The Love-Charm of Bombs (2 page)

Macaulay’s ambulance may well cross paths with the fire engine of Henry Yorke (better known by his pseudonym Henry Green). He is working as an auxiliary fireman just around the corner from Macaulay in Davies Street and has been constantly fighting fires since the bombing began. The duality of Yorke’s names reflects a division between two identities. Henry Yorke is an upper-class socialite who works in his father’s business, Pontifex, and spends most of his evenings at extravagant parties. Henry Green is an experimental novelist who writes strange and lyrical tales of factory life and bright young things. Unlike Macaulay, Yorke is enjoying the Blitz, which has come as a relief after months of sterile waiting during the so-called ‘phoney war’. He is pleased to be a hero at last and to see his heroism reflected back by girls who look him ‘straight, long in the eye as never before, complicity in theirs, blue, and blue, and blue’. And between shifts at the fire station he can make the most of this adoration, enjoying the absence of his wife and son whom he has evacuated to the countryside.

But Yorke is frightened as well as excited by fire and he does not look forward to the raids as much as Graham Greene. For Greene the real action of the day begins when he can leave his desk at the Ministry of Information in Bloomsbury and start his night-time duties as an ARP warden, often accompanied by his lover Dorothy Glover. Greene’s wife and children, like Yorke’s, are out of London and he is enjoying his independence. Emerging unscathed from the bombs each morning, Greene has conquered his lifelong boredom and found a way to feel urgently alive. Meanwhile for the Austrian writer Hilde Spiel, serving supper to her husband, parents and child in Wimbledon, the fading light heralds the tedium and fear of another wakeful night at home. Once the raid begins the family will pile their mattresses against the windows and listen to music on the gramophone, trying to drown out the noise of the bombs which they hope will land elsewhere.

These writers, firefighting, ambulance-driving, patrolling the streets, were the successors of the soldier poets of the First World War, and their story remains to be told. Like the poets in the trenches, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were participants rather than witnesses, risking death, night after night, in defence of their city. The Second World War was a Total War. No one escaped the danger and every Londoner was vulnerable. While the fighting in the First World War took place far away, the bombing of the Second World War was superimposed onto a relatively normal London life. Books were written, parties hosted, love affairs initiated and broken off. But the books, parties and love affairs were infused with the danger of death; every aspect of life was refracted through the lens of war.

Looking back on the Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen described this as a period of ‘lucid abnormality’; a moment outside time when she and her friends were ‘afloat on the tideless, hypnotic, futureless to-day’. When a bomb exploded, nearby clocks ceased to function, remaining stuck at the time of the detonation. London was a city of shock-stopped clocks and for its inhabitants, the suspended present created a climate where intense emotions could flourish. ‘It came to be rumoured,’ Bowen recalled, ‘that everybody in London was in love.’

Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke floated dangerously on that futureless present. All experienced the war as an abnormal pocket of time. As writers, they observed the strangeness of war imaginatively. London became a city of restless dreams and hallucinogenic madness; a place in which fear itself could transmute into addictive euphoria. To stay in London was to gamble nightly with death. And so each day was unexpected; each moment had the exhilarating but unreal intensity of the last moment on earth. Their public war work became the backdrop for volatile individual private lives. For Bowen, ‘war time, with its makeshifts, shelvings, deferrings, could not have been kinder to romantic love’. Bowen, Greene and Yorke spent the war in the kind of love that blazed with the raging intensity of the fires igniting their city.

Often separated, necessarily or wilfully, from their spouses, they immersed themselves in a makeshift present in which pre-war morality seemed less relevant. As the bombs fell outside, lovers huddled together in basements and shelters, or defiantly outfaced the raids in blacked-out bedrooms or torch-lit streets. The passionate love affairs in Bowen’s
The Heat of the Day
(1948), Greene’s
The End of the Affair
(1951) and Yorke’s
Caught
(1943) all had their basis in the wartime lives of their creators.

The stories told here do not always concur with the official propaganda, which portrayed the Blitz as a scene of cheerful togetherness and courage, making the most of the ‘London can take it’ spirit that developed among Londoners. Documentary films from the period show cheerful groups of civilians resiliently flouting danger with communal singing and cups of tea. For the writers in this book, the reality was less wholesome and more reckless. To defy the nightly threat of death took more than staunch morale and national pride. They were too selfish to ‘take it’ for the sake of their city and too snobbish to sing together; they were more likely to be found drinking cocktails than tea.

Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke all had moments of enthusing about the ‘People’s War’, especially during the first months of the Blitz. They all felt briefly united with their neighbours and their colleagues in the civil defence services, and would all look back on this as a time of unusual community spirit. In 1969 Bowen reviewed
The People’s War
by the historian Angus Calder, a book which challenged the commonplace image of national unity against a common enemy. She insisted that in fact the ‘exuberance, during the early London Blitzes, was not a fake’. For her the myth of collective harmony, ‘though bedraggled’, persisted throughout the war; ‘How else should we have gone on?’

But the exuberance referred to by Bowen was not quite the community spirit encouraged by government propaganda. Greene or Yorke, enjoying the sexual freedom enabled by war, indulged in a licentiousness that would not be officially encouraged; Greene’s exuberance during the raids was symptomatic of a rather frightening glory in destruction for its own sake. So, too, it was a luxury to find the war exciting; a luxury enabled by class privilege (Bowen and Yorke had access to private shelters and to far more enticing food than rationing alone allowed) and also by the imaginative possibilities open to writers. Bowen later described her wartime writing as a ‘saving resort’, suggesting that writing allowed her to experience actual events on two planes at once. Writers and artists tended to be peculiarly receptive to the temporal and erotic freedom offered by the war in part because they could switch off from the danger and enjoy the raids as aesthetic events.

According to the fireman and short story writer William Sansom, the city bereft of electric and neon light took on a new beauty: ‘By moonlight the great buildings assumed a remote and classic magnificence, cold, ancient, lunar palaces carved in bone from the moon.’ In September 1940 Rose Macaulay recounted her experience of watching an air battle over London which she found ‘most beautiful’: ‘the search-lights, and parachute flares, the fiery balls . . . and the sky lit up into gun-flashes, like sheet-lightning, and a wonderful background of stars.’ Painters such as John Piper and Graham Sutherland depicted the raids in London as scenes of incandescent splendour, making the most of the surreal juxtapositions and the pinks, reds and yellows of the fires, glowing against the darkness of the blacked-out city.

For Bowen, in her review of Calder’s book, the historian is in danger of falling into the same tendency to over-generalise as the government propagandists fell into at the time. ‘We at least,’ she writes, ‘knew that we only half knew what we were doing.’ She suggests that a picture of the war should be presented not just in terms of the actualities, but in terms of the ‘mood, temper and climate’ of the time. This is a climate best accessed through individual stories and through the intense, often strange war-writing of individual writers. Describing her own wartime short stories, Bowen wrote that ‘through the particular, in wartime, I felt the high-voltage current of the general pass’.

Taken together, Bowen’s statements can be seen as the impetus behind this book, which focuses on the lucidly abnormal particular stories of five writers in wartime London and post-war London, Ireland, Vienna and Berlin. In the process it attempts to tap into the high-voltage current of war, illuminating a ten-year period through the lives of five extraordinary individuals. The five writers are chosen for their own experiences and for their confluence in London in the Blitz. They were of different ages and nationalities and did not form a clear coterie in the manner of the First World War poets or of 1920s Bloomsbury. In a 1958 letter to her friend William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen looked back on her contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s as ‘the only non-groupy generation’. Nonetheless, she did acknowledge a shared social world. ‘What an agreeable life we all had, seeing each other
without
being a group,’ she wrote.

By seeing each other without being a group, Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were often in the same place at the same time, and shared friends, experiences and, at one remove, lovers. Before the war, Bowen had been the theatre critic for
Night and Day
, the short-lived magazine edited by Graham Greene; in 1949 she would correspond publicly with Greene in a series of letters called ‘Why do I Write?’ Bowen and Macaulay were close friends and were linked by their mutual friendship with Virginia Woolf. Bowen always attributed her initial success as a writer to Macaulay’s help in finding a publisher for her first stories. And Bowen and Yorke were linked by the incestuous love triangles which tessellated in literary London. After Bowen’s lover Goronwy Rees jilted her for the beautiful novelist Rosamond Lehmann in 1936, Lehmann herself found solace from Rees’s callous waywardness in Yorke’s arms.

In his autobiography, Rosamond’s brother, the publisher John Lehmann (who at this stage was working with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press), described an ‘imaginary but nevertheless imaginable’ party, drawing together some of the people who drank pre-dinner cocktails in his flat during the war. He hoped in the process to produce ‘a composite picture that would illuminate the anatomy of our wartime society in the most truthful detail’. In this scene there are partygoers from the Ministry of Information, notably Graham Greene, ‘full of sardonic stories about muddle and maze-like confusion of action’; there are guests from the fire service – Stephen Spender, William Sansom and Henry Yorke, who tells ‘extraordinary stories of his fellow firemen’; at the other end of the room is Elizabeth Bowen, ‘in high spirits, radiating charm and vitality’; and then there is Rose Macaulay, ‘symbol of some dauntless, indomitable quality of moral and intellectual integrity in the pre-1914 generation’.

Hilde Spiel is notably absent from this party. She did encounter Macaulay during the war, but this tended to be at gatherings organised by the PEN club rather than at more decadent parties. She was an enthusiastic reader of Bowen and Greene and would later translate both novelists into German. However she herself remained unknown to both of them in the 1940s, although the three almost crossed paths in Vienna in 1948. Spiel’s presence here acts as a counterpoint to the more exalted lives of the other four protagonists; a reminder of the gloomy and often horrific reality of the war years and of the fact that the main events of the war took place outside London. Exiled from her native Austria, Spiel was in the strange position of attempting to avoid bombs dropped by her former compatriots. Both she and her German husband Peter de Mendelssohn were attempting to resist their position as exiles, starting to publish fiction in English and insisting on their allegiance to Britain. But it was still hard to read about the gradual destruction of their homelands without ambivalence; and there were continual indications from the British that they did not quite belong. The sense of displacement was compounded by financial anxiety and by Spiel’s resentment that she had left behind a successful literary career in Vienna to become a housewife in suburban Wimbledon.

It was only after the war that Spiel came into her own and that the roles of the five writers were reversed. Bowen, Greene and Yorke all had a good war but a bad peace. Spiel, on the other hand, had the most exciting time of her life in post-war Berlin and Vienna, where she was sent as an Allied press officer. The ruined European cities provided the setting for a new kind of ecstatic vitality. But, as she blacked out her windows on 26 September 1940, Spiel found it hard to be hopeful that life would ever dramatically improve or that she would feel fully at home anywhere again. For now it was Bowen, Greene, Macaulay and Yorke who could claim the territory of the blacked-out city as their own.

See notes on Introduction

Part I

One Night in the Lives of Five Writers

26 September 1940

London 1940