A Writer of Originality and Power

‘His novels were not meant to be easy reading and tended to pessimism,” said his obituarist in The Times. As to the author himself, ‘an insatiable demand for independence entailed austerities that included a rigid vegetarian diet extracted from an allotment upon which he arduously laboured.’

Meanwhile his sole fervent contemporary champion tried to allure readers with such epithets as ‘capable’ and ‘consistent’. His first publisher went bust two weeks after his book came out. No wonder, perhaps, his work is not well-known. And yet it should be.

John Mills Whitham (1883-1956), known to family and friends as Jan, published ten novels and a few non-fiction works, and translations. He was a Tolstoyan visionary of the back-to-the-land movement and a pacifist jailed as a conscientious objector.

Born in Folkestone, his parents, William Whitham (1848-1901) and Elizabeth Edwards (1855-?), were both from Manchester. His father was a Primitive Methodist minister. Jan Mills Whitham was educated in Liverpool and at first trained as an architect’s clerk, but by his early twenties, in 1905, was already describing himself as a writer.

He was briefly a part of the bohemian Café Royal crowd in London, friendly with the Imagist circle around Richard Aldington, ‘H.D.’, John Cournos and F.S. Flint. But he followed the advice given him by Yeats to go and ‘fraternise with the peasants’ somewhere in the West Country, and went to live the simple life in Devon, growing his own food and learning handicrafts, in a similar way to the short story writer H A Manhood, who lived in a converted railway carriage on a field in Sussex.

Like Manhood, he essentially used his writing income, which was never appreciable, for the things he could not grow, make or mend himself. As well as his books, he was a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. Whitham never returned to London or Liverpool and it was said he could hardly even be induced to visit the local cathedral city of Exeter.

Jessica Gardner and Ian Mortimer (Modern Literary Papers in the University of Exeter Library: A Guide, University of Exeter, 2003) explain that when Whitham’s second novel, Starveacre, was published in 1915, he was in prison: ‘Rather than enlist in the ranks, he had become a conscientious objector.  He was led from Barnstable tribunal on foot to Dartmoor Prison, and jeered and struck as he marched through Tavistock, chained to other prisoners.  In prison he went on a hunger strike in order to improve conditions.  In this at least he was successful; the Home Office allowed him to be released to work as a farm labourer near Combe Martin . . . '

The forced farm work did at least have one happier outcome: ‘In 1916, while staying in Combe Martin, he started courting Sylvia Milman . . . who was staying with her uncle, the vicar of Martinhoe.'  Sylvia was born on 12 October 1878 in South Kensington, the daughter of a barrister. She was already a noted wood-engraver and painter. Whitham and his wife, who shared his views and embraced his chosen lifestyle, took a remote cottage in Exmoor, on the great coastal hill of Holdstone Down, with its many Bronze Age remains.

The American critic and aesthete Paul Jordan-Smith was a keen collector of his work. In his For the Love of Books (1934), this admirer does not at first (as he admits) deploy praises likely to quicken the reader’s pulse. He describes Whitham as ‘one of the most capable, consistent and sympathetic of present-day regional novelists,’ but he does go on to say, more forcefully: ‘He writes clearly, beautifully, and in at least three of his novels, with great power.’

Jordan-Smith adds that although quite a few novelists have been said to be Hardy’s successor, he would be willing to advance this author’s claim.  The three novels the essayist thought his best were Starveacre (1915), Silas Braunton (1923) and The Windlestraw (1924). The New York Times (February 18, 1923) also saw the influence of Hardy in Silas Braunton, with its ‘realistic vigour [and] tang of the soil’

These are indeed Hardyesque but their stories of rural poverty and hardship cannot avoid the satirical shadow of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Another comparison might be with the work of John Cowper Powys, and more especially T.F. Powys.

 However, The Sinful Saints: A Romantic Tale (1925), his penultimate novel, is more unusual. It is in some ways like Arthur Machen’s account of youthful poverty while trying to live by writing. There is the same intense devotion to the cause of literature in the face of penury and hardship.

Though not as lyrically mystical as Machen’s work, there is a sort of doomed nobility about his protagonist’s struggles, and hints of an inexorable destiny. It is bleak, sometimes awkwardly done, but with intensity and morbid interest: and there are phrases and passages of sombre quality.

Jan Mills Whitam died on 28 July 1956 at the North Devon Infirmary, Barnstaple, and Sylvia on 7 January 1957 at the same hospital. His wife donated most of his literary papers to Exeter University, and some are also held in Texas. The obituary in The Times called him ‘a writer of originality and power, whose work was much appreciated by the discriminating few.’

A friend writing to The Times in response to its obituary noted that there were several unpublished works, including ‘three further novels: A Poor Man's Journal, sequel to The Windlestraw: Christina Ballard, a novel of Exmoor; and Gunnar, a psychological study. His War Journal and his Philosophy of Recipience contain the final embodiment of his thinking.’ The correspondent added, ‘these fruits of a fine mind and life deserve to be harvested’ (The Times, 4 Aug 1956). But unfortunately they never yet have been.

A Checklist of the Published Novels of J. Mills Whitham

Broom (Sands, 1912)

Starveacre (Methuen, 1915)

Wolfgang (Methuen, 1917)

Fruit of Earth (Methuen, 1919)

The Human Circus: A Tale (Collins, 1919)

The Heretic: A Study of Temperament (Allen & Unwin, 1921)

Silas Braunton (Allen & Unwin, 1923)

The Windlestraw (Allen & Unwin, 1924)

The Sinful Saints: A Romantic Tale (John Castle, 1925)

Swings and Roundabouts (Duckworth, 1937)

(Mark Valentine)