The Love-Charm of Bombs (66 page)

Macaulay's mission, while writing
The Pleasure of Ruins
, was to find consolation through aesthetic pleasure. By leaving London to survey the ruins of the world she could escape personal anguish and dwell in the more impersonal beauty of ruins that no longer smelt of fire and mortality. Nonetheless she began her labours with the personal, making the pilgrimage to Ireland. Tellingly, Loughrea itself does not make it into the final book, but there are several pages devoted to Ireland, including a poignant passage on the ‘dispossession of the ancient Catholic glory of Ireland', which lends a grief to the Irish clerical and monastic ruins. The Irish church itself is ‘demeaned and deflowered by the bitter centuries of persecution which, though they could not crush it out of existence, plucked from it the proud flower of its intellect and breeding, reducing it to a devout provincialism'. Broken abbeys and churches lie strewn along coast and river, hill and plain throughout Ireland. They have been destroyed ‘by Danes, by Normans, by Englishmen, by decay, by time, by poverty, vandalism and dissolution'. Now, ‘their crumbling arches and portals and fragments of wall stand in reproachful witness to the passing of a murdered culture'. Here Macaulay takes on O'Donovan's reproachful dissatisfaction both with the Irish, who have failed to emerge out of poverty, and with the English, who have rid the country of its ancient glory. Together, the English and the Irish have murdered an ancient culture and broken O'Donovan's own youthful dreams. Mourning her lover, Macaulay stands, like the fragments of wall, in reproachful witness to the country where his ambitions died. These ruins are too melancholy to be pleasurable.

These are the same melancholy ruins that characterise the landscape of
Bowen's Court
, where Bowen describes Ireland as ‘a country of ruins'. Lordly or humble, military or domestic, ruins pervade the Cork landscape of Bowen's book. ‘Some ruins show gashes of violence, others simply the dull slant of decline.' The religious ruins are repaired or rendered picturesque but the lay ruins are left in a state of unchecked decay, used as shelters for cattle. ‘By the roadsides, roofs of abandoned cabins sag in slowly; desolate farms rear chimneys out of brambles, at the end of silted-up boreens.' Ruins stand for error or failure, ‘but in Ireland we take these as part of life'.

Having visited the ruins of Ireland, Rose Macaulay moved on to Wales and then Italy. Over the next three years, she engaged in a panoramic exploration of ruins throughout the world and throughout history. The book was originally commissioned as a short survey of 40,000 words, but quickly grew to more than three times that length. Macaulay's non-fiction always had a tendency to proliferate uncontrollably. But there is a particular obsessiveness to this book which testifies to the urgency of its author's quest to find aesthetic and spiritual meaning amid desolation and destruction.

Perhaps the most urgent task for the post-war ruin-goggler was to explore the relationship between war and pleasure in ruins. Macaulay starts the book by supposing that the earliest such pleasure was ‘inextricably mixed with triumph over enemies' and with the violent excitements of war. But, she goes on (and this surely is the book's crucial manifesto and self-justification), ‘to say that man found pleasure in celebrating such disasters by word and picture is not quite the same as to say that he found emotional joy in the contemplation of the ruinous results'. ‘Or', she asks, ‘is it?' It is crucial to distinguish aesthetic from vindictive pleasure, and even in the earliest accounts of battles a ‘profound, passionate, poetic pleasure in ruin as such' is distinguishable from the separate triumph of victory.

The book is Macaulay's attempt to locate this aesthetic pleasure and, implicitly, to see if it can be applied to the ruins of post-war Europe. She sees ruin-sensibility as essentially blending pleasure and romantic gloom. Pity and self-pity can be enjoyable; ‘the darkly ruinous mind of torn Europe' has always loved the desolation it bewailed. Humans are, she states, intrinsically ‘ruin-minded'. Ruins lead to a civilisation of mortality and to our part in a long history. This does not sound particularly pleasant. Macaulay describes ruin as part of ‘the general Weltschmerz, Sehnsucht, malaise, nostalgia, Angst, frustration, sickness, passion of the human soul'. But the romantic melancholy enables a contemplation of transience, reminding us that our current sorrow will pass. Whatever horrors may befall our current civilisation, that civilisation is itself only a temporary façade; a brief interim between one enjungled state and another.

The Pleasure of Ruins
ends in the ruins of post-war London, which Macaulay insists will be ‘enjungled, engulfed' and rendered picturesque in their turn. Month by month it will become harder to trace the original streets within the bombed areas, and small yellow dandelions will make their pattern over broken altars. Already, there is a bizarre new charm in the stairway that climbs to the roofless summit where it meets the sky, though the larger ruins are more tragic – the bombed cities and churches and cathedrals of Europe offer ‘nothing but resentful sadness'. Macaulay finds that her own contemporaries, bewildered by the Second World War, can currently confront their ruins only through art. John Piper's depictions of the smouldering bomb sites have succeeded the romantic Roman ruins of Piranesi's engravings and the picturesque remnants of a lost age in Poussin's paintings as the ‘ruin-poems' of the day. People hanker for wholeness amid the ruins. But, as in
The World My Wilderness
, the longing for wholeness is not granted the final word. ‘Such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.'
Ruinenlust
will return; anger at destruction will fade; and in the meantime one way to confront the sadness of twentieth-century destruction is to contemplate the ruins of the past. Macaulay does not quite dare to offer the consolation of ruin pleasure to her generation. Their ruins are too raw. But by explaining and insisting on the pleasurable nature of ruins in general, she clears the way to allowing aesthetic pleasure to enjungle and engulf the ruins of the Second World War.

 

 

Between the publication of
The World My Wilderness
and
The Pleasure of Ruins
, Rose Macaulay returned from ‘Anglo-Agnosticism' to Anglicanism. She was aided in her renewed faith by her extensive correspondence with Hamilton Johnson. Rose had first met ‘Father Johnson' at a retreat shortly before the First World War. He later recalled that the two discussed ‘how a young lady living with her family might most suitably conduct herself'. In August 1950, now living in America, he came across a copy of her 1932 novel
They Were Defeated
and wrote to renew their acquaintance. This voice from her Christian past came at a time of great need. ‘If you were in England,' she wrote in response to his letter, ‘I should probably ask if I might come and talk to you sometimes, and I wish you were.' She regretted how long it had been since she had been on a retreat ‘or anything at all of that nature'; ‘I have sadly lost touch with that side of life, and regret it. We do need it so badly, in this queer world and life, all going to pieces and losing.' He responded helpfully, and a month later she wrote again, describing her struggle with
The Pleasure of Ruins
and regretting that

 

The people I love most have died. I wish they had not. But there is nothing to be done about it . . . This seems one of the many reasons for wanting, so to speak, a link with another sphere of life.

 

Johnson continued to encourage her to return to the faith, but she initially found it too difficult.

 

Partly my difficulties are intellectual – I just can't make the grade – partly, I sometimes think, the blindness that comes from the selfish and deplorable life I've led. Who knows? It's all a kind of vicious circle – badness keeps one from the realisation of God; perhaps nothing but that could cure badness – well, so there one is.

 

However, by January 1951 she had gone to confession, and by February she was enthusiastically attending Grosvenor Chapel, a high Anglican church in Mayfair, and asking Johnson for advice on how much prayer, what churchgoing, and at what hours he would advise. Two years later, she looked back on this as a time when she ‘didn't feel jolly': ‘I was in a state of darkness and tension and struggle.' She thanked him for providing her with the remedy for her misery, with the result that she was now happy and did not quite believe her good fortune.

The various phases of Rose Macaulay's lifelong comings and goings from Christianity are recorded through the character of Laurie in
The Towers of Trebizond
, a novel written once Macaulay was ensconced in the relative comfort of the church. A religious child, Laurie was an agnostic through school and university and then at twenty-three ‘took up with the Church again'. ‘But', she says, without apparent regret, ‘the Church met its Waterloo a few years later when I took up with adultery . . . and this lasted on and on.' This is a religious novel, written by Macaulay after she had converted back to Christianity and had begun to look on aspects of her life with regret. She is clear that adultery is ‘a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness'. But, even now, she does not deny Gerald O'Donovan's arguments; she still sees love as on the side of life, maintaining that ‘out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined'. After Vere has died as a result of the accident in which Laurie believes she has killed him, Laurie reads a carved inscription about salvation from sins. She hesitates to say the prayer because she does ‘not really want to be saved from my sins, not for the time being, it would make things too difficult and too sad'.

What Laurie does find is not the consolation of Christianity but the pleasure of ruins. Her journey to the ruined city of Trebizond in Turkey is at the heart of the novel, and it is apparent that she both expects and finds an epiphany. For Laurie, Trebizond is ‘the country one's soul recognised and knew' that Barbary found in the London ruins. This is a country that combines beauty with exile. In 1954 Rose Macaulay reported to Hamilton Johnson that she had just returned from Trebizond, the ‘last little Byzantine empire', not conquered by the Turks until 1461, eight years after the fall of Constantinople. By the time of Rose's visit, it was completely Turkish, but there was a Byzantine ruined palace and castle on a high crag above the town, and she climbed up there and felt ‘forlorn Byzantine ghosts pattering about it'.

Laurie encounters these ghosts as echoes of her own unlived lives. Before arriving at Trebizond, she has conflated the city with her own soul. Trebizond is a corner of a lost empire, slipping into forgetfulness of its own Byzantine origins just as Laurie is forgetting her Christian past. When she first sees the ruined town lying in its splendid bay, it is like seeing ‘an old dream change itself, as dreams do', because this seems more a picturesque Turkish port than a Byzantine ruin. The ‘brooding ghost' of the fallen Byzantine empire has been banished and it is this ghost that she must find. Returning later, she learns the meaning of Trebizond, and the revelation comes with the first intimations of a return to God. Shattered by Vere's death, she has pondered going back to the church, but is debarred from it less by guilt than by a horror of being divided still further from Vere. Now she makes steps towards accepting the God in whom she seems already to believe: ‘Having to do without God, without love, in utter loneliness and fear, knowing that God is leaving us alone for ever; we have driven ourselves out, we have lost God and gained hell.' She is aware that she lives now in two hells, for she has lost God and also love. Laurie resembles Bendrix in Greene's
The End of the Affair
, for whom hatred of God is a first step in belief. She may shut God out, but she has never stopped believing in him; never lapsed into the agnosticism she fears.

But the novel does not end with the consolation of religion; instead, it ends with Trebizond. Thinking about her future without Vere, Laurie anticipates a life that will offer diversions, given that the world is full of beauty and excitement and romance, but will remain hollow and thin like a ghost. Eventually, she will plunge into death, a prospect which drowns her in mortal fear and mortal grief. She is reluctant to relinquish life itself, which for all its agonies of loss and guilt, ‘is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and love . . and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again'. At this point, she has a vision of Trebizond, the fabled city where the towers still shimmer on a far horizon, held in a luminous enchantment. For Laurie, however much she must stand outside the walls, ‘this must for ever be'; the vision will remain. This, if anything, is the meaning of Trebizond. The towers will continue to shimmer; the luminous enchantment will remain present. These haunted ruins offer a promise of eternity less desolate than the primeval enjungled ruins in London. But, ‘at the city's heart lie the pattern and the hard core', and these Laurie can never make her own: ‘they are too far outside my range. The pattern should perhaps be easier, the core less hard.' Here is ‘the eternal dilemma'. This is an ambiguous ending, but it seems that this city that has forgotten its own past retains the knowledge of Byzantium in its core. Laurie must struggle to unravel the pattern and break through the core to grasp Byzantium, which for her will involve an acceptance of God.