John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure by Adrian Wright Duckworth 308pp, £18.95 in UK
Antonia White: A Life by Jane Dunn Cape 484pp, £20 in UK
The ease with which literary reputations can rise and fall is eloquently demonstrated by these two biographies. Both make valiant, if ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to resurrect once-feted authors; in each case, the exercise itself proves to be more interesting than the results. John Lehmann was a man accustomed to bringing not just himself but other writers to public attention. He has always suffered from comparison with his near-contemporary Cyril Connolly whose literary style - and judgment - was superior to that of Lehmann. Connolly, infinitely more clear-sighted about his worth, always recognised himself as a mandarin, whereas Lehmann, despite copious amounts of self-examination, failed to see the patrician manner horribly evident to everyone else. John Lehmann and his two sisters, Beatrix and Rosamond - one an actress, the other a novelist - might be considered cut-price Sitwells, sharing a flair for publicity, a modicum of talent and far too little charm. Arrogance and humourlessness are other qualities the Sitwells and Lehmanns had in common; the latter, like so many of their class during the 1930s, embraced socialism but, at least in John Lehmann's case, this seems to have been primarily an excuse to embrace as many members of the proletariat as he possibly could. In the wake of Auden, Spender and Isherwood, Lehmann took himself off to Germany and Austria where he liked to imagine he was assisting the overthrow of the bourgeoisie while requiring at least one working class lover to act as his chauffeur. Meanwhile, he worked with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press and produced several books of mediocre poetry and fiction. Woolf later wrote that John Lehmann "takes life and himself, much too seriously . . . and he is much too certain that he is right", while a reviewer of his poetry correctly assessed him as "a minor voiced lyricist, a soft romanticist in a hard age".
Of more lasting value was Lehmann's work as a publisher and editor. After parting from the Hogarth Press, he began producing New Writing (later called Penguin New Writing thanks to the intervention of Allen Lane) which, along with Connolly's Horizon, was responsible for offering an outlet to so many fine writers during the 1940s. After the second World War, he established his own publishing house which released books by Elizabeth David, Paul Bowles, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Sartre, Andre Malraux, Denton Welch, Laurie Lee and Nikos Kazantzakis. Had John Lehmann been satisfied with his role as a publisher of some brilliance, he might have been more content and less unpleasant as a character. His desperate need to be recognised as a writer was shared by Antonia White, eight years his senior and the subject of yet another biography - both her daughters have published memoirs of their mother since her death in 1980 and two volumes of diaries have also been issued.
On the wedding certificate of her first marriage, White gave Authoress as her profession even though nothing had yet been written, let alone published. Like Lehmann, Antonia White (christened, by the way, Eirene Botting) consistently demonstrated an inordinate degree of self-absorption without any corresponding self-awareness. During the last years of her life, she attempted to write an autobiography and, after some 70,000 words, had still not got beyond the age of four. She was also hideously self-pitying which is understandable given the grimness of much of her life - two marriages to homosexuals, a rape, two abortions, at least two nervous breakdowns and a spell in a mental asylum - but eventually comes to seem merely tiresome. White liked to imagine herself as a victim, even when she was clearly responsible for her own misfortunes. She was inclined to dramatisation as well, typically commenting on her family's conversion to Roman Catholicism when she was aged seven, "I never did feel free again."
White is fortunate in her biographer, frequently more sympathetic than her subject deserves. Dunn is, for example, happy to portray the nuns at Antonia White's convent school as consciously cruel and shows little understanding of either the era (pre-first World War England) or indeed of the complexities of Catholicism. But perhaps this is understandable given White's own muddled thinking about her upbringing and faith. Ambivalence was the norm; her convent years White managed to remember as both appalling and wonderful, hating her time there and then horrified when forced to leave. This was the period she mined for her most successful novel, Frost in May, the first of four autobiographical works of fiction that followed White's life through to her mid-twenties. A combination of writer's block and the need to earn money by translating French writers - notably Colette - into English meant she never produced another novel. Frost in May, with its curious combination of intensity and dispassion, remains a wonder and forty years after its first appearance was justifiably brought to the attention of a new generation in the late 1970s when republished by Virago. It also serves Antonia White better than any biography could hope to do.