by Lara Feigel
About the christening – I really want to leave this to you. I should have liked, of course, to be present, but I can see that it gets postponed further and further, and after all, as you say, it isn’t such a frightfully important occasion and you should perhaps really go ahead without me. I think I’m for it.
Hilde sent Peter a description of the event, and he wrote back worried that too much fuss was being made of Anthony and not enough of Christine, given that Hilde had described Christine as looking ‘quite sweet’ while Anthony was ‘immensely admired’. ‘Is it possible that my little muffin is being neglected in any way, Mummi?’ Peter asked. He felt sorry and apprehensive and was tempted (though not enough to act on it) to rush home and take care of his daughter.
She is our first child, and it was for her that we lived through these five terrible years – at least I did – and I will never allow her to suffer the slightest bit of unhappiness because now she is no longer the only one.
Anxious, sad and herself feeling neglected, Hilde cannot have seen this as a welcome piece of interference. It was lucky that there were friends like Flesch to make London a less lonely place to be.
For Elizabeth Bowen, VJ Day was merely depressing. ‘You know how I felt about VE Day,’ she wrote to Charles.
But that sort of thing can’t happen twice. The days were listless and a flop, the nights orgiastic and unpleasant. (Violent anti-Yank demonstrations in Piccadilly, etc: a lot of fights all over the West End and people beaten up.) The most enjoyable human touch was that the poor Queen’s hat – powder-blue – fell to pieces on her during the return drive from the opening of Parliament, owing to being saturated with rain. The crowd would not permit her to put up an umbrella.
As far as Elizabeth was concerned, feeling was exhausted. And there was a pervasive sense of guilt (‘wrong, I think’) about the atomic bomb. Elizabeth was relieved to leave London and return once more to the unchanging world of Bowen’s Court.
See notes on Chapter 15
Part V
Surveying the Ruins
1945–9
Post-war Europe 1945–9
Once the half-hearted excitement of VJ Day had passed, a new era of post-war living began. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke took stock and surveyed the world that remained. All five were disappointed by London in this period. Labour immediately started to put in place the reforms they had promised; the buildings damaged by war were gradually repaired. But after the intensity of wartime life, the post-war period seemed grey and slow. Moments out of time, suspended between past and future, gave way to a continuum in which life was measured once again in years and decades rather than in days and weeks.
Bowen, Greene and Yorke in particular had all had an exciting war, and looked set to have a less exhilarating peace. All three had found a kind of spiritual home in wartime London, seizing each unexpected day and each dangerous, blacked-out night. All three were unusually alive to the imaginative possibilities of the moment, and had appreciated the war’s power to contract time and suspend the present, whether in the moment of bombing or in the wider temporal climate created by the uncertain tomorrow. They would never again be able to value the present moment so wholeheartedly.
Macaulay’s war had been intense too, but tragic rather than ecstatic in its intensity; if she had dwelt in the present moment, then the moment itself had threatened to engulf her in sorrow and pain. She found the prospect of post-war London as dispiriting as Bowen, Greene and Yorke. However she experienced less of a disjunction between war and peace, embarking instead on a period of gradual recovery.
It was Spiel who learnt to inhabit the post-war present most successfully; Spiel, who had found the war itself miserable and unrelenting, who was able to have a better experience of peace than of war and who found in post-war Vienna the suspended present that the others had found in wartime London.
For all five writers, if intense experience was possible in the post-war world it was to be found outside England. Although for most people in Britain travel was severely restricted at this time, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Spiel all managed to journey to Europe. And if Europe was not always feasible, then Ireland was. Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke all made trips to Ireland in the years following the war, enjoying the relative plenty still possible in a country that had experienced the past six years as merely an ‘Emergency’. This was a period of deciding how and where to live in the post-war world. Journeys outside Britain were voyages of exploration or return, which offered a chance to try out potential destinations and ways of life. They also presented the opportunity to inspect the landscapes left behind by war and to assess how the world had changed.
During the war, Londoners had become acclimatised to the black and white landscape of their city. In wartime at least, the monochrome streets were rendered briefly beautiful by strange lighting effects. Bomb sites glowed yellow, red and pink in the fire and under searchlights; ruins turned familiar landscapes into odd, other-worldly scenes. But now the greyscale city became more monotonous. The gashed holes and crumbling ruins were bleakly depressing rather than dramatically beautiful, except in areas such as the City of London, where plants had begun to sprout amid the still ghostly, empty streets. And the colourless feel was reinforced by the continued austerity. Rationing was tightened in February 1946 to release supplies for the British Zone in Germany; even bread was rationed in May. In the winter of 1946 Britain was hit by dangerously severe cold weather, widespread power cuts, labour strikes and a fuel crisis.
For these five writers, to leave Britain was to be jolted awake by ruins on a less human, more frightening scale in Germany or Austria, or to be rejuvenated by the colours of southern Europe, or soothed by the dreaminess of the Irish coast and countryside. For Bowen, the greyness of London could be forgotten amid the green of Ireland. Here the ruins were older and more romantic; the wistful landscape evoked the grandeur of a past that was being neglected in London, where a new world was insistently being forged. This was Ireland’s appeal for the English as well; Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were all relieved to escape to a country where time seemed slower and nature more luxuriantly green. They all enjoyed the continued opulence of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel and the relative ease and plenty of the Irish countryside. And Macaulay was also more energetically awakened by a trip to the coast of Spain and Portugal, where she swam in one glittering bay after another, rediscovering the sensual pleasures of water and sunlight.
Like Macaulay, Spiel was reawakened by travel, though for her it was the total destruction of Vienna and Berlin that enabled her mental renewal. The very horror of the ruined landscapes ended a period of anaesthetisation, convincing her that the most exhilarating experiences in the post-war world were to be found as a British subject occupying a defeated, desecrated European city. Greene and Bowen were less enamoured of post-war Vienna than Spiel was, but they too were excited by the chance to experience history in occupied Vienna, revolutionary Prague and humiliated Paris. In Europe and in Ireland the intense moment of the war in London that had ended in the spring of 1945 could be recaptured; pockets of time could be hollowed out of these new and strange landscapes.
16
‘The magic Irish light and the soft air’
Elizabeth Bowen’s return to Ireland, 1945
Shortly after VJ Day, Elizabeth Bowen returned home to Ireland. She and Alan arrived by boat in the south, steaming up the estuary of the river Suir and landing at Waterford, where they were greeted by rows of high decaying buildings along the quay and a smell of wood smoke in the damp morning air. Elizabeth was ready to leave behind the ruins in London and return to a country whose decay had begun centuries earlier and whose ruins blended unobtrusively and romantically into the landscape.
There was no doubt that this was a homecoming. ‘It is impossible’, Elizabeth Bowen wrote in a 1946 essay entitled ‘Ireland makes Irish’, ‘to be in this small vivid country and not of her . . . What has proved so
winning, so holding, is, I think, the manner of life here – life infused with a tempo and temperament bred of the magic Irish light and the soft air.’
Soon after her arrival in August, Elizabeth announced to Charles that Ireland, now that she had come back, seemed ‘very amiable and good and sweet’. During the war, Elizabeth had been a Londoner who often identified with England. That had changed on the day of the 1945 election, when she decided that it was an advantage to be Anglo-Irish and to disassociate herself from the situation in England. She told Charles that she was happy to ‘belong to a class, that potted at by the Irish and sold out by the British, has made an art of maintaining its position in vacuo’. As a result, she felt entitled to escape again now. ‘I stare at the outside of this house and think my ancestors didn’t care a damn about English politics, and how right they were.’
Elizabeth appreciated the Irish because, unlike the English, they were responding to peace with straightforward enthusiasm.
Quite illicitly – I mean, in view of their having been neutrals – everybody is enjoying peace madly; going about with shining and beaming faces. In fact the Irish are the only people I have met so far who are really just getting 100% kick out of world peace. They also remark with justifiable smugness that they always knew this war would end up in Bolshevism, and they are gladder than ever they kept out of it.
It took impressive insouciance on the part of the Irish to enjoy the peace unequivocally. After Hitler’s death at the end of April, de Valera had somewhat ignominiously followed official protocol for neutral countries by formally offering his condolences to the German Minister in Dublin. As far as the British were concerned, Ireland now had no right to celebrate the peace. Churchill tempered the jubilatory note of his VE Day broadcast with a taunt at ‘the action of Mr de Valera’ who, ‘so much at variance with the temper and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battle-front to prove their ancient valour’, had denied the Allies access to the ports. ‘This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we would have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish forever from the earth.’ De Valera retaliated, shocked by Churchill’s suggestion that given sufficient necessity Britain might have been forced to violate Ireland’s neutrality, by accusing Churchill of disregarding the autonomy of small nations in a manner comparable to Hitler. He nonetheless thanked Churchill for avoiding the temptation on this occasion. It was hard for the strong to be just to the weak ‘but acting justly always has its rewards’.
Unlike Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen did not grudge her compatriots their moment of glory. Politically, she had now lost patience with England as well as Ireland; personally, she was grateful that the Irish at least were entering the post-war era with style and gaiety. Elizabeth was also appreciative of the comparative luxury available in rural Cork. Here at least, Ireland did seem to be the land of plenty it was portrayed as during the war. Elizabeth informed Charles that although there was not much soap (a deficit remedied by the supplies he sent from Canada), there was, thanks to the kindness of friends, plenty of cream, peaches, eggs, meat, lobsters and butter. ‘The sense of profusion, ease, courtesy, leisure, space drips like warm honey over one’s nerves,’ she added gratefully, though she was aware that elsewhere in the country things were still as bad as in England. ‘The food in all Co Cork houses (other than mine where it is rather haphazard) is simply marvellous,’ she boasted in September,‘swimming in cream and cakes and hot scones running with melted butter. I suppose, strictly, Irish country house life is the last form of comfortable, old-fashioned existence left anywhere in Europe. How absolutely furious it would make the British.’ Most of all, Elizabeth appreciated the silence of Bowen’s Court because it gave her the imaginative space she needed to write and the leisure to think, uninterrupted, about Charles. ‘This house’, she wrote to him shortly after her arrival, ‘was built by that long-ago, unconscious Bowen for you and me to be happy in. That July when you and I were here it reached its height. It will again when you’re back. I often wonder what time of year that will be.’
Elizabeth had arrived at the house with Alan and, practically, they were in the process of arranging their future there together. She told William Plomer that their plans were fluid. They still had Clarence Terrace but had sublet the top floors to a BBC couple. Alan’s health was deteriorating. One of his eyes had been bad since the First World War, when he had suffered from trench poisoning, and he now had a cataract in the other eye. He also had a weak heart, which was exacerbated by his weight and heavy drinking. Now he resigned from the BBC and took up a new job as educational adviser for the gramophone and record company EMI. This would allow him to be in Ireland more and the current plan was to move most of their furniture to Bowen’s Court and to base themselves there.
But for Elizabeth it was a large and dreamy enough house to contain both her actual life with Alan and her imagined life with Charles. Over the course of the summer, she settled down into a routine of sleepily repetitive days, writing, gardening and dreaming. She wrote in the morning; she cut down nettles after tea; and, writing to Charles, she was able to inscribe him in the rhythm of her days. ‘It is a drowsy late-August afternoon,’ she wrote, ushering him into the scene. ‘I am writing in the library with the windows open. One large blue bottle fly is bumbling about the ceiling: outdoors there is a hum of unspecified insects in the trees. The sky is overcast, but there is a sort of sheen of obstructed sunshine on the heavy dark-green trees and the grass.’
In Ireland, Elizabeth could take stock of her feelings since Charles’s departure in January. She looked back on her summer in London as a miserable nightmare, which had culminated in the election. Since then she had been feeling aggressive and disaffected: ‘I can’t dis-obsess myself from the feeling that democracy has celebrated its victory by being had for a mutt in a big way.’ In her disappointment about the election, Elizabeth was in line with many of her friends and social class. But the intensity of her reaction was unusual; few of her friends responded to the results by being physically sick. The election had become imbued with all the desperate helplessness of her longing for Charles. This was a summer that she would always remember with repugnance. ‘Like when one’s inside is upset, everything has disagreed with me. I have desired nothing (that I could have) and enjoyed nothing.’ She dated the nightmare as beginning in January, with Charles’s departure.
Now, Elizabeth was learning to be happy again. ‘Right or wrong, I cannot tell you how well all this agrees with me,’ she told Charles in September. She could now admit to him the scale of her unhappiness during the summer. ‘I really was getting into a most odd state in London, Charles. I don’t know what would have happened if I had stayed there much longer.’ She revealed that she had woken up almost every morning in floods of tears. And at times she had caught herself groaning aloud with exasperation.
Escaping to a place where she was able to disassociate herself from English politics, she was also learning strategies to survive Charles’s absence. The most effective was to ensconce herself, even more than she had in June, in the imaginary life they shared. ‘To one person you are an entire world,’ Elizabeth wrote to Charles at the beginning of September. In this letter she admits that, since January, she has been living on the vague hope (‘a hope I never openly formulated, but clung to’) that he might reappear. Now that she had left London, she could begin to live once again in the present, and it was a present which could include Charles even in his absence. ‘I don’t know how I should live if it were not for letters,’ she told him.
How would one not (as you say), without the beloved evidence of a letter, come to torment oneself with the fear that love and the entire world of life that surrounds it was an illusion, subjective, brain-spun. As it is, the unfolding of a letter from you, the whole cast and shape of the handwriting on the paper, even before I have begun to read what is written, gives me a sort of rush of nearne
ss.
Writing to Charles enabled Elizabeth to imagine their shared existence at Bowen’s Court. Receiving his letters allowed her to picture herself with him in Canada.
The hour – day or evening – in which you write, the things round you, the Ottawa bells ringing (like when you wrote last) envelops me. Partly, of course, it stirs up an agonising restlessness. But the happiness, the whole sense and aura of you is worth that.
Although she had never been there, she felt nostalgic for the early autumn Ottawa weather, with its crisp air and red leaves. She was also envisaging the life they could share in New York and finding that the fantasy evoked the make-believe lives she had imagined while looking out at the same Irish countryside as an only child; ‘a life lived to the last detail, so real one could hear curtains rustle in imaginary rooms, and street-sounds in a city one was not in.’
There is a sense in which, cut off from her London life, Elizabeth was living with Charles. Writing to him, reading and rereading his letters, picturing him in the house in which they had been so happy together, she came close to sharing her life with him. All this time, Elizabeth was in fact living with Alan; but it was a marriage that gave her the mental space to keep Charles almost permanently in her mind. ‘I have felt particularly near you all this last week,’ she wrote to him; ‘so much so that sometimes I can’t bear to be spoken to; as though someone else had come into the room when we were together.’ She could feel his presence and she could hear his voice: ‘It wakes me up, sometimes, in the night when I’m asleep.’