The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  The ghost’s ‘compound’ includes Hamlet’s father; Dante’s old master Ser Brunetto; Mallarmé; Swift; Milton and W. B. Yeats, who had died in 1939. The language given to him, echoing or alluding to these figures, represents in itself with memorable authority the power of tradition in poetry as Eliot conceived it. For him the tradition is not ‘English’ only but ‘European’. Bombed London is the site on which European tradition is reaffirmed. But in the rest of ‘Little Gidding’, the timelessness of England and the ‘peculiar genius’ of English people are strongly affirmed.

  History, in effect, is over: ‘now and England’. The quarrels of the seventeenth-century civil war (and, by extension, all struggle and faction in the English past) don’t matter any more. Charles I and the regicides who cut his head off ‘Accept the constitution of silence/ And are folded in a single party’. They were, we are told in Section III, ‘United in the strife which divided them’. History is a ‘pattern of timeless moments’, one of which is ‘now and England’. The fire of the Blitz is like the fire of Purgatory. And eventually (Section V):

  … All shall be well and

  All manner of thing shall be well

  When the tongues of flame are in-folded

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.5

  I can understand why people who take Eliot very seriously as a religious poet find a reading of the last three Quartets as ‘propaganda’ deeply offensive. They are about ‘eternal matters’. There is no way that their last five lines, just quoted, can be read as a descriptive statement about secular society in 1942. They speak of Christian hope for a timeless and paradisal state. There is ample evidence that the Quartets’ many wartime readers loved the poems because they meditated about matters other than war, ‘above’ the daily news bulletins. So how can I argue that ‘Little Gidding’ provides one of the definitive versions of ‘the Myth of the Blitz’?

  I can do so because the poem, without literally stating them, appears to endorse central elements in the Myth extremely strongly.

  ‘History is now and England’ chimes with Churchill’s ‘this was their finest hour’. The folding ‘into one party’ of past factions suggests Churchill’s mighty, triumphant coalition. Bombardment – or at least the fire which it generates – is equated with purification: Blitz makes people better. And because, with their ‘peculiar genius’, the English people have turned out to be especially good, ‘all shall be well’. There is no doubt that when Eliot refuses in Section III to ‘summon the spectre of a Rose’, he is referring to the factional Wars of the Roses. But the Rose is a favourite symbol of England. In the Myth ‘fire’ and ‘Rose’ come together in so far as the latter represents the flowering of English unity amid the flames which never destroyed the dome of St Paul’s. In the pattern of its symbolism, in the equation of ‘History’ and ‘England’, ‘Little Gidding’ supports the Myth all the more powerfully because so few of its readers (or so it seems) have ever thought of relating it to the war at all.

  Compared to Eliot’s achievement, attempts by lesser poets to stamp their art on the Myth while it was being created seem as conceitedly trivial as the activities of the fly in La Fontaine’s fable, which, darting around the horses, imagines that it pulls the huge coach up-hill. Embarrassment is now triggered even by a poem, ‘To the Seamen’, written by the competent, much-loved and certainly sincere Poet Laureate, John Masefield:

  Through the long time the story will be told;

  Long centuries of praise on English lips,

  Of courage godlike and of hearts of gold

  Off Dunquerque beaches in the little ships.6

  Herbert Asquith’s Battle of Britain poem ‘Youth in the Skies’, already quoted, takes the Churchillian rhetoric about chivalrous fighter pilots to a vapid extreme of euphemism:

  Old men may wage a war of words,

  Another race are these,

  Who flash to glory dawn and night

  Above the starry seas.

  These verses, which appeared in The Times in August 1940, were dutifully collected by Thomas Moult, to whom fell the tricky task of editing The Best Poems of 1941, the latest volume of a twenty-year-old series which, by including English-speaking authors from both sides of the Atlantic, had ‘kept bright’ the links between Britain and the USA. ‘Thus the present endeavour by the leaders of thought to establish a closer political and economic union of the two great Western commonwealths had for a prelude the already united poets’ contribution’, Moult wrote in the introduction.

  This was hardly apparent from Dorothy Sayers’s ‘The English War’, reprinted by Moult from the Times Literary Supplement and rejoicing in a moment:

  When no allies are left, no help

  To count upon from alien hands,

  No waverers remain to woo,

  No more advice to listen to,

  And only England stands …

  And all the tall adventurers come

  Homeward to England, and Drake’s drum

  Is beaten through the Straits.

  But Sayers’s infatuation with the Sea Dogs was fully matched by one of Moult’s chosen American poets. Robert Nathan’s ‘Dunkirk’ originally published by Harper’s Monthly in March 1941, is a short narrative, lavishly echoing Newbolt, Alfred Noyes and Masefield, about a boy who comes home from school and, with his fourteen-year-old sister, sails a tiny ship across to Dunkirk where they pick up fourteen men. They bring them home through an ‘English mist’ which baffles the Stuka dive bombers over the Channel:

  For Nelson was there on the Victory …

  And guns were out on The Golden Hind …

  The old dead Captains fought their ships.

  And the great dead Admirals led the line.

  It was England’s night, it was England’s sea.

  Moult also trawled in much less clichéd and sensitive responses to the mythical events of 1940 (he collected poems published between July in that year and June 1941). But their very thoughtfulness and modesty expose why the Myth-making capacity of poets in this war (contrasting with the Great War) would be extremely limited. They suggest, on the one hand, the partial, specialised character of each individual’s experience in this varied and complex struggle, on the other, the reluctance of decent persons to indulge in patriotic, bombastic and all too falsifiable prophecies of Triumph, Peace and Universal Justice. This kind of thing could be left to Churchill, who did it with the appearance of complete conviction.

  Edward Thompson’s ‘England, 1941’ from The Listener disturbingly inverts an element of the Myth. The beloved landscape ‘turns traitor’. Familiar symbols of ‘Deep England’ stretching back to prehistory – the white horses cut in chalk, ‘the Ancient Man’ – are now signalling to the enemy:

  And this brook, whose waters flow

  To push the wheel and rock the mill-pond’s freight

  Of sleepy lilies, beckons in the foe

  To wreck the hamlet it beguiled to rise!

  Yet this rather subtle poem remains within the paradigms of the Myth. Like all the Myth’s products, its reading will depend on the large fact: either defeat, in which case the verses are prophetic but slight; or victory, which makes it into intelligent whimsy.7

  One young poet, Roy Fuller, virtually avant-garde, attempted in several wartime poems overviews as magisterial as those of his own master, Auden’s ‘Spain’ and ‘September 1, 1939’. An accountant of Marxist proclivities, Fuller was not called up until April 1941. He found that joining the navy on the lower decks (though he finally became a mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm) ‘extricated me from the great problem of the thirties – how to live and write for a class to which one didn’t belong’.8 In ‘Autumn 1940’, before this experience, he produced an impressive but rather bombastic version of the Myth in its left-wing aspect. The ‘real’, the poem announces, has at last reached England from ‘Spain and China’, as ‘rubble and fear, as metal and glass’. The Blitz, for this young Marxist, brings ‘relief’
; the shells and the bombs are objectivities outside the ‘deathly self’ of the bourgeois:

  Death is solitary …

  But where the many are there is no death,

  Only a temporary expedient of sorrow

  And destruction; today the caught-up breath –

  The exhalation is promised for tomorrow.

  The very violence of the moment guarantees ‘changed tomorrow’.

  Fuller’s ‘Soliloquy in an Air Raid’ is a more thoughtful and troublesome poem. The predicament of the soliloquising poet is its main topic:

  Inside the poets the words are changed to desire

  And formulations of feeling are lost in action

  Which hourly transmutes the basis of common speech.

  He sees the Blitz as a challenge to the current resources of ‘common speech’ and to the English verse tradition, now ‘sunk in the throat’ between the opposing voices of the old (capitalism) and the new (socialism). His Marxist perspective aligns him with what Paul Fussell and John Keegan would later show us about the failures of language in 1914–18, and sets him counter to Eliot’s Christian confidence in the endurance of tradition, as where he asks the questions, already quoted:

  Who can observe this save as a frightened child

  Or careful diarist? And who can speak

  And still retain the tones of civilisation?9

  The reluctance of the better young poets, Fuller excepted, to tackle overviews and large themes is a point on which all who have read through wartime magazines and anthologies seem to be agreed. Robin Skelton in his thorough anthology of Poetry of the Forties quotes approvingly another anthologist, Ronald Blythe, as remarking: ‘The great thing was not to pretend, or proffer solutions or to be histrionic. Each poet spoke as wholly and truthfully as he could from out of the one inviolable spot of an otherwise violated order, his own identity.’10 Reasons for this are not hard to find. The trench poets of the Great War – Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg – had exposed the horrors of battle definitively. A younger generation believed with them that war might be necessary, but that pre-1914 heroics in verse about it were contemptible.

  Furthermore, this new kind of war – heavily mechanised, often fast-moving, scattering conscripts south into Africa, east into far parts of Asia – had an impersonal character and a vast complexity which defied representative verse statement. The ‘careful diarist’, as Fuller had shrewdly anticipated, was the most plausible model for poets, presenting their ‘components of the scene’ (a phrase from one of them which Blythe used as title for his anthology).

  That poetry can have extraordinary myth-making power is demonstrated by the case of Wilfred Owen, whose effigy and imagery still domineer over conceptions (as purveyed by television) of what the Great War ‘was like’. So my detour, as it might seem, into discussion of an art form which, except through Eliot, made very little short-term or long-run impact on memory of 1940–41, is actually helping to establish a most important, though negative, point.

  8

  Fictions

  A bad raid last night with heavy civilian casualties, as usual, in the densely populated port areas. I was sent this morning to investigate the reports of panic, and frantic crowds running through the streets crying, ‘give us peace’… In Santa Lucia … I saw a heart-rending scene. A number of tiny children had been dug out of the ruins of a bombed building and lay side by side in the street. Where presentable, their faces were uncovered, and in some cases brand-new dolls had been thrust into their arms to accompany them to the other world. Professional mourners, hired by the locality to reinforce the grief of the stricken families, were running up and down the street, tearing at their clothing and screaming horribly.

  Norman Lewis, Naples ’44

  THAT DESCRIPTION OF reactions to a Luftwaffe air raid in the Second World War obviously doesn’t refer to Britain. Norman Lewis, then a British Intelligence officer in Naples, presents in his diary, with brilliant terseness, a scene in that city in March 1944. Neapolitans have their own way of coping with death. Lewis does not commit the racist solecism of finding their behaviour absurd and barbaric.

  His own worst experience of being bombed came some weeks later, when he had been ‘dining’ on the crude delicacies available in that famished city with a friend and a couple of local women. The British officers were reluctant to use the shelters provided for tenants of the block of flats ‘for reasons of face’, the women refused to go down without them; bombs began to fall, the ceiling came down, the whole building ‘began to heave and sway as if in the tremors of a moderate earthquake’. Their ‘hair, skins and clothing were coated with lime-dust. No one spoke, and neither girl showed any sign of fear.’ But after the All Clear, when they went down into the street, Lewis found they ‘were all chattering loudly in a childish and pointless fashion’.1

  The behaviour described in this passage is such that no one would notice if it were slipped into some collage or anthology of Blitz experiences from Britain. It is reasonable to assume that some reactions to bombing are not specific to any one cultural background, and may be found in many parts of the world. But recognising this does not prevent retrospective embarrassment over Douglas Wilkie’s report in the Herald, published in Melbourne, Australia, on 19 January 1942:

  Europeans here have given up talking about ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ races – these Europeans are proud to be trying to help Asiatics show the world that Singapore can take it … Singapore island’s three-quarter million Asiatics can take it. They have taken it with a smile when the Japanese dropped bombs indiscriminately on the outlying native suburbs and villages, killing innocent civilians whom Tokyo threatens nightly to ‘liberate’, blasting nothing but precious gimcrack furniture and savings of a coolie’s lifetime … The European ARP workers who braved death alongside Singapore’s splendid body of Asiatic wardens, roof-spotters and fire-fighters have learnt things not easily forgotten. European women shielding children in the same shelter with Chinese mothers, who have exchanged smiles of relief as a stick of bombs passed a few hundreds of yards away, have discovered many things which will not vanish when Singapore’s ordeal has passed.2

  Of course, it didn’t ‘pass’: the city soon fell. Nor was Wilkie reporting accurately. During the raids that January, in which 600 Singapore civilians were killed, 1,512 injured, defence was badly organised, and Asian workmen (‘coolies’), so far from Taking It, were prone to disappear from their jobs when Japanese broadcasts and leaflets threatened air raids. They had good cause: very little had been done to provide shelter for them. Yet without an idea of what really happened, any fairly experienced Blitz-reader would surely sense untruth in Wilkie’s account. It blatantly imposes on a different situation rhetoric originating in the London Blitz, substituting ‘European’ for ‘middle-class’ and ‘Asiatic’ for ‘working-class’.

  Wilkie’s report is ‘fictional’ in a clearly pernicious way: it distorts experience in order to provide a heartening story. However, it should not be supposed that Lewis’s diaries, as edited many years later by the distinguished novelist who wrote them, are, by contrast, providing unmediated truth. One’s delight while reading Lewis’s Naples ’44 is much like that sparked by a superb work of fiction with a large but still select cast of vividly drawn characters. Experience is shaped artistically: Lewis’s book rings as true as a good novel, one which gets behind the clichés of journalism and the stereotypes of bad fiction to expose fleeting and ambiguous emotions, inadmissible reactions, the complexity in human nature which makes ethical distinctions between collaborator and partisan, cautious Appeaser and British Bulldog, inane optimists (in the autumn of 1940) and thoughtful and fearful citizens, ultimately so hard to draw.

  A vast quantity of fiction has dealt with Britain’s Second World War. Valiant efforts have been made to sort it into classes by Holger Klein.3 I propose now to take certain post-war novels bearing on 1940, and to see how the ways in which they acknowledge or counter the Myth may illuminate the Myth’s structure
and the capacity, if any, of fiction writers to disturb it.

  Leslie Thomas’s The Dearest and the Best: A Novel of 1940 appeared in 1984. Its author, born in Wales in 1931, must remember the year of Dunkirk and Blitz directly. However, he researched for the novel carefully, and provides a bibliography of eighteen titles. His book centres on the Lovatt family, who live in a Hampshire village by the sea. They are upper middle class. Robert, who fought in the Great War, ‘principled and quite often pompous’, is a Tory patriot prone to thank God he is ‘an Englishman, not British but English’. He is chairman of the parish council, in charge of ARP and inevitably, when it is mustered, commands the local Home Guard. His eldest son, James, is an army officer who returns in a grim mood from the Norway campaign and is seconded to work for Churchill himself. The younger, Harry, is in the navy. All three happen to be together, with the village’s Home Guard, in a sandbagged emplacement on the jetty, aiming to bring down a low-flying German, when the plane comes up from inland and neatly drops its bomb, killing James and crippling Robert. This is the moving final climax of the book, as Battle of Britain is shading into Blitz.

  Thomas provides a great range of vivid episodes, arising from the family’s varied experiences. Besides risking, quite successfully, a fictional presentation of Churchill, he commendably brings in the difficult matter of the interned aliens: James involves himself honourably in assisting one of them. The comic potential of the Home Guard is well exploited and the human limitations of the male Lovatts are kept sharply in view. James’s affair with a female American newspaper reporter is the least convincing element in the book. She is represented as a loner with ample time to go to concerts and make trips and love with James: in fact, as will be illustrated later, the US press in London characteristically hunted in packs. Overall, though, Thomas’s novel is a very honourable attempt to reconstruct, without false heroics or condescending farce, the texture of life on the south coast ‘Front Line’ in the summer of 1940.