J.N.W. Sullivan & Colin Wilson — ‘The Desirability of the Ordinary.’

Found in a pamphlet by Colin Wilson: Autobiographical Reflections (Paupers' Press, 1980) this quotation from the writer J.W.N. Sullivan. Sullivan was a friend of Aldous Huxley & John Middleton Murry, later he knew Aleister Crowley and was part of Ottoline Morrell's intellectual country house salon at Garsington in the 1920s. In the first World War he worked in the ambulance services in Serbia. Colin Wilson writes of him:

I have always felt that the very essence of the human problem was grasped by that fine music critic, J. W. N. Sullivan, in his classic autobiography But For the Grace of God (London: Jonathan Cape 1932). He writes about the first world war:

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The Air of Bloomsbury 3

The last part of an article found in a Times Literary Supplement from 1954 - a very lengthy anonymous review of J.K. Johnstone's The Bloomsbury Group. This part is good on on their attitude to mysticism (see Cambridge conviction). At the time there was still a debate as to whether the Bloomsbury Set actually existed. In Clive Bell's slightly irascible article in Century in February 1954 What was 'Bloomsbury'? he continually asks whether it actually existed - as far as he could see it was just 'a dozen friends..between 1904 and 1914 (who) saw a great deal of each other...' He names these '...the surviving members of the Midnight Society -Thoby Stephen (died in the late autumn of 1906) Leonard Woolf...Lytton Strachey (who actually lived in Hampstead) Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell. There were the two ladies. Add to these Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, H.T.J.Norton and perhaps Gerald Shove...certainly Desmond and Molly MacCarthy and Morgan Forster were close and affectionate friends but I doubt whether any of them has yet been branded with the fatal name..' Bell refers to these as the 'old gang' and names a few younger candidates: David Garnett, Francis Birrell, Raymond Mortimer, Stephen Tomlin, Ralph Partridge , Stephen Sprott, F.L. Lucas and Frances Marshall ((later Mrs Ralph Partridge). This review is anonymous but is certainly by someone who knew his (or her) stuff.

Yet as temperaments appear to run in families they retained a passionate individualist faith, though without obligations. 'We were,' says Maynard Keynes, 'in the strict sense of the word immoralists, we recognized no moral obligations on us, no inner sanction to conform or to obey.' It was this rejection of tradition, combined with 'comprehensive irreverence,' which made them suspect to the outer world. lt was 'I think a justifiable suspicion,' he says, and proceeds with admirable candour, wit and yet loyalty to show that there was something both brittle and far too narrow in their early views, and perhaps dubious about their later lives, when 'concentration on moments of union between a pair of lovers got thoroughly mixed up with the once rejected pleasure.'

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Iris Murdoch and friends

Found – a photo of a crowd of writers and intellectuals. The novelist Iris Murdoch is recognisable, with her husband John Bayley to her left and the man in suit and tie second last to the right is possibly Isaiah Berlin (without his usual heavy specs) described in an obituary ‘as the most prominent thinker of his generation.’ Probably from the early to mid 1970s and possibly taken in the garden of Iris’s house Cedar Lodge at Steeple Aston near Oxford. Oxford may well have provided most of the guests, some of whom look vaguely familiar. Identifications welcome.

Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde

From a large spiritualist collection this curiosity Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (Psychic Book Club, London 1924) published 24 years after his death and purporting to be spirit communications from purgatory with the great writer. Why Oscar was in purgatory and not heaven is not explained (although he famously said 'I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.') One of the communicants, Eric Dingwall (described online as '...a man of many parts – psychical researcher, librarian, book and antique collector, anthropologist, sexologist, intelligence operative) was no mere gullible spiritualist and occasionally they get Oscar's tone...his damning opinion of Joyce's recently published Ulysses is interesting, but it seems more likely Oscar would have approved...

COPY OF AUTOMATIC SCRIPT OBTAINED MONDAY,

JUNE 18TH, 1923.

Present.-Mr. V., Mrs. Travers Smith, Mr. B., Mr. Dingwall (Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research), Miss Cummins.

Mr. V. was the automatist, Mrs. T.S. touching his hand.

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Major-General Fuller on ‘The Black Arts’

From The Occult Review in April 1926 this article by J.F.C. Fuller. Major-General John Frederick Charles Fuller, CB, CBE, DSO (1878–1966) was a British Army officer, military historian and strategist, notable as an early theorist of modern armoured warfare. He was also the inventor of "artificial moonlight". He was also something of an occultist and an early fan of Aleister Crowley and author of a book on him The Star in The West: a critical essay upon the works of Aleister Crowley (Walter Scott Publishing Co., London, 1907).This article was also published in Austin Osman Spare's magazine Form. When later Fuller attempted to distant himself from Crowley to advance his military career The Great Beast fired this salvo at him:

I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don't think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P. Morgan depends on his favourite clerk.

As to Fuller's merits as a writer, it is probable that he wrote better prose as a military tactician than a follower of the occult. Worth noting in this longish piece is Fuller's quotation from Arthur Machen-- an over-the-top rant about the British Museum Reading Room:

O dim, far-lifted, and mighty dome, Mecca of many minds,
mausoleum of many hopes, sad house where all desires fail! For there men enter in with hearts uplifted, and dreaming minds, seeing in those exalted stairs a ladder to fame, in that pompous portico the gate of knowledge, and going in, find but vain vanity, and all but in vain...

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Wheatley – a motley collection

Two press cuttings about a sale of papers belonging to  Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977) writer of thrillers and occult novels. Dated 5th August 1984. The reports, which mention the sum of money (£1100) as if it were a fortune, differ in emphasis and depth. One reporter, Cowdry, seems to have gone through the lot himself. He also seems to suggest that the secret lover had become a 'difficulty', requiring the services of a private detective.

Riddle of an author in love
By Phillip Jordan

Dennis Wheatley prided himself on being the writer who put sex into English thrillers.His middle-class heroes and heroines used not only to battle the forces of Satanism, but also to go to bed with each other even when they were not married.
Yesterday, seven years after Wheatley died, a mystery worthy of his own pen developed – over his love life.
The clues came from an auction in Bournemouth of 15 boxes of the author's personal papers. They included a bundle of about 100 letters and notes from women.
The mystery is over seven letters posted to him in 1926, three years after he married his first wife Nancy.
One thanks him for 'last night'. Another says: 'You must know, darling, I would do anything to be with you.' All are signed lovingly, 'Gwen'.
But the correspondence ends abruptly in the first week of December, 1926. And alongside the letters in Lot 464, which fetched £1,100, are a series of reports from Thomas P. Cox, private investigator.These, headed 'G.M.L.,' give details of how detectives followed a woman from the same address in Ashley Gardens, London, which was at the top of the letters from 'Gwen'. 
And they are pinned to other reports tracking down the background of an apparently wealthy shipbroker, Thomas Albert Clements of Lansdowne Road, Holland Park. And a man from Reading, seemingly known to 'G.M.L.,' called Kilpatrick.
In 1931 Wheatley married for a second time. His new wife Joan Johnstone had the middle name Gwendoline. But the initials did not match: She was 'J.G.J.' not 'G.M.L.'.
Auctioneer Trevor Langton said that the man selling the papers had no connection with Wheatley, whose second wife died in 1982.
The author's son, publisher Anthony Wheatley, said: 'We know nothing about this auction.'

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Walt Whitman Parody

From a Ignes Fatui, a Book of Parodies by Philip Guedalla (Oxford 1911) Parodic poems and playlets written while Guedalla was at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. Some of the parodies are of slightly forgotten authors like W.E. Henley and Maeterlinck (a piece that sounds like  Beckett's Godot) but he also lampoons Macaulay, Swinburne, Kipling, Baedeker, Omar Khayyam, Hardy, Shakespeare and Shaw. Here is his Whitman squib - at the time Whitman's reputation was still breaking in England.

'Walt Whitman, Inciting the Bird of
Freedom to Soar' by Max Beerbohm 1904

Canzonette to Democracy

I sing the song of me mendacious and the lies of
me mendacious:

I see God give the Land to the People, and the
grasshoppers on the Land,

I see double! Libertad, Americanos, Libertad I
cry. (No, I will not keep quiet.)

I want Eight, Votes for Women, brilliantine, a half blue,
one Man one Pub., Home Rule for Wales and a National Theatre.

Allons, camerados, let us tax the foreigner; let's
tax him in Paumanok, Manhattan, Oswego
and Illinois, but especially in Illinois.

I care nothing, or comparatively nothing for 
Second Chambers, Revising or otherwise. I 
am not a Peer: are you?

How hot you all look, the En Masse, the Tout
Ensemble: I too am hot from my unkempt
hair-thatch to the ten curling toes, each self
-contained with its individual nail.

O Columbia, how hot I am!

[Oxford 1910]

The tone is reminiscent of Rick the 'people's poet' from The Young Ones but it passes the first test of parody - i.e. you know who is being parodied...not sure what 'Eight' was however.

The Estate of the late F.Scott Fitzgerald

After his death, there was $706 cash in hand, Frances Kroll wrote Judge Briggs; $613.25 would go for burial expenses: “casket and services $410; shipping $30; city tax $1.50; transportation (to Baltimore) $117.78.” His worldly goods consisted of:

1 trunkful of clothes

4 crates of books

1 carton of scrapbooks and photographs

1  small trunk with some personal effects—the Christmas presents sent him, personal jewellery (watch, cuff links), several scrapbooks and photographs

2  wooden work tables, lamp, radio

Is this how a man ends? — a few crates “dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies” (from the brief verse found in his desk after his death).

From College of One: The Story of How F. Scott Fitzgerald Educated the Woman He Loved (1967) by Sheilah Graham.

Salinger reading Salinger

An auction concluded this August at the august RR Auctions where a credit card receipt signed by the reclusive J. D. Salinger made $450. It was described thus:

Receipt for a purchase of two books at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, NH, on November 11, 2001, 2.75 x 7.5, signed in black ballpoint, “J. Salinger.” In fine condition, with an area of slight staining at the bottom. Pre-certified PSA/DNA and RR Auction COA.

This was spotted by a Jot101 reader (many thanks JK) who saw the salient point in the lot – one of the books was about the writer himself With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond To The Work Of J.D. Salinger.

This writer remembers Catcher in the Rye being confiscated at school in the 1960s and one of the ‘Squalor’ contributors, Walter Kirn, talks of how the book was snatched from his hand and thrown across the floor at college when he was reading it after the murder of John Lennon (it was reported that his assassin had found secret messages in the novel.) It is not uncommon for a writer to buy books about himself – we had a copy of J. Franklin Bruce’s book on Robert Heinlein extensively annotated by Heinlein. Of course being notably litigious JDS may have been looking for something to put his lawyers on to…

Oscar and the Oxford bullies

T. Earle Welby (1881-1933) is an almost forgotten writer, columnist and character. He is at present unknown to Wikipedia although Bill Greenwell writes about him at his blog about the New Statesman competition.  It's odd that this should be his only memorial as he was somewhat right wing and hostile to democracy.He enjoyed conversation, and was known for a mannerism whereby he used a sideways movement of his hand for emphasis, which, since it was often associated with his reminiscence of India, was described by a wit as 'the Calcutta Sweep.' His collection of literary essays has a review of a memoir by the actor manger Sir Frank Benson who was at Oxord with Oscar Wilde. Welby writes:

Oscar Wilde, a contemporary at another college, was, (Sir Frank) tells us, so far from being in those days 'a flabby aesthete' that only one man in that college was physically his match. Four raggers having decided to wreck his rooms, Wilde knocked down three, picked up the fourth and carried that vainly struggling enemy to his rooms, piled up all his furniture on top of the poor wretch, and then invited a crowd which had changed its allegiance to celebrate the triumph in the wines of that parsimonious creature. Excellent! and, disapproving of those who engage in horseplay with ass-sense, were I capable of tampering consciously with the sacred text of Peacock I should comment :

'The wines of beasts provide our feast,
And their overthrow our chorus.'

But, and alas! it is very evident Sir Frank Benson thinks that if Wilde had kept to throwing hefty men downstairs he would have written something better than that matchless play, The Importance of Being Earnest, which is at once the perfect comedy of manners and the perfect parody of the comedy of manners.

**Welby is included in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations for this piece from his culinary book The Dinner Knell : '"Turbot, sir," said the waiter, placing before me two fishbones, two eyeballs, and a bit of black mackintosh…'