Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  He starts off with an obscure reference to a music hall show featuring a bawdy cleaning lady called “Winnie.” The letter resumes the next day, written in a darker type of ink. Bernard describes a late-night discussion with fellow students about the reasons why people choose certain careers. One man, he writes, maintained that such choices are based on one of three things: the chance of success, of making a great deal of money, or because your father was in the same line of work before you. None of these reasons motivated Bernard.

  He writes, “I took up medicine to begin with primarily because I realised structurally how wonderful life is & then the idea to be a doctor grew on me for quite a different reason. Perhaps it was the war. It was there I saw anyway a man’s gratitude for that little best you can do for him, when he is down and under, however small it may be, and I decided that there is nothing greater, nothing that can give one more satisfaction than cheering up misery and helping the sick and wounded. My job in life should be a doctor and his work—well, my religion. That is what I determined and I hope I shall carry it out. There, that’s enough of my soul even to you for one day. I’ve never given word to these sentiments to anybody, hardly to myself.”

  Win’s reply to “Dear Bernie” starts off with a mention of a forthcoming dance at the Schwabs’, which promises to be “topping.” She is also frightfully “bucked,” because her cousin in Kassel, the famous Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, has finally become engaged to the girl he was about to propose to six years before. This had been aborted then because, according to Win, “I turned up” and “quite inadvertently & quite unconsciously messed their lives up for them, only temporarily tho’, thank goodness.” Franz Rosenzweig had fallen in love with Win.

  I have good reason to be thankful that nothing came of it. Franz was the only child of Georg Rosenzweig and Win’s aunt, Adele Alsberg, known to her as Tante Dele. Unsuited for any combat role, Franz had served during the war as a spotter in an antiaircraft battalion in the Balkans and then, in 1917, in Macedonia, facing Bernard, who was just a few miles away on the other side. Apart from spotting enemy planes, Franz lectured the troops on such topics as the meaning of Islam. His marriage, Win relates, meant so much to Tante Dele, more even than to most mothers, “because Franz is the only thing she has got in the world, & being a genius, he has always been a queer, restless, eccentric spirit, and very difficult and estranged sometimes.” But “now that he has anchored, and has come home to roost at last,” all would be well.

  I have a small picture at home of Franz Rosenzweig as a toddler, being hugged closely, as though he might be snatched away at any moment, by a pretty-looking Tante Dele. The photograph was taken in Kassel at the studio of a Mr. Hegel.

  Win could not have known that a year later, after publishing his best-known book, The Star of Redemption, laying out his proposal for a new approach to Judaism, Rosenzweig would develop Lou Gehrig’s disease. Almost totally paralyzed in the last years of his life, propped up in a special chair in a small Frankfurt apartment, he dictated his essays to his devoted wife, Edith, by blinking an eye when she hit on the right letter in the alphabet. Rosenzweig died in 1929. His last words, taken down by Edith, were, “And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there . . .” And that is where it ended. There was no more.

  Win always had a somewhat strained relationship with the “fearfully highbrow” side of her German family. She had no romantic interest in Rosenzweig. It is in any case hard to see her fitting into his religious as well as philosophical milieu. On the other hand, she was a highly intelligent woman. Who is to say that if she had lived in Kassel or Frankfurt, instead of in London, she might not have been less keen to demonstrate her interest in golf and horses and been as highbrow as her German cousins?

  Near the end of her letter she finally comes to Bernard’s late-night thoughts on his chosen “religion,” that is to say, his devotion to a medical career.

  She is glad that he let her “have a little peep at your soul the other day—one so rarely gets a glimpse of it, altho’ I have learned to fathom quite a good bit of it now, without your telling me anything.” She quite understands his point about human gratitude being the most priceless thing in the world. Of course, she writes, “I experienced a bit of it too, altho’ one cannot compare the sort of work I did during the war with what you boys did for each other out there, and what doctors do all their lives.”

  These were uneasy times. The worldwide flu epidemic was still raging. Bernard had seen enough horror in the war to be severely shaken. And yet there is not a hint of trauma in his letters, nor was there in his later life. The war had certainly affected him, hence his lifelong silence about his experiences. But if there was any trauma, he kept it well hidden.

  Not everyone was so lucky. Win mentions, on February 9, 1920, a family friend named Stanley, who was “terribly, dangerously ill” with flu. He was delirious for four days and barely able to recognize his wife. It took two people to hold him in bed. When Win went to see him, Stanley “was shouting the whole place down. He is in a terrible rage nearly all the time and seems to be living through the whole war again.”

  Like most students of his generation, Bernard couldn’t afford to waste time at university. Having lost four years to the war, he had to get on with it. And Bernard and Win officially announced their engagement on August 1, 1922. The announcement in The Times, kept with their letters, is stuck to the paper from a press clipping bureau. It is part of a bundle of letters of congratulations from family and friends tied neatly together with a piece of string. Almost every one comes from an address within twenty minutes’ walk of Finchley Road station in Hampstead. However, they couldn’t afford to actually get married until Bernard had completed his studies and hospital training and found a suitable job. This meant years of waiting, longing, pining for the day, until they were finally wed in 1925. The question was what she would do in the meantime. And the way they behaved to each other in those seemingly endless three years of waiting is scarcely imaginable today.

  Bernard’s views on women’s proper role in life, although far from radical, sometimes seemed to be more progressive than Win’s. But then her opinions were often colored by a chronic lack of self-confidence. In a letter, still addressed to “Dear Bernard,” on July 26, 1919, Win writes that her parents “are such dears” that they might allow her to study at Oxford, even though “it would be a great sacrifice to them.” But she doesn’t want to go: “I feel it is my place, now that I am grown up, to be at home and help Mother . . . In any case, Oxford would be a tremendous luxury, which is not at all necessary, just at present of all times. I should have a very bad conscience about accepting it.”

  She wrote this almost a year after British women had been given the right to vote in an act of Parliament. The war had changed the lives of women forever, since they had been mobilized to work on the home front while the men were dying on the Continent. Even comfortably well-off women like Win could no longer be pushed back into the purely domestic roles they had been stuck with in the past.

  Bernard’s response to Win’s letter, though phrased with the slight condescension that was customary, is encouraging: “About Oxford, Winnie dear, I really don’t quite know what to say. I am still in favour of it, really, if you are spareable . . . Oxford will give you firstly occupation for your thoughts, brain and mind in the form of friends and whatever subjects of interest to you that you take up, and secondly occupation for your body in fresh air and exercise; and these are two of the essential of several ingredients in the recipe of a contented and happy Winnie or anyone else in your position.”

  A year later, in a letter addressed to “My darling, adorable little girl,” Bernard finds the perfect expression of his views on modern women in a short item he had cut out from the newspaper. “I enclose, Win, an extraordinarily good cutting from the Sunday Times,” he writes on Novem
ber 7, 1921. “It bucked me up no end when I read it as it epitomises exactly what I want to say and think in a few terse well chosen sentences.”

  They are the words of a Miss E. Wordsworth, of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who had just received a degree of M.A. honoris causa. She writes, “I hope the words ‘sex-antagonism’ will never be breathed in our Oxford air. I should like to take this opportunity of reminding our younger students that, when all is said and done, the best contribution any woman can make to the world is her womanliness, and that if she loses that the life of humanity will be far more impoverished than it could possibly be enriched by her passing any number of examinations or holding her own with the most erudite of professors.”

  Bernard’s comment: “Take it to heart, all ye modern girls. You have, I know darling, and that is one of the many reasons why I love you.”

  In fact, Oxford was rather more hospitable to female students than Cambridge at the time. In a letter dated November 30, 1919, Bernard remarks in passing, “You will look funny in cap and gown. I see girls at Oxford can now take degrees there and will wear gowns at leccers [lectures] like the men. The first step towards emancipation of women up there.”

  It is clear that he approved of this. Despite his fairly conventional views on the female sex, he was not a chauvinist. In a letter sent on February 1, 1920, Bernard writes about attending a concert at the Cambridge Musical Club with a program that was “too modern for my taste,” even though he liked the Elgar Violin Sonata. Then he observes, “The admittance of members of Newnham and Girton* into the C.M.C. was defeated by 1 vote . . . so you see Cambridge are just as bad in some ways as Oxford as regards women.”

  Win was in most things more conservative than Bernard, certainly when it came to politics. She was not a “feminist” in the modern sense of the term, but neither was she happy with female subservience. Win frequently wished that she were a man. After a visit to Oxford in February 1919 to see her elder brother, Walter, act in a student production with his contemporary at university, John Gielgud, she writes, “You know, men do have a good time up at the ’Varsity—it strikes me anew every time I go to Oxford or Cambridge. I would give anything to be a man just for the sake of Public School or ’Varsity; it’s all so different from a girl’s career, & I should love to take some magic potion & transform myself.”

  The same sentiment is repeated in November of that year, again after a visit to her brother at Oxford: “I should simply adore to be reincarnated a man & go either to Christ Church or Magdalen . . . however, it is too late now.”

  And so she frets all through 1919 and 1920, feeling duty-bound to stay at home in Parsifal Road, working on her matriculation from school and looking after her parents, even as she knows that “it would make a lot of difference to me to get away from here for a bit to quite other surroundings. I have never been away from home in my life . . . You see I have got your future to consider too, Bun, & I have got to keep as young and fresh as I can . . . but with this kind of life for another four or five years I should just stagnate. But it seems so selfish to try and get away . . . I wish I knew what I ought to do. I have been revolving it round and round in my mind and I can’t come to any conclusion.” This is on June 7, 1920.

  In a letter written earlier in that same year, she apologizes for going on about inconsequential things: “I suppose it is really because I lead such a newsless existence, there is nothing else to write about—one continuous unbroken round of [reading] The Times, food, mathematics, Latin, Greek, fiddle, massage, exercise, Times & so on ad infinitum, none of them particularly interesting topics upon which to enlarge.”

  There were some diversions, apart from visiting Walter at Oxford. Evenings at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead—“so very embarrassingly gemütlich,” because one was always running into people one knows—where she saw George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: “He was sitting in the 2d row & laughed heartily at his own jokes.” Then there was Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado: “I came away so delighted and refreshed . . . I believe that if I had the choice of Grand Opera, any play going, or Gilbert and Sullivan, I should choose the latter.” She played the violin in an outfit called Grünebaum’s Opera School Orchestra. In October 1919, she is about to lead the Fauré Quartet: “I am awfully funky, because I have never seen nor heard the thing, and I shall not have a second to practice it as I am going away over the weekend—moreover it is modern—& you know what that means.”

  Modernity is of course a relative concept. I was once told by my great-uncle Walter that his parents couldn’t abide Brahms. They thought his music was just noise. Win assures Bernard in a letter of February 4, 1920, that if he listens often enough, he will “come to appreciate the comprehensible of the modern music, César Franck, Debussy & Chausson. You know Walter was a confirmed anti-any-music-later-than-Mozart man until quite recently, and now he suddenly revels in Brahms.”

  Brahms, as I mentioned earlier, was one of Win and Bernard’s shared passions, as much as if not more so than the plays and books of James Barrie. They adored Wagner as well, but Brahms, Win writes, “always wins to this day with me. He has such a limpid, flowing rhythm, and such marvelously blended harmonies, like a sort of iridescent opalescent colouring. I don’t know whether you can translate music into colours, I can’t generally, but Brahms always produces that effect on me. His music is so essentially pure with very rarely any passion in it, it just dreams away like a rippling brook, very beautifully.”

  Perhaps Bernard’s response reflects a more worldly understanding of human passion. To “Dearest little girl,” he writes on February 8, “I don’t entirely agree with you about Brahms . . . I don’t think he is always the bland, dreamy sort of man you want to make out. I have on many occasions seen his face quite flushed, his pulse quicken, his veins stand out on his head, his lips quiver as they poured out some story of love.”

  About physical passion, Bernard, though still inexperienced, was a good deal less innocent than she was. There was during their long years of waiting a great deal of cuddling and kissing. On September 27, 1920, Win writes to “My angel” that he should close his eyes and “pretend I am as close to you as it is possible to be, and that I am giving you the longest kiss you have ever had in your life. Then, when it is all over, we both sigh rapturously and start all over again.”

  Bernard ends most of his letters with such sentiments as these (August 8, 1920):

  Darling Win, come and sit on my knee & let me stroke and cover you with kisses all over and thereby show you in some small way how I love you,

  My eternal love from your very own Bun

  When Win invites him to an “At Home” at Parsifal Road with dancing to commence at 8:30, she scribbles a note that a “discreet sitting out place” might be in the offing in an airing cupboard on the second floor of the house.

  Still, I am convinced that things did not go further than that. Two incidents seem to bear this out. In March 1920, Win went up to Cambridge to visit Bernard. It was evidently an idyllic weekend, with breakfasts (“brekkers”) and dances, to which unmarried female partners often came with a chaperone, so nothing untoward could happen. Quite what Bernard said to Win at one of these dances is not spelled out, perhaps something about indecent pictures he might have seen in Egypt during the war. Whatever it was, she was shaken by the experience. Here is her response, on March 17, to “Bern, my one and only love”:

  I’m afraid you must have thought I was very stupid & prudish the other day—but what you told me at the dance just gave me a bit of a shock at first. I always imagined, as far as I ever considered the subject at all, that that type of picture was supplied just for one type of man, and not a very desirable type, and that your type loathed it and was repulsed by it just as much as I was—and so at first I was a little shocked and self-conscious, like I was when I first heard about all the relations between man and woman, but once I have assimilated these ideas and got used to them, it’s quite alright. Men
are just fundamentally different from women. They have different feelings and conceptions and a totally different outlook on life . . . You see I am very proud of my sex, and of the honour of my sex, and it seemed to me that that kind of picture must debase us, and that once a man has seen a woman so stripped of all modesty, even if it is only a picture of one, the whole sex must sink in his eyes and be held lightly by him for evermore.

  This was not an unreasonable response to pornography. It was even one that many feminists of later generations, rightly or wrongly, would have endorsed. It doesn’t even mean necessarily that her physical relations with Bernard didn’t exceed kisses in discreet alcoves. But there was another incident in February 1921, when he evidently tried to “go too far.” His letter, sent from Emmanuel College on the twelfth, is full of contrition: “My adored Win, my rock of life,” it begins:

  You are a little brick. It’s a very humble shame-faced, hang-headed Bun that’s writing to you now. I always told you I wasn’t worthy even to lick your shoes and now I have unwillingly proved it.

  You thought we were doing wrong, that even engaged people are not allowed to pretend they are married. I knew it all along & yet singly I was too weak to battle against it.

  I used to go away, make wonderful resolutions, come back and break them, & so life went on. I wanted to speak about it, so that we could join hands, for I felt that you were fighting just the same. Then I remembered once when I had said something at Cambridge, and you got so unhappy and blamed your innocent self & tried to cast yourself down in my estimation, when all the time it was this worthless fellow. I think one could almost call oneself a cad in this instance for most men should know & I do know that altho’ a man is most easily excitable, woman is harder to become excited, but once excited, her inhibiting powers are even less than a man’s. Win, darling, you are the good woman for having put a stop to it and I the bad man for having let it go on.