Love in the Blitz

by Eileen Alexander

  We begin, too, to appreciate that Eileen is involved in a new literary genre with a multiple purpose. The first is to enmesh her beloved in her life, to keep him engaged with herself and prevent him straying during their long separation – the sort of narrative letters that Ovid imagines Penelope writing to Ulysses. She wants to display all her talents, her knowledge, her first-class degree, her ability to find a quotation in Elizabethan literature for every eventuality. There is also much about her friends’ liaisons – perhaps in order to warn Gershon to keep faith with her.

  The second is to create an intensely personal narrative, a type of Bildungsroman, so rich that it holds us as we follow the daily experience of a young woman setting out on life, with all its uncertainties, exploring her environment and learning from the mistakes of those around her.

  The third is perhaps inadvertent; without knowing it, she is fashioning a feminist vision of war, a description of war as it is seen by women, not men – a time of absence and waiting, of hoping and doubting, of being caught between tradition and modernity, desire and faithfulness. That makes the narrative almost unique, the outside world impinges, disasters hit her, but she never acts, only reacts: and yet life goes on apparently normally. Elias Canetti’s famous description of contemporary London, Party in the Blitz, seems mean-spirited and randomly vicious beside Eileen’s instantaneous, daily, witty and loveable take on the undisturbed rhythms of Cambridge and London Jewish life in wartime Britain.

  Did she ever think of publishing? She knew she had a talent for ‘the Art of letter-writing’, but publishing was never part of her plan. In September 1943 she wrote: ‘Pan has just come in to say: “Really, the care you take over your letters to Gershon – one would think that you were writing for future publication.” I looked at him Sternly, my dear love, & said: “Oh! no, I’m writing for a far more important reason than that.” But one day, he’ll learn, my love. Pan is the sort of person who will love a woman as I love you.’

  Rather, her letters and her love for Gershon were her life: ‘I once thought that I had a genius for writing,’ she told him, ‘but I find instead I have a genius for love.’

  As far as I’m concerned all my creative energies, all my critical & social faculties, all my moods and thoughts, and, above all, all the boundless sea of my love for you go into my letters to you … My letters are only a translation of my love, my darling. I can only give you my love itself when I’m with you, when I’m lying back in your arms – then, darling, I can give you my love with my voice & my eyes & my body. I am tired of being a translator, my darling. I want to be a creative genius again. If I have any creative genius, my dear love, it is in my love & not in my writing, which is insignificant & meaningless beside my love. What would the outside world know of my love for you, darling, if they were to read my letters? They would know what I know of the Odyssey when I read it in translation – but you are the only person, my darling, who has read the story of my love in the original and you are the only person who understands it fully & truly. That’s good, darling. It was a story which was written for you & only for you. I don’t want anyone else to understand it. It is not their story – it is only our story. I’m as arrogant & exclusive about our love as Ouspensky is about his Esoteric Knowledge.

  This was ultimately the point: ‘I wonder what anyone would think if they suddenly came across my letters to you & started reading them in chronological order? I think they’d say “This girl never lived till she loved” – and it would be true, darling. Until I loved you, I was in the process of undergoing intellectual and emotional dry-rot. If I’d never known you – people, in later years, would have looked at me as though they’d taken a mouthful of vinegar – with the corners of their mouths screwed up, & said “Wormwood! Wormwood!” – but now they’ll say “While she lived she was a true lover & therefore she had a good end.”’

  As she wrote these letters Eileen was surely thinking of the portrayal of courtly love in her favourite book by C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, which she described as ‘the finest piece of Medieval literary criticism of our time & perhaps of all time’. She seems to see herself half ‘in the precarious dream-world of medieval love poetry’, as the faithful damsel of troubadour tradition in her chastity belt, creating a romance as she writes to her beloved lord away on the Crusades about the strange deeds at home in their feudal castle. She moves between ‘the allegory of the Body and the Heart’. And she follows C. S. Lewis in believing in the continuity of courtly love into the English literary tradition of Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Donne. She is a supreme writer of modern literary prose, schooled by her love of English literature from Malory to Elizabethan and modern literature, yet with all the wickedness of a Stella Gibbons in her delight in ‘mollocking’. Compared to these, Eileen seems scarcely aware of Jewish antecedents, such as the Song of Songs or the books of Ruth and Esther, let alone the Jewish and Arabic love poetry of medieval Spain, still to be discovered. Yet she has written a masterpiece worthy to stand with these earlier writings in the Jewish tradition, alongside Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962); and perhaps her insistence on the virtues of chastity and faithfulness, so at odds with her contemporaries, owes much to her Jewish upbringing.

  The experience of love is both unique and universal, but it changes almost imperceptibly in each generation. Too often it is reflected in recollection, when, for whatever reason it is lost, its intensity dispersed or transformed by memory, as in Proust or the late poems of Thomas Hardy. There are many accounts of love from the two world wars, beginning with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and Helen Thomas’s memoirs (1926 and 1931). Diana Athill – Eileen’s exact contemporary, who graduated from Oxford in the same year – may have experienced some of the same emotional highs and lows as Eileen as she corresponded with her fiancé, also in Egypt, but their relationship failed: he betrayed her (Instead of a Letter, 1963) and the letters themselves are lost. One of the nearest accounts in both time and place is Laurence Whistler’s numinous The Initials in the Heart (1964) about his love for the actress Jill Furse in the early years of the war, her death and his subsequent grieving for the rest of his life. But that too is about loss, and, like Athill’s account, is written twenty years after the event in an attempt to assuage his grief.

  The one thing that such historical narratives lack, however personal they are, is ignorance of the future, and so they cannot capture the vividness of living in the present as this book does. This is what makes Eileen Alexander’s letters such an immense literary discovery. It is a description of love as it unfolds, ‘suspended between unborn tomorrow & dead yesterday’, as she wrote in the middle of war, an emotion as it is experienced by a young woman day by day, existing in a moment of history, unique to its time but universal in its meaning.

  Historical Introduction by David Crane

  On 19 July 1939, as Europe drifted towards war, a short report from the police courts under the mildly sardonic heading ‘DIFFERENT TYPE OF STUDENT HAD SIMILAR SORT OF ACCIDENT’ appeared in the inside pages of the Cambridge Daily News. ‘When a research student at Cambridge University,’ the piece began, ‘was summoned at the Maidenhead Borough Police Court on Monday for alleged dangerous driving and for failing to conform to a “Halt” sign at Braywick cross-roads on June 29th, he said to the magistrates, “I want to persuade you that I am not one of those reckless undergraduates about whom you have heard from time to time. I have already spent four years at Cambridge University, having gained a State Scholarship and two other scholarships and am now beginning my fifth year of study as a research student. During the four years I have been there, I have held various positions of responsibility in the life of the university, and have never come into contact with the Cambridge police or other authorities at all. I am not just a reckless undergraduate, but a research student of four years.”’

  ‘It was an accident that might happen to anyone,’ he told the court �
� the car roof was down, the sun was in his eyes, the road unfamiliar – but that was probably not a wise line to take. ‘It was alleged in evidence,’ the report went on, that he had driven over a major junction ‘at colossal speed’, smashed into a car coming from his right on the main Maidenhead to Windsor road, spinning his car over onto the far side of the road twenty-eight feet away and hurling his ‘lady passenger … herself a Cambridge student’ out of the passenger seat and onto the tarmac.

  The ‘lady passenger … on her way to London to meet her parents who were coming home from Egypt the next day’ was Eileen Alexander, and the driver – banned from driving for a year, fined £3 and ordered to pay costs – was the Liverpool-born son of devoutly Jewish parents, with a double-first in classics and psychology, called Gershon Ellenbogen, the recipient of these letters. At the time the case came to court Eileen was in Maidenhead hospital, slowly and painfully recovering from her injuries, her nose and collarbone broken, her teeth and left eye-socket damaged, her face bruised and swollen.

  If there was one event in her life, however, that Eileen would not have seen undone it was that car crash. She had first met Gershon Ellenbogen in the summer of 1938 but it was the accident that changed their lives, turning a friendship that might have naturally ended with their Cambridge days into the all-consuming love affair celebrated in these letters.

  Eileen’s remarkably forgiving letter from her hospital bed, with which this volume opens, was just the first trickle in an unstoppable flood of words that passed between them over the long years of war. At some stage Gershon’s letters to her were either lost or destroyed, but he preserved hers to the end of his life, more than a thousand of them in all, written from air-raid shelters and office desks, on buses and station platforms, in hotel foyers and under hair-dryers, in that minuscule hand of hers that could have damaged stronger eyesights than Gershon’s.

  Like the lovers in a poem of Donne’s – a God in her pantheon second only to Shakespeare – Eileen lived through Gershon, happy only when she was writing to him or when a letter from him arrived to obliterate the space between them. In many ways the letters are closer to a diary than love letters, and closer still to an uninhibited and unstoppable stream of consciousness than either – a ‘complete chronicle’ of her life, waking and sleeping, as she put it – with that ‘little room’ of Donne’s lovers that she inhabited, peopled with a wonderful array of characters and incident.

  Even were these letters less brilliantly written they would still be of historical interest for the people Eileen knew, from wartime cabinet ministers, financiers, soldiers, philanthropists and art collectors to some of the major figures in the Zionist movement and the future State of Israel. She was lucky to have been part of a very bright Cambridge set, and yet it is just as much the London beyond her friends and family, the London of chance meetings in cinema queues and Lyons Corner Houses, of overheard snatches of conversations in restaurants and shelters – the London of the Blitz – that gives her letters their life and their colour.

  These letters – vibrant, intimate, joyous, dark, angry, obsessive, neurotic, generous, scurrilous and very, very funny by turns – can speak for themselves, but something needs to be said of the remarkable woman who wrote them.

  Eileen Helen Alexander was born in Cairo on 13 April 1917, the oldest of three children of Vicky Mosseri and Alec Alexander, a much-loved and highly successful South African-born and Cambridge-educated Cairo barrister of impoverished Polish Jewish parents. While it was from her father that Eileen inherited her intellectual rigour and fierce attachment to Cambridge, her Italian Jewish mother’s influence was equally marked. Each summer the Alexanders would escape the Cairo heat for the Highlands of Scotland and London’s Mayfair Hotel, but it was as ‘a poor little rich girl’, surrounded by the uncles, aunts and cousins of her mother’s sprawling, immensely wealthy, and interrelated Mosseri family that she spent her cosseted and unhappy childhood. ‘I think I should inform you that she is a very brilliant daughter of a very brilliant father,’ Eileen’s headmaster at the Cairo English School began a letter in support of her application to Girton in the summer of 1934 – a reference that tellingly says more about her parents than it does Eileen:

  Mr Alexander is a Jew and Mrs Alexander is a member of the Mosseri family, one of the principal Jewish families in Central Europe and the Near East. She also is a woman of very great ability and the widest education … Mrs Alexander is extremely particular, not to say old-fashioned, in the upbringing of her daughter and until the time comes for her to go to Cambridge she would, I know, hesitate to send her to England alone or leave her there after her own departure … Eileen, herself … hopes to be called to the Bar and it is her ambition eventually to enter Parliament.

  If ever one heard the voice and ambitions of the parent rather than the child it is in that last sentence, but if Alec Alexander had already mapped out the future for his daughter, Eileen had other ideas. When ‘I was about sixteen,’ she wrote later,

  my father hauled me off to Cambridge to see the Mistress & the Director of Studies in Law (I knew I was going to read English but Dad refused to believe anything so revolutionary – so, in spite of my protests, he arranged that I should be interviewed as a prospective law-student). It was a grilling day in August, I remember. I dressed very carefully in my best clothes to give myself confidence. (I was very frightened) Dad took one look at me & said that he wasn’t going to be a party to the prejudicing of my chances – by letting me appear before women of High Living & Thinking, with short-sleeves (it was, as I have said before, a grilling day in August) and looking as though I were an associate of the doubtful revels of Brighter Mayfair. He ransacked my wardrobe, while I stood by, crying – and drew forth a knitted jersey which I kept for fishing in Scotland – a very old skirt and a pair of hearty shoes – and said ‘wear those’. I did – and cried all the way to Cambridge … We had an uneventful interview with the Mistress – but I recovered my self-respect with the D of S in Law. She and Dad were obviously twin souls. They discussed highly technical points of International Law for a long time – while I sat languidly staring out of the window. Then she turned to me & asked where my particular interest in the Law lay … I said – nowhere – I was going to read English. She drew herself up to her full height, turned a cold eye on my father & asked him why we were seeing her if that was the position. He had nothing to say in answer to that & we withdrew hastily.

  It would be another two years before Eileen finally escaped parents, siblings and a Cairo she had grown to hate, but in the October of 1936 she finally had her wish and left to study English at Cambridge. The official college photograph of the Girton entrants for that year shows the young woman whom Gershon would have first met, uncomfortably perched second from the right in the third row from the back, a nineteen-year-old who looks little more than half that age, a schoolgirl ‘bent on celibacy’, as she put it, and still recognisably the same physically awkward, emotionally uncertain adolescent her father had dragged to the Girton interview two years before.

  If this is nothing like the whole story – in a college full of ‘Amazonian clergyman’s daughters with bulging, scrawny legs’ she was happy enough to play the ‘Mosseri card’ when it suited – it is worth keeping in mind this Eileen because for all the brilliance and intellectual swagger of the letters this is the young woman who wrote them. She had come up to Cambridge, too, with every hope of emulating her father’s dazzling record, but if a ‘second’ in ‘Prelims’ was not disgrace enough for an Alexander, she had spent the summer of 1938 – ‘ill with anxiety’ from her father’s ‘intellectual demands’ – recovering in the Evelyn Nursing Home from a duodenal ulcer which had stopped her even sitting the Part I of her English Tripos.

  It was a low period in her life, brightened only by her first meeting with Gershon, but a year later redemption had come. As she set off to meet her parents with Gershon driving her car, ‘Semiramis’, it was to give her father the new
s that she had gained one of only three firsts awarded that year to women in the English Tripos. She had also won a college prize, and with a place at Cambridge to begin research with the promise of some teaching, her academic future seemed assured. All she had ever wanted as she grew up, she said, was to be a Cambridge don, and now there seemed nothing to stop her.

  We first meet Eileen in July 1939, recovering in hospital, her hopes for the future still alive in spite of a worsening situation in Europe. When she is well enough to travel she goes for the summer to the family’s holiday house near Drumnadrochit, high above Loch Ness, and it is not until 23 August, the same day that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact is signed, that the first half-fearful, half-comic references to the outside world break in on her letters. From this point, as it becomes clear that there is to be no second Munich, the fragile quiet that had held since Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in the spring unravels at frightening speed. On 24 August, Parliament passes an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government control over virtually every aspect of national life. On the 25th, Britain and France reaffirm their commitment to Polish independence and territorial integrity and, six days later, in the early hours of 1 September, German troops cross the border into Poland. By 6 a.m. that same day Warsaw will be under air attack and Britain and France left facing the consequences of their Polish alliance.

  1

  Drumnadrochit, summer 1939

  Monday 17 July Gershon – what everyone seems to have forgotten is that if I hadn’t asked you to drive me to London that Tuesday, you would never have had your arm broken & your life thoroughly disorganized for a considerable period of time – Furthermore if I had directed you rightly we’d never have got into that damned death trap of a side-road.