The Love-Charm of Bombs (28 page)

In
The Towers of Trebizond
Macaulay allowed herself to depict a full adulterous affair that resembled her own. Here Laurie and Vere are placed in the same dilemma as Ann and Brian in
The Holy Tree
or Rome and Mr Jayne in
Told by an Idiot
. But Vere's wife, unlike Mr Jayne's lunatic Russian, is a reasonable woman who adores him. Vere convinces Laurie that he is fonder of his wife because of Laurie; ‘men,' Laurie adds, ‘are given to saying this'. But, justifying her own conduct, she states that

 

really she bored him; if she had not bored him, he would not have fallen in love with me. If I had refused to be his lover he would no doubt, sooner or later, have found someone else. But I did not refuse, or only for a short time at the beginning, and so we had ten years of it, and each year was better than the one before, love and joy gradually drowning remorse, till in the end it struggled for life.

 

By 1955, Macaulay had come to regret the selfishness of adultery, but she could not regret a relationship that could have been so happy, had it been allowed to flourish normally. There does not seem to have been any question of allowing this to happen. Rose Macaulay is clear throughout her novels that she disapproves of divorce; Gerald might have come a long way since his days as a Catholic priest, but he does not seem to have inclined towards separation. Indeed, many of Rose's friends assumed that she would not have wanted to marry anyway; she was too independent and happily self-reliant. Rose and Gerald's mutual friend the writer Marjorie Grant Cook later insisted that marriage to Gerald would have been a disastrous mistake on Rose's part, although Marjorie's own rather intense feelings towards Gerald may have influenced her opinion.

Certainly, Macaulay was scathing about marriage in several essays and novels. In a 1920s article entitled ‘People who Should Not Marry' she maintained that

 

some men and women might well prefer to live alone, meeting their beloved only when it suits them, thus retaining both that measure of freedom . . . enjoyed by the solitary, and the delicate bloom on the fruit of love which is said to be brushed off by continual contact.

 

She expressed this more strongly in an essay on the ‘Problems of Married Life' in
A Casual Commentary
, where she states that ‘to be with the beloved just enough – that is passionately moving and contenting', while ‘to be with the beloved too much – that is surfeit and thraldom'. Later in this book, Macaulay inquires ‘Into the Sanctity of the Home', challenging the assumption that people who have families are morally superior to those without. What is sanctity, she wonders, and how can one acquire it? ‘How does one know whether sanctity adorns one's home or not?' Can the home of a bachelor or a spinster have sanctity? Can a flat have sanctity? Can a boarding-house? Presumably, they cannot. Gerda holds out against marrying the man she loves in
Dangerous Ages
on the grounds that marriage is ‘a fetter on what shouldn't be fettered' and that it has the same Victorian fussiness as antimacassars. Macaulay was also often dismissive of child-bearing. In Macaulay's 1920 novel
Potterism
,
Jane dismisses babies as ‘a handicap, like your frock (however short it was) when you were climbing', complaining that babies make women ill before they arrive and need care and attention afterwards. Denham, the heroine of
Crewe Train
(1926) is so distressed to find herself pregnant that she goes out of her way to encourage a miscarriage.

But there is both a defensiveness and an ambivalence in many of these accounts. Macaulay adds in ‘Problems of Married Life' that to be with the beloved insufficiently is ‘annihilating anguish of the soul', with the sudden seriousness of this phrase jarring within this delicately comic essay. And she did not quite put the weight of her own conviction into ‘People who Should Not Marry'; the carefully placed ‘
is said
to be brushed off' allows for the possibility that in fact the delicate bloom of love might remain. The light-hearted cheer with which she dismissed marriage is belied by the earnestness with which Laurie, in
The Towers of Trebizond
, imagines marriage as a fortress and a peace.

Writing to her friend Sylvia Lynd about Gerald's death, Rose celebrated the fact that the story of her love affair had been ‘a good one', adding that ‘it might have ended worse – perhaps in weariness, faithlessness, or nothingness, or a mere lessening of love'. She wondered if this constancy was ‘the reward of sin'; had their love survived because it was spared the strain of years of constant household use? Gerda or Denham, even Kitty, might say that it had; Rose Macaulay, bereft and desolate, had more faith in her own constancy. ‘Perhaps our love would have survived intact; it might, I think, because there was such a fundamental oneness – but who knows?' She would, she admitted, ‘like to have a child or two of his', though it would have created complications. Later, writing to Hamilton Johnson, Rose admitted the sin in the relationship but insisted that, given the chance, it would have succeeded as a marriage:

 

Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that, all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been the almost perfect thing.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 9

10

‘
Can
pain and danger exist?'

Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Yorke, July–December 1942

 

In July 1942, Charles Ritchie accompanied Elizabeth Bowen to Ireland. The war was going badly for the British and it was a relief to escape the atmosphere of helpless apprehension in London. Since January 1942, British forces had suffered setbacks on all fronts. The public learnt of defeats in Singapore and Hong Kong in the Far East and of a particularly humiliating reversal at Tobruk in North Africa. In a speech to the House of Commons in April, Churchill acknowledged that there had been ‘a painful series of misfortunes in the Far East' but insisted that ‘the violence, fury, skill and might of Japan' had exceeded anything they had been led to expect. As for the Middle East, ‘by what narrow margins, chances and accidents was the balance tipped against us no one can compute'. ‘Even Hitler makes mistakes,' he added rather plaintively in a broadcast to the world in May. Churchill's popularity fell to a wartime low of 78 per cent in June and he faced a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons at the start of July.

In Russia, Stalin's beleaguered forces fought on heroically against Hitler's, while Stalin pleaded with Britain and America to open a second front in western Europe to relieve the unrelenting attack on the eastern front. Meanwhile Hitler had responded to the bombing of the old German cities of Lübeck and Rostock by retaliating with the so-called ‘Baedeker raids' on Britain. The Nazi Deputy Head of the German Information and Press Division coined the phrase ‘Baedeker raids' as the targets all featured in Baedeker's
Great Britain: Handbook For Travellers.
‘We shall go out to bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Guide.' Severe attacks on Bath, Norwich, Exeter, Canterbury and York were the result.

This visit to Bowen's Court in July 1942 was the first of many trips Charles would make to the house which Elizabeth soon came to think of as their home. Elizabeth stayed on after he had left. Bowen's Court was a dreamy house and from now on its dreaminess would be perennially associated with her longing for Charles. Alone, detached from reality and time, she could continue in a fantasy of togetherness, returning to their shared life by entering familiar rooms or gazing at familiar views. In
The Heat of the Day
,
Stella visits Ireland in the autumn of 1942 and spends her days thinking about Robert. She wakes from a deep sleep to be confronted by Robert's face. She wanders through sun-shafted beech trees, struck by ‘a breathless glory' which travels through the layered foliage, mysteriously illuminated by the dappled light.

In the secluded Irish countryside, Elizabeth could assess her relationship with both Charles and the war from a distance. Charles's image remained vivid, while the war seemed at times to recede into unreality. Most people in England in this period who were not directly subject to bombing or fighting felt torn between the competing realities of their day-to-day personal life and the war going on elsewhere. In Ireland, where the war really could seem to disappear altogether, this duality was thrown into relief. The question implicit in all Bowen's wartime accounts of Ireland is whether it is possible or even desirable to escape the war; whether Irish neutrality made the country a peaceful haven or an irresponsible hiding place.

Bowen's Court
, which had been published shortly before Bowen's arrival in Ireland, celebrates the enchanted quality of the house and its surroundings but is also dominated by the presence of death. The Ireland of Bowen's book is a mystical country in which ‘the light, the light-consumed distances, that air of intense existence about the empty country . . . the great part played in society by the dead and by the idea of death' creates an ‘unearthly disturbance' in the spirit. Her own house – for centuries the focus of generations of intense living on the part of her ancestors – is peopled by the ghosts of the dead.

Bowen's awareness of these ghosts had become even more powerful in wartime. She had come from a city that still shimmered with the blood of the recent dead, and the deathliness of Ireland reminded her of this. At the same time, the palpable sense of centuries of Irish dead buried around her had the effect of comfortingly opening up time, suggesting that this war, like others, would pass. Bowen had to decide whether the Irish dead would lull her into forgetfulness or stir her into remembering the war going on elsewhere.

In an afterword to
Bowen's Court
written in 1963, Bowen described how the house shielded its wartime inhabitants from the world outside:

 

Only the wireless in the library conducted the world's urgency to the place. Wave after wave of war news broke upon the quiet air of the room, and in the daytime when the windows were open, passed out on to the sunny or overcast lawns.

 

Here was ‘peace at its most ecstatic' – a sustaining illusion that conjured away the war. She supposed that ‘everyone, fighting or just enduring, carried within him one private image, one peaceful scene. Mine was Bowen's Court. War made me that image out of a house built of anxious history.'

However, the history remained anxious. The ancestors whose presence pervaded the house had left an atmosphere of apprehension that could not quite be dispelled. ‘
Can
pain and danger exist?' Bowen asked herself, surveying the empty countryside from the steps of her peaceful house. The question itself contained the possibility that they could. ‘The scene was a crystal in which, while one was looking, a shadow formed.' The Elizabeth Bowen who was the author of
Bowen's Court
may have been a romantic dreamer who had spent the war immersing herself in the history of her dead Anglo-Irish ancestors. But there was another Elizabeth Bowen who was in Ireland writing war reports for the Ministry of Information and for whom pain and danger could and did exist. She at least was unable to sustain the fantasy that the war stopped just because she herself was no longer attending to it. In the afterword to
Bowen's Court
she went on to state that the ‘war-time urgency of the present, its relentless daily challenge' affected her view of the past. ‘In the savage and austere light of a burning world, details leaped out with significance.' The waves of news breaking upon the quiet of the library inflected everything that she saw around her.

That news was dominated by the epic battle playing itself out in Russia. By 15 July the Germans were at the gates of Voronezh and Rostov, and the British government was debating whether or not to start a second front. It was a difficult decision to make. Harold Nicolson reflected in his diary that if Britain created a new front as a forlorn hope, just to show support, there would be a defeat as disastrous as Dunkirk. If they did not, they would be accused of letting down the Russians. The Germans then began to close round Rostov, leaving the Russians in danger of being cut off from their oil supplies. By August the Germans were pushing into Stalingrad. But in Ireland, the news took a long time to get through. Bowen reported to the Ministry of Information from Cork on 31 July that the country as a whole was experiencing a ‘greater degree of cut-offness, since last year, with regard to up-to-date war news'. Papers were scarce and arrived late; there were few wireless sets. As a visitor from England, she was eagerly questioned about the war by people who she felt were using it as ‘a form of escapism'. She herself may have been escaping the war by coming to Ireland, but the Irish were apparently escaping their own realities by attending to the war.

The news that did get through was heavily censored. Irish newspapers and radio stations were obliged to maintain a balance between the perspectives of the two sides in their war coverage. As a result, news of bombing in either Britain or Germany, and of the fighting in Russia, had to be brutally edited, because the facts alone were too distressing not to induce people to question the morality of Eire's neutral stance. When radio stations did decide to present an opinion, they balanced it with a view from the opposite side. Thus, the Irish heard regular broadcasts from the pro-Nazi writer Francis Stuart, a former IRA gunman once championed by Yeats (and married to his muse Maud Gonne's daughter), who was a direct contemporary of Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O'Faolain. Stuart, who had taken up a post at the University of Berlin in 1940, was now regaling the Irish public with tales of the amazing heroism of the German army in Russia.