by Lara Feigel
Her new flat was small; there was only a bedroom and a sitting room in addition to the kitchen and bathroom. But she only had the furniture that she had inherited from Margaret to fill it with, so she did not mind the lack of space. And her first act on moving in was to put her new Oxford Dictionary on its shelf; her one reminder of the life she had lost.
Rose Macaulay spent the summer of 1941 clambering around the ruins of her old flat, beginning the compulsive haunting of ruined buildings that would continue for the rest of her life. She was hoping to find books or letters surviving amid the debris, but in fact the only objects to survive were those contained in her old kitchen dresser, which had been sheltered by the roof of the building when it collapsed in the fire. Here she found some glasses and crockery, a jar of marmalade, some tea and an old silver mug.
In September Rose tore herself away from the rubble and attended the International PEN congress in London, which began with a lunch at the Savoy Hotel on Piccadilly and was conducted mainly in the French Institute in South Kensington. This meeting, which brought 470 delegates together to discuss ‘Writers and Freedom’, was a brave event to hold at this stage in the war, especially because it involved international speakers travelling from Europe and America. And for most of the audience it offered a moment of hope, showing that literary and political discussion was still possible despite the violence that was tearing their world apart. This was particularly the case for Hilde Spiel, who was pleased to be asked to help with the preparations and to have a chance to get to know Storm Jameson, whom she found ‘very very charming’. Jameson herself began the Congress with a speech insisting that the war was or could be a social revolution and that afterwards the duty of the English writer would be to convince the English that they were responsible for Europe and could not evade this duty out of indifference or modesty. Here at least the fate of England was seen as bound up with the fate of Europe. And later that afternoon a ‘Mr Smith’ from Scotland Yard came to talk to Hilde and Peter about being naturalised as British citizens.
On the fourth day of the congress, Peter de Mendelssohn gave a speech on ‘Writers without Language’ where he compared two types of exiled writer, those for whom it was impossible to change languages because their identity was bound up with their mother tongue, and those who were able to start writing in the language of their host country. He gave J. B. Priestley as an example of the kind of writer who would be able to change linguistic currency. ‘I am an Englishman’, he imagined a hypothetical Priestley saying in Germany, ‘true enough, but I am also a European. Where I am is Europe, and as I happen to be in Germany I declare Germany to be Europe, at least for the time being.’ These were of course Peter de Mendelssohn’s own sentiments, and both he and Hilde were starting to feel secure in their new British identity. In the world after the war, Peter stated, the émigrés who had changed language (as opposed to the refugees who had merely sought temporary refuge) would help build a great bridge which would span the waters and re-connect the continents and their peoples. He would help Storm Jameson in the task she had set the post-war writer. These were popular sentiments. Hilde reported in her diary that Peter’s speech had been well received by the audience.
But Rose Macaulay remained unaffected by these notes of optimism ringing out around her. For her the rows of seated delegates remained less real than the charred ruins of her flat or the gradually atrophying body of the man she loved. Margaret Storm Jameson, meeting Rose on the way out at the end of the day, listened to her friend talking rapidly and watched as her smile flickered and her small head bobbed in a strange simulation of her usual animated state. She felt sad that old age could come upon someone so suddenly. But it was evident to Margaret that age alone could not account for the sad fatigue underlying Rose’s show of liveliness. She wondered if Rose was still saddened by the bombing of her flat in May but guessed that her friend was weighed down by a more complex grief. ‘You’re very tired,’ Margaret observed. Rose moved down a step, paused, and looked back at her friend. ‘Margaret, you don’t know what it’s like to watch the person you love dying.’ Margaret later wrote that she could feel the anguish pricking the ends of her fingers.
In November, Rose Macaulay wrote an article on ‘Losing One’s Books’ for the Spectator. This opens with brisk, impersonal aloofness and with a characteristically whimsical linguistic aside:
It happened to me last May to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called Blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attacks by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides. Anyway, whatever the thing was called, it destroyed my flat, leaving not a wrack behind, or rather, nothing but wracks.
The tone then becomes more emotional, as she describes the charred remains of the wreckage, smelling of mortality, which troubled her with hints of what had been. A page of the Oxford Dictionary telling of hot-beds, hotch-pots, hot cockles, hotes and hotels; a page of Pepys. ‘When the first stunned sickness begins to lift a little, one perceives,’ she says, ‘that something must be done about lost books.’ When out, she climbed her ruins. When in, she made lists. A list of books she had owned (‘that is the saddest list; perhaps one should not make it’), a list of books that could be replaced, another of books that could not be replaced, another of good riddances. She goes on to list books in each category. Among the irreplaceable books are her Baedekers, which are now hard to find; ‘and anyhow,’ she adds curtly, ‘travel is over, like one’s books and the rest of civilisation’. The article ends abruptly:
One keeps on remembering some odd little book that one had; one can’t list them all, and it is best to forget them now that they are ashes.
It is clear, though, that Rose Macaulay has not forgotten them. The description of list-making in this article reveals the continued obsessive nature of Rose’s grief for her books. Although London was not seriously bombed again until 1944, the war continued horrifically elsewhere. Meanwhile Gerald was probably in the final months of his life. Yet Rose spent her time making lists of books, allowing the two sources of sadness to fuse in her own mind and finding in her lost volumes a way of giving public expression to private grief.
See notes on Chapter 8
Part III
The Lull
June 1941–May 1944
9
‘You are the ultimate of something’
Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Rose Macaulay, summer 1941–summer 1942
The raid of 10 May 1941 which flattened Rose Macaulay’s flat was the last attack on so brutal a scale that London would suffer for three years. The summer following the Blitz came as an unreal period of calm after a gruelling nine months of bombing. At first, Londoners waited anxiously for another attack. ‘We are puzzled why, in this lovely weather, the Germans have not seriously attacked us by air,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary in June, wondering if they were ‘equipping their machines with some new device, like wirecutters’. Quickly, it became evident that the focus of the German war effort was now on Russia. On 22 June Hitler reneged on the non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Russia was unprepared for the attack and within three weeks of the invasion German forces had penetrated 450 miles into Russian territory. Churchill denounced Hitler on the radio as ‘a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder’, who had terrorised Europe into submission and was now carrying on his butchery and desolation by victimising the multitudes of Russia and Asia. But in London the butchery was now experienced at a distance. ‘War moved,’ as Elizabeth Bowen observed in The Heat of the Day, ‘from the horizon to the map’; daily life could resume again.
Graham Greene found the lull frustrating and longed to escape into a war zone. Even at the height of the Blitz in December 1940 he had told Anthony Powell that he was keen to do Free French propaganda in West Africa from a base in Liberia. His sister Elisabeth, as secretary to the regional head of the Secret Intelligence Ser
vice (SIS, popularly known as MI6) in the Middle East, was doing her best to pull strings to get both her brother and Malcolm Muggeridge accepted as overseas agents. Finally, a mysterious ‘Mr Smith’ invited Greene to a party that turned out to be part of the vetting process for spies. On 20 August he informed his mother that in two or three months he would be going out to West Africa, supposedly working for the Colonial Office. ‘The pay is very good, and the job interesting,’ he told her. Before he could start, the SIS decided Greene should be instilled with some military discipline, so that autumn he attended a four-week training course at Oriel College, Oxford. He reported to John Betjeman that he had been taught how to salute with a little stick under his arm while marching and, without success, to ride a motorcycle. He was also trained in the specific skills befitting an intelligence officer: to assume and inhabit another identity, use surveillance technology and choose and obtain information from local agents.
Most Londoners were more appreciative of the peace than Greene was. As in the phoney war, the calm was unreal. But after eight months of ‘taking it’ people felt entitled to a lull, and the impulsive spirit of the Blitz continued into the summer. Waking up from the long months of sleeplessness and fear, Londoners emerged grateful to be alive, and continued to float on the tideless present of war. ‘Everyone has a sort of false armistice feeling,’ Hilde Spiel observed in her diary; ‘drinks, paints her finger-nails, makes love to young girls, and says: ce Noel à Paris!’
It was in the summer of 1941 that Elizabeth Bowen began the affair with Charles Ritchie that would heighten her experience of the next four years of war and dominate the rest of her life. ‘Beloved, I can’t believe any human being can ever have made another as purely wholly unchangeably and yet increasingly happy as you have made me,’ she would write to him four years later, as the Red Army liberated Warsaw. She had been passionately in love before. But now, surrendering herself to the frightening exhilaration of complete vulnerability, she was reconfiguring her sense both of love itself and of herself as a woman who loved. ‘For me, you are the ultimate of something. Till I met you, I did not imagine that such an ultimate could be reached. Now I rest in it, and cannot go beyond.’
Elizabeth and Charles had met at a christening during the brief lull in the London Blitz in February. ‘She says it began when she saw me standing outside the church after the christening,’ Charles recorded in his diary that September. He found this hard to believe. ‘It smells to me of literary artifice,’ he observed. He was less prepared for love than she was, and was particularly unprepared to fall in love with a woman whom he found on first impressions to be ‘well-dressed middle-aged with the air of being the somewhat worldly wife of a don’. In his diary that evening he indifferently catalogued her ‘narrow intelligent face, watching eyes’ and ‘cruel, witty mouth’, not suspecting that four months later they would be lovers.
Charles Ritchie
Charles was six years younger than Elizabeth, and at once her junior in youthful irresponsibility and her senior in cynicism. A Canadian diplomat, he had been posted to London in January 1939 and was treating the commission as a holiday. A few months before war was declared he was yearning either for a new mistress or for the chance to risk his life in an aeroplane stunt. In fact his war would be pretty much risk-free, but it did bring a succession of mistresses. ‘Wartime London was a forcing ground for love and friendship,’ he wrote in a subsequent introduction to his diaries; ‘for experiments and amusements snatched under pressure’. In January 1941, a month before he met Elizabeth at the christening, he listed his ‘symptoms of sexual happiness’ in his diary: ‘I am temporarily cured of my mania for seeing things in a straight line’; ‘Time no longer seems to be slipping away from me’. The ballerina who was the object of this happiness was about to depart on tour and he was already looking forward to ‘early and varied infidelities’ during her absence.
A month after meeting Elizabeth, Charles complained that he was sick of his ‘present hectic life – the work, the miscellaneous love affairs and the mixed drinks’, yearning only for Victorian evenings in the company of a wife and adoring daughters in a small provincial town. A bald patch was appearing on his head, marriage was hovering on the horizon as the only dignified course, but still he squeezed the last drops of pleasure out of his final months of youth. In May 1941, looking back on the extraordinary feeling of happiness and completeness he had experienced during the Blitz, he had a premonition that it must mean that he had gone as far as he could go and that retribution must follow. A week later, emerging once again from the bed of his ballerina, he observed that when he died they would find ‘some woman’s name written on my heart – I do not know myself whose it will be!’ That summer, retribution came in the form of love; from now on, adolescent escapism would always be tinged with guilt. And it became increasingly clear that the name written on his heart would be that of Elizabeth Bowen.
For Elizabeth and Charles, the unreal climate of the summer of 1941 was the ideal climate for love. ‘We go,’ Charles wrote, ‘from one cloudless, high-summer day to another in a kind of daze. The parks are full of soldiers and girls in summer dresses. It is difficult to get a table in a restaurant. My friends indulge their love affairs and their vendettas.’ For Elizabeth at least, love was immediate and consuming. In a passage which she later excised from the first draft of The Heat of the Day, she described the dawning of love.
It was not that she had been taken by surprise. To find oneself fallen into love is, however surprisingly, not surprising: in this state culminates, with a commanding calm, some suspended expectation of the whole being. It was, more, that it seemed inconceivable to be in love now.
Love, once acknowledged, brought the recognition that it had been developing for months. Elizabeth accepted love’s vulnerability fearlessly; Charles allowed himself to be entranced by a woman he frequently characterised as a witch; together they drifted, dazed and absorbed, from day to day.
In early September, on one of the last, borrowed days of summer, they visited the rose garden in Regent’s Park. They had been talking about going to see the roses for days, but Charles found it hard to escape the office before nightfall and it began to seem as if they would not see them together. Then, spontaneously, Elizabeth telephoned to say that if they did not go it would be too late, as the blooms were almost over. So he put away the Foreign Office boxes in the safe, locked up the files and took a taxi to Regent’s Park. This was a perfect moment outside time that both would later see as marking the blooming of their happiness. The rose, flowering delicately and luxuriously in the midst of war, came to be a leitmotif of their love. So much so that Charles later added an extended account of the scene to his diary when he edited it for publication after Elizabeth’s death:
As we walked together I seemed to see the flowers through the lens of her sensibility. The whole scene, the misty river, the Regency villas with their walled gardens and damp lawns, and the late September afternoon weather blended into a dream – a dream in which these were all symbols soaked with a mysterious associative power – Regent’s Park – a landscape of love. A black swan floating downstream in the evening light – the dark purplish-red roses whose petals already lay scattered – the deserted Nash house with its flaking stucco colonnade and overgrown gardens – all were symbols speaking a language which by some miracle we could understand together.
Queen Mary’s rose garden, Regent’s Park, 1938, photographed by H. F. Davis
Both Elizabeth and Charles later memorialised this lull in the war in London as an era of unbroken mutual love. The roses are recreated at the opening of The Heat of the Day where, on just such a perfect September evening, ‘great globular roses, today at the height of their second blooming, burned more as the sun descended, dazzling the lake’. In 1950 Elizabeth wrote to Charles regretting that they had not found the time to walk in the park together on his last visit to London.
A particular gentle tract of our happiness belongs to it – walks af
ter lunch, walks when we were coming back here to this house for tea. So much so that the park has become you for me.
In 1961, lunching with Elizabeth off whisky and sardine sandwiches at her hotel in New York, Charles recalled that twenty years ago they used to lunch off sardine sandwiches at Clarence Terrace in the early days when she lay stretched on the hard narrow Regency sofa in her little upstairs drawing room.
Looking back, Elizabeth and Charles yearned wistfully for the early, unconscious days of their love affair. Elizabeth Bowen pays tribute to this gentle entwinement in an early chapter of The Heat of the Day. Here she describes the genesis of love as more than a dream:
More, it was a sort of growing, smiling regard, a happiness of which it seemed that the equilibrium became every day surer. The discovery together, for the first time, of life was serious, but very much more than serious, illuminating; there was an element of awe. Miraculously, unhindered, the plan of love had gone on unfolding itself.
Stella and Robert both start to feel that they are only fully alive in each other’s presence. Though singly ‘each of them might, must, exist, decide, act; all things done alone came to be no more than simulacra of behaviour: they waited to live again till they were together, then took living up from where they had left it off.’ Together, they acquire a doubled awareness, an interlocking feeling, which intensifies everything around them so that all they see, know or tell one another is ‘woven into the continuous narrative of love’. They do not tell one another everything, though: ‘Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what is to it relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.’