Writing in the Dark

David Ford reviews Will Loxley’s

Writing in the Dark. (Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine)

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For those of us with a love of Orwell, Horizon Magazine and a warm feeling about the ‘Bloomsberries,’ this book is one that shouts out from the shelves to be bought and read. My feeling entirely when I spotted it in a very good bookshop in York recently.

The book starts with the contextual statement that “The final month covered by Horizon, January 1950, was the month that George Orwell died …. Orwell had been, along with only a couple of others, Horizon’s star-turn”. Thus, setting both Orwell and Horizon in their rightful places as key commentators on and contributors to the literary and cultural life of Britain in the 1930s and 40s.

Horizon first published Orwell when it featured “Boys Weeklies” of which Peter Watson, the magazine’s financier said “Please tell me who is George Orwell? His article is splendid”.

The book covers more than Orwell and Horizon. It looks at many of the writers who made up the British new generation at the time, starting with the older Bloomsbury Group, with a heartfelt chapter on Virginia Woolf’s final days and suicide, as well as exploring many of the other figures, writers and artists who made up the group – Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Julian Bell, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster etc.

It deals at greater length with the younger group of writers who were emerging in the 30s, and it is good to be reminded just how young most of them were. The group centred around Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, William Sansom, Julian McClaren-Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly (the editor éminence grise of Horizon), John Lehmann (the chronicler of British wartime writing through his magazine Penguin New Writing) who were all in their twenties or early thirties at the time. The author also looks forward with very young writers such as Dylan Thomas, who earns a not uncritical chapter in the book.

There was of course some crossover, for example John Lehmann also worked at the Hogarth Press (the Woolf publishing outfit), and Stephen Spender who sometimes worked with the Bloomsberries.

The pages covering the London Blitz give a good insight into the pressures that war puts on people and also on to publishing and writing. Many writers at the beginning of the war seemed to dry up, feeling that world events were so overwhelming as to stifle any response from literature. The physical deprivations of wartime bombing also had their impact, with print runs up in flames in bombed warehouses and writers’ attics smashed by Hitler’s doodlebugs.

The book also covers the political attitudes of writers at the time. Many were of the Left and had an uncritical attitude towards the Soviet Union, despite the stories coming out about the Holodomor and Stalin’s oppression. Right up to 1939 many writers who perhaps should have known better were singing the Soviet Union’s praises until the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact and the Nazi-Soviet pincer movement invasion of Poland. A great deal of backtracking went on. Again, our hero was far more prescient than many. Orwell’s reputation remained untarnished because his non-ideological approach to politics and world affairs ensured that he recognized wrong when he saw it, not when he was told to by people with a political axe to grind.

One criticism of the book, and perhaps it is an unfair one, is that Loxley records authors’ thoughts that surely could never be fully known. For instance, he recounts Lehmann’s agonies when starting Penguin New Writing and Woolf’s feelings prior to her suicide that were only cursorily expressed in a note to her husband and so can only be speculative. He talks about Isherwood’s “guilt” at absconding to the US, but do we know for sure he was feeling guilty? In his defence, he clearly makes extensive use of diaries and letters, so perhaps his metamorphosis into the minds of these writers is achieved by a very deep understanding of their own words in whatever correspondence survives.

I enjoyed the accounts of Orwell at the BBC, and the great work he did giving writers from the Indian subcontinent such as Mulk Raj Anand and Tambimuttu space in “Voice”, his poetry magazine programme broadcast to India. There was a propaganda element to this, which Orwell acknowledged, to try to draw the Indian population into the war against Hitler in the face of pro Hitler elements in India such as Subhas Chandra Bose and his Axis backed Radio Azad Hind (Free India.) Such a crying shame that the BBC kept none of the recordings. Some of this information and more about Orwell’s own life is gleaned from Sylvia Topp’s excellent book on Eileen, which if Orwell Society members haven’t yet read I would recommend.

The final page of the book ends with the figure who dominates so much of the critical thinking in the war years, and goes on to become so influential in the postwar years, with this sad conclusion:

So, the figure Connolly looked down on in that hospital bed, who would soon be slipping away from them, who seemed to embody the massive scope of an unprecedented half a century in all its wars and woe…that was what a writer looked like.

And I think that Orwell Society members can concur, that for us, Orwell is indeed what a writer with true resolve and integrity should look like.

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Writing in the Dark. (Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine)

By Will Loxley. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2021)