Geoffrey Gorer

Geoffrey Gorer is in the pantheon of great British travel writers, and it is somehow fitting that of his dozen great anthropological works, only Africa Dances survives as a book that is still read and in print and found on the shelves of a bookshop. For Africa Dances proved to be the cornerstone in Geoffrey Gorer’s life and career. After its publication, Geoffrey grew to become an ever more dedicated anthropologist (recognised on both sides of the Atlantic) while before it he was a feckless and rather precocious free-spirit, playing around with writing and travelling, undeniably intelligent, and refreshingly untouched by the prevailing evils of racism and class snobbery with half a dozen languages on his lips. So Africa Dances is one of those happy books that is both touched by intelligence and wisdom but also the zeal of a young adventurer with a gift for language. The whole mission was famously based on a chance encounter with a friend of a friend. For Geoffrey was once again in Paris (en route to Morocco) when he met Féral Benga, a spectacularly handsome star of the French ballet who was then being painted by his friend, Pavel Tchelitchew. They got on so well, that Féral Benga asked Gorer to join him on a trip home, that would also take them for three-months across West Africa. Geoffrey Gorer said Yes.

Geoffrey Gorer was fortunate in many ways. He was well educated: at Charterhouse and then at Jesus College, Cambridge enriched by an interlude at the Sorbonne from 1922–23. He graduated in 1927 with a degree in classics and modern languages. He was also wealthy, but he and his brothers instinctively knew the dangers associated with their inherited wealth. Geoffrey’s great grandfather Lewis Gorer had emigrated from Prussia and first settled in Brighton where he worked as a scrap-metal dealer. He also had an eye for what should be melted down and what was worth selling on as an antique. He was prosperous enough to marry Hannah Cohen in 1839 and by 1851 they had moved up to London with their four children, and lived at 7, North Street in Stepney – in London’s east End. We can follow the rise to fortune of one of his sons, Solomon, who first traded as a tobacconist in Kensington, then as a silversmith in Paddington, then also dealt in gold from his shop at 113, Edgeware but by 1886 was also dealing in diamonds from 433, The Strand. By the end of his life, he was trading from the smartest street in London, at 59 New Bond Street. His son Edgar Ezekiel Gorer (1872-1915), inherited the family eye for the shape and form and history of objects but took it in a different direction, becoming one of the principal dealers in Oriental porcelains, with a show room at 170 New Bond Street. He also worked hand in glove with a business partner in New York (Dreicer & Co) with a showroom at 500, 5th Avenue. But the fortune that he was able to leave to his family, was to be tainted with tragedy, for on the return from one of his frequent journeys across the Atlantic Edgar (aged just 43) went down when the SS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. At this point in his career Edgar was on the point of being sued for misrepresentation in the courts by a powerful rival in the art world, Lord Duveen. Geoffrey was aged ten (he had been born on 26 March 1905) when his father was drowned at sea. They knew their father’s last act had been selfless, for on the boat deck he had given his life-jacket to a distraught opera-singer.

So Geoffrey and his two younger brothers, Peter and Richard were brought up at 45, Netherhall Gardens, in the north London village of Hampstead by their widowed mother Rachel Cohen, who was a sculptor (trained at the Slade School of Art) and a passionate gardener with a wide circle of friends that included the poet Edith Sitwell and the painter Pawel Tchelichew. It was a remarkably happy childhood, untouched by prejudice of any form, and Geoffrey grew up in a home full of books and art, and free to explore the streets of London. Neighbours remember how Rachel (nicknamed “Ree’) would saunter off to a pub, with a son on each arm. Geoffrey’s parents had married in a Hampstead synagogue in December 1902 and knew themselves to be both English and Jewish. The names they gave their firstborn, Geoffrey Edgar Solomon Gorer, show this, proudly part of a double culture full of uplifting role models, be it Benjamin Disraeli or Ernest Casson, while such families as the Sassoon, Montefiore or Rothschilds had stood at the very apex of British society for generations. This double heritage may also have helped Geoffrey to stand free from the class snobbery and habitual racism that limited the perceptions of so many of his contemporaries. And when Geoffrey had finished his education at Cambridge, he had the resources to try his hand at creative writing, be it a picaresque novel or a number of unperformed plays, before he made that life-changing journey to West Africa. He did not feel too much of a freak, for his two brothers were also intellectual prodigies. Peter Alfred Gorer (1907-1961) would become a leading immunologist (one of the pioneers who made the first heart transplants possible) while Richard Gorer (1913-1994) was both a musicologist, writing for the BBC and Grove’s dictionary, but also a passionate horticulturist, encouraging his friend john Hooper Harvey, to create the garden history society. Richard also edited the best-selling Country Dairy of an Edwardian Lady and co-wrote (with my great-uncle Thomas Rochford III) the Rochford Book of House Plants which went into many editions, aside from helping run a market garden with two friends.

Africa Dances was published in 1935 and proved both a critical and financial success. As Cecil Roberts wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘He has made one of the most singular journeys of modern times, and he has given us a book which opens a window on a world that most of us hardly realize exists…There are no reservations in this astonishing book. Sex, religion, politics, the negro conception of life contrasted with the white man’s, the place of fetish and magic, wrestling, dancing and marriage…a book I could not put down from the first page to the last.’ It was also one of the most searing criticisms of the bleak reality of French colonialism to have ever been published.

Africa Dances also served as Geoffrey Gorer’s introduction to many of the leading anthropologists in the USA, especially Margaret Mead of the American National Museum of Natural History, Ruth Benedict of Columbia University and John Dollard of Yale University. From 1935 to 1936 they educated him in the methodology and theoretical background on anthropology. At the end of 1936 travelled to India, where another fan of Africa Dances, Major Morris of the Gurkha Rifles had used his influence with the Maharajah of Sikkim to enable Geoffrey Gorer to study a totally isolated Himalayan people, the Lepchas. Having acclimatised and learned their language Geoffrey Gorer would live in the village of Zongu for three months (March-May 1937). He would turn this experience into one of the classic studies of anthropology, Himalayan Village. But it was to be his last major field trip for he contracted a rare tropical disease – sprue – as well as fracturing his backbone in a bad rock fall.

The success of Africa Dances also provided Geoffrey Gorer with willing publishers. Bali and Angkor, Or looking at Life and Death was published in Boston in 1936 and Hot Strip Tease and other Notes on American culture was published 1937. There was also a satirical novel, Nobody Talks Politics and an earlier work, The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, which he would revise and republish throughout his life.

During the Second World War Gorer worked for the British Embassy in Washington, advising them on propaganda issues while also studying behaviourism under Clark Hull at Yale. He combined both interests in his book Japanese Character Structure and Propaganda (1941), which in the author’s own words had ‘a quite fantastic circulation and influence’. Later he collaborated on a book-length study of a schizophrenic youth, Tom Malden, and undertook further investigations of national character: The Americans (1948) followed by The People of Russia – produced in collaboration with a psychologist, John Rickman.

In 1950 he returned home to England and bought Sunte House, a small 17-th century manor house near Haywards Heath in Sussex. Geoffrey’s youngest brother, Richard, also decided to live in East Sussex at this time. Richard and Geoffrey were both passionate about gardening and extremely knowledgeable about plants, and after the death of their adored mother (in 1954) they needed to establish homes of their own. They were also both gay in a period of English history when it was a crime to engage in any homosexual act. By the standards of their time, they lived remarkably open lives, proud of their friendships with many of the most interesting men of their day (who were also gay) such as Francis Bacon, Angus Wilson and W.H.Auden. They were also both consciously returning to Sussex, where their Jewish great grandfather had first settled.

From this elegant sanctum, Geoffrey Gorer wrote three substantial studies of English culture (Exploring English Culture (1955), Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain (1965) and Sex and Marriage in England Today (1971) alongside a stream of reviews and articles. He wisely used his 70th birthday (in 1976) as the moment to stop writing books though he remained an active correspondent. He became ever-more devoted to his garden and died in May 1985 at the age of eighty. His papers, books and letters were all deposited at the Library of The University of Sussex.

Back to Articles page