by Lara Feigel
On 28 March Virginia Woolf disappeared, leaving a suicide note for her husband. She was suspected to have drowned herself in the river Ouse. Woolf had suffered from nervous breakdowns throughout her life; this time she believed that she would not recover. For a generation of writers, Woolf’s suicide, coming as it did in the middle of the Blitz, brought home the relationship between the public atrocities of war and private suffering. Woolf’s decision to drown herself was not in itself a response to war; but her illness was exacerbated by a war which she found overwhelming both in its destruction of her own home and in its more general savagery, brought oppressively into her sitting room on the radio each night. Elizabeth Bowen, who had stayed with the Woolfs in Sussex only a month earlier, wrote to Leonard that as far as she was concerned ‘a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world. She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one’s thoughts.’ This was not, like the First World War, a conflict in which everyone in Britain knew someone who had been killed. But it was a war even more barbaric in its methods, even more all-encompassing in its destruction. And if, as seemed perfectly possible in 1941, Britain was to lose, the barbarism would continue seamlessly into post-war life.
In June 1940 Virginia Woolf had recorded debating suicide during an air raid with Kingsley Martin and Rose Macaulay. Both Woolfs had a suicide pact with Stephen Spender in the event of defeat and Macaulay, like Woolf, was on the German black list in Britain. The actuality of Woolf’s suicide now took on an eerie inevitability for Macaulay, whose obituary for her friend appeared in the Spectator on 11 April. Here she described Woolf’s pre-eminent ‘personal charm’ and the ‘warm and gleaming’ quality of her talk. ‘It amused her to embellish, fantasticate and ironise her friends,’ she added, aware that she had been the subject of some scorn herself. In the early days of their acquaintance Woolf, herself a participant in a celibate marriage, had dismissed Macaulay in a letter as ‘a spindle shanked withered virgin’; even once they had become friends Woolf described Macaulay in her diary as ‘a ravaged sensitive old hack’. But Macaulay now forgave Woolf: ‘nothing that she touched stayed dull’. The article ends on a note of anguish: ‘The gap she leaves is unfillable, her loss (and now when so much else is on the way to be lost) intolerable, like the extinguishing of a light.’
Rose Macaulay’s sense that ‘so much else is on the way to be lost’ betrays her anguish as a lover as well as a friend. Woolf’s death, coming so soon after Margaret’s, had made her painfully aware of the fragility of the people she loved and of Gerald O’Donovan in particular. He, like Margaret, had been diagnosed with cancer; it was only a matter of time before it took hold. Then on 18 April, the same day that Leonard Woolf identified his wife’s battered body, Mary O’Donovan, the youngest of Gerald’s children, died of septicaemia at the age of twenty-three after swallowing an open safety pin. This, Rose lamented, was ‘a wretched way to lose someone – much worse than enemy action, which would seem normal’. Grieving with Gerald over his daughter’s death, she began to fear the impending death of her lover. The relationship with Gerald was the most important in Rose’s life and she now became consumed by dreading the end she knew would come.
Rose Macaulay (left ) and Gerald O’Donovan, c. 1920
Rose Macaulay and Gerald O’Donovan had fallen in love while working together at the Ministry of Information in 1918. He was her boss, heading the Italian section in the Department for Propaganda in Enemy Countries. She was thirty-six and resolutely single; he was forty-six and married. Love, when it came, was unexpected and overwhelming. In her 1918 novel What Not, written during the first months of love, Macaulay marvelled at the ‘continual, disturbing, restless, aching want’ caused by the proximity of the beloved. Her heroine, also in love with her boss, finds that there is now ‘no peace of mind, none of the old careless light-hearted living and working’:
what was it, this extraordinary driving pressure of emotion, this quite disproportionate desire for companionship with, for contact with, one person out of all the world of people and things, which made, while it lasted, all other desires, all other emotions, pale and faint beside it.
A former Irish Catholic priest, Gerald O’Donovan had begun his career in 1897 as the second curate at Loughrea, a small town in County Galway, in the west of Ireland. For seven years, he ambitiously attempted to reform a troubled parish, fighting widespread drunkenness with temperance societies, and raising money to encourage the local Celtic revival in the arts. Here O’Donovan worked together with Irish revivalists including Lady Gregory and the painter Jack Yeats, the poet’s brother, whom he commissioned to work on motifs for St Brendan’s Cathedral at Loughrea. The art was a success but the town remained impoverished; in O’Donovan’s 1913 novel Father Ralph the eponymous priest sees the ‘muddy red of a stained glass window’ as distilled from ‘the blood of the poor’. O’Donovan reproached himself for deflecting the town’s limited funds into art rather than into housing or education. The local inhabitants blamed him for enjoying fundraising trips to America and dinners with Lady Gregory too much to be committed to the needs of his parish.
In 1904 O’Donovan left Loughrea, cheered off by much of his parish, but believing himself to be a failure. He spent the next four years wandering between Ireland, America and England, eventually settling in London in 1908. Throughout this time, he was a priest without a parish, but in 1908 he left the priesthood. Two years later he married the twenty-four-year-old Beryl Vershoyle, whom he had met at a house party in County Donegal and proposed to after five days. Beryl described herself in her twenties as ‘gay, young and enthusiastic’. Gerald, recently released from his vow of celibacy, fell for her easily. Beryl remembered Gerald at this time as ‘considerably older, and exceedingly brilliant intellectually’, adding that ‘nobody thought me at all up to his standard, which was true, and I was humbly aware of it’.
By the time that Gerald met Rose, he was the progenitor of two children and two novels. At first, he was funded by Beryl’s family money. Then, after short spells in the Service Corps and the Ministry of Munitions and a period in publishing, he was posted to the Ministry of Information in late 1917. Rose arrived at the Ministry a few months later and the two fell in love in the spring of 1918, when Beryl was pregnant with Gerald’s third child. There is no directly autobiographical account of the start of their relationship, but Rose Macaulay reworked it compulsively in her novels, right up to her death in 1958.
Rose and Gerald first appeared as Kitty Grammont and Nicky Chester in What Not, Macaulay’s prescient novel of post-war bureaucracy and eugenics, published during the First World War in 1918. Here, true to life, Chester heads a civil service department, though in the novel it is the satirically named Ministry of Brains, a department set up to encourage (and indeed enforce) superior intelligence throughout Britain. He is detached, fiery and impressive; ‘his manners were bad’ but ‘he set other people on fire’. Kitty is his intelligent employee; ‘something of the elegant rake, something of the gamin, something of the adventuress, something of the scholar’. She is impressed by Chester’s ‘interesting appearance’, judging him to be, like Gerald, ‘a brilliant failure’ with ‘a queer, violent strength’. And when he smiles, she feels as though ‘someone had flashed a torch on lowering cliffs, and lit them into extraordinary and elf-like beauty’.
Gradually, the two spend time together socially as well as professionally, and Kitty observes that behind the work relationship, ‘so departmental, so friendly, so emptied of sex’, there is a ‘relationship quite other and more personal and human’ developing rapidly. Then, when Chester says goodnight to her at a house party and holds her hand ‘but as long as all might or so very little longer’, she is struck by a look in his eye which sends her up to bed ‘with the staggering perception of the dawning of a new and third relationship . . . something still more simple and human’. ‘One might surmise,’ she observes, that ‘he might fall very deeply in love before he knew anythi
ng much about it’. She, on the other hand, observes herself carefully, ‘step by step, amused, interested, concerned’. This way, she asserts to herself confidently, ‘is the best; not only do you get more out of the affair so, but you need not allow yourself, or the other party concerned, to be involved more deeply than you think advisable’.
Rose Macaulay mocks Kitty here, and by extension she mocks herself. Kitty, capable, detached, treating life as a ‘decidedly entertaining’ game, inherits Macaulay’s own public persona. But all the time that she thinks she is in control of her own part in the flirtation, she is in fact plummeting into a passion that she is no better able to restrain than Chester. She begins sleeping badly, ‘her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain’. Then the two of them are caught in a futuristic street aeroplane when something goes wrong with the machinery and they crash to the ground. Kitty bangs her head and faints; Chester believes her dead. Once she awakes he informs her, with ministerial restraint, ‘I have bitten my tongue and fallen in love.’ Kitty becomes giddy, finding that seas seem ‘to rush past her ears’. Asked what she feels, she replies, ‘cool and yet nervous, “I expect I feel pretty much the same as you do about it.” ’
Five years later, Macaulay reworked the scene in Told by an Idiot, a family saga that takes its central characters from the Victorian to the Georgian period. This is a detached novel, which does not dwell in the heads or hearts of any of its characters for long, but two women emerge as heroines, and both fall problematically in love. The first and most sustained heroine is Rome Garden, ‘negligent, foppish and cool’, an urbane thirty-one-year-old who likes ‘to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts’. She falls in love, requitedly, with Mr Jayne, another brilliant, laconic and ‘gracefully of the world worldly’ man, whom Rome finds ‘conceited, clever, entertaining, attractive and disarming, and the most companionable man of her wide acquaintance’. Both coolly English, they refrain from confessing their love until in a moment of unrestrained passion Mr Jayne insists that they should stop pretending: ‘I love you more than any words I’ve got can say. You know it, you know it . . . dear heart . . .’ He draws her up from her chair and looks into her face, ‘and that was the defeat of their civilisation, for at their mutual touch it broke in disorder and fled. He kissed her mouth and face and hands, and passion rose about them like a sea in which they drowned.’
Macaulay repeatedly reimagined not only the initial meeting but the dilemma that keeps the lovers apart. In What Not, she shied away from adultery. Instead, Chester and Kitty are unable to be together because Chester has mental deficiency in his family and so, in the new order set up by the Ministry of Brains, is uncategorised, and forbidden to marry. Kitty, meanwhile, is class A, and must therefore marry and reproduce with someone of her own rank. Although this is intended to seem laughable to the reader, both of them take the Ministry seriously enough for it to keep them apart. Initially, they agree to mere friendship, but Chester finds the ‘farce’ of their ‘beastly half-way house’ intolerable, maintaining that they have to be ‘more to each other – or less’. He urges Kitty to marry him secretly but she, high-minded, refuses. ‘Let’s be sporting,’ he pleads; ‘We’re missing – we’re missing the best thing in the world . . . I thought you never turned your back on life’; ‘My dearest dear, I love you. Can’t you . . . can’t you? . . .’ ‘I love you,’ she returns; ‘I think I worship you.’ But they agree to separate, and as they walk on together, the April afternoon itself cries out to them in its beauty, ‘like a child whom they were betraying and forsaking’.
The separation does not last. ‘The fact remained,’ the narrator declares, with the wisdom of personal experience, that ‘when two people who love each other work in the same building, however remote their spheres, they disturb each other, are conscious of each other’s nearness.’ Kitty is very far from being ‘amused, interested, concerned’ by her own feelings; she is struck by that ‘continual, disturbing, restless, aching want’; ‘no longer may life be greeted with a jest and death with a grin’. In the middle of the night, with aching, fevered head she writes Chester notes promising to marry him whenever he likes. But waking up, she is determined to give him his chance to stick by his principles. In the end, his presence overpowers her resolve. Seeing him again after several months, she admits that there is no good in living ‘if you can’t have what you want’. Chester announces that he has wanted her ‘extremely badly these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much.’ The two agree to get married.
In Told by an Idiot Macaulay made the obstacles separating the lovers more realistic, confronting the subject of adultery. Mr Jayne, like O’Donovan, is married. But Macaulay protected Rome from moral infamy by making Mr Jayne’s wife less palpably present than Beryl O’Donovan. She is a mad Russian woman, safely hidden away in Russia, whom Mr Jayne can honestly claim never to have loved. Nonetheless, Rome is principled. ‘I’m not,’ she insists, ‘going to take you away from your wife.’ Mr Jayne avows that ‘his love, his passion, his spirit, and his soul’ are Rome’s alone and encourages her to see civilisation as an arbitrary construct ‘of society’s making, that binds the spirit’s freedom in chains’. The two endure a winter in which civilisation fights ‘its losing battle with more primitive forces over the souls and bodies of Miss Garden and Mr Jayne’. Rome maintains that they can only be friends; Mr Jayne is unable to meet her with self-control; Rome retreats to ‘the city of that name’ with her father.
However, Mr Jayne follows his beloved to Italy and, spending time with the man she loves, walking in the warm sunlit air, Rome is ‘caught into a deep and intoxicated joy’:
The bitter, restless struggling of the last months gave way to peace; the happy peace that looks not ahead, but rejoices in the moment. The tall and gay companion strolling at her side, so fluent in several languages, so apt to catch a half-worded meaning, to smile at an unuttered jest, so informed, so polished, so of the world worldly . . . take Mr Jayne as merely that, and she had her friend and companion back again, which was deeply restful and vastly stimulating. And beneath that was her lover, whom she loved; beneath his urbane exterior his passion throbbed and leaped, and his deep need of her cried, and in her the answering need cried back.
Ensconced in this moment of idyllic mutual need, Rome responds more favourably to Mr Jayne’s sense that their fates are entwined. Although she still favours the claims of civilisation, and of his wife and children, she admits that neither of them can be ‘happy, or fully ourselves, without being together’. She promises to take a week to decide, and he lifts his hands to her face. ‘You are so beautiful,’ he says, speaking, according to his self-deprecating narrator, ‘inaccurately’;
There is no one like you . . . You hold my life in your two hands. Be kind to it, Rome. I love you, I love you, I love you. If we deny our love we shall be blaspheming. Love like ours transcends all barriers, and well you know it. Take your week, if you must, only decide rightly at the end of it, my heart’s glory.
For an Oxford-educated, quintessential English gentleman, Mr Jayne sounds suspiciously Irish here. For an atheist who is irritated when Rome strays into religious arguments, he also sounds distinctly Christian. Mr Jayne is so closely associated with Gerald O’Donovan that he slips into his voice. His argument, that love transcends barriers, and that to deny the gift of love is to blaspheme, comes straight out of O’Donovan’s own account of the relationship in his novel The Holy Tree, which had been published a year earlier. After Gerald’s death, Rose Macaulay described this book to Rosamond Lehmann as ‘his real work, the one I love’. ‘In it,’ she wrote, ‘he put his whole philosophy of love, through the medium of Irish peasants – all the things he used to say to me about love and life, all he felt about me, all we both knew.’
The heroine of The Holy Tree is a passionate, uneducated Irish girl called Ann. Times are hard and Ann marries a decent but prosaic man called Joe without love, in order to save her family from bankruptcy. All the tim
e she yearns for love, and is struck by it, innocently and delightedly, when Brian appears from afar, bringing with him dreams of founding a new and saintly community in the town. She becomes ‘weak to think of him, or to talk of him’; he ‘was always in her dreams. And, when she woke in the night, it was like as if he was in the room with her.’ From the start, religious and human sensuality fuse in Ann and Brian’s love. During their first kiss she has the sense of being ‘in a holy place’; ‘It wasn’t on the earth at all they stood, but before the throne of God.’ She walks in a new world, infused with the soul of her lover. Brian tells her that love is ‘the wonder of God’ ; not ‘the flesh alone, or the spirit alone, but the perfect union of them both’.
When Ann is swayed by the disapproval of her family, and of her community, Brian quotes the Yeats poem from which the book takes its title:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
Obediently, Ann looks into her heart and sees the holy tree, ‘the like of which never grew and blossomed in the world before’. But she, like Kitty and Rome and like Macaulay herself, is swayed by convention. She realises that she cannot have both Brian and her child, Bessie, who is ‘woven into the very woof of her heart’. She sees, like Kitty, that she must allow Brian to live according to his own principles so that he can fulfil his great plans. ‘A sort of god he was among the people, the way he worked on them . . . Real love was to add to his power for the good of the world.’ She will ‘offer up her love to save him’, sacrificing herself for the higher good.