My London
May 2019
When May Sinclair sat next to Mark Twain at his seventieth birthday party, apparently she sat there saying nothing, and at the end of the evening he thanked her for a ‘remarkably interesting silence’. Whether she was distraught over a recent bereavement, or drowned out by Twain’s repartee, or exhausted by the American social scene, we may never know. But as a writer of novels, short stories, philosophy and more, Sinclair had plenty to say about women, writing and the life of the mind. Perhaps it was a matter of listening.
London was Sinclair’s adopted home and chasing this elusive writer across the city has led me to eschew many of the traditional ‘sights’ in pursuit of the person who quietly noticed the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the radical Imagist poets and the modernist concept of ‘stream of consciousness’. The journey to a deeper understanding of this deliberately private writer has involved archival trips to Philadelphia, New York and Paris, but to understand the person has involved entering the deeper recesses of libraries large and small across London. So for me, the sights of London, the Tower, the Palaces and the Parks have their place, but the treasures of this city of endless curiosity lie in the darkest corners of its libraries, at a desk with a lamp, in a world of my own, but not of my making. As each library has its own atmosphere, so it has shone new light upon Sinclair.
Nothing builds a London frisson for me like the walk along the Euston Road to the British Library. With the traffic receding step by step, to stride across the continental plaza is to marvel at the commitment of public funds. The warning notice that the mosaiced stone floor is ‘slippery when wet’ raises a wry smile, for this is England and a library is the perfect place on a rainy day; this irony provides some entertainment in the extensive queue to pass security and enter the building. Described as cathedral-like, by some, it always comes as a shock that the British Library is now also a social space, indeed, one of London’s ‘sights’. To head for the reading rooms is to brush past tourists browsing the giftshops and propping up coffee counters, and to edge past students spilling into open zones lined with sofa-seats and long tables. Walking deeper into the library, however, the contemplative atmosphere resumes and the finely choreographed movement of the King’s Library, shifting to an unknown rhythm, reminds us that knowledge, like life, is necessarily incomplete.
May Sinclair is not an easy writer to truly understand. Although her publications can be obtained straightforwardly enough, it is the marginalia that reveals a the person. She destroyed much evidence of her life, avoided personal interviews and redacted elements of her papers. For her, the writing was everything. Yet in the Rare Books section of the British Library, buried in century-old copies of a journal for writers, The Author, there is evidence of her professional concerns and cares. She wrote bemoaning the decreasing rate of pay for typists; she warned other writers about placing their work with unscrupulous magazines, naming and shaming; and debated the use of that new-fangled American idea: copyright. The British Library then, with its unknowable resources and holdings in London and Boston Spa, yields at least a glimpse of the person: the professionally-engaged and responsible writer behind all those woman-centred novels. Fittingly, Sinclair can be contributing to her writing community in this sociable library.
A short trip from Kings Cross on the Piccadilly Line and off at Piccadilly Circus, with the Royal Academy and Fortnum’s in the distance, past the shirt shops of Jermyn Street, keeping Chatham House on the right, and ignoring the invitation of St James’s Square’s grassy garden is the route to the London Library. This library, tucked in a tight corner of the square but labyrinthine inside, is an altogether more tactile and sensual experience. There are rooms for reading and writing, some modern, some antique, but far more appealing are the nooks and crannies to be discovered as you explore the metal-floored stacks and wooden low-ceilinged rooms crammed full of books on all manner of subjects from aesthetics to witchcraft, and much in between. There are small, old fashioned desks and tables with a single lamp, squeezed in here and there. At one of these you can work away for an entire day, undisturbed and forgotten. The pleasures of exploring alone, browsing serendipitously and handling the books gives the library an intimate feel. May Sinclair was a member of the London Library, she used it for her research, made a gift of membership to Richard Aldington, and bequeathed her philosophical books. One May Sinclair scholar has undertaken a project to map the books and sources that Sinclair used there, others have traced similar journeys of the mind for Bram Stoker writing Dracula and even for the exploits of Ian Flemming’s 007 character, James Bond. The ghosts of writers and their creations permeate the stacks of the London Library, and with each volume plucked from the shelf, you may wonder who held it before, and what may pass through the static shock you likely receive.
Unmediated access in this subscription library nonetheless feels like a gift to the reader. May Sinclair‘s work as a journalist has revealed itself through century-old newspapers, slowly browsed in hidden basements of the London Library. Her reports sent in to the Daily Chronicle and elsewhere revisit the work of her Red Cross Ambulance at the front line in Belgium, a private venture with Dr Hector Munroe of the Medic-Psychological Clinic (now Tavistock). Her journalism focussed on the work of women at the front, the rescue missions of ambulance drivers and stretcher bearers, and the early triage station established behind the front line by the two ‘Heroines of Pervyse’. It seems fitting that the library she loved should be the one to reveal the extent of her First World War reportage.
One discovery at the London Library was Sinclair’s contribution to the Journal of the Society for Psychological Research, an intriguing Society that boasts names like William James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The SPR houses its library quietly and reservedly in a Mews in Kensington. But the collection shown to me offered no further clues and if the society knew more about Sinclair, it kept its secrets to itself.
However, a journey on the Bakerloo Line to Lambeth North for the library of the Imperial War Museum, brought a markedly more enlightening experience. An extraordinary museum at any time, the library is an exceptional resource not least because members of the public generously donate their family treasures, mementoes and heirlooms. Access to the library was by armed escort and I was delivered straight to a desk forming part of a larger circle. My pre-ordered items were set out, but in addition there were other papers, suggested by the librarian who deployed her impressive knowledge of the archive to make new connections. These artefacts included handwritten accounts by another member of the very same Red Cross Ambulance Corps, and this revealed another side to Sinclair. Her behaviour was criticised, seen as hysterical even, and certainly thought inappropriate for her role as correspondent for the Corp’s activities. Eventually, she was sent home from the front, only now has it fully emerged why.
Sinclair’s account of her time at the front, A Journal of Impressions (1915) was a very early war journal indeed. It offers a female, emotional reaction to the War. Distaste regarding women writing about the First World War at the time was palpable, ‘It is not for women to talk of mud’ declared some. Indeed, Sinclair’s Journal was badly received and attracted poor reviews. Her behaviour and Impressions may not have conformed to Edwardian etiquette, but I suggest she was ahead of her time in understanding and recording the emotional impact of War.
The journey around London trying to understand May Sinclair, has offered different perspectives at different libraries. Like the city of London itself, Sinclair remains elusive and complex, varied and contradictory. Libraries as gatekeepers for the physical books and journals we understand, but what else can they reveal? At the British Library I learned how Sinclair, as a writer of some standing, advised her writing community about their changing profession. The London Library allowed a glimpse of her other roles: Sinclair as researcher, newspaper correspondent, and member of the SPR, seeking and dispensing new knowledge and understanding of this world and the next. The Imperial War Museum offered an adjunctive perspective, from the valuable viewpoint of a fellow front-line traveller. It pointed to Sinclair’s extreme emotional reaction in the face of wartime upheavals and horrors. The libraries across London, with their different textures, have opened up new ways of understanding a life lived not only in the mind, but in the world too. Next stops are to visit the London villages where Sinclair lived and which she worked so convincingly into her fiction. In the early days she lived with her mother, moving from Ilford to Eltham, Hampstead, Primrose Hill, Kensington and then St John’s Wood, as her writerly success and fame led to improved domestic circumstances, and where she entertained writers such as Ezra Pound, not so silently.
Dr Laurel Forster will be editing a critical edition of May Sinclair’s Journal of Impressions in Belgium to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023 as part of the republication of all May Sinclair’s known works.