Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen

Abstract

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: Biography, by Elizabeth Maslen. Northwestern University Press, 2014. 556 pages. After decades of neglect, at best making cameo appearances in lists of little-read writers of the or as a star in recovery scholarship, Storm Jameson might well be on the cusp of a true revival. As part of Northwestern University Press's series Cultural Expressions of II, the second major biography of this always engaging, never flawless, luminary of twentieth-century British letters and political activism may hopefully accelerate a growing wave of critical evaluation to match the historical interest. Jameson was a vital part of world historical events of the 1930s and 1940s, working diligently through the interwar years in the peace movement and serving as a Sponsor in the Peace Pledge Union. In the years leading up to the Second War, she began assisting political refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe, the most famous of these being Czeslaw Milosz, who would be a friend to the end of her life. During the war, Jameson was elected president of PEN, the international organization of writers that, under her leadership, changed from being avowedly apolitical to becoming directly engaged with advocating for social justice against fascist regimes. It was at her behest that PEN would publish An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (1940), urging allied countries and all PEN centers to fight for universal free speech. And it was as PEN's president, though not officially speaking on its behalf, that she would publish her pamphlet End of This War (1941), the document that announced her formal break with the absolute pacifism that was crucial to her activist politics after the Great War. This impressive resume of political activity during a much studied time in European history might have been enough to merit biographical scrutiny, but Jameson was first and foremost a writer, the staggeringly prolific author or editor of seventy books of fiction, criticism, drama, politics, and memoir. Her productivity was spurred along partly by financial need, but unlike other highly productive writers--Georgette Heyer, say, or Jameson's much admired Georges Simenon--she never quite managed to make formulaic genre fiction a forte. Her letters often show a desire to have either more time to spend on a big serious novel or the capacity to crank out hack work that could readily sell. She would have neither. Reading Maslen's biography, one finds a lifelong saga of mixed reviews that fail to fully comprehend the complex, formally experimental, politically engaged fiction that it seems Jameson could not help but write. She also never seemed to be a truly rapid writer, revising heavily and spending fourteen-hour days with her fiction as well as her political activities, along with, as Maslen notes, keeping house for her husband and son. All of Jameson's Yorkshire-bred hardiness and work ethic combines with a distinct challenge for any biographer--the thicket of harsh self-criticism that pervades her letters and her monumental autobiography Journey from the North (published in Britain in two volumes, 1969-1970). Maslen is an adept reader of Jameson's writings, both the published works and the archival materials, and throughout her biography there are signs of the combative approach Maslen takes to her subject, a necessary measure it one does not wish to accept Jameson's nearly constant self-deprecation as fact. For instance, her novel That Was Yesterday (1932), which she sometimes regarded as her first mature work, begins with this disclaimer on the copyright page: A few sentences in this book, chiefly conversational, have been lifted with slight alterations from an earlier novel of the writer's. This earlier book was fortunately not much read: even more fortunately it was printed on quickly perishable paper. The pity is that it was printed at all. This, one thinks, would not inspire confidence in the prospective reader. …