Strange quirks of history connect this beloved poetry series with propaganda statistics and picture books, as our editor investigates…
Occasionally – very occasionally – great art emerges from the most contrived of circumstances. New Excursions into English Poetry was one such project: a collection of seven poetry anthologies with sympathetic illustrations, published by Frederick Muller Ltd. from the latter half of the Second World War. The series announced itself as ‘something of a new experiment’, giving free rein to both illustrators (a roll-call of notable Neo-Romantics) and editors. ‘The authors are no hack compilers’, reads the jacket blurb: ‘the selections will be personal – they may even seem arbitrary and capricious – but they will have unity and reflect the real temper of the anthologer.’
On the one hand, New Excursions arrived at a time of relatively strong receptivity to British poetry, old and new – just after the withdrawal of T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in 1939, and after the birth of its spiritual successor, Horizon, spearheaded by Cyril Connolly. But looming over its head was the Ministry of Information, intent on establishing a programme of publications celebrating and preserving British culture at a time when the threat of German invasion was very real. New Excursions, under the editorship of poets Walter James Turner (forthright literary editor for the Spectator and respected musicologist) and Sheila Shannon (with whom Turner was having an affair) joined a host of such ‘soft propaganda’ series. The best known remains Britain in Pictures, which paired famous authors with subjects of national identity and accomplishment. What should have been transparently jingoistic morale boosters succeeded, as did New Excursions, on the sheer force of the personalities commissioned for the series: David Low on British Cartoonists; Edith Sitwell on English Women; Vita Sackville-West on Country Houses; Graham Greene on British Dramatists; John Piper on British Romantic Artists (more on this volume in David Whiting’s excellent article on page 40); John Betjeman on English Cities and Small Towns; Cecil Beaton on British Photographers; George Orwell on The English People.
These wartime books emerged at a time of much broader cultural and geographical mapping of the country – think of the beloved Shell Guides, or the New Naturalists, with illustrated covers by Bath Academy of Art’s Rosemary and Clifford Ellis. And this was an introspection borne out, in part, by the slow collapse of the British Empire, and by Britain’s isolation during the early months of the war: Britain in Pictures’ volume on India, for example, was written by Feroz Khan Noon, one of the architects of Pakistani independence.
But the real unsung hero of this new wave of illustrated publications was the ‘book-packaging’ firm Adprint, founded in 1937 by the Austrian publisher Wolfgang Foges with help from his sponsor, Lord Glenconner. Foges, who was Jewish, had fled his life in Vienna in 1934 after a Social Democratic Party uprising was violently quashed, leading to Austria becoming a one-party state. After Austria’s annexation by Hitler four years later, he was joined by Walter Neurath, a Viennese publisher of anti-Fascist textbooks for children who had attracted the ire of the Gestapo. Neurath had not even been granted citizenship by the time he was put on the Britain in Pictures project, and was briefly interned alongside other foreigners in a camp on the Isle of Man before the civil service managed to secure his release. He would go on to found the publishing house Thames and Hudson in 1949.
Foges and Neurath were the unseen hands guiding this new scheme of ‘soft propaganda’ publications. Both had experience of bringing illustrations more closely alongside text, and in this they were aided by the arrival in May 1940 of Otto Neurath (no relation, confusingly) and his wife Marie Reidemeister, founders of the nascent Isotype Institute. With their colleague, Gerd Arntz, Otto and Marie were pioneers of the ‘isotype’ illustration, in which statistics are depicted pictorially using basic symbols in order to convey complex or large numbers with ease and immediacy – perfect for the Ministry of Information’s propaganda pamphlets. Having already fled Vienna in 1934, they had escaped Holland on the last boat out of Scheveningen harbour before German occupation.
And so, behind this patriotic programme of books and pamphlets, full of self-examination, was a team of refugees from central Europe, looking not inward but out to a world and life beyond the war. Together, outsiders and in produced, in the strangest of circumstances, something very special indeed.
English, Scottish and Welsh Landscape 1700-c.1860 (1944) - John Piper, John Betjeman, Geoffrey Taylor
Geoffrey Taylor (born Jeoffrey Gibbs) was an Irish poet, born and raised between East Anglia and Sligo. A serial philanderer, he spent the late 1920s and ‘30s breaking up Robert Graves’ own domestic ménage à trois with the artist Nancy Nicholson and poet Laura Riding before remarrying and settling in Dublin, where he and John Betjeman met during the war, bonding over a shared love of neglected Victorian poetry.
Betjeman had second thoughts about working with Adprint again. In 1939 he had been so offended by the quality of the colour reproductions in his book Vintage London that he asked them not to print it. Three years later he was astonished to see it on bookshop shelves, the rights having been sold to Collins who had published it without telling him. As a result, this guide to the capital, written before the Blitz, recommended visits to buildings that now lay destroyed in piles of rubble, a point which rather cruelly hammered home the importance of the New Excursions aim to preserve British culture. But he was reassured by Taylor, who had received advance copies of their landscape volume: Piper’s pictures, he reported – in a deliciously sepulchral palette of black, ochre and deep purple – ‘are damn good and don’t, in my opinion, compete or fuss with the poems…’
Graham Sutherland had originally been tipped to illustrate this volume, but in private Piper fought ferociously for the commission. In November 1942 he wrote to Betjeman ‘that the anthology was the best of its kind ever made and that G. Sutherland would miss the point of Faringdon Hill and Grongar Hill and everything else, and that I wanted to do nothing else so much’. In the end his insistence won out, his gloomy illustrations attending words by Clare, Coleridge, Pope, Tennyson and Wordsworth, alongside a host of ‘lesser-known people’ whom Betjeman joked had been salvaged exclusively from second-hand bookshops: ‘quiet Georgian rectors, village schoolmasters, peers in their libraries looking across the park, Victorian drunks and reformers and escapists...’
The Poet's Eye (1944) - John Craxton, Geoffrey Grigson
John Craxton was just 22 years old when he was approached in 1943 to illustrate this loosely-themed anthology of visionary poems, collated with the famously irascible writer Geoffrey Grigson (co-founder and editor of the inter-war literary magazine New Verse, in which he championed emerging poets Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden). After taking on the commission Craxton was invited to visit Graham Sutherland in his Pembrokeshire haunting grounds, with stays between Whitesands Bay and St Davids (in view of the cathedral) and at John Phillips’ Picton Castle. Return visits over the following months, joining Sutherland on sketching trips, brought him deep into the dank South Wales countryside, to fields littered with stones and mushrooms – a damp reverie from which he had, eventually, to be dragged by a letter from Cowell’s director pleading him to return to Ipswich to complete his lithographs. In these pastoral scenes he merged the influences of Pembrokeshire and Samuel Palmer with Miro and Picasso and a growing desire for the heady warmth of the Mediterranean, as described by his friend Peter Watson, sponsor of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine. Craxton’s biographer, Ian Collins, points out that he needn’t have looked far for inspiration for his Arcadian figures: among the field workers in Pembrokeshire were Italian prisoners of war – swarthy, handsome, and easily identified by the red circles sewn to the backs of their shirts.
Sea Poems (1944) - Mona Moore, Myfanwy Piper
Having helmed the influential abstraction review Axis in the mid-1930s, Myfanwy Piper donned her editorial cap once more for this maritime anthology. Her illustrator, Mona Moore, had from early 1941 worked for Recording Britain and the War Artists’ Committee, particularly in Wales, where she documented the ruins of the Swansea Blitz and, on director Kenneth Clark’s secret orders, the decommissioned Manod slate mines in Blaenau Ffestiniog where the National Gallery had stashed its collection of Old Master paintings to protect them from bombing raids. Moore’s use of lithography’s airy and chalky textures make for an effective evocation of the changeable salt-breezes in Piper’s highly personal selection, reflecting the ‘alluring, hostile, indifferent, treacherous’ human attributes that are part of the ocean’s powers of seduction.
Soldiers' Verse (1945) - William Scott, Patric Dickinson
New Excursions found William Scott on the cusp of an awkward transition in his career: just as he was asked to contribute to a project celebrating the national character, the Ulster-born Scotsman was looking to escape the pervasive ‘Englishness’ critics saw in his wartime watercolours. He had lived in France before the war, in Pont Aven, and with the inspirational arrival of a major Picasso / Matisse show at the V&A a year later would completely revaluate his painting, once associated with Neo-Romantics John Minton, Michael Ayrton, and Keith Vaughan, turning to the more open avenues of still life. The empty soldier’s coat that hangs on barbed wire on the cover of this War Poetry collection evokes, of course, the devastating loss of life he had seen just months ago – but could it also suggest, perhaps, the artist shedding his Romantic skin, slipping away from the carnage and drama that had defined his art for the past five years to begin anew?
Poems of Death (1945) - Michael Ayrton, Phoebe Pool
Michael Ayrton’s illustrations for this anthology were suitably haunting – shades of decay and mythological overtones of the kind that shaped his later visions of Daedalus and the Minotaur. Little could he know that similar shadows were secretly cast over this project. His collaborator, Phoebe Pool, was an erstwhile reviewer for the Spectator and later an art historian; she had also been recruited as a spy for the USSR in the 1930s, acting as a courier for Anthony Blunt (member of the famous ‘Cambridge Five’, and later Pool’s PhD supervisor at the Courtauld). Though prone to depression throughout her life, her publications (on Picasso, Degas, Constable and French Impressionism) were successes, particularly with undergraduate art students. Betrayed by Blunt in 1964, MI5 organised for her Courtauld colleague, Anita Brookner, to extract her own confession of guilt. Pool later threw herself under a tube train in 1971. Her death, alongside two others, put an end to MI5’s investigations for fear of public backlash.
Travellers' Verse (1946) - Edward Bawden, Mary Gwyneth Lloyd Thomas
Walter Turner’s own sudden death in November, 1946, from a blood clot did not prevent the arrival of the last two volumes in his New Excursions series. There are glorious nods toward Paul Nash’s Garden of Cyrus in this contribution by Edward Bawden, with intimations of exotic far-flung lands. Bawden no doubt drew on his wartime exploits in these illustrations, having travelled to Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia during his time as an Official War artist. His adventures, as described by print historian Pat Gilmour, included ‘following a camel cavalcade to Addis Ababa and circumnavigating Africa on his return, only to be shipwrecked off Lagos, taken to Morocco by a French vichy warship and interned in Casablanca. Rescued by the Americans, he eventually arrived back in England via America.’
Poems of Sleep and Dream (1947) - Robert Colquhoun, Carol Stewart
By 1947, Robert Colquhoun – inseparable from his cohabitor, Robert Macbryde – was considered one of the rising stars of a new generation of British artists fusing Expressionist figuration from the continent with the homegrown Surrealism that lay at the heart of Neo-Romantic painting. His illustrations for this eclectic collection of poems reveal what an extraordinary influence the presence of Jankel Adler had been on the two Scottish artists’ lives, with whom they shared a house and studio in 1943. An exile of war, Adler brought with him direct contact with pre-war European modernism – Klee, Picasso – that fed Colquhoun’s visions of wracked figures apparently fighting for survival in the aftermath of the global conflict. If New Excursions had confirmed anything, it was that British art’s character was enriched during the war by an embrace and union of outside influences with inward looking.
