The Love-Charm of Bombs (23 page)

Certainly, there was an androgynous quality to Rose Macaulay, which was often noted by friends, and which finds its way into her girlish, neutrally named heroines. Several of her books feature coltish girls and young women, who shy away awkwardly from sexual contact. In
Keeping up Appearances
,
the twelve-year-old Cary Folyot is so appalled by learning about sex from a secret reading of Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams
that she resolves to become a nun to avoid the whole ‘beastly' business. Macaulay was also frequently publicly dismissive of sex. She was impatient with the younger generation for placing too great an emphasis on it. In Macaulay's 1921 novel
Dangerous Ages
, Neville, a forty-three-year-old woman, mocks her daughter Gerda's continual emphasis on sex, suggesting that ‘There
are
other things . . .' Gerda admits that there is also drawing and poetry, beauty, dancing and swimming; ‘But the basis of life was the desire of the male for the female and of the female for the male.' At the same time Neville's mother, Mrs Hilary, is trying to allay the embitteredness of old age by embarking on a course of psychoanalysis. Both she and her analyst are lampooned by the narrator for their simplistic emphasis on sex. Mrs Hilary now misinterprets the behaviour of her daughters because she has learnt from her analyst ‘the simple truth about life; that is that nearly every one is nearly always involved up to the eyes in the closest relationship with some one of another sex. It is nature's way with mankind.'

But Rose Macaulay always insisted nonetheless on the importance of sexual desire within love. In a 1927 letter to Jean she reminded her sister that though love between a man and a woman ‘is the important part of their desire for each other', the originator of that love was ‘mere animal desire'. The ‘sexual parts' that Virginia Woolf found lacking in Macaulay's social persona are consistently evident in Macaulay's decidedly unvirginal novels. The post-war editor of the
TLS
Alan Pryce-Jones recalled Rose Macaulay flashing out a retort to the Woolfs and Mannins of the world, complaining that ‘It is stupid to think that just because I never cared to marry I have no experience of life.' Life includes sex here. In even Macaulay's most ironically detached novels, there are moments when the author's pulse quickens, seriously and sensually, with the pulse of her characters, male and female. There is the aching want in
What Not
and the passion that rises about Rome and Mr Jayne in
Told by an Idiot
– that sea in which they drown when he kisses her mouth and face and hands. ‘While you hold me I can't think,' Rome complains, just as O'Donovan's Ann finds that ‘her limbs and every organ of her' quiver ‘like fiddle strings under the bow of his love', blowing duty and God and religion out of sight. Even in
And No Man's Wit
, on the whole a detached comic novel, Macaulay takes Ramón's desire for the slippery, mermaid-like Ellen seriously. In answer to Guy's cynical profession that ‘the longer I live the less it seems to matter particularly about sex', Ramón maintains that sex matters, ‘to the imagination and to the body': ‘Each such experience, when it is achieved, satisfies a dream that one had . . . if one didn't satisfy it, it would haunt the body and the mind.'

Rose Macaulay's own sensuality and embodiment are apparent in her frequent descriptions of the delights of swimming. Almost all of her heroines swim enthusiastically. In
What Not
Chester and Kitty pass ‘amphibious days' on the Ligurian coast where Rose spent her childhood, swimming out for a mile, then lying on their backs and floating. In
And No Man's Wit
Ramón's beloved, Ellen, is so enthusiastic a swimmer that she turns out to be infused with mermaid blood, and is contented only when she can leave behind the constraints of dry land. ‘Bathing' features prominently in
Personal Pleasures
, where
Rose Macaulay muses lyrically on the joys of being ‘lapped in the clear, thin stuff, so blue, so buoyant, so serene, you can conceive no reason for ever leaving it'. She is familiar with that ‘reeling goddess', pleasure, but, bathing on an August afternoon off the Ligurian coast, ‘we know you at your most reeling, your most zoneless. Such felicity seems to know no limit.'

Gerald O'Donovan was sensually drawn to Rose's maritime self. He repeatedly associated Ann with water in
The Holy Tree
. Although the sea is frightening, Ann cannot help loving it; ‘To swim out agin the waves of a morning . . . was to feel alive.' It gives ‘a delight to her heart that nothing else could give'; she can breast waves ten times higher than other bathers. Ann's body is beautiful and she enjoys her sense of her own embodiment, which she feels most strongly when in contact with the water. After bathing, she thinks that ‘to run bare naked along the strand, and dry herself in the warm breeze, 'd be heaven itself'. Gerald may have been remembering times when he and Rose had swum naked together. In a 1936 radio broadcast on the pleasures of bathing, Rose suggested that swimming is best when undertaken naked:

 

if one is so fortunate as to find a place and a time when one can bathe without a bathing suit, it enormously increases the pleasure of a bathe. The feeling of water, even river water, against one's bare skin is delightful.

 

Neville opens
Dangerous Ages
with a naked dip in the sea, finding that this is a moment when it is enough simply to be alive.

Neville may disapprove of her daughter's public analysis of sex as the basis of every emotion, but she enjoys her own sensuality and mourns the fading of her beauty in middle age. Macaulay mocks Neville's daughter Gerda, but she also mocks herself, through Neville, for disapproving. And within the novel Macaulay identifies simultaneously with Neville and with Gerda and Neville's sister Nan, two women who love. Few of Rose Macaulay's friends would have recognised her in Gerald O'Donovan's Ann, that naively ingenuous peasant girl who seems incapable of a satirical remark. Yet Rose was proud of her role in
The Holy Tree
; proud that Gerald inscribed Yeats's lines about the holy tree in her copy of the novel. She shared Ann's delight in the body; delight in swimming, running naked along the strand, and in kissing and touching her lover, glad of ‘the feel of his arms, and of his lips'.

 

 

Now, in the summer of 1941, Rose was achingly aware that she would soon lose Gerald's touch for ever. She spent the beginning of May 1941 undertaking the difficult task of sorting through her sister's belongings. Then on 10 May, London was the target for one final, brutal bombing attack. This was the last and perhaps the heaviest night of the London Blitz, with 507 aircraft bombing London in a single night, many of them returning for a second attack. There were over a thousand Londoners killed and similar numbers wounded; the British Museum and the Houses of Parliament were both damaged and 12,000 people were rendered homeless. On 11 May Rose came back from sorting through Margaret's belongings to find that her own flat had been destroyed. A bomb had landed on the building at 2 a.m. and at 4 a.m. the fire brigade had reported that the ensuing fire was out of control. Among other possessions that Rose lost in the flames were all her letters from Gerald and her inscribed copy of
The Holy Tree
, bidding her to find the strength of love in her own heart. That strength now failed. For the past eight months, she had distracted herself from personal sorrow by throwing herself into ambulance driving, socialising and writing. Once war had invaded her home, she could not help but feel its blows personally. It was as a preemptively bereft lover that she confronted the ashes of her accumulated fifty-nine years of possessions.

 

London after the 10 May raid

 

Rose wrote a series of disbelieving letters to her friends in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. In a letter to Storm Jameson, she explained the origins of the fire – ‘it got first an HE, then fire started, and wasn't put out' – adding that ‘everything was consumed'.

 

I can't start again, I feel. I keep thinking of one thing I loved after another, with a fresh stab. I wish I could go abroad and stay there, then I shouldn't miss my things so much, but it can't be. I loved my books so much, and can never replace them. I feel I am finished, and would like to have been bombed too. Still, I suppose one gets over it in the end.

 

To Daniel George, with whom she was collaborating on the literary animal book that was one of the things keeping her going, she wrote on a scrap of paper:

 

House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and
nothing
saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with.
All
my (and your) notes on animals gone – I shall never write that book now.

 

Ten days later she added that it would have been less trouble to have been killed by the bomb herself. Her sense that she should have been bombed too seems to come together with her background consciousness of Virginia Woolf's suicide in a letter to Victor Gollancz:

 

Luxborough Towers have fallen down. Saturday night I returned there after the weekend to find it bombed and burnt to bits –
everything
– destroyed. I am desolated and desperate – I can't face life without my books . . . I have no clothes, no nothing. I feel like jumping into the river.

 

She attempts to manufacture some characteristic stoicism, but fails: ‘soon hope to feel rather better (or doesn't one?)'.

In these letters, Rose's books become the focus of her sense of loss. Both in public and in private she poured all her sadness into grieving for these lost volumes. In another letter to Storm Jameson, two days later, she described the loss of her books as leaving a gaping wound in her heart and mind and listed the missing volumes:

 

all my lovely seventeenth century books, my Aubrey, my Pliny, my Topsell, Sylvester, Drayton, all the poets – lots of lovely queer unknown writers, too – and Sir T Browne and my Oxford Dictionary.

 

There were four generations of books here. Macaulay was related on both sides to the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and came from a family of Cambridge academics and clergymen. She had inherited a large collection of seventeenth-century volumes, which she had used to immerse herself in the relevant period when writing a biography of Milton and a historical novel,
They Were Defeated
,
in the decade before the war. By reading and writing her way into the seventeenth century, Rose had found a way to gain access to the lost Cambridge world of her father and uncles, and to explore a period whose political turbulence and violence resembled and illuminated that of her own era. As a result, losing the seventeenth-century volumes she seemed to lose a decade of her own life.

Rose was more upset about the destruction of her Oxford Dictionary and her seventeenth-century collection than she was about the loss of her own work. She was distressed about the notes for the animal book, which she described to Jameson as her heart's blood, but relatively unbothered by the loss of her unfinished novel: ‘I don't mind that so much, nearly.' Her grief for her books was in part a way of mourning publicly for her lost letters from Gerald and the death that she knew would soon come. Later, it would become clear that the loss of the letters was even more wrenching than the destruction of her precious volumes. But her grief for her dying lover was also entangled with her grief for her books, and with the seventeenth-century collection in particular.

The relationship with Gerald had all along been in part a literary collaboration. In the early days, he had helped her hone her own writing and develop her characteristic style. For the past twenty years, reading and writing had been mutual activities. Although they were often physically separated, they could always connect to each other through the books they loved and shared. This would have been one way in which she could have survived the permanent physical separation imposed by his death, and now she had lost it with the demolition of the volumes they had read together. And the vanished editions of Milton (inherited from her father) could have served as an especially poignant reminder of Gerald.