Gilbert Cannan

Biography

Writer, translator, and theatre critic Gilbert Cannan is a lesser-known British author whose work emerged in the concluding years of World War I. Though his pessimistic realism echoes the writing of his contemporaries at the height of literary modernism, it is perhaps his tragic personal life that has prevented readers from learning more about him and delving into his works. Cannan’s entire life was overshadowed by madness and disappointing relationships, and though he managed to produce a wide variety of literature, he is marked by The New York Times and many of his intimates as “a genius that never developed” (Farr, Gilbert Cannan181).

Gilbert Eric Cannan was born on June 25, 1884 in Broughton, Manchester. He was the second of nine children to Henry Angus Cannan and Grace Charlotte Violet, a Scottish shipping clerk and the daughter of an Anglican clergymen. Overshadowed by his clever older brother Angus, young Gilbert experienced “long bouts of crying,” which were likely the first symptoms of the insanity that plagued him throughout his life (Farr, “Cannan”). In 1898, Cannan won a scholarship to Manchester grammar school, which he earned while attending Ducie Avenue board school. He went on to attend Cambridge, where he studied English, French, and German. He left with only a pass degree, which suggests a possible decline in health (Farr). After leaving Cambridge, Cannan read for the bar, but soon abandoned the law in order to devote himself to writing. Cannan began his translation of Romain Rolland’s French masterpiece Jean Christophe in 1907, and two years later he published his own first novel Peter Homunculus (Farr). Cannan began criticizing theater at this time, and he continued to publish more novels, short stories, poems, and translations.

Cannan’s romantic life was turbulent and complex. After a passionate affair with British sculptor Kathleen Bruce came to an end, he become involved with J.M. Barrie’s wife, Mary. When the Barries divorced in 1909, Cannan married her “out of a sense of chivalry” on April 28, 1910, which was against the advice of H.G. Wells (Farr). After the publication of his novel Mendel (based on the somewhat truthful events in the life of artist Mark Gertler) incited outrage, Cannan’s life and marriage effectively fell apart. He moved to London and became “increasingly unstable,” but he still continued to write and translate (Farr). In 1918, Mary Cannan was granted a judicial separation, and Gilbert fell in love with a young South African woman named Gwen Wilson. They moved to London together and took on Henry Mond (later Lord Melchett) as a lodger, which later led to a ménage à trois that scandalized London society. However, just two years later, Mond married Wilson while Cannan was lecturing in North America, “a blow from which Cannan never recovered” (Farr).

After this betrayal, Cannan travelled across Africa by horse, occasionally sending letters back to London; these were published in a book called Letters from a Distance (1923). When he returned, he descended into a “violent madness” and was certified insane. In April 1924, Cannan became a patient in The Priory, a mental health hospital in Roehampton, London. Fifteen years passed in which Cannan authored “twenty-seven books, countless articles, scores of poems, and at least fourteen one- and two-act plays,” one of the best-known being Everybody's Husband (Farr). Many of his works were based on his view of his childhood experiences, which were dismal at the very least. Only Gwen Melchett and Rita (the widow of economist Edwin Cannan) were allowed to visit him in The Priory. Cannan was moved to Holloway Sanitorium in Virginia Water, Surrey, in 1952, but died of cancer on June 30, 1955. He was cremated in Woking and left only one possession: a barrister’s moth-eaten wig (Farr).

Cannan’s literary contemporaries included Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, David Garnett, and Compton Mackenzie, all of whom were highly influential authors of the modernist era. He became involved with these authors through the literary magazine Rhythm, and though he was never on the staff, several of his criticisms and short stories were published in the magazine (Farr, Gilbert Cannan 86). In 1913, Henry James described Cannan as one of the up-and-coming authors who left Lawrence in the “dusty rear,” and this incited deep resentment on Lawrence’s part (116). Cannan’s writing was particularly cynical; especially near the end of his life, Cannan was convinced that the world was “heading for disaster through the sheer stupidity and greed of men” (182). This bitterness marks much of his work, and shades of Cannan’s mental health issues appear in the portrayal of his characters and the situations that they experience.

Cannan’s cynicism underlies his short story “Old Maid’s Marriage,” though it was published in Rhythm in January of 1913 before Mary left him and long before he began his affair with Gwen. The story itself features Phoebe, a schoolteacher who leads a miserable life and is constantly discouraged to marry by her mother. She yearns for a change from her increasingly dismal position and decides to finally marry her dear friends’ brother, though her uneducated husband ultimately disappoints her. Shortly after the birth of their child, Phoebe returns to the prison that she had longed to escape from for so many years: her mother’s home. “Old Maid’s Marriage” reflects Cannan’s already pessimistic views of marriage and love which only deepened later in his life. It also reveals the unhappiness that can occur in one’s childhood home, a theme that Cannan himself experienced and wrote about frequently.