by Lara Feigel
Praise for The Love-charm of Bombs:
‘An original and ingenious recreation of the Second World War in London as experienced through the lives of writers who also fought fires, drove ambulances or worked in the Ministry of Information . . . This is a highly readable interweaving of their individual stories – shocking, enjoyable, full of surprises’ Michael Holroyd
‘A fascinating and brilliantly researched group biography . . . an extraordinary tapestry of life in wartime, from September 1940 in London to the ruins of postwar Europe . . . This is a glorious mixture of history, literature and riveting gossip about war as – yes – an aphrodisiac . . . what remains with you at the end of this engaging book is the sense that Larkin was right, and that after the bombs, after the grieving, “what will survive of us is love”’ Daily Mail
‘One pleasure of this brave and original book is seeing these lives overlap, mirror each other, and diverge . . . Feigel shows the English in a new light: not cold or repressed, but a sensuous people for whom love matters most of all. She also shows why the period from September 1940 to May 1941, when we stood alone against the powers of darkness, remains the defining moment in our recent history’ Peter J. Conradi, Independent
‘A fine account . . . An absorbing and well-researched group biography of five prominent writers’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Intelligently written, seamlessly presented, and with something of the quality of a tapestry’ Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
‘Reads like an apocalyptic thriller . . . A fine book that brings the writers of the Second World War into the spotlight . . . The breadth and depth of Feigel’s research is admirable, but this is not a dry account of famous lives. Her love and curiosity about her subjects is palpable and her writing style is simple but affecting . . . A thrilling insight to each writer’s response to war, both published and private’ Independent on Sunday
‘A skillfully composed group portrait . . . Feigel is a good storyteller and responsive to the nuances of expression in the period’ Tessa Hadley, Guardian
‘Feigel writes with modesty and grace, never patronises or sentimentalises her subjects, and makes the reader glad to be sharing her ideas. The Love-Charm of Bombs is a bounding success as an account of wartime London and as a study of highly strung but tough characters under stress . . . I haven’t for many a year read a book of literary scholarship with such impatience to know what happens next’ Richard Davenport-Hines, Sunday Telegraph
‘A strikingly original book. It succeeds in its ambitious combination of group biography and literary criticism . . . The Love-charm of Bombs excels in demonstrating that these years of bleakness and loss were also, for a fortunate few, a time of extraordinary excitement and literary aspiration’ Economist
‘Scintillating account of the lives of London litterateurs during the Blitz’ Scotsman
‘From these various fragments she has created a meticulously researched and elegantly rendered whole’ Newsweek
‘Feigel’s method of juxtaposing writers in London brings out the drama and accidents of wartime, while her well-documented historical research supports both a detailed account of the German air raids and a broader outline of progress of the war’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Inspired . . . Feigel had an immense task in shaping these extraordinary stories of love, war and creativity. The later sections of Feigel’s elegantly written, multifocal biography have the charm of a maze’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘It reads like a novel because there’s great intimacy in this fugue-like composition of writers and their books and world events. Feigel has an ear for her subjects’ individual voices, an eye for detail, a feel for contiguities and for the city of London. After the frenzy and intoxication of war, the dénouement of Bowen and Macaulay and Spiel, Greene and Yorke and their entourage of family and lovers, all coming to terms with the end of an era, all spent and striving to renew: that is the most moving and revealing section of this extraordinary book’ Evelyn Juers, The Australian
‘As an account of life in London under bombardment and as an examination of how a handful of gifted writers responded to the stress and anxiety of war, Ms. Feigel’s intelligent and lucidly written book is continuously interesting and illuminating’ Wall Street Journal
‘Lara Feigel’s ambitious fusion of criticism and biography . . . The Love-Charm of Bombs is a richly layered work . . . Her writing radiates with poignance and insight’ Boston Globe
‘A lovingly researched book that focuses on the experiences of five writers living in London during those suspenseful months . . . This is an enterprising, lively and original work, full of striking cameos and fresh insights’ Miranda Seymour, New York Times
for Humphrey
Contents
Introduction
PART I: One Night in the Lives of Five Writers
Map of London, 1940
Newsreel
Chapter 1 7 p.m.: Blackout
Chapter 2 10 p.m.: Fire
Chapter 3 1 a.m.: Rescue
Chapter 4 6 a.m.: All Clear
PART II: The Blitz
Chapter 5 ‘War, she thought, was sex’
Chapter 6 ‘Ireland can be dementing’
Chapter 7 ‘How we shall survive this I don’t know’
Chapter 8 ‘So much else is on the way to be lost’
PART III: The Lull
Chapter 9 ‘You are the ultimate of something’
Chapter 10 ‘Can pain and danger exist?’
Chapter 11 ‘Only at night I cry’
Chapter 12 ‘Alas, what hate everywhere’
PART IV: Approaching Victory
Chapter 13 ‘Droning things, mindlessly making for you’
Chapter 14 ‘A collective intoxication of happiness’
Chapter 15 ‘The days were listless and a flop’
PART V: Surveying the Ruins
Post-war Europe 1945–9
Chapter 16 ‘The magic Irish light and the soft air’
Chapter 17 ‘Flying, no, leaping, into the centre of the mainland’
Chapter 18 ‘O, maybe we’ll live a while in Killala’
Chapter 19 ‘The returning memory of a dream long forgotten’
Chapter 20 ‘The place I really did lose my heart to was Vienna’
PART VI: Mid-Century: Middle Age
Chapter 21 ‘We could have been happy for a lifetime’
Chapter 22 ‘Let us neither of us forget . . . what reality feels like and eternity is’
Chapter 23 ‘The world my wilderness, its caves my home’
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Introduction
It is six o’clock on the evening of 26 September 1940, at the end of the first month of London air raids. This is the final hour of daylight on one of the last days of an Indian summer. Soon it will be time to black out windows and to retreat indoors. Any light will be eliminated, leaving people to stumble along gloomy streets. And then the sirens will start wailing, as they have wailed every evening for the last two and a half weeks, and another night of bombing will begin.
Across London, people are making the most of this final interlude of peace before the bombers arrive. ‘War had made them idolise day and summer,’ the narrator observes in Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime novel The Heat of the Day; ‘night and autumn were enemies.’ Between the dark and fearful nights, the days offer a brief holiday from fear. ‘Out of mists of morning charred by smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter.’ In Marylebone, Bowen herself must shortly go on duty as an ARP (Air Raid Protection) warden. From the balcony of her ter
raced Regency house at the edge of Regent’s Park she can see the empty boating lake where trees have started to shed their first autumnal leaves. The park is shut because of an unexploded bomb and the white terraces bordering the park look to her like scenery in an empty theatre.
Standing on her balcony surveying the park, Elizabeth Bowen presents an imposing figure. She is strong-backed and long-necked; her face with its high cheekbones and tall forehead seems to many of her friends to have become more beautiful now that she has entered her forties. The narrator of Bowen’s first novel The Hotel observes that everyone has an age at which they are most themselves. The Second World War is Bowen’s own. As an Anglo-Irishwoman she has always had torn loyalties; in her childhood she was half at home in the Cork countryside and half at home on the Kent coast. Now she has found a home in wartime London and she paces the blacked-out streets with a vigorous certainty. She is a successful and popular writer who has already published ten books and is confident of her own powers. And literary success has brought social and romantic success. Since her early twenties Bowen has been married to Alan Cameron, an English civil servant. The marriage is contented but celibate and for two years before the war Bowen was engaged in a passionate affair with the Irish writer and one-time IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain. In the summer of 1941 she will fall in love with the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, the man who will centre her world for the next thirty years.
A few streets south in Marylebone, Bowen’s friend Rose Macaulay is in her flat in Luxborough Street, completing the day’s writing before fear and noise make it impossible to concentrate. She is exhausted by the weeks of bombing, and is unlikely to have much sleep tonight. Later, she will go on duty as an ambulance driver, rescuing people trapped by debris or scalded by fire. Unlike Bowen, Macaulay is finding the intensity of wartime London more sad than exhilarating. She is almost sixty and is a frail though wiry and redoubtable woman. The arduous physical labour of her work as an ambulance driver distracts her both from her dismay at the war going on around her and from personal sorrow. For the last twenty years she has been in a secret but idyllic love affair with the married Irish novelist and former priest, Gerald O’Donovan. Ten years older than Macaulay, he is now dying and Macaulay can confide in very few people about the loss that she is preparing herself to face.
Macaulay’s ambulance may well cross paths with the fire engine of Henry Yorke (better known by his pseudonym Henry Green). He is working as an auxiliary fireman just around the corner from Macaulay in Davies Street and has been constantly fighting fires since the bombing began. The duality of Yorke’s names reflects a division between two identities. Henry Yorke is an upper-class socialite who works in his father’s business, Pontifex, and spends most of his evenings at extravagant parties. Henry Green is an experimental novelist who writes strange and lyrical tales of factory life and bright young things. Unlike Macaulay, Yorke is enjoying the Blitz, which has come as a relief after months of sterile waiting during the so-called ‘phoney war’. He is pleased to be a hero at last and to see his heroism reflected back by girls who look him ‘straight, long in the eye as never before, complicity in theirs, blue, and blue, and blue’. And between shifts at the fire station he can make the most of this adoration, enjoying the absence of his wife and son whom he has evacuated to the countryside.
But Yorke is frightened as well as excited by fire and he does not look forward to the raids as much as Graham Greene. For Greene the real action of the day begins when he can leave his desk at the Ministry of Information in Bloomsbury and start his night-time duties as an ARP warden, often accompanied by his lover Dorothy Glover. Greene’s wife and children, like Yorke’s, are out of London and he is enjoying his independence. Emerging unscathed from the bombs each morning, Greene has conquered his lifelong boredom and found a way to feel urgently alive. Meanwhile for the Austrian writer Hilde Spiel, serving supper to her husband, parents and child in Wimbledon, the fading light heralds the tedium and fear of another wakeful night at home. Once the raid begins the family will pile their mattresses against the windows and listen to music on the gramophone, trying to drown out the noise of the bombs which they hope will land elsewhere.
These writers, firefighting, ambulance-driving, patrolling the streets, were the successors of the soldier poets of the First World War, and their story remains to be told. Like the poets in the trenches, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were participants rather than witnesses, risking death, night after night, in defence of their city. The Second World War was a Total War. No one escaped the danger and every Londoner was vulnerable. While the fighting in the First World War took place far away, the bombing of the Second World War was superimposed onto a relatively normal London life. Books were written, parties hosted, love affairs initiated and broken off. But the books, parties and love affairs were infused with the danger of death; every aspect of life was refracted through the lens of war.
Looking back on the Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen described this as a period of ‘lucid abnormality’; a moment outside time when she and her friends were ‘afloat on the tideless, hypnotic, futureless to-day’. When a bomb exploded, nearby clocks ceased to function, remaining stuck at the time of the detonation. London was a city of shock-stopped clocks and for its inhabitants, the suspended present created a climate where intense emotions could flourish. ‘It came to be rumoured,’ Bowen recalled, ‘that everybody in London was in love.’
Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke floated dangerously on that futureless present. All experienced the war as an abnormal pocket of time. As writers, they observed the strangeness of war imaginatively. London became a city of restless dreams and hallucinogenic madness; a place in which fear itself could transmute into addictive euphoria. To stay in London was to gamble nightly with death. And so each day was unexpected; each moment had the exhilarating but unreal intensity of the last moment on earth. Their public war work became the backdrop for volatile individual private lives. For Bowen, ‘war time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love’. Bowen, Greene and Yorke spent the war in the kind of love that blazed with the raging intensity of the fires igniting their city.
Often separated, necessarily or wilfully, from their spouses, they immersed themselves in a makeshift present in which pre-war morality seemed less relevant. As the bombs fell outside, lovers huddled together in basements and shelters, or defiantly outfaced the raids in blacked-out bedrooms or torch-lit streets. The passionate love affairs in Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) and Yorke’s Caught (1943) all had their basis in the wartime lives of their creators.
The stories told here do not always concur with the official propaganda, which portrayed the Blitz as a scene of cheerful togetherness and courage, making the most of the ‘London can take it’ spirit that developed among Londoners. Documentary films from the period show cheerful groups of civilians resiliently flouting danger with communal singing and cups of tea. For the writers in this book, the reality was less wholesome and more reckless. To defy the nightly threat of death took more than staunch morale and national pride. They were too selfish to ‘take it’ for the sake of their city and too snobbish to sing together; they were more likely to be found drinking cocktails than tea.
Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke all had moments of enthusing about the ‘People’s War’, especially during the first months of the Blitz. They all felt briefly united with their neighbours and their colleagues in the civil defence services, and would all look back on this as a time of unusual community spirit. In 1969 Bowen reviewed The People’s War by the historian Angus Calder, a book which challenged the commonplace image of national unity against a common enemy. She insisted that in fact the ‘exuberance, during the early London Blitzes, was not a fake’. For her the myth of collective harmony, ‘though bedraggled’, persisted throughout the war; ‘How else should we have gone on?’
But the exuberance referred to by Bowen
was not quite the community spirit encouraged by government propaganda. Greene or Yorke, enjoying the sexual freedom enabled by war, indulged in a licentiousness that would not be officially encouraged; Greene’s exuberance during the raids was symptomatic of a rather frightening glory in destruction for its own sake. So, too, it was a luxury to find the war exciting; a luxury enabled by class privilege (Bowen and Yorke had access to private shelters and to far more enticing food than rationing alone allowed) and also by the imaginative possibilities open to writers. Bowen later described her wartime writing as a ‘saving resort’, suggesting that writing allowed her to experience actual events on two planes at once. Writers and artists tended to be peculiarly receptive to the temporal and erotic freedom offered by the war in part because they could switch off from the danger and enjoy the raids as aesthetic events.
According to the fireman and short story writer William Sansom, the city bereft of electric and neon light took on a new beauty: ‘By moonlight the great buildings assumed a remote and classic magnificence, cold, ancient, lunar palaces carved in bone from the moon.’ In September 1940 Rose Macaulay recounted her experience of watching an air battle over London which she found ‘most beautiful’: ‘the search-lights, and parachute flares, the fiery balls . . . and the sky lit up into gun-flashes, like sheet-lightning, and a wonderful background of stars.’ Painters such as John Piper and Graham Sutherland depicted the raids in London as scenes of incandescent splendour, making the most of the surreal juxtapositions and the pinks, reds and yellows of the fires, glowing against the darkness of the blacked-out city.