IN DIALOGUE WITH ENGLISH MODERNISM: STORM JAMESON’S EARLY FORMATION AS A WRITER, 1919-1931 Deborah Frances Gerrard De Montfort University January 2010 Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy For Prue and Julia Abstract After a period during which Storm Jameson’s restricted literary identity has been that of the politically engaged woman writer, critical interest in the intellectual and stylistic complexities of her work is now reviving. Yet Jameson’s background in early English modernism and the manner in which it enriches her writing continues to pass unnoticed. This thesis uncovers new evidence of Jameson’s immersion in the early English modernisms of Alfred Orage’s Leeds Arts Club and New Age journal and of Dora Marsden’s journals, the New Freewoman and the Egoist, as an avant-garde student before the Great War. Drawing analogies with the post-colonial notions of ‘Manichean delirium’ and of ‘writing back to the centre’, this thesis argues that, subsequently – as a provincial socialist woman writer struggling to make her way at the predominantly male and elitist cultural centre – Jameson developed a vexed outsider-insider relation to English modernism which she expressed during the 1920s in a series of intertextual novels critiquing the contemporary cultural scene. It examines each of these novels chronologically, beginning with Jameson’s critique of the early modernisms of Orage, Marsden and associated writers in her first two novels, before moving on to her engagement, in turn, with the work of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Employing a socially oriented model of intertextuality, this thesis reads each novel synchronically as a sceptical and often witty probing of some of the polarised, and frequently contradictory, positions taken within the modernist debate. It also interprets the 1920s fiction diachronically as a developmental journey towards what Jennifer Birkett terms the ‘stylised realism’ of the 1930s and 40s, in which William James’s Pragmatism plays a central role, allowing Jameson to assimilate those intellectual and stylistic elements within English modernism that she values before leaving the rest behind. Acknowledgements I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Julia Briggs, a wonderful supervisor and dear friend to whose loving memory (in company with that of my mother, Prue) this thesis is dedicated, and to Andrew Thacker, who stepped in and guided me to the finish with such knowledgeable advice, patience and good humour. I am also indebted to the following generous individuals for professional help, advice, inspiration and encouragement of various kinds: Humaira Ahmed, Rebecca Beasley, Ian Bell, Jennifer Birkett, Chiara Briganti, Cathy Clay, Paul Edwards, Peregrine Horden, Mary Joannou, Lena Kore-Schroder, Henry Mead, Michael Whitworth, and John Wood. I would like to thank the University Libraries of Leeds, Edinburgh, Warwick and Princeton, the British Library and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale for granting me access to papers and archives related to this thesis and also the ‘country members’ staff at the London Library for their invaluable efficient and friendly service. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of friends and family members. Amongst many endlessly patient friends, some of whom have greeted my endeavours with real interest, others with bemused tolerance, Jane Hodge, Morag Jordan and Kathy Roberts deserve special thanks for acts of kindness that have buoyed me up during moments of difficulty and doubt. Equally, special thanks are due to my father, Peter, my sister, Phyllida, and my brother, Hugo, for their staunch loyalty and support. And thanks most of all to Philip, Simon and Jamie, whose endless love and support cannot be quantified. Finally, my grandmother, Hilda, should not be forgotten, for it was she who ardently believed that the much loved work of her old friend and fellow northerner should be rescued from its unmerited neglect and who pushed me towards playing my part. Time and changes in critical fashion have granted Hilda’s wish; I wish that she were still around to read my small contribution to Storm’s rescue. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Introduction 1 1 Whitby, Leeds, London: Jameson’s Journey into Modernism 25 Introduction 25 A Divided Childhood 26 Leeds and Social Transformation: 1909–1912 32 Apollonian London and Aesthetic Modernism: Autumn 1912–April 1914 47 Conclusion 56 2 Reconciling Modernisms in Jameson’s M.A. Thesis, ‘Modern Drama in Europe’ (1914) 58 Introduction 58 Early New Age Nietzschean-Socialism 60 Orage and Carter’s Neo-Classical – or Neo-Medieval – Drama 63 Anthony Ludovici’s ‘Hard and Dry’ Classicism 66 Edward Carpenter’s Mystical Evolutionary Socialism 70 Jameson’s Attitude to Women 72 Conclusion 74 3 ‘Master-architects’: The Pot Boils (1919) as a Satire on New Age and other Early-Modernist Messianisms 76 Introduction 76 The Pot Boils 77 A Wellsian Pragmatism 94 Conclusion 98 4 ‘Freemen … in a commonwealth of real things’: Looking Back on Pre- War Dreams of Anarchism in The Happy Highways (1920) 100 Introduction 100 A ‘Classical’ Northern Childhood 104 Anarchistic Socialism in Pre-War London 105 Ideological Disillusionment and Freud’s ‘Blindness in Seeing Eyes’ 119 The Mid-War Present and William James’s Pragmatism 126 Conclusion 130 5 Violence, Difference, Women and the Gothic: Writing Back to D. H. Lawrence in The Clash (1922) and The Pitiful Wife (1923) 132 Introduction 132 Intellectual and Cultural Background 137 A Feminist Dialogue with Lawrence’s ‘Ethics of Alterity’ in The Clash 146 Jameson Reading Lawrence Reading the Brontë Sisters and Ruskin in The Pitiful Wife 163 Conclusion 172 6 ‘The Battle of the Brows’: Writing back to Virginia Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) in Three Kingdoms (1926) 173 Prelude 173 Introduction 174 Writing Back to Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ 180 Revisioning Mrs Dalloway, Redistributing Cultural Power 184 Problematising Partisan Positions 196 Conclusion 201 7 A ‘Voyage Home’ from Modernism: Wyndham Lewis, William James and The Triumph of Time (1927–1931) 203 Introduction 203 Time and Western Man (1927) 208 Responding to Lewis in ‘The Decline of Fiction’ (1929) and The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson (1929) 210 Lewis and James in The Voyage Home (1930) and A Richer Dust (1931) 215 Conclusion 232 Conclusion 235 Works Cited and Select Bibliography 242 ABBREVIATIONS CJ Storm Jameson. Civil Journey. London: Cassell, 1939. GN Storm Jameson. The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson. New York: Morrow, 1929. HH Storm Jameson. The Happy Highways. London: Heinemann, 1920. JMHR Storm Jameson. The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell. London: Macmillan, 1945. JN Storm Jameson. Journey From the North. 2 vols. London: Collins and Harvill, 1969- 70. LG D. H. Lawrence. The Lost Girl. 1921. London: Penguin, 1950. MD Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Granada, 1976. MDE Storm Jameson. Modern Drama in Europe. London: Collins, 1920. NTLP Storm Jameson. No Time Like the Present. London: Cassell, 1933. PB Storm Jameson. The Pot Boils. London: Constable, 1919. PW Storm Jameson. The Pitiful Wife. London: Constable, 1923. R D. H. Lawrence. The Rainbow. 1915. Cambridge: CUP, 1989. RDP D. H. Lawrence. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. 1925. Cambridge: CUP, 1988. SCAL D. H. Lawrence. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. TOT Storm Jameson. The Triumph of Time. London: Heinemann, 1932. TWM Wyndham Lewis. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1993. TWY Storm Jameson. That Was Yesterday. 1932. New York: Berkley, 1976. WIL D. H. Lawrence. Women in Love. Cambridge: CUP, 1987. 3Ks Storm Jameson. Three Kingdoms. London: Constable, 1926. Introduction The conventions of the avant-garde are not less an orthodoxy. (Jameson, Writer’s 61) The truest eye may … belong to the migrant‟s double vision. (Bhabha 7–8) In their introduction to the first essay collection to be devoted to Storm Jameson‟s work, Margaret Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue (2007), Jennifer Birkett and Chiara Briganti observe that „the cultural community that can read all the levels of her work is only now emerging‟ (1). This is particularly true of the early work, the nature of which has been obscured both by Jameson‟s misleading accounts of it in her various autobiographies and by her subsequent reputation as a social-realist writer. This thesis focuses on Jameson‟s early writing between 1919 and 1931, shortly before anti-Fascism „swung [her] round the compass as a writer‟ and she began to write those social-realist novels for which she is best known (JNI 300).1 In this study it is argued that what is distinctive and fascinating about her early work is the dialogue with English modernism that it develops from the perspective of a cultural outsider-insider, in Jameson‟s case that of a provincial socialist woman writer who had been deeply immersed in the avant-garde as a student in Leeds and London before the Great War. Excavating the relevant modernist intertexts and reading the early novels alongside them, a picture begins to emerge of the commitment, sophistication and seriousness of this dialogue, although the astuteness of Jameson‟s cultural-criticism-as-fiction can also be highly amusing. The rediscovery of this early work thus provides one possible answer to the question, „What other aesthetic and political agendas were … erased from cultural memory … as the literary avant-garde achieved cultural legitimacy …?‟ (Ardis, Modernism 7). The novels are also of value for the light they shed on so much that comes later in Jameson‟s work, for in them we observe how she begins to forge her identity as a writer. 1 It does not include either That Was Yesterday (1932) or A Day Off (1933), since although both these texts were written before Jameson returned to London to fight Fascism in 1932, they were written after October 1930, the moment of literary crisis during which she made the decision to „civilize‟ herself as a writer (JNI 283).