The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  However, once Alan died, this became harder. Charles is as central to A World of Love as to The Heat of the Day but he is present primarily as an absent figure. The world of love is an isolating one and the memory of Guy is not enough to protect the women who loved him from pain. Yet if the book is partly an exploration of whether Elizabeth would be happier without Charles, then the answer is that in fact life without Charles is inconceivable. Years after his death, Guy is just as present as if he were alive. For Elizabeth there could be no question of leaving Charles, because by this point her entire imaginative landscape was bound up with him. To give him up would be to give up not only seeing him but also writing to him, which would be to renounce a mode of being in which she was never completely alone because she was always living partly in the terms in which she would describe her experiences to him. To leave him and to begin again with someone else would be to relinquish her own inner world. The life that resulted would be far lonelier than a life in which she was merely physically absent from the man she loved much of the time.

  And on Charles’s side, every time that he rejoined Elizabeth in Ireland or London, he stepped back into her fairy tale. He could escape it in her absence but not in her presence, and he never stopped seeking her presence. He was aware that he was diminished without her; that she offered not only the vanity-pleasing affirmation of intense love, but a version of himself in which he was finer, larger and more imaginative than he could be without her. ‘E has a miraculous and terrifying capacity to bring one to life, to awaken other desires and inspire belief in other possibilities in oneself,’ he would observe in his diary in November 1956. He was no longer sexually attracted to her, but he was attracted to himself, reflected in her eyes. And though desire had faded, he found her beautiful, and found the beauty all the more compelling because it was a blend of her physical appearance, her voice, her writing and her house, all converging into her luminous presence which allowed any moment in her company to be alive with possibility.

  After reading the new novel, Charles felt himself being gradually lured once more ‘into her “World of Love” ’. He and Elizabeth sat before the fire and drank whisky, sinking into that ‘unreal happiness’ they shared. Looking back on the remote joy of his visit a week later, Charles was increasingly convinced that this ‘middle-aged paradise’ was the only paradise which was now not a false one. Elizabeth, meanwhile, told him that she was still living in the happiness of their perfect week. ‘Your sweetness, and our hours, and your dear presence.’ Yet for Charles, the crisis continued. In April he wrote in his diary the letter he would write Elizabeth if he still dared to tell her everything; ‘if your hatred did not frighten me (that hatred is eating into you, you said it was like a cancer)’. He felt possessed by her, worried that their love had ‘twined roots of good and evil’ and that they would end by destroying each other. This, he wrote in August, was a ‘sad, disturbing, fearful love which I half hate and without which I am not alive’. Yet every day they spent together remained precious; ‘patches and tatters of complete life together’.

  In the months that followed the publication of A World of Love, Elizabeth attempted to follow the advice she had given herself in the disappointment essay and to expect less of Charles. In a letter to him in January 1956 she asked how he could ever think that he could disappoint her. ‘You must really realise’, she commanded him, ‘that loving you is like being absorbed in something that though it never changes always moves forward.’ In other people’s relationships, the first wild flame gave place to something steadier; for her there was always the flame. Yet ten days later, she was so lonely for him that she was ‘nearly off my head: it undermines my physical morale’. ‘The fact is Charles’, she told him in February, ‘that saying goodbye to you this last time has made me feel as though my inside had been torn out.’ She was walking from room to room by herself, crying out ‘Charles, Charles, Charles’. But her spirits were revived by another of his visits in May, and writing to him afterwards she invoked the continual present they had experienced in wartime to bind him to her once more:

  These last ten days are not the past, they are a sort of eternity. Oh you beloved Charles, you beloved love. Let us neither of us forget, for a single moment, what reality feels like and eternity is.

  See notes on Chapter 22

  23

  ‘The world my wilderness, its caves my home’

  Rose Macaulay

  In July 1949 Rose Macaulay followed Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke in visiting post-war Ireland. Her trip, unlike theirs, was an act not of hopeful escape but of sorrowful pilgrimage. Accompanied by Marjorie Grant Cook, she was visiting the lost homeland of her dead lover. On 15 July Rose and Marjorie spent a night with Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court. The next day they went to the sea at Glengariff, where Rose was delighted to find ‘a lovely little bay, with little islands scattered about it, and woody shores and rocks – lovely for bathing’. They were making their way around the coast towards Loughrea, where she would visit the cathedral where Gerald O’Donovan had begun his career, seeing for herself the stained-glass windows he had commissioned all those years ago.

  This journey to Ireland was the first stage in a three-year exploration of the ruins of the world which comprised the research for Rose Macaulay’s compendious The Pleasure of Ruins (1953). Since Gerald’s death, Rose had taken on the desolate persona she had ascribed to herself in ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’. Bereft of both her home and her lover, she was now ‘a ghost, without attachments or habitation’. Accepting her own ghostliness, she began to haunt ruins. At first, she scrambled around the ruins of her own flat and of the City of London. The younger novelist Penelope Fitzgerald later recollected alarming experiences of clambering after Rose when she joined her on these expeditions, keeping Rose’s lean figure just in view as she ‘shinned down a crater, or leaned, waving, through the smashed glass of some perilous window’. At this stage Rose was seeking a physical manifestation for her own spiritual state, but there was already an element of intellectual quest in her explorations. In an article in Time and Tide in October 1940 she described wartime Londoners as ‘cave-fanciers and ruin-gogglers’, morbidly fascinated by ruins. ‘ “There’s a good one in my street,” we say, proud of our own monuments. “Makes you think, doesn’t it,” we say. But just what it makes us think, I am not sure.’ As a ruin-goggler, Rose Macaulay was attempting to answer this question, and was becoming fascinated by listing and cataloguing the flowers sprouting in the ruins, pressing, preserving and labelling the cuttings she collected during her expeditions. Then, in her 1947 trip to Spain and Portugal, she began to find in ruins a consolation for grief; a reminder that everything eventually passed. The ruins also offered an aesthetic pleasure which gradually enabled Macaulay to move beyond the anguish that made her wish, in 1941, that she could have been bombed herself. ‘A seed can lodge and sprout in any crack or fissure,’ Henry Yorke had told Rosamond Lehmann during the war. It took Macaulay longer to believe this, but when she did her consolation was more lasting than Yorke’s.

  Flowers growing in a bombsite in the City of London, c. 1943

  Macaulay made her visit to Ireland straight after she had submitted the manuscript for her first post-war novel, The World My Wilderness (1950). This is a book built on the ruins of love and set in the ruins of post-war London. It ‘is about the ruins of the City’, Macaulay wrote to Hamilton Johnson, the priest who became a friend at this time, ‘and the general wreckage of the world that they seem to stand for. And about a rather lost and strayed and derelict girl who made them her spiritual home.’ Although she ascribed it to Anon, Macaulay wrote the epigraph to the novel herself:

  The world my wilderness, its caves my home,

  Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,

  Its chasm’d cliffs my castle and my tomb . . .

  In 1949 she was still seeking a tomb in which to bury herself and she hoped to find it in the London wilderness, roaming its weedy wastes a
nd chasm’d cliffs.

  Typically, Macaulay splits herself between two heroines in this novel, an older and a younger woman, Helen and Barbary. Barbary is the lost and derelict girl, while Helen is her forty-four-year-old mother, an English woman living in post-war France. Here she mourns the death of her second husband, Maurice, who was drowned by the local Resistance for collaborating with the Germans.

  Like Macaulay’s, Helen’s grief is private and unseen. Richie, her elder son, informed of the death in a brief and dry letter, does not know ‘if she greatly grieved or not’. In fact, Helen aches with unspoken want. When her small son, Roland, cries out for Barbary after her departure to England, Helen echoes his childish phrases in her mind – ‘Want Maurice. Maurice is coming never’ – before turning from the sea that had swallowed him up. Hungering for Maurice, her senses engulfed in an aching void, Helen attempts to fill the void and to stupefy the ache with artistic endeavours, reading, translating, painting and gambling. But the darkness merely deepens about her, ‘as if she were in a cave alone’.

  The image of the empty cave reflects Macaulay’s own post-war mental state. In the novel, as in actuality, the cavernousness in her mind finds a physical reality in wartime London, where Barbary is sent to stay with her father after the war. The ostensible reason for Barbary’s departure is that she has become uncivilised. Like so many Macaulay heroines, Barbary wanders scruffily around, failing to turn into a young lady. Her life on the outskirts of the Resistance during the war has trained her to steal, lie and catapult the police – habits which must be unlearned in London. But in fact Helen sends her daughter away partly because she believes that she has some responsibility for the drowning of Maurice. Helen finds Barbary’s presence difficult to bear, and has transferred the full force of her maternal love to Roland, who is Maurice’s child.

  For Barbary, missing her home in France, London is an unfriendly and strange habitat. She can only feel at home in the ruins of the City, finding a retreat in the caves and the wilderness. She enacts the epigraph of the novel, roaming through the ‘weedy wastes’ of London. These wanderings are sometimes made alone, but more often Barbary is accompanied by Raoul, Maurice’s son from his first marriage, who has also been sent off to stay with relatives in the hope of acquiring some civilised English manners. The two flit alongside ghosts ‘about dust-heaped, gaping rooms’. The ‘gaping shells, the tall towers, the broken windows into which greenery sprawled, the haunted, brittle beauty’ evoke the landscape of the French maquis, offering Barbary in particular a ‘spiritual home’. She and Raoul play at home-making, domesticating the caves by accumulating broken possessions. Trapped at a dinner party in her father’s house, she escapes into the darkness of the Embankment, and wonders what ‘the ruined waste lands looked like after dark’. She knows that it would be a strange and frightening landscape, but believes that it would still have the familiarity of ‘a place long known’, with the ‘clear dark logic of a dream’. Unlike the unshattered streets and squares, the ruins make ‘a lunatic sense’: ‘it was the country that one’s soul recognised and knew’.

  Rose Macaulay, consumed by secret, silent grief for Gerald O’Donovan, sought out landscapes that reflected her internal state of mind. Restless and anguished, she, like Barbary, recognised the shattered landscape of the London ruins as her spiritual home. In The Towers of Trebizond, she would find a peace in ruins, consoled by their beauty and longevity. By 1956, Rose’s own renewed religious sense enabled her to find in the ruins an intimation of the eternal which mitigated the force of intense individual suffering. This consolation is not yet present in the ruins of The World My Wilderness, which act as a more temporary refuge. Here, the haunted, brittle beauty of the desolate streets is juxtaposed onto the charged landscape of Blitz infernos. The flames that ignited Rose’s flat and brought on her wrenching knowledge that her lover was about to die become in this novel the tormenting flames of hell.

  Roaming the ghostly London ruins, Barbary is unable to escape the past. Macaulay herself would observe in The Pleasure of Ruins that the recent ruins wrought by the Second World War were less consoling than older ruins, caused by forgotten battles or merely by neglect. ‘New ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality.’ Barbary’s helpless anger and guilt find a physical reality in the fires of the Blitz, transformed into the landscape of a Catholic vision of hell. She has had very little exposure to Catholicism. A nominally Anglican childhood was followed by a period of cheerful paganism while living with Helen in France. ‘I can’t think,’ Helen says, ‘if people want Gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions.’ But Barbary is increasingly preoccupied with a Catholic idea of sin. Overweighed with unexpressed guilt about the murder of her stepfather, she regrets that heathens like herself cannot be forgiven because ‘we sin only against people, and the people stay hurt or killed’, where if she were a Catholic she could repent and be granted absolution.

  However, Catholicism brings with it the possibility of damnation and Barbary frightens Raoul with her obsession with hell. Together, they visit a ruined church where they find fragments of hymn books, torn and charred, which Barbary uses to read the Dies Irae. ‘ “Day of wrath,” she read aloud, “O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophet’s warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!” ’ She urges Raoul to repent. ‘You must repent, so that you don’t go to hell.’ She then goes on to preach in French about hellfire, making such vehement gestures that she falls and bruises her knee. Later, they come back to the church, armed with a portable radio, a Judgment Day painting and a black cat, to stage a full Sunday morning service. The radio plays jazz, Barbary sings self-abasing hymns from her torn hymn book, and Raoul holds the mewing, struggling kitten before the altar as a symbolic sacrificial offering. Both are unsurprised when a priest enters, instructing them to stop the noise, put down the kitten and swing the censer, because he is going to say mass.

  Obediently, Barbary and Raoul genuflect while the priest says the creed and then goes on to preach about hell. ‘We are in hell now,’ he says, with matter-of-factness comparable to Barbary’s own; ‘Fire creeps on me from all sides; I am trapped in the prison of my sins; I cannot get out, there is no rescue possible . . . I cannot move my limbs . . . the flames press on; they will consume my body, but my soul will live on in hell . . . Trapped, trapped, trapped; there’s no hope.’ Eventually his voice breaks, strangled in his throat, and he shudders to his knees, ‘his face in his scarred hands’. Barbary, crying, experiences a moment of clarity: ‘It was true, then, about hell; there was no deliverance.’ This Blitz-inspired vision of imprisonment in hell has confirmed her own.

  In The Pleasure of Ruins Macaulay goes on to reassure the reader that the Second World War ruins will not continue to smell of fire and mortality for long. ‘Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them.’ These are the flowers that Macaulay had catalogued during her wartime scrambles through the City of London. The World My Wilderness is set in this moment of transition and the task, for Barbary as for Macaulay herself, is to escape the flames of hellfire and dwell among trees. Macaulay makes this explicit by associating the ruined landscapes with the wasteland of Eliot’s 1922 poem, which she quotes throughout the novel. Her own epigraph is followed by an extract from The Waste Land, describing bats which ‘Whistled, and beat their wings’, ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’ and the ‘empty chapel, only the wind’s home’, with no windows and a door that swings. Early on, post-war London’s ‘broken habitations’ are explicitly connected to ‘stony rubbish’, and later the narrator describes the maze of little streets; the ‘scarred and haunted green and stone and brambled wilderness’ which, lying ‘about the margins of the wrecked world’, receives ‘the returned traveller into its dwellings with a
wrecked, indifferent calm’.

  Here, its cliffs and chasms and caves seemed to say, is your home; here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set; here you find the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depth of the earth, and that you have known elsewhere. ‘Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess . . .’ But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and from nowhere else.

  Eliot’s prophetic poem has taken on an eerie truth in post-war London. Here is the barbarism of war; here is the wrecked world. Eliot is asking if a redemption is possible within the spiritual wasteland of 1922 Europe. He assembles a plethora of texts and brings together opposed religious doctrines in the hope of shoring fragments against ruins and finding roots that clutch. Both Macaulay and Barbary seem to be searching for a similar consolation as they explore the physical ruins. Barbary, finding in them confirmation of hell, fails to locate any secure roots. Detained by the police for stealing, she becomes dangerously ill, and starts to dream about the ruins. In her dreams, she runs down rocky corridors, leaping chasms, squirming into dark caves where she finds the Gestapo waiting for her. She lies among rocks and brambles and is ‘seized, bound, beaten, her arms twisted back, matches lit between her toes’. Always, there is ‘fear and blackness and red pain’. Consumed by excessive guilt, she can no longer find a spiritual home in the ruins. As a result, she is grateful to be packed off back to France, leaving the London wilderness behind. If anyone can comfort Barbary, it is Helen, who offers an earthly version of forgiveness: ‘It mattered between us once; but I don’t mean it to matter any more. I don’t think you or Raoul deliberately let Maurice be murdered.’