The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Where the ruins of London provided a physical equivalent for the pain of grief, the ruins of Trebizond offer a way to move beyond grief to a state where even sadness is endowed with a shimmering beauty. This beauty is crucial to The Towers of Trebizond, which is a religious novel that never negates the sensual beauty or the love at its heart. Writing to thank Rosamond Lehmann for a letter commending the novel, Rose Macaulay described it as ‘a book I have had in mind to write for a long time, the heart of the matter being my own story’. ‘Looking back,’ she wrote, ‘now I am getting old, I can’t not be glad of the past, in spite of knowing I behaved dishonestly and selfishly for so long. Love is so odd. It can’t help being everything at the time.’

  See notes on Chapter 23

  Coda

  In March 1955 Rose Macaulay accurately predicted her own death. ‘I have an intuition that I shall die in 3 years,’ she wrote to her sister Jean; ‘ie in 1958, so must bustle about and do a lot of things in the time. When do you expect to push off? My own death is very credible to me now, though it usen’t to be.’

  When she wrote this letter, Rose was finishing The Towers of Trebizond, the book that she had intended to write for a long time, and she meant it to be her final word. The novel was partly a testament to Hamilton Johnson: a proof of his influence over her, and of her commitment to her new vision of Christianity. Writing to him afterwards she assured him that she was confident that Laurie would encounter some influence to bring her churchwards: ‘she would not for very long be outside it’. But at the same time it was her final tribute to Gerald O’Donovan. ‘I can’t not be glad of the past,’ she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann. Laurie may end the novel on the verge of Christianity but, as yet, Laurie, like her creator, accepts love as everything. And the book is dominated by the presence of Vere, with his ‘wit and brains and prestige’, his ‘brilliance and delightfulness’, and by that togetherness in which peace flows about them like music. Even after she had written Hamilton Johnson letters regretting ‘the long years of low life’ she had lived, Rose could recover both the joy of love and the desolation of a death which had cut her off from life, leaving her ‘scattered adrift, lacking the coherence and integration of love’.

  Rose Macaulay may have regretted her own lowness, but she did not regret the joy, the sensuousness or the good-humoured enjoyment of life, and these were still evident in this novel. Laurie and Aunt Dot both bathe as enthusiastically as any Macaulay heroine; they inhabit a world in which camels love alongside humans, grumbling and stamping at love’s pains. And Rose herself continued to laugh and to bathe until her death in 1958. Indeed, she came to see swimming as a partly religious experience, diving into the Serpentine every Sunday on her way home from church. ‘A kind of shining peace prevails in both places,’ she informed Hamilton Johnson, happy to fuse her Christianity with good-natured pagan ritual.

  In 1955, Rose organised a lunch party at the Lansdowne Club to celebrate the marriage of her publisher, Mark Bonham-Carter, instructing all the guests to bring their swimming costumes. Only Bonham-Carter, Rosamond Lehmann and Rose herself actually swam, and Rosamond later described the manner in which Rose emerged, ‘her ice-blue eyes obliterated beneath a bathing helmet some sizes too large for her’, armed with an inflated rubber mattress which she cast upon the waters ‘with business-like dispatch’:

  Another moment, and her brisk commentary is rattling down as it were from ceiling-level: she has scampered up, up, out, to the outermost verge of the high-diving board. There I still see her figure indomitably poised: androgynous tall figure, flat as a shape cut out in white paper and blacked in to knees and shoulders; gaunt, comical, adorable – heroically topped with an antique martial casque. She is off, she has jumped feet first, clutching her nose; has cleft the chlorinated blue and sunk sheer as a pair of scissors to the very bottom of the white-tiled basin. She takes a long time to come up; indeed (having by now immersed myself with caution) I become slightly alarmed and haul her upwards by the shoulders. She thanks me cheerfully, and paddles round and round, sketching an old-fashioned side-stroke. Mark swims noiseless, watchful, amused, at a discreet distance. I had assumed Rose to be, like myself, an expert swimmer: it is not so. This fanatical amphibian is not at home in water. She explains this to me as if it had never been a bar to full enjoyment. ‘I’m the wrong shape, you see – too long, too thin. I never could remain at the correct angle for self-propulsion. Do swing my legs up.’ I do so. Down they fall again. Her laughter is so infectious that I laugh too; but I think: She simply isn’t safe; surely she could just go down and not surface again. How is it that a creature apparently so ill-suited to this element should sport in it so fearlessly? Also, her lips are blue. She clambers on to the mattress, stretches her peeled-wand limbs full length, and allows me to pull her from end to end of the bath. Almost dreamily – for her prim, somehow practical, academic accents had too much wit and crackle ever to sound dreamy – she ejaculates: ‘Oh, Rosamond dear, this is extraordinarily pleasant! I feel like Cleopatra in her barge.’

  In March 1958, the time Rose had appointed for her death, she was still living at full speed, although she was worried that one day her writing brain would become muddled, leaving her ‘unable to put words together properly, and writing awful sentences, and general low-grade nonsense’. In August, she was in Venice, fantasising about converting the native Catholics to Anglicanism. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she asked Anthony Powell, whom she bumped into walking along a canal. ‘I might well ask you the same question,’ he replied. ‘Oh, me?’ Rose said insouciantly. ‘I’m just on my way to the Black Sea.’

  That October, she was dead. On the morning of 30 October she telephoned the doctor to say that she was feeling ill. A few minutes after opening the door to him she suffered a fatal heart attack. ‘But we have all just seen her,’ Rosamond Lehmann wrote in disbelief; ‘just been talking to her!’ Rose Macaulay, who had wished in 1941 that she could have been bombed herself, died as a cheerful eccentric. She had lost everything in the war: all her possessions, the only man she ever loved and, with him, the passionate, sensual woman who had surfaced, in private, from beneath the veneer of the androgynous girl or the redoubtable old lady. After the war, the moment for joy had passed. But by clambering around the ruins of the world she had exorcised her own ghostliness, overcoming desolation through the quiet appreciation of beauty. And it was a vision of beauty that until the end was suffused with ardent human love.

  Rose Macaulay on her way to the Black Sea, 1958, photographed by Victor Glasstone

  After her death, Rose Macaulay was remembered affectionately by her friends. In a 1959 interview Elizabeth Bowen emphasised Rose’s role in contributing to her early success: ‘I had immense hope and encouragement from one writer, forever dear to me as a person, and that was Rose Macaulay.’ Elizabeth Bowen gave this interview at a time when she herself was beginning to come to terms with solitary middle age and when her life was starting to resemble aspects of Rose’s own. She, like Rose, was learning to take pleasure in the everyday and to move beyond her sadness at Alan’s death and her anguish at her continued separation from Charles. In 1958 she told William Plomer that she had enjoyed her fifties; it was the first epoch where she had liked being ‘grown up’ as much as she had expected to as a child. She was successful and she was in demand, though she could never earn quite enough to keep up Bowen’s Court, which had consistently drained away the mental and financial resources of the Bowens for the last two hundred years.

  Elizabeth Bowen’s essays anatomising disappointment were written during a period in which Elizabeth was adjusting her expectations of Charles. After Alan’s death, she hoped periodically that Charles would come to replace her husband in her life. The arguments she started in Bonn were pleas for Charles to recognise the significance of the relationship in his own mind. By 1957, Charles felt that he and Elizabeth had become calm. The scenes between them in Germany were not likely to begin again. That first year in Germany ‘was the last in
which the panics of youth played a part’. Now, their relationship had settled and he believed that they loved each other equally, though it showed in different ways.

  Nonetheless, Elizabeth remained bitter towards Sylvia and she continued to hope that Charles could play a more consistent role in her life. Since Alan’s death, Elizabeth had seen Bowen’s Court as the symbolic centre of her world; as both her home and her family. ‘We are a family,’ she wrote in a 1958 essay about her house, describing the writers congregating in the library at the end of the day. ‘In here, conversation sweeps, swoops, takes an unforeseeable course – by now the ribbed velvet arms of the chairs are rubbed to a gloss by the hands of excited talkers.’ Elizabeth hoped, always, that Charles saw its centrality too and that it could be both home and family for the two of them. ‘Welcome home,’ she said to Charles when he arrived at Bowen’s Court in May 1956. ‘E and I came home here for dinner and it was coming home,’ he observed in his diary the next day. ‘This is your house, ours, and it’s simply a matter of time till you’re back again,’ she wrote to him after his departure. In an essay on ‘The Idea of the Home’ she maintained that the ‘dependence on home is one of the few dependences which are not a weaning: on the contrary, this is an origin of strength’. As humans, we are completed ‘by what the home gives us – location. Identity would be nothing without its frame’. She was committed to the idea of the home and insisted that Charles should be too.

  Part of what Elizabeth needed from Charles was a financial commitment to keeping up Bowen’s Court. Despite regular stints of lecturing in America and a flurry of reviews and articles for high-paying magazines, Elizabeth was frequently in debt. In June she told him that she was going to have to sell, and that she was not sure ‘it really would break my heart if I did’. Now that he was back in Canada, she had less need of the house. ‘Its virtue to me these last years (while you’ve been in Europe) has consisted in its being our home.’

  ‘The trouble is’, Charles wrote in his diary after receiving her letter, ‘that it IS my home, but that I get the pleasure of it at her expense in money and worry.’ He considered offering her $1,000 a year but was worried that she wanted ‘to get out of it – out of her life there’. Without Charles’s visits, Elizabeth was growing bored in Ireland. ‘I suppose it’s the effect of hardening my heart,’ she wrote; ‘when one can no longer afford to support an illusion, one rather welcomes seeing it break down.’ The illusion she could no longer afford was a belief in the future of their love; she was hardening herself against disappointment.

  Elizabeth Bowen at Bowen’s Court, 1962, photographed by Slim Aarons

  In 1959 Elizabeth sold Bowen’s Court. A few months later, the new owner demolished the house. It was, she wrote in the 1963 afterword to Bowen’s Court, ‘a clean end’. Better that than one more Irish ruin and, through her book, the spirit of the house remained very much alive. The great and calming authority of the light and quiet around Bowen’s Court had endured beyond the war, when it had served as an illusion of ‘peace at its most ecstatic’. Now, it had also survived the physical demise of the house itself. ‘It remains with me now that the house has gone.’

  But this was the house that she had branded after Alan’s death as her next of kin. Though she would have other homes, she would never regain a family. At the end of her idiosyncratic 1960 travel guide, A Time in Rome, Bowen adopts an oddly personal voice as she describes her departure from Rome. Backs of houses waver into mists, stinging her eyes, and she is left feeling displaced and alone. ‘My darling, my darling, my darling,’ she writes. ‘Here we have no abiding city.’ In Bowen’s Court, Bowen recorded how in 1888 her father had put up a white marble memorial to her grandparents in the church next to the house. Below the two names was the quotation from Hebrews: ‘Here we have no abiding city, but we seek one to come’. In the valediction at the end of A Time in Rome, Elizabeth Bowen both mourns the demise of her house and portends the deaths of herself and Charles, united beyond the grave.

  While Elizabeth Bowen was facing her own homelessness, Hilde Spiel was coming to terms with the knowledge that she had failed to find a lasting home in London. The 1950s saw the gradual breakdown of Hilde and Peter’s marriage and the increasing dependency of Hilde on Hans Flesch-Brunningen. Ostensibly, Flesch remained a family friend. Most weekends, he came to stay on Saturday nights and spent his Sundays visiting parks with Hilde and the children. This was an arrangement fully accepted by Peter, who needed the weekends to make progress with his writing. Indeed, Peter dedicated his book Der Geist in der Despotie to Flesch in 1953. But all this time Hilde was starting to rely less on Peter and more on Flesch, coming to value quiet adoration more than the tempestuous passion provided by her husband.

  When Hilde was first warned about Peter’s violent fits of anger before their marriage, she had felt capable of standing up to him. She was beautiful, talented, desirable; she would rather suffer occasionally for the sake of passion than bind herself to someone who would passively admire her. But as Hilde herself lost strength, she was becoming less equipped to shake off Peter’s moods. Guests invited for dinner who disagreed with their host about questions of German literature or British politics would find themselves angrily asked to leave. Hilde’s sense of dignity was affronted. She wanted a quieter life in which she could be at the centre of a gentle circle of adoration. Part of Flesch’s allure was his chivalrous formality. Until he and Hilde finally married in 1972 they continued to address each other with the formal ‘Sie’. Even after their marriage, Hilde called her husband ‘Flesch’ or ‘Fleschy’. But despite this formality, in the 1950s the relationship developed from courtly companionship into a more passionate affair. Hilde’s son Anthony was often taken to meet Flesch and instructed not to tell his father about the encounters. Meanwhile Hilde was becoming increasingly vulnerable within her marriage. Questioned abruptly by her husband or son, she was liable to respond with tears.

  There were moments when Hilde and Peter’s relationship revived. In 1957 Peter wrote to thank Hilde for a holiday in the house she now owned in the Austrian countryside. ‘For the first time’, he said, ‘I was really heartbroken to have to go away.’ He had not been so happy for years. ‘It was so harmonious and smooth, everything sunny and lovely.’ Hearing that Hilde had charmed a group of men at a party, he told her that he was not surprised. ‘With every year that passes I’m more strongly attracted and more deeply attached to you. To me, at any rate, you are simply the woman – unlike anything, the thing itself.’ But for Hilde this came too late; increasingly, the central relationship of her life was with Flesch.

  This eventually became apparent to Peter, who demanded a clear separation in 1963. When Hilde complained that he was leaving her, he accused her of wilfully destroying their shared existence together and then expecting him to take the blame. ‘You have systematically, step by step throughout the last few years, taken away your trust. Everything you did you did behind my back; you lied to me and made excuses.’ He maintained that his own affairs had been trivial – he would not have embarked on them at all if he had not needed someone to give him ‘a little warmth now and then’ – and complained that she had told all their mutual friends that she was planning to leave Peter because she could not live without Flesch. Initially, Peter suggested a two-year trial separation, but Hilde insisted that ‘our life is too short for that kind of thing and two years are too long’. Instead, they should end the marriage irrevocably. The separation, when it came, seemed to outsiders, including their own children, merely to confirm the existing status quo. But for Peter it took away the secure base he had always taken for granted. He had often found Hilde irritating; he did not especially appreciate her as a woman or a writer; but he had relied on her as his partner. For Hilde, however, it allowed for the formal foundation of a new, more peaceful existence lived according to the principles of the courteous and artistic city in which she had grown up.

  Hans Flesch-Brunningen and Hilde Spiel, c. 1979

&
nbsp; After the separation, Hilde returned to Vienna, where she began a more public relationship with Flesch. By going back to Vienna she acknowledged the failure of her attempts to integrate fully into English society. Her children were growing up to be English, but she would always be an outsider. In 1967, revisiting her diary entries from her 1946 trip to Vienna, Hilde Spiel realised that her ultimate return to Vienna was already inevitable at this point. The slow process of freeing herself from the English sphere had begun. She retained a connection with English literature by translating books by the English authors she loved. In 1958 she published a German translation of Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love, and in the 1960s she translated Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians as well as a collection of his short stories. But increasingly her home was in Austria, and once she accepted her Austrian identity it brought its own rewards. Hilde Spiel died in 1990 as a distinguished Austrian woman of letters, at last granted the recognition that she had craved during the war in England, though perhaps never again quite so energetically hopeful as she had been in the immediate post-war years in Vienna and Berlin.

  For Henry Yorke the post-war period offered no new beginnings. Instead the 1950s saw the beginning of a process of gradual retreat from the world which would continue until his death. After the war he decided never to return to his family home, Forthampton Court, even after his brother Gerald inherited it from his father in 1957, on the grounds that it was unhealthy. And he drifted away from friends as well as family. In 1951 Evelyn Waugh invited Henry for a long weekend at his house in Gloucestershire and reported to Nancy Mitford that he looked ‘GHASTLY’.