997.
Modersohn-Becker, Paula. 1983 [1979]. Briefe und Tage Büchern, edited by
Günther Busch and Liselotte von Reinken. Berlin: Fischer, 1979. English
translation by Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Cley Hoey, Paula Modersohn-
Becker: The Letters and Journals. New York: Taplinger, 1983.
Quignard, Pascal. 2005 [1991]. Georges de la Tour. Paris: Galilée.
Radycki, Diane. 2013. Paula Modersohn Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1925. ‘Letter to Hulewicz’ (13 November 1925). See full
text of ‘Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke’, Vol. II, 1910–1926’. Accessed 5
December 2019. https://archive.org/stream/lettersofrainerm030825mbp/
lettersofrainerm030825mbp_djvu.txt.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1963 [1923]. ‘Die Siebente Elegie’. Duineser Elegien.
Leipzig: Insel, 1923. English translation by C. F. MacIntyre, ‘The Seventh
Elegy’. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1982 [1908]. ‘Requiem für eine Freundin’. Leipzig: Insel,
1908. English translation by Stephen Mitchell, ‘Requiem for a friend’. In
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Random. Accessed 5
December 2019. https://www.paratheatrical.com/requiemtext.html.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1998 [1973]. Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit (1898–1900).
Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1973. English translation by E. Snow and Michael
Winkler, Diaries of a Young Poet. London: Norton, 1998.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2002 [1952]. Briefe über Cézanne, edited by Ruth Silber-
Rilke. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1952. English translation by Joel Agee,
Letters on Cézanne. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. See full
text of ‘Letters Of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol. I, 1892–1910’. Accessed 5
December 2019. https://archive.org/stream/lettersofrainerm030932mbp/
lettersofrainerm030932mbp_djvu.txt.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2004 [1903]. Auguste Rodin. In Die Kunst: Sammlung illus-
trierter Monographien, edited by Richard Muther, Berlin: Bard, 1903; Leipzig:
Insel, 1913. English translation by Daniel Slager. New York: Archipelago,
2004.
Roussel, Frédéric and Philippe Vasset. 2013. ‘Philippe Vasset: De passage Secret’.
Libération, 22 August 2013.
Rye, Gill. 2009. Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary
France. New Ark: University of Delaware Press.
Schwob, Marcel. 2004 [1896]. Vies imaginaires. Paris: Flammarion.
Vasset, Philippe. 2007. Un livre blanc: Récit avec cartes. Paris: Fayard.
Vasset, Philippe. 2013. La Conjuration. Paris: Fayard.
Viart, Dominique and Bruno Vercier. 2008. ‘Fictions biographiques’. In La
littérature française au présent: héritage, modernité, mutations, pp. 99–124.
Paris: Bordas.
Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth.
PART IV
Fictional Representations of Artists’ Lives

Transnationally
CHAPTER 13
‘Don’t Tell Anyone’: K. Schippers’s

Reflections as Novelist on Life-Writing
and Transnationality
Sander Bax
From the start of his career onwards, Dutch literary writer K. Schip-
pers (1936–), a pseudonym for Gerard Stigter, has established himself
as a writer with a huge fascination for the visual arts. In the 1960s, he
was editor of the Dada-esque literary magazine Barbarber, which reintro-
duced European avant-garde and American pop-art into Dutch literature.
In the course of his career, Schippers continually wrote about the way
he looked at visual art—and his output may therefore be viewed as a
fascinating piece of art history.
On the back cover of his 2017 collection of selected essays Tot in
de verste hoeken [To the farthest corners], Schippers claims that ‘this is
the biography of my own view’. Reading the book, one soon discovers
that transnational life-writing is at stake. Schippers’ transnationality shows
itself in the many journeys he undertakes: he follows the trail of several
S. Bax (B)
Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
e-mail: p.a.bax@tilburguniversity.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_13
222 S. BAX
European writers and visual artists across the continent. In doing so, he
searches for biographical details (mostly triggered by photographs) that
lead him to contemplate places that have meant something to the artists
in question and in which he can experience the environment that inspired
them to create their work.
Interestingly enough, he sometimes combines these journeys in search
of international artists with specific elements of his personal biography.
In his 2015 book Niet verder vertellen (henceforth Don’t Tell Anyone),
he focuses on details about the life of his own mother. The book is quite
complex in terms of both structure and style. Using creative fiction, Schip-
pers connects the visual artist Alberto Giacometti’s birthplace of Stampa,
Switzerland, with his mother’s early twentieth-century Amsterdam. In
doing so, Schippers confronts his perspective on life-writing with the work
of a conventional biographer (i.e. his own biographer) in a reflection of
what an artist’s life is and how it can be written.
The Autobiographical Novel

Don’t Tell Anyone is a novel in which the narrator undertakes two jour-
neys: he travels to Stampa because he wants to see the same (sun)light
that Giacometti saw there, and he travels back in time, to the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, when his mother, Dientje, was painted
and photographed by the famous Dutch artist George Hendrik Breitner.
In the course of the book, Schippers uses his imagination to erase all
sorts of temporal and spatial borders as he brings all the main charac-
ters together: his mother Dientje and the famous Dutch painter meet in
Amsterdam, Dientje also encounters Giacometti in Stampa and she finally
comes in contact with the main character’s twenty-first-century travelling
companion, Simone.
After Don’t Tell Anyone was published, Schippers was interviewed
several times about the book. In all these interviews, he emphasises its
autobiographical nature. He speaks about ‘my mother’ and tells the inter-
viewer she used to live at the Van Hogendorpstraat and was happy to have
escaped from the Jordaan area (Zwetsloot 2016). Schippers even explic-
itly mentions, in his particular, literary style, that he wrote this book ‘to
give an image of that time period, the beginning of the twentieth century,
Breitner, the time of Breitner, painter, Breitner, my mother and Breitner,
who visited the same photographer, she also poses for him’.1 But when
the interviewer asks him if he has therefore written a ‘history book’, he
13 ‘DON’T TELL ANYONE’: K. SCHIPPERS’S REFLECTIONS … 223
is quick to point out its fictional dimension too: ‘It is more [about] me
telling good stories, that’s what you want of course, that your mother
becomes alive again. And damn I think I managed it!’2 In an interview
on Dutch television, Schippers identifies the genre of the book:
It is not a biography about her. It is just as it happened. I started travelling

and I looked at those photos, and thought: I do have the present, travelling
in Italy, in Switzerland, but these photos became so important, became
so…um… here, where is she now? Then I will tell a story, can I, because
that says it more clearly actually. Yes, when I tell a story, in my family it
immediately turns into something funny.3
Earlier in the same conversation, Schippers had told interviewer Wim

Brands that the aim of his book was to bring his mother back into
the world. He connects this autobiographical mission explicitly with the
notion of photography: ‘That is what photography does: brings it back to
life. Most memories of my mother I deal with in my novels are authentic,
but sometimes I have her experience something new. Nice things, of
course, because I liked her’.4
The narrator of Don’t Tell Anyone sometimes acts like a historian in
search of traces of the past. Schippers undertakes two quests—one for
Giacometti and one for his mother—that have a clear (auto)biographical
nature. But that does not mean that we are dealing with a conventional
biography. Schippers functions simultaneously as novelist, art critic and
life-writer. In the novel, he confronts us with alternative forms of life-
writing in which fiction plays a crucial role. This will become clear when
we consider the importance of the artistic notions of ‘viewing’, ‘light’ and
‘space’ to the biographical enquiry.
Let us firstly consider two pictures that play a crucial role in the book.
In the course of the narrative, the narrator shares some pictures of his
mother Dientje. They come from a collection of photos he takes with
him while travelling. First, Schippers presents the reader with two photos
from 1916, produced by the Automatic Photo Company, located at 32
Kalverstraat, Amsterdam. The narrator puts the two pictures alongside
each other, and by doing so, he establishes a dynamic between them.
And now one photo makes contact with the other. As a result of these two
photos falling towards each other, the movement touches you, and you are
in the presence of a little girl trying to take the right pose in 1916, in a
224 S. BAX
time frame of weeks, from a bare wall to a gate with roses, at no. 32 in
the Kalverstraat.5
The narrator reflects on these photos while on the train to Italy. He

connects the quest for his mother with his journey in search of the
space and the light in the artwork of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico
and Giacometti. In Turin, he looks for ‘De Chirico’s emptiness’ (Schip-
pers 2015, p. 31). The next day he travels to Chiavenna—in search of
the typical way that Giacometti uses the light in his artworks, which
the narrator defines as ‘light that has to disappear yet’ (Schippers 2015,
p. 58). When he travels by bus to the Swiss city of Stampa, where
Giacometti was born, he visits the studio of the Giacomettis and ends
up in conversation with Marco Giacometti, one of Alberto’s descendants,
who shows him where to find the house that he is looking for.
After having a close look at the house, he moves to the other side of the
river to take in a broader view. He is looking for a place there that Marco
had described to him as having been very important to Alberto. Marco
told Schippers that there is a stone there that had been hollowed out by
the rain and wind. When he arrives there, Schippers cannot find the stone.
He does not search very thoroughly: ‘it fits well with Giacometti, things
that are only half visible, you always have to search it partly and meanwhile
it also disappears, the thing that you thought to have grasped’.6 When he
stoops down, he still cannot find it.
I stoop, look in the lowest bushes as far as possible and let the branches
rebound in a state of nothing-can-ever-happen-here-anymore. However
much I try, I cannot mix with what I’m searching for. At the Festival
del Alpi Val Chiavenna, I fell outside every episode.
For Alberto the closest becomes unfindable, even if nothing is missing.
A girl eighty centimeters high, fifteen metres from him, is less than eight
centimetres high. For from a distance it has the length of his thumb.
My gaze wanders over the bushes again, you are just not attached to an
occurrence and it doesn’t try to attach itself to you, that is how it feels.7
Then, he turns around and sees the house, captured in nature, as if nature
had constructed a frame for the painting. ‘Now I have to think about the
dark while I am in the light, that is what I came for. Maybe I can see
traces of it’.8
Back in the reality of the twenty-first century, the narrator travels to
Stampa in order to find traces of the past. He emphasises again and
again how hard it is to find those traces, but sometimes he succeeds.

The narrator voices experiences that are common in biographical theory.
Schippers’ experiences resemble those of biographer Richard Holmes in
his books Footsteps and Sidetracks , in the latter of which Holmes describes
biography as ‘a personal adventure of exploration and pursuit, a tracking’
(2000, p. ix). In writing a biography, according to Holmes, one combines
‘researching, travelling, dreaming and writing (which go on simultane-
ously)’, and ‘the journey also spreads out in many unexpected directions’
(p. x). It is these sidetracks that gave Holmes the title for his book:
‘Yet these wanderings from the main path, these seductive sidetracks over
another part of the hill, are often the places where I have learned most
about my subjects and have felt most free in their company’ (p. x).
In Alleen een wonder kan je dragen, a book of biographical essays
on Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, Léon Hanssen adheres to Holmes’s
conceptualisation of the biographer as traveller and turns it into a theory
of the biographer as a vagabond (2017, p. 27). Hanssen considers
the biographer—the cultural historian par excellence—to be a ‘spoor-
zoeker’ (a follower of traces). He is not Carlo Ginzburg’s goal-oriented
‘detective’, but more akin to a ‘vagabond’.
For the detective the problem is given beforehand. The historian still has
to find the problem. He has to stumble over it. The vagabonding historian
does not know the urge for a destination that the detective has at all. He
does not have an insurmountable problem he has to solve to break the
case. No, he follows the trails as he finds them and only later the pattern
will show itself like the knots of a Persian tapestry.9
The vagabond-historian looks for traces of the past in a different time,

a time in which winding paths are overgrown and streets, lanes and
roads have been sacrificed in the name of progress. He does not look for
the centre, but dwells at the fringes. Hanssen therefore pleads for slow-
ness, for wandering, rambling and strolling as activities one undertakes to
encounter the strangeness and the difference of the past from the present.
Both Holmes’s and Hanssen’s conceptualisations of the biographer as
a romantic traveller or a vagabond help us to understand one of the roles
of the narrator in Don’t Tell Anyone. In some parts of the book, he takes
up the role of the Romantic traveller-biographer, travelling through time
and space, following traces and constructing images of his mother, as well
as of Breitner and Giacometti. In the second half of the book, though,
226 S. BAX
his journey takes another direction, one that Holmes and Hanssen would
never take.
The Novelist as Biographer

In the second part of the volume—for instance, when the reader is intro-
duced to the travelling narrator and his companion, Simone—Schippers
starts to use other fictional techniques to bring the past back to life. In
that sense, this book can be considered an example of what Max Saunders
(2010) has coined ‘autobiografiction’. Or, to use a less complex concept,
Don’t Tell Anyone is a ‘life narrative’, one that alternates between signs of
reference and signs of fiction (Smith and Watson 2001; Missinne 2013).
In the remainder of the text, the narrator starts telling us more about
the life of his mother. He presents these scenes from a certain distance,
but that does not mean they are not intimate. In the first half of the
book, the narrator looks at his mother from an outside perspective. In
the second part, he starts presenting the past through the eyes of Dientje
as a focal point, which has the consequence that we get to know her from
the inside. In one of the narrated scenes, her father sends her out in the
streets at night to tell his colleague that he is not able to go to work due
to illness. When she walks these nightly streets, we feel and look with
her. But at the end of the scene the perspective shifts back to that of
the narrator. This paragraph is told completely from the point of view of
Dientje, as we are told that she encounters an unknown biker passing her
on the streets at night.
In a moment he will pass her on his bike. Will he greet her or will he
not, she hopes both, but mostly that he does greet her, and that is what
happens, ‘hey little girl’, her heart is pounding.
From the other side she sees a woman on a bike with heavy breasts and
a sad face, it becomes a little less sad now, she smiles when she sees the
young daughter, what is she doing there?
At the corner of Hogendorp and Groen van Prinsterer, she almost
flies off the page to the theatre, she often visits an uncle there, high on
the gallery [‘schellinkie’] she experiences something outside of this story,
should I follow her?10
This long quotation illustrates the subtleties of Schippers’ narrative tech-

nique. The paragraph presents us with a problem every conventional
biographer also encounters: we cannot know what our protagonist thinks
and feels. Many biographers will fill in these gaps by speculating about the
thoughts and feelings of their main characters, but they cannot present
these speculations as facts. Fiction, Schippers seems to assume, brings us
closer to the past in this respect. In the second paragraph, the focus of
the narrative shifts from internal to external. In this one sentence, we start
with a view from Dientje’s perspective, then we encounter the narrator’s
external perspective and we end with a focus on the lady on the bike. In
the third paragraph, the focus lies with the narrator again, who achieves
two things in this paragraph: closing the gap between past and present by
using a historical Amsterdam dialect word (‘schellinkie’) to describe the
gallery of the theatre, and emphasising the gap between past and present
by explicitly mentioning the written page.
This short analysis shows that Schippers uses all kinds of fictional narra-
tive techniques to turn Dientje into an autonomous and living subject in
his fiction: in the last paragraph, she does things that are presented as if
they occur beyond the narrator’s control. In a later scene, we run into her
again. Now, it is the afternoon, and she is on her way to the Kalverstraat
where she wants to have her picture taken. While she goes there, a man
calls her: he asks whether she would like to pose for him. It is the afore-
mentioned painter and photographer, Breitner. When she is in his studio
and sits in his chair, he asks her to take off her clothes and pose for him
naked.
‘You can take off your clothes’, not a question, not an order, it sounds so
normal and she takes off her clothes. There is a sofa with a cloth full of
flowers and a big chair, is this not going a bit too fast, in her body she
feels the desire of something happening to her, I wish I was older, she
sometimes thinks.11
Here, Dientje ends up in a difficult situation. Breitner uses her lack of

experience to have her pose for him naked. The narrator here maintains
the focus on Dientje, who on the one hand enjoys posing naked, but also
has the feeling that something is not right. She does realise that there is
something awkward going on, so she does not tell her parents about it.
She only mentions it to her progressive aunt (a painter herself), who does
not see a problem with it:
‘I posed in front of a painter’, Dientje did not tell anybody about it.
‘If you are able to.’
‘…did not wear any clothes.’
228 S. BAX
‘…nothing at all?’
‘No…’ she sighs.
‘For an actress that is completely the same.’
‘…as working in a shop?’
‘As working in a shop.’12
The narrator reconstructs a conversation between Dientje and her aunt in

which the aunt reassures her that posing naked is just one of the things
one has to do in order to become a successful actress, which is what
Dientje wants. But the context of the conversation (Dientje confesses her
deed after a policeman has entered the shop to buy some milk) makes
clear that she has experienced this encounter between her and the painter
as something that is prohibited.
The traveller-biographer in Stampa had great trouble bringing
Giacometti to life, but the fiction writer does manage to recreate the life
of his mother. We get to know her because we can read her mind, and
therefore, we know how she feels. We also witness her intimate conversa-
tions with the painter and with her aunt. The narrator gives us access to
her and what seem to be facts from her life story (but we as readers never
know exactly what is fact and what is fiction here), and in doing so, he
does more or less the same as Breitner did: he paints an intimate picture
of her and shows that picture in public. He uses literary fiction as a way
to lay bare the private life of someone else—an issue of power that will be
discussed later on in the novel by the characters themselves.
It does not end there. Schippers also endeavours to bring the two
settings of the book (twenty-first-century Stampa and twentieth-century
Amsterdam) together. In that sense, Schippers’ approach to life-writing
is clearly transnational. Schippers brings Giacometti’s use of light in art
(portraiture), in which things are only half visible, to the biographical
scenes that he is reconstructing from his mother’s life. Looking at and
thinking about Giacometti help him to think about and reconstruct the
life of his mother. The borrowing of light in this scene can be considered
a transnational transfer from one place and time to another. The following
quotation provides a fine example: the light that the narrator took from
Stampa plays a significant role in bringing his mother to life.
The light I borrowed from Stampa falls on the Haarlemmerdijk, it slides

over the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century, a
lot of space and light for Dien[tje] and the people she passes. Sometimes
dark, but with a lot of light spots, so that you can take a sound or a scent
with you, when you have just been somewhere else.13
In this novel, the biographical project sometimes works very well, only
to be undermined a moment later. In the next chapter, we see Dientje
slipping away from the narrator. Here, his sensory techniques to bring
the past to life do not succeed, and we see him on the Haarlemmerstraat
alone.
…and before Dien[tje] sneaks out completely, you manage to grasp a slip
of her jacket, it lets go, sensuous desperation, lost.
What kind of jacket is this, velvet? Something like that, but not exactly
the same. Stiff, you can feel that too, some sort of withheld tweed.
I walk in the Haarlemmerstraat, feel the wind on my skin and will never
say anything about it again.14
At the end of the book, the narrator returns to Giacometti. Dientje and
her young friend Bertha are travelling to Italy. First, they visit Alber-
to’s grave at the cemetery in Borgonovo. At the cemetery, something
strange happens. The two historical characters (Dientje and Bertha) meet
Simone, who is more usually the narrator’s travelling companion. Two
or three time periods intermingle in the scene that is narrated here: the
past of Dientje and Breitner, the past of Giacometti and the present of
the narrator and Simone. Simone arrived by car from Basel and subse-
quently takes the two girls to the school that Alberto’s brother, Bruno
Giacometti, designed in Stampa.
While Simone is talking to Dientje’s friend Bertha, Dientje decides to
look around: ‘For a moment, she has the feeling that she is in no one’s
story at all, not Bertha’s, not Simone’s, she doesn’t have to be part of
anything. No side road demands her attention’.15 The narrator constructs
an imaginary encounter between his mother and a tall boy who turns out
to be Alberto Giacometti. Alberto speaks to her and tries to explain the
strange numbers he has drawn on the wall. When she is called back, she
whispers, ‘Will I see you again?’ and he answers: ‘I am here every day!’
(Schippers 2015, p. 192).
In the final chapters of the book, Dientje returns to ‘her painter’,
Breitner, again. She asks him about ‘the light’—she makes clear that
she has promised Alberto that she will dive into the mystery of the way
painters and photographers deal with the light in the places they want
230 S. BAX
to portray in their work. Breitner remarks: ‘There is always light already,

without you even thinking about it’.16 When she is back on the streets
later, she thinks back to the light and how she can use it in the works of
art she aspires to create:
Maybe she can do something with a photo, she can make the light à la
Stampa fall on a face, shadowed light, that was how it was with Alberto,
in the cabin.
Much stays in the dark, when she lies on the painter’s couch, she has
noticed that, with light spots for the differences, but not too much.17
The twenty-first-century narrator describes the thoughts of his twentieth-

century mother. In her mind, she connects Breitner and Giacometti by
taking the light she saw in Stampa to the light that is in the painting
that Breitner is making of her. This light—and of course the viewer who
captures the light—connects times and places. In making these connec-
tions, Schippers uses fictional strategies to write about the life of his
mother. What the traveller-biographer cannot achieve, the literary writer
manages by using his imagination.
Everything here follows the logic of writing, including punctuation, para-

graphs, chapters. But do make sure it does not get wet from the rain, like
it did when a friend of mine had written down the theory of relativity. The
notepad papers were in front of an open window, a downpour, I came
home almost washed away and could not read a word of it.18
Bringing Einstein into the discussion, Schippers makes clear that his book
is ordered around the principle of relativity: there are no fixed points
from which people observe something, for instance, the light in Stampa.
Schippers’ text takes the notion of relativity to another level—as fiction
writers are allowed to do—in order to bring together times and places in
the act of transnational and transhistorical observing.
Writer vs. Biographer

The narrator of Don’t Tell Anyone starts as a traveller-biographer, only to
develop later into the creator of a fictional story in which the biographer’s
desire to surpass the boundaries of time and place is fulfilled. The life-
writer as a novelist has far more opportunities than the life-writer as a
biographer—that is what we can take from Don’t Tell Anyone. But why
does Schippers enter into such a discussion? If we want to understand

that, we have to take a short look at a new character we encounter halfway
the book: the narrator’s own biographer, with whom he has a strange
conversation.
The narrator reflects on things that have happened to him, but that
gave him the feeling that they did not get attached to him and that they
did not belong to him. He wonders what these incidents might mean to
his biographer: ‘What does it matter to him that I photographed Barack
Obama, in his helicopter, high in the air […]?’19 The narrator then refers
to his own book as a ‘parody of life writing’20 :
I ask him if people sometimes sell their life by the decade, ‘ten thousand
for the first ten years…’
‘…and five thousand from ten to twenty…’ he asks.
‘Yes, like that…’
‘Then I would want a discount on the last decade…’
‘…[which] does not last that long…’
‘“…you better first tell me something about your mother’, he laughs, ‘you
have been quite silent about her until now.’21
Here, it becomes clear that the life narrative that the narrator is creating is
inspired by the fact that he has himself become the subject of biographical
inquiry. In this part of the text, the narrator creates a quite negative image
of his own biographer. While the biographer is away in Hamburg, he does
not pay attention enough. We, as readers, have digested all the afore-
mentioned information about the narrator’s mother, but the biographer
apparently did not even notice. This also suggests that the biographer
does not read his subject’s literary work thoroughly enough, depending
as he does on explicit questions in order to collect the facts of his life.
But the role of the biographer even gets one step more complicated—
he is also captured by Schippers’ imagination and he too becomes a
character in the novel. When Dientje is in Stampa, shortly before she
will meet Alberto, she runs into a man whom she believes she recog-
nises. He introduces himself as ‘the biographer of the one who is writing
this’.22 Dientje wonders what he wants from her. They discuss the issue
of authorship. Dientje asks him what would be the case if she appeared
to be the one writing this, and she emphasises that she has to get on with
her story about walking in the Haarlemmerstraat. She tells the biographer
232 S. BAX
about her encounter with Breitner, adding to that the words that are the
title of the book: don’t tell anyone.
‘…it worked out…together with a painter…’

‘…you posed…?’
‘…don’t tell anyone…and you?’
‘…as a biographer?’
‘…yes…’
‘I am a man who is not able to be part of anything myself. Therefore I am
looking for other people’s occurrences.’23
Here again, we encounter quite a negative perspective of the biogra-

pher. He considers himself to be someone in search of episodes in other
people’s lives. But then, the narrator has put him into a story now. Both
the narrator’s mother and the narrator’s biographer deal with the same
problem: they want to be the narrator of their own story, but they realise
that they are being narrated by the narrator. In the last part of their
conversation, they look for ways to ‘escape the power of the writer’.
‘Anything else?’ She wants to continue now.

‘I am looking for something that reduces the power of the writer.’
‘What might that be then?’
‘That you escape from his plans with you.’
‘What do you blame him for?’
‘That I am not in the book from the beginning.’
‘From the beginning?’
‘I know enough about him.’
For a moment it is quiet. ‘Is it difficult, what he is talking about?’ she asks.
‘What?’
‘…the space, the light…’
‘That is none of my business.’ And he continues.24
This conversation reveals several things at once. Dientje confesses to the

biographer what she has told no one but her aunt. She asks him not to
tell anyone, and as far as we know, the biographer did not do so. But the
narrator, the one the biographer ought to be writing about, assumes the
power here by telling her story to the reader instead.
In recreating the life of his mother in this fictional text, Schippers
points us at several complexities of the biographical inquiry. On the one
hand, he brings her to life and he gives the reader access to her mind and
her experience; but on the other hand, he can only do so by taking up

a position that is comparable to Breitner’s. However much the character
may be resisting the narrator, in the end, she is being narrated by him.
At the end of the book, this issue of narrative power is discussed again
when Schippers enters into a struggle with his own biographer. The biog-
rapher wants to be independent and critical, but Schippers turns him into
a character in the story.
The narrator devises a clear opposition between the creative writer who
performs life-writing through viewing and experiencing space and light on
the one hand, and the biographer who thinks that is none of his business
on the other. The narrator implies that the biographer does not really
know what is at stake in the texts of the subject he is writing about, despite
his claim that he knows enough about him. The biographer, however,
turns out to be on the losing end: just after he turns away from the scene,
the reader gets what the biographer was looking for—access to the story
of Dientje, access to her mind and access to her experiences.
While the biographer looks the other way, the transnational life-writer
performs his trick. He uses his imagination to cross the borders of ages
and nations in order to recreate a life. This seems to suggest that any
future biographer of Schippers should take into account the importance
of the transnational aspects of his artistic practices.
Notes
1. ‘[Het boek is bedoeld] om een beeld te geven van die tijd, begin van
de twintigste eeuw, Breitner, de tijd van Breitner, schilder, Breitner, mijn
moeder en Breitner, die kwamen bij dezelfde fotograaf, zij poseert ook
voor hem’ (Zwetsloot 2016). All translations provided in this chapter are
my own.
2. ‘Het is meer dat ik probeer door de goede verhalen te vertellen, wat je
natuurlijk wil, dat je moeder weer tot leven wordt gewekt. Verdomd het
lukt me ook nog, denk ik!’ (Zwetsloot 2016).
3. ‘Het is geen biografie van haar. Het is zoals het gebeurde. Ik ging
op reis en ik bekeek die foto’s, en ik dacht: ik heb wel het nu, in
Italië reizen, in Zwitserland, maar die foto’s werden zo belangrijk, die
werden zo… eh… hier, waar zit ze nou? Dan vertel ik er meteen een
verhaal bij, mag dat, want dat zegt het eigenlijk duidelijker. Ja, als ik een
verhaal vertel, dan heeft het in mijn familie altijd meteen iets grappigs.’
VPRO Boeken, 3 January 2016, https://www.vpro.nl/boeken/progra
mmas/boeken/2015/4-januari.html, 8:42–9:12 (accessed 2 July 2019).
234 S. BAX
4. ‘Dat is iets wat fotografie doet: tot leven wekken. De meeste herinner-
ingen aan mijn moeder die ik in romans verwerk zijn authentiek, maar ik
laat haar ook wel eens iets nieuws beleven. Leuke dingen, natuurlijk, want
ik mocht haar graag’ (Visser 2015).
5. ‘En nu maakt de ene foto contact met de andere. Door die paar naar
elkaar toe buitelende foto’s raakt de beweging je aan, ben je aanwezig bij
een meisje dat in 1916 de goede houding zoekt, over weken verspreid,
van een kale muur naar een poort met rozen, op nummer 32 in de
Kalverstraat’ (Schippers 2015, p. 19).
6. ‘Ik zoek niets eens al te goed naar de steen,’t hoort bij Giacometti, dat
half en half zichtbare, altijd moet je ’t deels zoeken verdwijnt ’t ook nog,
wat je in handen dacht te hebben’ (Schippers 2015, pp. 65–66).
7. ‘Ik buk me, kijk zo ver mogelijk in de onderste struiken en laat de takken
weer terugspringen in een stand van hier-kan-nooit-meer-iets-gebeuren.
Hoe ik ’t ook probeer, ik kan me niet vermengen met wat ik zoek. Op
het Festival del Alpi Val Chiavenna ben ik buiten elk voorval geraakt.
Voor Alberto wordt het meest nabije onvindbaar, ook al is er niets
zoek. Een meisje van tachtig centimeter, vijftien meter van ’m vandaan,
is niet meer dan acht centimeter groot. Van een afstand heeft het immers
de lengte van z’n duim.
M’n blik dwaalt nog eens over de struiken, je zit net niet aan een
voorval vast en het probeert zich ook niet aan jou vast te maken, zo voelt
het’ (Schippers 2015, p. 66).
8. ‘Ik moet nu in het licht aan het donker denken, daar ben ik voor
gekomen. Misschien zie ik er sporen van’ (Schippers 2015, p. 68).
9. ‘Voor de detective is het probleem vooraf gegeven. De historicus moet
het probleem eerst nog vinden. Hij moet erover struikelen. De vagabon-
derende historicus kent de bestemmingsdrang van de detective al helemaal
niet. Hij heeft geen onoverkomelijk probleem dat hij moet oplossen zodat
de zaak is geslecht. Nee, hij volgt de sporen zoals hij ze aantreft en pas
later zal het patroon dat deze sporen vormen duidelijk worden zoals de
knopen van een Perzisch tapijt’ (Hanssen 2017, p. 245).
10. ‘Straks fietst hij langs haar heen. Dat hij haar wel groet en niet groet,
ze hoopt op alle twee, wel groet het meest en zo gebeurt het ook, ‘dag
meissie’, het klopt zo in haar keel.
Van de andere kant komt een vrouw op de fiets met van die zware
borsten en een droevig gezicht, nu wordt het iets minder droevig, ze
lacht als ze de jonge dochter ziet, wat doet ze daar?
Vliegt ze op de hoek van de Hogendorp en de Groen van Prinsterer
bijna van de blz. naar de schouwburg, gaat ze vaak met een oom naartoe,
hoog op het schellinkie maakt ze iets mee buiten dit verhaal, moet ik haar
volgen?’ (Schippers 2015, pp. 75–76).
11. ‘“Kleedt u zich uit,” geen vraag, geen opdracht, het klinkt zo gewoon en
zij doet het. Daar staat een sofa met een doek vol bloemen en een grote
stoel, gaat het niet iets te snel, in haar lijf zit het verlangen dat er iets met
je gebeurt, was ik maar ouder, denkt ze soms’ (Schippers 2015, p. 98).
12. ‘Ik heb voor een schilder geposeerd,’ Dien[tje] heeft ’t er nog met
niemand over gehad.
‘Als je dat kan.’
‘…had niets aan.’
‘…helemaal niets?’
‘Nee…’ zucht ze.
‘Voor een actrice is dat hetzelfde.’
‘…als in een winkel helpen?’
‘Als in de winkel helpen’ (Schippers 2015, pp. 125–26).
13. ‘Het van Stampa geleende licht valt op de Haarlemmerdijk, het glijdt over
het eind van de negentiende, begin twintigste eeuw, veel ruimte en licht
voor Dien[tje] en haar voorbijgangers. Soms donker, maar met veel lichte
plekken, zo kun je ook een klank of een geur meenemen, als je net ergens
anders bent geweest’ (Schippers 2015, p. 104).
14. ‘…en voor Dien[tje] helemaal wegglipt pak je haar nog net bij een slip
van haar jas, het laat los, tastzinnige wanhoop, verdwenen.
Wat is het voor jas, fluweel? Iets daarvan, maar niet helemaal. Stug, dat
voelt er ook in door, een soort ingehouden tweed.
Ik loop in de Haarlemmerstraat, voel de wind op m’n huid en zal er
nooit iets over zeggen’ (Schippers 2015, p. 106).
15. ‘Even voelt het of ze in geen enkel verhaal zit, niet van Bertha, niet van
Simone, hoeft ze nergens meer deel van uit te maken. Geen zijweg eist
haar op’ (Schippers 2015, p. 185).
16. ‘“… het licht… als de bergen te hoog zijn, verdwijnt het in de winter…”
“…in het dal…”
“…ja…”
“…dat moet je niet zo ernstig nemen, het licht zit overal aan vast…wie
vroeg je dat?”
“…omdat ik nog jonge ogen heb…”
“…geef het niet te veel nadruk…” zegt de schilder.
“…nee…?”
Hij houdt van ronde dingen, zegt hij, een zin met een wiel, cirkel,
volle maan, gulden, confetti, in een schrift, maar niet op het doek.
“…dan valt het te veel op…” vraagt Dien[tje].
“Er is vanzelf al licht, zonder dat je eraan denkt”’ (Schippers 2015,
p. 207).
17. ‘Misschien kan ze iets met een foto doen, dat ze het licht à la Stampa
op een gezicht kan laten vallen, beschaduwd licht, zo was het ook bij
Alberto, in de hut.
236 S. BAX
Veel blijft in het donker, als ze bij de schilder op de bank ligt, dat
heeft ze wel gezien, met lichte plekken voor het verschil, niet al te veel’
(Schippers 2015, p. 208).
18. ‘Alles verloopt hier volgens de logica van een geschrift, tot en met
de interpunctie, alinea’s, hoofdstukken toe. Pas alleen wel op dat het
niet verregent, als toen een vriend voor mij de relativiteitstheorie had
opgeschreven. De blocnotevelletjes lagen voor het open raam, een
stortbui, ik kwam zo goed als uitgewist thuis en kon geen woord meer
lezen’ (Schippers 2015, p. 146).
19. ‘Wat moet hij ermee dat ik Barack Obama fotografeerde, in z’n helikopter,
hoog in de lucht, recht boven Warung Djawa?’ (Schippers 2015, p. 150).
20. ‘Een parodie op een levensbeschrijving dan maar’ (Schippers 2015,
p. 150).
21. ‘Ik vraag hem of iemand z’n leven wel ’ns per decennium verkoopt,
“tienduizend voor de eerste tien jaar…” vraagt hij.
“…en vijfduizend van tien tot twintig…”
“ja, zo…”
“Dan wel korting op het laatste decennium…”
“…duurt minder lang…”
“…vertel me eerst maar ’ns iets meer over je moeder,” lacht hij, “tot
nu toe ben je nogal zwijgzaam over haar”’ (Schippers 2015, pp. 150–51).
22. ‘biograaf van degene die dit schrijft’ (Schippers 2015, p. 187).
23. ‘“…het ging…samen met een schilder
“…geposeerd…?”
“…niet verder vertellen…en jij?”
“…als biograaf?”
“…ja…”
“Ben een man die zelf nergens in terecht kan komen en daarom
voorvallen van anderen zoekt”’ (Schippers 2015, p. 187).
24. ‘“En wat nog meer?” ze wil nu vlug doorlopen.
“Ik zoek nog iets wat de macht van de schrijver beperkt.”
“Wat dan wel?”
“Dat je ontkomt aan wat hij met je van plan is.”
“Wat neem je hem dan kwalijk?”
“Dat ik er niet meteen in voorkom.”
“In het begin?”
“…ik weet genoeg van ’m.”
Even is het stil, “is het niet moeilijk waar hij het over heeft?” vraagt ze
dan.
“Wat?”
“…de ruimte, het licht…”
“Daar ga ik niet over,” en hij loopt door’ (Schippers 2015, pp. 187–
88).
Bibliography
Hanssen, Léon 2017. Alleen een wonder kan je dragen: Over het sublieme bij
Mondriaan. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Huis Clos.
Holmes, Richard. 2000. Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. New
York: Pantheon.
Missinne, Lut. 2013. Oprecht gelogen: Autobiografische romans en autofictie in de
Nederlandse literatuur na 1985. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt.
Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the
Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schippers, K. 2015. Niet verder vertellen. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Querido.
Schippers, K. 2017. Tot in de verste hoeken. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Querido.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Visser, Arjan. 2015. ‘K. Schippers: “Godsdiensten timmeren alles dicht”’. Trouw,
16 August 2015. Accessed 19 September 2019. https://www.trouw.nl/
home/k-schippers-godsdiensten-timmeren-alles-dicht-~a40d8b7ef/.
VPRO Boeken, 3 January 2016. Accessed 2 July 2019. https://www.vpro.nl/
boeken/programmas/boeken/2015/4-januari.html.
Zwetsloot, Rob. 2016. ‘K. Schippers—Niet verder vertellen’. YouTube, 18
January 2016. Accessed 2 July 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Xl_RM2_QVeM.
CHAPTER 14
The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s

Life and Art in Michael Cunningham’s
America
Maximiliano Jiménez
In a chapter devoted to the emergence of metropolitan modernisms, Jane

Goldman argues that 1925 ‘was a particularly rich year’ (2006, p. 63)
not only for the avant-garde novel, but also for English writer Virginia
Woolf, since ‘it is her two great modernist landmarks, Mrs Dalloway and
“Modern Fiction”… that dominate that year, and to an extent… many
that follow’ (pp. 63–64). Aside from the cultural importance of English
modernism, Woolf herself is now considered a key figure of twentieth-
century literary history: ‘it is now difficult to conceive of the terrain of
English Literature without some reference to Woolf’s work, and Woolf
studies has evolved into a vibrant and burgeoning arena in its own right’
(Sellers 2010, p. xix). By themselves, Woolf’s insights into fiction and the
literary experimentation of her period, attested by her vast criticism, give a
M. Jiménez (B)
School of Philosophy and Letters, National Autonomous
University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
e-mail: maximiliano.jiro@filos.unam.mx

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_14
240 M. JIMÉNEZ
sense of why she came to hold such a prominent role as an artist critically
engaged with the advancement of art in an era that revolved specifi-
cally around the notion of innovation (Levenson 2011, p. 6). Goldman
(2006), for example, pays attention to Woolf’s famous assertion that
‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ (Woolf 1924,
p. 4), with which the writer refers to ‘a shift from the Edwardian to
the Georgian era’ (Goldman 2006, p. 61) that would inevitably modify
the world that literature uses as its source material. ‘[W]hen human rela-
tions change’, says Woolf, ‘there is at the same time a change in religion,
conduct, politics, and literature’ (1924, p. 5).
Though usually overlooked, Woolf’s critical take on her context is a
core aspect of her work. According to Helen Carr (2010), the ‘patri-
archal code; the world of finance and acquisition; the Empire: all these
three… are intimately linked in Woolf’s writings and in her analysis of
her world’ (p. 197), and ultimately, her anti-imperialism ‘is as integral
to her modernist aesthetics and her exploration of subjectivity as her
feminism’ (p. 202). In fact, Carr suggests that Woolf’s anti-imperial atti-
tude, in contrast to her more widely discussed feminism, started to be
a subject of discussion only during the 1990s (p. 200), which accounts
for the usefulness of the relatively recent transnational turn in literary
studies towards highlighting such thematic approaches. Accordingly, by
bringing to the surface certain extratextual and intertextual connections
between Mrs Dalloway and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass —in which
the poet identifies himself ‘specifically as a New Yorker and an Ameri-
can’ (Goldman 2006, p. 70)—Jane Goldman argues that Woolf’s novel
‘is already in dialogue with Paris and New York, and opening doors to
each’ (p. 71). Goldman’s reading can be further justified by what Jessica
Beerman (2017) calls ‘transnational modernisms’, a phrase in which the
term ‘transnational’ is used ‘to describe a web of social and textual inter-
relationships linking modernisms worldwide as well as a critical optic
through which to see modernist attitudes and impulses that transcend
and contend with the nation’ (p. 108). Therefore, it seems to be the case
that a work like Mrs Dalloway can and ought to be read paying attention
to the discourses that, in their own right, transcend national borders.
But what happens when a transnational-modernist text becomes
the object of a more literal kind of transnational crossing? Michael
Cunningham’s engagement with Mrs Dalloway, the quintessential English
modernist novel, is such a case, and considering how the American
author transposes the life of Clarissa Dalloway, one June day in 1923
14 THE HOURS AND THE NATIONS: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LIFE … 241
in London, to the New York of ‘the end of the twentieth century’

(Cunningham 1998, p. 9), suggests certain thematic and aesthetic
concerns that, like Woolf’s anti-imperialism, seem integral to Cunning-
ham’s identity as an American writer. Defined as a ‘homage’ (Goldman
2006, p. 64), a ‘re-telling or re-presentation’ (Hughes 2004, p. 349),
or simply a ‘rewrite’ (Spohrer 2005, p. 114) of Mrs Dalloway, Cunning-
ham’s The Hours (1998) presents the typical characteristics of postmodern
practice. As Charlotte Broad (2009) explains, Cunningham deliber-
ately constructs the great American novel on the foundations of a
work written by a pioneering feminist and English modernist (p. 77).
For Broad, Cunningham therefore represents a ‘guide and interpreter
between the American and English people by refashioning Mrs Dalloway
in a postmodern way’ (p. 68)1 : there is a sort of parodic transfor-
mation that replaces the British monarchy and the Prime Minister in
Woolf’s novel with the ‘imposing dominion of Hollywood in our days’
(p. 72). Although Cunningham’s updating of Woolf’s novel (Sanders
2006, p. 118) would be enough to present a cohesive postmodern narra-
tive and outline a transnational analysis of the connections between both
novels, there is an aspect of Cunningham’s hypertext (Genette 1997, p. 5)
that still requires further critical exploration: the construction of Woolf
herself as a character based on the real author.
In the discussion that follows, I propose a reading of The Hours ,
framed by the transnational dimensions of Woolf’s work and attitude,
concerning the function of a fictional Virginia Woolf in a novel that, for
the most part, is about the conception and creation of Mrs Dalloway,
‘a narrative about London after World War I’ (Cunningham 2019). In
this sense, Cunningham directly engages with the life and art of one of
the most representative British novelists of the twentieth century—one
whose critical take on ‘the boundaries of nationhood’ (Marcus 2010,
p. 158) is effectively and critically confronted with Cunningham’s own
nationality. After all, given that Woolf was particularly vocal about ‘the
damage inflicted by British imperialist policies and attitudes’ and ‘the
threat of Americanisation and a mass commodity culture’, among other
controversies (Cuddy-Keane 2010, p. 237), the fictionalisation of Woolf
in an American work of fiction demands analysis. Accordingly, after briefly
explaining the most direct correspondences between Mrs Dalloway and
The Hours to signal the general thematic frame of the modern Amer-
ican transposition, here I will pay close attention to the characterisation
of Cunningham’s Woolf in relation to the ‘real’ modernist author and
242 M. JIMÉNEZ
her ideas on characters, reality and artistic creation. As I will show, in

The Hours, these aspects can be condensed into the notion of world-
building that then becomes relevant for a revision of the perceptions
and ideas of Laura Brown, the one protagonist in Cunningham’s novel
who, unlike the modern-day Clarissa or the fictionalised Woolf, adopts
the role of reading, interpreting and being affected by Mrs Dalloway in
her own suburban American context. For this, I will reflect on the concep-
tualisation of worlding as a more specific postmodern concern related
to life, art, fiction and Cunningham’s critical take on America at the
end of the twentieth century. Since Cunningham ‘creates a work that
exists in symbiotic interplay with Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction… and
her personal biography’ (Sanders 2006, pp. 116–17), analysing how The
Hours appropriates Woolf’s national and aesthetic concerns to elaborate
on the all-encompassing notion of world-building provides an insightful
take on what might be associated with ‘another ground or another world’
(Goyal 2017, p. 5) in transnational studies.
Many critics have paid attention to the spatiotemporal and structural
transformations of Mrs Dalloway in The Hours —transformations that
are at the core of the transnational perspective I adopt here. That the
change traces a path that goes from London, ‘capital of the imperial
crisis [and] the metropolitan world’ during ‘the era of High Modernism’
(Deane 1995, p. 358), to suburban California in the late 1950s and
New York City at the end of the millennium, is ‘in keeping with the
twentieth-century’s imperial power shifts’ (Goldman 2006, p. 64). That
is to say, although Cunningham’s ‘is an appropriation informed as much
by late twentieth-century queer politics and theory as it is by its femi-
nist and postmodern counterparts’ (Sanders 2006, p. 117), Goldman’s
attention to the imperial power shifts portrayed in The Hours might
be a better alternative to revise the transnational implications of the
hypertextual relationships (Genette 1997, p. 5) between the two novels.
Tellingly, Erika Spohrer (2005) directs attention to the plot-related corre-
spondences between Mrs Dalloway and The Hours , in which ‘Queens
become actresses, the London streets become movie sets, [and] Impe-
rialist activists become degraded movie stars’ (p. 114). Spohrer recurs to
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of cultural capital to address the ‘cul-
tural elitism’ (Spohrer 2005, p. 118) that the transformed characters of
Cunningham’s novel reveal through their thoughts on fame, taste, beauty
and art. In fact, this view of Cunningham’s text leads Spohrer to argue
that the concept of ‘celebrity… points to a central concern of The Hours
while… encouraging us to read Mrs Dalloway as a tale as much about

stardom as it is about shell-shock, snobbery, and stream-of-consciousness’
(p. 114).
While Spohrer’s reading does not develop the deeper thematic
concerns of both Mrs Dalloway and The Hours, she makes a suggestion
that gives way to other possible interpretations when seen in relation to
Cunningham’s engagement with Woolf’s (fictionalised) life and aesthetic
interests. Specifically, Spohrer explains that ‘Although critics do not insist
that the public figure begins with the movie star, they often assume that
celebrity in its present political form indeed derives from movie stardom’,
but she considers that ‘Cunningham assumes differently’:
If the primary function that the celebrity serves in The Hours is as cultural
currency, currency located absolutely in twentieth-century America but not
otherwise especially nationalistic, then one might say that one of its primary
functions in Mrs Dalloway is as currency of a decidedly national nature.
Its most obvious function is as a stabilizing center, a coherent, though
not necessarily ‘meaningful’, center of the British Empire. (Spohrer 2005,
p. 123)
Since I am particularly concerned with the critical implications of

replacing London with New York and, indirectly, with the suburbs of
Los Angeles, it does not serve my purpose to dismiss, as Spohrer does,
the culturally bound comment on a specifically American context as seen
through a close reading of Mrs Dalloway, not the other way round.
Indeed, it is possible to make a retrospective reading of Woolf’s novel
in relation to Cunningham’s, but considering the logic of appropriation,
I find it much more fruitful to wonder about what Cunningham is saying
about his society via Woolf’s representation and criticism of the imperi-
alistic discourses of her world. After all, could Spohrer’s argument not
be read backwards to establish that, in replacing the centre of the British
Empire with the increasingly pervasive (and transnational, given its global
presence) cultural role of Hollywood and stardom, The Hours suggests
that the cinema and celebrity industry has the same sort of American
national force that the Crown and its propagation had for Mrs Dalloway’s
England?
Yet, as I suggested before, this transnational thematic approach can be
easily examined by paying attention only to the ‘Mrs Dalloway’ narrative
244 M. JIMÉNEZ
arc in The Hours —that which clearly presents Mrs Dalloway as a story re-
enacted in New York. In other words, if such a critical take is transparent
enough, then what is the point of including not only a fictionalisation of
Woolf herself, but also the dramatisation of a reader of Mrs Dalloway in
suburban Los Angeles? Broad (2009) affirms that Cunningham is inter-
ested in explicitly establishing that his inspiration is, first and foremost,
Woolf’s life and art, which moreover ‘playfully destabilizes his own narra-
tive project’ by making the emphasis ‘fall on the reading/re-reading,
critical interpretation, deconstruction, and reconstruction’ of her work
(pp. 69–70). In fact, by including an epigraph taken directly from Woolf’s
diary and evoking her real existence, The Hours provides a metafictional
twist that addresses the role of Woolf and, by extension, Cunningham
as authors. In accordance with the broader theoretical implications of
metafiction, of which a common narrative strategy is the fictionalisation
of the author, this twist is ‘one of the many ways in which Cunningham
blurs the line that separates life from literature, thus questioning the illu-
sion that there is a clear distinction between fact and fiction’ (Broad
2009, p. 75). Postmodern as this concern sounds, the very problem of
separating fact from fiction can be directly linked to Woolf’s modernist
preoccupations as evinced by her critical writings, material on which
Cunningham also relies to construct his version of the English author.
In Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Woolf’s plea for the renovation of
‘literary form in response to the radical changes she saw in “human char-
acter”’ (Goldman 2006, p. 71), the author criticises Edwardian author
Arnold Bennett for his reluctance to welcome such a renovation. ‘He says
that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance
of surviving’, claims Woolf; ‘Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself,
what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?’ (Woolf 1924, p. 10;
emphasis added). Certainly, the polysemy and instability of the term ‘real-
ity’ ought not to be neglected, for Woolf and Bennett’s use of the word
does not refer, at least here, to a contemporary conceptualisation of the
tangible ‘shared fantasy’ that constitutes ‘[w]hat we call the real world’
(Barth 1984, p. 221). Nevertheless, Woolf’s general aesthetic interests in
and around 1925 address the issue of the direct representation, through
art, of the world. While in the process of writing Mrs Dalloway—in 1923,
at which point the novel still had the working title ‘The Hours’—Woolf
wonders in her diary, ‘Am I writing [it] from deep emotion?… I haven’t
that “reality” gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting
reality—its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying
the true reality?’ (Woolf 1982, p. 56; emphasis added). ‘Is life like this?’
she wonders in her 1925 manifesto ‘Modern Fiction’; ‘Must novels be
like this?’ (Woolf 1984, p. 160). Finally, laying the path for Cunning-
ham’s subsequent transposition of Mrs Dalloway into the Hollywood era,
Woolf’s early analysis, in 1926, of what would become ‘the art of the
cinema’ establishes that, with the invention of the movies, things ‘have
become not more beautiful, in the sense in which pictures are beau-
tiful, but… more real, or real with a different reality from that which
we perceive in daily life… We see life as it is when we have no part in it’
(Woolf 1966, pp. 268–69).
Simply put, Cunningham’s postmodern smudging of the boundaries
between fiction, art and reality is genetically inscribed in Woolf’s poetics
and her problematisation of the idea of reality. Therefore, when Cunning-
ham’s Woolf sets out to write Mrs Dalloway, she notices that ‘[t]his
morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach
the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self , or
rather a parallel, purer self’ (Cunningham 1998, p. 34; emphasis added).
The notion of the parallel self, drawn from Woolf’s real reflection ‘that
people have any number of states of consciousness’ (1982, p. 74), outlines
in The Hours a take on creativity that the fictional Woolf understands as:
an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world

because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortu-
nate she is able to write directly through that faculty… but her access to it
comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and find that
she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen. (Cunningham
1998, p. 35)
This explanation presents Woolf’s ‘artistic self’ as one that has a particular
type of relation with the world—with reality—and in doing so, it vouches
for the stability (or at least recognisability) of said world, while acknowl-
edging the ‘multiplicity’ of selves. In other words, Woolf, as an artist, can
see the world with different eyes: she possesses an artistic gaze that lets
her glimpse into that ‘true reality’ that is in the world. Accordingly, the
actual writer’s preoccupation with her ability to preserve the ‘substance’
that she aims to contain in her fiction (Woolf 1982, p. 57) (echoed also
in Cunningham’s epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Other Tiger’) is
directly related to Woolf’s construction of the character of Mrs Dalloway
and her love of life.
246 M. JIMÉNEZ
Upon deciding that the better solution for her novel would be to
have Clarissa Dalloway not kill herself, Cunningham’s Woolf resolves that
‘Someone else will die. It should be a greater mind than Clarissa’s; it
should be someone with sorrows and genius enough to turn away from
the seductions of the world, its cups and its coats’ (1998, p. 154). The
writer sees it clearly: ‘Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will
not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London… Clarissa,
sane Clarissa—exultant, ordinary Clarissa—will go on, loving London,
loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged
poet, a visionary, will be the one to die’ (p. 211). This is, in fact, the
dichotomy with which Woolf (1982) seems to have actually ventured
into the writing of what would become Mrs Dalloway: ‘I adumbrate
here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the
insane side by side—something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good
name?’ (p. 51). In other words, there seems to be a conceptualisation of
‘world’, of reality that, in accordance with Brian McHale’s (1987) study
of modernist and postmodernist fiction, is clearly concerned with ‘such
epistemological themes as the accessibility and circulation of knowledge,
the different structuring imposed on the “same” knowledge by different
minds, and the problem of “unknowability” or the limits of knowledge’
(McHale 1987, p. 9). The world remains stable, and Woolf seems to
wonder: ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what
am I in it?’ (Higgins, quoted in McHale 1987, p. 9).
This aesthetic reflection lies at the core of the transposition that
Cunningham makes in The Hours, and he even signals the prominence of
world in his rendering of Mrs Dalloway. In Woolf’s novel, ‘[people] love
life’ reflects the protagonist. ‘In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and
trudge; … in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of
some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment
in June’ (Woolf 2004, p. 2). These paradigmatic words at the beginning
of Mrs Dalloway illustrate why Woolf’s novel is generally read as a book
‘about the inextinguishable beauty of life itself’ (Cunningham 2019).
Yet, Cunningham’s approximate equivalent of this fragment in The Hours
signals a subtly different angle of the love of life. Walking on the streets
of Greenwich Village, Clarissa Vaughan ‘simply enjoys without reason the
houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It’s childish, she knows… Still,
this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the
world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world
has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but
is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself ’ (Cunningham 1998, p. 12;
emphasis added). Cunningham’s Clarissa seems to love ‘the things’ of
life because they suggest something that is not really there, thus drawing
attention more to the significant material dimensions of the world than
to the meaningful potentiality of life. The change therefore exemplifies
the shift identified by McHale (1987) from a modernist epistemolog-
ical dominant to postmodern ontological concerns. Moreover, linking
the ‘postmodernist questions [that] bear either on the ontology of the
literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects’
(McHale 1987, p. 10) with how Cunningham dramatises worlding in
relation to the construction of Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown, his
American characters, directly comments on the national frame in which
such a characterisation occurs.
Like ‘reality’, the notion of ‘world’ requires clarification. Martin
Heidegger (2002) understands it in relation to its being constituted by
and through a work: ‘To be a work means: to set up a world’ (p. 22).
Yet, he also states that:
World is not a mere collection of the things… that are present at hand.
Neither is world a merely imaginary framework added by our represen-
tation to the sum of things that are present. World worlds, and is more
fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things in the midst
of which we take ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that
stands before us and can be looked at. World is that always-nonobjectual
to which we are subjects as long as the paths of birth and death… keep us
transported into being. (p. 23)
Heidegger’s definition of ‘world’ can account for the relationship that

Clarissa Vaughan establishes with the objects that surround her: she
understands the worlding they entail inasmuch as her own identity is
dependent on how she regards this interaction between herself and these
objects. ‘Worlding’ then becomes not so much the process through which
the work constructs a world, as the means by which the objects in that
world determine a person’s reality—a concept that, once again, remains
anchored to the subjective perception of the tangible. As Heidegger
comments, ‘The stone is world-less. Similarly, plants and animals have no
world; they belong, rather, to the hidden throng of an environment into
which they have been put. The peasant woman, by contrast, possesses
a world, since she stays in the openness of beings’ (Heidegger 2002,
248 M. JIMÉNEZ
p. 23). Nonetheless, considering that in the postmodern context the limits

between art and life, language and metalanguage, and fiction and criticism
are subject to philosophical inquiry (Broad 2009, p. 79), the conscious-
nesses of Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown also constitute focal points that
set up worlds in The Hours . Rather than addressing how Cunningham
worlds his characters, though, now I simply want to show that the novel
presents this worlding as a key motif that enables the critical reading of US
postmodern society while outlining what I consider a fundamental artistic
aspect of twenty-first-century art and literature—the artificial rendering of
reality. In fact, since in Cunningham’s novel Hollywood and everything
surrounding it take the place of what in Mrs Dalloway stands for the
structuring forces of the British Empire and national identity, as I previ-
ously suggested, it becomes evident that The Hours advances a critical
view that very much vouches for the ‘unreality’ of America—something
that Woolf had already regarded sceptically in her 1925 essay ‘American
Fiction’ (Woolf 1947, pp. 103–4).
As it is, the notion of worlding is particularly prominent in relation to
the characters of Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown—one as the fiction-
alised writer and the other as a fictional reader of Mrs Dalloway. Apart
from the already discussed rendering of Woolf’s aesthetic preoccupations
regarding a modernist understanding of the world in The Hours , it is
important to note that her reflection on that greater mind that resists the
seductions of the world, Septimus Warren Smith, is implicitly related to
her own suicide in 1941. After all, The Hours begins with Woolf’s last
moments ‘of true perception’ (Cunningham 1998, p. 5) before she walks
into the current that eventually lays ‘Virginia’s body at the river’s bottom,
as if she is dreaming of the surface… on a day early in the Second World
War’ (p. 8). Moreover, Woolf’s conviction that ‘she can survive, she can
prosper, if she has London around her; if she disappears for a while into
the enormity of it’ (pp. 167–68), explicitly links Cunningham’s character
to Woolf’s own Mrs Dalloway. In a way, then, Cunningham seems to
suggest that it is the double bind of Woolf’s artistic and ordinary gazes
that define so much of how she treats the world in her fiction: ‘She is
better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not travel impetu-
ously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this
way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses. Better, really, to face the fin in
the water than to live in hiding, as if the war were still on’ (p. 169).
These views are particularly relevant for Laura Brown’s reading of Mrs
Dalloway, which Cunningham presents, to a certain extent, as a reflection
of what reading fiction implies. Laura, in fact, ‘is trying to lose herself.
No, that’s not it exactly—she is trying to keep herself by gaining entry
into a parallel world’ (Cunningham 1998, p. 37) by reading Woolf’s
novel in a suburb in Los Angeles in 1949. For starters, the conception
of parallel worlds, metaphorical as it might be, insists on the promi-
nence of worlding not only as a process of interpretation, but also, due
to the metafictional aspect of The Hours, as a phenomenon of real-life
experience. Such a dimension of the concept (perhaps taking it back to
the more philosophical domain presented by Heidegger) can be identi-
fied early in Laura Brown’s day, for after reading the first page of Mrs
Dalloway—which Cunningham transcribes at length, emulating Laura’s
reading experience—her mind stops to reflect: ‘She inhales deeply. It is
so beautiful; it is so much more than… well, than almost anything, really.
In another world, she might have spent her whole life reading. But this is
the new world, the rescued world—there’s not much room for idleness.
So much has been risked and lost; so many have died’ (p. 39). In just
a few lines, Cunningham presents Laura as a character fully aware of the
context and implications of what she has:
She and her husband and son are in a house in which no one but they
have ever lived. Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked,
where radio waves are full of music, were young men walk the streets again,
men who have known deprivation and a fear worse than death, who have
willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty and
beyond, haven’t any more time to spare. (p. 45)
Laura’s need to think about these qualities of her life is prompted by her
awareness that, although she seems unsatisfied, she has a role that she ‘has
consented to perform’ (p. 42). ‘Why did she marry [her husband]?’ she
wonders later that morning; ‘[s]he married him out of love. She married
him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism’ (p. 106).
The general comment on the American archetype of suburban life, closely
linked to the notion of a post-war American Dream, is somewhat clear.
Yet Cunningham’s insistence on presenting this setting, through Laura’s
consciousness, as a world artificially constructed cannot but underline
worlding itself:
Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of
us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or
250 M. JIMÉNEZ
paintings but a whole world—a world of order and harmony where chil-
dren are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond
imagination, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted
windows, to perfume, to plates and napkins. (p. 42)
Laura’s understanding of her role in this society, in a California where ‘It

is almost perfect… to be a young mother in a yellow kitchen touching
her thick, dark hair, pregnant with another child’ (p. 44), speaks of a
complex character who notices she has a ‘mother-self’ (p. 47), and yet
cannot come to terms with her being unhappy with the life she has,
even if she knows that life is beautiful. ‘She loves life, loves it hopelessly’
(p. 152), she reflects, and upon reading more about the development
of Mrs Dalloway’s day, that exaltation of ‘life; London; this moment of
June’, Laura wonders: ‘How… could someone who was able to write
a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a
sentence like that—come to kill herself?’ (p. 41). Ironically, later in The
Hours , this worry will bring about the realisation that ‘it is possible to
stop living’ (p. 152), which gives her comfort and a deeper understanding
of the writer: ‘She imagines Virginia Woolf, virginal, unbalanced, defeated
by the impossible demands of life and art’ (p. 152).
Laura’s reading then becomes a reading not only of Mrs Dalloway, but
also of the aesthetic, thematic and philosophical concerns that lie deep in
Woolf’s life and art. Illuminating as this interpretation of hers might be, it
also helps her to realise that she is all the more a victim of a time and place
that demand a specific role of her and that try to world her in a particular
way. Ultimately, when later in the novel we learn that Laura eventu-
ally tried to commit suicide, failed and then abandoned her family—and,
very tellingly, her nation—to become a librarian in Canada, The Hours
endorses an interpretation of Laura as a woman who, to achieve happi-
ness, has to commit symbolic suicide—to abandon the world that worlds
her: America, that most fantastic of places. Through Laura’s narrative
arc, Cunningham echoes Woolf’s understanding of America as a place
where ‘there is baseball instead of society; instead of the old landscape
which has moved men to emotion for endless summers and springs, a
new land, its tin cans, its prairies, its cornfields flung disorderly about like
a mosaic of incongruous pieces waiting order at the artist’s hands; while
the people are equally diversified into fragments of many nationalities’
(Woolf 1947, p. 104). Paradoxically, it is art that helps Laura to see just
how fragmented she is: the destabilisation of her world comes from the
pages in Mrs Dalloway. She ‘occupies a twilight zone of sorts; a world

composed of London in the twenties, of a turquoise hotel room, and of
this car, driving down this familiar street. She is herself and not herself.
She is a woman in London, an aristocrat, pale and charming, a little
false; she is Virginia Woolf; and she is this other, the inchoate, tumbling
thing known as herself, a mother, a driver, a swirling streak of pure life’
(Cunningham 1998, p. 187). Ultimately, her understanding of parallel,
alternative worlds, fuelled by Woolf’s take on reality, presents to Laura a
vision of post-war America as one ruled by ‘simulators [that] attempt to
make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation’
(Baudrillard 2010, p. 2). It is not that Mrs Dalloway’s London seems
more real to her, but rather that the overtly artificial constitution of her
American life lacks a real substance like the one through which Virginia
Woolf constructed her art.
The relationship between Jean Baudrillard’s explorations of post-
modern society and both Laura Brown’s suburban life—with its sprin-
klers, lawns and sun-gilded aluminium carports that are ‘unutterably
real’—and Clarissa Vaughan’s hegemonic reality of celebrity, film stars and
TV fictions, highlights the critical take on a nation that, after the Second
World War, took from England the position as the world’s largest power.
After all, that American nationalistic discourses are to a great extent prop-
agated via the global presence of Hollywood and, more generally, that of
American consumer and media culture does not seem to be that much
of a stretch when seen against Woolf’s parallel concerns regarding imperi-
alism. And yet, Woolf’s early comments on America and its ‘glorification
of machinery, this lust for “toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instanta-
neous hot water bottles… at first the signs, then the substitutes for joy
and passion and wisdom”’ (Woolf 1947, p. 99) apply as much to 1925 as
to 1998 and well into the twenty-first century.
What Cunningham adds by fictionalising the author and emphasising
the postmodern worlding not only of fiction, but also of the American
reality—epitomised by the figure of Hollywood and its international pres-
ence in the global imaginary of the digital era—is a problematisation of
fiction and fictionality as concepts that, through the reality of simulacra,
can world us. Framed by Laura Brown’s experience and illustrated by
the appropriation of the plot of Mrs Dalloway, The Hours constitutes a
work in which American identity is grounded in the artificial and pervasive
discourse of a world for the most part created by real and artistic fictions.
As David Foster Wallace (1997), another American writer, succinctly
252 M. JIMÉNEZ
suggests, ‘The real authority on a world we now view as constructed

and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view’
(p. 62). This, of course, could lead to either negative or positive effects,
even if in the 1990s the general take was rather pessimistic. ‘But what
can art do to counter this situation?’ Cunningham seems to ask. After all,
‘[t]here is no comfort… in the world of objects, and Clarissa [Vaughan]
thinks that art, even the greatest of it… belong[s] stubbornly to the world
of objects’ (Cunningham 1998, p. 22). Perhaps that is indeed the case,
but the fact that Mrs Dalloway and The Hours can be analysed on these
terms beyond the national borders of England and the US, partly thanks
to the success of the Hollywood adaptation (2002) of Cunningham’s
novel, could come as comfort enough.
Note
1. All translations of this source appearing in this chapter are my own.
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CHAPTER 15
Ethel Smyth as the Composer Edith Staines

in E. F. Benson’s Dodo Trilogy
Christopher Wiley
Contributing to the first published biography of the composer, author

and onetime leading suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth (1958–1944), the
writer Vita Sackville-West famously remarked that ‘She might concisely
have entitled her successive books Me One, Me Two, Me Three, and
so on, even as she called her sheepdogs Pan I, Pan II, Pan III, up
to Pan VI’ (1959, p. 246). Sackville-West’s words referred to Smyth’s
ten books of prose writings (autobiographies, biographical sketches and
polemical essays on the music profession and the status of women within
it) published in her later decades and, by implication, specifically to her
chronological volumes of memoirs, Impressions That Remained (1919),
As Time Went On… (1936a) and What Happened Next (1940), which
collectively chronicled Smyth’s first 50 years. Yet, while her extensive
prose writings have received significant scholarly attention, less frequently
considered are the various fictional representations of Smyth to have
appeared in a range of Anglo-American art over the decades, from novels
C. Wiley (B)
Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_15
256 C. WILEY
to plays to radio, television and YouTube videos, doubtless a product

of the fascinating and diverse life she led coupled to her distinctive and
highly entertaining personality.
Smyth was no stranger to such modes of literary adaptation even
in her own lifetime, appearing in novels first thinly disguised as the
female composer Edith Staines in E. F. Benson’s Dodo (1893) and
its sequels Dodo’s Daughter (1913) and Dodo Wonders (1921), and
then as Rose Pargiter in Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), as well as
contributing to the character of Miss La Trobe in Woolf’s Between the
Acts (1941) (Wood 1983, pp. 137–38). She might, indeed, on occasion
have employed analogous strategies in her own creative output: Eliza-
beth Wood (1995, pp. 614–15, 628) has proposed that she modelled the
feisty heroine of her fourth opera, The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–1914),
on none other than Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), the charismatic
leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union under whose influence
Smyth, who was to become Pankhurst’s close friend and ally, pledged
two years’ service to the ‘Votes for Women’ campaign in the early 1910s
(Wiley 2018a). Neither did Smyth’s long-standing friend Henry Brewster
(1850–1908), the librettist for her first three operas, escape being simi-
larly immortalised, as the villainous Gilbert Osmond in Henry James’s
novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (Stallman 1958).
Subsequently, the female composer Hilda Tablet, who featured in a
series of seven satirical radio plays by Henry Reed broadcast on the
BBC’s Third Programme between 1953 and 1959, was a composite char-
acter based principally on a combination of Smyth and Elisabeth Lutyens
(1906–1983); four of the scripts were later published (Reed 1971). Smyth
was not herself one of the central figures of the pioneering six-part
BBC television mini-series Shoulder to Shoulder (1974) on the women’s
suffrage movement in Britain, episodes of which focused on suffragettes
including the Pankhursts‚ Annie Kenney and Lady Constance Lytton; but
she nonetheless made an appearance in three of the episodes, played by
Maureen Pryor, and the show’s title is a phrase also used in Cicely Hamil-
ton’s lyrics to Smyth’s suffragette anthem, ‘The March of the Women’
(1910) (IMDb, n.d.).
Closer to the present, Smyth appears as a character in the opera
Violet by Roger Scruton, premiered at the Guildhall School of Music and
Drama, London, in 2005 under Tess Gibbs’s direction, and based on the
1996 biography of keyboardist Violet Gordon Woodhouse written by her
great-niece Jessica Douglas-Home; the role of Smyth is played by a male
15 ETHEL SMYTH AS THE COMPOSER EDITH STAINES … 257
voice (accounts indicate that she had an extraordinary vocal range), and
the score quotes from ‘The March of the Women’ (Scruton, n.d.; Conway
2005). Smyth has also been the subject of an assortment of smaller-
scale theatricalised shows that have between them established a tradition
of dramatisations of the real-life person, as distinct from the presenta-
tion of larger-than-life caricatures. These include Welcome! Company’s
Ethel Smyth: A Passionate Life (1995), written by Venetia Davan Wetton
and performed by actresses Jean Trend (who had previously played
Smyth in the 1981 BBC radio play Only Goodnight by Maureen Duffy)
and Moira Govan, pianist Janet Haney and soprano Talitha Theobald;
Entirely Ethel, written and performed by North England-based actress
Jean Stevens; Essentially Ethel, another one-woman show, written in 2004
and performed across England ever since by actress Gill Stoker; and
Ethel Smyth—An Extraordinary Life (2017) by the Galos Piano Trio,
Felicity Broome-Skelton (violin), Heidi Parsons (cello) and James Long-
ford (piano), featuring soprano and actor Sarah Gabriel (Galos, n.d.).
Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle (2018–2019) is a nationally touring profes-
sional solo production for actor-singer Lucy Stevens (no relation to Jean
Stevens of Entirely Ethel ) accompanied by Elizabeth Marcus at the piano,
characterised by having been compiled almost exclusively from excerpts
from Smyth’s writings, together with quotations from contemporaries
who knew her. Woking Community Play Association, a non-auditioning
group that seeks to retell stories of people associated with the town of
Woking, where Smyth lived for over three decades, has recently written
and performed a play about her life, Ethel Smyth: A Furious Longing —The
Story of Woking’s Composer (2018) (Wiley 2018b).
While some of the aforementioned have enjoyed a transnational reach
(the novels of Virginia Woolf—and, as we shall see, E. F. Benson—having
particular mobility given their distribution in different countries), lately a
number of works of art originating in North America have demonstrated
the attainment of new levels of transnationality for fictional represen-
tations of Smyth in terms of the countries represented. Smyth is, of
course, herself a transnational character, being a British composer who
trained in Continental Europe (while not itself unusual at the time) and
whose mother had been brought up in Paris. Recent projects to have
appeared internationally include Red Hen Productions’s play PASSION:
The Life and Loves of Dame Ethel Smyth (2017), written by Muriel
Hogue and performed in Winnipeg, Canada, featuring a seven-strong
cast, directed by Kelly Daniels (Classic 107 2017); and Ethel Smyth
258 C. WILEY
Plays Golf in Limbo (2016), a ten-minute musical monodrama written

by Brooklyn-based composer-librettist Rachel J. Peters for the Albatross
Duo, Jennifer Beattie (mezzo-soprano) and Adam Marks (piano), which
imagines the eponymous protagonist enjoying a game of golf in the after-
life while reflecting on the continuing plight of the female opera composer
(Albatross Duo 2016). Smyth did not herself appear as a character in
Sarah Gavron and Abi Morgan’s internationally acclaimed film Suffragette
(2015), but ‘The March of the Women’ is sung diegetically by a gathering
of female protestors to open the scene in which the public announcement
is made that women will continue not to be enfranchised.
While the chequered lineage of artistic representations of Ethel Smyth
has accumulated a rich and diverse body of works transnationally over
the decades, this chapter proposes to explore the earliest of this succes-
sion of literary portraits of the composer: the character of Edith Staines
in E. F. Benson’s Dodo and its two sequels. This was the only one upon
which Smyth commented in print (even though her close friendship with
Virginia Woolf was such that she surely knew of her appearance as Rose
Pargiter, if not also Miss La Trobe), and it has the distinction of having
evolved in tandem with her flourishing career as a composer and musi-
cian, which was essentially precluded after 1930 owing to the severity of
the hearing problems she was by then experiencing. Dodo is also espe-
cially significant for having brought public attention to the notion of a
woman composing large-scale musical works (even if it was not unique
among Victorian fiction in this respect), at a time when female composers
were more usually associated with smaller, desultory pieces suited to
the domestic environment such as pretty songs and piano airs. Dodo,
instantly and sensationally popular in its day, enjoyed a wide transna-
tional circulation in English-speaking communities; like its sequels, it was
published on both sides of the Atlantic. But its claim to transnationality
is increased by the distinctive publication history of its sequel, which, for
reasons unknown, appeared in the US as Dodo’s Daughter (Benson 1913)
one year in advance of its UK publication as Dodo the Second (Benson
1914), emblematic of the story’s popularity beyond British borders and
illustrative of its wide geographical reach. Both editions were evidently
intended to serve as the sequel to Dodo but, as was not uncommon
at the time when the same book was printed in England and the US,
the text was revised for the later publication. Dodo also appeared in an
authorised German translation by Emmy Becher in 1895. If Smyth’s auto-
biographical writings may as well have been titled ‘Me One, Me Two,
Me Three’, as Sackville-West suggested, then her appearances as Edith

Staines in Benson’s trilogy surely correspond to Smyth I, Smyth II and
Smyth III.
∗ ∗ ∗
An illuminating satire on late Victorian high society recounting the life

and loves of its protagonist, Dodo: A Detail of the Day was published in
1893 by Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940), son of the then Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, at the start of a literary
career that culminated in the Mapp and Lucia series of six novels for
which he is now best known. Smyth was well acquainted with Benson’s
family: her memoirs describe his mother, Mary Benson, as ‘the mainstay
of my life’ from 1886 onwards (1919, vol. 2, p. 188); through her, Smyth
came to know the rest of the family, enjoying particular friendship with
her daughter, Nelly, and remarking that ‘Of the Archbishop I stood in
deadlier awe than of anyone I ever met in the whole course of my life’
(p. 191). She notes that out of the seven members of the family, six were
authors (p. 192); A. C. Benson, one of the brothers, was to pen the
lyrics to Elgar’s patriotic anthem ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (1902). Of
E. F. Benson, Smyth writes that ‘I was always fond because he was such
a dear at home, not to speak of his intense funniness and proficiency in
games’ (p. 190). It is, however, difficult to believe that Smyth—a well-
educated, independent woman who habitually dressed in tweeds, and
whose domineering personality enabled her to push the boundaries of
a music profession that was then fiercely male-dominated—would have
wholeheartedly shared in the humour of having been caricatured in Dodo
as one of the characters that Benson had based on real-life individuals,
specifically, the eccentric composer and New Woman, Edith Staines.
The obvious similarity of their names alone offered a major clue as
to the identity of the person who provided the basis for Edith, one of
the novel’s secondary characters, who provides suitable counterpoint to,
and contrast with, its heroine. The earliest information with which the
reader is presented about the fictional composer concerns the epony-
mous socialite, Dorothea ‘Dodo’ Vane (herself based on Margot Tennant,
later Lady Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister), informing us that ‘She’s
writing a symphony or something, and she’s no use except at meal-times.
I expect she will play it [to] us afterwards’ (Benson 1893, p. 76). While
Smyth never actually composed a symphony—unless one includes her
260 C. WILEY
oratorio, The Prison (1929–1930), which is described as a symphony

on its title page—she certainly aspired to write large-scale orchestral
works, a lofty ambition for a woman composer in late nineteenth-century
Europe and hence a highly distinctive topic for popular fiction in its
day. Smyth also customarily played (and sang) at the piano by way of
interesting potential patrons in her music, and one can imagine her
offering postprandial performances in a domestic setting, even—as is
suggested here—realising her orchestral works at the keyboard. This
episode witnesses the first of several of Edith’s performances of her own
compositions, which include the scherzo of the piece she whimsically
names the ‘Dodo’ Symphony, upon which she had been working while
staying with the titular protagonist.
The portrait of Smyth as composer comes into sharper focus upon
mention of another of Edith Staines’s works, a Mass, first in passing
(Benson 1893, p. 88) and later in connection with a domestic perfor-
mance in lieu of a church service (pp. 114–17). 1893, the year of
publication of Benson’s Dodo, was also the year in which Smyth’s Mass
in D (1891) was published, having received its first performance on
18 January of that year at the Royal Albert Hall—the same venue,
incidentally, at which Edith’s ‘Dodo’ Symphony was performed in the
novel (p. 136). Dodo tells Edith that ‘You sit down and write a Sanctus,
which makes one feel as if one wants to be a Roman Catholic archbishop’
(p. 93), a statement that at first glance seems to allude to Benson’s father,
but may also refer to the dedicatee of Smyth’s Mass, Pauline Trevelyan,
the devout Catholic under whose influence Smyth had sought to recon-
nect with her own faith; Edith even states (p. 113) that she ‘nearly’
became a Catholic. Subsequently (p. 114), we learn that Edith’s work is
a ‘Mass in G flat’, the musical joke being that G flat major, with six flats,
would be a thoroughly awkward key for many instruments and hence
impractical for a piece of this scope, suggesting that the reader is not
to take Edith—and, by extension, Smyth—too seriously as a composer.
Later, we witness Dodo entering the drawing-room as Edith is playing an
overture to a ‘nearly completed’ opera (p. 133), foreshadowing Smyth’s
own six operas, the first of which, Fantasio (1892–1894), she would
have been writing at the time that Dodo was published.
When we first meet Edith Staines in the novel, as a guest of Dodo’s,
she has emerged from the drawing-room, where she has been composing
at the piano, and complains of only having been given two poached
eggs (and no grilled bone, let alone a brandy and soda) for breakfast.
She habitually smokes cigarettes while composing ‘to keep the inspira-
tion going’ (Benson 1893, p. 90), not a practice that one particularly
associates with Smyth—even if her autobiographies incorporate multiple
references to her having smoked—so much as a detail introduced by
Benson to highlight her eccentricity (one may read her later participa-
tion in a shooting-party in the same light, since Smyth’s memoirs relate
that she was not a good shot). We are told that ‘Edith Staines talked in a
loud, determined voice’ (p. 86), a depiction consonant with Smyth’s own
unwavering resolve to succeed in a profession unfavourable to women but
also with her tendency to speak loudly, exacerbated by the hearing prob-
lems she suffered in later life that had plagued her intermittently as early
as 1891 (Wood 2009, p. 34). Dodo herself reinforces this characterisation
immediately following their conversation, remarking that ‘Edith really is
splendid. She is so dreadfully sure of herself, and she tells you so. And
she does talk so loud—it goes right through your head like a chirping
canary’ (Benson 1893, p. 88). Such descriptions were surely intended
to present an unflattering portrait of Smyth; some years later, Virginia
Woolf was to compare talking with her to ‘being a snail and having your
brain cracked by a thrush—hammer, hammer, hammer’ (Nicolson and
Trautmann 1975–1980, vol. 5, p. 160). Later, in the novel, we learn that
Edith, like Smyth, had a certain predilection to dominate the conversa-
tion (Benson 1893, p. 103), and that she talked ‘at the top of her voice’
(p. 108); Dodo subsequently reiterates that she is ‘rather loud’ (p. 226).
When Dodo looks into the drawing-room, she finds Edith ‘completely
absorbed in her work’ (p. 91), and it is no stretch to imagine that one
might have regularly found the industrious Smyth similarly captivated by
the act of composition. Even during an evening at the opera, Edith sits
in one of the boxes (p. 190), annotating a full score so that she can take
up specific points with the conductor following the performance.
Like Ethel Smyth at the time (she was not awarded the first of her
honorary doctorates until 1910), the fictional composer is referred to by
the title ‘Miss Edith Staines’. Dodo reports that ‘if anyone ever proposed
to [Edith], whom she cared to marry, she will feel it only fair to tell him
that the utmost she can offer him, is to play second fiddle to her music’
(Benson 1893, p. 133). While in the two sequels to Dodo, to be discussed
presently, Edith is indeed married, the view expressed here echoes Smyth’s
own, articulated in her memoirs, that ‘My work must, and would always,
be the first consideration’; she asked, ‘Where should be found the man
262 C. WILEY
whose existence could blend with mine without loss of quality on either
side?’ (1919, vol. 2, p. 5).
Several other details in the novel participate in the characterisation of
Edith as Smyth. Echoing the transnationality of the person on whom she
was based, we are told that Edith has secured a German conductor, Herr
Truffen, for her symphony (Benson 1893, p. 87), hinting at the musical
training that Smyth had undertaken in Germany from 1877, firstly at the
Leipzig Conservatorium and then privately under the pedagogue Hein-
rich von Herzogenberg, as well as the extensive contacts she had made
during over a decade spent on the Continent, which led to her first three
operas being premiered in German theatres. Apart from the transnational,
Edith also played a good game of lawn tennis (p. 308), a sport in which
Smyth enthusiastically participated, and through which she came to the
attention of Durham University, which was to confer upon her the first of
her honorary doctorates (Smyth 1928, p. 39). Finally, the appearance of
‘two large collies’ (Benson 1893, p. 393) belonging to Edith is surely an
oblique allusion to Marco, Smyth’s dog at the time, a St Bernard cross she
had acquired in 1887 as the first of a succession of dogs she was to keep
for the remainder of her life. These pets were themselves to reach their
literary apogee with Smyth’s Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog
Lovers (1936b), a collected biography of some of her canine companions.
∗ ∗ ∗
Benson’s 1913 sequel, Dodo’s Daughter, is significant to the portrayal

of Smyth as Edith Staines not just because it reached American reading
publics in advance of their British counterparts, as noted, but also because
Smyth had enjoyed substantial success in the field of composition in the
intervening period. However, while Smyth had secured performances in
America by this time—including a landmark production of her second
opera, Der Wald (1899–1901), as The Forest at The Metropolitan Opera,
New York City in 1903 (the first and, for over a century, the only instance
of a work by a woman composer being presented at that venue)—and she
had also made international headlines for her suffragette activity (Anon.
1912), it is less likely that American readers would have been familiar with
her.
Only once in Dodo’s Daughter is Edith Staines referred to as such (i.e.
in the way in which the character’s similarity to Smyth would have been
readily apparent from her name), and it is in the context most recog-
nisable as having been based on Smyth, as well as the first mention of
Edith in the book. Bertie, Edith’s son, tells us that ‘my mother wrote
the “Dod[o] Symphony” for instance. She’s something; she was Edith
Staines, and when she has her songs sung at the Queen’s Hall, she
goes and conducts them’ (Benson 1913, p. 22). By 1913, Smyth—who
often conducted her works in public—had herself secured performances
at Queen’s Hall (a prestigious London concert venue and home to The
Proms at the time), including a concert of her music that took place under
her baton on 1 April 1911 at which several of her songs were performed
(Anon. 1911, p. 321), suggesting that Benson had continued to follow
Smyth’s career since the days of Dodo. Later in the novel, Edith conducts
her own quartet (Benson 1913, p. 86), another allusion to Smyth, whose
String Quartet in E minor, begun in 1901 but abandoned for over a
decade following composition of the first two movements, was completed
by 1913 and premiered in full on 23 May of that year; we also learn that
Edith, like Smyth, has been made a ‘music-doctor’ (p. 118).
In Dodo’s Daughter, Edith Staines has become Edith Arbuthnot, wife
and mother, a significant departure from the unmarried (and lesbian)
Smyth and one whose adherence to prevailing social conventions thereby
diminishes her eccentricity. In the time that has elapsed since the first
novel, Edith has also—in characteristic fashion—‘loudly proclaimed that
she could never be friends with Dodo again’ (Benson 1913, p. 40),
although they are quick to reconcile. One can easily imagine Smyth simi-
larly making clear exactly where she stood in relation to those with whom
she was acquainted, and sadly, she endured major fallings-out with some
of her closest friends, most notably Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, the
musically talented wife of her composition tutor with whom she lodged
during her period of study in Germany, about which she wrote at length
in her memoirs.
Smyth’s Teutonic training is itself hinted in Dodo’s Daughter: the violist
and cellist who perform her quartet are identified, somewhat negatively,
as ‘young and guttural Germans’ (Benson 1913, p. 85), with whom
Edith speaks in their native language, much as Smyth had acquired a
working knowledge of German from her extensive time abroad. Other
of Edith’s works mentioned in the novel include the music she had
composed for Dodo’s (third) wedding, which she has also arranged to
be performed at Queen’s Hall as a ‘Marriage Suite’, and which includes
an anthem, a hymn and two psalm chants. Another of these pieces is
264 C. WILEY
a ‘rather Debussy-like wedding march’ (p. 118), which, while it has no

direct analogue in Smyth’s output, nonetheless reflects Smyth’s time spent
on the Continent as well as the contemporary French influences apparent
in some of her music, such as her third opera (her latest, by the time
of publication of Benson’s sequel), The Wreckers (1902–1904), originally
written to Henry Brewster’s French libretto as Les naufrageurs, or her
four Songs (1908), which set French texts for mezzo-soprano or bari-
tone and chamber ensemble. Edith’s music is labelled ‘highly original’
(p. 118) and ‘exceedingly up-to-date’ (p. 119), both of which would
have been fair descriptions of Smyth’s works, even if they fell short of
the modernist aesthetics of leading Continental composers in the first
decade or so of the twentieth century such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky
and Bartók. Benson also describes how ‘Edith proceeded straight up into
the seventh heaven of her own compositions, which, good or bad, were
perfection itself to their author’ (p. 310; the final clause is omitted from
the English edition), echoing what Virginia Woolf was to remark ironically
about Smyth in her diaries some years later: ‘As she conducts, she hears
music like Beethoven’s’ (Bell and McNeillie 1977–1984, vol. 4, p. 10).
It is difficult to envisage Smyth sharing in Edith’s idealised and unre-
alistic view that ‘everyone who aspired to the name of Musician […]
should be able to play every instrument in the band’ (Benson 1913,
p. 149)—for much of the book, Edith is learning the double bass (not
an instrument one associates with Smyth)—but Smyth’s orchestrations,
with their highly imaginative use of colour, demonstrate that she had a
secure understanding of the constituent instruments nonetheless.
Where Dodo had introduced Edith as a tennis player, the sequel refers
to golf (Benson 1913, pp. 255, 319, 369), highlighting her Englishness
with reference to another sport about which Smyth was also passionate,
and to which she had particularly turned at this time (St John 1959,
p. 116); she held, indeed, that her pursuit of golf had been indirectly
responsible for her receiving her Damehood in 1922 (Smyth 1928,
pp. 39–40). Other details of her characterisation are consistent across the
two novels: Edith continues habitually to talk ‘at the top of her voice’
(Benson 1913, p. 149); likewise, following a performance of her quartet,
we find that ‘Edith was lecturing about the music they had just heard’
(p. 86), making herself the subject of conversation in much the same way
that, as Sackville-West noted, her prose writings are all about her. We are
also told that ‘Edith did not generally use long words, but chose them
carefully when she indulged in polysyllables’ (p. 36). While in 1913 Smyth
had yet to publish the first of her ten books, in which she writes fluently
and learnedly (even if her prose can sometimes be quite bruising), with
an elastic vocabulary, one can imagine that she had nonetheless already
cultivated the art of selecting her words judiciously.
The last in the trilogy, Dodo Wonders (1921), was published just
eight years after the second; Dodo is now a grandmother in her mid-
fifties. More importantly, these two publications fell on either side of
the First World War, which had major implications for Smyth given her
Continental contacts; for example, two of her operas were to have been
produced at German theatres in 1915. At the outset of the final novel (set
during the war), Dodo is talking to Edith, who had ‘just returned from
a musical tour in Germany, where she had conducted a dozen concerts
consisting entirely of her own music with flaring success’ (Benson 1921,
p. 7), discovering, by her own report, that ‘They hated me and my
music, and everything about me, because I was English’ (p. 9), the first
indication of any such opposition received from abroad. Whereas Smyth
continued to secure concerts in Germany in the interwar period, she
never quite regained the foothold in Continental Europe that she had
enjoyed prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and it is highly probable that
she would have encountered some strong anti-English sentiment while
working over there. We are specifically told that Edith’s concert tour of
Germany had taken her to Leipzig (p. 9) and Berlin (p. 18), the cities
in which Smyth’s operas The Wreckers (as Strandrecht ) and Der Wald,
respectively, had been premiered.
In Dodo Wonders , Edith continues to be strong and steadfast in her
views; for instance, we are told that her ‘honesty about music was quite
incorruptible’ (Benson 1921, p. 46), a detail that one can easily envisage
being true of the highly opinionated Smyth as well. She persists in
‘thump[ing] out’ tunes at the piano in her characteristically loud manner
(p. 78), a habit that Smyth’s own hearing problems, which substantially
worsened in the late 1910s, would only have intensified. Edith has also
kept up her passion for golf (pp. 124, 217, 286), playing at the Mid-
Surrey links, a further allusion to Smyth‚ who had lived in the county of
Surrey in South-East England for the majority of her life (Wiley 2018a),
and who moved to Woking, taking up residence in a house she had built
for her adjacent to the Golf Club, in 1910; at her request and in recogni-
tion of her love for the sport, following her death, her ashes were scattered
in the woodland in its vicinity.
266 C. WILEY
While there are fewer references to Edith’s musical endeavours in Dodo

Wonders than its two predecessors, at one point in the novel we learn that
since Dodo had not attended the performance of Edith’s Mass at St Paul’s
Cathedral, presumably the same Mass as mentioned in the original Dodo,
Edith ‘consoled her after dinner by playing the greater part of it on the
piano, singing solo passages in a rich hoarse voice that ranged from treble
to baritone […] When no solo was going on she imitated the sounds of
violin and bassoon and ’cello with great fidelity’ (Benson 1921, p. 124).
This description resonates unmistakeably with Smyth, whose custom was
to sing any and all vocal parts at such gatherings, and who, in a well-
known anecdote, once performed the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Benedictus’ from
her Mass in D for Queen Victoria and her entourage, ‘singing the chorus
as well as the solo parts, and trumpeting forth orchestral effects’ as best
she could (Smyth 1921, p. 100). The allusion also curiously anticipates
subsequent history, since Smyth’s Mass, long neglected following its 1893
premiere (even if obliquely immortalised in the pages of Dodo), was redis-
covered and given a second performance in revised form on 7 February
1924, following what Smyth described as ‘thirty-one years of suspended
animation’ (1936a, p. 173). At least, it would appear, on the evidence of
Dodo Wonders , that the work had not been entirely forgotten.
∗ ∗ ∗
Smyth’s first biographer, Christopher St John, remarks that Dodo had

already appeared in a dozen editions in the year following its original
publication (1893), concluding that ‘Its popularity must have been due
to the widely circulated on dit that Mr Benson’s characters were far from
being wholly fictitious; he had drawn them from celebrities in the fashion-
able world’ (1959, p. 62). While St John believed that Smyth would have
been ‘rather flattered at finding herself included among the social celebri-
ties parodied in Dodo’ (p. 63), and more recently, the actress Prunella
Scales has noted that the portrait was ‘gleefully acknowledged by the
subject’ (1986, p. vii), it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that
she might at the same time have been slighted by the caricature. Smyth
had little to say about the novel in her own writings, other than that
‘I found myself permanently installed there as […] a young lady who
ate eggs and bacon on the lid of her piano while composing;—no mean
feat, by the by’ (1936a, p. 204). Her memoirs recount the story of how
the Bensons, fearing that she had been offended by the parody, invited
her to dine with them (pp. 205–6); but that the reality was that she
considered Edith Staines to be ‘the one decent character in the book’
(p. 206). This view is consonant with modern evaluations of Benson’s
fictional composer: Sophie Fuller, for instance, also finds Edith to be ‘one
of the most rounded and compelling characters in the novel […] even if
she is too ridiculous to be regarded as a great composer’ (2004, pp. 48,
49). Dodo and its sequels, therefore, present a portrait of Smyth that is
simultaneously satirising and admiring.
Smyth, who recognised that late nineteenth-century Britain was not
the place from which to launch an international career in music compo-
sition and hence sought training in Germany, and who enjoyed success
in her lifetime in Continental Europe and America as well as in England,
already constitutes a transnational subject; Dodo and its two sequels, as
novels published in both the UK and the US (with no consistent pattern
as to which country was the first in which the book appeared)‚ likewise
represent iterations of transnational writing. What is particularly telling
in this respect is that the real-life individuals upon whom E. F. Benson
based the characters of his novels essentially took the form of semi-public
in-jokes; for example, in writing of the reaction of her close friend Lady
Mary Ponsonby (the wife of Queen Victoria’s private secretary, to whose
memory Impressions That Remained is dedicated), Smyth observed that
‘Most of the people who composed “Dodo’s” set were, in real life, either
related to [the] Ponsonbys or younger members of families they had
consorted with since time was’ (1936a, p. 204).
In placing them before national and international audiences, and (even
more so) in publishing in the US in advance of the UK, both coun-
tries in which they were evidently popular, Benson heightened not just
the transnationality of his novels, but also that of the people on which
the characters were based. For Ethel Smyth, this inaugurated something
of a fascinating tradition of fictional representations that, as we have
seen, has continued up to the present, even if Dodo itself has had little
direct impact on the later artistic portraits. But for Edith Staines, this
meant that communities of readers in England and (especially) beyond
were finding out about the fictional composer without necessarily being
acquainted with the person on whom she is—notwithstanding piecemeal
details such as Edith’s having a family of her own in the sequels—for
the most part quite faithfully based. Thus, Smyth, through her literary
surrogate, was placed before new reading audiences unfamiliar with the
268 C. WILEY
composer herself—and crucially, given the social context of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, those likely also unfamiliar with the
very notion of a woman composing large-scale pieces such as symphonies
and Masses. Smyth once reflected that her own prose writings had led
to ‘a certain curiosity as to the author’s music’ (1933, p. 37), generating
interest in her works among readerships who were previously unaware
of her compositional activity. At the same time, we should acknowledge
the role of Benson’s texts in bringing a fictionalised version of Smyth—
as well as the phenomenon of the female composer of large-scale works
itself, all but unknown in the days of Dodo—to widespread attention
transnationally.
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May 1911): 321.
Anon. 1912. ‘Suffragist Leader Accused of Arson: Dr. Ethel Smyth, the Well-
Known Composer, Arrested at Her Home in England’. The New York Times,
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Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, eds. 1977–1984. The Diary of Virginia
Woolf , 5 vols. London: Hogarth.
Benson, E. F. 1893. Dodo: A Detail of the Day, 2 vols. London: Methuen.
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Index
A Ballantine, Christopher, 84, 85

Abstraction, 43, 46, 53–56, 62 Bardach, Emilie, 153, 154
Achebe, Chinua, 196 Barthes, Roland, 6
Afinogenov, Alexander, 169 Bassnett, Susan, 95
Afterlife, 16, 17, 93, 95–99, 101, Becker, Paula Modersohn, 19,
103, 127, 128, 137, 139–141, 205–215
258
Beets, Nicolaas, 7
America, 21, 48, 49, 52, 56, 141,
Behr, Shulamith, 45, 48, 49, 52
185, 192, 239, 242, 243, 248,
250, 251, 262, 267 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 96
Amsterdam, 19, 222, 223, 227, 228 Benson, E.F., 20, 255–259, 267
Apartheid, 79, 82, 84 Dodo, 20, 256, 258–260, 266, 267
Arbuthnot, Edith. See Staines, Edith Dodo’s Daughter, 20, 256, 258,
Archer, William, 150, 152 262, 263
Australia, 63, 138, 142 Dodo Wonders , 20, 256, 265, 266
Autobiografiction, 226 Biofiction, 1, 3–6, 9, 12, 19, 21, 203,
Autofiction, 4, 203 204, 215
Avant-garde, 8, 45, 48, 57, 67, 68, Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 18, 150, 151,
72, 205, 214, 215, 221, 239 158–160
Blaue Reiter, Der, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53
B Bloomsbury Group, 28, 33, 64
Baldwin, James, 18, 19, 183–188, Boswell, James, 13, 33
190–197 Brandes, Georg, 153, 156
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 271
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1
272 INDEX
Breitner, George Hendrik, 19, 222, ‘Die Stem van Suid Afrika’, 84
225, 227–230, 232, 233 Digital era, 17, 127, 140–142, 251
British Empire, 85, 243, 248 Digitisation, 109
Bródy, Sándor, 131, 133, 135, 138 Dnieper, 167, 174
Brown, William, 94, 100, 101 Dunedin, 61, 63
Budapest, 128, 130–132, 134, 135,
138
E
Byron, Lord, 7, 39
Eddy, Mary, 139
Eichner, Johannes, 14, 43–48, 51, 52,
C 55–57
Calcutta, 111, 114 Einstein, Albert, 230
Cameron, Julia Margaret, 16, 107 Ellison, Ralph, 184, 185
Campos, Juan, 96, 101 England, 13–16, 31, 32, 39, 52,
Carlyle, Thomas, 31, 32, 40 61–70, 72, 79, 80, 86, 94, 108,
Carroll, Lewis, 115, 118 109, 111–114, 117, 121, 150,
Ceylon. See Sri Lanka 152, 155, 251, 252, 257, 258,
Cézanne, Paul, 50, 205, 207, 210 267
Chirico, Giorgio de, 224 Englishness, 14, 33, 61, 63, 64, 67,
Chopin, Fryderyk, 18, 167, 172–177 69–72, 80, 102, 264
Christiania, 157, 160 Erdős, Renée, 17, 127, 128, 130–141
Cincinnati, 78, 81, 82 Exile, 8, 10, 83, 149, 190
Cinema. See Film Exofiction, 203, 204
Clarissa Dalloway, 240, 246 Expressionism, 205
Clarissa Vaughan, 20, 246, 247, 251
Colonialism, 16, 62, 63, 121 F
Cosmopolitanism, 111 Feminism, 240
Cossa, Francesco del, 1, 2, 12 Feminist theory, 56
Crompton, Richmal, 15, 16, 93–103 Film, 12, 20, 130, 188, 251, 258
Just William, 15, 16, 93–96, Florman, Lisa, 54, 57
99–103 France, 10, 13, 15, 18, 29, 32, 57,
Cunningham, Michael, 12, 20, 65, 70, 72, 108, 109, 111, 185,
240–252 187, 190, 197, 203, 205, 214
Hours, The, 12, 20, 241–244, 246, Freshwater, 107, 111, 113–115
248, 250 Freud, Sigmund, 46, 209
Fry, Roger, 64
Fülöp, Lajos, 131, 135, 136, 138
D
Darrieussecq, Marie, 19, 203–215
Vie de Paula M. Becker, 204, 206, G
211 Gauguin, Paul, 11, 205, 207, 210
Davis, Miles, 189, 191 Gender, 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, 44, 51, 116,
Death of the Author, 6 118, 120
INDEX 273
Germany, 10, 13, 14, 20, 39, 44, 45, Imperialism, 20, 83, 251
52–57, 175, 205, 207, 215, 262, Impressionism, 63
263, 265, 267 India, 16, 108, 111, 114, 121
Giacometti, Alberto, 19, 222, 229 Irpen, 174, 176, 177
Ginzburg, Carlo, 122, 225 Israel, 109, 137, 138, 140, 142
‘God Save The Queen’, 84, 85 Italy, 2, 8, 57, 131, 134, 141, 142,
Gorky, Maxim, 168 223, 224, 229
Gosse, Edmund, 11, 13, 17, 18, 35,
38, 39, 147–162
Father and Son, 17, 35, 147–149, J
151, 154–160 Jæger, Henrik, 152
Grigson, Geoffrey, 71, 72 James, Christopher, 10, 15, 78, 79,
81, 82, 85–87
Images from Africa, 81, 82
H Like A Rainbow You Shone Out , 79
Hanssen, Léon, 225, 226 Paradise Regained, 15, 81–86
Hegel, G.W.F., 54 Johnson, Samuel, 34
Heine, Heinrich, 10 Jull Costa, Margaret, 94
Hodgkins, Frances, 14, 15, 61–68,
71, 72
Green Valley, Carmarthenshire, 67, K
68 Kandinsky, Wassily, 14, 43–57
Ibiza Harbour, 65, 66 Kiev, 174, 176, 177
Hollywood, 12, 20, 243, 245, 248, King, Martin Luther, 195, 196
251, 252 Künstlergruppe Brücke, 48, 49
Holmes, Richard, 109, 110, 113, 114, Künstlerroman, 4
122, 225, 226
Footsteps , 225
Sidetracks , 225 L
Holroyd, Michael, 97 Lejeune, Philippe, 203
Hughes, Langston, 80, 194, 195, 241 London, 2, 20, 31, 63, 72, 73, 111,
Hungary, 13, 131, 134, 141, 142 115, 116, 138, 148, 149, 155,
Hutton, R.H., 149, 150 157, 161, 185, 241–243, 246,
248, 250, 251, 263
Los Angeles, 20, 243, 244, 249
I
Ibsen, Henrik, 11, 17, 18, 147–160
Digte, 150 M
Doll’s House, A, 159, 209 Malcolm X, 195, 196
Hedda Gabler, 155 Manchester, 65
Studies in the Literature of Northern Mandela, Nelson, 15, 82–85
Europe, 150, 151 Manrique, Diego, 100
Wild Duck, The, 17, 148, 154, 159 Marc, Franz, 45, 48
274 INDEX
Marías, Javier, 94 P
Marriott, Charles, 70, 72 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 256
Maurois, André, 27, 39 Paris, 18, 28, 29, 51, 53, 55, 62, 68,
Melbourne, 65, 73 72, 184, 187, 205, 207, 209,
Michon, Pierre, 204 210, 212, 215, 257
Migration, 10, 111 Pasternak, Boris, 18, 165, 170–173,
Milton, John, 15, 83 175
Doctor Zhivago, 18, 165–167,
Modernism, 61, 62, 64, 68–72, 239,
169–171, 174, 175, 177–179
240
Second Birth, 18, 173, 174, 176
Modersohn-Becker, Paula, 9, 204,
Paulsen, Johan, 153, 157, 162
205, 209, 211
Phillips, Caryl, 18, 183–192, 194,
Modersohn, Otto, 205
195, 197, 198
Monet, Claude, 53 The European Tribe, 18, 184, 188,
Mosely, Oswald, 40 189
Motherhood, 19, 51, 119, 204, 205, ‘The Price of the Ticket’, 188, 193
207, 210, 212, 215, 216 Photography, 16, 57, 111–113, 117,
Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty, 107 118, 223
Münter, Gabriele, 9, 14, 43–56 Pliny the Elder, 3
Plutarch, 8, 14, 31, 32, 151, 204
Parallel Lives , 8, 151, 204
Poitiers, Sidney, 193
N Poland, 174–176
Nash, Paul, 62, 67 Postcolonialism, 9
National anthem, 15, 84, 85 Proust, Marcel, 29, 97
Nemes Nagy, Ágnes, 129
Neo-Romanticism, 62
Nerli, Girolamo, 62 Q
Neuhaus, Heinrich, 18, 167, 174–177 Queen’s Hall, 20, 263
New Biography, The, 27, 28, 31, 39,
40, 103
R
New York, 20, 161, 187, 240, 241,
Reed, Henry, 256
243, 244
Rembrandt, 11, 65
New Zealand, 13, 14, 61–65, 71, 72 Rhodesia, 15, 78–80, 82, 85
Nicolson, Harold, 13, 27–39, 261 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 204, 206, 207,
Development of English Biography, 209, 210, 213, 215
The, 13, 27–29, 39 Requiem für eine Freundin, 212
Paul Verlaine, 28, 29 Rodin, Auguste, 6, 7, 210
Some People, 27–29, 35, 36 Romanticism, 3, 4, 9, 65, 109, 120,
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, 84, 85 225
Norway, 13, 150, 152, 155, 156, Royal Academy, 62, 68
158, 160–162 Russia, 13, 47, 53, 55, 173–175
INDEX 275
S Tomalin, Claire, 98
Sackville-West, Vita, 5, 28, 30, 255, Translation, 12, 93–97, 100–103,
259, 264 137, 141, 151, 157, 215, 258
Saint Paul de Vence, 18, 197 Travel, 8, 12, 49, 52, 79, 109, 111,
Sargent, John Singer, 155 136, 185, 222, 224, 248
Savater, Fernando, 101 Tunisia, 48, 57
Schippers, K., 19, 221–236
Don’t tell anyone, 19, 20, 222, 223,
225, 226, 230 U
Scruton, Roger, 256, 257 Union of Soviet Writers, 18, 165,
Seven and Five Society, The, 68 168, 169, 178
Shakespeare, William, 11, 155 UNISA, 86
Othello, 187 University of South Africa, 81, 82
Sherriff, Ben, 94, 95, 100–102
Sherriff, Margaret. See Jull Costa,
Margaret V
Smith, Ali, 1, 2, 11, 12 Van Gogh, Vincent, 5, 11, 204, 205,
How to be both, 1–3, 5 207, 210
Smyth, Ethel, 20, 21, 255–267 Vasari, Giorgio, 2, 3, 8, 204
Socialist Realism, 168, 172 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
South Africa, 13, 15, 77–79, 81, 82, Sculptors and Architects , 2, 204
84–87 Vasset, Philippe, 203, 216
Soviet Union, 178 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 66, 85
Spain, 13, 65, 93, 94, 97, 99–103
Sri Lanka, 16, 108, 109, 138, 142
Staines, Edith, 20, 256, 258–263, 267 W
Stampa, 19, 222, 224, 228–231, 235 Walton, Izaak, 32, 34, 37
Stevens, Lucy, 257 Westhoff, Clara, 206, 209, 210, 216
Stigter, Gerard. See Schippers, K. Wilhelmine Germany, 47, 51, 57
Stone, Irving, 5, 11 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 5, 9, 12, 20, 27,
Strachey, Lytton, 13, 27, 28, 33, 35, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 97,
36, 38, 39 99, 103, 104, 107, 110–112,
Queen Victoria, 36 116, 119, 129, 209, 239–246,
Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 116, 119 248–251, 257, 261, 264
Surrealism, 70, 71 Dalloway, Mrs , 20, 239–246,
248–252
Orlando, 5, 30
T Room of One’s Own, A, 209
Theophrastus, 14, 31, 32 World citizenship, 10, 149
Tolstoy, Lev, 167, 172, 173, 178, 209 Worlding, 242, 247–249, 251
276 INDEX
World War I, 14, 28, 51, 61, 64, 72, Wright, Richard, 184, 185
132, 241, 265
World War II, 28, 67, 132, 248, 251 Z
Worpswede, 205–210, 215 Zimbabwe, 15, 78, 79, 82

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING

SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Cover image: © The Lenbachhaus, ‘Gabriele Münter’ by Wassily Kandinsky Kallmünz,

1 Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures:

Part I (Re)Thinking Biography—Artists in Between

2 The Transnational Aspect in Harold Nicolson’s The

3 Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky:

4 Frances Hodgkins: A Twentieth-Century Modernist

5 ‘No Use Calling Yourself South African. South

Part II Writing the Lives of Transnational Artists

6 The Spanish Translations of Richmal Crompton’s Just

7 Alienation and Intimacy: Transnational Writing

8 A Hungarian Woman Writer’s Transnational Afterlife

Part III Artists on Transnational Artists

9 ‘Something Out of the Way’: Edmund Gosse’s

10 Chopin on the Dnieper: The Musician-Poet and Boris

11 ‘All the Nuances of His Predicament’: Caryl Phillips

12 Vie de Paula Modersohn-Becker by Marie Darrieussecq:

Part IV Fictional Representations of Artists’ Lives

13 ‘Don’t Tell Anyone’: K. Schippers’s Reflections

14 The Hours and the Nations: Virginia Woolf’s Life

15 Ethel Smyth as the Composer Edith Staines in

Sander Bax is associate professor in Literary Studies, Cultural History

feminist methodology, art sociology, and fictional and academic writing

Social Media in the Context of Contemporary Hungary. From September

Marc Röntsch is a musicologist, guitarist and bassist living in Cape

co-editor of volumes including Researching and Writing on Contempo-

Fig. 3.1 Gabriele Münter, ‘Stilleben mit Heiligem Georg’, 1911,

Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations

Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Artists’ Lives and the Return of the Author

of the notion of ‘genius’ and the changed appreciation for imagination,

(Desmond McCarthey, quoted in Parke 2002, p. 28). This illuminates

The resurgent popularity of artists’ biofictions runs parallel to the

The Turn to Transnationalism

of Belgium’s national painter; and the composer Dvořák was celebrated

This volume aims to advance research in this field in two directions.

to an (inter)national audience. It explores how authors construct their

by foreign influences, including elements of the European classical revival

periods spent in Continental Europe, particularly France, which exerted

which have been widely translated, and whose eponymous eleven-year-

half of Don’t Tell Anyone, Schippers’ use of fictional techniques become

Encyclopedia and in other foundational studies in the field, such as Smith

Kisters, Sandra. 2017. The Lure of the Biographical: On the Self-representation of

(Re)Thinking Biography—Artists in Between

The Transnational Aspect in Harold

Harold Nicolson is generally remembered for his career as a diplomat, and

© The Author(s) 2020 27

Nicolson was a fervent Francophile and had a deep-rooted knowledge

the 1920s and 1930s. He produced biography, theorised and interacted

a chronological study of the genre’s evolution, the main elements of

Nicolson perceives the nineteenth century in a similar way, his own

p. 40). Nicolson may be referring more specifically here to the memoirs of

Hence, the assets of British biography, according to Nicolson, are to be

Strachey’s Queen Victoria is also considered part of the English revo-

Nicolson describes Strachey’s Queen Victoria as being a significant feat

I have now traced the development of English biography […] I have