John William Navin Sullivan

John William Navin Sullivan (1886-1937), was a popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven. He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot.

Sullivan fictionalized his origins, and at one point persuaded Aldous Huxley that he was born in Ireland and had attended Maynooth with James Joyce. In fact he was born on 22 January 1886 in Poplar, in the East End of London, where his father ran a mission to seamen. Facts about his early years are few, but he appears to have left school at a young age and worked from 1900 onwards at a Telegraph company; the directors recognised his outstanding mathematical abilities and paid for him to study part-time at the Northern Polytechnic Institute. By 1907 he and his parents were living at Grosvenor Road, Canonbury, London. From 1908 to 1910 he studied and did research work at University College London, but he left without taking a degree. In 1910, he moved to America, where he worked for an electrical company for a year, before becoming a journalist.

In 1913 he returned to Britain, working as a journalist. Early in the First World War, he worked in the ambulance service in Serbia, and he spent Christmas 1914 in a Serbian war hospital. In May 1915 he resumed his career as a journalist, writing for The New Witness about his Serbian experiences, as well as writing about literature and science. Through the publisher Grant Richards he was recommended to work at “Watergate House”, the Department of Information. There he worked with the literary journalist John Middleton Murry, who was to become a close friend and valuable contact over the following years. Late in 1917 he married his first wife, (Violet) Sylvia Mannooch, with whom he had a daughter, Navina, born in November, 1921. Through Murry he was introduced to Ottoline Morrell’s salon at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, and it was through this network that he became known to many literary figures, including T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley.

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