The Love-Charm of Bombs (68 page)

While Elizabeth Bowen was facing her own homelessness, Hilde Spiel was coming to terms with the knowledge that she had failed to find a lasting home in London. The 1950s saw the gradual breakdown of Hilde and Peter’s marriage and the increasing dependency of Hilde on Hans Flesch-Brunningen. Ostensibly, Flesch remained a family friend. Most weekends, he came to stay on Saturday nights and spent his Sundays visiting parks with Hilde and the children. This was an arrangement fully accepted by Peter, who needed the weekends to make progress with his writing. Indeed, Peter dedicated his book
Der Geist in der Despotie
to Flesch in 1953. But all this time Hilde was starting to rely less on Peter and more on Flesch, coming to value quiet adoration more than the tempestuous passion provided by her husband.

When Hilde was first warned about Peter’s violent fits of anger before their marriage, she had felt capable of standing up to him. She was beautiful, talented, desirable; she would rather suffer occasionally for the sake of passion than bind herself to someone who would passively admire her. But as Hilde herself lost strength, she was becoming less equipped to shake off Peter’s moods. Guests invited for dinner who disagreed with their host about questions of German literature or British politics would find themselves angrily asked to leave. Hilde’s sense of dignity was affronted. She wanted a quieter life in which she could be at the centre of a gentle circle of adoration. Part of Flesch’s allure was his chivalrous formality. Until he and Hilde finally married in 1972 they continued to address each other with the formal ‘Sie’. Even after their marriage, Hilde called her husband ‘Flesch’ or ‘Fleschy’. But despite this formality, in the 1950s the relationship developed from courtly companionship into a more passionate affair. Hilde’s son Anthony was often taken to meet Flesch and instructed not to tell his father about the encounters. Meanwhile Hilde was becoming increasingly vulnerable within her marriage. Questioned abruptly by her husband or son, she was liable to respond with tears.

There were moments when Hilde and Peter’s relationship revived. In 1957 Peter wrote to thank Hilde for a holiday in the house she now owned in the Austrian countryside. ‘For the first time’, he said, ‘I was really heartbroken to have to go away.’ He had not been so happy for years. ‘It was so harmonious and smooth, everything sunny and lovely.’ Hearing that Hilde had charmed a group of men at a party, he told her that he was not surprised. ‘With every year that passes I’m more strongly attracted and more deeply attached to you. To me, at any rate, you are simply the woman – unlike anything, the thing itself.’ But for Hilde this came too late; increasingly, the central relationship of her life was with Flesch.

This eventually became apparent to Peter, who demanded a clear separation in 1963. When Hilde complained that he was leaving her, he accused her of wilfully destroying their shared existence together and then expecting him to take the blame. ‘You have systematically, step by step throughout the last few years, taken away your trust. Everything you did you did behind my back; you lied to me and made excuses.’ He maintained that his own affairs had been trivial – he would not have embarked on them at all if he had not needed someone to give him ‘a little warmth now and then’ – and complained that she had told all their mutual friends that she was planning to leave Peter because she could not live without Flesch. Initially, Peter suggested a two-year trial separation, but Hilde insisted that ‘our life is too short for that kind of thing and two years are too long’. Instead, they should end the marriage irrevocably. The separation, when it came, seemed to outsiders, including their own children, merely to confirm the existing status quo. But for Peter it took away the secure base he had always taken for granted. He had often found Hilde irritating; he did not especially appreciate her as a woman or a writer; but he had relied on her as his partner. For Hilde, however, it allowed for the formal foundation of a new, more peaceful existence lived according to the principles of the courteous and artistic city in which she had grown up.

Hans Flesch-Brunningen and Hilde Spiel,
c
. 1979

After the separation, Hilde returned to Vienna, where she began a more public relationship with Flesch. By going back to Vienna she acknowledged the failure of her attempts to integrate fully into English society. Her children were growing up to be English, but she would always be an outsider. In 1967, revisiting her diary entries from her 1946 trip to Vienna, Hilde Spiel realised that her ultimate return to Vienna was already inevitable at this point. The slow process of freeing herself from the English sphere had begun. She retained a connection with English literature by translating books by the English authors she loved. In 1958 she published a German translation of Elizabeth Bowen’s
A World of Love
,
and in the 1960s she translated Graham Greene’s novel
The Comedians
as well as a collection of his short stories. But increasingly her home was in Austria, and once she accepted her Austrian identity it brought its own rewards. Hilde Spiel died in 1990 as a distinguished Austrian woman of letters, at last granted the recognition that she had craved during the war in England, though perhaps never again quite so energetically hopeful as she had been in the immediate post-war years in Vienna and Berlin.

For Henry Yorke the post-war period offered no new beginnings. Instead the 1950s saw the beginning of a process of gradual retreat from the world which would continue until his death. After the war he decided never to return to his family home, Forthampton Court, even after his brother Gerald inherited it from his father in 1957, on the grounds that it was unhealthy. And he drifted away from friends as well as family. In 1951 Evelyn Waugh invited Henry for a long weekend at his house in Gloucestershire and reported to Nancy Mitford that he looked ‘GHASTLY’.

Very long black dirty hair, one brown tooth, pallid puffy face, trembling hands, stone deaf, smoking continuously throughout meals, picking up books in the middle of conversations and falling into maniac giggles, drinking a lot of raw spirits, hating the country and everything good. If you mention Forthampton to him he shies with embarrassment as business people used to do if their businesses were mentioned.

Dig meanwhile was gentle, lost behind ‘her great moustaches’, and employed a whole new proletarian argot with ‘an exquisitely ladylike manner’. ‘I really think Henry will be locked up soon,’ Waugh concluded.

Waugh’s description was perhaps more amusing than fair. In 1948 Henry Yorke had invited Christopher Isherwood to dinner and Isherwood had found both Yorkes ‘really very nice and so much fun’, enjoying Yorke’s tales of football matches, blondes and the Fire Service. Even in 1951 Nancy Mitford replied to Waugh that she herself had met Henry and Dig recently and had not seen them in the same ‘livid light’, though that might be because her ‘(health service) spectacles’ were pinker than his.

At this point Henry was still focused enough to be very involved in Pontifex, although even there he felt stifled by his father’s continued presence in the business. In 1948 James Lees-Milne met Henry on a bus and asked how he was. Henry replied that he was ‘Bloody awful!’ and launched into what Lees-Milne described as

a diatribe of hate against his octogenarian father who, he claimed, refused to retire from the family firm, in order deliberately to retard his son’s succession and ruin his prospects . . . It was evident that he was being deeply thwarted in his middle age by a tyrannical and senile parent who would not relax his grip on the wheel, Henry’s wheel by rights of nature.

When Henry got off the bus he departed with the words ‘It’s unmitigated hell, I can tell you.’

Henry Yorke did launch into a few new friendships in this period. He particularly enjoyed time spent with the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, who was also now a friend of Hilde Spiel’s. According to Koestler’s biographer, the two men were brought together by ‘a shared fondness for women and alcohol, an intolerance of fools and an admiration for each other’s very different novels’. Throughout the 1950s they spent their Sunday mornings together in their shared local pub. Yorke also had more affairs, including one fairly impassioned one with Kitty Freud (then married to the painter Lucian Freud), but this ended in 1952 and in 1955 Yorke published a short account of ‘Falling in Love’ which, though partly satirical, does seem to reflect his accrued cynicism on the subject. ‘A man’, he begins here, ‘falls in love because there is something wrong with him.’ He gets to the point where he cannot stand being alone and may imagine he wants children, although in fact he does not, ‘at least not as women do’. And once married with children of his own he longs to be alone again. Love is a weakness and only after his marriage does the man realise how sick he has been. Affairs outside marriage are no more fulfilling. A man in love with another woman who does not have the courage to leave his wife is like ‘a man who takes off his belt, ties it round the branch of a tree, and hangs himself to death in the loop while his trousers fall round his ankles’. Yorke states that love comes from a lack within yourself. We are all animals, and are therefore subject to animal attraction, but there is no need for this to transmute into love, and certainly not more than once given that ultimately we are ‘all and each one of us, always and always alone’.

By the 1950s Henry was hardly in touch with Mary or Alice Keene. In 1949 Mary wrote to Henry to congratulate him on
Concluding
and he replied that they ‘must meet some time if you can put up with it’ but added that he was in poor shape at the moment. In 1957 Mary sent Henry a copy of
Mrs Donald
to read and he responded cautiously. He assured her that she was ‘a very good writer indeed’, but reprimanded her for her atrocious spelling and suggested that she cut the novel down to a short story. He described himself as ‘temperamentally incapable’ of reading books with children as the central characters, suggesting that the focus of the novel is Rose, Violet’s small sister, rather than Violet, and completely failed to comment on his own alter ego, the poet-painter Louis.

Despite his estrangement from Mary, Henry remained on friendly terms with Matthew Smith, with whom Mary was now in a more settled relationship. Matthew had given Henry a portrait of himself in 1950 which Henry celebrated in his thank you letter as ‘beyond words wonderful’: ‘it glows and lives with a great life of its own and is and always will be a Jewel in my heart’. In 1958 Matthew’s wife died and Henry wrote to send his ‘deepest sympathy for all the feelings that must have been dredged up from the past by this death’. He added that breaking with the past was

one of the hardest things we all have to learn, and when we have managed this in a fashion it comes as a blow to find the past still inexorably stretching out its cold arms to us, turning one’s blood into a pile of, in my case, guilt and regret and shame. But we have our sons to be proud of, and there is still work to be done.

In fact Matthew did not have his sons to be proud of; they had both died in the Second World War. Henry had Sebastian, but that does not seem to have been enough to prevent the guilt, regret and shame. This admission of guilt may have been in part an implicit apology to Mary, whom he could reasonably expect to read the letter, but it also seems to reflect a more endemic bleakness. And for Henry Yorke in fact there remained very little work still to be done in 1958. After his father died he took little interest in the business, despite having waited impatiently all those years for him to retire. He did not write another novel after
Doting
was published in 1952.

Yorke’s final three novels,
Concluding, Nothing
and
Doting
, are characterised by a cold detachment. People love, dote and mourn but the narrator does not imbue the world he depicts with anything like the lyricism of the earlier novels. Rosamond Lehmann’s 1954
TLS
tribute to Henry Yorke and to
Loving
in particular can be seen as a generous recollection of a now faded friend. She lauds the unusual tenderness of
Loving
and states that this quality ‘is to become a great deal less evident, if not to disappear entirely, in his subsequent novels’. Rosamond’s homage was perhaps intended partly to restore to Henry the life and tenderness he had lost, or at least to remind him to look back appreciatively on his wartime self. In this respect it was successful. After the piece was published, Henry wrote a warm letter of thanks to Rosamond Lehmann.