The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  In her letters to her lover, Elizabeth always insisted that Charles was a better man than he himself was prepared to admit. But she was aware, too, that he was habitually unfaithful to her; aware that those years of promiscuous love-making had deadened his feelings. ‘I told her the other evening that I was a crook,’ he recorded in his diary in April 1942, ‘which was a guarded way of saying that I had been and would continue to be unfaithful to her.’ Two weeks later he described a ‘desolating’ evening with Elizabeth, where he attempted to convey that he did not love her, only to take her ‘sadly to bed’, which was a ‘fiasco’.

  For her part, Elizabeth retained her faith in the relationship. In ‘Summer Night’, the tale of disappointed love which Elizabeth had written before she met Charles, the heroine wonders if her lover has broken her heart and knows only that he has ‘broken her fairytale’. Elizabeth kept her own fairy tale intact because she was unassailable in both loving and dreaming; confident in believing in the myth of their love. And it is fairy tales and dreams that Charles continually associated with Elizabeth. ‘She holds me by the imagination,’ he observed in September 1941. ‘My daylight feelings, solid affections and passions are on another plane.’ ‘One of the luxuries of this love affair,’ he wrote after a day trip to Kew in May 1942, ‘is the giddy feeling of being carried along on the tide of her imagination.’ ‘I am in love with E imaginatively,’ he wrote the next day, ‘she even has a strange beauty like a woman in a tapestry.’ ‘Of what is her magic made?’ he wondered the following week. ‘What is the spell she has cast over me?’ Walking, once again, in Regent’s Park, sitting on the bank by the canal watching the swans pass by, he was both fascinated and disturbed by her flashes of insight, like summer lightning. Charles was discovering ‘more and more of her generous nature, her wit and funniness, the stammering flow of her enthralling talk, the idiosyncrasies, vagaries of her temperament’. Bewitched, he observed with fateful prescience that ‘this attachment is nothing transient but will bind me as long as I live’.

  In the spring of 1942 Rose Macaulay was acutely aware of the binding strength of love as she waited for her lover to die. That February Gerald O’Donovan was admitted to King’s College Hospital where he was informed that his colorectal cancer was an inoperable malignant growth. The doctors decided to operate as a palliative to prevent future pain and told Rose that he was unlikely to get through the operation. In fact he survived, but the growth turned out to be more widespread than they had expected. His life expectancy was shortened from eighteen months to considerably less. Gerald had known that he was unlikely to survive the operation, but did not know that it was not a cure. ‘It’s not too easy talking on that basis,’ Rose told her cousin Jean on 25 February. She was finding it hard to concentrate on anything else.

  It gives one a queer dazed feeling – a sudden precipice yawning across a road that has run for nearly 25 years. First Margaret, then he. No doubt life must be thus, when one reaches my age. Perhaps, for him (as for her) it may be better to slip out before worse befall us all.

  Here, for the first time, she acknowledged Gerald’s letters as the source of much of her anguish at the bombing of her flat the previous May. ‘I find it is minor things that stab deepest,’ she wrote; ‘the destruction of all his letters at Luxborough, for instance. Why didn’t I move them in time?’

  Over the next few months Rose Macaulay wrote a short story called ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ in which she made the role of the letters in her grief explicit. Commissioned by Storm Jameson, the story was published only in America, offering Macaulay the chance to publish with relative anonymity as she could assume that none of her London acquaintances would come across it. This is one of the most haunting and personal pieces that Macaulay ever wrote and is the only fiction that she published in the ten years between And No Man’s Wit and The World My Wilderness.

  ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ is an elegy for Rose’s burned possessions and an anticipatory elegy for Gerald. It is an account of a woman whose life is ‘cut in two’ when her flat is bombed, leaving her as ‘a ghost, without attachments or habitation’. Unlike Rose herself, Miss Anstruther is present during the bombing, and has a chance to save some of her possessions. Confused and rushed, she rescues her typewriter and portable wireless. It is only after a gas main has burst, feeding the fire, that she remembers her lover’s letters, and by now it is too late. With ‘hell blazing and crashing all around her’, she sits down helplessly in the road, ‘sick and shaking, wholly bereft’. Her lover, unlike Gerald, died a year earlier; she has not yet had the courage to reread his letters. Only fragments of phrases remain in her memory: ‘Light of my eyes’; ‘the sun flickering through the beeches on your hair’.

  Like Rose, Miss Anstruther spends the succeeding days combing her ruins for relics of her past. She finds only a fragment of a letter, written during a quarrel: ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don’t care twopence; if you did you would . . .’ Twenty years ago, Miss Anstruther refused to commit to her lover; this was his remonstrance. ‘She had failed in caring once, twenty years ago, and failed again now, and the twenty years between were a drift of grey ashes that once were fire, and she a drifting ghost too.’

  Macaulay’s story is painful in its candid portrayal of loss. Gerald had inscribed a new copy of The Holy Tree for her, but most of the mementoes she had of the relationship had been destroyed in the bombing of her flat. It is only in ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ that the letters become central to her sorrow at the destruction of her possessions, and that the scale of this sorrow is explained. The public mourning for her books had enabled Rose to express her private grief at the death she now felt to be imminent. It was Gerald whom she could not face life without; Gerald whose impending death made Rose wish that she had been killed too. By writing ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’, Rose Macaulay created one final relic of Gerald O’Donovan which, once published, could not be destroyed by bombs. At the same time, she assured Gerald that his death would not lessen her love. Like Miss Anstruther, she too would be left as a mere ghost of her former self.

  In June Macaulay wrote an article about the war that blended anger with despair. Powerless in preventing Gerald’s death or in preventing the bloodshed of war, she railed against the rhetoric of politicians. ‘Is there anything to be said,’ she asked, ‘for the smug, pompous and tedious clichés which most of our public speakers drop about like worn coins whenever they speak? There are some phrases whose reiteration becomes nauseating: among them are “the freedom-loving nations”, “the common peoples of Britain” . . . “retribution”.’ These phrases could not be uttered except in a smug voice and she wished that a concerted effort could be made to rid public speaking of platitude and sentimentality and allow it to resemble intelligent conversation. More angrily, Macaulay complained that they were being told again, as in the last war, that their enemies (and in particular the Italians) ‘don’t like cold steel’. ‘Does any one,’ she asked dismissively, ‘like steel, either cold or hot, when it is plunged into them without (or even with) anaesthetics? This kind of exultant taunt seems to add an edge of barbarity to the accounts of the assaults of painful weapons of war on agonised human flesh and blood.’

  On 26 July 1942 Gerald O’Donovan died. Rose had spent the previous day with him, managing to communicate with him although he was only semi-conscious. He became unconscious after she left and died the next morning. In a letter to Rosamond Lehmann, Rose tried, as always, to be buoyant, grateful that ‘he didn’t linger on in pain’. She was comparing him with her sister Margaret, whose final weeks of agony she had found hard to bear. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ she asked Rosamond helplessly, ‘with all this dying, so inevitable, we haven’t yet learned to accept it. We are unadaptable about that. It still comes as a shock. It’s all this loving we do. Worthwhile, but it doesn’t fit us for losing each other.’ She felt empty and dead and without purpose, and longed, as she had after her flat was bombed, to escape, perhaps to neutral Portugal,
hoping that a change of scene would help her begin again. This is the new beginning Rose had found impossible to contemplate after the bombing of her flat. Once the death she had dreaded for so long had come at last, she began to see starting again as a possibility. ‘He was the dearest companion, you know,’ she added, looking back. ‘And had such a fine, brilliant mind . . . Well, it’s over if things are ever over.’

  Rose was doubly bereft and exiled by Gerald’s death. She was left without her partner and lover of twenty years, and she was denied the opportunity to grieve. Only a handful of close friends could know the scale of her loss, and very few of these had any intimate knowledge of Gerald himself. Two weeks later, Rose wrote an anonymous obituary for Gerald in The Times. Signed by ‘a friend’, it was painfully detached and impersonal. She described his ‘in parts brilliant’ novels and his ‘wide and versatile interests’, listing his successive careers as sub-warden of Toynbee Hall, publisher, and head of the Italian section at the Ministry of Information. She let a note of affection intrude when she mentioned his recent work assisting Czech refugees, adding that ‘his sympathetic understanding of their problems was a characteristic example of the generous help he always gave to those in need’. She ended with a restrained but personal tribute to the man she loved: ‘As a friend he never failed; his wise judgment and unstinting interest were always on tap behind his reserve and behind the sometimes sardonic wit that was his Irish heritage. To know him was to love him.’

  It is in her subsequent novels that Rose Macaulay’s more effusive tributes are found. It is also in her fiction that she allowed the full force of her grief to surface. Rose did not write novels for some time after Gerald’s death. Looking back on the period in a 1951 letter to her spiritual mentor and friend, a priest called Hamilton Johnson, she wrote that she was too unhappy to write fiction: ‘I always talked over my novels with my companion, who stimulated my invention; when he died my mind seemed to go blank and dead.’ When she did return to novel-writing, her grief for Gerald remained central to her work. In Macaulay’s 1950 novel The World My Wilderness, Helen, a middle-aged English woman who lives in post-war France, mourns the death of her second husband, who was killed by the Resistance during the war: ‘Her want of Maurice grew no less; it hungered in her night and day, engulfing her senses and her reason in an aching void.’ Six years later in Macaulay’s final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, Laurie is shattered by the death of her married lover Vere: ‘And now the joy was killed, and there seemed no reason why my life too should not run down and stop now that its mainspring was broken.’ For a companionship like theirs to end is ‘to lose a limb, or the faculty of sight; one is, quite simply, cut off from life and scattered adrift, lacking the coherence and the integration of love’. Life will, she supposes, proceed, ‘but the sentient, enjoying principle which had kept it all ticking, had been destroyed’.

  Earlier in the novel, Laurie recalls an occasion when she and Vere fantasised about the life they might have shared. On holiday, wrapped in the bliss of togetherness, understanding each other, laughing at each other’s jokes, allowing love to be their fortress and their peace, they wonder ‘how long we should live in this doped oblivion if we had been married’. Laurie supposes, sensibly, that ‘the every-day life which married people live together after a time blunts romance’. But neither she nor Vere thinks they should mind that, if they had all the other things to do together, and could plan their holidays and argue about the maps and the routes. She imagines that they would be very fair about equal turns of driving. They would like their children. And, crucially, ‘marriage would still be our fortress and our peace, just as love was now when we could be together but could be a sadness and a torment when apart’.

  In The Towers of Trebizond Macaulay allowed herself to depict a full adulterous affair that resembled her own. Here Laurie and Vere are placed in the same dilemma as Ann and Brian in The Holy Tree or Rome and Mr Jayne in Told by an Idiot. But Vere’s wife, unlike Mr Jayne’s lunatic Russian, is a reasonable woman who adores him. Vere convinces Laurie that he is fonder of his wife because of Laurie; ‘men,’ Laurie adds, ‘are given to saying this’. But, justifying her own conduct, she states that

  really she bored him; if she had not bored him, he would not have fallen in love with me. If I had refused to be his lover he would no doubt, sooner or later, have found someone else. But I did not refuse, or only for a short time at the beginning, and so we had ten years of it, and each year was better than the one before, love and joy gradually drowning remorse, till in the end it struggled for life.

  By 1955, Macaulay had come to regret the selfishness of adultery, but she could not regret a relationship that could have been so happy, had it been allowed to flourish normally. There does not seem to have been any question of allowing this to happen. Rose Macaulay is clear throughout her novels that she disapproves of divorce; Gerald might have come a long way since his days as a Catholic priest, but he does not seem to have inclined towards separation. Indeed, many of Rose’s friends assumed that she would not have wanted to marry anyway; she was too independent and happily self-reliant. Rose and Gerald’s mutual friend the writer Marjorie Grant Cook later insisted that marriage to Gerald would have been a disastrous mistake on Rose’s part, although Marjorie’s own rather intense feelings towards Gerald may have influenced her opinion.

  Certainly, Macaulay was scathing about marriage in several essays and novels. In a 1920s article entitled ‘People who Should Not Marry’ she maintained that

  some men and women might well prefer to live alone, meeting their beloved only when it suits them, thus retaining both that measure of freedom . . . enjoyed by the solitary, and the delicate bloom on the fruit of love which is said to be brushed off by continual contact.

  She expressed this more strongly in an essay on the ‘Problems of Married Life’ in A Casual Commentary, where she states that ‘to be with the beloved just enough – that is passionately moving and contenting’, while ‘to be with the beloved too much – that is surfeit and thraldom’. Later in this book, Macaulay inquires ‘Into the Sanctity of the Home’, challenging the assumption that people who have families are morally superior to those without. What is sanctity, she wonders, and how can one acquire it? ‘How does one know whether sanctity adorns one’s home or not?’ Can the home of a bachelor or a spinster have sanctity? Can a flat have sanctity? Can a boarding-house? Presumably, they cannot. Gerda holds out against marrying the man she loves in Dangerous Ages on the grounds that marriage is ‘a fetter on what shouldn’t be fettered’ and that it has the same Victorian fussiness as antimacassars. Macaulay was also often dismissive of child-bearing. In Macaulay’s 1920 novel Potterism, Jane dismisses babies as ‘a handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing’, complaining that babies make women ill before they arrive and need care and attention afterwards. Denham, the heroine of Crewe Train (1926) is so distressed to find herself pregnant that she goes out of her way to encourage a miscarriage.

  But there is both a defensiveness and an ambivalence in many of these accounts. Macaulay adds in ‘Problems of Married Life’ that to be with the beloved insufficiently is ‘annihilating anguish of the soul’, with the sudden seriousness of this phrase jarring within this delicately comic essay. And she did not quite put the weight of her own conviction into ‘People who Should Not Marry’; the carefully placed ‘is said to be brushed off’ allows for the possibility that in fact the delicate bloom of love might remain. The light-hearted cheer with which she dismissed marriage is belied by the earnestness with which Laurie, in The Towers of Trebizond, imagines marriage as a fortress and a peace.

  Writing to her friend Sylvia Lynd about Gerald’s death, Rose celebrated the fact that the story of her love affair had been ‘a good one’, adding that ‘it might have ended worse – perhaps in weariness, faithlessness, or nothingness, or a mere lessening of love’. She wondered if this constancy was ‘the reward of sin’; had their love survived because it was spar
ed the strain of years of constant household use? Gerda or Denham, even Kitty, might say that it had; Rose Macaulay, bereft and desolate, had more faith in her own constancy. ‘Perhaps our love would have survived intact; it might, I think, because there was such a fundamental oneness – but who knows?’ She would, she admitted, ‘like to have a child or two of his’, though it would have created complications. Later, writing to Hamilton Johnson, Rose admitted the sin in the relationship but insisted that, given the chance, it would have succeeded as a marriage:

  Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that, all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been the almost perfect thing.

  See notes on Chapter 9