Review
T.F. Powys’s Favourite Bookseller, the Story of Charles Lahr
by Chris Gostick
Powys Heritage series, 32pp, £6.00 ISBN 978-1-907286-01-8
When I first met Charles (or Charlie) Lahr in 1967, four years
before his death, it seemed appropriate he was running the
bookshop of the Independent Labour Party, since in old age he
had slipped back into the world of far-left groupings (the ILP
having disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932) that had
sustained him after his arrival in London in 1905. Born Karl
Lahr in the Rhineland Palatinate, he had fled aged twenty to
England to avoid military service, working in a bakery and then
as a razor-grinder.
Throughout the interwar years, though, he owned with his wife
Esther (née Archer, anglicized from Argeband) a notable bookshop
in Red Lion Street, Holborn, much mentioned in literary memoirs
of the period, becoming the firm friend of such writers as Hugh
MacDiarmid, James Hanley, Liam O’Flaherty, H.E. Bates, Rhys
Davies, Malachi Whitaker and Olive Moore as well as the painter
William Roberts. John Cowper Powys visited in 1929, noting in
his diary:
Went to Theodore’s favourite German bookseller in Red Lion St
and signed a lot of my books. He is publishing a book of
Lawrences wh is very rough & crude & violent and angry and
plebian and obscene [Pansies]….He corresponds with Violet and
gets them an honest penny by selling Theodore’s books (signed)
I gave him some roses for his wife. I liked him very much. It
was the smallest shop I have ever been in.
In the mid-twenties Lahr had published the six issues of the
New Coterie for its three editors. Although (pace Chris
Gostick) he had little if any editorial input, this was how he
came into close contact with two contributors, D.H. Lawrence (by
then in France) and T.F. Powys, whom he would visit several
times a year in Dorset. Striking out entrepreneurially he began
to publish off-prints from the magazine as strange, unglamorous
limited editions, no fewer than five in the case of Powys, but
one including an original story, ‘A Strong Girl’, together with
a fine portrait drawing by Roberts. Christ in a Cupboard
followed in 1930 as one of eighteen Blue Moon Booklets.
Another Blue Moon Booklet was Philippa Powys’s collection of
poems, Driftwood. Lahr also published the first volume
of poetry by Laurence Powys, that is Francis Powys, Theodore’s
son. To complete the connection with the Powys family, one needs
to go further than Gostick does and say that in 1931 an essay by
Llewelyn Powys was announced as a ‘Blue Moon Octavo’ (yet there
couldn’t have been a worse time than at the trough of the
Depression to launch such a venture). Llewelyn was to tell
Kenneth Hopkins that Now That the Gods Are Dead was
originally written for Lahr, although thirty years later Alyse
Gregory corrected this to Glory of Life.
Gostick’s pamphlet is in general well-informed and
well-researched. However, portions of text get repeated, and
there are errors and misspellings: for example, the poet John
Gawsworth appears as ‘Gawsworthy’ and P.R. Stephensen, Lahr’s
Australian co-conspirator in his dealings with Lawrence, is
repeatedly named as ‘Stephenson’. Few people who knew Lahr well
are still alive and Gostick is understandably much reliant on
the testimony of the two daughters. But he goes too far,
captured by them in Lahr family wars in which they take the side
of their mother, hard-done-by according to them.
Lastly, Gostick, while struggling valiantly with Lahr’s youthful
anarchist activism, has no interest in the political dimension.
Entirely missing is the distinctive – and unusual – politics of
Lahr’s clientèle: ILP, anarchist, heterodox Marxist including
(very importantly) Trotskyist. If Lahr can be said to have
discovered any writers, they were not only Rhys Davies but also
George Woodcock, the future historian of anarchism and leading
man of letters in Canada, a tiny collection of whose poems he
printed in 1938. But Lahr also attracted Africans such as Jomo
Kenyatta and the novelist Peter Abrahams, as well as two notable
West Indian revolutionaries with whom he became intimate, George
Padmore and C.L.R. James, the latter a commanding figure in
Caribbean literature and thought.
David Goodway
From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 68, November 2009
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