The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  In this quiet, homely, unadventurous way her recovery continued, and she left Stockbridge for good in July, five months after her arrival.

  * * *

  August was spent away from the heat of New York, on Island 727 of the 30,000 in Georgian Bay, Ontario, staying with Bev and Marian Robinson. A photograph survives of this vacation: a picnic scene, in which a smiling Jan is holding her pocket-knife threateningly towards Dolf’s face. She could still be an unnerving person to be at a picnic with. She peppered her talk with four-letter words (which invariably came as a shock to anyone who expected her to be like Mrs Miniver); but apart from her swearing and her occasional knife-wielding, she was good company.

  A manic gesture with the pocket-knife

  In New York she was on the radio and television again, appearing on quiz programmes and doing ‘Guest Spot’ jobs, and she signed a contract with Columbia Broadcasting. ‘You can be forgotten in America,’ she wrote to her brother, ‘because they have been so goddamned loving that they’ve run you ragged with popularity, and you think you’re down & out & flat-broke & will never stage a comeback – and then you do one little 15-minute radio show, as I did last week, & within 24 hours they’re all on your neck again.’

  But she and Dolf were none the less almost ‘flat-broke’, and could not legally break the lease on an apartment which they could no longer afford.

  Our rent at this apartment sorry flat is so screwing sorry fucking high [she wrote to Douglas], namely $1680 a year for two repeat TWO rooms, that we are perpetually one jump ahead of the sheriff, which doesn’t worry me because I was born with a silver bailiff in my mouth, but does worry Dolf, who comes of a respectable Viennese family. He had two ‘firsts’ yesterday: (1) he found his own name in Debrett – a thing that his grandfather, the Grand Rabbi of Moravia, would hardly have foreseen happening; and (2) he had his first bounced cheque returned, from the Columbia Men’s Faculty Club. So I had to take a taxi down to the Guaranty Trust (it’s so expensive being broke, don’t you find?) and cash a cheque, and Dolf braved the Faculty Club cashier. He was terribly upset and embarrassed about it last night. ‘Do relax, darling, and let me go to sleep,’ I said to him. ‘Everybody in Debrett has bouncing cheques … Two terms abshlutely sh’nonymous…’

  But then something happened which was a little bit eerie, but which brought a sudden prospect of financial rescue. MGM were in the process of making a sequel to Mrs Miniver, to be called The Miniver Story: and they had taken a liberty with Jan’s fictional character. She wrote to Jamie explaining the state of affairs:

  We are in the midst of two delicious bits of legal proceedings, one against our landlord, who is the son of a bitch, and one against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who is so to speak the bitch that our landlord is the son of. Briefly, it seems that MGM have nearly finished making the sequel to Mrs M., and that Mrs M. dies of cancer in the last act. I have (genuinely) received no less than three offers recently to do a sequel myself, and the gist of my case is, ‘Oy, you carn’ do that there ’ere.’ We are very much hoping, and it looks pretty promising, judging by the obviously damp state of the MGM attorney’s pants, that they will what’s delicately called Prefer To Settle It Out Of Court. If not, then they’ll bloody well have to settle it in court. Bastards. Even if I didn’t want to accept the offers, they’ve still got no right to make it impossible for me to do so by killing the old girl off.

  MGM did settle it out of court. On 15 February 1950, after coming home from seeing The Third Man at the cinema (‘Dolf and Pauly cried in their beards and were ganz nostalgic, and it was simply thrilling, and if you haven’t seen it you must,’ Jan wrote to Jamie), Jan received a cheque from MGM for $13,000 – $5,000 for the sequel, and $8,000 in damages for killing off Mrs Miniver. They celebrated with Kümmel. ‘Let’s not waste all this lovely money,’ Jan said. ‘Let’s spend it.’

  She did not find it difficult. The swing from penury to riches echoed her swings from depression to euphoria. In June she and Dolf sailed to England, where they missed Robert. He was nineteen, doing his two-year National Service in the Scots Guards, and had been commissioned and sent to Malaya with his regiment a few weeks before she arrived. This, for Jan, was ‘sickeningly disappointing’ as well as worrying. Robert was not communicating with her by letter, and she longed to see him. She and Dolf spent time with Jamie in Scotland, and went to Paris to meet Janet, who was staying there; Jan and Janet got on badly, and Jan returned to New York feeling that two of her three children were out of sympathy with her.

  But she also returned with a comforting prospect in view: Jamie was to sail to America in September, and he and she planned to go on a road trip for three weeks. She wanted to show him the country she had grown to know and love during the war years, and he wanted to look at American livestock and farming methods. But she found that, rather than looking forward to his visit, she was merely dreading his leaving, even before he had arrived.

  Still reckless with the proceeds of the MGM damages, Jan and Dolf moved into a ground-floor apartment at 68 West 68th Street which had its own garden (‘Moving house is my favourite indoor sport,’ Jan wrote to Jamie). While they were settling in and putting plants into pots, The Miniver Story opened in London at the Empire, Leicester Square. (It had been filmed in Britain, in a quest for the ‘realism’ which had been missing the first time.) ‘Remember the Minivers!’ proclaimed the MGM advertisements. The public, it turned out, preferred to remember the Minivers as they were in the original picture, rather than be re-introduced to them looking tired and ill in post-war Britain. The film lost Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $2,311,000. The only good thing the Punch critic could say about it was that Mrs Miniver’s death in the last act at least ensured there would be no further sequels, ‘for which on the whole we may be grateful’.

  It is a dreadful film. Its direction by H. C. ‘Hank’ Potter merely emphasizes how good William Wyler’s was. In the original film, no scene went on for too long; in the sequel, every scene does, and a pall of gloom hangs over the whole. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon still play the leading roles, Garson looking middle-aged and careworn and Pidgeon lacking the wit and wryness which made the first film uplifting in spite of its tragic events. The children are all utterly changed. Vin is absent altogether, his death in the Battle of Britain fleetingly mentioned: Garson had refused to act with her former husband Richard Ney. Judy, now played by Cathy O’Donnell, is a cold, depressed post-war maiden, and Toby, played by James Fox, has grown into a charmlessly precocious and loud-voiced twelve-year-old. The audience knows Mrs Miniver is dying of cancer – the film opens with her visit to the doctor for the diagnosis (‘not less than six months, not more than a year’) – but Clem doesn’t, and the first hour is spent in the dreary tension of waiting for her to collapse and then break the news to him. In one of the dullest scenes of the film, she and Clem dance together, slowly and sadly, in his office overlooking a bomb-site, to the music of a barrel-organ playing outside. After seeing to it that Judy marries a good honest local boy rather than the cad she is in love with, Mrs Miniver dies. Clem is left with the last words, reflecting on her goodness and wisdom.

  The film opened in at Radio City in New York in October; but Jan was not there. She never saw it. Though she always dissociated herself from the character, she knew privately that a bit of her was, or had once been, Mrs Miniver, and nothing would induce her to witness her death at the hands of a Hollywood studio.

  Jamie arrived in New York, and off he and Jan went on their agricultural tour of America.

  Liebstes [she wrote to Dolf from Cabin 2, Bass Point Camp, Lake Rd 14b, Missouri on 17 October 1950], Remind me never to be away from you for so long ever any more. Silly, ain’t it, to get so mixed up with another human being that one feels a 3 weeks’ separation is a kind of amputation? (And besides, I am as randy as hell.) At the same time, I’m glad you weren’t able to come with us, because you would have been bored to a frazzle and sick at the stomach with fast driving, and with the inspissated foulness
of the food we’ve been forced to eat. Really what I think of American cooking …

  Jamie is a very sweet companion, and we have lots of jokes all the time, and lots of hill-billy music on the car radio. We stop here & there by the wayside when we see interesting breeds of pigs, sorry, hawgs, or cattle, & go and ask the owner about them. The heat at the Kansas City show was terrific, & even Jamie got a mite tired of looking at bulls’ behinds …

  The whole country is too big, & all the middle part ought to be compressed & shrunk like one of those South American Indian human heads.

  Was it middle America that had changed, or was it Jan? She was not sure. All she knew was that she was falling out of love with the country which had so enchanted her during her wartime travels. In those distant, gasoline-rationed years, each small town she visited had seemed fascinatingly different from the last: now, she was aware only of their ‘ghastly, ghastly sameness’. Was it just that there were no charming, dowdy sponsors waiting to greet her at each town or give her a ‘bokay’ on railway platforms? Or was it that a new complacency was settling where unspoiltness had been? It was perhaps a bit of both. Showing Jamie America, she wrote afterwards, felt ‘like introducing him to somebody one has married but has in the meanwhile fallen out of love with and now sees the faults of.’

  She waved goodbye to Jamie as he boarded his ship back to Britain and came home to an angry letter from Janet about a radio-phonograph Jan had sold without asking Janet’s permission: and these two things tipped her over into the new depression she had felt coming. All the good that Stockbridge and Dr Wheelis had done a year before seemed to have been undone. She was back where she started. The symptoms were the same: confusion, perpetual tension and sobbing, an inability to keep food down, revulsion against cooking and letter-writing, a disinclination to answer the telephone, a feeling of inadequacy in company, and a dread of being alone.

  Desperate to recapture the magic that had worked eighteen months before, she started typing a diary of her days to show to her new psychiatrist in New York, Dr Jackel, recommended by Dr Wheelis. His method during appointments was not to ask her a single question. ‘I begged him to ask me questions,’ Jan wrote in her first instalment on 12 December 1950, ‘but he said the usual stuff about how if he asked questions it would put ideas into my head about what he considered important. I started trying to tell him about my childhood, and my parents not getting on, and how I felt a dread of the repeating pattern: but in the middle of it all I was overcome with discouragement and despair and folded up almost entirely.’

  Now she had every reason to panic. If each ‘cure’ from depression was only temporary, was it worth being cured at all?

  Will it go on this way for the rest of my life? If so, I can’t see the point of being alive, with this dread of recurrence hanging over me. The happiest thing would be to get killed in an accident at one of the moments when one is normal and on top of the world: but that kind of thing doesn’t happen, and anyway, when I’m on top of the world I have such a keen zest for life that I don’t want to die, ever. Was it real, that sense of joy, that welling-over of love and sympathy towards one’s fellow-beings, that energy, that desire to help make the world better for people, that urge to create things? If it was real, how can it have so utterly gone? What is real, and what is unreal?

  She carried on with her television and radio appearances throughout this time, and audiences had no idea that she was a nervous wreck when not in public view. With a supreme effort of will, she could act her former self for long enough to ensure that, as she put it, ‘the show could go on’. She appeared on the television programme Celebrity Time as a co-guest with the critic John Mason Brown, in which they had to play charades and tell ‘riveting little anecdotes’ about their literary careers. Jan felt ‘jittery’ all afternoon, and found the endless waiting beforehand, with camera rehearsals, almost intolerable. ‘But it went off all right – as far as anything so idiotic could be all right. There were fifty people in the studio, spending nine hours preparing for half an hour of almost complete crap.’

  Each week in February and March 1951 she was on the panel of a television programme called We Take Your Word, in which the players had to make up the etymology of a given word. Two were false, one was correct: it was an etymological Call My Bluff. This was Jan’s response to the word ‘pumpernickel’: ‘A young lieutenant in Napoleon’s army arrived on horseback at an inn in Prussia one evening, tired and hungry. After arranging for his horse, Nicolai, to be watered and stabled, the officer demanded his own dinner. The innkeeper’s wife brought him an unfamiliar dark bread which he took a bite of and then threw on the floor with disgust. “C’est bon pour Nicolai!” he said.’

  The audience laughed and clapped: but by the middle of the night, Jan was back in a state of despair. The act of typing long tracts about her days was not helping this time. The magic which had worked so well at Stockbridge, she realized, must have been like an amulet or a magic charm in a fairytale, which only worked once.

  In the mornings, when Dolf went out to work, someone always came to sit with her. One day, when neither Bennes nor Pauly could come, Pauly arranged for one of her Viennese friends to come instead: and this visit induced in Jan a final wail of despair.

  Well, she arrived – a nice, quiet little woman with a kind face. She asked whether there wasn’t some mending or something that she could do for me, and I managed to find her a few stockings and slips that needed washing, which she is at present doing in the bathroom. No doubt she is wondering how the hell I can be in this state and yet still be able to go on doing the radio and television jobs. She must think I’m such a phoney – or maybe she understands more about such things than I imagine she does. Poor thing – she lives quite alone in a little apartment on 98th Street, and she has very little money and – at the moment – no job. She was in concentration camp in Europe and lost everything, like so many of them. And here am I, by comparison so damned lucky and well-off and successful – what must she think of me for being ‘depressed’? It’s one of those cases which one feels ought to make one ashamed of grumbling about anything – but it just doesn’t work that way. If one’s in this kind of state, one loses the ability to make comparisons. Hell is absolute, not comparative. How am I to get out of it? How, how, how?

  There was a way out. In August 1951 Jan was diagnosed as having breast cancer, and a mastectomy was carried out at once. Her revulsion against living was replaced by a deep and justified fear of dying.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Honour the true believer,

  The man whose feet have trod

  Life’s road of fret and fever

  Sustained by trust in God.

  Whatever foes assailed him

  He faced them fair and square:

  His strong sword never failed him –

  Faith in the power of prayer.

  Crown him with wreaths of laurel,

  Of myrtle and of bay:

  With that I have no quarrel –

  Yet spare one slender spray

  For him who, unbelieving,

  Unpious, undevout,

  Long wandering and weaving

  Among the pits of doubt,

  Faced, prayerless and unweeping,

  The flying spears of grief,

  Unarmed, yet proudly keeping

  Faith with his unbelief.

  ‘Prayer’, written in hospital, August 1951

  THERE WAS SOMETHING to blame again, and something official to be brave about. Though Jan was terrified of cancer, with its implications of impending death, the shock gave her the violent jolt she needed to regain a sense of the preciousness of life. In bed, she wrote a poem to her surgeon: ‘… And though in the glass I look like heck to me, I’m grateful for this neat mastectomy.’ She also wrote the poem quoted overleaf, which she paraphrased in a letter to Jamie: ‘If one never bothers with the Old Man in one’s good moments, it doesn’t seem quite cricket to pester him during one’s bad ones.’ Her ink, once aga
in, was beginning to flow.

  Physically, the mastectomy caused in her a coup de vieux. She was fifty: but she now felt and looked old. Privately she was horrified with the ‘butchery’ which had been done to her body. ‘She never wanted me to see her naked again,’ Dolf remembered. The mastectomy was pronounced successful by the doctors: she was supposedly cleared of cancer, but her face was puffy with the medicine and alcohol of the past years, her hair was thin and grey, her sight was bad, and her back ached. ‘I’d better get this letter off quickly,’ she wrote to Jamie, ‘in case any other bits of me drop off or fail to work.’

  But, writing to her brother in September 1951, in response to his depressive cry for help (‘Personally the only thing I feel at the moment is that I want to die and never come out of anything again. Any advice on how to break the spell of Nervous B.?’), Jan realized that she, concerned now with physical recovery, was the lucky one. ‘My problem is the comparatively simple one of training one group of muscles to do, in addition to their own work, all the work of the front group which used to run from the breast-bone to the armpit (a fan-shaped job called the pectorals). This is just a matter of strains and stresses, and quite an interesting engineering problem to work out. (See a medical dicker or a book on anatomy.) If only yours were as easy, my poor darling, either to cope with personally or to give advice about.’

  With the clarity of someone who has known but emerged from depression, she described her own ‘hell’ vividly to Douglas, and then suggested that a way of dealing with it was to accept the ‘conflicting roles’ which one was trying to play. These were hers: