Mervyn Jones (Author)

Mervyn Jones (born February 27, 1922 in London , † February 23, 2010 in Brighton , Sussex ) was a British journalist and writer.

Life

Mervyn Jones was born in 1922 as the second of four children to the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and his wife Katerina. Katherina was Ernest Jones' second wife. She came from a Jewish family in Vienna. The marriage was concluded in 1919.

Mervyn Jones' family was wealthy (also through inheritance), owned - in addition to a villa in London - houses in Sussex and on the Gower Peninsula in Wales as well as a villa in Menton on the Côte d'Azur . For Mervyn and his three siblings (Gwenith * 1920, Nesta * 1930 and Lewis * 1933), however, the upper-class household meant that they were raised less by their parents and more by a nanny , a working-class woman who Mervyn lived in an environment that he did mostly felt as strange and cold, gave motherly warmth. "My real mother was Nanny" ("My real mother was my nanny"). In his autobiography Mervyn writes about his mother: “I didn't love her, I didn't admire her as I admired my father, and to be honest I never liked her.” (“I didn't love her, I didn't admire her like my father, and to be honest, I never liked her. ")

In 1934 Mervyn was sent by his parents to Abbotsholme School in south-west Derbyshire , a middle class boarding school with, for the time, advanced teaching methods and content. Mervyn still hated going to school. "Throughout my five years at Abbotsholme, I longed to get away." ( "During my five years Abbotsholme, I had to constantly make the request this school behind me.") However, he was an avid reader and devoured the literature of the Left Book Club , particularly the writings of John Strachey that led him to join the Young Communist League in 1938, at the age of 16 . When the school administration found out that he was a member, he was expelled from school on an excuse.

His father suggested he go to Oxford and he could have gotten a place at Queen's College . Mervyn turned down this option, however, which led to serious conflicts with his father, who had got it into his head that his son should continue his education at Oxford. Mervyn then went (together with his mother) to New York in August 1939 and enrolled at New York University . He took literature and took part in seminars / lectures by the poet and writer WH Auden . But he was plagued by remorse because he kept telling himself that he should actually be in Britain to fight against fascism . So he returned to Britain with his mother in 1942. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Communist Party of Great Britain) and initially took a job in a car repair shop in London.

However, as late as 1942, he joined the British forces in was Second Lieutenant in an anti-tank artillery - Regiment , which in the invasion of the Western allied troops on June 6, 1944 in the Normandy ( Operation Overlord was used). Only a few months later, in October 1944, Mervyn was captured by Germany in the Netherlands and was in a prison camp in the Rhineland during the collapse of the so-called “ Third Reich ” , from which he was liberated by American troops.

At the end of the war, Mervyn Jones returned to England only for a short time and then did another two years of military service in India . On August 15, 1947, British colonial rule in India ended, the colonial troops were demobilized and Mervyn returned to England.

Even after the Second World War , Jones remained a staunch communist, wrote articles for the Daily Worker and campaigned for the Communist Party (England) in 1945. In the course of the so-called Cold War , however, he became disillusioned by the anti-American line and the Communist Party's demand for unconditional loyalty. As a freelancer, he continued to write articles for the Daily Worker , but left the Communist Party of England in 1951. He started writing and started his writing career. No Time to Be Young (1952), the story of an Anglo-French girl who grew up in the interwar period , immediately received very good reviews. In 1955 he ran for the Labor Party in Chichester , West Sussex (a previously safe Tory constituency).

In the same year he became an employee of the Tribune , a socialist weekly newspaper founded by Labor politician Aneurin Bevan in 1937 , whose motto was: "A thorn in the side of all governments, constructively to Labor, unforgiving to Conservatives."

As a result, Jones wrote articles on everything from reports on party conferences to articles on rock 'n' roll . He quickly rose to deputy editor and co-wrote with Michael Foot , the former editor of the Tribune, the book Guilty Men (1957), a critique of British politics during the Suez crisis in 1956. In addition to his work at the Tribune he has written articles for the New Reasoner, a left-wing, strictly anti-Soviet newspaper, launched in late 1956 by Edward P. Thompson .

In 1960 Jones left the editorial board of the Tribune to work as a full freelancer and press officer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , Britain's largest peace movement . From 1966 to 1968 he was the assistant editor of the left-wing New Statesman founded in 1913 .

Mervyn Jones spent his final years, almost completely blind, in a home in Brighton, Sussex. In his autobiography Chances, written in 1987 , Jones writes: “When I was young I was certain that the world would be Socialist by 1950 at the latest. Now it's 1987, I am no longer young and I'm left wondering what went wrong. ”(“ When I was young, I was sure that the world would be socialist by 1950 at the latest. Now it's 1987 and I wonder what went wrong. ”) Jones came to the conclusion that the radical left“ (had) failed to take account of the central place that the value of personal freedom holds in modern minds ” has taken into account personal freedom for modern man ”).

Works

Novels

• No time to be young. London, Cape, 1952.
• The New Town. London, Cape, 1953.
• The Last Barricade. London, Cape, 1953.
• Helen Blake. London, Cape, 1955.
• On the last day. London, Cape, 1958.
• A set of wives. London, Cape, 1965.
• John and Mary. London, Cape, 1966; New York, Atheneum, 1967.
  • German, translated by Peter de Mendelssohn ; Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1968. As paperback by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1970.
• A survivor. London, Cape, and New York, Atheneum, 1968.
• Joseph. London, Cape, and New York, Atheneum, 1970.
• Mr. Armitage Isn't Back Yet. London, Cape, 1971.
• Holding On. London, Quartet, 1973; as Twilight of the Day, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1974.
• The Revolving Door. London, Quartet, 1973.
• Strangers. London, Quartet, 1974.
• Lord Richard's Passion. London, Quartet, and New York, Knopf, 1974.
• The Pursuit of Happiness. London, Quartet, 1975; New York, MasonCharter, 1976.
• Nobody's fault. London, Quartet, and New York, Mason Charter, 1977.
• Today the Struggle. London, Quartet, 1978.
• The Beautiful Words. London, German, 1979.
• A short time to live. London, German, 1980; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981.
• Two Women and Their Man. London, German, and New York, St Martin's Press, 1982.
• Joanna's Luck. London, Piatkus, 1984.
• Coming home. London, Piatkus, 1986.
• That year in Paris. London, Piatkus, 1988.

Collected short stories

• Scenes from Bourgeois Life. London, Quartet, 1976.

Uncollected short stories

• "The Foot," in English Story 8, edited by Woodrow Wyatt. London, Collins, 1948.
• "The Bee-Keeper," in English Story 10, edited by Woodrow Wyatt. London, Collins, 1950.
• "Discrete Lives," in Bananas (London), 1978.
• "Five Days by Moonlight," in Encounter (London), November 1978.
• "Living Together," in Woman (London), 1979.

Plays

• The Shelter (produced London, 1982).

Radio plays

• Anna, 1982
• Taking Over, 1984
• Lisa, 1984
• Generations, 1986.

Other

• Guilty Men, 1957: Suez and Cyprus, with Michael Foot . London, Gollancz, and New York, Rinehart, 1957.
• Potbank: A Social Inquiry Into Life In The Potteries (documentary). London, Secker and Warburg, 1961.
• Big Two: Life in America and Russia. London, Cape, 1962; as The Antagonists, New York, Potter, 1962.
• Two Ears of Corn: Oxfam in Action. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1965; as In Famine's Shadow: A Private War on Hunger, Boston, Beacon Press, 1967.
• Life on the Dole. London, Davis Poynter, 1972.
• Rhodesia: The White Judge's Burden. London, Christian Action, 1972.
• The Oil Rush, photographs by Fay Godwin. London, Quartet, 1976.
• The Sami of Lapland. London, Minority Rights Group, 1982.
• Chances: An Autobiography. London, Verso, 1987.
• A Radical Life: The Biography of Megan Lloyd George. London, Hutchinson, 1991.
• Michael Foot. London, Gollancz, 1994.
• (As editor) Kingsley Martin: Portrait and Self-Portrait. London, Barrie and Rockliff, and New York, Humanities Press, 1969.
• (As editor) Privacy. Newton Abbot, Devon, David and Charles, 1974.
• (As translator) The Second Chinese Revolution, by KS Karol. New York, Hill and Wang, 1974.

Web links

• Literature by and about Mervyn Jones in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary in The Guardian
• Obituary in The Daily Telegraph
• Obituary in The Times
• Detailed list of his works

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mervyn Jones: Chances. To Autobiography. London. New York (Verso) 1987, p. 1 f.
2. ^ Mervyn Jones: Chances. To Autobiography. London. New York (Verso) 1987, p. 3 f.
3. ^ Mervyn Jones: Chances. To Autobiography. London. New York (Verso) 1987, p. 7.
4. ^ Mervyn Jones: Chances. To Autobiography. London. New York (Verso) 1987, p. 9.
5. ^ Mervyn Jones: Chances. To Autobiography. London. New York (Verso) 1987, p. 20.