David Denison explores the life of a significant figure with Hampshire, Portsmouth, and international connections
Who was Rom Landau?
Romuald Zbigniew Landau (1899–1974) was an author, sculptor, Foreign Service officer, educator, art critic, book reviewer, and a specialist in Arab and Islamic cultures, with an especial interest in, and love for, Morocco. His literary and scholarly works had an enormous impact during his lifetime, but unfortunately he is less well-known these days than he should be.
Romuald Zbigniew Landau (1899–1974) was an author, sculptor, Foreign Service officer, educator, art critic, book reviewer, and a specialist in Arab and Islamic cultures, with an especial interest in, and love for, Morocco.
Landau’s early years
Born in Lódz, Poland, at a time when it was still part of Tsarist Russia, and also during its short-lived independence, Landau had Polish-German parents. In 1918, he moved to Germany to study architecture at Darmstadt, and Sculpture at Frankfurt. He then relocated to Berlin where he later worked as a journalist. His early schooling having compulsorily been entirely in Russian, he was fortunate to have had a German governess at home, and over time his linguistic abilities flourished.
It was in Berlin, in 1925, that he published his first book Der Unbestechliche Minos (Minos the Incorruptible), a review of contemporary continental art. Thomas Mann, the celebrated author of Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1927), and 1929 Nobel Laureate, is reported as having declared it one of the best art reviews ever written – although the sexually-conflicted author was often complimentary about good-looking young male writers. In the copy he sent his elder brother, Walter, Landau wrote, ‘art review is the intellectual method to find yourself through foreign art. To my brother Gautiero with sincerest greetings’. While working at this time as a pianist in Italy, Walter had assumed the equivalent Italian name, Gautiero, just as he had adopted the French version, Gauthier.
Rom Landau scored an early literary success with the best-selling God is My Adventure (1935), which charted his encounters with leading lights in the realms of religion, philosophy, and mysticism, including George Gurdjieff, Rudolf Steiner, and Meher Baba.
The England years
Landau arrived in England in 1927, and lived there until the 1950s. His next book, Pilsudski, The Hero of Poland (1930), was first written in German but translated into English by Geoffrey Dunlop. [An edition is scheduled for completion later in August 2022]. Landau dedicated many of his books to Billy Henderson, the wealthy Old Etonian artist, and those he gave as gifts were white Morocco bound with WBH embossed are now in Portsmouth University library. Landau and Billy shared a house in Chelsea and travelled widely together in the 1920s and 1930s. Although both gay men, their lasting friendship seems based on their joint love of art.
Hampshire connections
Landau lived at Manor Farm House, Stoughton (near Chichester and Havant) from the 1930s to the 1950s, and enthused about the ‘spirit of the valley’. He also wrote about how his young resident German gardener enjoyed outings to Portsmouth.
Four of his books refer to his time in Stoughton in the 1930s and 1940s when he joined the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve. In Of No Importance (1940), he describes how he discovered Stoughton and learnt about gardening. This work contains photographs of the exterior of the house and garden. He wrote warmly about the ‘spirit of the place’, confiding that ‘I find it difficult to define that hidden power’ (p. 18). Later he refers glowingly to the resident housekeeper as Mrs Boswell, but does not name his young German Jewish refugee gardener. They are named in the September 1939 census as Rosaline Boswell (b. 20/05/1878) and Wolf D. Zedner (b. 30/10/1918). The house evidently had no electricity. Rom Landau used different names for the house each time he published a new book. It was then the custom to print the author's address at the end of each preface.
A 1943 work, Letter to Andrew, is dedicated to his love for Sgt. Andrew Brigstocke, his young Service friend from Liverpool whom he met on a RAF Air Gunnery course in 1940. Andrew often visited Stoughton but was tragically lost at sea in 1942 offshore Portugal where his bomber was last seen.
Two 1944 works provide further insights. The Wing: Confessions of an RAF Officer, an autobiographical account of Landau’s brief service in the RAFVR between 1939 and 1940, he relates that he let his Commanding Officer’s wife occupy the Manor. The Brother Vane – a collection of short stories in which ‘Jerusalem’ has Stoughton as background, including country walks in the neighbourhood. Autobiographical elements are evident in the story’s references to an ‘Andrew from Liverpool’ who meets an older man, John, on an Air Gunnery Course in the RAFVR. This story permitted Landau to articulate his feelings for Andrew in ways that he was, in 1944, unable to express elsewhere. Landau sent an early copy of this to R.A. Butler (later Lord Butler), then Minister of Education and planning major reforms to education. Landau’s letter of 1st November 1944 sought the inclusion of sex education in the national school syllabus.
Ensuring that the important legacy of Landau’s rich life and work endures and is fully recognised has been my work over the past few years.
Portsmouth connections
Ensuring that the important legacy of Landau’s rich life and work endures and is fully recognised has been my work over the past few years. In 2022, Madame Karen Gauthier-Landau, the widow of RL’s nephew in Paris, and others donated a collection of Landau’s works, including signed first editions, to the University of Portsmouth Library’s Special Collections. Landau spent time near Portsmouth, and his Hampshire connections make him an author worth celebrating in this city.
Three other important collections exist: the Rom Landau Papers (1927–79) are held at Syracuse University Library; the Rom Landau Collection (1899–1965) is at University of California, Santa Barbara; and the Rom Landau Middle East Collection (1920–1970) held by the University of the Pacific.
Sexual politics
On its publication in 1943, Letter to Andrew was a controversial work because of its homosexual allusions. Landau continued to push the case for changes in attitudes and laws in this area. Sex, Life and Faith (1946), was more controversial still, containing a 50-page chapter describing the history of homosexuality and advocating a change in English legislation, which at the time was highly punitive for gay men. This work was addressed to a middle-class readership, many of whom may never have heard or uttered the word. It is quite likely that he held this book back until he had gained British nationality in 1940 and the Second World War had come to an end. In a positive review, The Listener averred that ‘he has written a courageous book, and one that will doubtless bring comfort to many who are in difficulties’.
While his commitment to equality of sexualities was a significant aspect of his career, he also insisted that it was in some ways secondary to more important concerns. In Sex, Life, and Faith, he argued that the private life of the artist and their ‘sublimated sexual potentialities’ have ‘but a limited bearing, if any, on his work’ because they are ‘only one of the forces that go to its making’. Whilst giving his weekly radio broadcasts in retirement in Morocco he was asked why he never married. He replied that he was “married to Morocco” and did not need another wife.
Race and faith
Landau’s elder brother, living in Paris, had in the 1930s adopted the surname of Gauthier-Landau (Walter-Landau in English) in order to reduce attention to his father’s Jewish faith. Landau was often in Paris, and the publishing house of L’Arche in Rue Saint André des Arts first published a French edition of God is My Adventure with the title Dieu est mon aventure. Controversially, Landau and his three brothers were brought up in their mother’s Roman Catholic faith. Although RL later gave little support to organised religion, he had a strong Faith and in the 1930's was a director of the 1937 World Congress of Faiths.
The Morocco connection
Landau first visited Morocco in 1924. This and subsequent travels in North Africa and the Middle East spurred his gradual development as a student of Islamic culture. He met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and King Abudullah I of Jordan, and in 1938 published Arm the Apostles, which related these adventures but also saw him advocate for arming the Arabs to forge anti-Nazi alliances with France and the U.K.. Following his mainly biographical/ philosophical publications, Landau turned in the late 1940s/early 1950s to the writings about Morocco and Islam for which he is probably better known. These include Invitation to Morocco (1950), Moroccan Journal (1951), Portrait of Tangier (1952), France and the Arabs (1953), and History of Morocco in the Twentieth Century (1963).
He also wrote many articles and reviews for New Statesman and The Reporter. The 1950s saw his intense involvement with the USA Campaign for Morocco to regain its independence from France – a goal that was achieved in 1956, with the new ruler, King Mohammed V, honouring Landau in 1957 by making him Commander of the Royal Moroccan Order Ouissam Alaouite. His pivotal role there is well described in Dr David Stenner's recent book Globalizing Morocco (Stanford University Press, 2019). After a 1952–3 lecture tour in the U.S., Landau took up residence in San Francisco, assuming up the Professorship of Islamic Studies at the University of the Pacific in San Francisco from 1956 until his retirement in 1968. At the request of President John F. Kennedy, Landau took up the appointment of Educational Director preparing the first team of US Peace Corps Volunteers to Morocco. Fittingly, his final years were then spent in Marrakech, where he died in 1974, and was buried in the city’s Christian cemetery, where on 2nd March 2024 the Polish and British Embassies will hold events to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.
Landau’s was a fascinating life, well-lived, courageous, and dedicated, above all, to understanding.
David Denison is a member of the RAF Club, London, housing works by Landau (a member in the 1940s). Landau’s Chelsea home had been a street away from where David had lived before retiring to Southsea. Landau’s lifetime links with Morocco were especially interesting to David, whose own ‘Morocco Experience’ may be viewed at: British Moroccan Society and read more about Rom Landau Project
As a gay man, David was very grateful for the important campaigning by Landau in the UK and USA to help explain homosexuality to a wider readership - in the footsteps of Edward Carpenter but without the safety net of wealthy establishment friends.
