Walter Wheeler Jr.

 

Walter H. Wheeler Jr. was an American businessperson and sailor.

Wheeler was born in New York in 1897. In 1918, at the age of 19, he earned the Croix de Guerre with the U.S. Ambulance Corps in Paris. A year later, he received the Navy Cross for service as a submarine chaser. At Harvard University, he led the football team as captain. During WWII, he worked in various roles with the War Production Board.

Wheeler joined Pitney-Bowes in 1919 and served as its president from 1938 to 1960. He later became chairman, a role he held until his retirement in 1973. Under his tenure, the company achieved revenues of $384.9 million by 1973. He oversaw the introduction of the first mass-market postage meter, and developments in mail processing equipment adopted by the United States Postal Service. He also held positions as honorary chairman and director emeritus.

As a sailor, Wheeler navigated his yawl, Cotton Blossom IV, across the Atlantic. He held memberships in several organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Wheeler died on December 11, 1974.

Odd Eidem

Odd Eidem was a Norwegian writer, journalist, and literary critic.

He was born on October 23,1913 in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway. He was the eldest of three sons born to Gunnar Kølbel and Dorothea Serine Eidem. He grew up in Hamar and received his artium in 1931. He earned a master's degree in literature history at the University of Oslo in 1938.

He debuted in 1939 as a fiction author. During the 1930s, he was an active member of the political movement Mot Dag. He worked as a secretary for Nansenhjelpen from 1938 to 1940. After World War II, Eidem became a literary critic at Verdens Gang, where he remained a regular contributor until 1977. From 1955 to 1977, he also wrote theater reviews. He wrote a column for Aftenposten from 1978 to 1988. 

Eidem received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1978 for the flâneries, Cruise and received the Cappelen Prize in 1980.

Eidem died on June 10, 1988.

Golo Mann

 

Golo Mann was a popular German historian and essayist. Having completed a doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, in 1933 he fled Hitler's Germany. He followed his father, the writer Thomas Mann, and other members of his family in emigrating to France, Switzerland, and the United States. From the late 1950s he re-established himself in Switzerland and West Germany as a literary historian.

Mann was best known for his master work German History in the 19th and 20th Century (1958). A survey of German political history, it emphasized the nihilistic and aberrant nature of the Hitler regime. In his later years, Mann took issue with historians who sought to contextualize the crimes of the regime by comparing them with those of Stalinism in Soviet Union and with wartime Allied bombing. At the same time, he was sharply critical of those, broadly on the left, who carried a unique German guilt for the Holocaust not only back into the pre-Nazi past but forward in a manner that questioned the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic.

Mann was born Angelus Gottfried Thomas Mann, March 27, 1909 in Munich, the maternal grandchild of the German Jewish mathematician and artist Alfred Pringsheim and the actress Hedwig Pringsheim, and on the side of his father, the writer Thomas Mann, of the Lübeck senator and grain merchant Johann Heinrich Mann and his Brazilian wife, the writer Júlia da Silva Bruhns. As a child, he pronounced his first name as Golo, and this name was adopted. He had an elder sister, Erika Mann, an elder brother, Klaus Mann, and three younger siblings, Monika, Elisabeth, and Michael.

In her diary his mother describes him in his early years as sensitive, nervous, and frightened.[1] His father hardly concealed his disappointment and rarely mentioned the son in his diary. Golo Mann in turn described him later: "Indeed he was able to radiate some kindness, but mostly it was silence, strictness, nervousness or rage."[2] Among his siblings he was most tightly connected with Klaus, whereas he disliked the dogmatism and radical views of his sister Erika.[3

An average pupil, he received a classical education at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich beginning in September 1918, revealing talents in history, Latin, and especially in reciting poems, the latter being a lifelong passion.[4] "Longing to be like the others", at school he joined a nationalist youth association (Deutsch-Nationale Jugendbund) but was soon talked out of it by the conversations he heard at the family table: discussion of the need for "tolerance and above all peace, and therefore of above all, so Franco-German reconciliation". Later in the 1920s he shared his father's enthusiasm for Pan-European Union.

New horizons appeared to open in 1923, when Mann entered the Schule Schloss Salem, a famously spartan boarding school where he was joined by his sister Monika, near Lake Constance. He felt liberated from home, enjoyed the new educational approach, and developed an enduring passion for hiking. Yet in 1925 Mann suffered a mental crisis that overshadowed the rest of his life. "In those days the doubt entered my life, or rather broke in with tremendous power ... I was seized by darkest melancholy."[6]

Upon the final school exams in 1927, he commenced his studies of law in Munich, moving the same year to Berlin and switching to history and philosophy. He used the summer of 1928 to learn French in Paris and to get to know "real work" during six weeks in a coal mine in Lower Lusatia, abruptly stopping because of new knee injuries.

At last Mann entered the University of Heidelberg in spring 1929. Here he followed the advice of his teacher Karl Jaspers to graduate in philosophy on the one hand, and to study history and Latin with the prospect of becoming a schoolteacher on the other. He nevertheless found time to join a Social-Democratic Party student group in the autumn of 1930. The students were sharply critical of the party leadership in Berlin for tolerating the presidentialism Brüning government. In May 1932, Mann finished his dissertation, Concerning the terms of the individual and the ego in Hegel's works, which was rated with an average cum laude. (While recognizing Mann's literary potential, Jaspers suggested to Mann that the lack of originality and clarity in his analysis is something that would have shamed his father).

Golo Mann's plans to further his university studies in Hamburg and Göttingen were interrupted in January 1933 by Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. His father, who never hesitated to articulate his dislike for National Socialism, and his mother moved to Switzerland. Golo Mann looked after the family house in Munich in April 1933, helped his three younger siblings leave the country and brought the greater part of his parents' savings via Karlsruhe and the German embassy in Paris to Switzerland.

On 31 May 1933, Mann left Germany for the French town of Bandol near Toulon. He spent the summer at the mansion of the American travel writer William Seabrook near Sanary-sur-Mer and lived six further weeks at the new family house in Küsnacht near Zurich. In November, he joined the École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud near Paris for two intensive, instructive years as lecturer on the German language. At that time, he worked for the emigrants' journal Die Sammlung (The Collection) founded by his brother Klaus.

In November 1935, Mann accepted a call from the University of Rennes to lecture on German language and literature. Mann's travels to Switzerland prove that the relationship with his father was easier, because in the meantime Thomas Mann had learned to appreciate his son's political knowledge.[clarification needed] But it was only when Golo Mann helped edit his father's diaries in later years that he realized fully how much acceptance he had gained. In a confidential note to the German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki he wrote, "It was inevitable that I had to wish his death; but I was completely broken-hearted when he passed away."

In 1936, Thomas Mann and his family were deprived of their German citizenship. His father's admirer, the Czech businessman Rudolf Fleischmann, helped Golo Mann obtain Czechoslovak citizenship, but plans to continue studies in Prague were disrupted by the Sudeten crisis.

Early in 1939, Mann traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father worked as guest professor. Although war was drawing closer, he hesitantly returned to Zurich in August to become editor of the emigrant journal Maß und Wert (Measure and Value).

As a reaction to Adolf Hitler's successes in the West in May 1940 during World War II, and at a time when many of his friends in Zurich were being mobilized for the defense of Swiss neutrality, Mann decided to join a Czech military unit on French soil as a volunteer. Upon crossing the border, he was arrested at Annecy and brought to the French concentration camp Les Milles, a brickyard near Aix-en-Provence. In the beginning of August, in what was then unoccupied Vichy France, he was released by the intervention of an American committee. On 13 September 1940, he undertook a daring escape from Perpignan across the Pyrenees to Spain. With him were his uncle Heinrich Mann, the latter's wife Nelly Kröger, Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel. On 4 October 1940, they boarded the Nea Hellas headed for New York City.

Mann stayed at his parents' house in Princeton, then in New York City where he lived for a time in what his father described as a "kind of Bohemian colony" with W. H. Auden (with whom his sister Erika contracted a marriage of convenience), Benjamin Britten, the tenor Peter Pears, and others.

In the autumn of 1942, Mann finally got the chance to teach history at Olivet College in Michigan but soon followed his brother Klaus into the US Army. After basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, he worked at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. In his capacity as intelligence officer, it was his duty to collect and translate relevant information.

In April 1944, he was sent to London where he made radio commentaries for the German language division of the American Broadcasting Station. For the last months of World War II, he worked in same function for a military propaganda station in Luxembourg. Then he helped organize the foundation of Radio Frankfurt. During this period, he worked with and won the confidence of Robert Lochner. Returning to Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Allied advance, he was shocked at the extent of destruction, especially that caused by British and American bombing.

In 1946, Mann left the US Army by his own request. He nevertheless kept a job as civil control officer, watching the war crimes trials at Nuremberg in this capacity. The same year saw the publication of his first book of lasting value, a biography in English of the 19th century diplomat Friedrich von Gentz who was to account a critical influence upon his own political thinking.

In the autumn of 1947, Mann became an assistant professor of history at Claremont Men's College in California. In hindsight he recalled the nine-year engagement as "the happiest of my life"; on the other hand, he complained, "My students are scornful, unfriendly and painfully stupid as never before." The professorship in California was interrupted by several residences in German-speaking Europe.

In 1956 and 1957, Mann spent many weeks at the tavern Zur Krone at Altnau on the shores of Lake Constance, writing his German History of the 19th and 20th century. It was published in 1958 and became an instant bestseller. It also marked his final return to Europe because he became guest professor at the University of Münster for two winter terms in a row.

In autumn 1960, Mann joined the University of Stuttgart (then the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart) in the higher position of professor in ordinary Political Science. It soon became clear that he felt unsatisfied with the machinery at the universities: "In those years I had a feeling of immense, but fruitless effort without getting any echo. This led to a depression that made me resign from the professorship in 1963.

In the following years, Mann worked as a free-lance historian and essayist, suffering in both capacities from chronic overwork that increasingly damaged not only his work but also his health. He took up residence at his parents' house in Kilchberg near Lake Zurich, where he lived until 1993 — sharing the house for most years with his mother.

Of his sixteen historical studies, the bestselling proved to be a monumental biography of Albrecht von Wallenstein published in 1971. It arose from a fascination in childhood with the role in the Thirty Years' War of the imperial marshal for which, Mann confessed, he had no satisfactory explanation. The LA Times described Wallenstein: His Life Narrated as “a work not only of erudition but of art.”

Asked in 1965 by the television interviewer Günter Gaus how in the last days of the Weimar Republic he had avoided being pulled like so many of his generation to the political extremes of either the right or left, Mann suggested it had been a matter not only of analysis but also of temperament. Figures like Calvin or Robespierre, Trotsky, or Lenin, he had "always hated". Mann described his own outlook as broadly conservative. But conservatism too he rejected when presented as an "ism” when represented by those believed they had a monopoly of truth (as if they had "eaten the truth with a spoon").

By conservative, Mann understood a particular stance (Haltung), or tendency of thought. It is an assessment of human nature sufficiently pessimistic to reject utopian belief in the reliable goodness or reason of man and, accordingly, can appreciate of inherited ties, even if irrational, so long as "they bind people and give them a moral and spiritual home." It is not an attitude Mann identified in party-political terms: he might "very well be able to vote Social Democratic" without seeming contradiction in himself having these basic conservative tendencies.

In early years of the Federal Republic, Mann praised Konrad Adenauer for his policy of seeking reconciliation and integration with France and alliance with the United States. In time, however, he came to criticize the Chancellor's commitment to German unification as largely rhetorical. Later still, believing that the post-war territorial settlement had to be accepted as "an accomplished fact", he supported the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt as foreign minister (1966–1969) and then as the new Social-Democratic Chancellor (1969–1974). He would sometimes even ghostwrite for Brandt. But he emphasized that as an acknowledgement of "hard facts that can no longer be changed", his support of diplomatic recognition of Europe's post-war division was "more conservative than revolutionary."

Mann had been wary of the left-wing student movement and the development of the so-called "extra-parliamentary opposition" in the 1960s and was to reproach Brandt as Chancellor for taking an insufficiently hard line against East German infiltration and domestic subversion. Mann called the terrorist activities of the Red Army Faction "a new development in the phenomenon of civil war".

It was nonetheless a shock to many when in 1979, with a post-script to the politician's hagiographic campaign book, Mann announced his support for Franz-Josef Strauß, the right-wing Chancellor candidate of the CDU/CSU. He sought to justify his choice as precautionary. Tax-supported welfare had advanced to the point at which it "greatly diminished the joy of making money" with potentially dire consequences for a future in which "more and more retirees" will depend, proportionately, on an "ever smaller number of productive workers". There was also need for a retrenchment in Ostpolitik. In Afghanistan, the West had failed to contain the Soviet Union. Were he an American, Mann allowed that he would have voted for Reagan rather than Carter.

Mann foresaw the reputational loss of embracing Strauss, a figure who since the Spiegel Affair in 1962 had been a bete noir of liberal and left opinion. "I will have to pay for it", he wrote in his diary, as Kaiser Wilhelm did for his 'Daily Telegraph Affair'".

In one of his last interviews, with Die Welt in 1991, Mann again alarmed his more liberal readers and colleagues by calling for restrictions on the constitutional provision for political asylum. To the suggestion that Germany should openly acknowledge itself as an immigrant country (Einwanderungsland), the man who had himself sought asylum abroad said "No, the boat is full."

In the early years of the Federal Republic, Mann acknowledged that Hitler had been an "unpleasant subject" too often avoided. But as a staunch defender of the political and economic achievements of post-war West Germany, once the taboo was broken, he had little patience with the Sonderweg thesis which placed Hitlerism within a context of German exceptionalism, or with the "critical-emancipatory" historiography of the 1968 generation and the Bielefeld school of early 1970s. He was critical of what he regarded as the Left's obsession with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past). In 1978 he posed the rhetorical question: "When will the past cease to poison the present."

It was perhaps from this perspective that, years before, Mann had been among the first critics of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt had portrayed Adolf Eichmann, the principal organizer of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, less as an exceptional anti-Semite than as a typical, if unusually talented, German bureaucrat. The controversy led to Mann's permanent estrangement from Jaspers, who had also been Arendt's doctoral supervisor.

Mann insisted that there was nothing preordained about Hitlerism. It was not the inevitable product, as others had suggested, of the contradictions of the Reich's formation or of the chaos induced by its defeat in the Great War. The Weimar Republic did not have to collapse; the Jews of Europe did not have to die or even have to be classified as Jews. In an essay collected in Geschichte und Geschichten (1962), he appreciated A. J. P. Taylor for his certitude on the subject.

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, willful, unreasonable, and senseless than our conceit allows.

At the same time, Mann rejected the temptation to "normalize" the Holocaust by setting the genocide in an international context. Although not among the principal protagonists in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute, 1986–88), Mann's comments broadly aligned him with Eberhard Jäckel (who had replaced Mann on the faculty in Stuttgart). Like Jäckel, Mann opposed the revisionist efforts of Ernst Nolte to press comparisons with, and to find context in, Stalinism or in Allied carpet bombing, or to otherwise deny the uniqueness what of Mann described as the "vilest crime ever perpetrated by man against man."

In 1986, his adopted son Hans Beck-Mann died. Beck-Mann was a pharmacist he got to know in 1955 and supported financially in his studies. In November of the same year his successful semi-autobiography Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Eine Jugend in Deutschland (Memories and Thoughts. A Youth in Germany) was published. He immediately started work at a sequel that was never finished. In 1988, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) by the University of Bath.

After the death of his adopted son, he lived a secluded life, most of the time in Berzona, in the Swiss Canton of the Ticino. He devoted his time to translating into German the work of the dark and picaresque Spanish novelist Pío Baroja. He was surrounded by a group of young Spanish-language enthusiasts, some of whom have become notable in their field.

The East German regime lifted its ban on Golo Mann at the beginning of 1989. Not only was his Wallenstein biography finally available in East Germany after 18 years — he was even allowed to read from it on invitation from the East German Minister of Education. When the reunification of Germany came only one year later, he reacted dispassionately: "No delight in German unity. They are bound to fool around once more, even if I won't live to see it".

In March 1990, Mann had a heart attack after a public lecture. In the same year it became evident that he suffered from prostate cancer. Because of his ill health he moved to Leverkusen in 1992, where he was nursed by Ingrid Beck-Mann, the widow of his adopted son Hans. A few days prior to his death, he acknowledged his homosexuality in a TV interview: "I did not fall in love often. I often kept it to myself, maybe that was a mistake. It also was forbidden, even in America, and one had to be a little careful". 

Mann died in Leverkusen on April 7, 1994, aged 85.

A.I. Belkin

Aron Belkin was a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and sexologist.

Aron Isaakovich was a pioneer in the field of transsexuality in the USSR. It was he who developed methodological recommendations and criteria for diagnosing transsexuality in the USSR. For a long time only he was the only one specialist who was issuing permits to transsexuals for surgical correction of gender. A.I. Belkin was the first among the scientists who formed a hypothesis about the existence of hormonal situational codes.

In 1989, Belkin, together with the well-known Russian expert in the field of scientific information research, Professor Anatoly Ilyich Rakitov, wrote an article "Hormones in the Information Structure of a Man: concept and hypotheses," where they tried to describe the processes of neuroendocrine regulation of the human body with the help of concepts of information theory and consideration of hormones (primarily neuropeptide) as related to various aspects of mental activity, the person ESA determinants carrying certain code, along with three other prior art codes (nejrodinamicheskih, behavioral and speech-expressive) associated with human mentality.

Professor A.I. Belkin is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and 15 inventions. Social activity Aron Belkin was one of the initiators of the creation of the Russian Psychoanalytical Association (1990) and the Chairman of its Board (1990-1995). For a long time he headed the Russian Psychoanalytical Herald (1991-1995) and "Psychoanalytic Herald" (1995). He was the co-editor of the revived series of books Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library (1992), the First Vice- President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Revival Foundation (since 1993), Honorary President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (since 1995), Vice- President of the National Federation of Psychoanalysis. Belkin not only proposed the treatment of homosexuality, he was also busy wth this activity at the Novosibirsk Institute, as well as in Moscow.

Professor A.I. Belkin was the permanent head of the Federal Scientific Center of Psychoendocrinology, the President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, the editor-in-chief of the journal "Psychoanalytical Journal", a member of the International Society for Biological Psychiatry and Psychoendocrinology. In recent years, A.I. Belkin led the Moscow Center for Psychiatric Endocrinology on the Arbat and was the chief psychoendocrinologist of the Russian Ministry of Health, that is, the chief specialist on transsexuality. Managed the department of psychiatric endocrinology at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.

Witold Gombrowicz

Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish writer and playwright. His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. 

Gombrowicz was born on August 4, 1904 in Małoszyce near Opatów, then in Radom Governorate, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina (née Ścibor-Kotkowska of the Clan of Ostoja). In an autobiographical piece, A Kind of Testament, he wrote that his family had lived for 400 years in Lithuania on an estate between Vilnius and Kaunas but were displaced after his grandfather was accused of participating in the January Uprising of 1863. He later described his family origins and social status as early instances of a lifelong sense of being "between" (entre). In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, Gombrowicz studied law at Warsaw University, earning a MJur in 1927. He spent a year in Paris, where he studied at the Institute of Higher International Studies (French: Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales). He was less than diligent in his studies, but his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean.

When Gombrowicz returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started writing. He soon rejected the legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to manifest his "worse" and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kępiński was a failure. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s Gombrowicz began to write short stories, later printed under the title Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity, edited by Gombrowicz and published under the name Bacacay, the street where he lived during his exile in Argentina. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns began appearing in the press, mainly the Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier). Gombrowicz met with other young writers and intellectuals, forming an artistic café society in Zodiak and Ziemiańska, both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the Polish transatlantic liner MS Chrobry, to South America. When he learned of the outbreak of war in Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires until it was over; he reported to the Polish legation in 1941 but was considered unfit for military duties. He stayed in Argentina until 1963—often, especially during the war, in poverty.

At the end of the 1940s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position in Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures at the Fray Mocho café, and, finally, by publishing in 1947 a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke, with the help of friends including Virgilio Piñera. This version of the novel is now considered a significant event in the history of Argentine literature, but at the time of its publication it did not bring Gombrowicz any great renown, nor did the 1948 publication of his drama Ślub in Spanish (The Marriage, El Casamiento). From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of Bank Pekao, and formed a friendship with Zofia Chądzyńska, who introduced him to Buenos Aires's political and cultural elite. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc, and in 1951 he began to publish work in the Parisian journal Culture, in which fragments of Dziennik (Diaries) appeared in 1953. In the same year he published a volume of work that included Ślub and the novel Trans-Atlantyk, in which the subject of national identity on emigration was controversially raised. After October 1956 four of Gombrowicz's books appeared in Poland and brought him great renown, even though the authorities did not allow the publication of Dziennik (Diary).

Gombrowicz had affairs with both men and women. In his later serialised Diary (1953–69) he wrote about his adventures in the homosexual underworld of Buenos Aires, particularly his experiences with young men from the lower class, a theme he picked up again when interviewed by Dominique de Roux in A Kind of Testament (1973).

In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognised globally, and many of his works were translated, including Pornografia (Pornography) and Kosmos (Cosmos). His dramas were staged in theatres around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden.

Having received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, Gombrowicz returned to Europe in 1963. In April 1963 he embarked on an Italian ship, landing at Cannes and then taking a train to Paris. A record of the journey can be found in his diary. Gombrowicz stayed for a year in West Berlin, where he endured a slanderous campaign organised by the Polish authorities. His health deteriorated during this stay, and he was unable to return to Argentina. He went back to France in 1964 and spent three months in Royaumont Abbey, near Paris, where he met Rita Labrosse, a Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature. In 1964 he moved to the Côte d'Azur in the south of France with Labrosse, whom he employed as his secretary. He spent the rest of his life in Vence, near Nice.

Gombrowicz's health prevented him from thoroughly benefiting from his late renown. It worsened notably in spring 1964; he became bedridden and was unable to write. In May 1967 he was awarded the Prix International. The following year, on December 28, he married Labrosse. On the initiative of his friend Dominique de Roux, who hoped to cheer him up, he gave a series of 13 lectures on the history of philosophy to de Roux and Labrosse, ironically titled "Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes", which de Roux transcribed. The lectures began with Kant and ended with existentialism. 

The series ended before Gombrowicz could deliver the last part, interrupted by his death on July 24, 1969. He was buried in the cemetery in Vence.

L.P. Hartley

Leslie Poles Hartley was a British novelist and short story writer. 

Although his first fiction was published in 1924, his career was slow to take off. His best-known novels are the Eustace and Hilda trilogy (1944–47) and The Go-Between (1953). The latter was made into a film in 1971, as was his 1957 novel The Hireling in 1973. He was known for writing about social codes, moral responsibility and family relationships. In total, Hartley published 17 novels, six volumes of short stories and a book of criticism.

Leslie Poles Hartley was born on December 30, 1895 in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. He was named after Leslie Stephen, the father of the writer Virginia Woolf. His father, Harry Bark Hartley, owned a brickfield and was also a solicitor and justice of the peace. His mother was Mary Elizabeth née Thompson. He had two sisters, Enid and Annie Norah. Hartley was raised in the Methodist faith. While he was young, his family moved to Fletton Tower, near Peterborough. Hartley began his education at home and particularly enjoyed the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote his first story, a fairy tale about a prince and dwarf, when he was 11 years old. In 1908 he attended Northdown Hill Preparatory School in Cliftonville and then briefly Clifton College. It was there he first met Clifford Kitchin. In 1910, Hartley finally settled at Harrow School, where he was a Leaf Scholar and highly regarded by his peers. While there, Hartley converted to Anglicanism but was still greatly influenced by his earlier Methodism.

In 1915, during the First World War, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Modern History. This was a time when most of his contemporaries were volunteering for the armed services instead of pursuing university careers. In 1916, with the arrival of conscription, Hartley joined the army, and in February 1917 he was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment; however, he never saw active duty because of a weak heart. He returned to Oxford in 1919, with the intention of becoming a writer. While there, Hartley made a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil and Aldous Huxley. He left Oxford in 1921 with second-class honours in Modern History.

Oxford Poetry first published Hartley's work in 1920 and 1922. During this time, he edited Oxford Outlook with Gerald Howard and A. B. B. Valentine, publishing work by L. A. G. Strong, Edmund Blunden, John Strachey, and Maurice Bowra. His own essays, short stories, and reviews were also included in its pages. In this early part of his career, Hartley spent most of his time broadening his social life. He was introduced by Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who welcomed him into her famed literary circle. Kitchin, with whom he had been reunited at Oxford, introduced him to Cynthia Asquith, who became a lifelong friend. He also met the writer and socialite Elizabeth Bibesco, whose support and status catapulted Hartley into aristocratic British circles. Although he enjoyed rapid social success, his career as a writer failed to take off, and he was unhappy.

After his years at Oxford, Hartley worked as a book reviewer. He wrote articles for multiple publications, such as The Spectator, Saturday Review, and The Nation and Athenaeum. His favourite publication to write for was The Sketch. Hartley was praised extensively for his critical, steady, and wise reviews. However, the large number of books he had to read distracted him from his goal to write novels.

In 1924, he met Constant Huntington of G. P. Putnam, who published his first volume of short stories, Night Fears, in that year, as well as his novella Simonetta Perkins in 1925. Night Fears was relatively unsuccessful, earning him no money. Simonetta Perkins brought him only £12, though it was written about favourably. The Saturday Review called the young writer "one of the most hopeful talents", and The Calendar of Modern Letters said that Simonetta Perkins was a "distinguished first novel". Modern critics have called it his most dangerous novel, as Hartley explored infatuation and sexuality in a way not considered respectable at the time. In 1932, Hartley published The Killing Bottle, a collection of ghost stories. Cynthia Asquith included some of them in an anthology, which increased his popularity with the public. Critics thought of Hartley as the successor of the Gothic greats M. R. James and E. F. Benson.

Though he had worked on it for two decades, Hartley did not publish his first full-length novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone, until he was 49 years old. He had started and stopped writing the novel many times and even submitted it to a writing contest under a different name, but it did not win. The main characters, Eustace and Hilda, were inspired by Hartley himself and his sister Enid. He continued the series with the novels The Sixth Heaven and Eustace and Hilda. The trilogy explores the ideas of childhood nostalgia and the reality of adulthood. By the time of the third book's publication, Hartley had become a well-known author. Critics reviewed the books favourably, often marvelling at the author's ability to create characters that were lovable despite their high-class status. Walter Allen in the New Statesman called the last novel "one of the few masterpieces in contemporary fiction", and other critics agreed in similar reviews. Some, however, found the plentiful Italian dialogue pretentious. Despite the overwhelmingly good reviews, Hartley most valued the reactions of his friends and fellow writers. Both Edith Sitwell and Clifford Kitchin wrote him touching letters, expressing their awe and love of the novel.

After writing a few more novels with moderate success, Hartley wrote The Go-Between in just five months. Having left his previous publisher after disputes over compensation, he decided to publish this one with Hamish Hamilton. Critics' reviews were enthusiastic, and Knopf immediately wanted to publish the novel in the United States. There, it became extremely popular and even made The New York Times's bestseller list. The novel was translated into Italian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Japanese. Hartley gained favour with other writers as well. W. H. Auden read the book and told Hartley that he was his favourite novelist. Many of Hartley's friends drew parallels between him and the main character Leo; just like Hartley, Leo was stuck between his middle-class upbringing and his high-class social circle. Leo also comes to understand near the end of his life that being alone is not something he wants, wishing that he was married instead. (This theme would be repeated in Hartley's later works.) Hartley had intended The Go-Between to be a commentary on the loss of innocence and morality; however, he was shocked when he found that many readers sympathized with the characters he thought should be hated. He was known to be a strict moralist, once describing compassion as doing away with moral worth and a substitute for justice.

Though Hartley joined the Chelsea literary group, the Bloomsbury group was also prominent in England at the time. Though the Bloomsbury circle was more popular, Hartley had no interest in joining them. He expressed his distaste for Virginia Woolf after her novel The Waves was published, asking the leader of the Bloomsbury group, Raymond Mortimer, "What are the Wild Waves saying?" On another occasion Woolf asked Hartley, "Have you written any more shabby books, Mr. Hartley?", particularly referring to "the one that might have been written by a man with one foot in England and the other in Venice". She advised him to change his formal way of writing.

Cynthia Asquith was a support through much of Hartley's career, publishing some of his earliest writings in her anthologies and welcoming him into her social circles. However, feelings started to change after Hartley did not allow her to publish his novel The Go-Between. Asquith reminded him of this fact often, and Hartley came to believe that the only reason she continued to be friends with him was his increased popularity. At one point, Asquith convinced Hartley's cook to leave him and work for her. On another occasion, she gave him vinegar instead of alcohol.

The major influences on Hartley's work were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Emily Brontë. His books often explore themes of social and personal morality—in particular, depicting passion as a route to disaster. He wrote about characters on the brink between adolescence and adulthood, contrasting childhood innocence with eventual self-knowledge. Hartley is usually regarded as both a realist and a romantic by critics and historians. He is known for using symbolism to develop characters and comment on the complexities of the class system. He is also praised for introducing fantasy, horror, and mysticism to comment on the mystery of existence. In columns Hartley wrote for The Daily Telegraph, he often expressed a distaste for contemporary culture because of its general vulgarity and rudeness. Beginning in 1952, Hartley travelled in England, Germany, Italy, and Portugal to lecture about his critical ideas.

In 1947 Hartley was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Eustace and Hilda, and his 1953 novel The Go-Between was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours. In 1972, he was named a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He was the head of the English section of P.E.N. and was also a member of the management council of the Society of Authors. In total, Hartley published 17 novels, 6 volumes of short stories, and a book of criticism. These were mostly done during the last half of his life.

In 1971, the director Joseph Losey made a film based on Hartley's novel The Go-Between, starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates. In 1991, the filmmaker Clive Dunn directed a documentary about Hartley for Anglia Television, titled Bare Heaven.

While attending Oxford, Hartley proposed to Joan Mews; it is not known if she accepted his proposal or not. In 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon afterwards he started spending much of his time in Venice, Italy, and he continued to do so for many years. He travelled there with his aristocratic circle, eventually buying a home next to the church of San Sebastiano. A statue of Saint Sebastian outside the church, with arrows piercing his body, had a great influence on Hartley, as he would soon come to see the saint as "a symbol of mankind". While there, he owned a gondola, had his own personal gondolier, and was known to spend entire days on the canals. He also entertained many guests – including the painter Henry Lamb, the art critic Adrian Stokes, and the novelist Leo Myers – and often set his writing aside to focus on social events.

During the later part of his life, Hartley resided in London at Rutland Gate, enjoying swimming and rowing during his free time. He was known to have many servants, a number of whom became dear companions and appeared in his novels. Hartley became relatively reclusive during these years, no longer attending the social gatherings that had punctuated much of his earlier life. Hartley enjoyed reading a number of his contemporary authors, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton, and Henry Green.

Hartley was known to be a hypochondriac, particularly afraid of tetanus and a painful death. Many believe this fear of sickness came from his mother, who was known to be overly concerned about his health. Hartley was very concerned with remaining an individualist within the structures of modern society; this led many to label him as a non-conformist. He referred to himself as a moralist. 

During his trips to Venice, David Cecil joined him many times, leading many to believe that Hartley was homosexual. The first novel in which he included homosexual characters was My Fellow Devils – though instead of painting their sexuality in a favorable light, he portrays it as the reason for a friendship's ruin. Hartley was not open about his sexuality until toward the end of his life. He regarded his 1971 novel The Harness Room as his "homosexual novel" and feared the public reaction to it.

Hartley died in London on December 13, 1972 at the age of 76, and was buried at Golders Green Crematorium.