The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Very long black dirty hair, one brown tooth, pallid puffy face, trembling hands, stone deaf, smoking continuously throughout meals, picking up books in the middle of conversations and falling into maniac giggles, drinking a lot of raw spirits, hating the country and everything good. If you mention Forthampton to him he shies with embarrassment as business people used to do if their businesses were mentioned.

  Dig meanwhile was gentle, lost behind ‘her great moustaches’, and employed a whole new proletarian argot with ‘an exquisitely ladylike manner’. ‘I really think Henry will be locked up soon,’ Waugh concluded.

  Waugh’s description was perhaps more amusing than fair. In 1948 Henry Yorke had invited Christopher Isherwood to dinner and Isherwood had found both Yorkes ‘really very nice and so much fun’, enjoying Yorke’s tales of football matches, blondes and the Fire Service. Even in 1951 Nancy Mitford replied to Waugh that she herself had met Henry and Dig recently and had not seen them in the same ‘livid light’, though that might be because her ‘(health service) spectacles’ were pinker than his.

  At this point Henry was still focused enough to be very involved in Pontifex, although even there he felt stifled by his father’s continued presence in the business. In 1948 James Lees-Milne met Henry on a bus and asked how he was. Henry replied that he was ‘Bloody awful!’ and launched into what Lees-Milne described as

  a diatribe of hate against his octogenarian father who, he claimed, refused to retire from the family firm, in order deliberately to retard his son’s succession and ruin his prospects . . . It was evident that he was being deeply thwarted in his middle age by a tyrannical and senile parent who would not relax his grip on the wheel, Henry’s wheel by rights of nature.

  When Henry got off the bus he departed with the words ‘It’s unmitigated hell, I can tell you.’

  Henry Yorke did launch into a few new friendships in this period. He particularly enjoyed time spent with the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, who was also now a friend of Hilde Spiel’s. According to Koestler’s biographer, the two men were brought together by ‘a shared fondness for women and alcohol, an intolerance of fools and an admiration for each other’s very different novels’. Throughout the 1950s they spent their Sunday mornings together in their shared local pub. Yorke also had more affairs, including one fairly impassioned one with Kitty Freud (then married to the painter Lucian Freud), but this ended in 1952 and in 1955 Yorke published a short account of ‘Falling in Love’ which, though partly satirical, does seem to reflect his accrued cynicism on the subject. ‘A man’, he begins here, ‘falls in love because there is something wrong with him.’ He gets to the point where he cannot stand being alone and may imagine he wants children, although in fact he does not, ‘at least not as women do’. And once married with children of his own he longs to be alone again. Love is a weakness and only after his marriage does the man realise how sick he has been. Affairs outside marriage are no more fulfilling. A man in love with another woman who does not have the courage to leave his wife is like ‘a man who takes off his belt, ties it round the branch of a tree, and hangs himself to death in the loop while his trousers fall round his ankles’. Yorke states that love comes from a lack within yourself. We are all animals, and are therefore subject to animal attraction, but there is no need for this to transmute into love, and certainly not more than once given that ultimately we are ‘all and each one of us, always and always alone’.

  By the 1950s Henry was hardly in touch with Mary or Alice Keene. In 1949 Mary wrote to Henry to congratulate him on Concluding and he replied that they ‘must meet some time if you can put up with it’ but added that he was in poor shape at the moment. In 1957 Mary sent Henry a copy of Mrs Donald to read and he responded cautiously. He assured her that she was ‘a very good writer indeed’, but reprimanded her for her atrocious spelling and suggested that she cut the novel down to a short story. He described himself as ‘temperamentally incapable’ of reading books with children as the central characters, suggesting that the focus of the novel is Rose, Violet’s small sister, rather than Violet, and completely failed to comment on his own alter ego, the poet-painter Louis.

  Despite his estrangement from Mary, Henry remained on friendly terms with Matthew Smith, with whom Mary was now in a more settled relationship. Matthew had given Henry a portrait of himself in 1950 which Henry celebrated in his thank you letter as ‘beyond words wonderful’: ‘it glows and lives with a great life of its own and is and always will be a Jewel in my heart’. In 1958 Matthew’s wife died and Henry wrote to send his ‘deepest sympathy for all the feelings that must have been dredged up from the past by this death’. He added that breaking with the past was

  one of the hardest things we all have to learn, and when we have managed this in a fashion it comes as a blow to find the past still inexorably stretching out its cold arms to us, turning one’s blood into a pile of, in my case, guilt and regret and shame. But we have our sons to be proud of, and there is still work to be done.

  In fact Matthew did not have his sons to be proud of; they had both died in the Second World War. Henry had Sebastian, but that does not seem to have been enough to prevent the guilt, regret and shame. This admission of guilt may have been in part an implicit apology to Mary, whom he could reasonably expect to read the letter, but it also seems to reflect a more endemic bleakness. And for Henry Yorke in fact there remained very little work still to be done in 1958. After his father died he took little interest in the business, despite having waited impatiently all those years for him to retire. He did not write another novel after Doting was published in 1952.

  Yorke’s final three novels, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, are characterised by a cold detachment. People love, dote and mourn but the narrator does not imbue the world he depicts with anything like the lyricism of the earlier novels. Rosamond Lehmann’s 1954 TLS tribute to Henry Yorke and to Loving in particular can be seen as a generous recollection of a now faded friend. She lauds the unusual tenderness of Loving and states that this quality ‘is to become a great deal less evident, if not to disappear entirely, in his subsequent novels’. Rosamond’s homage was perhaps intended partly to restore to Henry the life and tenderness he had lost, or at least to remind him to look back appreciatively on his wartime self. In this respect it was successful. After the piece was published, Henry wrote a warm letter of thanks to Rosamond Lehmann.

  Darling. I’ve read your piece in the TLS and haven’t been able to think of what to say. Then it came to me. I think it is one of the four nicest things that ever happened to me in my life.

  Moments of connection like this were becoming rarer. Henry saw fewer and fewer friends. His former acquaintances continued to meet Dig, who would assure them that Henry was doing fine and would appreciate a visit. But according to Lees-Milne, old friends were given a hostile reception if they did indeed call. In the early 1960s Henry’s drinking became more out of control and Arthur Koestler helped Sebastian to check his father into a clinic for treatment. The friendship with Koestler had remained very close throughout the 1950s, but Koestler was maddened by Henry’s refusal to wear a hearing aid, despite his deafness, and found Henry unrelentingly gloomy. Cynthia Koestler wrote that in this period Henry suffered from depression, which was made bearable only by gin. ‘The dark eyes with winged eyebrows which seemed to dance according to his feelings – one or the other was often raised – were set in a face whose pallor rarely saw the light of day.’ Even the friendship with Koestler ended in 1962 when Koestler decided that Henry was anti-Semitic.

  In 1963 Henry Yorke wrote a short biographical sketch in which he characterised himself accurately as a hermit. ‘Only the other day’, he announced, ‘a woman of sixty looking after the tobacconist’s shop was dragged by her hair across the counter and stabbed twice in the neck. That is one reason why I don’t go out any more.’ Danger threatened on the street and the best thing was not to go out at all. ‘If one can afford it, the best thing is to stay in one place, which might
be bed. Not sex, for sleep.’

  Henry Yorke remained in bed until his death in 1973, the same year as the death of Elizabeth Bowen. After the sale of Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth had based herself in Oxford and then from 1965 in Hythe in Kent, returning to the small section of coastline where she had lived on first coming to England with her mother as a child. The Hythe house was small, modern and practical; she was not going to attempt to compete with the grandeur of the world she had lost. But from the start she entertained friends from London, putting them up at the local hotel, and encouraged Charles to see the house as his home. She also published a novel, Eva Trout, set on the Kent coast where she was now living; a strange and original tale of a clumsy and trouble-making childlike woman. And she made forays into her own childhood, starting an autobiography to be called Pictures and Conversations, as well as continuing to lecture abroad and to write essays, though without the financial necessity imposed by Bowen’s Court.

  Elizabeth Bowen lived in Hythe for eight years before dying of lung cancer in hospital in February 1973. In 1961 Charles had written in his diary that ‘nothing, I believe, except death or the ghastly attrition of old age can touch us, and when either happen I shall be finished whether I know it or not’. By the late 1960s it had become apparent to him that old age and death did indeed threaten. In 1968 he reread Elizabeth’s early letters, awed and saddened by the strength and certainty of her love. ‘I had that and it is gone, but its ghost, thank God, remains to haunt me till I die.’ Certainly, it haunted him after her death. Desolate, Charles made no attempt to protect himself from his grief.

  I do believe in her love for me. I do believe it and in mine for her.

  I shall never see her again in this world or the next . . . She will never advance to me across the grass of Regent’s Park at any time of day. She is gone from me forever.

  I am never to recover or cease to feel the absence and the pain till I cease feeling anything.

  Five years after Elizabeth Bowen’s death, Catherine Walston died, also of lung cancer. The cough that Graham Greene had immortalised in The End of the Affair had indeed killed her in the end. Like Charles Ritchie, Catherine had come to regret the failure of the love affair with Graham and to see it as the most important relationship of her life. ‘I think of you so often and with such pleasure,’ she wrote to him in 1975. ‘What a vast amount you gave me.’ Shortly before her death she wrote to him in shaky handwriting, just home from a period in hospital, looking back on their happiest times together. ‘What a vast amount of pleasure you have given me playing scrabble on the roof at the Rosaio . . . and teaching me to swim underwater at Ian Fleming’s house; smoking opium and Ankor etc.’ She told him that she would always remember their times in Capri, from the day they first walked through the gate of the villa. ‘There has never been anyone in my life like you and thanks a lot.’

  Graham and Catherine had sustained an intermittent sexual relationship through the 1950s and into the 1960s, but they had drifted apart as both became involved with other lovers and Catherine’s health declined. In 1966 Graham had moved to France to live with Yvonne Cloetta, a younger French woman with whom he would remain until his death in 1991. He was happy with Yvonne and these were productive years for him as a writer. ‘If she didn’t exist I’d put a bullet to my head,’ he told a friend in 1990. But he still looked back on the war years and the time with Catherine as the period when he had been most insistently alive.

  Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke all saw the arc of their lives as shaped by their experiences in the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. For Rose Macaulay this was a time of intense sadness, mitigated by moments of beauty under the Mediterranean sun that she and Gerald O’Donovan had loved, and among the ruins that served as a reminder of a wider time-frame. But for the other writers these years brought an exhilaration that was unrivalled in the later post-war period. Bowen, Greene and Yorke responded intensely to the peculiar climate of wartime London; to its temporality, its accelerated intimacies and its visual beauty. They all produced extraordinary novels during and in response to this period. In contrast to the suspended present of wartime, the post-war period was predicated on the future. The welfare state imposed taxes in the present designed to improve the world for the next generation. Bowen, Greene and Yorke all found this depressing. In post-war Vienna and Berlin, however, Hilde Spiel found just the climate that the British writers had found in wartime London, and in Ireland Greene and Bowen were both briefly able to forget post-war actualities and find instead a timeless world of love.

  In the quiet years before his death, Henry Yorke was writing very little but he did publish a brief account of his time in the fire service in 1960, intended to be the start of a book-length account of London and Fire, 1939–45. Retreating into the past, Yorke regained the energy and humour that he had lost in daily life, mocking his firemen colleagues for their preoccupation with their pensions at the same time as he lauded them for their collective bravery, ‘ready to take on lions’. During this period, Graham Greene was recording his dreams, and the continued significance of the war for Greene is evident in his posthumously published dream diary, where he makes frequent nocturnal excursions back to the Blitz. In February 1965, after an air raid, German parachute troops land near his London house; in 1972 a large tranche of London is destroyed by bombs.

  And for Elizabeth Bowen, most of all, the war remained a charmed pocket of unrepeatable happiness. Her review of Calder’s The People’s War, written not long before her death, insists on the unique importance of the war years for those who experienced them in London. ‘Existence during the war had a mythical intensity, heightened for dwellers in cities under attack.’ Here she sees the war as defining the lives of her generation, whether it brought exuberance, loss or horror. ‘War is a prolonged passionate act, and we were involved in it.’ For individuals as well as for their country the stakes of that involvement were high. But the reward was an intensity they would never know again.

  See notes on Coda

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  People and books

  CR: Charles Ritchie

  CW: Catherine Walston

  EB: Elizabeth Bowen

  B’s C: Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters

  HoD: The Heat of the Day

  LCW: Love’s Civil War, Letters and diaries from the love affair of a lifetime

  GG: Graham Greene

  EoA: The End of the Affair

  HoM: The Heart of the Matter

  HG: Henry Green (where quotations are from work published under this pseudonym)

  HS: Hilde Spiel

  DaB: The Dark and the Bright: Memoirs 1911–1989

  HY: Henry Yorke

  PdeM: Peter de Mendelssohn

  RM: Rose Macaulay

  ToT: The Towers of Trebizond

  WMW: The World My Wilderness

  VG: Vivien Greene

  Archives and libraries

  Bod: Bodleian Library

  EB HRC: Elizabeth Bowen archive, Harry Ransom Center, Austin

  GG BU: Graham Greene archive, Boston University

  GG GU: Graham Greene archive, Georgetown University, Washington

  GG HRC: Graham Greene archive, Harry Ransom Center, Austin

  HRC: Harry Ransom Center

  HS NLV: Hilde Spiel archive, National Library of Vienna

  HS PdeM: Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn correspondence, private collection, Austria

  HY archive: Henry Yorke archive, private collection, Yorkshire

  London Met: London Metropolitan Archive

  Nat Arch: The National Archives, Kew, Surrey

  PdeM Mon: Peter de Mendelssohn archive, Monacensia Library, Munich

  RL KC: Rosamond Lehmann archive, King’s College, Cambridge

  RM TC: Rose Macaulay archive, Trinity College, Cambridge

  VG Bod: Vivien Greene archive, Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Westminster: Westminster Archive

  Wher
e novels are available in multiple editions, chapter numbers are given instead of page numbers.

  More than one chapter or page number may be given where there are several quotations from the same text within a single paragraph.

  Introduction

  ‘War had made them’: EB, HoD, ch. 1.

  ‘scenery in an empty theatre’: see EB, ‘London, 1940’, The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999).

  ‘straight, long in the eye’: HG, Caught (London: Harvill Press, 2001), p. 47.

  ‘pile their mattresses’: see HS, DaB, p. 127.

  ‘lucid abnormality’: EB, preface to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (The Mulberry Tree).

  ‘It came to be rumoured’: EB, HoD, ch. 5.

  ‘war time, with its’: ibid.

  ‘exuberance, during the early’: EB, review of Angus Calder’s The People’s War (The Mulberry Tree).