Jameson, Storm (1891–1986)

British novelist, playwright, literary critic, editor, and administrator who, as the first woman president of the English Center of International P.E.N., worked vigorously to help writers escape from Nazi Germany and Eastern European countries before and during the Second World War. Name variations: (pseudonyms) James Hill and William Lamb. Born Margaret Storm Jameson on January 8, 1891, in Whitby, York-shire, England; died in Cambridge, England, on September 30, 1986; daughter of Hannah Margaret (Gallilee) Jameson and William Storm Jameson (a sea captain); first woman graduate in English, Leeds University, B.A. (first class honors), 1912; King's College, London, M.A., 1914; married second husband Guy Patterson Chapman (a writer and historian), on February 1, 1926 (died 1972); children: (first marriage) Charles William Storm Clark.

Awards, honors:

John Ruteau fellowship (1912–13); D.Litt., Leeds University (1948); English Center of International P.E.N. award (1974) for There Will Be a Short Interval.

Worked as a copywriter for the Carlton Agency, a London advertising firm (1918–19); was editor of New Commonwealth, London (1919–21); served as English representative and later co-manager for Alfred A. Knopf, a New York publishing firm (1925–28); served as president of English Center of International P.E.N., an international writers' organization (1938–45); authored over 45 books, contributor of short stories, articles, and prefaces to numerous publications.

Selected writings—fiction:

The Pot Boils (1919); The Happy Highways (1920); The Clash (1922); The Pitiful Wife (1923); Lady Susan and Life: An Indiscretion (1923); (translator from French) Guy de Maupassant, Mont-Oriol (1924); (translator from French) de Maupassant, Horla and Other Stories (1925); Three Kingdoms (1926); The Lovely Ship (1927); Farewell to Youth (1928); Full Circle (oneact play, 1929); (translator with Ernest Boyd) de Maupassant, Eighty-Eight Short Stories (1930); The Voyage Home (1930); A Richer Dust (1931); The Triumph of Time: A Trilogy (includes The Lovely Ship, A Voyage Home, A Richer Dust, 1932); That Was Yesterday (1932); The Single Heart (1933); A Day Off (1933); Women Against Men (includes A Day Off, Delicate Monster, The Single Heart, 1933); Company Parade (1934); Love in Winter (1935); In the Second Year (1936); None Turn Back (1936); Delicate Monster (1937); (under pseudonym William Lamb) The World Ends (1937); (under pseudonym James Hill) Loving Memory (1937); The Moon Is Making (1937); (under pseudonym James Hill) No Victory for the Soldier (1938); Here Comes a Candle (1938); The Captain's Wife (1939); Europe to Let: The Memoirs of an Obscure Man (1940); Cousin Honoré (1940); The Fort (1941); (editor) London Calling (1942); Then We Shall Hear Singing: A Fantasy in C Major (1942); Cloudless May (1943); The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945); The Other Side (1946); Before the Crossing (1947); The Black Laurel (1947); The Moment of Truth (1949); The Green Man (1953); The Hidden River (published serially as The House of Hate, 1955); The Intruder (1956); A Cup of Tea for Mr. Thorgill (1957); One Ulysses Too Many (1958); A Day Off: Two Short Novels and Some Stories (1959); Last Score; Or, The Private Life of Sir Richard Ormston (published serially as The Lion and the Dagger, 1961); The Road from the Monument (1962); A Month Soon Goes (1963); The Blind Heart (1964); The Early Life of Stephen Hind (1966); The White Crow (1968); There Will Be a Short Interval (1973).

Nonfiction:

Modern Drama in Europe (1920); The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson (1929); The Decline of Merry England (1930); (editor) Challenge to Death (1934); The Soul of Man in the Age of Leisure (1935); The Novel in Contemporary Life (1938); Civil Journey (essays, 1939); The End of This War (1941); The Writer's Situation and Other Essays (1950); Morley Roberts: The Last Eminent Victorian (1961); Parthian Words (1970); (editor) A Kind of Survivor: The Autobiography of Guy Chapman (1975); Speaking of Stendhal (1979).

Autobiography:

No Time Like the Present (1933); Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson (2 vols., 1969–70).

In June 1938, during an International P.E.N. Conference in Prague, Jiřina Tůmová , author and secretary of the Czech Center, speaking to Storm Jameson, author and president of the English Center, asked: "My darling … tell me please, why does your government not say to Hitler, 'These dull sober obstinate Czechs are our friends, do not threaten them?' Why?" In her acclaimed autobiography, Journey from the North, Storm Jameson records her excruciating inter-views with Eastern European writers who were desperately facing Nazi invasion before the Second World War. Many would subsequently suffer imprisonment in concentration camps, torture, and murder. Tůmová was herself imprisoned; her husband, a physician, was displayed bruised and broken, then killed in front of her.

What I do not know, and cannot even hope to understand before I die, is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other.

—Storm Jameson

In the book, Jameson refers frequently to Tůmová's ordeals, believing, as she had expressed in No Time Like the Present (1933), that "literature is the living nerve between past and future—the continuity of human experience, the mind which experiences and the mind which remembers." Jameson was president of P.E.N. from 1938 to 1945, from the period before the abandonment of Poland and Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany until the period after the war's end when she returned to ravaged Warsaw and disillusioned Prague. Imagining herself into the experiences of her European compatriots, she had created a body of anti-fascist fiction, including Europe to Let (1940), Cousin Honoré (1940), Cloudless May (1943), and The Black Laurel (1947).

Margaret Storm Jameson was born on January 8, 1891, in Whitby, a northern sea village in Yorkshire, England; it was a profoundly influential early environment, as she attested in her autobiography written when she was 70 years old:

I could not live in Whitby again, but in a sense I live nowhere else, since only there and nowhere else except in the lowest level of my being, do I touch and draw energy from a few key images, sea, distant lights, the pure line of a coast, first images and last, source of such strength as I have. Source, too, of my talent for happiness.

Her father William Storm Jameson spent 61 years at sea as a ship captain and was seldom home during her childhood. Her mother Margaret Jameson , a daughter of a shipowner, accompanied her husband on voyages to foreign ports before becoming confined to home with children, conveying to Jameson her yearning for adventure and disappointment in life. Margaret Jameson was a harsh and punitive mother, beating her six-month-old daughter each time she stubbornly and repeatedly attempted to crawl upstairs: "If I looked closely enough, I might see that what made me loathe Fascism was only my hatred of authority, only a mute rebellion against my violently feared and loved mother."

Nonetheless, Storm Jameson attributes her ambition for fame, "to be somebody," to her mother: she "was zealous for my future." In 1908, Margaret took Jameson, aged 16 years, to the Municipal School in Scarborough, assuming she would receive necessary training in one year to qualify as recipient of one of three North Riding County scholarships. At Municipal, Jameson remembers gratefully that she was no longer persecuted as a "freak." She made friends with the brothers Sydney and Oswald Harland, later to share a flat with them in London, remaining friends throughout life. They read and argued ideas with her—anarchical, socialist, atheist, a torrent. At year's end, as her mother had expected, she was awarded the County scholarship; it provided enough money to cover fees at a provincial university.

Between 1909 and 1912, Jameson studied English literature at Leeds University, where, despite being "self-absorbed and undisciplined," she wrote an honors thesis about William Blake and earned a first in English. She was the first woman to graduate in English at Leeds. In London in 1913, the recipient of a scholarship, Jameson studied for a short time at London University before transferring to King's College, which had fewer than a dozen women students. Her roommates, the Harland brothers and Archie White, invited Jameson to join a King's College discussion group, the Eikonoklasts; she was the only woman participant, discovering in herself "the promptings of a shrewd nonconformist." While writing her thesis on modern European drama, she volunteered to tutor at a newly founded Working Women's College. Impoverished, sometimes hungry, often unable to afford transportation, Jameson and her three companions tramped the streets of London—hilarious, intellectually exhilarated, free. In one of her first novels, The Happy Highways (1920), and in her first autobiography, No Time Like the Present (1933), she recorded her memories of this confident, optimistic moment before the First World War.

Jameson married in 1913, the year before the beginning of the war that would slaughter and "push under the earth" her cohort generation of young men. She confessed, however, that she was far more preoccupied with her private life than she was with the war. From the beginning of her marriage, she was unhappy. She gave birth to her son, Charles William Clark, called Bill, on June 20, 1915, leaving him, aged 4, in the keeping of a paid caretaker, while she worked as a copywriter for the Carlton Agency, a London advertising firm. Thus began several years of weekly train trips between Whitby and London. Jameson's autobiography is permeated with deep regret about the decision she had made as a young woman to leave her beloved son, prompting her to write:

I am deeply convinced—so deeply that it will be no use citing against me married women who are famous scientists or architects or financiers—that a woman who wishes to be a creator of anything except children should be content to be a nun or a wanderer on the face of the earth. She cannot be writer and woman in the way a male writer can be also husband and father. The demands made on her as a woman are destructive in a particularly disintegrating way—if she consents to them.

Jameson did not "consent" to conventional, gendered marital expectations. She preferred all of her life to live in hotel rooms, as she would for months at a time, rather than organize a house for which she was responsible: "My hatred of settled domestic life was, is, an instinct, and borders on mania." Divorced from her first husband, she then, on February 1, 1926, married Guy Patterson Chapman, a novelist and historian. On occasion in the ensuing years, Jameson's son Bill lived with her, sometimes in the country, sometimes in London. Of their foot-loose existence, Guy Chapman wrote before he died in 1972:

Until the last nine or ten years we have never lived for long in any place. Whose fault is it? Mine in so far as I never made a determined attempt to settle anywhere. My wife's restlessness—no, she must speak for herself. The centre holds. I have lived in her, and she, I think, in me. I ask for nothing more.

Between 1919 and 1921, Storm Jameson edited an obscure periodical entitled the New

Commonwealth. A novel she had started to write while pregnant, The Pot Boils, was published in 1919, followed by her published master's thesis, Modern Drama in Europe (1920), which caused a literary stir. She produced several novels: The Happy Highways (1920), The Clash (1922), The Pitiful Wife (1923). Jameson became an established literary figure in the 1920s, associating with Rose Macaulay and her companion Naomi Royde-Smith , editor of the Saturday Westminster, among others, including Michael Sadleir, Middleton Murray, Walter de la Mare, Frank Swinnerton, and Q.D. Leavis. Jameson's novels were financially successful; she bought a fur coat for her mother and in 1921 gave her editorship of the New Commonwealth to her first husband who was unable to find work.

The New York publishers Alfred and Blanche Knopf hired Jameson as their English representative in 1923, expanding their operation in 1926 when they established a British office. Storm Jameson and her second husband, Guy Patterson, were co-managers of British Knopf until 1928. Shy and retiring by nature, Jameson was a public person against her will: "During these years I came to know so many people that I almost died of it."

Meanwhile, she was translating from the French stories of Guy de Maupassant, writing literary criticism and novels, striving now for an honest, spare, non-emotional style. In this more disciplined vein were The Lovely Ship (1927), The Voyage Home (1930), and A Richer Dust (1931), collected in a trilogy entitled The Triumph of Time—a chronicle of a woman shipbuilder who prospered during the 19th century on the Yorkshire coast. One of Storm Jameson's contemporaries noted that her "feminism is so profound that she takes it for granted."

Storm Jameson is regularly listed with those authors of the '30s who were knowledgeable about European politics and prescient about the crisis of impending war. Elaine Feinstein , poet and biographer, notes that many "of her best books came to be written from a deepening comprehension of the nightmare that was developing in Europe through the '30s. Among them, Cousin Honoré, draws a portrait of the province of Alsace as a microcosm of the forces under-mining European civilization as a whole." Several of Jameson's novels of this period were reproduced by the feminist press, Virago, in the 1980s, including Women Against Men (1933) and The Mirror in Darkness trilogy: Company Parade (1934), Love in Winter (1935), and None Turn Back (1936) in which the fate of the Yorkshire woman and writer, Mary Hervey Russell, is tangled with the General Strike masters and workers, fascists and communists, politicians and trade unionists during the '20s. Politically, Jameson was a socialist who was motivated by concern for poverty: "There is little to choose between the ancient custom of exposing unwanted babies and ours allowing an accident of birth to decide which child shall be carefully nurtured and which grow up in a slum."

By 1933, Jameson was deeply involved in anti-fascist committee work. She hated and dreaded the prospect of war, having lost her younger brother, a pilot, in the First World War. (Her loved younger sister was killed by a bomb during the Second World War.) Jameson was a pacifist in the early '30s, organizing a Peace Symposium which included Rebecca West , Rose Macaulay, and Winifred Holtby . Contributing an article of her own, Jameson edited a volume of essays against war, Challenge to Death (1935). At first, she held to her pacifism despite the deepening flood of refugees streaming out of Nazi Germany. A young German socialist, Lilo Linke , lived with her, then immigrated to Ecuador where she became a renowned liberal activist.

By 1940, Jameson shifted her position and began to support Britain's participation in the war:

I could not cry with the pacifists: Submit, submit. The price was too high; the smell from the concentration camps, from cells where men tortured men, from trains crammed to suffocation with human cattle, choked the words back in my throat.

Between 1938 and 1945, Storm Jameson was the elected president of the English Center of International P.E.N., the first woman to hold this office. She was at the center of a community of European writers living in exile, witnessing firsthand Nazi persecution of writers and intellectuals. Before war was declared, she visited Prague, where she met Tůmová, and Budapest, where her host, a Jewish journalist, described anti-Semitic brutalities. He did not survive the war. She worked, literally, day and night throughout the war, securing visas for escaping authors, aiding German immigrants interned in England as potential spies, providing a welcoming community for desolate refugees. She "never felt separate from an exile by more than a thin membrane," writes Feinstein, who describes Storm Jameson as a "gallant and humane" president of P.E.N.

After the war, Jameson first traveled to Warsaw, now in ruins, and then Prague, where she accompanied Tůmová on a visit to give bread to an imprisoned German woman who had been Tůmová's prison guard during the war. Jameson toured German prison rooms still containing guillotines once used for executing political prisoners. She inspected inhumane Czech internment camps for German citizens. Forty years later, she mused, "The ways to be cruel, to inflict pain, are countless: all have been or will be tried. Why? Why? What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or—worse—is sensually moved?"

After the war, Jameson moved with her husband to Leeds where she rented rooms in a hotel and continued to write. Guy Chapman was appointed professor of modern history at Leeds University. In 1949, Jameson and Chapman lived in the United States, he lecturing on history, she teaching creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She remained an energetic participant in P.E.N. throughout the Cold War, a politician behind the scenes working for Anglo-French relations and helping writers escape from the totalitarian Communist countries in the Soviet bloc.

Although Storm Jameson's novels published through the Second World War were bestsellers and well-received by reviewers, those written after the war were misunderstood and disparaged; her readership dwindled as taste sought new voices. In 1962, the critic W.S. White wrote:

The present, mature Storm Jameson is a social satirist of keen perception, a skillful writer, who has an ability to comment with ironic detachment, a figure of literary distinction and integrity which makes the merely angry young British writers seem pallid and puerile.

Storm Jameson died in Cambridge, England, aged 95, on September 30, 1986.

sources:

Adcock, St. John. The Glory That Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors. NY: Frederick A. Stokes, 1928.

Chapman, Guy. A Kind of Survivor: The Autobiography of Guy Chapman. Edited by Storm Jameson. London: Victor Gollancz, 1975.

Feinstein, Elaine. "Introductions," in Women Against Men (London: Virago, 1982), Love in Winter (London: Virago, 1984), None Turn Back (London: Virago, 1984).

Jameson, Storm. Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson, Volumes I and II. London: Virago, 1984.

——. No Time Like the Present. London: Cassell, 1933.

suggested reading:

Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Jameson, Storm. That Was Yesterday. London: Knopf, 1932.

collections:

Manuscripts: The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell, the Pennsylvania Public Library; A Richer Dust, the Central Library in Leeds; That Was Yesterday, St. Andrew University; No Time Like the Present, Wellesley College; The Voyage Home, Kenyon College.

Jill Benton , author of Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, and Professor of English and World Literature at Pitzer College, Claremont, California