[Vwoolf] J F Holms

[Stuart N. Clarke]

I’ve been looking into the past – fancy the appalling D S Savage being English!  I always thought he was a US religious fundamentalist who deplored the irreligion of the modernists: at least Dr Bradshaw and Miss Kilman were committed to a view of Life.  He only died in 2007.

Anyway, Holms did a review of Mrs. D. in 1925, & it’s in your Majumdar:

“How ... can such talent co-exist with a sentimentality that would be remarkable in a stockbroker, and inconceivable among educated people? ... most of the book ... is sentimental in conception and texture, and is accordingly aesthetically worthless.” (pp. 170-1)

Turns out Holms (who for decades I called Holmes) was more interesting, well, than he otherwise might have been.  He was married to Peggy Guggenheim.  See:
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2012/09/john-ferrar-holms-the-least-productive-writer-in-the-english-language-part-2/

I like the comment at the bottom:

You know, one does get just the teeny bit bored hearing about all these jolly chaps from privileged backgrounds about the time of the First World War, their bravery, their unsuccessful love-lives, the occasional scribbling printed by an obliging friend, never having to work, self-indulgence, boozing and, oh dear me, death. Who will write tributes to the unpublished Alfred Nigginses of that time, shop-keepers, gassed in the war, married to a bar-maid, with the only fall from grace tumblinging over in the road when sozzled? It’s all so bleedin’ unfair, yer literary world…..

Stuart
(Day 216)
"He began to look comfortably through a recent catalogue of second-hand
books from a bookseller who specialised in uncut review copies.  Like so
many British book-lovers, Mr. Purfleet always bought his books second-hand,
no doubt to encourage authors."
ALDINGTON, Richard (intro. by Anthony Burgess), "The Colonel's Daughter", The Hogarth Press, 1986 (1931), p. 165
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