Guest post by John Pym: One of my first Communists

The first edition of Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx (1972 and 1976)

Patrick Miles named me the dedicatee of his story My First Communist published here in two parts in the spring, so let me return the compliment with this ‘sketch from memory’ of the redoubtable Yvonne Kapp – one of my own first communists.

Yvonne Kapp (1903–99), translator, novelist and trades-union speech-writer, was the author of the first major biography of Eleanor Marx, youngest of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen’s four daughters. Published in two dense volumes, four years apart, it was Kapp’s magnum opus. Eric Hobsbawm, her friend and comrade, summarised Kapp’s life – taking their political belief as an unarguable given – in an obituary published in The Guardian on 29 June 1999, and for those curious about Yvonne but knowing nothing of her it’s a notably succinct and sympathetic starting point.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

For Yvonne in her own words, there’s a posthumous book of ‘Memoirs’, Time Will Tell, edited by Charmian Brinson and Betty Lewis. This illuminates, in particular, the years of the author’s peripatetic European bohemianism (and subsequent political awakening) up to the opening of the Second World War, and was published by Verso in 2003 (the cover photograph above was taken in the 1930s). Verso also has on its website Yvonne’s vivid conversational account of the trials and joys of an amateur historian researching and writing her first and only full-scale biography.

Yvonne Hélène Mayer was born in Tulse Hill, South London, in 1903 into a middle-class Jewish family with roots in the Rhineland. The Mayers’ prosperity came from the vanilla trade and Yvonne endured (as she might have put it) a privileged Edwardian childhood that took in a class-bound girls’ college in Harley Street and ended at a Swiss finishing school. She neither sat nor passed, she was proud to tell anyone who’d listen, a single public exam.

She was a friend of my parents from the time of my boyhood in North London in the 1950s and, I suspect, closely involved during those post-war years in the opaque activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as was my mother Diana, who was also, incidentally, schooled in Harley Street. Both my mother and Yvonne held fast to their political beliefs until the end of their lives despite what many might now regard as the unanswerable lessons of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the collapse of the Soviet Union – among much else. ‘It was like a religion,’ my father Jack, who was a socialist but not a Party member, remarked of his wife’s faith.

Yvonne was far removed in character, background and outlook from that of the father deftly outlined in Patrick’s story. Here is how she elegantly (one might say, judiciously) described herself on the flyleaf of Volume II of her biography of Eleanor Marx (Lawrence & Wishart, 1972 and 1976):

Despite a varied career – Literary Editor of Vogue in Paris during the late nineteen-twenties; full-time worker for refugees from Nazi persecution during the ’thirties; Research Officer for the Amalgamated Engineering Union throughout the ’forties; and employed in the industrial field by the Medical Research Council in the early ’fifties – Yvonne Kapp has never ceased to be a writer since the age of seven. Her first work to appear in book form, Pastiche: A Music-Room Book, written under the name Yvonne Cloud to accompany drawings by her husband, Edmond X. Kapp, was published exactly fifty years ago.

Edmond Kapp (1890–1978), whom Yvonne married at the age of 19 (a daughter, Janna, was born in 1924, but the marriage lasted only briefly), was in his day a distinguished caricaturist and war artist. Among his many portraits was a black-chalk study of Sir William Rothenstein (1931), the friend of George and Kittie Calderon, which can be viewed on request at the V&A museum in West London.

Edmond survived a gas attack while serving as a lieutenant in the British Army in France during the First World War and Yvonne kept one of his portraits (was it a self-portrait?) in the airy sitting-room of her small Georgian terraced house with its handsome garden at No. 39 North Road, a few steps from Highgate Village. Horticulture was a bond that Yvonne shared with my maternal grandmother, Dorothea, Lady Gough, a widow of the First World War, who lived in the house next door to us on North Hill, a few hundred yards down the hill from Yvonne. Roses thrived on the clay soil of Highgate – and I can remember the two ladies with opposed political views in conversation about such matters as pruning and spray-pumps.

Here is not the place for a full-bore critical re-evaluation of Yvonne’s biography of Eleanor ‘Tussy’ Marx (1855–98) who, in the publisher’s words, made ‘a significant contribution to the British and international working-class movement in which she was greatly loved and is still remembered’, except to say that this immensely readable work of nearly 1,100 pages can justly claim to be groundbreaking and remains, by its own lights, ‘definitive’. Eleanor, her father’s favourite child, led a relatively short but notably full and varied life. She had that unquenchable Victorian ‘need to be doing’ – and among her many achievements was the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (see Vol. II, ‘The Crowded Years’, p. 96).

Kapp was a full-time worker for refugees from Nazi persecution in the 1930s. In this (as illustrated above) she was joined by her partner Margaret Mynatt.

The Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams described Kapp’s biography as ‘immaculately documented, immensely scholarly and positively hypnotic […] in scores of deft, almost imperceptible touches she brings the Marxes to life’. Claire Tomalin, who was then working on her own first biography, of Mary Wollstonecraft, called Eleanor Marx ‘never less than fascinating’; and Michael Foot, writing in The Evening Standard (a newspaper to which Yvonne contributed as a young woman), exclaimed, ‘Since [Kapp] relies only on properly sifted evidence and abjures all the resorts of a novelist or the Freudian biographer, the feat of achieving so complete a portrait is the more amazing. It is a work of scholarship but also a work of art.’

There were, however, dissenting voices. Frederic Raphael, for one, gave the biography both barrels in the closing paragraph of his review (The Sunday Times, 23 January 1977 – from an envelope of press-cuttings kept by my father):

It is without any wish to deny the epic quality of these things that I am bound to say that Mrs Kapp has allowed herself a complacent prolixity, not unstuffed with sententiousness, heavily damaging to her book’s pretensions to the status of art to which some critics were quick to promote the first volume. There is splendid and affecting material here, diligently researched, enough to halt any middle-aged drift to the Right in its world-weary tracks, but the mixture of grandiloquence and scholarship is not enough to persuade one that hagiography and style are any more happily married than Eleanor and [her partner] Edward.

Hobsbawm later observed in Kapp’s obituary: ‘After 60 unwavering years as a communist, “everything about Yvonne”, an admiring visitor noted, “is elegant, from her literary vocabulary to the delicious cake she offers with afternoon tea”. In spite of all the temptations of bolshevism, in her happy great-grandmotherhood she remained recognisably what her family in the Rhineland would have called “eine Dame”.’

The Yvonne I remember was a short, slightly stooped lady with a helmet of white hair and strikingly enquiring eyes behind thick round spectacles. A powerful untipped cigarette burned permanently between her fingers. She listened intently and spoke only in finished sentences, with wit and irony never far away; she relished argument, but could also, to my knowledge, be extremely thin-skinned and quick to see offence – despite being a woman who had, in Hobsbawm’s phrase, an ‘oxhide’ toughness. She gave abundant encouragement to the young – as I discovered when, aged about 15, I showed her a story of mine published in the school magazine and she offered a discreet opinion on it – it was, for me, a red-letter moment!

One day, soon after I left school in 1965, or possibly during a university vacation, Yvonne invited me to join her on a research expedition. We drove from Highgate to the West End and parked near Waterloo Bridge. Inside Somerset House, then still the repository of all English paper records of births, marriages and wills, I was required to act the hod-carrier, lugging several huge volumes to an ill-lit desk where Yvonne scrutinised the inked copper-plate lists through a magnifying-glass, pencil in hand.

What was she looking for? I can’t be sure, but I think it was some aspect of the obfuscated record of the life of Edward Aveling, the scapegrace common-law husband of Eleanor Marx. (On the title page of Vizetelly & Co.’s 1886 edition of Madame Bovary you will read ‘Translated from the French Édition Définitive by Eleanor Marx-Aveling’.) A few tiny facts, in any event, required exact verification from a primary source.

Title page of the first edition of Eleanor Marx’s translation, 1886

For a few years I had an intermittent correspondence with Yvonne and one of her letters, I remember, came from East Berlin where she was engaged on more Eleanor research at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. (Unlike Karl Marx’s notorious scrawl, Yvonne’s beautiful longhand was a perfection of legibility.) She was treated by the state as an honoured overseas member of the nomenklatura. But unfortunately, at the very start of her stay, while crossing a street in the drab half of that then still divided city, she tripped over a pedestrian barrier and smashed up one of her knees.

She found her subsequent five-month recovery in the GDR hard to take, and, to her credit, said as much – in private, at least. She was hobbling around, she wrote to me, like the Commendatore from Don Giovanni. Could she please have (my mother reported the request) a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, to occupy her mind and to remind her of home. Later, in her ‘Memoirs’, Yvonne would summon up, for amusement, a passage from Tristram Shandy on the tendons and ‘what-not’ connected with the knee – very much the worst bony part of the body to smash up.

When I first met her, Yvonne shared her Highgate home with Bianca Margaret Mynatt, daughter of an Austrian mother and an English musician father. Volume I of Eleanor Marx is dedicated to Margaret – and she was another of my first communists.

Margaret was manager of the Communist Party bookshop, Central Books, on the Grays Inn Road, where I had my first paid job, stocktaking in the basement and running errands to the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. Later she became a director of the Party’s official publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, and editor-in-chief of the many-volume English edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels. She was in several ways, and certainly outwardly, an even more formidable figure than Yvonne. Margaret appeared somewhat mask-like, watchful and withdrawn, while Yvonne’s default setting was an open, loquacious effervescence. They were a devoted, unforgettable couple.

Announcement of the founding of Central Books by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Source: ‘spitalfieldslife.com‘)

Margaret Mynatt left Vienna, the city of her birth, in 1929 and settled in Berlin in her early twenties where she became an active member of the German Communist Party and simultaneously a member of the intimate circle of Bertolt Brecht. From Nazi Germany in 1934 she moved to England. Thirty-five years later I accompanied Margaret and Yvonne to a London stage performance at the Saville Theatre of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a transfer from the Glasgow Citizens’ with Leonard Rossiter, like a coiled spring, as the Chicago mafioso of the title. Neither Margaret nor Yvonne entirely approved of Michael Blakemore’s direction; and afterwards as they dissected the performances and mise-en-scène in minute detail (the substance of which, I’m afraid, I can no longer recall – but I fancy it was along the lines of ‘the Brechtian method was not to be monkeyed with’) it was as if 30 years rolled back and Brecht was standing beside us, smiling at the argumentative nit-picking, rubbing his unshaven chin and trying perhaps to get a word in edgeways.

Leonard Rossiter as Arturo Ui, 1959

Search for Margaret Mynatt on the Internet and you’ll see she had some eight ‘aliases’ in her Berlin days and that, once settled in London, she was suspected of acting as an undercover Moscow courier. I’ve no idea if this is true. A deep and abiding regret of Margaret’s life, Yvonne told me, was that circumstances prevented her from pursuing, in the footsteps of her father, a career as a professional musician. (Her father, incidentally, ‘italianised’ his own English name for professional purposes to Giovanni Carlo Minotti.)

I visited No. 39 North Road in 1977 when Margaret lay on her deathbed at the back of the sitting-room. The family GP had recently reassured her, Yvonne said, that no patient to whom she’d prescribed morphine had ever become an addict. Beside Margaret’s bed on a small table lay an unframed black-and-white photograph of the young Bert Brecht. Yvonne confided sotto voce that they’d engaged a very capable Irish nurse to help them. The nurse had asked if she could say a prayer for Margaret. Yvonne, a devout atheist, had offered no objection, but was upset that the nurse had placed a hot cup on the polished surface of one of her good pieces of furniture.

Edward Aveling abandoned Eleanor Marx in 1898 to marry a younger woman under an assumed name. This was too much for Eleanor and shortly afterwards she committed suicide. I once had the temerity to offer Margaret, who smoked almost as incessantly as Yvonne, a tipped American cigarette. She refused with an exclamation of disgust that stays with me to this day. It was as if I’d offered her a vial of the prussic acid that Eleanor purchased to ensure her end.

*

Postscript. Before Margaret’s funeral at Golders Green Crematorium, Yvonne asked me to perform a task of the utmost secrecy. After the ceremony I was to drive to an address Yvonne would reveal only when we were on the road. She did not wish to meet any of the mourners. And no one was to know whither she’d disappeared.

Mindful of my assignment, I sat beside Yvonne on the aisle at the end of a row near the front of the non-denominational ‘chapel’. The tall, spidery, instantly recognisable figure of Eric Hobsbawn, who was to deliver the eulogy, was displeased to be told that I had a very good reason to be sitting in the seat he’d earmarked for himself. I conceded the place, of course, and budged up beside Yvonne. We sat through the ceremony squeezed together, not very comfortably, with me between the two most eminent personages of the proceedings. The coffin entered bedecked with the Red Flag and the Comrades rose to the strains of ‘The Ode to Joy’. (La Pasionaria, had she been present, might have cried from the back of the room ‘¡No Pasarán!’) At the conclusion, after Hobsbawm’s moving and intimate address, the coffin approached the flames and ‘The Internationale’ sent us all on our way. (Or was it ‘The Internationale’ first and Beethoven at the close? Memory plays tricks.)

In the getaway car, Yvonne directed me to East London and the Thames. It would be some years before the district was gentrified. And Eleanor Marx would certainly have recognised the few still working docks, the narrow cobbled streets and the tall forbidding warehouses. We stopped at one of these industrial buildings, rang a bell and ascended an uncarpeted staircase to a shadowy and seemingly disordered artist’s studio. A large unkempt man appeared in an unbuttoned shirt, a friend of Edmond and Yvonne’s younger days: Edward Wolfe, the famous South-African-born painter, now a Royal Academician. The two embraced. ‘I’ll stay here for a week and then go home,’ were Yvonne’s parting words. ‘Then I’ll be quite all right – I recover quickly, you know.’ Yvonne Kapp lived another twenty-two years but, alas, that was the last time I saw her.

© John Pym, 2023

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.