In Cornwall everyone was listening to the wireless five times a day. Nancy’s mother was fretting incessantly that the girls’ pregnant nanny would give birth at any moment. An ultimatum was broadcast at every meal: Rosina must return to London by the end of the week, not a day later. Nancy was desperate. If Rosina left, she would be trapped for the duration with evacuated, bridge-playing relations. Then, on the morning of Hitler’s 2:00 p.m. deadline, Wednesday, September 28, an ominous telegram arrived at the breakfast table in Bude: SUGGEST MOMENT UNSUITABLE TO SEND ROSINA TO LONDON STOP MICHAEL.
For the past month Christopher Isherwood had been feeling like a man in debt up to his ears, begging his creditors for more time, in the full knowledge that it was hopeless. He’d asked the war correspondent Peter Fleming if the crisis over Czechoslovakia meant certain war. It was like taking a hat off a mouse, Fleming said; it may run in any direction. As the two o’clock deadline approached, Christopher arrived at Victoria to meet Wystan’s train and found it teeming with weeping women. He bought some gum and a newspaper just as Big Ben tolled twice. There were now new editions every twenty minutes; the newsboys peeled them off like they were shucking corn. After stowing Wystan’s luggage in a taxi, they saw that new placards had been posted: DRAMATIC PEACE MOVE. Christopher bought another paper.
At the end of a long speech in the House of Commons, Chamberlain announced he was returning once more to Germany. Trunk calls overwhelmed the telephone exchanges. Letters from Cornwall crossed in the post with ones from Belsize Park. Wystan was dropped off at Upper Park Road, sunburned and wearing a very loud suit. Michael Spender let him in without a kiss. In Brussels, John finished packing, preparing to leave for India the next day. In Cornwall, Nancy wrote him a goodbye letter.
She hoped he would find another upon whom to fix his “as always,” reminding him of what Wystan had said about women being natural destroyers. Several of the war jobs going were paying ones; war would provide her the freedom and independence she had long sought. Of course her mother said her only job was to look after her children, but if she had to answer one more question about how Juliet liked her rice pudding, she would kill herself. She regretted they couldn’t have spoken before he left, but the lines were hopelessly tied up.
Nancy had managed to get a call through to Dublin. Louis MacNeice’s letters had studiously avoided the crisis. When she pressed him he purred as calmly as a cat that there wouldn’t be a war. War would come when least expected and since everyone was expecting it, they would all be proved wrong. In the silences that hung between them on the telephone, the sound of his slow, even breathing calmed her.
Even before Chamberlain returned from Munich, Wystan had made plans to leave London. He was sick of listening to the wireless, sick of a press that “turned forests into lies.” For all the English paeans to liberty and justice, Hitler had called England’s bluff, exposing the venality Wystan had witnessed during his tour of the British Empire’s eastern strongholds. En route to Hong Kong, he’d asked a rubber planter based in Malaya whether England would ever leave India. Not while there is either a virgin or a rupee left, the man had replied smugly.
Wystan had told John he would welcome war when it came. He planned to enlist, not as a patriot—he hoped the empire would be shattered in the coming conflict—but because war would bring an end to his years of lonely isolation. After leaving London he completed a sonnet sequence that would close Journey to a War, his and Christopher’s book about what they had witnessed of Japan’s war on China. To Wystan’s mind the war had already begun and there would be no refuge. London would be as vulnerable as Nanking.
A Calcutta Hospital,
Saturday Evening, October 1, 1938
Bishop Foss Wescott was a kind man, Reverend Scott thought as he lay in his hospital bed listening to him talk. The bishop had never paid much mind to what his young curate was doing in his off hours. As long as he showed up on time for Sunday services and prepared a decent homily the bishop was happy. And when a watcher from Special Branch had reported to him that he had seen Reverend Scott’s red sports car on Karaya Road the bishop had gently suggested that, if he must visit these establishments, it would be more discreet to take a taxi. Scott sometimes met underground contacts on Karaya Road. He would have laughed at the memory, if he didn’t hurt so much.
His sports car: well that was done for. He had taken a Moth out for a brief flight, hoping to clear his head of the Munich farce. Hitler and Mussolini in ear-to-ear grins were all over the papers, photographs of Chamberlain standing in an open car, acknowledging the Heils of the Munich crowds, and again at Heston airfield, bowler hats hailing him as if he were Caesar. The long line of expensive cars said it all. Before the day was out Hitler’s troops had reached Sudetenland.
Scott had ascended above the clouds of the receding monsoon as the sun set. He was still feeling aloft when he started back to the city. His last thought before his car collided with a bus was that it was Saturday night and he had yet to write his Sunday sermon. He broke the steering wheel with his chest.
Wasn’t it better for a few agitators to suffer than see all of India laid waste? The archbishop of Bombay’s question still haunted him. But what of those Bengali villages, where British soldiers, maddened by their support for the nationalists, beat children, raped women, and burned their homes to the ground? British rule had now substituted vengeance for justice. And if England with its empire had not the will to stop the evil of Nazism, then what, truly, did it have to offer India? Bishop Wescott was still talking at his bedside, counseling Scott not to lose heart, telling him there remained a great deal of work to be done. He considered confessing everything to the old man.
Instead, he went to Kasauli to convalesce. There he and Carritt wrote a pamphlet describing the short and brutal lives of landless peasants in Bengal. It was their last hurrah.
Hatibagan, 139 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta,
December 24, 1938
At the Parichay adda Sudhin Datta dismissed female writers in one word: “petty.” George Eliot was insufferable. He was indifferent to Emily Brontë. Jane Austen was the least offensive, but her prose had the air of cut flowers. A member of Calcutta’s Progressive Writers’ Association listened with his head tilted to one side. The secret diarist noted that with his oiled black hair brushed straight back over his head, the man looked very much like a curious, long-necked bird. When Sudhin finished pillorying nineteenth-century lady novelists, the birdlike man asked him about Virginia Woolf.
“You can get her measure only if you compare her to a male writer of her education and range, say Aldous Huxley.”
Sudhin was not without his blind spots.
In keeping with the partisan tone that had invaded the adda of late, one of the young Communists challenged Nehru’s private secretary, a guest that evening, to name even one progressive English writer.
Surely, the man offered, A Passage to India expressed an anti-imperialist mind-set?
Didn’t The Ascent of F6 qualify? Sudhin asked. Auden and Isherwood’s play had been recently staged at Calcutta University.
Yet for the Communists, a recent Left Book Club anthology told the real story. Poems of Freedom did not include a single poem addressed to the question of India’s freedom, its Bengali reviewer had noted. In the introduction, W. H. Auden had backed away from the stance that English poets had any role to play in politics, even in instances of injustice carried out in the name of British rule. For all the left’s hand-wringing over Spain, Germany’s treatment of Jews, or the cutthroat greed of capital, as far as the brutality of British rule in India went, there was now a clear conspiracy among English writers to maintain a deadly silence. They dithered over whether to become Communists or socialists as if it were a choice between dinner jackets. They financed excursions to Spain with Indian dividends.
Mulk Raj Anand, visiting Calcutta from London that December, agreed. Anand was a small, handsome, and fast-talking novelist partial to scarlet shirts. On the outer ring
s of Bloomsbury, he was a friend of Louis MacNeice and had met George Orwell in Spain. Anand had done his best to argue the cause of India’s freedom before the British public. Only MI6 showed any real interest. And Special Branch returned the favor when Anand had arrived in Calcutta. On a previous visit to the adda, Anand had clashed with Shahid Suhrawardy over his sympathy for the downtrodden, as evident in his banned book, Coolie.
Anand had also crossed paths with Stephen Spender in Spain. He found him insufferable and patronizing. Stephen had stated plainly that he didn’t believe India was ready for independence. Though Stephen seemed to grasp imperialism’s fascist nature, he was more concerned with what that meant for artistic freedom in England, his own particularly, than with India’s political aspirations.
Stephen’s views didn’t surprise Orwell, Anand told his Calcutta friends. Orwell was just beginning to see that the left’s call to dismantle England’s economic order was complete humbug. England was not some rustic village of their school holidays, but a world power dependent upon the unlimited cheap labor the empire afforded them. Invariably overlooked in the left’s concern for the working class, he pointed out, was the fact that Indians made up the greater portion of the British proletariat. They labored in the tens of thousands on East African railways, Malayan rubber plantations, Burmese teak forests, and Ranigunj coal mines. Yet while Orwell had none of Stephen’s middle-class haughtiness, Anand said, on hearing Stephen’s views on India, he had simply chided him for being silly.
Sudhin might then have gone to his bookshelves to pull out I Spy with My Little Eye:
Mill was a clerk in India House;
Carlyle approved of Governor Eyre;
A hundred poets roared and cawed
Behind the imperial rocking-chair.
CHAPTER 13
The Truth about Love
38 Upper Park Road, Belsize Park, London,
January 17, 1939
With the immediate threat of war receding, Wystan was leaving the guest bed at Upper Park Road once more. The previous January it had been for China; the January before that, Spain; this time it was for New York. When Bill had asked Wystan what he would do in New York, he got a reasonable reply. He promised Nancy he would be back if war broke out but until then he planned to make the most of what freedom remained to him. Indeed, the time had come for everyone to grab a brass ring. Some loyalties, those arising from patriotism or political partisanship, were already spoken for, but hearts were still up for grabs. It was as if no one could bear to be found in the same bed when the war music started up again and the world began to spin ever faster.
As everyone knew it would.
At the farewell party at Benjamin Britten’s new flat, Stephen Spender was standoffish, as if he didn’t want to be compromised by a room full of pansies. Wystan had encouraged Britten to be more playful in his compositions, assuring him it was perfectly all right to be vulgar or silly. Stephen couldn’t stomach that; he was a highbrow. He told Benjamin that his music was too homosexual. Periodically Stephen would sidle up to Nancy and hold her hand, as if he needed to be reassured while in hostile territory.
Stephen was too soft, red faced, and puffy, Nancy thought. Michael was more of a real man. Nancy’s plan for a cozy winter had taken form the moment the Munich Agreement was signed. Michael would write a book while she painted. Yet on the eve of her return to London Michael had told her he wasn’t in a fit state to run off with her and had applied for a job in the west of England. A poisonous letter followed. Michael was a pig. Why not Manchester or Perth? Did he imagine he could be home for dinner by seven? He didn’t rise to the bait. Wystan had heard them go at it over the telephone.
“Why are you behaving like that? You know, don’t you, that you are only cutting your own throat?” Nancy was no match for Michael, Wystan wrote a disconsolate John in Calcutta. Michael could take the indifferent line far better than she could.
Hedli Anderson, a late arrival at the party, upstaged all the little dramas by heading straight for the piano to belt out Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.” Classically trained, exiled from the cabarets of Berlin, Hedli had been cast in several plays at the Group Theatre, including The Ascent of F6. To Nancy’s chagrin, Hedli would marry Louis before the war ended. But that night she was intent on giving Wystan a memorable send-off. After the Porter tune, she launched into a new song by Wystan called “O Tell Me the Truth about Love.”
It was to be their last night together at Upper Park Road; their landlord hadn’t renewed the lease. While Wystan drew a bath, Bill made him a cup of Ovaltine and Nancy went to bed. They talked for a bit before Bill tottered off. Snug in their separate beds, they were soon fast asleep, dreaming separate dreams.
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
Lansdowne, above Mussoorie, Garhwal District,
February 1939
With both Michael John Carritt and Humphry House back in England, John Auden was again drinking alone among strangers. He’d been trying to convince Sudhin to come with him to the Garhwal in January, but for a man who complained unceasingly of Calcutta, it was hard to get him out of it. The one time Sudhin had gone up into the mountains he said he had nearly frozen to death. When Reverend Scott returned from his convalescence in Kasauli, John took him to dinner at Firpo’s to mark his recovery.
The beau monde could always be found at Firpo’s. With its faux Louis XIV chairs and white tablecloths, the dining experience was akin to that of first class on a P & O steamship. The table d’hôte was excellent. There was a nightclub featuring European cabaret acts and, for the spendthrift, American cocktails with free cocktail sausages at the bar. Signor Barazini, the Italian proprietor and maître d’, had been raised in one of the whorehouses on Karaya Road. A thick layer of white powder covered his wife’s face, as if to turn her into an Italian as well.
No sooner had John and the reverend seated themselves than the Bonnerjee brothers, dressed in shabby suits and carrying rolled-up umbrellas, sat down at the next table. For a while they pretended not to see each other, but the reverend eventually waved them over. As they pulled up chairs, Scott introduced them to John Auden.
“Yes, of course I’ve heard of you,” Protap Bonnerjee said. “I know your name, your brother’s name well. I’ve just been reading criticism of his work in the New Yorker. Of course they have got him all wrong, haven’t they? They haven’t any idea really what he’s about, isn’t it? Don’t you agree?”
“Well, I don’t really know,” John said.
“Won’t you have some more bacon and eggs?” Protap asked. Before John had a chance to reply, he rattled on.
“Top you up? I say, won’t you have something to eat? Won’t you have a club sandwich? Very American meal this, isn’t it?”
“What, bacon and eggs?”
“Oh no. Ham and eggs. A great difference. This place reminds me of the Café Royal. The waiters there are all taught to play their part—don’t you think so, Mr. Auden?”
Protap gave him a searching look as if a great deal depended upon their seeing eye to eye. John was at a loss.
“Might I ask you a very personal question, Mr. Auden? What school was your brother at?”
“Gresham’s.”
“Oh, how odd. One of the new schools. Of course there was only one man there. Sanderson. And what school were you at?”
“I was at Marlborough.”
“Oh I know Marlborough well. One of the safe schools, isn’t it? In India the safe schools are thought to be Marlborough and Wellington. I suppose Beverley Nichols was before your time.”
He is just like his father, Ratna, Auden thought.
If John Auden wearied of being known simply as Wystan Auden’s brother, Protap’s father, Ratna Bonnerjee, though a distinguished barrister himself, was only ever the son of Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee. W. C. Bonnerjee was
the first Indian president of the Indian National Congress, a fantastically wealthy luminary of the Calcutta barristocracy, and a social pillar of the Set.
W. C. had been a great believer in an English education. When his eldest was ready for Oxford, he had purchased a three-story, ten-bedroom mansion just outside London, adding a new wing to accommodate a billiard room and smoking den. Named Kidderpore after the family ancestral estate on the Hooghly River, the spread included tennis courts, an orchard, gardens, and a stable. After settling his wife and eight children under its roof, W. C. returned to Calcutta to amass his wealth and reside in an equally grand residence on Park Street. Its grounds also included a tennis court and stable, as well as an aviary, two fern houses, and a veranda wide enough for a coach and four. For the legions of W. C.’s grandchildren, Kidderpore and the Park Street mansion where Protap spent his childhood represented a golden age as legendary as the man behind it.
Ratna had read Greats at Balliol before following in W. C.’s footsteps to practice law. Once, in a righteous fusillade of damnation aimed at an accused criminal sitting in the dock, Ratna suddenly realized he was meant to be acting in the man’s defense. He pivoted, deftly turning his own narrative on its head. Ratna’s four formidable sisters went to Cambridge; two became doctors, one studied at the Sorbonne. If an Englishwoman condescended to talk to her, she either replied in French or pretended she was a halfwit.
Ratna married Kitty Roy, the daughter of one of W. C.’s oldest friends. They had six children and lived on the top floor of the Park Street mansion. Ratna spoiled his four daughters with too many cakes, leaving Kitty to stay up all night holding their heads as they relieved themselves of them. He raised them on Shakespeare and Shelley, Browning and Tennyson, and on Greek, Roman, and Hindu mythology. They threw extravagant dinner parties in the English style, with everyone retiring to the music room for piano recitals and singing after. They were regular visitors to the Tagore and Datta households; indeed it was an uncle of Sudhin’s who had first introduced W. C. to Rabindranath.
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