modernisms

BLACKWELL’S RARE BOOKS
Presentation copy to Stephen Spender
72. Litvinoff (Emanuel) The Untried Soldier. Routledge,
1942, FIRST EDITION, pp. 40, crown 8vo, original stiff card
with pasted wrappers, backstrip printed in black and a
little cracked, light dustsoiling to back panel, very good
£250
A significant association copy of Litvinoff’s collection of
war poetry, based on his experiences serving in Northern
Ireland, North Africa, and Middle East - inscribed by him
on the flyleaf for a fellow Jewish poet: ‘To Stephen Spender,
for the pleasure and satisfaction I have derived from his
work, Emanuel Litvinoff’.
In the next decade, on a different, literary, battleground,
their shared Jewishness became a point of conflict when Litvinoff created a stir by
reading his poem ‘To T.S. Eliot’ in an audience that included his subject - taken to task
for the various anti-Semitic references in his early poetry that had been retained in the
post-war Selected Poems. Spender was among the voices hushing the dissenter - along
with Litvinoff’s erstwhile mentor and publisher, Herbert Read, who had organised
the event - pleading on behalf of the literary establishment, ‘As a poet as Jewish as
Litvinoff, I deeply resent this slanderous attack on a great poet and a good friend’.
The warmth of Litvinoff’s homage here, then,
is a relic from before this schismatic act.
An important collection of Second World
War poetry, written on active service by a
British Jew and described by Adam Piette as
a ‘powerful expression of Jewish anger and
denunciation’ (Cambridge Companion to
the Literature of World War II, p. 22).
Inscribed to her mother
73. Macaulay (Rose) The Furnace. John Murray, 1907, FIRST EDITION, light foxing to
prelims and to ads at rear with the odd spot to page borders, pp. vii, 236, [12,
ads], crown 8vo, original red cloth, lettered in white to upper board with wave
border blocked in white to same, backstrip lettered in gilt with very slight lean
to spine, extremities rubbed with just a hint of wear, faint browning to free
endpapers, good £475
The author’s scarce second novel, inscribed by her to her mother on the flyleaf: ‘G.M.
Macaulay, Nov. 4th 1907, from E.R.M.’; a note, presumably in her mother’s hand, to
the rear free endpaper records, ‘re-read May 1909’.
With the influence of Henry James prominent, Macaulay uses the central metaphor
indicated by the title - conveyed symbolically throughout by the presence of Mount
Vesuvius in the background of its landscape, always on the point of eruption - to enact
a complex meshing of social and mystical awakening for its protagonists, the brotherand-sister
pair of Tommy and Betty Crevequer.
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