The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  But at the same time, Elizabeth was fighting continued sadness and fear. In the letter where she mentioned being woken by Charles’s voice in the night, Elizabeth attempted to advise him on the question of whether to live in Europe or Canada, though she was aware that the ‘fors and againsts’ were maddeningly complicated and that it was hard for her to be dispassionate. She could see that he needed to use the full force of his brain, and that this was more possible in Ottawa. On the other hand, she could not bear the thought of his suppressing his imagination and sensuality, and was convinced that he had ‘a power to live through feeling and apprehension which makes you in nature more an artist or a poet than any orthodox artist or poet I have ever known.’ She was worried that in Canada he was losing touch with the artist and the poet and therefore with the lover. ‘And, how can you or I live without love? Without that, one feels an exile any place that one is.’ She herself felt exiled, even at Bowen’s Court. As always, Elizabeth’s fears about Charles were entwined with her anxieties about post-war Europe. She longed for the new Europe to crystallise so that Charles could find a home in which his whole nature could be fulfilled, but worried that it would take years. ‘War brutalised physical life; post-war seems to dissipate, in a way that is almost brutalising, psychic life.’

  Elizabeth was right to worry about the hardening of Charles’s heart. On the same day that she was writing this letter, he was reflecting in his diary that he had become inured to life without her. ‘I don’t think of E as much as I did. I don’t even think about myself.’ Like her, he feared his own petrification: ‘How long can I stand this midday light of commonplace common sense which is the light of middle age? How long can I stand the neatness and emptiness of my life? And in a way I am quite content.’ In this first post-war autumn, the pattern of their long-distance love affair was established. There were times when both Elizabeth and Charles believed that they loved each other equally. But Charles, unlike Elizabeth, lost the sense of powerful togetherness during their separations. She could live in the imaginary world created by their letters, reinforcing it through her novels, with their intense, consuming love affairs. He was unable to believe in the fairy tale of their love without her being present to give it a tangible reality. And when his feelings for Elizabeth proved too complicated to assimilate, he diverted himself by indulging in easier liaisons with younger women.

  Meanwhile, during the brief periods when she was not thinking about Charles, Elizabeth continued to distract herself with fierce sessions of violent gardening. Even when she felt melancholy and exiled without love, she could be engrossed and soothed by the everyday, concrete problems of the house. Writing to William Plomer, she described this as a process of rejuvenation.

  I came over here feeling like death, full of visitations and repugnances, but am feeling much better now. I have worked like a black out of doors (hewing down nettles and undergrowth, clearing woods) which was just what I wanted, and hardly laid pen to paper or finger to type-writer . . . I think I have the makings of a better forester than gardener: plenty of brute strength and aggression instinct, but the reverse of green fingers – in fact almost anything I plant dies.

  Elizabeth was also engaging in the life of her community, as it reawakened after the war. She was decorating the church in preparation for the Harvest ceremony, arraying it with beets, dahlias, turnips, carrots, michaelmas daisies. This was the first successful harvest since the war, and Elizabeth took it seriously. She persuaded her friend Jim Gates to play hymns on the organ, and put considerable energy into singing ‘Come ye thankful people, come’ to a congregation comprising the farmers and their wives. Despite her long periods of absence, she had a close relationship with many of her neighbours. In October, during a ‘cigarette famine’ in which no shop for a thirty-mile radius could provide supplies, she reported to Charles that a rumour must have circulated that she was in danger of madness, because a succession of unexpected people suddenly appeared and handed her their private supplies: the blacksmith, the rector, the chemist, the Master of Fox Hounds all sent small parcels of three or four battered, musty cigarettes to restore her sanity.

  In the afterword to Bowen’s Court she describes this first autumn spent in the house as a charmed period, when for the first time she saw the last of the leaves hang glistening in the transparent woods or flittering on the slopes of the avenues.

  The rooks subsided after their harvest flights; in the gale season one or two gulls, blown inland, circled over the lawns. I heard the woods roaring, and, like pistol shots, the cracking of boughs.

  This is a description of surprised discovery. For years, she writes, the house had been empty at this season. Elizabeth herself had only spent extended periods in the house in spring, summer and winter. But it is also a description of desolation. Elizabeth’s happiness remained fragile, relying, always, on her continued existence in Charles’s mind and on his in hers.

  ‘Yes, I have been and am (as you must have felt) infinitely happier here than I am in London,’ she admitted to him in November, after he had told her, to her disappointment, that they would not see each other until January. ‘At the same time it’s a life that must have something in its core – something not it. You and my love for you are in the core, or are the core. If you were dead or lost, or if I were confronted by having no prospect of seeing you again, I could not bear life here.’ In Bowen’s Court, more than anywhere else, her ‘heart and imagination and nerves and senses’ were exposed; if the inner part of her life died, she would leave the house and never return. And now, she was praying that nothing would prevent their meeting in January. ‘I love you so much. I don’t think I can go on living much longer without you.’

  Charles did make it to London in January 1946, and stayed for two months, attending meetings of the General Assembly of the United Nations. After a year apart, Elizabeth and Charles once again returned to the ease of a day-to-day relationship. Arriving back in Ottawa at the end of February, Charles abandoned his habitual self-protective hardness and admitted that he believed again in love. ‘I see now’, he wrote in his diary, ‘that what I feel for E with all its imperfections (on my side) is the “Love of my Life” and that I must never hope to find that again. Any other love will have to be of a different kind.’ Settling back into London life with Charles removed, Elizabeth returned to letters as ‘a substitute for being alive’. ‘Yes, certainly you are my life,’ she wrote to him matter-of-factly. ‘I have felt and still feel as though I were not here – in this room, in this house, in London – at all; but as though I had crossed the air over the Atlantic with you, and were now following you round Ottawa, from place to place.’

  For two weeks after Charles’s departure, Elizabeth did not leave the house at all, detained inside by jaundice and then by snow and ice. She was dejected and bewildered without him, and she was still depressed by the politics of post-war Britain. There was even a committee set up to decide the future of the Regent’s Park Georgian terraces, which she worried would decree that they were too badly damaged to be worth repairing and should be pulled down. ‘That they should do so exceeds one’s most horrific imaginations of the brave new world,’ she complained. She also felt claustrophobic at home. Alan had been through a work crisis, having turned down a job liaising between the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, and was driving Elizabeth crazy ‘ramping round and round my room at intervals having regrets and conscience-storms’, a ‘poor tortured creature’ distracted only by a bottle of rye fortuitously posted by Charles from Canada.

  Even for those who were not trapped at home with jaundice, London at the start of 1946 was a depressing place. Many of the wartime bomb sites remained in ruins. The economy had been badly hit by the abrupt withdrawal of American Lend-Lease funds the previous August. As a result of the huge debt owed to America all production went for export. Meanwhile, confidence in the government had been reduced by a dockworkers’ strike in October, which left food supplies stranded at British ports. When rationing was tightene
d in February it became clear that it would be some time before the pre-war quality of life resumed. Henry Yorke attempted to cheer himself up by bringing in Goronwy Rees to the London office of Pontifex as a director. This was a time when Yorke was starting to drift apart from many of his close friends. Anthony Powell and his wife had decided to stop trying to see him because of his churlish behaviour at a dinner party shortly after the end of the war. But Yorke remained close to Rees, despite his sympathy for Rosamond Lehmann when Rees jilted her in 1941. Indeed, Yorke had invited Rees to stay in Rutland Gate not long after Rosamond herself had departed, when Rees was posted to London in his work for the GHQ Home Forces in 1942. Rees was one of the few people with whom Yorke was happy to discuss his writing, and his presence at Pontifex now promised to integrate the usually disparate aspects of Yorke’s life.

  For his part, Rees was happy to spend his mornings at Pontifex. He was now comfortably married to Margie Morris, with whom he had already had two children. Margie, like Dig Yorke, was willing to countenance infidelity, informing her daughter Jenny that she looked on her husband rather like a favourite cat: ‘You see, with a cat, you like to see it go out in the garden and enjoy itself and then you are very pleased to see it again when it comes in.’ Rees’s experiences of lying to multiple women had stood him in good stead for his work at SIS, where each afternoon he was now secretly assessing and evaluating information gathered by British agents for the Political Section. Pontifex provided a useful explanation for his current whereabouts, and the work was not arduous. According to Mark Wyndham, Yorke’s cousin, who was also working for the business at this time, Yorke liked Rees to be there because he had a ‘much bigger brain than any of us’ and was prepared to oppose Yorke’s father. Rees moved from job to job within the firm, first handling advertising, then allocating newly made machinery to clients. The work was fuelled by alcohol. Yorke left for the pub every day at 11.30, where he would drink two pints before moving on to gin. By lunchtime Rees would join him. Wyndham described Yorke as sitting sipping his gin and making up stories about the pub regulars, as well as gossiping with Rees about mutual friends and about the typists and accountants in the office. Yorke was getting into a daily pattern which was dominated by drink, though he still managed to write in the evenings.

  While Yorke was assuaging his loneliness with drink, Charles Ritchie tried to cheer himself up in Canada with ‘Sex Excesses’. That April he catalogued the symptoms in his diary as ‘rapid heart action, sense of guilt, feverish erotic spasms’, as well as ‘coarsening of sympathy’ and ‘good timing in dancing’. Elizabeth Bowen hid herself away once again in Bowen’s Court, though she was becoming so lonely sometimes that she wondered if she was going mad. Day-dreaming that Charles was arriving at the airport and she was driving there to pick him up, she asked him ‘why shouldn’t one be able to be happy’, insisting that ‘love does matter more than anything else in the world. If more people were as right-minded and as happy as you or I are capable of being, the world would be a very different place.’ But as long as she was in Ireland, she could sustain herself on daydreams. Rereading his letters in bed she found that ‘there’s extraordinary happiness in the fact of being in love – however much the sufferings of separation are’. She hated leaving Bowen’s Court because it meant leaving behind all the vague happy hours in which she had wandered around the house thinking about Charles, and in London she felt frayed and pin-pricked.

  In October 1946, Elizabeth and Charles at last spent a week together in Bowen’s Court. They met in Paris, where Charles was one of the advisers to the Canadian Delegation at the Peace Conference convened to formulate peace treaties between the wartime Allies and Italy and the Balkan States. Elizabeth was accredited to the Conference as a journalist. Glimpsing her ‘bent head and the line of her neck and shoulders through the window’, Charles was touched, and felt himself ‘sliding back towards her’. Together they wandered around the tree-lined walks of the Luxembourg Gardens and dined in small restaurants on the Left Bank before travelling once again to the more peaceful setting of Bowen’s Court. After Charles returned to Canada, Elizabeth sat in Clarence Terrace picturing him ‘forging, with every minute, further and further away’ ensconced in the luxury of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, and felt torn in pieces, as though she were being drawn after him. ‘How happy we have been – and more than happy,’ she wrote; ‘I feel welded together with you forever.’ She commanded him to ‘be happy, and keep me inside yourself as I keep you inside myself’, supposing that ‘eventually we’ll grow old together’, as at present they were growing up together. She spent the next week reliving their days in Ireland, working away at The Heat of the Day and drinking anything to hand. She was also busy with social engagements – with C. V. Wedgwood, Cyril Connolly and Clarissa Churchill, among others – and with her usual journalism and reviews. Indeed, she was amazingly productive during this period, reviewing three books a week for Tatler as well as writing her novel. Nonetheless she remained in a state of submerged sadness, waking each day with ‘a feeling of loss and fear’.

  Elizabeth Bowen’s own sadness went into a review of Rose Macaulay’s They Went to Portugal that was published in her regular column in Tatler at the end of October. Here Bowen lamented the decline of civilisation, which Britain had supposedly fought to preserve. ‘We are confronted by dilapidation (more depressing, because subtler in its effects, than out-and-out ruin), by long, heart-breaking stories and short tempers.’ Civilisation itself was a matter of high spirits and was sustained by a blend of vision and will. The British now needed it for its renewing qualities, which meant that civilised books had a particular value in a disillusioned post-war world. They Went to Portugal, which, as Bowen knew, had emerged from just such a moment of renewal, was civilised and could be civilising.

  In November Bowen continued her manifesto for contemporary literature with an enthusiastic review of Henry Yorke’s Back. Here she paid tribute to Yorke as one of the great writers of their day. Unlike other novelists, who were prepared to borrow from their contemporaries or forebears, Yorke was an original writer who seemed to have read no other novels.

  Henry Green is one of the living novelists whom I admire most; also, I consider him to be nearer than almost any other to the spirit and what one might call the central nerve of our time (though there are, as you may at once protest, a dozen others who seem more widely topical).

  Elizabeth Bowen enjoyed her role as an arbiter of literary taste, but the effort of reading three books every week could prove exhausting and unrelenting. And the pleasure of these public pontifications did little to distract her from private sadness. The only real moment of lucidity during her stay in London came during a performance of King Lear starring Laurence Olivier. She saw it on her own and emerged ‘feeling dead tired but pure’: ‘The effect of Lear on me or rather on some part of my sorrow was that of a hot compress on a boil – it “drew” something to the surface and made it burst,’ she told Charles. In this period of grey numbness, Lear seems to have offered Elizabeth clarification by allowing the world to be tragic rather than merely disappointing. Here was a man bereft of home, love, identity and sight, baring an extremity of sorrow to the barren heath. Lear’s suffering could lend a dignity to Elizabeth’s own. After weeks of tense anguish she could give way to sadness and wail alongside him. But the clarity enabled by Lear was brief and it was a relief to return to Ireland in December. Existence in Bowen’s Court was now ‘all lopsided’ without Charles, but he still seemed to inhabit the house. His voice woke her in the night; he was present at her writing table in the library.

  In January 1947 Charles began a three-year post in Paris as Counsellor to the Canadian Embassy. Elizabeth was now able to visit him periodically (in February he recorded in his diary a very happy weekend spent ‘huddled over the weak radiator and the whisky bottle or on the enormous “made for love” bed’ of his flat on the Boulevard St Germain) and Charles became a fairly frequent guest at Bowen’s Court. Although Charles was
happy in Paris, he worried that returning to the city of his student days as a middle-aged official was like paying a social call on a former mistress. And the city had aged alongside him, her spirit contracted by sufferings and scarcities. Despite Elizabeth’s frequent presence, Charles was still busy with other love affairs. ‘Is it another illusion or could it be “love”?’ he asked in April, shaken by ‘the treacherous sweet poison of this spring’. ‘Oh God what a fool I am – at forty.’ ‘The trouble is’, he reflected in September, ‘that when I begin to ask myself the question: What woman do I love? I am overcome by a sort of mental dizziness.’ All along he was writing passionate letters to Elizabeth. ‘Your letter came yesterday morning and made me very happy,’ she told him in October. ‘Most of all, because of you I am happier than I’ve ever been in my life,’ she assured him. She was wondering why it had been accepted by Anglo-Saxon culture that ‘being in love should come so early, almost before one is oneself at all, and then be expected to be put behind and done with?’; she felt entitled to this resurgence of joy in her forties.

  Charles visited Bowen’s Court in November, and Elizabeth was able to sustain herself with memories once again, insisting that he should do likewise. ‘Your beloved letter came on Tuesday. How near each other we are. How deeply I love you: this is such a joy, such a joy we share.’ ‘Love isn’t really an illusion,’ she told him, addressing his doubts on his own terms, ‘it’s a reality. As far as I’m concerned, it’s you.’ For her part, she had lived with him every moment since his departure, and did not feel lonely. Her certainty lasted through into December – ‘the feeling of closeness I’ve had to you here, day and night, since you left has been extraordinary’ – though she missed him constantly, and longed to see him again. In December she left for London, and as always she hated shutting up the house in which the continuous daydream of their love could unfold so easily. ‘Every time I have to do it I feel as though something died in me – or even as though I became a degree less virtuous.’ She was always fearful that she would die in England and not come back.