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Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (21 November 1889 – 15 May 1949), who dropped his surname for professional purposes, was a versatile British writer and journalist. The writers Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn were his brothers.
Hugh Kingsmill Lunn was born at Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, London, second son and second child of the three sons and one daughter of Sir Henry Simpson Lunn, founder of the travel agency Lunn Poly, and Mary Ethel, née Moore, daughter of a canon.[1] He was educated at Harrow School and the University of Oxford. After graduating he worked for a brief period for Frank Harris, who edited the publication Hearth and Home in 1911/2, alongside Enid Bagnold; Kingsmill later wrote a debunking biography of Harris. He began fighting in the British Army in World War I in 1916, and was captured in France the next year. He was held as a prisoner of war at Mainz Citadel with, among others, J. Milton Hayes and Alec Waugh.[2]
After the war he began to write, initially both science fiction and crime fiction. In the 1930s he was a contributor to the English Review; later he wrote a good deal of non-fiction for that periodical's successor, the English Review Magazine. His large output includes criticism, essays and biographies, parodies and humour, as well as novels, and he edited a number of anthologies. He is remembered for saying 'friends are God's apology for relations', with a notable flavour of Ambrose Bierce. The dictum was subsequently used by Richard Ingrams for the title of his memoir of Kingsmill's friendships with Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm Muggeridge,[3] two intimate friends whom he influenced greatly.
Kingmill was literary editor of Punch from 1942 to 1944 and of the New English Review from 1945 to 1949. He married Eileen FitzGerald in 1915 and there was one daughter. The marriage broke up in 1927. Kingsmill married a second time in 1934 to Dorothy Vernon, and there were two daughters and a son. (She also had one son of her own). He died of cancer in Brighton in 1949.[1]
Muggeridge drew a darker attitude from Kingsmill's sardonic wit. Dawnist was Kingsmill's word for those infected with unrealistic or utopian idealism – the enemy as far as he was concerned.
Kingsmill's parody of A. E. Housman's poetry has been recognised as definitive:
What still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat 'tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.
Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.
Housman himself said of this parody: "It's the best I have seen, and indeed, the only good one."[4][5]
Despite his wide range as a novelist, biographer, essayist, and literary critic, Kingsmill is best known today as an anthologist. He compiled at least eight of his humorous and original anthologies (depending on how they are classified) between 1929 and 1955. The first, An Anthology of Invective and Abuse, was by far the most successful and remains the best known. Oswald Mosley was so enthusiastic about it that he forwarded a copy to Adolf Hitler.[6] According to Hesketh Pearson in his preface to High Hill of the Muses (the last of the anthologies) "Kingsmill himself became a little restless when people praised his volume of vituperation."
Michael Holroyd judges The Worst of Love (1931), a collection of insincere writing, to be the funniest. It resembles the better known anthology The Stuffed Owl, compiled by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, which was published the year before. Owing to his wide reading and good memory, Kingsmill could put together an anthology inside a month, which helped him meet pressing financial commitments. Two other works, The English Genius (1938) and Johnson Without Boswell (1940), take on aspects of the anthology form but include more original content.[7]
