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Journey from the North: A Memoir
One of the 20th century's finest memoirs of literary and political life, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, who referred to the book as “literary gold”“Stops you in your tracks. I would like to persuade everyone to read it” — Sunday TimesA compulsively readable, beautifully written account of a fascinating twentieth-century woman and life. This candid, affecting portrait of a woman who loathed domesticity explores how she sought to balance a literary career with political commitment.Towards the end of her life, the writer Storm Jameson began her memoir by asking, “can I make sense of my life?” This question propelled her through an extraordinary reckoning with how she had her early years in Whitby, shadowed by her tempestuous, dissatisfied mother; an early, unhappy marriage and repeated flights from settled domesticity; a tenaciously pursued literary career, always dogged by a lack of money; and her lifelong political activism, including as the first female president of English PEN, helping refugees escape Nazi Germany.In a richly ironic, conversational voice, Jameson tells also of the great figures she knew and events she encounters with H.G. Wells and Rose Macaulay, travels in Europe as fascism was rising and a 1945 trip to recently liberated Warsaw. Throughout, she casts an unsparing eye on her own motivations and psychology, providing a rigorously candid and lively portrait of her life and times.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
800 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
5 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Storm Jameson
79 books23 followersMargaret Storm Jameson was an English writer, known for her 45 novels, and criticism.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
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September 23, 2025She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman. Whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life.
few writers lived a life so synecdochic for a century as the novelist and socialist storm jameson. whatever modernity means—call it the total, irreversible transition from a whole way of life to another—jameson lived three, four times. born in the provincial seaport whitby, where her father was a sea captain and her mother came from a shipbuilding family, jameson journeyed to the university of leeds, where she was the first woman to study english literature, and then to a rapidly modernizing london where she sought work as a writer and journalist, eventually becoming the president of pen international. she found her way to a circuit that runs through france, italy, (née) czechoslovakia, hungary, germany, poland, and the u.s., a circuit that unhappily coincided with two world wars. along this circuit, jameson navigated between ‘the instinct to withdraw completely, and the desire to live a flashing life in the world.’
pushkin press has newly republished her formerly out-of-print, two-volume journey from the north, collected in one mammoth 800-page tome and introduced by vivian gornick’s uncharacteristically abysmal preface. rather than frame jameson for a new generation of readers, gornick decides to relate a charming story about her (gornick’s) mother’s reading habits and then goes on to dismiss all of jameson’s other writing by comparison to this one, reciting the tired cliché that jameson’s writing is too political, too ideas-driven, etc. (wake up! the cold war is over and everyone lost!) there’s no real context for who jameson was, no acknowledgement of her interest for the present moment (despite a steadily increasing readership), and very little evidence that gornick has even read much of the enormous body of work that she spends a baffling amount of the brief preface disparaging. there’s not all that much evidence that she’s read this book.
rather than take as read the redemptive work of dutiful life writing that gornick describes, we might place jameson’s chronicle of her ‘flashing life in the world’ in the lineage of the great modernist autobiographical sequences a la pilgrimage or proust.* for her part, jameson claims tolstoy as a lodestar, and her francophilia finds her seeking models in stendhal, girandoux, and malraux. but her drive-by literary-critical judgments show the taste of someone confidently, consistently, interestingly wrong: she is scandalized by joyce, robbe-grillet, and abstract expressionism, but praises j.b. priestley and minor english novelists as luminaries.** similarly, her thoughts on the relation of art and politics--a relation under strain in the 1920s and 1930s but one that her life made manifest--unfortunately seem yoked to the retrospective cold war bromides that were in the air when she was writing this in the late 1960s (her 1930s writings on this topic are great). beyond the judgments themselves, the freedom with which she inserts her literary criticism into intimate personal scenes, broader political reflections, and geographical and historical sketches helps to build a genuinely unique patchwork structure, one that jumps around in time with impressive grace. (consider, for instance, her striking technique of suddenly narrowing in on a character or motif, tracing it through time in a kind of vertical enlargement, and then returning to where we left off on the 'horizontal' line of narrative.)
despite the brevity of jameson’s flirtation with modernism (woolf dismissed her work as ‘middlebrow’), then, journey from the north overcomes the burden of its avowed influences to achieve a reflexivity about memory and matter that bears the stamp of jameson’s era: ‘in any life a few, very few, key images turn up again and again, recognizable even though deformed by the changed light or the angle at which they appear.’ ‘these primitive or underworld images, voices out of sleep, out of a lost harbor . . . may indeed be the only things i ever, in the positive sense of the word, hear or see.’ and yet: ‘do not believe that the earliest memories are anything but disguised choices.’
the primitive, underworld images of jameson’s youth in whitby feature her mother, who takes out her frustrated ambitions on her children, in the foreground. jameson’s refusal to lie or hedge, secure in knowing this will be published posthumously, proves bracing: ‘Every evening I prayed avidly that God would kill her in the night.’ the ambivalent relation between jameson and her mother shapes the entire first volume, including jameson’s flight from her parent’s antipathetic marriage to study literature at the university of leeds and then to work in publishing, thanks to her ‘specious air of competence.’ at one point, jameson is offered an editorial job at the egoist; she declines and the job goes to rebecca west. a counterfactual literary history with jameson in the place of west would be interesting, but jameson feels more at home on the outside of any coterie, as her brief encounter with a manic wyndham lewis and her later political battles with h. g. wells confirm. her ‘deep unrealized contempt for novel-writing’ puts her out of step with the religion-of-art crowd. ‘Nothing is more ridiculous than a writer, an animal whose response to disaster is a phrase.’
she writes novels anyway, though, throughout her first miserable marriage and then her brief unconsummated infatuation ('in the claws of a raging want') with an oafish man beguilingly referred to as ‘the texan.' ‘Since there was nothing else I could do, I began to write a novel.’ she sends the novel to a publisher under a different name. then she meets with an editor who sees through the ruse, rejects her manuscript, and hands her a book to read to emulate in future submissions. ‘Somewhere between London and Reading, after trying to read it, I dropped it from the window of the train.’ she gives birth to a son, she works in advertising, she works in publishing, she writes and publishes novels that do well, she writes and publishes novels that do less well, she writes political essays, she joins socialist and pacifist groups, she finally separates from her shitty first husband, she happily re-marries (‘Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings’), she and her mother develop a much closer and fonder relation than in childhood, she and her younger sister similarly draw closer—things speed up.
while jameson britishly maintains a controlled, sober tone throughout, her frequent flights of stylistic ambition reward: ‘I saw roofs and the black gulfs of streets, an alphabet I could not spell out, and behind them a sky with a veining of darker clouds like twisted roots.’ ‘Hell is five or six memories which are able occasionally to enter the intestines through the mind and tear them.’ ‘The image for my life in the years between 1919 and the end of 1923 is that of a vacant lot between crowded streets.’ ‘This church is part of my life: it speaks to my skeleton, which remembers clearly the worn places in stairs, the grain of old wood, the moment—each time as piercing as the first—when a man crossing the moors above Sleights sees the sea leaning against the sky, the edge of the cliff, and the church kneeling on it, waiting, beside the ruined Abbey. How could it forget, since those who live in me—and live nowhere else—have stared at it from the moors, from the harbour, from the sea, for eight hundred years? There is nothing here but what’s mine.’ (i like to imagine jameson loudly strumming an electric guitar after that passage.)
it’s not all as serious as that. jameson’s talent for zingers rivals her talent for the poetic turn: ‘A cynical old woman told me: ‘No mother ever woke her second child to make certain it had not died in its sleep.’’ ‘During these years I came to know so many people that I almost died of it.’ ‘If only, I shall say to myself, when I am dying of not being able to stay alive any longer, you had had a little more coolness and foresight.’ ‘I began my first attempt to write well.’ ‘the bladdernovel, that great modern industry.’ ‘We talked for a few minutes about ‘the novel’, with a certain delicacy, as if it were a disreputable relative of his or mine.’
to say that this is jameson is not quite right either. there are always at least three jamesons at every moment: ‘the threefold images dissolve into one behind my eyes—then, now, always.’ a ‘chimera of a book has haunted me all my life,’ ‘one book which recorded only the essence of my life, the one or two ideas that were mine, not picked up from other people or books, the one or two feelings, impulses, acts, in which my whole self had been engaged.’ as in proust, the layers of author, narrator, and narrative separate and recombine from sentence to sentence. 'time is not a succession of minutes but a labyrinth where the threads of past and present cross and recross, fusing, separating, turning on themselves, without rest.'
but the world interrupts her reflections on poetics. her younger brother’s death in the first world war shadows the remainder of the text, seeping into her relationships with her mother and with her younger sister. further, his death permanently wrecks the fragile relations between her devastated mother and her ineffectual, self-pitying father. jameson allows herself a rare moment of naked emotion: ‘My brother, his small round body, as hard as a green apple, convulsed with laughter he could not contain, rolled across the floor between the piano and the horsehair sofa… Ah, let me go back, I begged. Nothing got since is worth a minute of that infinite world.’
seeded here in the sense of a world lost, jameson's slow disillusionment in the liberal international order marks her career at pen international. ‘the whole of our civilization was living only in the internment camps where they played Beethoven.’ the build-up to the second world war occupies much of the book, making it seem inevitable even as all of europe remains in denial. she goes from country to country, everyone she meets either assured that war won’t come or convinced that hitler will wrest control of the continent. her time spent in her ambassadorial role among antisemitic czechs and among anxious hungarian jews is especially ominous. she tries to warn jewish friends in england about the possibility of internment there, but does so too late. (the book really gives the lie to benevolent britannia.)
notable moments from this period: when she arrives in berlin, an avant-garde play on the topic of marx’s law of value is being performed. she and her pen colleagues bond over shared contempt for jules romains. her son falls down an elevator shaft and is mostly unharmed, though she feels this is a failure of hers as a parent. she continues to write, somehow at an absurd rate of a novel a year or so. she is so self-effacing, at times, it's easy to forget her tireless refugee advocacy. somewhere in this sequence her mother dies, another moment where jameson’s even-keeled mask slips.
jameson helps her younger sister with her children after they move out of london during the war (a move jameson dangerously delays). among the most powerful scenes in the whole book is her younger sister’s death. her sister is volunteering at a camp for the wounded when she hears a bomb descending; at the last moment, a survivor hears her sister say, with stoic dryness, ‘that’s for us.’ if jameson's ambivalent relationship with her mother informs the first volume, jameson's deep grief for her sister suffuses the second.
perhaps the most accomplished sequence in the whole book is the whirlwind of postwar poland, where jameson arrives for a conference that turns out in a kafkaesque twist not to have been planned or scheduled. ‘The drive into the centre of Warsaw was disquieting, like the onset of a nightmare.’ ‘In the morning I stared from my single pane of glass at sprawling pyramids of rubble under a hard blue sky. So far as I could see there was nothing else, only these ossuaries of fractured stone and brick. A great tangled arc of steel sprang from the collapsed skeleton of some large building to hang grotesquely in mid-air.’ ‘Behind the disembowelled fronts, cataracts of rubble and dark dust.’ ‘narrow lanes traced the lines of vanished streets between the scorched shells of houses, each vomiting its dust-choked torrent of rubble.’ ‘One part only of the ruins was without life, an emptiness—that was the vast level plain of broken brick where the ghetto had been. Here nothing existed, no single line or form, not even a seed fallen among thorns, nothing.’
this visit tests jameson’s sometimes naïve, sensible liberal-socialist politics: ‘The Germans did not occupy Poland in the way they occupied other countries, as a military measure. In that sense it was not an occupation. It was a first stage in colonization. They were going to settle in Poland. Towards the defeated Poles they behaved with the ruthlessness of brutal colonists.’ (elsewhere, after hiroshima, she declares the very idea of european civilization dead.) in one mysterious scene, the impatient visiting party leaves their tour guides in a stuck cab on the barely navigable road from warsaw to krakow in the ‘history-soaked night’ ‘to be murdered by brigands.’ (no follow up on this.) milosz, who jameson clearly admires, makes a couple appearances.
despite this virtuosic set piece, though, the second volume suffers from repetition. this repetition works in the build-up to the second world war both as a mechanism of suspense and to convey bureaucratic banality in the face of looming catastrophe, but in the second volume finally becomes excessive, especially as the writing loses its earlier rigor. this feels inevitable: her political conviction is gone, her novels are doing poorly, her younger brother is gone, her mother is gone, her younger sister is gone, gossipy bits and celebrity cameos dry up, and, honestly, she just spends too much time in france. the juxtaposition of pre-war and post-war prague helps to re-energize the final quarter of the book, which finally picks up as she moves to pittsburgh with her husband to teach creative writing and hang with the leavises.
her awed impressions of the united states show the sublime effect of the new imperial hegemon at midcentury, and her travels in the u.s. showcase her writing at its best. a busy road is an ‘unbroken rippling chain of lights’ that, after wartime petrol shortages, she initially doesn’t recognize as headlights. she describes ‘crossing the Middle West, where for hour after hour the same field, the same town—called Warsaw or Troy or Macon—is repeated and repeated, an endless stuttering of the same unintelligible phrase.’ every place she visits makes for ‘Another splendid fragment of a country which does not exist.’
‘These memories have to end somewhere, or the world would be choked by them like a gutter by dead leaves.’ remarkably, jameson writes her own obituary (!) and inserts it into the final volume. of interest in this obituary especially is her final verdict on her own fiction, listing ‘Cousin Honoré, Cloudless May, Black Laurel with its prologue Before the Crossing, [and] The Green Man’ as the works that she hopes survive. (for those keeping score, the journal of mary harvey russell, which she cites earlier as her best, is curiously absent here.) i found jameson’s authorship of her life, in both senses, profoundly moving: ‘I am my choice. I am what I made of my original condition.’ her talent for self-diminution is equally affecting: ‘An old woman dies.’
an old woman dies; maybe gornick takes her at her word. gornick wants to parse storm jameson the didactic middlebrow novelist from storm jameson the shrewd and evocative life-writer. (what about jameson the activist?) in a sense, jameson anticipates gornick, who merely metabolizes the neurotic self-criticism that peppers journey from the north. as scholars note, jameson’s lifelong habit of masochistic self-deprecation may have hurt her career. but the division of fiction and not—the dismissal of jameson’s avowed fictions—comes undone as jameson stages scene after scene with novelistic flair and charges her prose with a stylistic ambition that does not always but quite frequently reaches vertiginous heights. in fact, jameson intermittently interpolates language from her own novels, novels that many readers rate highly (i would certainly contest jameson’s assessment of 1933’s a day off as a ‘failure’). she narrates her own death in the final, unbelievable passages of the—i want to write ‘novel.’ but even if we write off jameson’s novel-writing as unimportant (and bracket her political activity), gornick ignores the work to bring jameson back into circulation done by jennifer birkett, chiari briganti, katherine cooper, and elizabeth maslen, among others. i’m not asking for peer-reviewed scholarship. i’m asking for an acknowledgement that storm jameson matters, in the preface to a—sorry—magisterial book that is haunted by her sense that she might not. i think she does.
this book taught me the words ‘biophage,’ ‘consanguinity,’ and ‘contumacy.’
* jameson would disagree: 'I am prejudiced in advance against a novel I might enjoy, sensible, perceptive, a decent very drinkable little vin du pays, when I am told that its author is ‘the English Proust’.'
** joyce--'a purely disintegrating force, a sacred monster, . . . a great anti-humanist, the destroyer by his devilish skill and persistence of the thin walls against barbarism'--really disturbs english writers, i’ve noticed, inspiring similar histrionics from forster and woolf.
postscript
in addition to aiding and abetting vivian gornick's crimes, pushkin press has also decided to omit the photographs that accompanied earlier editions of this book. since the book was published posthumously, it's hard to know what jameson would've wanted, but this seems to me like cost cutting at the expense of the book. plus, pushkin press has inexplicably inserted the subtitle 'a memoir' on the cover and title page. but i'll stop whining since it is still thanks to pushkin press that this, again, magisterial book enjoys a second life.
few writers lived a life so synecdochic for a century as the novelist and socialist storm jameson. whatever modernity means—call it the total, irreversible transition from a whole way of life to another—jameson lived three, four times. born in the provincial seaport whitby, where her father was a sea captain and her mother came from a shipbuilding family, jameson journeyed to the university of leeds, where she was the first woman to study english literature, and then to a rapidly modernizing london where she sought work as a writer and journalist, eventually becoming the president of pen international. she found her way to a circuit that runs through france, italy, (née) czechoslovakia, hungary, germany, poland, and the u.s., a circuit that unhappily coincided with two world wars. along this circuit, jameson navigated between ‘the instinct to withdraw completely, and the desire to live a flashing life in the world.’
pushkin press has newly republished her formerly out-of-print, two-volume journey from the north, collected in one mammoth 800-page tome and introduced by vivian gornick’s uncharacteristically abysmal preface. rather than frame jameson for a new generation of readers, gornick decides to relate a charming story about her (gornick’s) mother’s reading habits and then goes on to dismiss all of jameson’s other writing by comparison to this one, reciting the tired cliché that jameson’s writing is too political, too ideas-driven, etc. (wake up! the cold war is over and everyone lost!) there’s no real context for who jameson was, no acknowledgement of her interest for the present moment (despite a steadily increasing readership), and very little evidence that gornick has even read much of the enormous body of work that she spends a baffling amount of the brief preface disparaging. there’s not all that much evidence that she’s read this book.
rather than take as read the redemptive work of dutiful life writing that gornick describes, we might place jameson’s chronicle of her ‘flashing life in the world’ in the lineage of the great modernist autobiographical sequences a la pilgrimage or proust.* for her part, jameson claims tolstoy as a lodestar, and her francophilia finds her seeking models in stendhal, girandoux, and malraux. but her drive-by literary-critical judgments show the taste of someone confidently, consistently, interestingly wrong: she is scandalized by joyce, robbe-grillet, and abstract expressionism, but praises j.b. priestley and minor english novelists as luminaries.** similarly, her thoughts on the relation of art and politics--a relation under strain in the 1920s and 1930s but one that her life made manifest--unfortunately seem yoked to the retrospective cold war bromides that were in the air when she was writing this in the late 1960s (her 1930s writings on this topic are great). beyond the judgments themselves, the freedom with which she inserts her literary criticism into intimate personal scenes, broader political reflections, and geographical and historical sketches helps to build a genuinely unique patchwork structure, one that jumps around in time with impressive grace. (consider, for instance, her striking technique of suddenly narrowing in on a character or motif, tracing it through time in a kind of vertical enlargement, and then returning to where we left off on the 'horizontal' line of narrative.)
despite the brevity of jameson’s flirtation with modernism (woolf dismissed her work as ‘middlebrow’), then, journey from the north overcomes the burden of its avowed influences to achieve a reflexivity about memory and matter that bears the stamp of jameson’s era: ‘in any life a few, very few, key images turn up again and again, recognizable even though deformed by the changed light or the angle at which they appear.’ ‘these primitive or underworld images, voices out of sleep, out of a lost harbor . . . may indeed be the only things i ever, in the positive sense of the word, hear or see.’ and yet: ‘do not believe that the earliest memories are anything but disguised choices.’
the primitive, underworld images of jameson’s youth in whitby feature her mother, who takes out her frustrated ambitions on her children, in the foreground. jameson’s refusal to lie or hedge, secure in knowing this will be published posthumously, proves bracing: ‘Every evening I prayed avidly that God would kill her in the night.’ the ambivalent relation between jameson and her mother shapes the entire first volume, including jameson’s flight from her parent’s antipathetic marriage to study literature at the university of leeds and then to work in publishing, thanks to her ‘specious air of competence.’ at one point, jameson is offered an editorial job at the egoist; she declines and the job goes to rebecca west. a counterfactual literary history with jameson in the place of west would be interesting, but jameson feels more at home on the outside of any coterie, as her brief encounter with a manic wyndham lewis and her later political battles with h. g. wells confirm. her ‘deep unrealized contempt for novel-writing’ puts her out of step with the religion-of-art crowd. ‘Nothing is more ridiculous than a writer, an animal whose response to disaster is a phrase.’
she writes novels anyway, though, throughout her first miserable marriage and then her brief unconsummated infatuation ('in the claws of a raging want') with an oafish man beguilingly referred to as ‘the texan.' ‘Since there was nothing else I could do, I began to write a novel.’ she sends the novel to a publisher under a different name. then she meets with an editor who sees through the ruse, rejects her manuscript, and hands her a book to read to emulate in future submissions. ‘Somewhere between London and Reading, after trying to read it, I dropped it from the window of the train.’ she gives birth to a son, she works in advertising, she works in publishing, she writes and publishes novels that do well, she writes and publishes novels that do less well, she writes political essays, she joins socialist and pacifist groups, she finally separates from her shitty first husband, she happily re-marries (‘Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings’), she and her mother develop a much closer and fonder relation than in childhood, she and her younger sister similarly draw closer—things speed up.
while jameson britishly maintains a controlled, sober tone throughout, her frequent flights of stylistic ambition reward: ‘I saw roofs and the black gulfs of streets, an alphabet I could not spell out, and behind them a sky with a veining of darker clouds like twisted roots.’ ‘Hell is five or six memories which are able occasionally to enter the intestines through the mind and tear them.’ ‘The image for my life in the years between 1919 and the end of 1923 is that of a vacant lot between crowded streets.’ ‘This church is part of my life: it speaks to my skeleton, which remembers clearly the worn places in stairs, the grain of old wood, the moment—each time as piercing as the first—when a man crossing the moors above Sleights sees the sea leaning against the sky, the edge of the cliff, and the church kneeling on it, waiting, beside the ruined Abbey. How could it forget, since those who live in me—and live nowhere else—have stared at it from the moors, from the harbour, from the sea, for eight hundred years? There is nothing here but what’s mine.’ (i like to imagine jameson loudly strumming an electric guitar after that passage.)
it’s not all as serious as that. jameson’s talent for zingers rivals her talent for the poetic turn: ‘A cynical old woman told me: ‘No mother ever woke her second child to make certain it had not died in its sleep.’’ ‘During these years I came to know so many people that I almost died of it.’ ‘If only, I shall say to myself, when I am dying of not being able to stay alive any longer, you had had a little more coolness and foresight.’ ‘I began my first attempt to write well.’ ‘the bladdernovel, that great modern industry.’ ‘We talked for a few minutes about ‘the novel’, with a certain delicacy, as if it were a disreputable relative of his or mine.’
to say that this is jameson is not quite right either. there are always at least three jamesons at every moment: ‘the threefold images dissolve into one behind my eyes—then, now, always.’ a ‘chimera of a book has haunted me all my life,’ ‘one book which recorded only the essence of my life, the one or two ideas that were mine, not picked up from other people or books, the one or two feelings, impulses, acts, in which my whole self had been engaged.’ as in proust, the layers of author, narrator, and narrative separate and recombine from sentence to sentence. 'time is not a succession of minutes but a labyrinth where the threads of past and present cross and recross, fusing, separating, turning on themselves, without rest.'
but the world interrupts her reflections on poetics. her younger brother’s death in the first world war shadows the remainder of the text, seeping into her relationships with her mother and with her younger sister. further, his death permanently wrecks the fragile relations between her devastated mother and her ineffectual, self-pitying father. jameson allows herself a rare moment of naked emotion: ‘My brother, his small round body, as hard as a green apple, convulsed with laughter he could not contain, rolled across the floor between the piano and the horsehair sofa… Ah, let me go back, I begged. Nothing got since is worth a minute of that infinite world.’
seeded here in the sense of a world lost, jameson's slow disillusionment in the liberal international order marks her career at pen international. ‘the whole of our civilization was living only in the internment camps where they played Beethoven.’ the build-up to the second world war occupies much of the book, making it seem inevitable even as all of europe remains in denial. she goes from country to country, everyone she meets either assured that war won’t come or convinced that hitler will wrest control of the continent. her time spent in her ambassadorial role among antisemitic czechs and among anxious hungarian jews is especially ominous. she tries to warn jewish friends in england about the possibility of internment there, but does so too late. (the book really gives the lie to benevolent britannia.)
notable moments from this period: when she arrives in berlin, an avant-garde play on the topic of marx’s law of value is being performed. she and her pen colleagues bond over shared contempt for jules romains. her son falls down an elevator shaft and is mostly unharmed, though she feels this is a failure of hers as a parent. she continues to write, somehow at an absurd rate of a novel a year or so. she is so self-effacing, at times, it's easy to forget her tireless refugee advocacy. somewhere in this sequence her mother dies, another moment where jameson’s even-keeled mask slips.
jameson helps her younger sister with her children after they move out of london during the war (a move jameson dangerously delays). among the most powerful scenes in the whole book is her younger sister’s death. her sister is volunteering at a camp for the wounded when she hears a bomb descending; at the last moment, a survivor hears her sister say, with stoic dryness, ‘that’s for us.’ if jameson's ambivalent relationship with her mother informs the first volume, jameson's deep grief for her sister suffuses the second.
perhaps the most accomplished sequence in the whole book is the whirlwind of postwar poland, where jameson arrives for a conference that turns out in a kafkaesque twist not to have been planned or scheduled. ‘The drive into the centre of Warsaw was disquieting, like the onset of a nightmare.’ ‘In the morning I stared from my single pane of glass at sprawling pyramids of rubble under a hard blue sky. So far as I could see there was nothing else, only these ossuaries of fractured stone and brick. A great tangled arc of steel sprang from the collapsed skeleton of some large building to hang grotesquely in mid-air.’ ‘Behind the disembowelled fronts, cataracts of rubble and dark dust.’ ‘narrow lanes traced the lines of vanished streets between the scorched shells of houses, each vomiting its dust-choked torrent of rubble.’ ‘One part only of the ruins was without life, an emptiness—that was the vast level plain of broken brick where the ghetto had been. Here nothing existed, no single line or form, not even a seed fallen among thorns, nothing.’
this visit tests jameson’s sometimes naïve, sensible liberal-socialist politics: ‘The Germans did not occupy Poland in the way they occupied other countries, as a military measure. In that sense it was not an occupation. It was a first stage in colonization. They were going to settle in Poland. Towards the defeated Poles they behaved with the ruthlessness of brutal colonists.’ (elsewhere, after hiroshima, she declares the very idea of european civilization dead.) in one mysterious scene, the impatient visiting party leaves their tour guides in a stuck cab on the barely navigable road from warsaw to krakow in the ‘history-soaked night’ ‘to be murdered by brigands.’ (no follow up on this.) milosz, who jameson clearly admires, makes a couple appearances.
despite this virtuosic set piece, though, the second volume suffers from repetition. this repetition works in the build-up to the second world war both as a mechanism of suspense and to convey bureaucratic banality in the face of looming catastrophe, but in the second volume finally becomes excessive, especially as the writing loses its earlier rigor. this feels inevitable: her political conviction is gone, her novels are doing poorly, her younger brother is gone, her mother is gone, her younger sister is gone, gossipy bits and celebrity cameos dry up, and, honestly, she just spends too much time in france. the juxtaposition of pre-war and post-war prague helps to re-energize the final quarter of the book, which finally picks up as she moves to pittsburgh with her husband to teach creative writing and hang with the leavises.
her awed impressions of the united states show the sublime effect of the new imperial hegemon at midcentury, and her travels in the u.s. showcase her writing at its best. a busy road is an ‘unbroken rippling chain of lights’ that, after wartime petrol shortages, she initially doesn’t recognize as headlights. she describes ‘crossing the Middle West, where for hour after hour the same field, the same town—called Warsaw or Troy or Macon—is repeated and repeated, an endless stuttering of the same unintelligible phrase.’ every place she visits makes for ‘Another splendid fragment of a country which does not exist.’
‘These memories have to end somewhere, or the world would be choked by them like a gutter by dead leaves.’ remarkably, jameson writes her own obituary (!) and inserts it into the final volume. of interest in this obituary especially is her final verdict on her own fiction, listing ‘Cousin Honoré, Cloudless May, Black Laurel with its prologue Before the Crossing, [and] The Green Man’ as the works that she hopes survive. (for those keeping score, the journal of mary harvey russell, which she cites earlier as her best, is curiously absent here.) i found jameson’s authorship of her life, in both senses, profoundly moving: ‘I am my choice. I am what I made of my original condition.’ her talent for self-diminution is equally affecting: ‘An old woman dies.’
an old woman dies; maybe gornick takes her at her word. gornick wants to parse storm jameson the didactic middlebrow novelist from storm jameson the shrewd and evocative life-writer. (what about jameson the activist?) in a sense, jameson anticipates gornick, who merely metabolizes the neurotic self-criticism that peppers journey from the north. as scholars note, jameson’s lifelong habit of masochistic self-deprecation may have hurt her career. but the division of fiction and not—the dismissal of jameson’s avowed fictions—comes undone as jameson stages scene after scene with novelistic flair and charges her prose with a stylistic ambition that does not always but quite frequently reaches vertiginous heights. in fact, jameson intermittently interpolates language from her own novels, novels that many readers rate highly (i would certainly contest jameson’s assessment of 1933’s a day off as a ‘failure’). she narrates her own death in the final, unbelievable passages of the—i want to write ‘novel.’ but even if we write off jameson’s novel-writing as unimportant (and bracket her political activity), gornick ignores the work to bring jameson back into circulation done by jennifer birkett, chiari briganti, katherine cooper, and elizabeth maslen, among others. i’m not asking for peer-reviewed scholarship. i’m asking for an acknowledgement that storm jameson matters, in the preface to a—sorry—magisterial book that is haunted by her sense that she might not. i think she does.
this book taught me the words ‘biophage,’ ‘consanguinity,’ and ‘contumacy.’
* jameson would disagree: 'I am prejudiced in advance against a novel I might enjoy, sensible, perceptive, a decent very drinkable little vin du pays, when I am told that its author is ‘the English Proust’.'
** joyce--'a purely disintegrating force, a sacred monster, . . . a great anti-humanist, the destroyer by his devilish skill and persistence of the thin walls against barbarism'--really disturbs english writers, i’ve noticed, inspiring similar histrionics from forster and woolf.
postscript
in addition to aiding and abetting vivian gornick's crimes, pushkin press has also decided to omit the photographs that accompanied earlier editions of this book. since the book was published posthumously, it's hard to know what jameson would've wanted, but this seems to me like cost cutting at the expense of the book. plus, pushkin press has inexplicably inserted the subtitle 'a memoir' on the cover and title page. but i'll stop whining since it is still thanks to pushkin press that this, again, magisterial book enjoys a second life.
July 20, 2024
I don’t often read memoirs but this reissue of two volumes by British writer Storm Jameson falls smack dab in the middle of my current literary sweet spot. Born in the small coastal town of Whitby, Jameson was a young adult during WWI, middle-aged during WWII, and so perfectly placed to watch the transformation of Britain from an empire to a European nation. The journey of the title is her move from the Yorkshire middle class to a kind of meritocratic world citizenry. Her prodigious energy of mind and body kept her continually moving house, traveling abroad, writing and speaking for political causes, all while producing a novel a year. Those books are mostly (deservedly?) out of print. But this one, recollections from her Victorian childhood though her Cold War seventies, is so alive with personality and insight that I couldn’t stop turning its 800+ pages - except when she described an emotion, a vista or an idea so felicitously that I had to sit back and simply admire.
June 11, 2025
Book Review: Journey from the North: A Memoir by Storm Jameson
A Monumental Literary Memoir of Displacement and Artistic Resilience
Storm Jameson’s Journey from the North stands as a towering achievement in autobiographical writing, offering not just a life recounted but a penetrating examination of 20th-century upheavals through the lens of a fiercely independent writer. Composed during the Cold War’s peak (1961–1965), this two-volume memoir transcends its historical moment to speak urgently to contemporary debates about exile, creative integrity, and the moral responsibilities of artists in turbulent times.
Intellectual and Emotional Impact
Reading Jameson’s prose—austere yet luminous—I was struck by her unflinching confrontation with displacement (both geographical and existential). Her depiction of Yorkshire’s industrial landscapes, interwar European wanderings, and the psychological toll of political disillusionment evoked a visceral sense of rootlessness that lingered long after reading. The memoir’s greatest power lies in its paradoxes: Jameson’s socialist ideals clash poignantly with her disdain for dogma, while her accounts of literary friendships (with figures like Rebecca West) reveal both warmth and unsparing critique.
Particularly moving were her reflections on writing as survival—how crafting fiction during WWII became an act of resistance against despair. As a scholar of life-writing, I found her meta-commentary on memory’s fallibility (“I reconstruct myself daily”) a profound contribution to theories of autobiography.
Constructive Criticism
-Structural Density: The non-linear chronology, though artistically deliberate, may disorient readers unfamiliar with Jameson’s oeuvre or mid-century history. A timeline appendix would aid navigation.
-Gender Analysis: While Jameson’s feminist defiance is evident, her reluctance to explicitly theorize gendered barriers feels like a missed opportunity for deeper intersectional critique.
-Volume Imbalance: The second volume’s focus on Cold War politics, though brilliant, occasionally overshadows the richer personal introspection of Volume 1.
Enduring Relevance
Reissued with Vivian Gornick’s incisive introduction, this edition invites new generations to grapple with Jameson’s central question: How does one maintain moral clarity when ideologies fail? Her ambivalence toward England—a homeland both cherished and suffocating—resonates powerfully in today’s debates about nationalism and belonging.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for the gifted review copy. This memoir belongs on syllabi for life-writing, modernist studies, and political history courses—its layered complexity rewards close reading.
Rating: 4.9/5 (A masterpiece of 20th-century memoir—would benefit from light editorial scaffolding for contemporary audiences.)
A Monumental Literary Memoir of Displacement and Artistic Resilience
Storm Jameson’s Journey from the North stands as a towering achievement in autobiographical writing, offering not just a life recounted but a penetrating examination of 20th-century upheavals through the lens of a fiercely independent writer. Composed during the Cold War’s peak (1961–1965), this two-volume memoir transcends its historical moment to speak urgently to contemporary debates about exile, creative integrity, and the moral responsibilities of artists in turbulent times.
Intellectual and Emotional Impact
Reading Jameson’s prose—austere yet luminous—I was struck by her unflinching confrontation with displacement (both geographical and existential). Her depiction of Yorkshire’s industrial landscapes, interwar European wanderings, and the psychological toll of political disillusionment evoked a visceral sense of rootlessness that lingered long after reading. The memoir’s greatest power lies in its paradoxes: Jameson’s socialist ideals clash poignantly with her disdain for dogma, while her accounts of literary friendships (with figures like Rebecca West) reveal both warmth and unsparing critique.
Particularly moving were her reflections on writing as survival—how crafting fiction during WWII became an act of resistance against despair. As a scholar of life-writing, I found her meta-commentary on memory’s fallibility (“I reconstruct myself daily”) a profound contribution to theories of autobiography.
Constructive Criticism
-Structural Density: The non-linear chronology, though artistically deliberate, may disorient readers unfamiliar with Jameson’s oeuvre or mid-century history. A timeline appendix would aid navigation.
-Gender Analysis: While Jameson’s feminist defiance is evident, her reluctance to explicitly theorize gendered barriers feels like a missed opportunity for deeper intersectional critique.
-Volume Imbalance: The second volume’s focus on Cold War politics, though brilliant, occasionally overshadows the richer personal introspection of Volume 1.
Enduring Relevance
Reissued with Vivian Gornick’s incisive introduction, this edition invites new generations to grapple with Jameson’s central question: How does one maintain moral clarity when ideologies fail? Her ambivalence toward England—a homeland both cherished and suffocating—resonates powerfully in today’s debates about nationalism and belonging.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for the gifted review copy. This memoir belongs on syllabi for life-writing, modernist studies, and political history courses—its layered complexity rewards close reading.
Rating: 4.9/5 (A masterpiece of 20th-century memoir—would benefit from light editorial scaffolding for contemporary audiences.)
October 16, 2024
The best sort of memoir – open, honest and candid. Storm Jameson was a prolific novelist, who has largely fallen out of view, and it is to be hoped that the reissue of this long memoir will introduce her to a new readership. Written between 1961 and 1965, she chronicles her turbulent, unsettled life during which she married and had a son but found domesticity difficult and could never adapt to the demands made of her. Always politically active she became President of the English Branch of PEN, and knew just about everyone in the world of the arts and politics in the UK and abroad. Always questioning her own decisions, she admits to her faults and comes across as a very driven personality. I found it a fascinating chronicle of her life and times and very much enjoyed hearing of her encounters with so many personalities. I don’t think she would have been an easy person to live with, but she was certainly an engaging and interesting companion, not least in this autobiography. A great read.
August 5, 2025
A compelling read thanks to the fearlessness with which Jamieson dissects her life decisions. It also proves to be an unique insight into a writer's life, in that she couldn't stop producing novels for decades, a total of forty-five books, unaware they were merely a practice run for the big work, this memoir, that finally launched her writing proper, in her seventies. Jamieson's honesty is ably matched by Vivian Gornick's introduction in which she confesses that if it wasn't for this brilliant memoir, Gornick, would not be writing about Jamieson.
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