Geoffrey Grigson as BBC producer

LISTENING TO THE VISUAL ARTS

STEPHEN GAMES

Ashgate/Routledge Hardback, 400 pages 2015 9781409461951 RRP £120.00

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was the single most visible art historian in Britain after the Second World War, becoming a household name through his talks on BBC radio, inspiring interest in subjects the British had never thought hard about and encouraging interest in conservation. During the war, however, the BBC had not wanted him, in spite of his potential as a black propagandist; it took a poet— Pevsner’s neighbour—to change its mind.

READERS’ COMMENTS

Hugh Chignell: A thoughtful and perceptive contribution to the field which will be seized on by broadcasting historians. Stephen Games is a leading authority on the life and work of Nikolaus Pevsner and this immensely readable history is as fascinating as it is informative. Harriet Atkinson: This and [Games’s] volume of Pevsner’s broadcasts are important because they offer a fascinating insight into how Pevsner devel— oped his ideas and allow a glimpse into the culture of the nascent BBC, with all its flaws, prejudices and lumbering bureaucracy.

Geoffrey Grigson brought Pevsner into the BBC but thought he lacked a soul

Pevsner is said by his family to have been introduced to the BBC by the poet and publisher Geoffrey Grigson (1905-85). Grigson was Pevsner’s next-door neighbour in Wildwood Terrace, a short row of bleak Victorian brick houses, inaccessible by car, on the west side of the Hampstead Heath Extension in north London. Born in Cornwall and educated at Oxford, Grigson became acting literary editor of The Morning Post, founded New Verse and, just at the moment when Pevsner and his wife and children were moving into Wildwood Terrace in early 1936, started giving talks on a freelance basis on the BBC’s Western Region service.

According to R.M. Healey, Grigson is unlikely to have been taken on by the BBC had he not already been known as a seasoned reviewer. ‘A close friend of the then unfashionable Wyndham Lewis, whose genius he was never afraid to champion, he was also friendly with Herbert Read and Henry Moore, both of whom lived near him in Hampstead, and counted among his other friends figures as different as John Summerson, John Piper, Tom Hopkinson, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Hugh Gordon Porteous and W.H. Auden.’

Grigson’s poetry began to appear when he was nineteen, in 1924; after Oxford he started to review, writing assertive, challenging pieces for the Yorkshire Post that showed a love and knowledge of literature and the natural world, and considerable critical maturity. The emergence of a new, modern poetic culture in Britain was important to him and he responded powerfully to the publication (by Eliot at Faber) of Auden’s first collection in 1930. At the same time he was troubled by the ambiguities of modernism, which he said worked ‘like a mole in spring under the smooth beds of the garden’, and called himself as a socialist who, under the influence of Lewis, a former Fascist, had turned from ‘Toryism to dogmatic Toryism’.

As a critic, what mattered to Grigson was that his readers should feel the life that exists in writing, and that they should sensitise themselves to the difference between the excellent and the second-rate, a difference he feared that only he understood. For Grigson, reputations needed rebalancing; many of the biggest names he considered undeserving opportunists. He was perpetually angry about bad writing and its warm reception by those who should have known better, and he wanted to expose its recurring flaws: deafness to true rhythm, inapposite words, redundancy, lack of objectivity, failure to sublimate.

In addition to the written, Grigson cared about the visual. Apart from paying attention to what verse looked like on the page, he believed that poets should observe closely and describe accurately. He wrote about the appearance of rocks, seashells and flowers and criticised those who discounted reality. In a talk in 1939 he condemned Sir Joshua Reynolds for advising his pupils to look at their subjects through screwed-up eyes in order to achieve ‘the grand generalisation’ and in 1946 quoted approvingly a complaint about the theatricality of John Martin ‘who was never afraid to tackle the end of the world, the last day, the gulfs of hell or the plains of heaven [but] could not paint a great toe from nature.’

For the BBC in Bristol Grigson gave short, highly polished talks about the literature and natural history of his native West Country, which he and others (including Betjeman and Betjeman’s BBC producer James Pennethorne Hughes) saw as being threatened by the creeping cosmopolitanism of London. His mission, in addition to that of sensitisation, was to bring attention to any work, artist or idea that was unjustly overlooked or underrated, as he felt Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and his native Cornwall were.

Grigson’s first literary encounter with Pevsner was not auspicious. He had reviewed Pevsner’s 1937 study of design in manufacturing, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, for the leading literary magazine John O’London’s Weekly, and his third wife, Jane, remembers that her husband did not warm to it. Pevsner’s book depended on a particular view about ‘taste’, he wrote, and taste was a dangerous word that ‘drips with self-satisfaction, superiority and insult’. Grigson was also offended by Pevsner’s revelation that rickets, ‘bred mainly in slums’, was known as ‘the English disease’ in Germany (Grigson seems not to have felt equally offended by the British calling rubella ‘German measles’) and felt that Pevsner had slighted mainstream British art which Grigson—for once—now defended for its ‘easy and good-natured conservatism’.

Having put down his customary marker, Grigson was partly converted to Pevsner’s cause after getting to know him over the garden fence. His new wife Berta (Bertschy) Emma Kunert, an Austrian, had also become a close friend and confidante—perhaps the only close friend and confidante in England—of Pevsner’s wife Lola. ‘When the phoney war was on,’ Grigson wrote in his Recollections Mainly of Writers and Artists,

and the bombs were vaguely expected, I spent nights with the Pevsners—till the allclear sounded in their coal-hole under our common access pavement, garnished with rugs, and when at last two hard-faced Bow Street runners arrived in the early hours of the morning to take him off to his shortlived internment … I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could quickly think of, which was an elegant little edition, a new edition, of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Grigson felt, however, that Pevsner had no soul and no real love of art or literature, as Grigson did, and ended this memory of his parting gift with the sting

I doubt if he ever read them

—which Pevsner gave the lie to in one of his first letters from his internment camp: ‘Geoffrey’s sonnets helped over odd hours.’ Grigson also claimed to have sent Pevsner more care packages, though the extent of his saintliness is said to have been exaggerated.

Just before Pevsner was released in September 1940, the BBC offered Grigson a full-time job as a sub-editor at the BBC monitoring station at Wood Norton, just outside Evesham. The job ruled out any possibility of his reviewing and producing but gave him financial security and brought him into contact with other BBC monitors including Anna Kallin, who went on to produce his radio broadcasts later in the 1940s and Pevsner’s in the 1950s.

At the time Wood Norton was also being used to house the BBC’s Features and Drama departments, both of which had been moved out of London when the war started. Of Drama’s arrival, Gilbert Harding wrote ‘The town was inundated with young persons of either or doubtful sex carrying Siamese cats [a reference to the Head of Drama, Val Gielgud] and teddy bears.’

Grigson was rescued from Monitoring by another great maker of BBC careers, the young George Barnes, who had commissioned his early work and admired his radio style and tyro manner. In January 1942 Barnes offered Grigson a job as a Talks Assistant at the BBC’s Western Region studios in Bristol, where he took over from James Pennethorne Hughes, the producer who had discovered Betjeman in 1936 and who, like James Richards, was now being sent to do war work in Egypt).

Back at the BBC’s Talks Department, Grigson pressed as many of his contacts as possible into service. One of his first conquests was Betjeman, whom he swooped on to give five talks, not on Betjeman’s favourite subjects (urban planning and rural life) but on Grigson’s (publishing). He also called on Betjeman’s friend the artist John Piper and discovered the cricket commentator John Arlott, then a police inspector and poet.

Grigson wrote in his 1950 autobiography The Crest on the Silver that his BBC productions at Bristol brought him in contact ‘with a diversity of people from Ministers of the Crown and Members of Parliament to farmers and millers, from men on aerodromes and in army camps and on ships to parsons and gipsy knife-grinders’. This quickly palled. ‘Geoffrey at heart was not altogether delighted at spending his time producing other’s people’s work,’ recalled his colleague Frank Gillard; ‘He wanted to be the chap at the microphone presenting his own work.’ Within four years he had handed in his resignation and on 20 September 1945 left his post to take up the job of part-time poetry reader at Routledge.

Grigson now embarked on a series of informal trades with Pevsner. He had started soliciting items for a new hardback anthology that he was editing for Routledge called The Mint: A Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism and won from Pevsner an important essay on the architecture of Mannerism, a topic never previously explored succinctly in English. At the same time, he helped to improve Pevsner’s translation of Goethe’s Von deutscher Baukunst, which appeared in a spe continued in the book