by Lara Feigel
Hilde was lonely in Wimbledon, where they had very few friends, and she increasingly felt as if she had no real identity. She was grateful for the support of the community:
the goodwill, the consideration and helpfulness of all around us, from our neighbours in Wimbledon Close to the housewives with whom I stood in line for hours at the shops of the beefy butcher Higgins and the popeyed fishmonger Burgess.
But despite the solidarity between strangers in a time of emergency, there was always a distinction between the British and their foreign guests. ‘As Great Britain had always described itself as “of Europe” but not “in Europe”, so we were well aware that we were “in England” but not “of England”.’ Since October 1941 Hilde and Peter had been naturalised as British citizens, but there were still obstacles to full integration. When their home help Mrs Sims left in November 1941 she had told Hilde dismissively that sometimes in their house she felt she was not in England, but in a foreign country. In December 1942 Peter was informed that as a German he could not be elected to the managing committee of English PEN, despite the fact that everyone wanted him to be.
Now that the height of the Blitz and the euphoria of its aftermath was over, Hilde had more time to miss Vienna. In her 1975 exile essay she wrote that it was possible to avoid homesickness when they were enduring the misery of the bombing, but that as soon as the danger abated and the inhospitable circumstances became halfway tolerable, the gnawing pain returned.
The vision of home broke over us in several simultaneous impressions, comparable to a collage: Viennese vistas, a curved shape, a faded shop sign which says ‘Saint Florian’s’, a lush and green meadow in the Salzburg countryside covered in dandelions, a bright Sunday morning in the hall of the musical society. Or a single, overpowering moment, a piece of the past captured: summer heat in one of the gardens in Döbling, complete silence, the smell of food from the house, and a feeling of infinite comfort, being at one with one’s existence in this world.
Hilde Spiel described in her autobiography how the memories of home, which she suppressed with difficulty, kept breaking out despite her efforts to embrace life in London. She dreamed of Heiligenstadt, of walks in the Prater with their dog Diemo, long dead, and of the contours of the Salesianerkirche on the Rennweg. Talking to her mother she reminisced happily about forgotten figures in their suburb of Döbling. Their laughter stopped abruptly when they wondered what fate had befallen these former acquaintances.
The homesickness was partly assuaged by contact with Austrian friends; notably with Hans Flesch-Brunningen, who was still a frequent visitor to Wimbledon, and sometimes took Hilde to the theatre in town. ‘I was so pleased to see him,’ she noted in her diary when he visited her in hospital after her operation. Writing The Fruits of Prosperity also enabled Hilde to take nostalgic forays into Vienna. It involved a lot of research, and she had some of her happiest London afternoons that spring in the domed reading room of the British Museum. Here she sat under a green reading lamp, suspended in space and time, with reference books heaped up on the desk. She appreciated the community of readers who surrounded her, some of whom were now her friends.
Hilde Spiel, c. 1943
After the stillbirth of their baby, relations between Hilde and Peter had become strained and volatile. Perhaps as a result of this, The Fruits of Prosperity had become a book about a difficult marriage. Spiel’s hero Milan, settled in Vienna, falls in love with Stephanie, the beautiful daughter of his mentor and patron Carl Benedict. Stephanie herself is in love with Andreas, a brilliant but feckless composer whom her father sensibly refuses to allow her to marry on the grounds that he is too self-obsessed to make her happy. Desperate with longing, Stephanie arrives one day at Andreas’s studio where she finds him in the arms of a rival, who advises her cattily to go home and get married.
Returning home, swooning with distress, she is greeted by Milan, whom Herr Benedict has invited to move into the family home. After several months in which Milan climbs the ladder at Herr Benedict’s firm and proves himself a worthy son-in-law, Stephanie succumbs to Milan’s adoration and agrees to a loveless marriage. At first, even when Stephanie lies crying beside him on their wedding night, Milan is so delighted to have her in his bed that he does not mind her coldness, which he believes will pass. Gradually, however, he succumbs to the (reasonably chaste) embraces of loose girls in rowdy bars and then, on his visit to England, embarks on an ardent affair with a young Englishwoman called Queenie Lorrimer. Here at last is mutual passion; electricity and lightning spring between them when they touch; together they lose sight of past and future; ‘so long as they remained entwined, joined by skin and hair, they were united by one flame’.
Meanwhile Stephanie, driven to desperation by loneliness, has visited Andreas, who is delighted to see her and takes her immediately to bed. The experience is perfunctory but salutary. She realises at last that she has been idealising him for all these years; he is no longer the man she once loved. Where her faith in Andreas ends, her trust in her husband begins. She writes an impassioned letter to Milan, begging him to forgive her and come home and promising a new life. Abandoning Queenie without even an explanation, Milan returns to his wife, who tells him about her unsatisfactory encounter with Andreas. Jealousy and possessiveness push Milan into outraged madness. Forgetting who she is, he hits her wildly, and then makes passionately violent love to her. It does not surprise him that for the first time the moment of lust is shared. Now calmer, Milan tells her that he has been unfaithful as well. ‘Then why did you hit me?’ Stephanie asks. Milan laughs. ‘Because I am a man, and you are a woman.’ They are both satisfied with the explanation. ‘If they could only love each other always as they had that night, they would need only this simple law and would spend the rest of their days in satisfied happiness.’
When Hilde was first introduced to Peter’s mother in Germany, she was surprised when the older woman took it upon herself in a reserved but not unfriendly manner to warn her future daughter-in-law against Peter’s violent fits of anger and changeable moods. This was, she explained, the unaccountable temperament he had inherited from his Baltic forebears. Peter himself saw his character in similar terms; it could not be changed. At first, in the excitement of love and of their new English life, imbued with confidence as a much-desired and passionate woman, Hilde had found his fits of temper relatively easy to deal with. Now, it was becoming harder; she had become vulnerable and tearful and she wanted to be reassured, looked after and adored.
In The Fruits of Prosperity Hilde Spiel seems to be in part reassuring herself that violent outbursts can be compatible with adoration; that, indeed, such outbursts are necessary proofs of love. Stephanie and Milan’s marriage is weakest when it lacks passion; when she is too detached to be tempestuous. Hilde suggests that passion can be restored through a crisis, and that violence is preferable to emotional stultification. She was prepared to put up with angry scenes for the sake of that emotional engagement with life that the war was in danger of eliminating altogether.
In April 1943 Hilde and Christine were evacuated to Cambridge to escape the renewed sporadic bombing attacks. While Hilde was away, the Wimbledon flat was burgled, and all Hilde’s jewellery was stolen. This jewellery was all that she had left of her earlier, grander life in Vienna, and she was devastated. ‘I should have thought we’d had quite enough bad luck already,’ she wrote to Peter on 30 April. ‘This burglary is dreadful. I am quite desperate about it – all I ever had! I was so unhappy last night I couldn’t sleep at all.’ Like Rose Macaulay, hopelessly listing the books she had lost, Hilde sent Peter a list of her lost jewellery. There was his aunt Olga’s sword-brooch, a Chinese silver ring, a golden necklace with a heartshaped medallion in which there had been a photograph of Christine, a pair of silver earrings, a silver chain with a coin, a small garnet pendant . . . Peter replied sympathetically, promising to replace what he could and sending her war news and literary essays cut from the newspaper. These included an essay by Arthu
r Koestler, another émigré writer who had entered literary London with rather more success than Hilde and Peter and whose novel Hilde had read earlier in the year. Hilde wrote back, grateful to Peter for his sympathy about her jewellery:
The vision of my beloved golden brooch etc is still before me and makes me sad. It is sweet of you to want to replace what you can. If only jewellery weren’t so damn expensive now. Anyhow, if I could have a little every few months, I should be so grateful. It is so dreadful to have to give up glamour.
She was also appreciative of the newspaper cuttings, and wished he was there to discuss them. But the literary news reminded her how cut off they were from present-day life, and she urged Peter to do what he could to change this. They could go to lectures together, and try to get the Horizon crowd or Koestler himself to meet in town for a meal. ‘Now, for instance, one might write to him. If you did, you wouldn’t get a rebuff, I’m sure.’
Throughout 1943 Peter de Mendelssohn was writing columns for the New Statesman about the political situation in the Far East; increasingly, he was becoming preoccupied with politics. In The Heat of the Day Bowen observes that at this stage of events ‘war’s being global meant it ran off the edges of maps’; what was happening in Japan ‘was heard of but never grasped in London’. Peter was attempting to rectify this situation, but now his wife urged him to focus more of his attention on literature and on life itself.
I have a feeling that politics play too great a part in your thoughts, held against the fact that you do not really believe in a cause, and are not really vitally interested in the betterment of mankind. Why not recognise this and devote one’s free thought to the things one believes in, like art, and literature, and the importance of emotions.
Aged thirty-one, Hilde Spiel was wondering how best to live. In the context of a demoralising war in which even her few glittery trinkets had been taken away, was it still possible to have an intense emotional life and to commit herself to literature and the life of the mind? Need looking after Christine preclude her from playing a part in the current of her time?
In The Fruits of Prosperity Milan, having fathered a second child with Stephanie, tries to persuade her to leave the lax morals and sullied air of the city and to move back with him to rural Croatia. Stephanie knows that it would be the right thing to do. Despite their new-found happiness, they are becoming corrupted by the city. At masked dances they flirt dangerously with other partners; after one such dance their sleep is filled with visions of enticing danger and iniquitous love. In the countryside, Milan would be happier, the children would be healthier, and even Stephanie’s mother would be more contented. But what joy would there be? She likes going to balls, to opera houses, to dances where handsome men take her in their arms. She likes sitting in front of the mirror preparing for a glamorous evening, placing a flower in her hair. They decide to compromise, and live in a garden suburb of Vienna not unlike Wimbledon. Stephanie is happy but she wonders if she has betrayed something important to her, which had been the goal and true purpose of her life. Meanwhile Milan is fearful; he worries that his happiness rests on too fragile a basis. And their anxieties prove prescient. They go to a crowded concert where a fire breaks out. The smoke causes Stephanie to faint, but Milan manages to revive her by carrying her onto the balcony. He urges her to jump; she is too frightened; they make their way to the stairs, where they end up suffocating. As Milan dies he dreams of the clear streams and lakes of Croatia. The novel ends with a vision of Milan engulfed in his native river.
Stephanie has to decide between the health of her children and her own mental survival. In the end it is clear that she should have agreed to move to Croatia. The Manichean fire that ends their lives is symbolic of excess; of a city doomed to consume itself in fire. But Hilde Spiel, writing the novel from the fresh air and boredom of Wimbledon and Cambridge, was not wholly convinced. She, like Stephanie, longed to sit in front of a mirror and put a flower in her hair; she longed for attention, for glamour and for emotional intensity. Surely it was time to allow a little bit of the excitement they had lost to seep back into their new life in England.
In February 1943 Henry Yorke went with his new lover Mary Keene to stay with the painter Matthew Smith at Stratford St Mary in Suffolk, where Matthew had rented a house called Weavers. Writing to thank Matthew at the end of the month, Henry said that he had gone home ‘refreshed (not quite as a lion, those halcyon days are past, or is it an eagle, but rather as a donkey that has been allowed to drop its burden) back home to the endless round of war, scrubbing floors one moment and directing the production of cordite plants the next’.
He was refreshed by the countryside, by the break from both office and fire station, by the escape from upper-class life into bohemia, by Matthew, whose work he would increasingly admire, and, most of all, by Mary. ‘To Mary To Mary To Mary’ Henry wrote in a copy of Party Going which he had inscribed to her at the end of January. Mary was twenty-one years old, at once impetuous, confident and vulnerable, with enormous grey eyes, creamy skin, long blonde hair and a metal lower leg. She was branded by the poet Ruthven Todd as ‘the most beautiful English girl I ever saw’ and later claimed to be commonly known as one of the two most beautiful women in London. In 1939, aged seventeen, she had embarked on an affair with Louis MacNeice, who a few years later described her in his poem ‘The Kingdom’:
Too large in feature for a world of cuties,
Too sculptured for a cocktail lounge flirtation,
This girl is almost awkward, carrying off
The lintel of convention on her shoulders,
A Doric river-goddess with a pitcher
Of ice-cold wild emotions. Pour them where she will
The pitcher will not empty . . .
. . . Vitality and fear
Are marbled in her eyes, from hour to hour
She changes like the sky – one moment is so gay
That all her words are laughter but the next
Moment she is puzzled, her own Sphinx,
Made granite by her destiny . . .
Mary Keene, c. 1943
Bewitched, MacNeice wrote to Mary during the affair that ‘in the centre of the most haunting chaos . . . it is still possible to think of you, the star, in the heart of the whirling nebulae. I do.’ Now, just when he had begun to be engulfed by the dreariness of the war, it was Henry Yorke’s turn to think of her, and he did too, as he began the novel that would be called Loving.
Set in an Anglo-Irish Big House in wartime neutral Ireland, Loving tells the story of the day-to-day life of a group of servants and their employers, working, dancing, stealing, worrying and, of course, loving. Although the war presses in on the house, with the servants wondering if they should go back to England and enlist, the Irish setting allowed Yorke and his characters to escape to the same heady fairy-tale world that had greeted Bowen when she arrived in Ireland the previous summer. Yorke later said that he was given the idea for the book by a manservant in the fire service who told him that he had once asked an elderly butler what he liked most in the world. For Yorke the reply evoked a whole setting. ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ The anecdote captures the tone of the novel, which is both carelessly sexual and extravagantly sensuous. Written in a spare prose style that can whirl lyrically into passages of thick, languorous beauty, it is certainly the most loving of Yorke’s novels, and at the heart of it is Edith, a young English serving-girl with creamy skin and huge eyes. Edith is universally adored: by the butler, Charlie Raunce, whom she eventually marries; by his young assistant, Albert, who gazes at her from a love-struck distance; by the children of the house, who will do anything for her; by Kate, her friend and fellow-servant, who at one stage undresses her and massages her back; and most of all by the narrator himself, who follows her around with the same amazed infatuation as his characters.
At the opening of the book Edith sticks a peacock feather ‘abov
e her lovely head’; a few pages later Raunce appraises ‘the dark eyes she sported which were warm and yet caught the light like plums dipped in cold water’. Naked to the waist in the bedroom she shares with Kate, Edith’s skin shines ‘like the flower of white lilac under leaves’. When she opens the window and gazes out into the morning, the soft bright light strikes her ‘dazzled dazzling eyes’.
Watching Edith watching the fire, Raunce is mesmerised as ‘her great eyes become invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft’. ‘I never seen anything like your eyes they’re so ’uge not in all my experience’ he says later, falling for her, gradually and then more precipitously, as the novel progresses. Early on, Edith and Kate are cleaning the house’s old ballroom when they decide to turn on the gramophone and dance, ‘wheeling wheeling in each other’s arms’ around the mirrored room. Raunce comes in and sees ‘two girls, minute in purple, dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass’. He tells them off but is unable to take his eyes off Edith; from this point he becomes more and more enraptured. ‘I could fall for you in a big way,’ he finally says, adding as he sees her back stiffen with attention, ‘for the matter of that I have.’ ‘I didn’t realise I could love anyone the way I love you,’ he declares once they have begun to talk of marriage. ‘I thought I’d lived too long.’