Stefan Themerson

Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her support of anti-Nazi causes reminded me of a number of other neglected writers who found themselves exiled not only from their own lands but also from their own languages.

The story of German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States, particularly those who gathered in Santa Monica around the towering figure of Thomas Mann, is well known. But less remembered today are those who headed to England instead, a number of whom not only chose to settle for good outside their own countries but who adopted English as the language in which they wrote from then on. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement that appeared in 1962, Norman Shrapnel wrote of such writers: “Some have used the language as a honeymoon hotel, some as a gymnasium, some as a concert platform for virtuoso performances, some as an ideas factory. It has accommodated them nearly all, and their tendency has been to amplify, rather than alter, what might by now, if left to itself, have turned into something as stylized as a Pall Mall club or an Indian dance.”

Arthur Koestler, of course, is still recognized and his Darkness at Noon has a solid place in the canon. Here, however, are five others who chose to follow in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps.

• Robert Neumann

Robert Neumann was, like the better-known Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew who decided to leave Austria well ahead of the Anschluss. He settled in a village in Kent that he then took as the setting for his novel written in English, Scene in Passing (1942). The novelist J. D. Bereford considered it more successful as prose than fiction: “Dr. Neumann seems more at home with the English language than with the manner of life in an English village.” Neumann went on to write ten more books in English before he moved to Switzerland in 1958.

The Inquest (1944), an inquiry into the last years of a woman of the international set before the war, was his most commercially successful book. Though he never returned to live in Vienna, the city was close to his heart, and his first postwar novel, Children of Vienna (1946) decried the living conditions, particularly of the large number of orphan children, in the ruins left after the initial Soviet takeover of the city, “There are indignation, pity, savage humour, obscenity, irony on irony in this ferocious novel,” wrote one reviewer.

Neumann helped establish Hutchinson International Authors, an imprint of the major publisher, for which he contracted translations of numerous German and Austrian writers in exile, including Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) and Heinrich Mann (Thomas’s older brother). His last work in English, The Plague House Papers (1959), was an unusual and light-hearted autobiography. “He has seemed to have decided to make the book worth his while as a novelist, and has arranged a nice patter of interacting themes,” Muriel Spark wrote in her review for the Spectator.

Neumann’s books are out of print in English, but Flood (1930), Children of Vienna (1946), and Insurrection in Poshansk (1952) are available on the Internet Archive.

• Peter de Polnay

Born in Hungary, the son of a leader of the Jewish community in Budapest, de Polnay spent most of his life distancing himself from his home and his family. According to the version of the story he tells in The Crack of Dawn: A Childhood Fantasy (1958) and My Road: An Autobiography (1978), his mother was ill, his father an absent and abusive brute, and his primary caregivers were the servants who looked after him and his brother and sisters as they grew up in Switzerland, Italy, and England.

After spending time in Argentina and an unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a gambler on the Riviera, de Polnay found himself broke and in Paris and turned to writing to make cash. Though fluent in at least three languages, he opted for English based on its larger market share, and began pumping out novels at the rate of at least one a year beginning in the late 1930s.

In May 1940, however, the German invasion disrupted his comfortable life. Along with the government and many of the upper bourgeosie of Paris, he fled to Bordeaux, but soon returned. It was easier to survive on the cheap in Paris. He lasted for about a year, until he was able to make his way to England via Spain and Gibraltar.

He quickly took himself an English wife and enlisted in the Royal Pioneer Corps. After the war, he took a lease on Boulge Hall, the former home of poet and Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald. Though he aspired to the life of a country gentleman, he soon found the cost beyond his means, and after his wife died, he spent years as an itinerant, living in France, Spain, and Portugal while tapping out novel after novel that fell somewhere between Balzac’s Comedie Humaine and Simenon’s romans dur.

He remarried, this time to a Spanish woman, and converted to Catholicism. The couple lived for a number of years in seaside towns in Kent but decided they preferred the food and sun of France. By the time he died in 1984, he had written nearly 90 books in English.

• Edith de Born

Edith de Born took perhaps the oddest route to writing in English. Born Edith Ausch, like de Polnay, she came from a Jewish family ennobled in the Austro-Hungarian court. When her father lost his title and most of his fortune after the end of World War One, she married Jacques Bisch, a French financier who’d come to Vienna to liquidate what remained of her family’s estate, and moved to Paris.

Having been taught French and English as a child, she quickly became fluent after stays in Paris and London before the war. Trapped in Paris by the German invasion, the couple became involved in the Resistance. She later said that the work of translating cables to and from London trained her to write in English with nuance and subtlety. When Jacques Bisch became president of the Société Générale Bank in Brussels, they took a palatial apartment on the rue Royale and hosted such English writers as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

Though de Born wrote in English, English characters were exceptionally rare in her books. Instead, she wrote of people she knew: Belgians, Dutch, French, and, in her trilogy of Schloss Felding (1959), The House in Vienna (1959), and The Flat in Paris (1961), Austrians and Austrian expats like herself. Many reviewers praised her elegant, pseudo-Jamesian prose, but novelist Francis King wrote somewhat more precisely that it was “in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed”:

I use the word ‘composed’, rather than ‘written’, advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a ‘foreigness’, though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.

King was dissembling in writing this. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, de Born sent all her manuscripts to the wife of an Anglican vicar in Norfolk, who returned them with meticulous line-by-line copy edits, before she submitted the corrected versions to her English publishers.

• Jerzy Peterkiewicz

When Jerzy Peterkiewicz arrived in England from France in 1940, he knew no English. Yet he enrolled in the University of St Andrews and went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at King’s College London. Soon after, he married Christine Brooke-Rose. Though they later divorced, both explored abstract and experimental themes and styles in their fiction. Peterkiewicz, however, grew somewhat more conventional in the course of his career, with one of his later books, The Third Adam, being a largely nonfictional account of the Mariavites, a Catholic cult based in the Polish town of P?ock whose leader considered himself to be the third Adam — the first two being the original man of Genesis and Jesus.

His first few novels, written in the 1950s, were full of Joycean wordsplices and almost embarrassing onomatopeia. He liked writing, as he wrote of one of his characters, “at his cosmopolitan best, daring every vocabulary to twist his eloquent tongue.” The Quick and the Dead (1961) might better have been titled The Dead and the Slow as it’s the story of a man who only figures out he’s dead halfway through the book. Its subject and style left the Telegraph’s reviewer unsure of what he was dealing with:

If only one knew what Jerzy Peterkiewicz was up to. Or, alternatively, if only one could be sure that what he was up to was elaborately pretentious nonsense. But if it is hard to find the viewpoint that would enable one to read some meaning into his oblique and arbitrary fancies, it is equally hard to belieave that a writer, more a writer working in an adopted language (like another Polish novelist, Mr. Peterkiewicz knew no English until he was grown up), who clothes those fancies in such precise and fastidious words means nothing at all.”

Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, loved it: “Mr. Peterkiewcz is on of our most intelligent and original novelists. There are some excellent things in The Quick and the Dead. Whatever you’re going to call this uncategorisable book, it’s an altogether brilliant performance.”

Peterkiewicz’s life and work are now commemorated by the Jerzy Peterkiewicz Educational Foundation. The Third Adam (1975) and Green Flows the Bile (1968), Peterkiewicz’s last novel, are available on the Internet Archive.

• Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson and his wife Franciszka — both artists and experimental film makers — were happy and productive members of the Left Bank avant garde, having settled in Paris after traveling there to meet the Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “I just knew I had to be in Paris,” he later said. When the war broke out, he joined a regiment of Poles that fell apart soon after the Blitzkrieg began, and he ended up spending two years in a Red Cross hostel in Vichy France. There, he began writing his first novel Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, an elaborate pastiche of a scientific lecture on the subject of the superiority of insects to human beings. After being smuggled out of France and reunited with his wife in England, Themerson decided to rewrite the book in English.

To say that Stefan Themerson wrote in English, however, is to accept that any one language could contain the energy of his imagination. Here, for example, is just an excerpt of the entry for Chapter Six in the Table of Contents of Professor Mmaa’s Lecture:

Wherein Professor Mmaa’s Lecture May Be Likened to a “Chariot Sailng over a Volcano ”

BATSMAN HITS A GOOSE & LADIES AND GENTLEMENT!
IMAGINING THE IMAGINATION
PROFESSOR MMAA’Ss ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A VERTICAL POSITION
HOW WILL MY OLD MAMMA COME TO BELIEVE IN THE SHALLOWEST BEING, & HOW WILL PROFESSOR SOUL COME TO BELIEVE IN CORPUSCLES?
LES MORTELS SONT EGAUX, AND THE TOLERANCE OF FANATICISM
LES MORTELS SONT DIFFERANTS, AND THE FANATICISM OF TOLERANCE
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN STOPS LAYING EGGS
NONOBODY ON SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS
PANCAKERS & FARCEMEATERS

After the war, the Themersons became cornerstones of the English avant garde — which might be a bit of an non-sequitur, as they never looked for imitators or others to imitate. In 1948, they formed the Gaberbocchus Press, under whose imprint a fair share of their books were published over the course of the next 30 years. Franciszka worked steadily as an illustrator of children’s book, including such collaborations with Stefan as Peddy Bottom (1950), Mr. Rouse Builds His House (1951), and The Table that Ran Away Into the Woods (1963). Franciszka also provided the illustrations for Barbara Wright’s remarkable English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style

Queneau’s fiction is perhaps the closest equivalent to Themerson’s. Both men drafted genres and put them to work for slyly anarchic purposes. In one of Themerson’s last works, The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), he took the international conspiracy thriller a la The Da Vinci Code and turned it into a playful epistemological fantasy. Not everyone appreciated the results. Kirkus Reviews “a stringy mass” of heavy-handed social comedy and compared it to “sour-tasting fudge.” Neville Shack, reviewing it for the TLS, recognized that Themerson was more of a puppetmaster than a master of characterization:

Many of them, weird and wacky, seem to have a flair for bemusement in action and speech. They are figures in a constantly shifting scenario, neither nautralistic nor typical ofmuch beyond themselves. These people who come and go, often in search of clues, serve only the fickle ends of the narrative. They are mannequins, walking constructs in the mode of Peter Greenaway’s cinematic inventions; the tableaux are highly synthetic, despite real settings and occasionally believable situations.

There’s a certain satisfying irony in the fact that more of Themerson’s work is in print now in Polish than in English. Several of his books, including Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, are available on the Internet Archive.