The Love-Charm of Bombs (69 page)

Darling. I’ve read your piece in the TLS and haven’t been able to think of what to say. Then it came to me. I think it is one of the four nicest things that ever happened to me in my life.

Moments of connection like this were becoming rarer. Henry saw fewer and fewer friends. His former acquaintances continued to meet Dig, who would assure them that Henry was doing fine and would appreciate a visit. But according to Lees-Milne, old friends were given a hostile reception if they did indeed call. In the early 1960s Henry’s drinking became more out of control and Arthur Koestler helped Sebastian to check his father into a clinic for treatment. The friendship with Koestler had remained very close throughout the 1950s, but Koestler was maddened by Henry’s refusal to wear a hearing aid, despite his deafness, and found Henry unrelentingly gloomy. Cynthia Koestler wrote that in this period Henry suffered from depression, which was made bearable only by gin. ‘The dark eyes with winged eyebrows which seemed to dance according to his feelings – one or the other was often raised – were set in a face whose pallor rarely saw the light of day.’ Even the friendship with Koestler ended in 1962 when Koestler decided that Henry was anti-Semitic.

In 1963 Henry Yorke wrote a short biographical sketch in which he characterised himself accurately as a hermit. ‘Only the other day’, he announced, ‘a woman of sixty looking after the tobacconist’s shop was dragged by her hair across the counter and stabbed twice in the neck. That is one reason why I don’t go out any more.’ Danger threatened on the street and the best thing was not to go out at all. ‘If one can afford it, the best thing is to stay in one place, which might be bed. Not sex, for sleep.’

Henry Yorke remained in bed until his death in 1973, the same year as the death of Elizabeth Bowen. After the sale of Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth had based herself in Oxford and then from 1965 in Hythe in Kent, returning to the small section of coastline where she had lived on first coming to England with her mother as a child. The Hythe house was small, modern and practical; she was not going to attempt to compete with the grandeur of the world she had lost. But from the start she entertained friends from London, putting them up at the local hotel, and encouraged Charles to see the house as his home. She also published a novel,
Eva Trout
, set on the Kent coast where she was now living; a strange and original tale of a clumsy and trouble-making childlike woman. And she made forays into her own childhood, starting an autobiography to be called
Pictures and Conversations
, as well as continuing to lecture abroad and to write essays, though without the financial necessity imposed by Bowen’s Court.

Elizabeth Bowen lived in Hythe for eight years before dying of lung cancer in hospital in February 1973. In 1961 Charles had written in his diary that ‘nothing, I believe, except death or the ghastly attrition of old age can touch us, and when either happen I shall be finished whether I know it or not’. By the late 1960s it had become apparent to him that old age and death did indeed threaten. In 1968 he reread Elizabeth’s early letters, awed and saddened by the strength and certainty of her love. ‘I had that and it is gone, but its ghost, thank God, remains to haunt me till I die.’ Certainly, it haunted him after her death. Desolate, Charles made no attempt to protect himself from his grief.

I do believe in her love for me. I do believe it and in mine for her.

I shall never see her again in this world or the next . . . She will never advance to me across the grass of Regent’s Park at any time of day. She is gone from me forever.

I am never to recover or cease to feel the absence and the pain till I cease feeling anything.

Five years after Elizabeth Bowen’s death, Catherine Walston died, also of lung cancer. The cough that Graham Greene had immortalised in
The End of the Affair
had indeed killed her in the end. Like Charles Ritchie, Catherine had come to regret the failure of the love affair with Graham and to see it as the most important relationship of her life. ‘I think of you so often and with such pleasure,’ she wrote to him in 1975. ‘What a vast amount you gave me.’ Shortly before her death she wrote to him in shaky handwriting, just home from a period in hospital, looking back on their happiest times together. ‘What a vast amount of pleasure you have given me playing scrabble on the roof at the Rosaio . . . and teaching me to swim underwater at Ian Fleming’s house; smoking opium and Ankor etc.’ She told him that she would always remember their times in Capri, from the day they first walked through the gate of the villa. ‘There has never been anyone in my life like you and thanks a lot.’

Graham and Catherine had sustained an intermittent sexual relationship through the 1950s and into the 1960s, but they had drifted apart as both became involved with other lovers and Catherine’s health declined. In 1966 Graham had moved to France to live with Yvonne Cloetta, a younger French woman with whom he would remain until his death in 1991. He was happy with Yvonne and these were productive years for him as a writer. ‘If she didn’t exist I’d put a bullet to my head,’ he told a friend in 1990. But he still looked back on the war years and the time with Catherine as the period when he had been most insistently alive.

Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Yorke all saw the arc of their lives as shaped by their experiences in the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. For Rose Macaulay this was a time of intense sadness, mitigated by moments of beauty under the Mediterranean sun that she and Gerald O’Donovan had loved, and among the ruins that served as a reminder of a wider time-frame. But for the other writers these years brought an exhilaration that was unrivalled in the later post-war period. Bowen, Greene and Yorke responded intensely to the peculiar climate of wartime London; to its temporality, its accelerated intimacies and its visual beauty. They all produced extraordinary novels during and in response to this period. In contrast to the suspended present of wartime, the post-war period was predicated on the future. The welfare state imposed taxes in the present designed to improve the world for the next generation. Bowen, Greene and Yorke all found this depressing. In post-war Vienna and Berlin, however, Hilde Spiel found just the climate that the British writers had found in wartime London, and in Ireland Greene and Bowen were both briefly able to forget post-war actualities and find instead a timeless world of love.

In the quiet years before his death, Henry Yorke was writing very little but he did publish a brief account of his time in the fire service in 1960, intended to be the start of a book-length account of
London and Fire, 1939–45
. Retreating into the past, Yorke regained the energy and humour that he had lost in daily life, mocking his firemen colleagues for their preoccupation with their pensions at the same time as he lauded them for their collective bravery, ‘ready to take on lions’. During this period, Graham Greene was recording his dreams, and the continued significance of the war for Greene is evident in his posthumously published dream diary, where he makes frequent nocturnal excursions back to the Blitz. In February 1965, after an air raid, German parachute troops land near his London house; in 1972 a large tranche of London is destroyed by bombs.

And for Elizabeth Bowen, most of all, the war remained a charmed pocket of unrepeatable happiness. Her review of Calder’s
The People’s War
, written not long before her death, insists on the unique importance of the war years for those who experienced them in London. ‘Existence during the war had a mythical intensity, heightened for dwellers in cities under attack.’ Here she sees the war as defining the lives of her generation, whether it brought exuberance, loss or horror. ‘War is a prolonged passionate act, and we were involved in it.’ For individuals as well as for their country the stakes of that involvement were high. But the reward was an intensity they would never know again.

See notes on Coda

Notes

Abbreviations

People and books

Archives and libraries

Where novels are available in multiple editions, chapter numbers are given instead of page numbers.

More than one chapter or page number may be given where there are several quotations from the same text within a single paragraph.

Introduction

‘War had made them’:
EB,
HoD
, ch. 1.

‘scenery in an empty theatre’:
see EB, ‘London, 1940’,
The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen
, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, 1999).

‘straight, long in the eye’:
HG,
Caught
(London: Harvill Press, 2001), p. 47.

‘pile their mattresses’:
see HS,
DaB
,
p. 127.

‘lucid abnormality’:
EB, preface to
The Demon Lover and Other Stories
(
The Mulberry Tree
).

‘It came to be rumoured’:
EB,
HoD
, ch. 5.