Review: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and Networks of Modernism

This review appeared first in Virginia Woolf Bulletin No. 39, January 2012.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, ed. Helen Southworth, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (ISBN 978 0 7486 4227 4), 2010, £70

Did you know that the Hogarth Press published the first novel written by a Muslim to appear in English, the first book in English by a Kikuyu, and the first English translation of the earliest autobiography written in Russian?  Or that it had two official wolf’s head logos from 1928 onwards?  Among the virtues of this nine-essay collection is the important attention its array of topics and approaches brings to the Press’s own rich diversity of writers, topics, genres, styles and perspectives in the period 1917–41.

Through these nine perspectives we see Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their press occupying a variety of liminal spaces—aesthetic, philosophical, political, pragmatic—in the midst of dramatic societal changes shaped by two world wars.  Anna Snaith subtly discusses ‘hybridity of resistance’ (120) in Bloomsbury’s complex anti-colonialism, while Stephen Barkway conveys the way in which the Woolfs manoeuvred within a small space between criticism and calculation on the one side, and advocacy and loyalty on the other.  Mark Hussey contributes invaluable depth to the book’s presentation of idiosyncratic editorial decisions through a close reading of a threshold image in Joan Easdale’s Amber Innocent.[1]

There is a space called the threshold,
Immeasurably long or unaccountably short,
But it is crossed, and all that is remembered
Is where we have left and where we have arrived.
But Amber did not cross, she stepped in to the threshold. (quoted 45)

The Press engaged with writers and artists in a transition as complex as Amber’s step.  Through the resulting exchange, it both lent and borrowed value.  Accordingly, these essays examine the ‘cultural capital’ (56) or ‘symbolic capital’ (181) invested by the various actors in a publishing endeavour.  Social and economic class, as well as race and gender, come strongly into play as Leonard and Virginia employ scholarly-class clout and savvy activism to build their brand, the Hogarth Press.

In the first of three essays grouped as ‘Class and Culture’, Hussey places the poetry of Joan Easdale in the foreground of a complex milieu.  Contemporary reviews of 1930s British poetry and the Hogarth approach to poetry (especially after the arrival of John Lehmann) frame the social relationships surrounding Easdale’s introduction to the Press.  In publishing eighteen-year-old Easdale’s work, Virginia went directly against the advice she offered in ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ to ‘publish nothing before you are thirty’ (quoted 34).  Hussey’s contextualisation opens new windows on Easdale’s poetry and throws light on Virginia’s multifaceted attitudes toward and interactions with poems and poets.  His essay provides telling details to fill out Southworth’s notion of ‘a lively counterpublic sphere peopled by a network of innovators’ (16).

Melissa Sullivan’s essay on popular fiction writers Rose Macaulay and E. M. Delafield attempts with mixed success to sort out the different kinds of cultural capital invested by the Press and by the writers themselves in their lesser-known scholarly works.  Sullivan posits that those works indicate ‘the fluid boundaries between highbrow and middlebrow spheres’ (56).  Unfortunately, her own argument becomes muddied as elements of her conceptual framework, such as ‘highbrow’ and ‘modernist’, conflate into indistinctness.  Along the way, however, she offers an effective sketch of the remarkable range of women writers published under the Hogarth impress in the interwar period—from Edith Sitwell and Lady Rhondda to Laura Riding and Gertrude Stein.

Diane F. Gillespie, focusing on the Press’s religion list, highlights its ‘direct interrogations of entrenched religious concepts and institutions’ (74).  Gillespie’s research unearths surprising background details: Logan Pearsall Smith (from a Quaker family like ‘Apostles’ Roger Fry and R. B. Braithwaite) was as a child the subject of a pamphlet, How Little Logan Was Brought to Jesus, by his revivalist father.  Gillespie summarises four diverse books and explores their intersections with the careers of Leonard and of Virginia.  For instance, Braithwaite’s book The State of Religious Belief is an interpretation of responses to a ‘Questionnaire on Religious Belief’ in The Nation authored by Leonard.  Gillespie invites the reader to view these intersections in terms of a ‘cultural context for certain aspects of Virginia Woolf’s own desire to create’ (76).

The second group of essays, ‘Global Bloomsbury’, begins with Snaith’s examination of Hogarth collaborations with Mulk Raj Anand (“a voluntary exile after his arrest for nationalist agitation in India” 107) and Trinidadian C. L. R. James.  Snaith presents these collaborations as points from which to evaluate the Press’s international character, especially its dissemination of anti-colonial theory.  She writes convincingly that the ‘outsider-insider status’ (105) of both Leonard and Virginia facilitated the creation of the Press as a ‘hub’ (106) connecting them with other ‘outsider-insiders’.  Snaith underlines the Press’s commitments to freedom of speech and to revolution, not only in the forms of art but also in social and political systems.  At the same time, the mixture of socialism with avant-garde aesthetics reveals ‘the impossibility of pure or all-pervasive resistance’ (121).

John K. Young’s essay on South African-born William Plomer converses helpfully with Snaith’s piece.  Young focuses on Plomer’s specific outsider-insider experience, a ‘sense of dislocatedness’ (131) that exists ‘somewhere between belonging and dispersion’ (quoted 129).  The Press published nine titles (including five fiction works) by Plomer, who lived in Japan for three years before settling in England.  Young analyses the narrative strategies in Plomer’s ‘challenging representations’ (145) of race, sex, class and colonialism.  Young also notes the connection of Plomer’s books to other Hogarth publications (such as Anna Whyte’s Lights Are Bright 1936) concerned with revising ‘conventional notions of gender and nationality’ (146) and resulting in ‘a queer geomodernism’ (145).

Jean Mills’s essay steers us away from ‘Anglo-Afro-Asian’ (quoting Plomer, 137) concerns and delivers us into the midst of Russian matters.  This is my favourite of the essays because of its focus on Jane Harrison, linguistics and translation, and because of its attention to the transmission of literature.  Mills writes a compelling piece telling how an odd assortment of political leftists, who were also lovers of language, collaborated to publish an English translation of the autobiography of the martyr Archpriest Avvakum, an extremist leader of seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox Old Believers.  The key players are scholar, linguist and Russophile Harrison, writer (and long-time companion of Harrison) Hope Mirrlees, Russian literary historian and critic D. S. Mirsky, and the Woolfs.  They are connected not only through the Avvakum translation, but also through Mills’s analysis of a shared crisis of identity consisting, as Mirsky himself put it, of a ‘combination of a Radical intellect with Conservative tastes and manners’ (166).  Mills highlights in Avvakum’s voice ‘simplicity, sincerity and vitality’ (171) and argues that Mirsky, Harrison and Virginia valued and strived for these qualities in their own work.

The last section, ‘Marketing Other Modernisms’, follows its predecessors in containing three diverse essays.  Elizabeth Willson Gordon’s on E. McKnight Kauffer stands out as the only contribution focusing on visual art.  Her richly detailed piece provides context for and gives instances of Kauffer’s dedication to ‘bridging or combining art and commerce’ (189).  Gordon sees Kauffer as the artist type described by Roger Fry in his 1926 Hogarth Art and Commerce: ‘an intolerant individualist claiming a kind of divine right to the convictions of his peculiar sensibility’ (191).  Fry and Kauffer crossed paths repeatedly, and Fry and his Omega Workshops participated in a cluster of concerns shared by Kauffer and the Press: aesthetic emotion, priority of form, and the putative contradiction between good artwork and good salesmanship.  Gordon sees both Kauffer and the Press as ‘placing importance on … the concepts of integrity and merit’ (193).  The multiplicity of products by both Kauffer and the Press prove crucial to understanding Kauffer’s contributions to the success of the Hogarth brand: the 1928 wolf’s-head logo and numerous striking dust-jackets.

Southworth on working class writers provides an overview of significant Hogarth titles that attempt ‘to represent a range of voices and to reach a range of readers’ (229).  Coal: A Challenge to the National Conscience (1927), Lancashire Under the Hammer (1928) and Drifting Men (1930), among others, show the Press’s engagement with the British worker ‘as subject, as author, and as reader’ (206).  Southworth gives extensive summaries of John Hampson’s and Huw Menai’s work and suggests ways in which the ‘socio-political works of the Press’ (216) may be read in conversation with Leonard’s and Virginia’s writings.

Barkway’s study closes the collection with attention to an often-overlooked aspect of Vita Sackville-West’s relationship to Virginia: the professional relationship of writer to publisher.  In establishing Leonard’s role as essential to managing the emotional gamble of mixing business and intimate friendship, Barkway traces subtle negotiations to be found in the extant correspondence, drawing on unpublished letters from the Hogarth Press Archive at the University of Reading.  Leonard is seen acting with respect and skill to maximise important details of timing and presentation.  In contrast, Virginia’s letters provide lighter, humorous remarks that reveal a mixture of discomfort and pleasure in acting as publisher to writer (and competitor) Vita, her ‘Dearest Creature’ (see Letters, passim).

As editor, Southworth extends ‘the study of networks’ (13) to the labyrinthine connections surrounding the Hogarth Press, opening intriguing paths of inquiry.  Strong in isolated passages, the introduction she provides nevertheless guides us inadequately.  Southworth’s discussion seems to assume that networks belong uniquely to modernism; there is no indication that networks could be essential and consequential to writers and presses in other eras.  Further, though supported by well-documented critical discourses, the informing concept of network here remains a chimera, first obscured by jargon, then by confusing sentence structures.  For instance, Southworth writes that ‘the Hogarth Press, as an idea, a physical institution and a site of cultural capital, became a node that linked together writers as disparate as Anand, Easdale, Menai and Sackville-West with emergent cultural formations like the middlebrow, religion, and globalism’ (21).  Is a network a metaphor, or is it a perceptible structure in a given time and place?  In what sense is religion emergent here?  Southworth’s worthwhile project of problematising one-dimensional views of modernism thus becomes mired in an underlying lack of delineation.

A variety of small copy-editing mistakes combine to distract from valuable passages in the book.  For example, on page 76, the section-title, ‘The desire to create . . . gone slightly crooked’, incorrectly punctuates the quotation from Virginia’s Letters (no. 1742)—yet it is correctly rendered in the text on the same page.  The reader pauses to wonder which is correct.

The occasional flaws in the book’s fabric do not prevent the enjoyment of its beauties.  The physical volume itself is lovely, with dark-cherry cloth-covered boards and a dust-jacket that pays homage in two ways to Hogarth design.  It echoes the 1920 Hogarth cover for Logan Pearsall Smith’s Stories from the Old Testament (illustrated on p. 79) and it reproduces a graphic pattern used in 1917 on cloth wrappers for Two Stories.[2]  The volume includes thirteen absorbing black-and-white illustrations, including Kauffer’s striking abstract dust-jacket design for T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi (1927).  Worthwhile, too, are the ‘Hogarth Press Timeline’, the appendix of Vita Sackville-West publications, and especially the ‘Works Cited’ lists, fascinating to peruse in their ranges of dates, genres and subjects represented.

The chief strength of the book lies in its most compelling analytical passages, where Bulletin readers will find impetus for further work.  Hussey’s close reading of Easdale’s work includes analysis of intersections between her work and Virginia’s.  He shows not only that Easdale and her mentor share in their imagery an exploration of ‘vision’ and ‘solidity’ (46) but also that the two concepts are related, citing Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and the character Rhoda in The Waves.  In highlighting their common search to portray ‘the moment as eternity’ (quoted 47), Hussey’s work perhaps opens an avenue of interchange between modernism and romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe).  Hussey’s essay converses with Gillespie’s in this area.  Gillespie writes that Virginia ‘is among those who [focus on] inner lives, unified by larger patterns’ (76–7).  She quotes Virginia’s ‘A Sketch of the Past’:  ‘We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself’ (77).  A persistent challenge for Woolfians remains articulating the pivot between Virginia’s visionary imagery and her worldly engagements with socio-economic issues of money and violence.

Young supports this train of thought with his observations on Plomer’s work: ‘Turbott Wolfe [Hogarth 1926] critiques the South African race/sex system while also retaining a textual self-awareness of its situatedness within that system’ (138).  Reading this in light of Snaith’s discussion of Virginia’s ‘hybridity of resistance’ (120), we can posit that Virginia’s texts offer critiques with parallel self-awareness of situatedness.  Young’s discussion of Plomer’s ‘reliable elliptical narration’ (quoted 142) likewise furnishes food for thought with respect to Virginia’s narrative strategies, especially in The Waves.  In the same vein, Southworth’s description of Virginia’s tendency toward non-polemical humanism in her ‘interrogations into the relationship between class and reading and writing’ (229) offers another perspective on the challenges of liminal spaces.

In her exploration of Hogarth liminality, Snaith notes that in ‘1917 Virginia was closely involved in researching and indexing for Empire and Commerce in Africa’ and that she ‘used a phrase from one of Leonard’s epigraphs to the book in A Room of One’s Own’ (118).  Snaith further highlights Leonard’s critique of the ‘extreme nationalist psychology in [imperialism’s] victims’ (quoted 115) and Virginia’s interest in ‘the androgynous union of Shiva and Shakti’ (115).  These seemingly disparate but nevertheless related observations support a characterisation of Virginia’s novels, Leonard’s critiques, and the Hogarth Press’s diversity as representing ‘the plethora of motivating and interdependent forces … that determine … capacity for change’ (121).  Through its richly detailed contributions, wide in scope, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism demonstrates that vital forces for change include variegated strands of artistry and revolution, and that these strands cannot in the end be separated when we consider Leonard, Virginia and the Hogarth Press.

Karen R. Daubert