The London Library Magazine Spring 2019 - Issue 43

MAGAZINE Spring 2019 ISSUE 43

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underground russia The diverse range of revolutionary postcards printed in late Imperial Russia is celebrated by Tobie Mathew

wilde times Matthew Sturgis mines a rich seam of material on Oscar Wilde among the memoirs in the Biography shelves

Hidden Corners The Library’s collection of books about the Berlin Wall is explored by Sophie Hardach

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Go beyond the page.

Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me

Hisham Matar in Conversation Tue 16 Apr

Mon 15 Apr

Candice Carty-Williams: Queenie Wed 17 Apr

Kit de Waal presents the Common People Anthology

Robert MacFarlane: Underland Tue 7 May

Wed 1 May

Man Booker International Prize Readings 2019 Mon 20 May

James Ellroy in Conversation Mon 27 May

Jeanette Winterson: Frankissstein Thu 30 May

Karen Armstrong: The Lost Art of Scripture

Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Mon 3 Jun

Tue 2 Jul

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The London Library Magazine / issue 43

14 Matthew Sturgis spent the best part of a month going through the memoirs on the Library’s Biography floors searching for references to Oscar Wilde for his recent biography.

He reveals some of the fascinating information and anecdotes he discovered.

Contents 7 FROM THE director 8 Contributors Oscar Wilde, 1882, from Boris Brasol’s Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist (1938).

18 Long periods spent in Russia researching his book on revolutionary postcards produced as propaganda under the Tsars took Tobie Mathew to some obscure areas of the State Archives, including a room with the original filing system used by the Tsarist police up to 1917

Ariane Bankes’s reading list at the Library for her book on the artist David Jones, co-authored with Paul Hills

13 MY DISCOVERY Coming across Horace Bell’s memoir Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881) in the Biography stacks was an inspiration for Davina Langdale’s recent novel

14 wilde times Anonymous artist, The Chemical Components of Russian Freedom, 1905.

Matthew Sturgis on researching his biography of Oscar Wilde

18 underground russia

22 This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Novelist Sophie Hardach searches through the Library’s particularly rich collection of German titles, including anthologies that record the moving stories of individuals affected on both sides of the Wall

10 BEHIND THE BOOK

Revolutionary postcards produced by anti-Tsarist groups, by Tobie Mathew

22 hidden corners Sophie Hardach on Berlin Wall literature in the Library collections

26 THE new york society library The history of this independent library is related by Sara Holliday Border fence between Soviet- and Westernoccupied Germany near the German town of Vacha after the Second World War, from Richard Errell’s Bilderbuch für Vergessliche (1961).

27 MEMBERS’ NEWS

26 Founded in 1754 and located in an elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, The New York Society Library has a broad collection of titles on open stacks and opens its Reference Room to the public. Sara Holliday describes its history as part of our series on independent libraries.

Entrance to The New York Society Library on 79th Street at Madison Avenue. Photograph

by Doreen Pastore, courtesy of The New York Society Library.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

RICHARD COLE MALTA GOZO FRANCE DEVON Exhibition to launch the artist’s new book Malta and Gozo, An Artist’s View

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6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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On the cover

After Georgii Erastov, Engrossed in Reading.

Hand-drawn postcard, c.1905.

Welcome to the spring edition of the London Library Magazine. It contains fascinating articles from Library members Matthew Sturgis, Sophie Hardach, Davina Langdale, Ariane Bankes and Tobie Mathew, which demonstrate the amazing range of our members’ work and also the value of the Library as a place of serendipity and discovery. I find it remarkable to see yet again how many works originate from detailed research in forgotten works from our diverse collection or from chance finds made on the open shelves. Our collection inspires ideas and supports great writing, and it is no exaggeration to say that since its foundation in 1841 the Library has been at the heart of literary creativity and inspiration.

Sadly, many aspiring writers find it difficult to take their first steps into a writing career. Without financial support and access to resources and expert advice, making the breakthrough with a first published work can be an overwhelming challenge. The Library is well positioned to help, and I am delighted to report that in January we launched a significant initiative to support writers at the outset of their careers. Our Emerging Writers Programme is offering up to 40 unpublished writers a year’s free access to the Library’s amazing resources, as well as regular networking events to help trigger ideas, develop skills and make connections. The programme is supported by a range of generous individuals and organisations (including A.M. Heath), and we are grateful to our judging panel who will select the programme’s participants. We look forward to welcoming our first cohort to the Library in May. More information on the programme can be found at londonlibrary.co.uk/emerging-writers.

The early months of 2019 have seen us embark on another new initiative as part of our expanding public-events programme: our first venture into theatre. Starting on 2 February and ending on 3 March (just before the magazine reaches you), Creation Theatre will have delivered 19 performances of their innovative production of Dracula. These take place in the venue where Bram Stoker researched his masterpiece, with the aid of at least 26 books, which have recently been discovered on our shelves, still carrying the marginalia he made in them.

In many respects Stoker is the supreme example of an emerging writer at the Library – joining at an early stage of his writing career and drawing on our collection to create one of literature’s great feats of imagination. We hope that our Emerging Writers Programme will help sow the seeds of many more.

Philip Marshall Director

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec.

Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 1 March 2019. © 2019 The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Catherine Cartwright

Editorial committee Julian Lloyd Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Communications Department, The London Library 020 7766 4704

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

CONTRIBUTORS

Ariane Bankes joined the library in 2007

Ariane Bankes is a former publisher, now writer, editor and curator, most recently of the exhibition Julian Trevelyan: The Artist and his World at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Her book, co-written with Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory, was published in 2015 by Lund Humphries (reprinted 2017). She is Artistic Director of the Dovedale Arts Festival.

Sophie Hardach joined the library in 2012

7—9 JUN E

Sophie Hardach is an author and journalist. Her third novel, Confession with Blue Horses, about an art-loving family in East Berlin during the Cold War, will be published by Head of Zeus in June 2019. Sophie grew up in Germany and worked as a journalist in Italy, Japan and France before settling in London.

BATTERSEA PARK

Sara Holliday

Photograph Karen Smul.

Sara Holliday has organised events at The New York Society Library since September 2000. A native of Texas, she now lives in Queens, New York, among too many books and records. She co-wrote the Library’s chapter in Richard Wendorf’s book America’s Membership Libraries (2007) and is also the author of A Thousand Dances: A Novel of the British Blues Boom (Coral Press, 2018).

Davina Langdale joined the library in 2011

Davina Langdale is an author and freelance writer. Her novel The Brittle Star (Sceptre, 2017), a coming-ofage story set predominantly in 1860s California, was researched and written in The London Library. Having spent the last ten years trying to leave London, she has recently travelled to California for the first time.

Tobie Mathew joined the library in 2015

Tobie Mathew is a writer and historian specialising in Russian graphic art and propaganda. He is now based in London but has previously lived in Almaty, Kiev and Moscow, where he worked as a journalist for The Associated Press. He is the author of Greetings From the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia (Four Corners Books, 2018).

Matthew Sturgis joined the library in 1983

Matthew Sturgis has written acclaimed biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, as well as Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (1995). His latest book, Oscar: A Life (Head of Zeus, 2018), is the first major biography of Wilde for 30 years.

www.firstslondon.com Photograph Garlinda Birkbeck.

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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Behind the Book Ariane Bankes lists the Library titles that were important reference works during her research for The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory (2017), co-authored with Paul Hills

‘

’

Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory (Lund Humphries, 2015), 2017 edition.

David Jones was until recently, in the words of Edmund de Waal, ‘a major artist who has eluded proper scrutiny’. He was a poet, painter, engraver and maker of inscriptions, and the sheer range of his creativity and its fundamental erudition defy easy analysis. Various volumes in the Library were crucial to an understanding of the ideas that lay behind his art and writings.  David Jones by Paul Hills (exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1981).

I co-authored The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory with Paul Hills, who befriended Jones while an undergraduate at Cambridge, and has written extensively on his work over the years. Hills curated the Tate Gallery retrospective in 1981 and his exhibition catalogue was my starting point, supplemented with a wide range of other reading. His subtle interpretation of the ideas that permeate Jones’s artistic output is underwritten by a deep and sympathetic understanding of the man.  The Great War and Modern Memory

by Paul Fussell (Oxford 1975).

Given that his experience as a young private during the First World War forged Jones into the man and artist that he became, I returned to this illuminating study by Paul Fussell of the literary dimensions of the war. He shows how the visceral experience of the trenches becomes memorialised and mythologised by writers from Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves to David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg. Jones elided his front-line experience, on one level, with the idea of medieval romance that had seduced him from childhood: ‘the Waste Land … as a place of enchantment’; a landscape that

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

spoke, in Malory’s words, ‘with a grimly voice’ . He never got over the war; its imagery saturated his paintings, and he distilled it into his poetic masterpiece In Parenthesis (1937).  Eric Gill by Fiona MacCarthy (London 1989).

Eric Gill was a powerful influence on Jones, who regarded him as a fatherfigure and mentor long after he had moved on from the Gill entourages in Ditchling in East Sussex and Capel-yffin in the Black Mountains. The time Jones spent with Gill, his community and family in the 1920s helped to crystallise his thoughts about art and Catholicism, and saw him develop into a woodengraver of genius; his doomed love affair with Petra Gill was a critical episode in his life. MacCarthy’s biography, with its startling revelations about Gill’s sexuality, aroused controversy when first published, but her depiction of the complex, obsessive, visionary artist and his world is never less than compelling.  Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in Twentieth-Century English Painting by Christopher Neve (London 1990).

This collection of thought-provoking essays on how Modernist painters have interpreted the English landscape was

a real discovery. Each artist is chosen for the idea they represent, as part of a journey in imagination, thinking in paint.

So Paul Nash’s absorption with time and history, the lightheartedness of Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer’s rootedness, all come under scrutiny. Jones’s search for transcendence through painting is the subject of a deeply thoughtful discussion which fuses biography and analysis of the works with great subtlety, and is convincing enough to make one want to read Neve’s thoughts on every other artist, too.  Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters, ed. René Hague (London 1980).

Before the publication of Thomas Dilworth’s biography in 2017, René Hague’s selection of Jones’s letters and diary extracts was the most direct introduction to Jones’s voice, life and thoughts. His voice is utterly distinctive, veering in one paragraph from the colourful slang of the former Tommy to the visionary observations of the poet. The deft selection of texts brings Jones vividly to life, and gives a piercing insight into his daily thoughts and preoccupations – and into the painful swings of mood and dilemmas of faith that underlay his rare creativity.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

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12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Detail from The Staffordshire Hoard: An Anglo-Saxon Treasure. (June 2019 )

MY DISCOVERY Reminiscences of a Ranger: or, Early Times in Southern California by Horace Bell Davina Langdale recalls a chance find in the Library stacks that inspired the central character in her recent novel ‘The two half-drunk sailor drivers would roar at each other, as we dashed along at lightning speed, sometimes passing each other, sometimes neck and neck, each team straining every nerve … “Helm a-port, you lubber! Don’t you see you will run into me!” always with an amount of profanity that was absolutely appalling. ’ A spontaneous high-stakes stagecoach race, and just an average day in the Los Angeles of the 1850s, according to the extraordinarily active Major Horace Bell, founder member of the Los Angeles Rangers, filibuster, attorney and newspaperman, whose Reminiscences of a Ranger: or, Early Times in Southern California was published in 1881.

From the moment Bell arrived in LA as a young man in 1852, the vitality of the place and its inhabitants seduced him. He was a ‘gringo’ (‘ignoramus’), ‘An American who had not yet learned how to eat Chili peppers stewed in grease, throw the lasso, contemplate the beauties of nature from the sunny side of an adobe wall, make a first-class cigar out of a corn husk, wear open-legged pantaloons, with bell buttons, dance on one leg, and live on one meal a week’ . He swiftly became enamoured of local ladies such as Doña Concha – ‘a fullbreasted, square-rigged, fast-sailing sort of craft’ – and the ‘baronial hospitality’ of the Spanish families who formed the town aristocracy.

Southern California had only recently been acquired from Mexico, and LA was unspeakably violent and filled with desperadoes, among them Ricardo Urives, who ‘could stand more shooting and stabbing than the average bull or grizzly bear’ . As a member of the volunteer police force that constituted the LA Rangers, Bell witnessed scenes both ‘sanguinary and desperate’ , but nothing that could not be

Illustration by James S. Bodrero, from Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger: or, Early Times in Southern California (1881), 1927 edition.

countenanced after ‘two military canteens of double-proof Mexican aguardiente’ .

Of all the rich characters that Bell sketches, it is a man named Bill, born on the Ganges, son of a British East India Company father and an Indian mother, who stumps most forcibly into Aliso Street. Even Bell lies prostrate before him: ‘He was the boss of this burg’ , ‘the Boss Angel’ , a man with ‘a skill in surgery not inferior to his dexterity in swordsmanship’ . A Wild West Flashman who could draw from the sleeve.

There is no doubt that Bell’s account of these years, which first appeared in the columns of his newspaper, The Porcupine, is embellished, but every anecdote has the ring of truth about it and you sense that these people, truly, once lived and breathed.

What has all this to do with an Englishwoman who has never set foot in

California? Some time ago, I decided to write a novel set in the American West, published as The Brittle Star by Sceptre in 2017. My research took me all over the History stacks, but it was on the Biography shelves that, by chance, the gold lettering on the green spine of Bell’s memoir caught my eye.

One line of Bell’s took particular hold of me: ‘During the hot times described … the robbers made a raid on the Mission San Gabriel, and … were gallantly repulsed and driven away by Evert, a boy of fourteen years. ’ It is the only mention of this boy, Evert, but it was as though he had walked up, taken off his hat, sat down next to me and begun to talk. He told me everything, and so I made him my narrator (I named him John Evert Burn) and built his world around him as I imagined it might have been. And because I couldn’t bear for others not to know them, I put the splendid boozer that was Bill, the Bella Union saloon (with its ‘bandit, cut-throat looking’ clientele), the Star newspaper, and ‘Old Horse Face’ Judge Ogier and his courtroom in my novel, too.

A few people have asked me how I was able to transport myself to the California of the mid-nineteenth century.

I put it down entirely to Bell’s rollicking, exclamation-mark-laden memoir and the larger-than-life characters therein. The Library’s open-shelf system encourages spontaneous, rumbustious findings such as mine. But for this discovery, my own story would never have come into existence, and I should not have known the LA of the time ‘with all its repute as a place of strife and turmoil, the abode of chivalry, the hot-bed of red-handed ruffianism, a place where every man carried his code strapped to his 75 posterior’ . Oh, how I wish I’d been there.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Wilde Times Matthew Sturgis offers an insight into researching his recent biography of Oscar Wilde, which included a traditional and fruitful method of browsing through the Library’s Biography collection

Do we really need another book about Oscar Wilde? It is hard to escape the question. Certainly I posed it to myself when I embarked on my new biography of the great man. And – over the course of the six years that it took me to research and write the book – many others posed it to me.

He has, after all, been much written about. The London Library lists over 300 titles about him and his work, divided principally between the ‘Biography’ and ‘L. English Lit. ’ sections, together with 17 fictional accounts, a scattering of ‘Pamphlets’ and several appearances on the ‘S. Trials’ shelf. Many aspects of Wilde’s achievement are touched on in these volumes, but the number of full, cradle-tothe-grave ‘biographies’ is relatively small.

After an initial flurry of works in the years immediately after his death, generally 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

written by people who had known Wilde personally, the pace slowed to one book every decade or so: Boris Brasol’s Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist of 1938, Hesketh Pearson’s The Life of Oscar Wilde in 1946; there were lives by Philippe Jullian in the 1960s and H. Montgomery Hyde in the 1970s. And, in 1987, there appeared Richard Ellmann’s magisterial volume, Oscar Wilde. A wonderful book in many ways, it has pretty much held the field since then.

Inevitably, though, the intervening three decades have altered its status. It became clearer and clearer that a new biography of Wilde was not just possible, but was necessary. A mass of important new material had come to light: the full transcript of Wilde’s celebrated libel trial was discovered, as were the witness statements gathered by the Marquess of Queensberry; many new items were brought together in a magnificent new edition in 2000 of Wilde’s letters put together by Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland (Wilde’s grandson). Wilde’s works began to be published – with copious scholarly notes – in the Oxford English Texts series. Dedicated biographies appeared of Wilde’s wife, his mother, his friends and his collaborators. There were fascinating studies of many specific aspects of his life: his working habits; his reading; his American sojourn; his sex life; his medical condition; his friendships with women; his theatrical ventures; his UK lectures; his love of Paris; his time in prison; his holiday at Worthing in 1894.

All this needed to be integrated into the record.

And there was more. Whole new frontiers of research had opened up. The first decades of the twenty-first century had seen the enormous growth of the

Internet – with its opportunities for sharing information, tracing articles and conducting debate. There had also been the digitisation of thousands of historic newspapers – now accessible through the Library’s eLibrary hub. For anyone who can recall the long trek out to Colindale to visit the old British Library Newspapers archive, the exhausting hours spent hunched over the microfilm reader in an eye-wearying search for a single stray mention of one’s subject, there seems something almost indecent about the new ability to type in a ‘search term’ and bring up, in an instant, dozens, if not hundreds, of new references.

But, even with all these fresh horizons to scan, I was keen not to ignore more traditional modes of research in my attempt to create the fullest possible picture of Wilde’s life and times. There were also old byways to be explored in the quest for previously overlooked materials.

And one of the most promising of these byways led through the Library.

Given Wilde’s great fame during the 46 years of his lifetime (from 1854 to 1900), I reasoned that anyone who had known him, or had encountered him, would – if they had written about their own lives – leave some record of that contact. They might preserve a unique anecdote or aperçu, or give details of an otherwise unrecorded meeting.

My idea was to browse along the shelves of the Library’s extensive Biography section – spread over the third and fourth floors of the main building – looking into every memoir or biography written in the half-century after Wilde’s death in search of such references. This was a plan that could not have been contemplated but for the Library’s unique arrangement of having the bookstacks,

ordered by subject, open to the readers.

Also fortunate was the Library’s system of stamping the date of publication on the spine of each book. I supposed that the enterprise might occupy a week or so. I was soon disabused.

The first half of the twentieth century was, I discovered, a period when many people not only wrote their memoirs but also got them published: lawyers, actors, men-about-town, society hostesses, minor littérateurs – figures I never knew existed, and whose books would have otherwise remained unknown to me. Over the course of a very full month I became adept at picking out the likely volumes – books, usually brought out in the 1910s and 1920s, with blockish spines, thick rag-paper and titles such as Forty Years at the Bar, Through an Old Stage Door, Memoirs of a Clubman, The Sunlit Hours, Stray Memories, Sword and Stirrup, My Restless Life, Eighty-Eight: Not Out and Time Gathered.

Many of the writers of these books had indeed come across Oscar – and they had preserved vivid (if often fleeting) memories of him. It was true that for a while, in the immediate wake of his death when his reputation was still tarnished, people were sometimes wary of mentioning Wilde’s name, or their connection to it. The indefatigable society hostess Mrs Jeune may have been one of Wilde’s great friends and supporters during the years of his success, yet when (as Lady St Helier) she came to write her memoir, Memories of Fifty Years (1909), she avoided all reference to him. Others, though, were bolder. And certainly as the decades passed, and Wilde’s reputation became re-established and his work reappraised, such reticence vanished.

Turning over the yellowing pages of one time-worn autobiography after another (for few of such books are indexed), I caught sight of Oscar in many a new and unexpected pose: leaning against a door-frame while listening to one of John Ruskin’s Oxford lectures on early Italian art; cutting a dash at a ‘Commem Ball’ in a white top hat; addressing a Dublin meeting on women’s further education – while wearing a pair of conspicuous doeskin gloves; upsetting a tray of biscuits at a St John’s Wood teaparty; ‘mooning about’ eating strawberries at a late-summer garden party; lolling (as

Opposite Oscar Wilde, 1889, W. & D. Downey.

Colourised image © Marina Amarai.

Right Photograph of Mrs Jeune (Lady St Helier), from her book Memories of Fifty Years (1909).

Below Photograph of Alfred Noyes, from his book Two Worlds for Memory (1953).

ever, it seems) against a pillar, during an interminable performance of Shelley’s verse-drama, The Cenci; sharing a bottle of wine with the writer Arthur Machen and his wife at the modest Florence Restaurant in Rupert Street, Soho; ‘swaggering along the King’s Road dressed in a brown frogged coat, trimmed with cheap fur, [with] on his head an extravagant hat – the brim of which was as much curled as the roof of a Chinese pagoda ’ .

In the pages of the travel-writer Phil Robinson’s Sinners and Saints, A Tour Across the States (1883), I encountered him on his way to Salt Lake City, during his year-long 1882 American lecture tour. (To Robinson’s colourful description of a tribe of ‘Red Indians’ who subsisted on a diet of sunflowers, Wilde replied excitedly, ‘How charming! If only I could have stayed and dined with them. ’) Alfred Noyes in his Two Worlds for Memory (1953) recorded him emerging from a London theatre hotly disputing with W.E. Henley, the irascible poet and editor who, following the amputation

of his leg, served as the model for Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The two men parted on the pavement, but when Wilde turned to make one final remark, Henley hurled his crutch at Oscar’s head.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

‘

From Lady Poore, I learned that Wilde’s notion of a perfect dinner party was “very little to eat, very little light, and a great many flowers”

’

Mrs J.E. Panton (daughter of the painter William Powell Frith), in her 1908 memoir, Leaves from a Life, provided a poignant glimpse of Oscar, during the years of his post-prison exile, standing by a bicycle in a little wood at Aix-les-Bains, looking like ‘a lost soul gazing through the gates of Paradise’ . And Mrs Will Gordon – in Echoes and Realities (1934) – recorded how her friend, the Romanian writer Hélène Vacaresco, visited Wilde in his Paris hotel room during his final illness, bringing with her ‘a bottle of champagne and a few comforts’ . She knocked on the door of his room – number 13 – and hearing someone call ‘Entrez’ went in.

Oscar was lying in bed with his face to the wall. When she asked what she could do for him, he replied, ‘Rien’ . She left her comforts on the bare table, and begged him to drink some of the champagne. He didn’t move, but as she left, she heard him whisper, ‘Merci, inconnue’ .

Hidden away in volumes that – from their issue slips – appeared not to have been opened in decades, I discovered numerous long-forgotten Wildean bon mots and flights of fancy : his pleasantly absurd suggestion that ‘There ought to be a specific form of prayer for a baronet’; his expostulation – during a dinner-party discussion on artistic matters – ‘Oh, don’t talk of Rome – it is the Whiteley’s of Art’; or his provocative claim, when asked for directions in Piccadilly, that he was ‘unacquainted with any part of London east of the Albany’ . From Lady Poore’s An Admiral’s Wife in the Making (1917) I learned that, during his last term at Oxford, he told the author (Ida Graves, as 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

she then was) that his notion of a perfect dinner party was ‘very little to eat, very little light, and a great many flowers’ .

Many authors had, it was clear, long cherished their encounters with Wilde and his wit, setting them down years after the event. According to Walter Sichel – in The Sands of Time (1923) – when he described Lady Dorothy Neville as being like an exquisite piece of porcelain, Wilde had readily concurred, adding that, indeed, he was always anxious in her company, ‘because he momentarily expected a large van to arrive and carry her off to the British Museum’ . In My Restless Life (1909), the campaigning journalist Harry de Windt, who in 1893 had published a defence of the Russian prison-camp system, recalled meeting Wilde soon afterwards. Oscar attacked the book, declaring that ‘Any Englishman who defends such a barbarous system, should himself be banished to Siberia’ . To the Anglo-French de Windt’s protestation that he was ‘only half an Englishman’ , Wilde countered sternly, ‘Then half of you should be exiled’ .

But, of course, as with all memoirs and

Right Photograph of Lady Poore, from her biography An Admiral’s Wife in the Making (1917).

Opposite, left Photograph of Harry de Windt, from his book My Restless Life (1909).

Opposite, right Photograph of Hervey de Montmorency, from his book Sword and Stirrup (1936).

memories there is the question of accuracy.

How much of this stuff was actually true? Just as there had been a moment, immediately after Wilde’s death, when memoir-writers – even if they had known Wilde well – might fail to mention him at all, as the twentieth century advanced – and Wilde’s reputation recovered – there was a tendency to claim a closer connection with the celebrated author than perhaps existed. Or indeed to claim a connection when none existed at all.

Some of these exaggerations and inventions were easy enough to spot – the claim to have been present when some well-known bon mot was first uttered, the generic reference to Wilde being a ‘brilliant talker’ , the unrevealing eye-witness account of Wilde’s cross-examination – written perhaps by someone who was only 12 years old at the time of the trial.

Just as implausible were some of the shrill claims of authors anxious to set a distance between themselves and Wilde.

The suggestion made by the Americanborn socialite Julian Osgood Field, in his 1924 volume Things I Shouldn’t Tell, that

Wilde times

Wilde originally wrote his Symbolist drama Salomé in English and then got it translated by a professional in Paris, is demonstrably false; the original manuscript survives. And it was hard to accept, too, the story that Wilde disdained to take Field’s bet that ‘he couldn’t write a page of French in a locked room’ as anything other than a malicious fantasy.

Other anecdotes required a degree of old-fashioned connoisseurship to assess.

Did the story feel right? Was it in keeping with the man – and his times? Or did it, perhaps, contain a half-remembered truth, passed on and slightly mangled in the second-hand retelling? Given that the eminent lawyer Sir Patrick Hastings was born in 1880, it is difficult to credit fully the account – from his 1948 Autobiography – of an uproarious 1887 dinner chez Herbert Beerbohm Tree at which he claimed to have been present, when both Oscar and

his brother Willie gave their views on how Hamlet should die. Together with their host ‘they each rose from the table in turn to demonstrate their preferred mode of extinction – and were all lying on the floor of the dining-room when the butler brought in the fish’ . Yet it may well preserve, at second hand, the partial memory of a real event.

And the same could perhaps be said for Hervey de Montmorency’s recollection of an evening at the Corinthian Club when, during a discussion of the latest dramatic success of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Oscar was asked why, in his own work, he had never tackled the interesting subject of incest.

According to de Montmorency – in Sword and Stirrup (1936) – Wilde replied, ‘I never write on any matter of which I have not had personal experience. And, you see, ’ he continued, indicating his brother and sister, who happened to be present, ‘I am

awkwardly situated, as my nearest relations are so very plain’ . The details are certainly awry: Oscar and Willie Wilde’s only sister, Isola, died in 1867, aged nine. Nevertheless Oscar’s reply foreshadows his ill-advised admission in the witness-box, during his first trial, that he had not kissed the serving-boy, Walter Granger, because he was, unfortunately, ‘very plain’ .

That month spent patrolling the narrow walkways between the shelves of the two Biography floors – A to Neh and Nei to Z – taught me many things: how to take notes while perched on a narrow window ledge; how to operate the camera device on my iPad; the virtues of wearing rubber-soled shoes to avoid static-electric shocks from the metal shelving. But most of all it taught me how closely woven Oscar Wilde was in the lives of his contemporaries – and, also, what an extraordinary institution is The London Library.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

Underground Russia Researching his recent book on Russian revolutionary postcards took Tobie Mathew into the depths of the Russian State Archives and led to some remarkable discoveries

‘Oh, these look old, ’ I said. Perhaps not my finest historical observation, but it prompted the wizened Russian archivist to turn away from the heavy wooden cabinets that stood before us, and to remark gravely, ‘Yes, very old’ . Only then did it dawn on me that the rows and rows of carefully inscribed index cards that the cabinets contained were not simply the bowels of a decidedly old-fashioned database, but the original filing system used by the Tsarist Police to record Russia’s criminal fraternity in the years leading up to 1917. I had not expected them to have survived, let alone still be in use.

I spent several months in the State Archives researching anti-Tsarist propaganda for my book Greetings from the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia (2018). Postcards were originally conceived as a cheap form of written correspondence, but the ease with which they could be printed, their small size and great popularity made them an ideal conduit for political ideas, as well as a convenient way of generating income.

Although little studied, postcards were in fact the most widespread form of pictorial opposition propaganda under the Tsars – a powerful example from a different age of a new form of communication serving to disrupt the status quo.

For weeks I had been looking for the police file of Imperial Russia’s leading dentist, Mikhail Chemodanov, who made subversive drawings for postcard reproduction. I knew that the file existed, 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

but had no idea where it was. The computer records of the State Archives in Moscow had produced nothing, and it was only a chance conversation with an archivist that set me in the right direction. ‘Have you tried the police archives?’ he asked. The answer, of course, was ‘no’ , but as I was to discover, the State Archives are akin – appropriately – to the proverbial Russian doll, concealing many smaller, more or less hidden archives within the whole.

So off I went, trudging through the snow, to look for such and such a room, in such and such a building, down such and such a corridor. And there I found the aforementioned archivist, Aleksandra Ivanovna. ‘Who are you looking for?’ she asked, as though I were after a colleague of hers. In response to the name, Chemodanov, she smiled and repeated his name like that of an old friend. Then she led me down the corridor to another room, its door lock secured by a wax seal.

Once inside, we were surrounded by the cabinets. I struggled to conceal my excitement. ‘Is Trotsky here?’ ‘Trotsky is here, ’ she replied. ‘And Lenin?’ ‘And Lenin. ’ Here, in truncated form, was the entire history of the early revolutionary movement.

I told Aleksandra I thought it extraordinary that the State Archives still used the original Tsarist-era index.

She did not find it extraordinary at all, however, simply responding that it was a highly efficient system and there was no point in reinventing the wheel. Since the

1990s, there have been notable attempts to update and digitise Russia’s main repositories and libraries, but due to lack of funding, many still lack up-to-date facilities. Indeed, for those who cherish the more old-fashioned aspects of The

Above Anonymous artist, Dmitrii Trepov surmounting a pile of artillery shells, late 1905.

Opposite, from top Anonymous photographer, revolutionaries on the

barricades during the Moscow Uprising, 1905; Mikhail Chemodanov, Two Perspectives, Moscow, October 1906.

The caption on the right reads: ‘It will all come to a bad end.’

London Library I would recommend a trip to Moscow. Forget the Internet: in some institutions you’ll be lucky to find a plug socket.

On a more upbeat note, the State Archives share with The London Library the blessing of extremely helpful and knowledgeable staff. I am often asked what it was like to research my book in Russia.

Certainly, it wasn’t easy, but the rewards are great and once trust has been gained, qualifications proved, and all the byways learned (viz. getting all the right stamps on your documents), I found a great willingness to help, all the more so because I was foreign. Not all the archives are fully open, but as a researcher you’ll never really know what you’re missing. And in respect of the revolutionary period, the sheer volume of what survives is astonishing.

Anti-government postcards were printed by Russian revolutionary activists in Western Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards, but the breakdown of Imperial authority in 1905 led to the establishment of a viable market inside Russia itself. Created by a disparate range of political groups and publishers, the images are highly diverse, from satirical cartoons of Tsarist officials to photographs of early political demonstrations. There is little to unite them ideologically, beyond their opposition to autocracy, but together they comprise a rich body of political art that all too clearly illustrates the danger of opposing the state during this tempestuous era.

The police and censors’ archives threw up all kinds of stories, not least that of a sailor in Sebastopol who was arrested following a visit to a ‘house of ill repute’ for disseminating propaganda among the staff – perhaps the ultimate example of multi-tasking. Chemodanov’s trajectory was rather more pitiful. A Moscow doctor who became a pioneering dentist, he was also a gifted artist who drew regularly for illustrated journals. In late 1905, he started making his drawings for postcards.

The police took notice, and after a long investigation he was detained and while in prison developed pneumonia. He died long before the case could come to trial.

The London Library’s Russian collections are not well known, but they provided an invaluable supplement to the State Archives. As one might expect,

the Library holds all the major Englishlanguage histories of the period, the best of which is Abraham Ascher’s The Revolution of 1905 (2 vols., 1988, 1992).

Based largely on Western sources, it is a superb history of a time when Russia stood on the brink of both revolution and reform. Contemporary accounts by Bernard Pares and revolutionary Sergei Stepnyak are also well worth seeking out.

Curiously, Stepnyak, who fled to England after murdering the head of the secret police, met his end in Chiswick in 1895, the hapless victim of a suburban train.

The Library also contains significant holdings of original pamphlets. Many

were purchased at the time of their publication by Charles Hagberg Wright, Secretary and Librarian of the Library from 1893 until his death in 1940, whose acquisitions reflect his keen interest in Russia. For obvious reasons, the majority are not on open shelves due to their fragile state, but for anyone who cares to see them, the texts that helped to convert the masses to Marxism are available on request. Among them is a near-complete run of the Social Democrat newspaper Iskra (‘The Spark’), which for my purposes contained vital evidence (in the form of financial reports) of the commercial nature of propaganda production. I had THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

not previously appreciated the extent to which publishing served as a way of revolutionary fundraising.

Perhaps inevitably, when Tsarist power was on the wane in 1905, the commercial expediency of publishing seditious material prompted the involvement of opportunists. I discovered one individual who had been selling postcards of the Imperial Family before he started producing opposition images.

Such commercial forms of political engagement were by no means limited to the print industry. It is hard not to scoff at an advertisement published in the Bolshevik newspaper Novaia zhizn (‘New Life’), which trumpeted Kneipp’s ‘nutritious’ malt coffee as the ‘drink of choice for all German workers’ .

Contemporary works present a remarkably candid view of the revolutionary struggle, characterised as it was by argument, failure and a chronic lack of funds. One Party report I found openly acknowledged that it was widely believed the revolutionaries ‘spent all their time in endless talk, when what was needed was action’ . After wading through piles of Soviet dogma, frank assessments such as these came as both a relief and a necessary corrective to later narratives.

While there were many dedicated political combatants, original documents show just how wide ranging and nuanced opposition activity and belief was under Nicholas II. The Revolution in 1917 was

Above Valery Carrick, Norway, c.1930s.

Photograph © Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds.

Right Valery Carrick, We’re Here by Virtue of

the Decree …/ And I’m Here by Virtue of the Government Circular!…, 1906.

Opposite Anonymous artist, Long Live Freedom!, 1905.

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anything but inevitable.

But if later accounts offer a less than balanced view, they do still impart wonderful colour. Vladimir BonchBruevich’s memoirs of his experiences as the Bolsheviks’ leading underground printer, published in 1924, for instance, present a vivid account of the ingenuity and commitment of the Russian radicals.

During this period, the vast majority of revolutionary propaganda was produced abroad then smuggled into Russia through one of its many porous borders.

Bonch-Bruevich, who was based in Geneva, describes how on one occasion seditious pamphlets were secreted in false-bottomed barrels of pickled fish.

Despite ongoing surveillance, Tsarist officials remained entirely oblivious to this red herring.

The Bolsheviks are by far the best known of the opposition forces in Russia, but they were by no means alone. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, represented in the Library by several political pamphlets, also produced vast quantities of visual material. However, in late 1905 both were outgunned by private manufacturers.

Concessions granted by the Tsar in October that year enabled publishers of all stripes to take political and economic advantage of the regime’s temporary incapacity, leading to the creation of a vibrant trade in printed opposition material. This short-lived period was characterised by one contemporary

commentator as a ‘publishing bacchanalia’ .

In the children’s book section of the Library there is a small group of Russian folk tales illustrated by the artist Valery Carrick (also Karrik). Looking at the charming drawings one would little suspect that they were produced by a fervent enemy of the Tsar; nonetheless, throughout the 1905 Revolution, Carrick privately produced vast numbers of hand-drawn postcards satirising the injustices of autocracy. His whimsical satires and portraits of leading opposition figures were hugely popular and were sought after by political progressives and postcard collectors alike. Carrick’s renown led to his work being featured in the Manchester Guardian, but he has since been all but forgotten.

Carrick is perhaps the most extraordinary figure I came across during the course of my research. He was born in St Petersburg in 1869 to a Scottish father and Russian mother. Despite holding a British passport, he always considered himself Russian, but never became a citizen of the country of his birth. His early political leanings came largely from his progressive parents. His father, the innovative photographer William Carrick, was well known for his sympathetic portraits of Russian tradespeople, and his mother, Alexandra Markelova, was one of the first female journalists in Russia and a passionate believer in sexual equality.

underground russia

Rebellion ran in the family. In 1888, Carrick’s elder brother Dmitry was caught with a gun near the Interior Minister’s house and, over the next decade, Valery would himself be drawn into the revolutionary sphere. After attending teaching college, he started freelance writing for the Russian finance ministry journal. Thanks to knowledge gained through his privileged access to sensitive information, he began sending reports and satirical poems to exiled activists in England. The Russian police got wind of this and, while on a trip to London, he was followed everywhere by a Russian spy, even through the galleries of the British Museum.

In 1904 Carrick was detained on suspicion of collaborating with revolutionary organisations abroad. A search of his St Petersburg apartment uncovered a significant quantity of tendentious writings, anti-government proclamations and cartoons. As a result, the foreign ministry issued an order to have Carrick expelled as an undesirable alien. He was saved at the last minute by

the British Ambassador, who intervened with the authorities to plead his case.

The matter was eventually dropped, and Carrick was thereafter given permanent leave to remain in Russia.

A kindly man, Carrick was above all a humanist. Tsarist despotism was to be opposed not because it was ideologically incorrect but because it was unjust. A friend wrote after his death in 1942: ‘For me he was the ideal human being – the most excellent of men … I shall never meet anyone who has the half of his goodness and wealth of mind. ’ But despite, or perhaps because of this, his art was vicious. As the Manchester Guardian put it: ‘Like other eminent practitioners, his profile is cut in bold, pouncing lines, his eyes are prominent, and he meets you with a direct straightforward gaze that is usually taken to express a frank, open nature, until his caricature appears. ’ Amid widespread government repression, Carrick stopped making opposition imagery in around 1907, and thereafter turned to less controversial pursuits. He started work on a series of

children’s books illustrating Russian folk tales, and later considered these to have been his greatest achievement. In 1917, he greeted the overthrow of the Tsar with joy; but already ambivalent about socialism, he was deeply disillusioned by the Bolshevik takeover later that year. Within a month he had left the country. He got as far as Norway, where he remained until his death. He never returned to Russia.

There are many such tales of emigration and loss, and the Library’s shelves are weighed down with works and memoirs written by both officials and former revolutionaries. And here the Library’s own indexing system – almost as old as that of the Moscow police archives – throws up some droll ironies. Shelved next to Alexander Spiridovich’s Notes of a Gendarme (1928) is a biography of Maria Spiridonova: the autobiography of Imperial Russia’s leading expert on the revolutionaries sitting next to a work on its most famous female terrorist. Two bitter enemies, but like Chemodanov and Carrick both victims of Russia’s turbulent history.

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Hidden Corners: Stories from behind the Wall Thirty years ago, thousands of East German protestors breached the Berlin Wall. Sophie Hardach traces the Wall’s history through the treasures of the Library’s German collection.

‘Once I lived near the Wall, ’ recalls the East German writer Helga Schütz in an essay written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Walking through the former no-man’s-land, she remembers the day it was constructed: ‘It was right in front of my garden … in the morning a soldier with a red rope came, then a bulldozer cut all the trees. ’ Schütz’s essay is part of Gute Nacht, du Schöne (‘Good Night, Beautiful’ , 1991), an anthology published in the aftermath of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. It is one of many fascinating books from the divided Germany that can

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be found on the shelves of the Library.

They offer a glimpse of life behind the Iron Curtain, the boundary that separated Eastern and Western Europe from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Die Mauer, as the Berlin Wall was known in German, came to symbolise the clashing powers of that era. It was also a reminder of private suffering: the separated families, the imprisoned dissidents, the lives lost at the border.

As Schütz tells a visiting journalist keen to see the remains of the Wall after its demise: ‘You are on the death strip …

on the former death strip … Only a few weeks ago you would have been shot here, right on the spot. See the cross over there? That’s for someone who wanted to go over to the other side. ’ Yet on that cold November evening 30 years ago, thousands of ordinary East Germans streamed to the heavily guarded border, encouraged by a politician’s slipup: Günter Schabowski, an East German party official, accidentally told reporters that the government’s official travel ban was being lifted with immediate effect.

Eventually, the overwhelmed border guards let the protestors through to the West. Once the border was breached, there was no turning back. Within less than a year, on 3 October 1990, Germany was reunited.

I came across Schütz’s essay, and the Gute Nacht anthology, during my research for my novel set in East Berlin, Confession with Blue Horses (Head of Zeus, 2019). The Library has an exceptionally rich German collection, a tradition that continued during the Cold War with acquisitions from both sides of the Wall. The result is an inspiring, slightly chaotic jumble of East and West German fiction, political speeches, poetry, essays and autobiographies.

Together they tell the story of the Berlin Wall from a multitude of different angles. I found several works particularly compelling, many of which were chance discoveries spotted while scanning the

Opposite On 9 November 1989, thousands of protesters breached the Berlin Wall after a politician accidentally announced the government’s intention to lift the travel ban.

Photograph © Alamy Stock Photo.

Left Border between the Soviet- and Westerncontrolled sectors in Berlin, which later became East and West Berlin.

The sign says: ‘Attention!

Both pavements and the road are part of the Soviet sector. The front gardens and houses on the right side are part of the Western sector.’

Photograph from Richard Errell’s Bilderbuch für Vergessliche (‘Picturebook for the Forgetful’, 1961).

Below The divided Germany: the area in green shows the Federal Republic of Germany; the area to the east is the German Democratic Republic. West Berlin is shown in green within the GDR.

shelves – one of the many delights of having open stacks.

The construction of the Berlin Wall began on 13 August 1961. But Germany’s division really began with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, and Germany’s occupation by the United States, the UK, France and the Soviet Union. In 1949, amid rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, two German states were founded. The area occupied by the Western allies became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), while the Soviet-occupied zone in the East became the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Berlin, which had been occupied by all four powers, was also split into East and West. Because of its geographic location in Eastern Germany, West Berlin effectively became a Capitalist island surrounded by the Socialist GDR. An unusual book at the Library called Bilderbuch für Vergessliche (‘Picture-book for the Forgetful’ , 1961) by Richard Errell features a striking picture illustrating this split in its early days. It shows an ordinary residential street in Berlin marked with a sign: ‘Attention! Both pavements and

the road are part of the Soviet sector. The front gardens and houses on the right side are part of the Western sector. ’ Bilderbuch für Vergessliche is a disturbing book. Its stated purpose is to remind ‘forgetful people’ (an ironic reference to Germans who chose not

to remember the recent past) of the atrocities of the war. In fewer than 200 pages, it crams together photographs and texts that show the horrors of the Nazi era. Bombed cities, concentration camps, war orphans and widows, soldiers’ cemeteries, maimed veterans, Nazi parades and POW camps are interspersed with pretty pictures of Germany before the war. Germany’s division is presented as another brutal consequence of Nazi aggression and the Second World War. Interestingly, Bilderbuch was last borrowed in 1989 and 1990, the years of the end of the GDR and of German reunification.

‘Nobody has any intentions of building a wall!’ Walter Ulbricht, the GDR’s head of state, famously declared on 15 June 1961. Two months later, construction had begun. Ulbricht’s speeches are collected in Dokumente zur Außenpolitik der Regierung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (1962), the GDR’s foreign policy documents, which take up several shelves in H. German Republic. They include his first public reaction to the Wall: he thanks the THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

The sky? This whole great arch of hope and longing, love and grief?

“On the contrary,” she said quietly.

“The sky gets divided first. ” ’

soldiers and workers who helped put it up, and promises that it will help protect the GDR, and prevent people-traffickers from smuggling East Germans over to the West. ‘Of course we will have to remain vigilant, ’ he says. ‘But life goes on, in its tranquil way. ’ One of the first and most successful East German novels about the Wall does not explicitly mention it at all. Der geteilte Himmel (‘The Divided Sky’ , 1963)

by Christa Wolf tells the story of Rita, an East German factory worker whose lover, Manfred, leaves for the West. Rita is critical of the GDR but decides to stay, thinking she can change things. Then the Wall is built, separating them forever.

Wolf started working on the novel in 1960, but was dissatisfied with the plot and felt that the love story was too banal.

The Wall gave her the dramatic, tragic plot device she had been looking for.

Der geteilte Himmel opens shortly after it was built, in late August 1961, with Rita recovering from a breakdown caused by grief over her lost lover. Later, she recalls thinking: ‘In the old days, lovers chose a star before they separated, so their gaze could meet there in the evenings. What should we choose?

“At least they can’t divide the sky,” Manfred said mockingly.

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However, Rita ultimately defends the GDR. On the day construction of the Wall begins, a Sunday, she heads to work in a show of solidarity. Wolf went on to become one of the GDR’s most celebrated writers. The Library has an extensive collection of her works, both in German and translated into English.

Many other novels in the German collection also provide a fascinating insight into life behind the Wall. Monika Maron’s Flugasche (‘Fly Ash’ , 1981), for example, was the first novel to tackle environmental pollution in the GDR, a taboo subject. Maron was unable to publish the novel in the GDR, so it was published in West Germany instead.

It tells the story of Josefa Nadler, a journalist fighting against censorship. In one scene, Nadler tells her lover about her investigation into a dilapidated power plant that is contaminating the city of B. He replies: ‘Just write two versions. The first one about what happened, and then a second one that can be printed. ’ Nadler protests and says this would be a form of intellectual perversion, a cynical denial of the truth. Her lover retorts: ‘It’s better than your self-censorship: black pen in the right hand, red pen in the left. ’ Some books in the Library span the German divide. Deutschland, Deutschland (1979) is an anthology of 47 authors from West and East Germany.

Here is how the West Berliner Ingeborg Drewitz describes her split city: ‘I have a street map of Berlin in front of me, with the border zigzagging right through it. My index finger wanders up and down the streets – without any border controls. ’ She reconstructs a sensory map of Berlin.

‘There are the images … on the retina, in photo albums, in dreams. And the smells. The smell of burnt things and the rotten brickwork of old ruins, the smell of fish, the smell of stacked coal, sweetish, the smell of gas in the stairwells, beets, cabbage, boiled potatoes and fried potatoes with onions, the smell of boiling laundry, of scouring soap … the smell of Schnapps, of beer, of piss, of rough tobacco, the smell of war and the smell of lilac, in courtyards, by green-painted park

benches, in allotment gardens. ’ A sense of loss, separation and mourning pervades many works of that era, as well as a spirit of pragmatism, of trying to build a decent life within the given constraints. One particularly poignant example of this is Guten Morgen, du Schöne (‘Good Morning, Beautiful’ , 1977), a feminist classic that inspired many follow-ups, including the aforementioned Gute Nacht, du Schöne.

Guten Morgen is a collection of interviews with East German women

by Maxie Wander, an Austrian writer living in the GDR. They talk about work, relationships, sex, motherhood and art, with occasional jabs at the political situation. Gabi’s uncle leaves for the West; Erika’s husband gives her Marx’s collected works as a gift when they divorce (‘That’s just great, to get Marx as a gift for your divorce, right?’). Rosi says of her uptight neighbours: ‘Naturally, one attends those Party meetings and makes sure there’s no discussion of the wrong sort, just like their parents used to go to church and ban any questions about God. If you scratch the red paint a bit, all the old rubbish peeks out, one layer after another, all the way back to the time of the Kaiser. ’ Ruth remembers her mother’s love of Stalin: ‘Well, Stalin, for example, that was a handsome man.

My mother was very fond of that man.

His portrait in her bedroom – in a golden frame – yes, yes. And when that wasn’t acceptable anymore, she hid him in the airing cupboard. Oh dear, how I used to squat by the open door of that cupboard, and little father Stalin would gloomily stare down at me!’

There is a yearning in these interviews not just for a better life, but for a new kind of society, one in which women earn the same as men, have the same rights and opportunities, can live independently and with dignity.

Perhaps the most moving interview is with Karoline, an ethnic German from Ukraine, who talks about her bitterly poor ancestors who yearned to return to their homeland. ‘After the hay harvest they would sit on the hay cart, as high as they could climb, and look in the general direction of Germany, and cry. ’ Karoline herself is committed to the GDR: ‘The things we take for granted today, those used to be a luxury, like having bread

hidden corners

Opposite Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (‘The Divided Sky’, 1963). © Alamy Stock Photo.

Left Maxie Wander’s Guten Morgen, du Schöne (‘Good Morning, Beautiful’, 1977).

every day, being able to buy shoes, and being treated as a human being …

And I put my trust in our youth. I find it wonderful to see young men pushing prams, and give their child a bottle. ’ The air of optimism that pervades Guten Morgen is largely absent from Gute Nacht, du Schöne, edited by the Polish-German writer Anna Mudry in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The title is a nod to Wander’s book, but also marks an ending, a rupture.

The women in Gute Nacht, all writers, reflect on their lives in the GDR. Their conclusions are infused with doubt, guilt and regret over personal and political failings.

Mudry, who was once an enthusiastic Marxist, faces up to her own collusion with the censors: ‘I met a woman in a care home who had fled East Prussia

with her family as a child, as part of the refugee trek, and whose parents were shot by the Russians right before her eyes. About ten years later she woke up one morning, completely paralysed …

I wanted to create a little monument to this woman and wrote a story about her. ’ However, to avoid implicitly criticising the Russians – another taboo in the GDR – Mudry changed the story. She wrote that the girl’s parents died in a bombing during the war. Realising that the selfcensorship was damaging the narrative and her own integrity, she stopped – and hid the story in her drawer. Many East German writers refer to such Schubladengeschichten: drawer-stories, stories that never made it out into the public sphere.

In Gute Nacht, political rifts merge with private ones, and ideological

conflicts are played out between parents and children. Mudry, for example, cringes at her harsh judgment of her poor and hard-working mother: ‘I reprimanded her bitterly for only thinking about our survival during the Fascist era, and not doing anything against the Nazis. ’ At the same time, Mudry fears that she did not do enough to protect her own daughter, Rahel, from the oppressiveness of the GDR’s school system.

Maja Wiens, another writer in the anthology, finds out that her own mother spied on her for the Stasi, the secret service, and tried to have her sectioned. The discovery stirs up old feelings of anger at her cruel and unloving parent: ‘Sometimes I catch myself looking for a resemblance between us in the mirror, just to prove to myself that there is none. ’ But while Wiens unflinchingly excavates painful truths, she observes that others prefer to bury the past.

She watches a man in a shop photocopy his daughter’s graduation certificate. ‘He carefully cut a sheet of white paper into strips to cover parts of her assessment.

They were presumably lines about a “firm class consciousness” and an “active participation in the life of the FDJ [the GDR’s youth organisation]” . ’ In my own novel, I tried to capture the tensions and contradictions of life in the GDR. But I also wanted to show the coping strategies that people developed, the humour, solidarity, poetry, love and friendship. I grew up in West Germany, but my mother’s family was from Berlin and the far eastern German provinces that are now part of Poland and Russia.

Many of the writers listed here feel somewhat culturally familiar with their eastern cadences, with their references to Baltic resorts and lakes, and their shared fondness for that Berliner institution the allotment. It is always startling to open a neatly labelled London Library cover and find these vivid scenes from behind the Berlin Wall, 30 years after it crumbled.

Incredibly, the Wall has now not been there for longer than it was there.

And yet, for those 28 years, it felt permanent, and left permanent marks.

As Schütz, who watched soldiers build the partition right at the bottom of her garden, recalls: ‘I had neighbours behind the Wall. I could hear their voices, but I could never shake their hands. ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

The New York Society Library Our series on independent historic libraries continues with a portrait of the Big Apple’s oldest library, by the institution’s Head of Events, Sara Holliday

In the spring of 1754, six civic-minded young men looked around New York City and asked what it needed. One of the British Empire’s key North American ports, the city was a multi-lingual commercial centre and had the beginnings of a major university, but the group decided that ‘a Publick Library would be very useful, as well as ornamental’ . The friends took out a newspaper notice, ordered books from England, borrowed a room in Lower Manhattan’s City Hall, and opened The New York Society Library, a self-selected society open to any reader who could pay a moderate fee.

King George III signed the Library’s royal charter in 1772, but three years later the Library closed for the duration of the War of Independence. In 1789, the trustees reorganised and reopened in City Hall, now the seat of the new federal government.

The Library’s historic charging ledgers record the reading of many American notables including presidents George Washington and John Adams, Washington Irving, Chief Justice John Jay, both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and St Elizabeth Ann Seton.

The nineteenth century saw Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe as speakers, Charles Dickens and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as visitors, and John James Audubon and Herman Melville as members. Melville both consulted and wrote in the Library’s books around the time he published Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), and when he began writing Moby-Dick (1851). The twentieth century would add such member writers as Willa Cather, W.H. Auden, P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Peck, Wendy Wasserstein and Tom Wolfe.

The Library shifted into its first purpose-built home in 1795, gradually moving uptown through a total of five buildings to its current address on 79th Street at Madison Avenue, in the heart 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Above The Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Exhibition Gallery.

Left The vintage card

of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in 1937. A landmark Italianate townhouse originally designed as the home of John and Catherine Rogers, the building offers elegant reading and study rooms, a Children’s Library, and the Peluso Family Exhibition Gallery with rotating displays of historic books and materials.

From a starter collection of about 700 volumes in 1754, book holdings grew to roughly 40,000 volumes by 1856. Today the Library offers a broad collection of just under 300,000 volumes – at least a little bit of everything, though especially strong in New York City history and culture, biography and literature. Any book in good

catalogue.

Photographs by Beth Perkins, courtesy of The New York Society Library.

condition published since 1850 stays in the open stacks, browsable by members.

Researchers may request access to Special Collections, which feature rare books on alchemy and Gothic literature, among other fields. Current members come in to scoop up the latest volume from their favourite mystery writer, plunge into research among the shelves, or write their own books in handsome, quiet workspaces.

The first-floor Reference Room is open to the public and tea is served there on weekdays at 3 o’clock. The building keeps busy with activities for children and families, lectures, performances and seminars. The Library also presents the annual New York City Book Awards to a handful of the best new Big Apple books, reinforcing our 265-year role as both useful and ornamental to the city.

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MEMBERS’ News

THE COLLECTIONS COMMITTEE The Collections Committee, consisting of trustees Philip Hook, Giles Milton, Rick Stroud, Elizabeth Herridge and Daisy Goodwin, is designed to support and advise the Executive and Board on issues affecting the collection and its management. Here they describe some of the work that is going on to address growing space constraints across parts of the Library.

The collection, which lies at the very centre of the Library’s existence and function, is under pressure from two directions: space and costs. As far as shelving is concerned, we are already at 94% capacity. In two or three years’ time, if we do nothing, we will run out of space.

Members will by now be aware that the Library is operating at an unsustainable deficit with subscriptions currently nowhere near enough to meet costs. That’s why we have to increase membership. To this end, we are taking a range of initiatives to raise the Library’s profile; and we are looking at ways to make the Library a more attractive place for members to study and meet.

This means redeploying some of the space available, which in turn means a small reduction in shelving.

So what are we doing in the Collections Committee to meet these challenges? First of all, we have studied in detail two excellent reports on the collection produced by Inez Lynn, before she retired, and updated by Gill Turner (Head of Acquisitions) and Mary Gillies (former Deputy Director) last year. These deal with Collection Management and Development, and Acquisitions

and Retention Policy. They identify various ways of saving space, which include: • Cancelling little-used journal subscriptions • Deduplicating • Finding alternative (generally electronic) formats for existing print-based material • Transfer of selected print-based material for storage off-site • Fine-tuning acquisitions We are making difficult decisions which will not be entered into without careful consultation with the Library’s expert staff, and indeed with other libraries facing similar challenges. Particularly sensitive issues include on what principle we should continue adding to our foreign-language sections. The Committee is always keen to hear from any member who has links to individuals or trusts that might help us to develop specific aspects of the collection, such as individual languages within the foreign-language collections. At this stage we have reached only one firm conclusion, that a certain amount of off-site storage is going to be necessary, and we are looking at ways of introducing this most cost-effectively and with least inconvenience to members.

In the coming months we will continue working closely with staff and particularly the new Director of Collections and Library Services, Matthew Brooke. One thing unites us all: the paramountcy of the collection and the importance of preserving as far as possible the original conception of the Library as a place where readers can find the books they want.

UNVEILING OUR HIDDEN COLLECTIONS We reported last spring about a new project to make visible on Catalyst for the first time the 25% of our collection that has not yet been fully electronically catalogued. The ‘hidden 25%’ represents older titles – acquired by the Library before 1950 – which we have been in the process of transferring from our print catalogues to Catalyst as part of the Retrospective Cataloguing Project. Fully cataloguing them is very detailed work and it will be many years before complete catalogue records can be completed.

However, we have identified a way to make 120,000 entries, comprising most of this hidden 25%, visible on Catalyst in their raw, unedited state. It is important to understand that until these records are properly catalogued the newly transferred entries have limitations and will contain inaccuracies, but it does mean that thousands of titles that have only been identifiable through our print catalogues are now appearing also on Catalyst.

We made great progress in 2018, uploading previously hidden records in batches, starting with Literature and moving progressively through different shelfmarks. Before Christmas we released 23,000 Science & Miscellaneous records and are currently working on Society publications. The next stop will be

95% of the Library’s collection will soon be visible on Catalyst.

the Times Room and Topography, which once completed will mean that the project will have covered almost all of the openaccess collections, adding a total of 100,000 previously hidden records. We will then move on to reveal around 20,000 records from the Special Collections. At that stage almost 95% of our entire collection will be visible on Catalyst.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

THE HIPPISLEY COLLECTION We recently agreed to loan the approximately 400-volume Hippisley Collection of Chinese books to the Royal Asiatic Society.

The collection was brought together by Alfred Hippisley – who worked for the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service between 1867 and his retirement in 1910 – and consists primarily of traditional thread-bound books, rebound (presumably by Hippisley) into hardcover volumes. It focuses on the Chinese classics, philosophy, dynastic histories and lexicography, and totals around 40 illustrated works of Chinese literature. They are mostly from the nineteenth century but also include several works printed in the eighteenth century. Although attractively illustrated, the titles in the collection are not considered to have significant scholarly or monetary value and have been very little used during their time at The London Library.

The loan arrangement with the RAS means that the books will be housed safely under excellent conditions in their premises at 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD. They will be available for anyone who wishes to access them – including, of course, members of The London Library – free of charge.

Clockwise from top Illustrated fiction from the Hippisley Collection; the collection is now safely housed – and publicly accessible – in the Royal Asiatic Society; wooden covers protect many of the Hippisley books.

MINIATURE BOOKS In time for Christmas the Library was delighted to receive a very generous donation in the form of a collection of the works of Shakespeare published as miniature books by David Bryce in Glasgow in 1904. Bryce also produced the ‘fly’s eye Bible’ – the world’s smallest printed copy of the Old and New Testament and so-called because the type was so small – a copy of which sits in our Small Books cupboard next to the Reading Room.

The miniature Shakespeares – each of which measures just 3.5 x 5.5cm and comes complete with illustrations – are delightfully produced and retain the original box in which they were stored. The set is dedicated to Ellen Terry, the great actress who often worked with Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre Company, where Bram Stoker was theatre manager. Both Stoker and Irving were London Library members, joining in 1890.

We don’t have full details on the provenance of this set, but intriguingly the box contains a loose cut-out copy of Ellen Terry’s own bookplate, signed by Terry herself.

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

The David Bryce miniature Shakespeare set dedicated to Ellen Terry.

MEMBERS’ NEWS

WELCOME TO MATTHEW BROOKE We are delighted to welcome Matthew Brooke as our Director of Collections and Library Services.

After obtaining an MA in Information Services Management at the University of North London, Matthew joined Royal Holloway College, University of London, in 1997 as a Liaison Librarian for the departments of History and Social & Political Science. After holding several posts including Matthew Brooke.

Library Services Manager and Associate Director (Academic & User Services), Matthew was most recently the Acting Director of Library Services from June 2017. He held responsibility for the leadership of the library service at Royal Holloway, including the archives, special collections, art collection and exhibition space. In addition to overseeing numerous adaptations to space and services in the previous modern and Victorian libraries, he led the library’s development of the £60m Library & Student Services Centre, the Emily Wilding Davison Building, which opened in September 2017.

CONGRATULATIONS TO HANNAH SULLIVAN We’re delighted for London Library member Hannah Sullivan, who in January this year won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for her debut collection, Three Poems (2018), comprising the poems ‘You, Very Young in New York’, ‘Repeat until Time’, and ‘The Sandpit after Rain’.

Chair of this year’s judging panel Sinéad Morrissey commented: ‘It is not just the formal mastery, but how that formal mastery is so well handled as to be almost invisible.

That is the height of praise. You Hannah Sullivan. Photograph by almost don’t notice the architecture Adrian Pope. underneath because you are so compelled by what is being said … It is an absolutely exhilarating collection and it is all the more surprising that it is a debut.’

Hannah has been a London Library member since 2014 and tells us that much of ‘The Sandpit after Rain’ was written in the Library. Three Poems is only the third debut collection to win the T.S. Eliot Prize in its 25-year history.

MOST BORROWED LONDON LIBRARY BOOKS IN 2018 Here’s the top 20 – as in previous years we have excluded multivolume works, collected works and journals.

FICTION 1. A Legacy of Spies, John Le Carré (2017).

2. Munich, Robert Harris (2017).

3. Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney (2017).

4. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman (2017).

5. The Only Story, Julian Barnes (2018).

6. Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853).

7. Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday (2018).

8. A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark (1988).

9. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (1954).

10. The Silence of the Girls, Pat

Barker (2018).

11. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (2017).

12. The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst (2017).

13. Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie (2017).

14. Clock Dance, Anne Tyler (2018).

15. Howards End, E.M. Forster (1910).

16. Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan (2017).

17. Lullaby, Leï la Slimani (2016).

18. Painter to the King, Amy Sackville (2018).

19. Normal People, Sally Rooney (2018).

20. Flights, Olga Tokarczuk (2017).

NON-FICTION 1. Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time, Hilary Spurling (2017).

2. Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, Craig Brown (2017).

3. Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain, Richard Davenport-Hines (2018).

4. In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civility in Early Modern England, Keith Thomas (2018).

5. A Life of My Own, Claire Tomalin (2017).

6. The Quest for Queen Mary, James Pope-Hennessy, ed. Hugo Vickers (2018).

7. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, David Goodhart (2017).

8. To Keep the Ball Rolling, Anthony Powell (2001).

9. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017).

10. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey (2017).

11. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Maya Jasanoff (2017).

12. The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars, Adrian Tinniswood (2016).

13. Queen Mary, 1867–1953, James Pope-Hennessy (1959).

14. Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940–1950, Agnès Poirier (2018).

15. Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906, David Cannadine (2017).

16. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff (2018).

17. War in Val d’Orcia: A Diary, Iris Origo (1984).

18. The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914, Simon Heffer (2018).

19. The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray (2017).

20. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, Ronen Bergman (2018).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

REMEMBERING JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT AND LINDA KELLY We were saddened to hear recently of the deaths of two great writers and Library supporters, Justin Cartwright and Linda Kelly.

Novelist Justin Cartwright passed away on 3 December 2018, aged 75. He joined The London Library in 1978 and remained a member for the next 40 years, becoming a very regular user of the place he came to call ‘the office’.

During that time he published 13 novels, including his 1996 book In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Leading the Cheers, which won the 1998 Whitbread Book Award for Best Novel. His most recent book, Up Against the Night, appeared in 2015.

Justin was a regular contributor to the Evening Standard, the Spectator and Condé Nast Traveller, and judged the Costa Book Awards in 2016, and Man Booker International Prize in 2011.

Photograph Jaime Turner.

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Historian Linda Kelly passed away on 12 January 2019. During a writing career spanning nearly 30 years, she produced 10 acclaimed biographies focused on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century romanticism. Her first subject was Thomas Chatterton (1971); others included Sheridan (1971) and Talleyrand (2017). As well as individuals, she excelled at bringing to life historical groups: Women of the French Revolution (1989) was followed by Juniper Hall (1991) with its cast of refugees from the same revolution, while Holland House (2013) brought together champions of Catholic emancipation.

Linda joined the Library in 1994 and remained a member for the rest of her life.

We will miss Justin and Linda and their wonderful writing, and our thoughts are with their families and friends.

MEMBERS’ NEWS

EVENTS in march and april MEMBER EVENTS INTRODUCE A FRIEND EVENING 20 March 2019 6.30–8.30pm Reading Room Growing our membership is central to ensuring the Library’s long-term financial sustainability, and very often it is endorsements from existing members that encourage others to find out more about us and become familiar with everything the Library has to offer.

On 20 March we are hosting a reception in the Reading Room, inviting members to bring guests with them who they think will be interested in joining. Along with drinks and a chance to meet other Library members and members of the Library team, we will be arranging special tours and displays to give potential members a better sense of what they can expect from membership.

There will be a special offer for new members joining via the event, and members who successfully introduce a new member to the Library are entitled to a £50 discount off their next renewal as a thank you from us. If you cannot make the event but you know someone who might like to join, you are very welcome to bring them to the Library at any time to show them around.

For more information, visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ get-member

LONDON LIBRARY PUBLIC EVENTS These events are open to Library members and nonmembers, and will take place in the Reading Room at The London Library (doors open 6.30pm, talks begin 7pm).

To find out more and to book tickets, visit: londonlibrary. co.uk/about-us/whats-on

Hitler (2019), a sweeping and intimate portrait of the ministers, aristocrats and amateur diplomats who, through their action and inaction, shaped Britain’s policy and determined the fate of Europe. An eye-opening history, it is also a timeless lesson on the challenges of standing up to aggression and authoritarianism – and the calamity that results from failing to do so.

Opening Hours – During the Jhumpa Lahiri and Tim Bouverie events (below) we will be able to keep the rest of the Library open to members until 9.00pm.

Jhumpa Lahiri in conversation with Adam Thirlwell 6 March 2019, 6.30–8.30pm To coincide with the publication of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, we are joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who edited the collection and translated a number of stories within it.

In conversation with Adam Thirlwell, she discusses Italian literature, the process of translation, her awardwinning novels, and the experience of working across multiple languages and cultures. In partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute.

Tim Bouverie: On Appeasement 24 April 2019, 6.30–8.30pm Writer and broadcaster Tim Bouverie discusses his new book, Appeasing

From top Tim Bouverie, photograph Urszula Soltys; Jhumpa Lahiri.

WEBSITE CHANGES You may have noticed that our website has recently acquired a fresh new look. The changes are designed to improve the functionality of the mobile version in particular, but will also improve navigation and signposting across both the desktop and mobile versions. They also make it easier to highlight stories, events and offers likely to be of interest to members. Content will still be organised in the same main areas that members have become familiar with (such as the ‘What’s On’, ‘About Us’ and ‘Members’ Area’ pages), but the changes should improve the usability and accessibility of the information across the site.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

Fine Books, Atlases and Manuscripts Montpelier Street, London | 27 March 2019

ENTRIES INVITED FOR FUTURE SALES

ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7393 3817 books@bonhams.com bonhams.com/books

* For details of the charges payable in addition to the final hammer price, please visit bonhams.com/buyersguide

TURING (ALAN) Autograph letter signed (“A.M. Turing”) to mathematician Lionel March, regarding March’s new system of algebra, Manchester University [1953] £40,000 - 60,000 *