Margaret Storm Jameson and the London PEN Centre: Mobilising Commitment1 Jennifer Birkett (University of Birmingham) Founded in London in October 1921 by Mrs. C. A. Dawson Scott, PEN (“Poets, Essayists and Novelists”) started life as a literary dining club, on the American model. Its beginnings were explicitly apolitical – refusal to take any particular political stand was one of the founding principles – and politeness was its watchword. John Galsworthy was invited to be first President, in preference to H. G. Wells, partly because he was “big enough to act as a magnet to draw in all the rest,” but mostly because he had no enemies: “He is charming, delightful, a pleasant speaker, has infinite tact. And he’s a gentleman. H. G. isn’t” (Watts, 98). Galsworthy remained President until his death in January 1933. By then, the times were changing, and the ungentlemanly Wells would be the choice to replace him. Wells took over just in time to lead the London Centre’s protests to the exile of Ernst Toller and Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and then to chair the 11th PEN Congress in Dubrovnik. There he ensured that the German Centre was made to answer for its failure to protest against the Burning of the Books in 1933, the ill treatment of intellectuals in Germany, and the Berlin Centre’s withdrawal of membership rights for Communists. At the next international meeting, the German Centre was formally expelled. In the next few years, Wells struggled with varying success to reconcile some members’ demands that PEN stay out of politics with the imperative to speak out in defence of such as the Marxist Ludwig Renn and the pacifist Carl von Ossietsky. On his retirement in 1936, he was succeeded briefly by J. B. Priestley, and then by Henry Nevinson, but times were changing again. As war drew nearer, both the founders and officers of PEN recognised an urgent need for a different kind of leadership. Margaret Storm Jameson, the young Turk recruited to the committee in the mid-1930s, held the English Presidency during much of the Second World War, from September 28 1938, just before Chamberlain returned from Munich, until her resignation in April 1944. The dining and the clubbing continued, but the networks they sustained were put to the service of a new kind of institution. The liberal preoccupations of the literary grandees of pre-war PEN and the outspoken left-wing politics of the younger generation of engaged writers were brought together, to create a broad ground for uncompromising speech and committed action. It was the ground that wartime Britain – and Europe – needed for their survival, and Jameson was uniquely placed to preside over its making. This essay will examine how her own socialist commitment came to marry effectively with the goals of wartime PEN, indicate some of the key networks and contacts she harnessed to the work of the institution, and point to the changes she envisaged for Western society, after the war, to which she hoped this newly-mobilised PEN could contribute. Jameson was Mrs Dawson Scott’s choice in 1937 to be Secretary to Henry Nevinson’s President. Of the then Committee, she was clearly the best prospect. She was known nationally and internationally. In publishing circles, she had friends and contacts worldwide, both as a result of her work in the 1920s as the young London representative of A. A. Knopf and the growing reputation of her own writing. Her novels were well-distributed in both Britain and the United States, and already, by the 1930s, were reaching Europe in translation. Her journalism appeared both in small left-wing reviews and the popular national press. In the 1920s, she had enjoyed the patronage of her elders, from Orage to Galsworthy and Forster, and in the 1930s, she mixed with a younger generation of engaged writers. She wrote for Edgell Rickword, she 1. The research for the project from which this paper was written (a literary biography of Margaret Storm Jameson) was generously facilitated by a Research Leave award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, travel awards from the AHRC and the British Academy, and by research leave and travel funding from the University of Birmingham. I should also like to acknowledge the kind assistance provided by the librarians of the Brotherton Library Leeds, the Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas, and the Institut Français, London. Birkett, Jennifer. “Margaret Storm Jameson and the London PEN Centre: Mobilising Commitment.” EREA 4.2 81 (automne 2006): 81-89. <www.e-rea.org> corresponded with James Hanley and helped him publish, and she attended an early meeting of the Writers’ Committee of the Anti-War Council, in October 1933 or 1934, where W. H. Auden, she was relieved to note, was also present (JN I, 307). She had close connections with both radical and conservative politicians in the Labour movement, and with trade unionists. Through her second husband, Guy Chapman, she had links with influential political journalists, radical academics, and various highly-placed figures in the cultural and military establishment. Her commitment to socialism was probably not part of Mrs Dawson Scott’s calculation, though it certainly seems to have done her no harm. She brought to PEN a radical past stretching back thirty years, in which she had shared most of the experiences of contemporaries across the whole range of the expanding British middle classes, and her life touched, at the extremes, both aristocracy and working classes. Each decade of the first half of the twentieth century had seen her engaging with its key social and political issues, and always from the left. She was, in every sense of the word, a representative intellectual of her generation. Jameson’s formative years were the 1910s, the period of her Yorkshire adolescence. She was part of the cohort of impoverished middle-class (and a very few working-class) young people who profited from the national expansion of education in that decade. Scholarships were provided to enable the brightest children to stay on in secondary education, and then to enter the expanding university system. The intention was to turn them into the teachers and trainers of a new workforce that would make Britain more competitive in European and international markets. She went to the prestigious Scarborough Municipal School, famous for encouraging the bright children of the less well-to-do, and then to a recently-established Leeds University. She could have gone on to be an inspiring headmistress, a university academic, or a fairly high- up civil servant in the Ministry of Education. But at school in Scarborough she met the charismatic Harland brothers, from a family of extremely poor dalesmen, and from them learned the thrill of ideas, especially political ideas, and the commitment to social justice she retained all her life. They introduced her to Orage’s journal, The New Age, and through it the three discovered together H. G. Wells, Anatole France in his Dreyfusard and Voltairean mode, a conviction that education for opportunity and freedom was the way forward for the working classes, and a loathing for the bureaucratic elitism of Fabian socialism. At Leeds University, between 1909 and 1912, she acquired a reputation as a socialist and feminist activist; and from that time on, industrial society and the intellectual were inseparable in her imagination: How convey the spirit of those north-country universities? Oxford is in another world. … As I walked about Leeds, I felt around me and under my feet the pulse of a vast machine. I might be in a university library bent over an Anglo-Saxon grammar but five minutes’ walk brought me to the place where, through a gap in the houses, I stared at the ring of factories closing in the town on three sides. By day hideous, at night flames writhed from the chimneys – that was indescribably beautiful and exciting. (No Time Like the Present 52) Her 1930s trilogy, The Mirror in Darkness, which models the forces at work in British society in the early 1920s that led to the making, and then the collapse, of the General Strike in 1926, traces a period in which politics for her took second place to personal matters (her first husband’s infidelity, a divorce, and her marriage with Chapman, their joint struggle to establish his publishing firm, her attempts to make a name in popular journalism, and her first operation for serious illness). By the end of 1926, at the latest, she was a member of PEN, and developing a close friendship there with Amabel Williams-Ellis, John Strachey’s sister and daughter of St. Loe Strachey, founder of The Spectator (letter from Jameson to Hermon Ould, 1st December 1926, in the Storm Jameson Collection, Letters from Storm Jameson to PEN, Folder 1926-38, HRC). Her activities at that point would seem still to have been more social than socialist. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, returned to her political commitment, she was working with local activists in the Labour Party in Whitby and Scarborough and making her first European political contacts with trade unionists. She was one of the many outraged by the treachery of Ramsay Macdonald and Philip Snowden and their ditching of the socialist ambitions of the Labour Party for the budget-balancing of the National Government. She was back in London in 1932 when Chapman enrolled at the London School of Economics to study social and Birkett, Jennifer. “Margaret Storm Jameson and the London PEN Centre: Mobilising Commitment.” EREA 4.2 82 (automne 2006): 81-89. <www.e-rea.org> economic history with R.